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  <row Id="1" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2" CreationDate="2010-07-19T19:36:53.637" Score="32" ViewCount="1262" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's inevitable that we will get lots of R questions in this forum. Should we:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bounce them all to SO&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answer all questions, even when it's clearly programming and not statistics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answer the question unless it clearly has no statistical content.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would vote for 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2014-10-08T17:53:57.573" LastActivityDate="2014-10-08T17:53:57.573" Title="How to answer R questions" Tags="|discussion|faq|r|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-19T19:44:00.640" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is something that we deal with over at &lt;a href=&quot;http://biostar.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;BioStar&lt;/a&gt; pretty regularly. Based on that experience, I'd argue that number 3 is the right approach, for the following reasons&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There's going to be a fair amount of overlap between responders on the two sites&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bouncing people around will just lead an already confused person to become more frustrated. We want to be helping.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, blatantly off-topic questions should should still be nixed. For borderline questions, I'd suggest that we give them a gentle nudge towards SO if they don't get answers here. Just suggest that they may get better responses there, and most people will be happy to make the jump over to the appropriate forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54" LastActivityDate="2010-07-19T19:44:00.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="3" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-19T19:50:19.470" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would go for choice 3.  Something along the lines of bouncing to Stack Overflow if the question is purely about implementation. Such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How do I do x in R?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Function Y/Script Z is not working, Help!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if the question has to do with understanding some theoretical aspect of statistics and then carrying those concepts forward into implementation using a tool, R or otherwise, then I would vote that Stats should have a home for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Update&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been tagging questions that may be too heavy on the programming as &quot;possibly-off-topic&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/possibly-off-topic&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/possibly-off-topic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way, we can easily locate them once we come to a consensus on this issue.&#xA;&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Retracted- &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/72/dont-use-possibly-offtopic&quot;&gt;see here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find a question that you think is off-topic, link it to the appropriate discussion on meta so that it may be tracked.  If there is no discussion on Meta yet, consider startin one!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T18:18:57.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="4" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-19T19:51:50.077" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with 3 too, although as ever it'll depend on the contents of the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2010-07-19T19:51:50.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="5" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30" CreationDate="2010-07-19T19:52:48.200" Score="18" ViewCount="446" Body="&lt;p&gt;There will be occasions when it would be useful to be able to include a statistical formula within a question, answer, or comment.  How is this supported?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T19:26:20.770" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T19:26:20.770" Title="What typographic support is available to support display of statistical formula?" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|math-display|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="6" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-19T19:54:43.873" Score="9" ViewCount="1022" Body="&lt;p&gt;In line with the link to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/the-7-essential-meta-questions-of-every-beta/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;7 Essential Meta Questions of Every Beta&lt;/a&gt; above. What should our FAQ contain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="5" LastEditDate="2010-08-12T20:39:22.917" LastActivityDate="2010-08-23T04:44:34.507" Title="What should our FAQ contain?" Tags="|discussion|essential-questions|" AnswerCount="12" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-05T00:20:00.320" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="8" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-19T20:00:00.523" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another vote for 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24" LastActivityDate="2010-07-19T20:00:00.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="9" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2010-07-19T20:06:33.020" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to incorporate the latex javascript library that &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/faq#latex&quot;&gt;mathoverflow&lt;/a&gt; use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:58:32.040" LastActivityDate="2010-07-19T20:06:33.020" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="10" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-19T20:26:52.177" Score="7" ViewCount="456" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://metaoptimize.com/qa/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Metaoptimize&lt;/a&gt; has been around for a few weeks and has accumulated a reasonably good set of questions, answers and users.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What does this site have to offer, to differentiate itself from Metaoptimize?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T17:33:42.840" Title="What advantages does this site have over Metaoptimize?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="11" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6" CreationDate="2010-07-19T20:27:04.077" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5/what-typographic-support-is-available-to-support-display-of-statistical-formula&quot;&gt;What typographic support is available to support display of statistical formula?&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/faq#latex&quot;&gt;something along those lines&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Mathematics support&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LaTeX&lt;/a&gt; expression in questions and answers. Simply put the expression within dollar signs. For example, &lt;code&gt;$\sqrt{\alpha+\beta}$&lt;/code&gt; produces $\sqrt{\alpha+\beta}$. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some R code contains dollar signs and to prevent these being interpreted as LaTeX expressions, please enclose all code in single left quotes like this: &lt;code&gt;`fit$x &amp;lt;- model$y`&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:58:32.040" LastActivityDate="2010-08-06T16:47:27.180" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-05T00:20:00.320" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="12" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19" CreationDate="2010-07-19T20:27:30.177" Score="25" ViewCount="2558" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When&lt;/strong&gt; this site takes off, we will get a number of homework questions that can be spotted a mile off. Should we&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just down vote them and not answer them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide helpful hints&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make a note in the FAQ and point them to it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that we will get more homework questions than SO (say), just because statistics is taught to a wide variety of people - biologists, medics, engineers, computer scientists, mathematicians. However, we don't want to appear rude and put off future contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I would go for a combination of all three options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2013-08-02T14:45:27.080" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T18:46:43.883" Title="How should we deal with obvious homework questions" Tags="|discussion|faq|homework|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="13" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-19T20:33:34.233" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I also vote on 3. On the other hand, this site is finally the place which can accept purely statistical R questions from SO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-07-19T20:33:34.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="14" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2010-07-19T20:36:35.770" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only time I've had to implement something like this was with a Moodle site where we made use of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.forkosh.dreamhost.com/source_mimetex.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;mimetex&lt;/a&gt; although this appears to have been superseded by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.forkosh.com/mathtex.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;mathtex&lt;/a&gt; which I haven't used. &lt;a href=&quot;http://nrich.maths.org/public/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;NRich&lt;/a&gt; make extensive use of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/jsMath/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;jsMath&lt;/a&gt; very successfully and it probably isn't going to be as much of a nightmare to get working as mimetex was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2010-07-19T20:36:35.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="15" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10" CreationDate="2010-07-19T20:37:20.620" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, despite all the broohaha over the StackExchange business plan- I would say this site will benefit from the marketing power associated with being a StackExchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More Users = More Questions = More Answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case in point- this site has already attracted a large colonization of R users from Stack Overflow which is very exciting as in general these people know &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; the theory behind statistics and how to use tools to apply those theories to get results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastActivityDate="2010-07-19T20:37:20.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="16" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="39" CreationDate="2010-07-19T20:42:38.660" Score="19" ViewCount="400" Body="&lt;p&gt;The is always a disputable thing, especially within &quot;pure statisticians&quot;. I personally think they are inevitable connected.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In a practical view, it would generate a lot of questions, and making a separate SE for it will drive to a total chaos. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Nevertheless a war has started, so I think it is time to revive the discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2013-08-02T14:45:04.220" LastActivityDate="2013-08-02T14:45:04.220" Title="Is machine learning a part of statistical analysis?" Tags="|discussion|faq|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="17" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12" CreationDate="2010-07-19T20:45:18.480" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that we should ask them to put more effort into the question, and if the user persists, just close the question.  The role of the site is not for doing other people's homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="5" LastEditDate="2010-07-19T20:50:42.837" LastActivityDate="2010-07-19T20:50:42.837" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="18" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16" CreationDate="2010-07-19T20:47:14.390" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that it should be included.  For instance, &quot;Modern Applied Statistics with S&quot; (MASS) includes all the machine learning techniques (including neural networks and SVM).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neural networks are one of the most popular non-linear models in statistics now-a-days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-07-19T20:47:14.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="19" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12" CreationDate="2010-07-19T20:48:44.010" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tried and true method of contempt, sadism and downvotes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a serious note, I think the best way is to encourage someone to put the effort into turning their homework question into an acceptable Statistical Analysis question that can stand on it's own.  This involves turning questions like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[copy and paste directly from homework]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How do I do X?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Into questions that are more like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm working on problem X and I think that I am supposed to do A, B and C.  However, I am starting to think A wasn't such a good idea because it lead me to P.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can anyone suggest an alternate approach to A?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or, I tried B, but got Q and I think Q is wrong or cannot understand how to interpret Q so that I can do C.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here is the work I did on step B to get Q.  Can anyone help me understand Q or suggest how I should go about using it to get to C?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, for that special case of homework question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Help! Due in 30 minutes!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contempt, sadism and downvotes are probably an appropriate response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastEditorUserId="10849" LastEditDate="2017-09-01T14:13:39.913" LastActivityDate="2017-09-01T14:13:39.913" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-19T20:54:17.007" Score="3" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/103/what-is-your-favorite-data-visualization-blog&quot;&gt;What is your favorite data visualization blog?&lt;/a&gt; which is essentially just allowing people to list and rank their favorites.  Should this be allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2010-07-19T21:07:56.210" Title="Should we allow &quot;best of&quot; lists as community wiki?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="21" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-19T20:57:02.477" Score="25" ViewCount="2014" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/489/write-an-elevator-pitch-tagline&quot;&gt;Write an Elevator Pitch / Tagline&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Note:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are closing this domain naming thread. It is asking the &lt;em&gt;entirely&lt;/em&gt; wrong question. See this blog post for details: &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/10/domain-names-the-wrong-question/&quot;&gt;Domain Names: Wrong Question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're going to keep the name stats.stackexchange.com. But we WILL be setting up redirects from the more &amp;quot;popular&amp;quot; domains names (e.g. seasonedadvice.com to cooking.stackexchange.com, basicallymoney.com to money.stackexchange.com, and others as we go through the list).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New question: &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Write and Elevator Pitch / Tagline!&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/489/write-an-elevator-pitch-tagline&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Click here to contribute ideas and vote.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[original message text below]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Continuing with my previous question taken directly from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/the-7-essential-meta-questions-of-every-beta/&quot;&gt;7 Essential Meta Questions of Every Beta&lt;/a&gt;, here's another. What should we call our site (and linked to that what should our domain name be)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/domain-names/&quot;&gt;Blog post&lt;/a&gt; about choosing domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;First round ended; the second will be announced soon.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/357/how-to-make-second-round-of-voting-for-the-site-name&quot;&gt;Here is a discussion about how the second round should look&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are still new proposals comming! To see them click &amp;quot;newest&amp;quot; tab below: &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Qq3kV.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-10-09T01:10:17.580" Title="What should our site be called? / What should our domain name be?" Tags="|discussion|site-name|domain-name|" AnswerCount="47" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2010-10-09T02:57:11.420" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="22" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10" CreationDate="2010-07-19T20:57:08.310" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is the same problem with BioStar and (planned) Bioinformatics. Still, I believe that the whole Area51 process is essential to gather a large, living community. Based on my example -- I didn't knew that Metaoptimize existed before you've mentioned it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2014-08-13T14:08:33.990" LastActivityDate="2014-08-13T14:08:33.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-19T20:59:01.177" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My suggestion is Statistically Speaking, the .com of which is currently being parked for free by GoDaddy: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.statisticallyspeaking.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.statisticallyspeaking.com/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorDisplayName="svadali" LastEditDate="2010-08-06T01:29:03.173" LastActivityDate="2010-08-06T01:29:03.173" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="24" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10" CreationDate="2010-07-19T20:59:08.603" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site also has things like meta, which we're using right now.  It's simply better software than the open-source equivalent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-07-19T20:59:08.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="25" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-19T21:01:39.113" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I listed a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5547/proposal-for-statistics-data-mining-stackexchange-site/5775#5775&quot;&gt;few here in the past&lt;/a&gt;, but my favorite is &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Confidence Intervals&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;; several of these are available as domain names.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T06:13:57.773" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="26" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-19T21:03:01.200" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about www.normallydistributed.com ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastActivityDate="2010-07-19T21:03:01.200" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="27" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20" CreationDate="2010-07-19T21:06:59.317" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Absoulutely! on the new &lt;a href=&quot;http://webmasters.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Webmasters&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://webapps.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;WebApps&lt;/a&gt; sites I found some really neat stuff on &quot;Best Of&quot; lists.  Making them community wikis is highly appropriate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastActivityDate="2010-07-19T21:06:59.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="28" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20" CreationDate="2010-07-19T21:07:06.993" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Taking Stack Overflow as our model I think we should. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are some caveats we need to think about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an issue with keeping the resources so listed up to date and making sure they're relevant, does this fall to the OP, a Moderator, each respondent? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm using such a list should I edit it if things become out of date, or aren't particularly useful. Maybe I should add a comment next to a list. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the post is CW do we want the links to be added to the Original Post or first answer (in the way that meta stackexchange contains a list of stack exchange sites &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4/list-of-stackexchange-sites&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or do we want individual answers one per post so that they can be voted up by usefulness etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2010-07-19T21:07:06.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="29" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20" CreationDate="2010-07-19T21:07:56.210" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say yes, as these lists are very valuable resources. A perfect example is your answer on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2252144/datasets-for-running-statistical-analysis-on&quot;&gt;statistical datasets.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2010-07-19T21:07:56.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="30" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2010-07-19T21:21:14.493" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;jsMath would be awesome as it could allow dynamic previewing of mathematics in questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a stopgap measure, you can use a service that compiles markup, such as TeX, to an image and then link the image into your Question or Answer.  Here's a list of some such services taken from a blog post by my good friend Cameron &lt;a href=&quot;http://cameron.bracken.bz/on-the-fly-latex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;see his blog post&lt;/a&gt; for side-by-side comparisons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.codecogs.com/pages/forums/pagegen.php?id=1047&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Codecogs&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; Delivers GIF or PNG &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.forkosh.com/mathtex.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;mathTeX&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; Delivers GIF or PNG&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.forkosh.com/mimetex.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;mimeTeX&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; An older version of mathTeX&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sitmo.com/latex/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sitmo Equation Editor&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; Delivers PNG, possibly others&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://mathtran.open.ac.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;mathTran&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  Delivers PNG, possibly others&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems StackExchange scrubs image links that pass script parameters- which is unfortunate as these services can't be used directly from a post.  However, you can download the generated image and rehost using a site like &lt;a href=&quot;http://tinypic.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;TinyPic&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastEditorUserId="13" LastEditDate="2010-07-19T21:31:41.677" LastActivityDate="2010-07-19T21:31:41.677" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="31" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-19T21:24:21.810" Score="6" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that these subjective list questions are useful, so it would be nice to have a separate tag for them (as in this example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/125/what-is-the-best-introductory-bayesian-statistics-textbook&quot;&gt;What is the best introductory Bayesian statistics textbook?&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2010-07-21T13:31:16.320" Title="Should we tag &quot;best-of&quot; lists with &quot;best-of&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="32" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31" CreationDate="2010-07-19T21:31:22.533" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, a separate tag would be helpful. However, instead of &quot;best-of&quot; what about &quot;list of&quot;? This is because some of the lists, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/114/what-statistical-blogs-would-you-recommend&quot;&gt;my blog question&lt;/a&gt;, aren't really 'best of', they are just lists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2010-07-19T22:17:10.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="33" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6" CreationDate="2010-07-19T21:51:59.707" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;An explanation of whatever answer we come up with in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1/how-to-answer-r-questions&quot;&gt;How to answer R questions&lt;/a&gt; and the more general &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/35/how-much-programming-here&quot;&gt;How much programming here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2010-07-19T23:22:08.877" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-05T00:20:00.320" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="34" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-19T22:03:22.400" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought of SignificanceTested. Domain is free, and it is in SE style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-07-19T22:03:22.400" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="35" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="63" CreationDate="2010-07-19T22:16:46.283" Score="12" ViewCount="468" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course in context of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/130/clojure-versus-r-advantages-and-disadvantages-for-data-analysis&quot;&gt;R-versus-Clojure&lt;/a&gt;, I felt it needs external discussion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I believe that there are two possible sorts of such questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An algorithmic question like, &quot;How to implement X?&quot; or &quot;My code is not working!&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A question about tool selection and usage like, &quot;I'm looking for X; what software should I use?&quot; or &quot;How to do X in Y?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO the first case should definitely migrate to SO; the second should get its chance to exist here.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I can't accept the argument that if something is a programming language, then the question about it is automatically off-topic. So would we accept Minitab versus Statistica because those are GUI based, and not SAS versus R because one can do programming there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2014-03-22T04:03:40.747" Title="How much programming here?" Tags="|discussion|migration|on-topic|software|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="36" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-19T22:37:32.460" Score="1" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;Already there are two tags for this (&quot;Modeling&quot; and &quot;Modelling&quot;).  Should we, very early on, decide on one tag and try to edit posts in order to keep consistency and better searching?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41" LastActivityDate="2010-08-05T08:48:20.053" Title="Modeling vs. Modelling tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="37" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="36" CreationDate="2010-07-19T22:44:25.473" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is basically a question AmE versus BrE; since the SE tags boxes has while-typing suggestions, simple the first will win if we just let it go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-07-19T22:44:25.473" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="38" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="35" CreationDate="2010-07-19T23:18:40.520" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think we should be fairly flexible with (statistical) programming questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that the first case is more SO, but when it's obviously statistical - as with this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/134/algorithms-to-compute-the-running-median&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; - then I'm not too sure. I think that people may come to this site, but would not necessary venture to the SO site. For example, what tags would the example question get at SO? Who monitors those tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit following comment from mbq&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose I come from the more computational end of statistics, so I would see this as a statistical algorithm. What we need to consider is where the questioner is most likely to get the best answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if you use MCMC you may need to keep a running estimate of the mean and variance, i.e. &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; isn't fixed. This is just an algorithm, but I suspect that people in this site may have more experience in implementing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T13:52:02.260" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="39" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16" CreationDate="2010-07-19T23:19:28.523" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original site description in my proposal was &quot;For statistics, data analysis, data mining and data visualization&quot;. I specifically wanted to include data mining/machine learning as it makes no sense to separate out these methods from the more statistical methods that are usually based on stochastic models. In fact, I like to call the whole area &quot;Data Science&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastActivityDate="2010-07-19T23:19:28.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="40" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6" CreationDate="2010-07-19T23:21:12.683" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whatever policy we end up adopting with respect to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12/how-should-we-deal-with-obvious-homework-questions&quot;&gt;homework questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is decided that the scope of Statistical Analysis includes helping hard working students understand their homework then we should outline how to ask good homework questions in the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2010-07-19T23:21:12.683" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-05T00:20:00.320" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="43" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="46" CreationDate="2010-07-20T00:20:00.757" Score="3" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if it is because it takes time (the cache thing) or if it is really an issue, but has anyone else noticed that the number of views is not giving an accurate measure of the number of times that a question has been viewed  (or the number of people who viewed a question)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/130/clojure-versus-r-advantages-and-disadvantages-for-data-analysis&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; I asked. It says that it has been viewed 3 times, but at least 4 people commented/answered the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T06:08:09.033" Title="Is there an issue with the number of views?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="44" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="59" CreationDate="2010-07-20T00:38:10.153" Score="1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few tags that have no questions. I think these were previously attached to questions which have been re-tagged. For example, I changed timeseries to time-series on one question. Someone else has retagged baysian as bayesian. But the old tags, now without questions, remain on the list and will pop-up as suggestions on future questions. Is there a way of completely removing these tags? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2010-07-20T08:34:03.757" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T08:34:03.757" Title="How to remove tags?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="45" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="44" CreationDate="2010-07-20T00:41:39.647" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a guess- but I have noticed delayed reactions to changes several times today.  I'll bet Stack Exchange is trying to be efficient by only examining global tag usage and adjusting every half hour or hour or something similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The test would be to see if these tags disappear after some time elapses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T00:41:39.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="46" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="43" CreationDate="2010-07-20T00:44:20.590" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Views change rapidly compared to votes- so the server may be caching a snapshot of the number of views and then using that number for a while before updating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a common trick used by websites to handle high load.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T00:44:20.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="47" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-20T05:15:49.683" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;alternativehypothesis.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-07-27T01:54:09.113" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="48" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-20T05:38:49.863" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;www.randomvariate.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastEditorUserId="159" LastEditDate="2010-07-26T03:47:43.567" LastActivityDate="2010-07-26T03:47:43.567" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="49" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-20T05:48:02.127" Score="10" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am very new to statistical analysis and so I have a feeling that a lot of what is going to be discussed here will be over my head. Just graduating from college, I'd really like to continue learning by diving deeper into this subject. But I know I am lacking the fundamentals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How, or when, should I post questions here about something I don't know? After doing some quick Googling on some of the initial questions, I found that there weren't many &quot;plain english&quot; explanation of terms or concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to learn about this stuff and I'm sure plenty of other n00bs want to as well. Do you guys/gals have some suggestions on when the right time to ask a question on statexchange is and when it is better to go off and research by yourself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T14:42:45.523" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T14:42:45.523" Title="How to ask basic statistical analysis questions?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|fundamentals|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="50" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="43" CreationDate="2010-07-20T06:08:09.033" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is buffered, as Sharpie mentioned, and also we calculate views very conservatively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's mostly only an issue when traffic is very low during the start of the private beta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T06:08:09.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="51" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-20T06:14:39.270" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Overfitting.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-07-26T03:47:57.340" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="52" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-20T06:15:56.413" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;DegreesofFreedom&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-07-26T03:47:26.343" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="53" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-20T06:16:55.973" Score="11" Body="&lt;h1&gt;CrossValidated.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="svadali" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-08-20T14:33:48.257" CommentCount="26" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="54" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-20T06:17:32.120" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;StatisticalSignificance.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-07-27T01:51:29.727" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="55" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-20T06:18:13.350" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;NotIntractable.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-07-26T03:48:10.647" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="56" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-20T06:18:45.610" Score="-2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;StatisticalInferences.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-07-27T01:55:28.550" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="57" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-20T06:19:30.493" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;MeanSquareErrors.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T06:19:30.493" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="58" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-20T06:20:22.923" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;NullHypotheses.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T06:20:22.923" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="59" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="44" CreationDate="2010-07-20T08:07:12.900" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a daily &quot;janitor&quot; task which cleans up incorrect and orphaned tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is due to the denormalizations we use for performance, etc. It is possible for things to be slightly out of sync.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T08:07:12.900" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="62" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-20T10:10:48.123" Score="15" Body="&lt;h1&gt;StatsOverflow.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2010-08-19T18:02:29.023" LastActivityDate="2010-08-19T18:02:29.023" CommentCount="10" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="63" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="35" CreationDate="2010-07-20T11:31:17.513" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once you get out of your first couple of stats classes (and maybe even before then), you're often doing stats with software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would assume that a lot of people who will come here (especially professionals, not so much students or academics) are probably looking for an answer like, &quot;how do I do &lt;em&gt;such and such&lt;/em&gt; in SAS or R&quot;? Especially if this is going to be &quot;statistical analysis&quot; and not &quot;statistical theory&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I work in a place with a few &quot;stats guys&quot; and a lot of programmers, and questions like that always come to the statisticians (it's always stuff like &quot;where are the p_values in this output&quot; or &quot;how do I transform this variable so I can use it in a logistic regression procedure&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would expect that stats-software questions to outnumber pure stats questions as this site progresses (might be wrong).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, I think this is a better site for that type of thing than stack overflow. Hopefully, we'll see good software answers, with enough of the stats thrown in to give the &quot;asker&quot; a little bit of foundation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that Colin's example should go here, and I hope that it's answered with a primary focus on the stats, and secondary focus on algorithmic efficiency. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, any SAS, R, S+, SPSS, Stata, etc. question is perfectly valid here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62" LastEditorUserId="62" LastEditDate="2010-07-29T13:06:37.547" LastActivityDate="2010-07-29T13:06:37.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="64" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="35" CreationDate="2010-07-20T12:59:09.993" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just think that questions need to be in reference to data analysis in some way or other.  Asking &quot;which is better: R or Clojure&quot; with no mention of what kind of data analysis is not appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T12:59:09.993" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="65" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-20T13:10:07.913" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This one is available:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UnbiasedEstimates.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T13:10:07.913" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="66" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="36" CreationDate="2010-07-20T13:30:54.010" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can alway merge tags down the road when one becomes dominant.  That's possible for the administrators to do.  I think trying to moderate every tag at the beginning is probably not going to work effectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just read the section in here on this subject: &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/the-7-essential-meta-questions-of-every-beta/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/the-7-essential-meta-questions-of-every-beta/&lt;/a&gt;.  In that case, I vote for &quot;Modeling&quot;.  Let's try to keep it clean on that.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this tag even signify?  On our site, it seems so general as to be almost meaningless.  A huge percentage of questions could be tagged with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="5" LastEditDate="2010-07-20T13:37:29.207" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T13:37:29.207" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="67" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-20T14:52:17.047" Score="7" ViewCount="1767" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose, someone asks a question that can be answered very easily by using either a textbook or Wikipedia or Google etc. (See this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/220/how-is-the-minimum-of-a-set-of-random-variables-distributed&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; for an example). Should we close this type of question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My 2 cents: yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasoning: If we allow questions that can be easily answered using another source then I think there will be a proliferation of such questions. I think we should encourage posters to ask questions that are difficult and for which there is no standard resource. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if they have overlooked a resource then we can point to that resource in the comments when closing the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to bump this up as we have had some more experience with the kind of questions that are being asked. See this question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/834/what-is-aic-looking-for-a-formal-but-intuitive-answer&quot;&gt;AIC&lt;/a&gt; as another example of a question that can be answered by Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to the reasons I mentioned earlier (see above), looking at the wiki before asking the question will also make the question a bit more focused and useful both to the poster and to the rest of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we have a policy for these type of questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="svadali" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T10:08:43.043" Title="Should we close questions that can be easily answered by Wikipedia or Google?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|closing-questions|policy|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="68" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="67" CreationDate="2010-07-20T14:54:54.917" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree. I don't see any reason for us to recreate wikipedia here. People should do a little bit of homework before asking a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact is: this is a community driven process.  You can vote to close a question, and you just need 4 more people to agree.  So go ahead and give it a try.  Getting people to discuss it on meta won't change behavior as much as trying to actually do it on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T14:54:54.917" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="69" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-20T15:54:46.497" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;BootstrapConfidence.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T15:54:46.497" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="70" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="49" CreationDate="2010-07-20T16:03:25.230" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My two different suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fundamental questions are&#xA;going to be asked anyway (in fact,&#xA;they already are; e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/26/what-is-a-standard-deviation&quot;&gt;standard&#xA;deviation&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/31/what-is-the-meaning-of-p-values-and-t-values-in-statistical-tests&quot;&gt;p &amp;amp; t values&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2/what-is-normality&quot;&gt;normality&lt;/a&gt;), so ask away.  If&#xA;the answers don't meet your need,&#xA;try to clarify what you don't understand or how the answers could be more helpful to you.  The submitted&#xA;answers should get better as more&#xA;people have a chance to chime in. &#xA;If they reach a level that the&#xA;community deems &quot;good enough&quot; they&#xA;can become canonical. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I would&#xA;suggest that you check the obvious&#xA;places (e.g.,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Statistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;simple.wikipedia.org/&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Category:Statistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikiversity.org&lt;/a&gt;).  You're bound&#xA;to still have questions, even after&#xA;going over those resources, and&#xA;those subsequent questions would&#xA;probably be perfect to ask here. In conjunction with this, if you have references you would recommend users check first, please add them as an answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/83/what-resources-should-i-review-before-i-ask-a-basic-question&quot;&gt;What resources should I review before I ask a basic question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T23:09:34.247" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="71" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-20T16:16:58.430" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;infinitevariance.com &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Taken, but apparently for a personal site, so maybe the owner can be convinced to give it up.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T16:16:58.430" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="72" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="79" CreationDate="2010-07-20T16:33:28.900" Score="3" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently 3 questions are tagged possibly-offtopic. Why is this done? The close votes will show what we think what is offtopic and the discussion will be done here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tags are used to give useful information about the question, not to add some meta-information to them. Anyway, who would decide which are qualified as such, because that is very subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suggestion: Remove all this tags. If you find something offtopic -&gt; do a close-vote as offtopic and open an meta-question if it is not evident.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2010-07-23T03:37:27.167" LastActivityDate="2010-07-23T03:37:27.167" Title="Don't use possibly-offtopic tag" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="73" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="67" CreationDate="2010-07-20T16:58:33.907" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree (disclosure: I posted the question you're using as an example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is certainly annoying to have duplicate questions within a StackExchange, but if the question is original and on-topic, I don't see the problem in having it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that the StackExchange engine has an advantage over random Google search results and Wikipedia entries; namely, that the answers are voted upon by knowledgeable users, so that incorrect (or unhelpful) material is less likely to appear at the top. With Wikipedia, it can be harder to know whether or not an entry is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T16:58:33.907" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="74" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-20T17:21:39.377" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently there is the question on the mainsite called &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/330/real-world-usages-of-statistical-analysis&quot;&gt;Real world usages of statistical analyses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is your opinion. Should we allow this kind of questions or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Where do you use statistical analysis&#xA;  at work? Do you use it in a company?&#xA;  What problems is it solving?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T17:51:05.160" Title="Is &quot;Real world usages&quot; question offtopic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="75" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="74" CreationDate="2010-07-20T17:26:54.687" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While it isn't a great question, I think that it should be fine as a community wiki.  There might be some interesting &quot;use cases&quot; that come out of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T17:26:54.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="76" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="74" CreationDate="2010-07-20T17:27:04.283" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion this question does not belong on this website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, this is a site for experts. The intended users of this sites are using their stuff in the real world (yes, universities are also real world in this topic)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we are all experts, this question has no purpose on this site. It only invites to summing up broad topics, or not being specific on the application anyway. A list of possible applications of statistical analyses is something you expect on a wikipedia-page (which is targeted on novices), not on an expert site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially in the beginning of this site, I would suggest to not have this topics. If this is allowed now, every question of &quot;Real world usages of method X&quot; where X is an related method would possible qualify for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO this site should be a Q&amp;amp;A site, not a site for getting inspiration, hearing great stories, or bragging about your job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T17:27:04.283" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="77" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="74" CreationDate="2010-07-20T17:28:14.983" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the question could be reworded to make it a bit more interesting.  For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I keep saying the sexy job in the next&#xA;  ten years will be statisticians.&#xA;  People think I’m joking, but who&#xA;  would’ve guessed that computer&#xA;  engineers would’ve been the sexy job&#xA;  of the 1990s?” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hal Varian, The&#xA;  McKinsey Quarterly, January 2009.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What jobs, do think, are being referred to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and make it a community wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T17:28:14.983" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="78" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31" CreationDate="2010-07-20T17:34:16.173" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, I don't think there should be a best-of tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question that you are describing will always be a community wiki question. The tag will not give any more information about the real content of the question, but instead be used to indicate the type of question. Because community wiki is already doing this (kind of) I think it is completely unnecessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T17:34:16.173" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="79" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="72" CreationDate="2010-07-20T17:37:02.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Update&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I keep forgetting about how nice linked posts are these days.  Given this- I agree that we should definitely keep the tag space free of clutter and collect links in the associated Meta questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;They are flagged possibly-off-topic because we have not figured out where to draw the lines yet.  See the following two discussions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/35/how-much-programming-here&quot;&gt;How much programming here?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1/how-to-answer-r-questions&quot;&gt;How to answer R questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The flags are very important as they allow us to keep tabs on these questions.  This is important for two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It allows us to easily find these questions so that they may be used as evidence to support discussions like the ones above that will decide policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Once policy has been decided, they allow us to easily find the questions and deal with them in a uniform fashion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please don't remove the flags until the relevant discussions have been completed and we have decided on guidelines.&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T18:21:33.727" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="80" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="74" CreationDate="2010-07-20T17:51:05.160" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am only curious whether there are any non-real world uses ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T17:51:05.160" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="82" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6" CreationDate="2010-07-20T23:03:34.210" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;What statistics resources provide basic instruction?  / What resources should I review before I ask a basic question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To help preemptively direct people with basic questions to review other available resources, maybe we should have a FAQ that provides a list of such resources.  Or maybe the answer can just link to an ongoing CW resource list.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T23:03:34.210" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-05T00:20:00.320" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="83" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-20T23:07:29.993" Score="6" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;In conjunction with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6/what-should-our-faq-contain/82#82&quot;&gt;a possible FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, I'm adding this as a CW to collect resources that users with basic questions can refer to prior to posting questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are references that you have found personally useful, or have recommended to others, to learn statistics?  Please include either a url or a full citation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2010-07-21T13:06:40.637" Title="What resources should I review before I ask a basic question?" Tags="|support|fundamentals|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="84" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="83" CreationDate="2010-07-20T23:14:05.270" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wikitrilogy: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category%3aStatistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category%3aStatistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Simple Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Category%3aStatistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikiversity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24" LastActivityDate="2010-07-20T23:14:05.270" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="85" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-21T00:40:22.877" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll say 3 as well, but there should be a very liberal criteria for determining whether a question has statistical content.  For example, a seemingly purely programing based question (e.g. how to work with and store data in sparse matrices) should not be bounced to SO so long as the question asker specify that it is their ultimate goal to perform a specific statistical procedure on that data. There are many cases where it will be better to ask that type of question to people familiar with the procedure (and the available methods for conducting that procedure) rather than to a general programing forum.  That is, a general programming forum may technically solve a problem but leave a dataset in a state that is not readily amenable to analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastActivityDate="2010-07-21T00:40:22.877" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="86" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-21T03:18:04.040" Score="4" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it may be desirable to streamline the tags on the main site as much as possible before the site goes public. For example, there are tags such as 'data', 'dataset' etc which causes confusion and more work later on. I started doing some re-tagging but then stopped as I felt that I should find out what others have to say about this idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reactions / thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-07-21T06:42:59.517" Title="Can/should we streamline the tags on the main site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="87" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-21T03:46:50.243" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Totally Stats!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;TotallyStats.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unambiguous. Easy to spell. Available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-07-21T03:46:50.243" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="88" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="86" CreationDate="2010-07-21T04:01:34.700" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I've seen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;obvious tag errors (e.g., &lt;code&gt;baysian&lt;/code&gt; instead of &lt;code&gt;bayesian&lt;/code&gt;),  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;where there is already a tag pattern (e.g., &lt;code&gt;distributions&lt;/code&gt; instead of &lt;code&gt;distribution&lt;/code&gt;; at the point I changed it, I think there were 6 &lt;code&gt;distributions&lt;/code&gt; and only the 1 &lt;code&gt;distribution&lt;/code&gt;), or  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;where there is another tag that would be appropriate (e.g., &lt;code&gt;fundamentals&lt;/code&gt;),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've changed or added the appropriate tag.  So obviously my vote in those areas is to streamline.  Anything beyond those three scenarios, I'd be hesitant to do without running it by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Along those lines, if you do streamline/clean-up tags, be warned that there may be almost a daylong timelag before the daily &quot;janitor&quot; cleans up the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/44/how-to-remove-tags&quot;&gt;incorrect or orphaned tags&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/data&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;data&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; versus &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dataset&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;dataset&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; example, I'd suggest you start a specific meta question.  Personally, I'm on the line and would wait to see what emerges over the next day or so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2010-07-21T04:10:19.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="89" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="86" CreationDate="2010-07-21T06:42:59.517" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would suggest waiting 3 or 4 days. This will give us some better statistics on which tags are naturally used. After that there is still enough time to fix things before the public beta starts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, probably some users will than have access to the moderation tools, which (I think) contain some easy things to do retagging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2010-07-21T06:42:59.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="90" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="83" CreationDate="2010-07-21T08:44:36.563" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's also worth trying &lt;a href=&quot;http://lmgtfy.com/?q=google&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;google&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="5" LastEditDate="2010-07-21T13:06:40.637" LastActivityDate="2010-07-21T13:06:40.637" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="91" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-21T12:25:39.880" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;PirateBayes.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="240" LastActivityDate="2010-07-21T12:25:39.880" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="92" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-21T12:26:50.517" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;two-tailed-z.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="240" LastActivityDate="2010-07-21T12:26:50.517" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="93" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-21T12:30:31.930" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;markov-zorro.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="240" LastActivityDate="2010-07-21T12:30:31.930" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="94" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="106" CreationDate="2010-07-21T12:48:47.633" Score="2" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the site becomes bigger it's reasonable to suppose that contributors will have asked, answered or commented on various questions scattered all over the site. It would be nice if there could some way to keep track of all these, perhaps an optional link section on each user's profile page to those questions they have asked or responded to? This would make it much easier to revisit these questions at a later date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="226" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T19:41:47.927" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T19:41:47.927" Title="Links to questions asked, answered or commented on?" Tags="|feature-request|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="96" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-21T13:28:37.447" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;ModelEpiphany.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Epiphany means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a sudden, intuitive perception of or&#xA;  insight into the reality or essential&#xA;  meaning of something&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-07-21T13:28:37.447" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="97" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31" CreationDate="2010-07-21T13:31:16.320" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.  It's only after consulting last year's list do I figure out what to wear this year.  This tag thing will make the entire process much smoother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(No, seriously, that's a Yes vote.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="251" LastActivityDate="2010-07-21T13:31:16.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="98" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-21T14:29:44.493" Score="2" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is similar to the question &quot;How to answer R questions&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1/how-to-answer-r-questions&quot;&gt;How to answer R questions&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;but for math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, if people ask math question, we can&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bounce them all to MO&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answer all questions, even when it's clearly mathematic and not statistics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly the &quot;poblem&quot; won't as frequent as with R questions but the frontier between math and statistic is not clear at all and it will be dificult to know and define if a question has &quot;too much math&quot; or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say 2, with a possible redirection when we believe that a better answer will be gievn by the math community...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already have an example of overlap (however I don't think this one is a problem)&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/414/intro-to-statistics-for-mathematicians&quot;&gt;Introduction to statistics for mathematicians&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2010-07-21T14:49:12.963" Title="How do we handle overlap with mathoverflow" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="99" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-21T14:36:18.970" Score="0" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5/what-typographic-support-is-available-to-support-display-of-statistical-formula&quot;&gt;What typographic support is available to support display of statistical formula?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't find how to write math equation. Why the functionnality of mathoverflow (latex ...) is not available? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2010-07-21T14:36:18.970" Title="How to write math equations" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2010-07-22T03:06:25.817" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="100" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-21T14:40:08.570" Score="3" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/35/how-much-programming-here&quot;&gt;How much programming here?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the two questions below.  I'm not sure why one was closed and other not.  I think both are fine; I liked Suresh's answer to the closed question, and was hoping to see more.  I think this is relevant because there seems to be some consensus that Machine Learning is within bounds, and computational statistics can't be completely out of bounds, so we should expect questions on algorithms related to the field.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what rules, loosely speaking, are in play when deciding to close such a question?  I think this would be nice to advertise in the FAQ, so people can decide whether they should be headed to MetaOptimize or StackOverflow before posting such questions here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/134/algorithms-to-compute-the-running-median-closed&quot;&gt;Algorithms to compute the running median?&lt;/a&gt; [closed]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/346/what-is-a-good-algorithm-for-estimating-the-median-of-a-huge-read-once-data-set&quot;&gt;What is a good algorithm for estimating the median of a huge read-once data set?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="251" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2010-10-19T15:53:33.177" Title="Algorithm related questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2010-10-19T16:19:26.207" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="100" CreationDate="2010-07-21T14:43:37.720" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to close the first one as it seems that a question like that seems better suited for Stackoverflow. The second one should also be closed but perhaps has not caught the attention of sufficient users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-07-21T14:43:37.720" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-21T14:45:28.027" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;statistical-power.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from having interesting statistical meaning, it has positive connotations and is easy to use/understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="219" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-07-27T01:49:35.613" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-21T14:47:16.777" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;AllYourBayes.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we don't want to appear partisan:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AllYourBayesAndFreqs.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="251" LastActivityDate="2010-07-21T14:47:16.777" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="98" CreationDate="2010-07-21T14:49:12.963" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My feeling is that this will depend on the kind of 'experts' that use this site. A few examples: (a) Theoretical questions on measure theory can be bounced to MO if no one here can answer them, (b) Very basic questions involving probability can be bounced to &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; or perhaps answered here itself. Anything in between basic probability and measure theory we should be able to handle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:38.337" LastActivityDate="2010-07-21T14:49:12.963" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-21T15:06:31.347" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;AllYourBayesAreBelongToUs&lt;/strong&gt;.com &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A play on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="5" LastEditDate="2010-07-22T00:19:14.697" LastActivityDate="2010-07-22T00:19:14.697" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="94" CreationDate="2010-07-21T15:46:26.187" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently, if you click on a user's name it takes you to their profile which contains exactly what you're describing for questions asked and answers given.  If you then click on the user's &quot;activity tab&quot; you can see a stream of their activity, including comments.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, for every question, if you look in the lower portion of the right hand column there are the associated tags, when it was asked, how many times it's been viewed, if there are any linked questions, the &lt;em&gt;list of linked questions&lt;/em&gt;, and finishing out that column is any &lt;em&gt;questions the stackexchange system thinks are related&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24" LastActivityDate="2010-07-21T15:46:26.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="94" CreationDate="2010-07-21T16:08:26.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Or on the letter (&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rOgBi.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;) icon to see and get to the recent events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2010-10-24T16:34:00.673" LastActivityDate="2010-10-24T16:34:00.673" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2010-07-21T19:08:08.203" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Latex support is now built-in. See this meta thread from math.SE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2/tex-math-markup-is-sorely-needed&quot;&gt;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2/tex-math-markup-is-sorely-needed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have made this answer CW in case you want to see what you have to do to get latex output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A demo: $\alpha$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/users/38/john-gietzen&quot;&gt;John Gietzen&lt;/a&gt; over at &lt;a href=&quot;http://math.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;http://math.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; has created a greasemonkey script which uses the Google Charts API to create images on the fly from latex. I have asked his permission to adapt it for our site. See his answer to this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2/tex-math-markup-is-sorely-needed&quot;&gt;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2/tex-math-markup-is-sorely-needed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a demo of the script: $\alpha$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, here is the script put together by John: &lt;a href=&quot;http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/81977&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/81977&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presently, I have it working for in firefox with &lt;a href=&quot;https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;greasemonkey&lt;/a&gt; installed. Apparently, it works in Chrome as well but I have not been able to get it to work. I will update this answer if I can resolve that issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps, we should start using tex + the above script. The advantage is that as and when we get tex support from the devs all our posts will look nice.&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="svadali" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:22.773" LastActivityDate="2010-07-29T20:34:01.837" CommentCount="7" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-29T20:36:34.933" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="109" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="110" CreationDate="2010-07-21T20:42:34.720" Score="3" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have the first of its kind, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/459/good-line-color-for-threshold-line-in-a-time-series-graph&quot;&gt;How to draw a threshold line&lt;/a&gt;. Especially this question fits best for User Interface (which is still on Area51), but it shows the problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2010-07-21T22:55:20.103" Title="What to do with pure visualization questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="109" CreationDate="2010-07-21T22:55:20.103" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that question was perfectly fine.  Although the line in question wasn't data-derived, the issue was clearly how that line should be drawn in order to help the plot tell the right story &lt;em&gt;about the visualized data&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastActivityDate="2010-07-21T22:55:20.103" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-21T23:24:56.907" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;OffTheMarkov.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220" LastActivityDate="2010-07-21T23:24:56.907" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;gaussinthehouse.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="240" LastActivityDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T00:48:49.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-22T10:24:09.740" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;liesanddamnlies.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-07-27T01:54:54.773" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-22T10:24:09.740" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="114" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-22T11:22:38.553" Score="6" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I basic sketching tool to quickly draw out graphs / concepts etc. along the lines of Balsamiq markups would be really useful. It would be doubly useful if people answering questions could access the same sketch and add their own information. Having to draw it up and then upload it is just a bit of a pain right now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T19:27:45.137" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T19:27:45.137" Title="A sketching tool would be very useful" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="115" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-22T14:41:47.207" Score="0" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that community wiki that ask for a best x questions should include all possible candidats for x as answers to allow everyone to rank them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see a good reason to have the x that the questioner starter proposes in the question itself as done in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/103/what-is-your-favorite-data-visualization-blog&quot;&gt;What is your favorite data visualization blog?&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/114/what-statistical-blogs-would-you-recommend&quot;&gt;What statistical blogs would you recommend?&lt;/a&gt;. The alternative is done in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/423/what-is-your-favorite-data-analysis-cartoon&quot;&gt;What is your favorite &amp;quot;data analysis&amp;quot; cartoon?&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having all possible x as candidates would allow the best x to rise to the top regardless of whether they come from the person who create the community wiki question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3807" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2010-07-22T22:14:47.880" Title="Should community wiki questions that ask for a 'best of x' include example x in the question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="115" CreationDate="2010-07-22T16:08:55.133" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is good to have them in separate answers to rank them. However, I think also collecting all the useful answers in the question is good and easy for people who come across the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2010-07-22T16:08:55.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="115" CreationDate="2010-07-22T16:21:18.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It isn't clear to me that we need to dictate a policy for this; people can decide on a case-by-case basis, and I personally don't see any major harm in either scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the examples you show above, I did include it in one case (the cartoon) and not in the other (the blogs).  I included it in the cartoon one is order to give an example for what people should do (although you're right that could have put this in an answer instead).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll change the cartoon question to match.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also like Peter's idea of collecting the best options into the question, although that wouldn't work in the cartoon question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-07-22T16:21:18.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="118" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-22T18:35:43.560" Score="2" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering, what can we ask about speech recognition on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16/is-machine-learning-a-part-of-statistical-analysis&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; indicates that machine learning is very much included in the site. So how about the following questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do I train an acoustic HMM model&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why does my ngram language model get so big&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What tool can I use to do Speech Recognition&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the advantages of using Finate State Machines for decoding/recognition&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do I do discriminative training&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;HTK (Hidden Markov Model toolkit) gives an error when I try to align my transcriptions. What is wrong?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do I adapt my Language model to law text&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we want this kind of question on the site? If complicated, please indicate which questions you think are ok and which not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2013-03-11T12:08:02.180" Title="How much can we ask about Speech Recognition" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="119" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-23T10:40:32.427" Score="4" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;As we are coming half way the private beta we should start discussing and preparing some things for the general public to come in. This question is mainly meant to show how far we are with &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/the-7-essential-meta-questions-of-every-beta/&quot;&gt;The 7 Essential Meta Questions&lt;/a&gt;&quot; and to have a nice browsing point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are questions about [subject] on or off topic?&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1/how-to-answer-r-questions&quot;&gt;R&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/35/how-much-programming-here&quot;&gt;Programming&lt;/a&gt; questions  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/109/what-to-do-with-pure-visualization-questions&quot;&gt;Visualization&lt;/a&gt; questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16/is-machine-learning-a-part-of-statistical-analysis&quot;&gt;Machine Learning&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/118/how-much-can-we-ask-about-speech-recognition&quot;&gt;Speech Recognition&lt;/a&gt; questions&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What should our FAQ contain?&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6/what-should-our-faq-contain&quot;&gt;FAQ thread&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How should we tag questions about {subject}?&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/120/tag-rename-suggestions&quot;&gt;Tag rename requests&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What should our domain name be?&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/21/what-should-our-site-be-called-what-should-our-domain-name-be&quot;&gt;Site Name / Domain name&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br/&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What should our logo and site design look like?&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No topics yet&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who should the moderators be?&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/133/who-should-the-moderators-be&quot;&gt;Who should the moderators be?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do we promote our site?&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126/ideas-and-designs-for-posters&quot;&gt;Posters&lt;/a&gt;    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/142/email-blurb-for-public-beta&quot;&gt;Email Blurb&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's give together input on all of these topics as it is important to but a strong basis now for how the site will look like. Obviously some points (like 5. and 7.) are not so relevant yet, but let's at least start discussing about the five others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Community wiki, so feel free to update this question as new topics are made)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="svadali" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2010-07-23T21:42:13.987" Title="The 7 Essential Meta Questions" Tags="|discussion|essential-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-23T10:40:32.427" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="120" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-23T10:46:46.413" Score="4" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which tags do you think should be renamed? Let's add here tag-rename requests as answers. We can vote up answers to indicate that we agree with that tag-rename request and use the comments to discuss the request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless there is a discussion about a tag-rename, anyone can go ahead to change the tags after some time and upvotes. This to prevent that somebody just retags everything when a request comes, now matter what the others think... When we get moderators this task will shift to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please all take a look now (and vote) and suggest more tag renames if you have.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2010-07-26T17:51:15.757" LastActivityDate="2010-08-09T14:43:35.167" Title="Tag rename suggestions" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="13" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-23T10:49:44.740" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="120" CreationDate="2010-07-23T10:47:43.977" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag Synonyms create&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;book -&gt; books&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;textbooks -&gt; books&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;textbook -&gt; books&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this change OK?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[books] == [textbooks] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PROPOSED RESOLUTION&lt;/strong&gt;: Make a synonym of books and textbooks, with books being the standard displayed value. &lt;em&gt;DIAMOND NEEDED&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="8" LastEditDate="2010-08-05T10:41:01.350" LastActivityDate="2010-08-05T10:41:01.350" CommentCount="11" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-23T10:49:51.620" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="118" CreationDate="2010-07-23T12:52:29.477" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think at least some of this is out of scope. Maybe Q1 is ok, but I don't know if acoustic HMMs are any different from HMMs in other areas. If the question is about training HMMs generally, it would be fine. But if acoustic HMMs are very different from other HMMs, then maybe it would be to application-specific for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, questions that require a lot of application-specific knowledge should be out-of-scope in my view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastActivityDate="2010-07-23T12:52:29.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="118" CreationDate="2010-07-23T13:13:24.020" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Rob. You could always make the question application agnostic by abstracting away some of the application details. Abstracting away application details can make the question difficult to understand but perhaps may also make it 'answerable' by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-07-23T13:13:24.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="118" CreationDate="2010-07-23T14:22:41.767" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you should give him a chance to ask them and then decide. It is better to close some questions than to have everyone asking on meta if they can ask a particular question. IMO 1, 2, 4, 5 and 7 are perfectly ok, 6 may be off-topic, for 3 the answer is R ;-) (ok, is also off-topic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2010-07-23T16:12:29.533" LastActivityDate="2010-07-23T16:12:29.533" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="120" CreationDate="2010-07-23T14:27:36.293" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag Synonym Created&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[random-variables] -&gt; [random-variable]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DONE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="8" LastEditDate="2010-08-05T09:08:45.177" LastActivityDate="2010-08-05T09:08:45.177" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-23T14:27:36.293" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="126" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-23T15:52:06.023" Score="2" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once we're out of beta, I'd like to announce the site at work.  There should be at least a few hundred potential users here.  Mass emailing is frowned upon, so I would like to hang posters by the elevators instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have ideas for what to put on a poster?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would anyone with design skills volunteer to make one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poster should be PDF and look good when printer on either letter-size or A4 paper.  Color is good, but it is nice if a black-and-white printout looks good as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220" LastActivityDate="2010-07-23T16:56:28.957" Title="Ideas and designs for posters" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="126" CreationDate="2010-07-23T15:53:36.413" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Idea lifted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/21/what-should-our-site-be-called-what-should-our-domain-name-be/105#105&quot;&gt;the site-name discussion&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;All your Bayes are belong to us&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2010-07-23T15:53:36.413" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="128" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="139" CreationDate="2010-07-23T16:45:15.480" Score="6" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently included a few paper references in my answers (in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/507/what-is-the-best-method-for-checking-convergence-in-mcmc&quot;&gt;MCMC convergence question&lt;/a&gt;, for instance).  Should we include footnotes with the full citation when we reference papers?  That might be hard to enforce, but it would certainly be a good thing to do in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="How should we include paper references?" Tags="|discussion|papers|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="128" CreationDate="2010-07-23T16:51:43.100" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I vote for URLs to the publisher site. This will work in a majority of cases, and gives a fast access to the paper. I just hate copying references to Google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-07-23T16:51:43.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="128" CreationDate="2010-07-23T16:56:13.670" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would prefer that the cite should ideally be a link to a free version (e.g., on SSRN, arxiv, on author website etc) and if a free version is not available then link to the publisher version. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-07-23T16:56:13.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="126" CreationDate="2010-07-23T16:56:28.957" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is useless to advertise something without a justified visual identification. On the other hand, beta is for testing, so some drawbacks that still exist may repel certain users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-07-23T16:56:28.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="128" CreationDate="2010-07-23T16:57:07.320" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it should be enforced, but we can indeed encourage people to do it. When we start with some unified format, people will quickly pick that up. And high-rep users / moderators can always edit it in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest the following guidelines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Using the Parenthesis Name Year format as proposed in (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/128/how-should-we-include-paper-references/132#132&quot;&gt;Smit, P., 2010&lt;/a&gt;), immediate linked to either doi or free pdf&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Putting the actual references in sup tags &lt;sup&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/40035/allow-the-small-tag&quot;&gt;hopefully small tags in future&lt;/a&gt;, vote it up!)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Including at least the doi link, and if available a link to a free pdf.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Smit, P. (2010) &lt;em&gt;Including references in answers&lt;/em&gt; Meta Stats Stackexchange, doi, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/128/how-should-we-include-paper-references/132#132&quot;&gt;free link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2010-07-23T16:57:07.320" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="133" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-23T18:27:01.807" Score="4" ViewCount="591" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/57986/how-to-organize-a-formal-moderator-election-on-a-beta-se-site&quot;&gt;the web-apps template&lt;/a&gt;, we should be choosing candidates to be our site moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Each nomination should be a separate answer. Link the name to the user's profile so we can see their activity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The nominee should indicate their acceptance by editing the answer, adding that they accept the nomination. Optionally they can write something about their self. This can be just practical stuff like which hours and how many hours they expect to spend on the site, but also some motivation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;From the top voted nominees a number of temporary moderators will be appointed, until the site is out of beta and real elections can be held.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some guidelines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be a currently registered user in good standing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must have a reasonably high reputation score to indicate active, consistent participation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should exhibit patience and fairness at all times in their questions, answers, and comments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should lead by example, showing respect for their fellow community members in everything they write.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They should want the responsibility. Nominating users isn’t the same as an obligation. It’s purely voluntary!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When nominating, please put the name of the nominee as a heading (with a #) and as a link to their real profile. Also add a link to their meta profile. (See the already provided answers). After that, please keep them empty for the nominees to add information themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides voting, everybody could off course also point out in the comments why that nominee is a good candidate to be moderator or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Temporary moderators have been appointed by the StackExchange team so the site can function smoothly until moderators are elected. The temporary moderators are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/88/mbq&quot;&gt;mbq&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/8/csgillespie&quot;&gt;csgillespie&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/5/shane&quot;&gt;Shane&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/159/rob-hyndman&quot;&gt;Rob Hyndman&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read more about &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/57986/how-to-organize-a-formal-moderator-election-on-a-beta-se-site&quot;&gt;the moderator nomination process here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2010-08-11T12:58:32.940" Title="Who should the moderators be? [LOCKED]" Tags="|discussion|essential-questions|moderation|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-23T18:30:59.583" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="133" CreationDate="2010-07-23T18:27:40.103" Score="15" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/159/rob-hyndman&quot;&gt;Rob Hyndman&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be happy to help out as a moderator. Most days I can be checking the site regularly throughout the day. My time zone is UTC+10 which is nicely complementary to most other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/users/159/rob-hyndman&quot;&gt;meta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-07-24T03:55:06.947" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-23T18:33:50.810" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="133" CreationDate="2010-07-23T18:29:35.827" Score="12" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/5/shane&quot;&gt;Shane&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/users/5/shane&quot;&gt;meta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-07-23T18:29:35.827" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-23T18:31:25.680" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="133" CreationDate="2010-07-23T18:44:55.000" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/190/peter-smit&quot;&gt;Peter Smit&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/users/190/peter-smit&quot;&gt;meta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hereby decline my nomination. Besides the fact that there are much better and knowledgeable candidates, I am afraid that moderation would be so fun that it would take all my time and prevent me from ever finishing my thesis :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2010-07-26T08:14:26.907" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-23T18:44:55.000" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="133" CreationDate="2010-07-23T18:45:53.733" Score="9" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/88/mbq&quot;&gt;mbq&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/users/88/mbq&quot;&gt;meta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for nomination; I believe I can take it. I live in a CET zone (UTC+1/2). I have a nice academic job, so generally I have a lot of time (except for out of a sudden emerging deadlines).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-07-23T22:04:13.027" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-23T18:45:53.733" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="133" CreationDate="2010-07-23T18:47:05.277" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/28/srikant-vadali&quot;&gt;Srikant Vadali&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/users/28/srikant-vadali&quot;&gt;meta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am in the Eastern Time Zone (United States). I can visit the site throughout the day until the start of the Fall semester (Sep '10) when I teach on MWF. On these days my visits will be sporadic and restricted to after 9 pm EST. On TR I am a bit more flexible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to ask any questions (via the comments to this 'answer') if you feel you need additional information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="svadali" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-07-23T19:09:16.417" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-23T18:47:05.277" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="128" CreationDate="2010-07-23T19:29:34.483" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;To provide a complete reference while minimizing the amount of work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For papers that have a DOI, always link to &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/thisisthedoi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://dx.doi.org/thisisthedoi&lt;/a&gt;.  Otherwise, link to the publisher's page for the paper, or some other source that provides a full citation and (if available) a link to the PDF.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clicking on the link will give the reader a full citation, so providing the full citation (author, title, journal, etc.) in the answer should not be required.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Optionally, add a second link with the text “(PDF)”.  This link should be to a free verison.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We shouldn't &lt;em&gt;expect&lt;/em&gt; the answerer to dig up a link to a free PDF.  Given a full citation, it is not too hard for the reader to Google for that himself if he doesn't have access to the publisher's version through his institution's library.  It's ok to offer a link to a free PDF in a comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Incorporate the link into the answer informally, in whatever way makes sense.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you want to include a full citation, feel free, but I don't think it's necessary to prescribe a format.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of fine ways to incorporate links:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“If you use &lt;a href=&quot;http://nips.cc/Conferences/2008/Program/event.php?ID=1258&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;random kitchen sinks&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.nips.cc/papers/files/nips21/NIPS2008_0885.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;PDF&lt;/a&gt;), you can …”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Boosting seems to work well for &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btm497&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;protein subcellular localization patterns&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0808843106&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;cellular morphologies&lt;/a&gt;.”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“You may want to try &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TMI.2008.918329&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Cheeger regularization&lt;/a&gt;.”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“&lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/aos/1016218223&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Friedman, Hastie and Tibshirani&lt;/a&gt; show that boosting can be understood as additive logistic regression.”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220" LastEditorUserId="220" LastEditDate="2010-07-23T19:50:48.067" LastActivityDate="2010-07-23T19:50:48.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="133" CreationDate="2010-07-23T20:13:20.523" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/8/colin-gillespie&quot;&gt;Colin Gillespie&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/users/8/colin-gillespie&quot;&gt;meta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be happy to help out as a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, I'm a statistics lecturer at Newcastle University, UK and so my time zone is BST.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ps I'm away from the office this week which is why I've been slow to respond and not answer any questions in the main site. I won't be fully back until Monday 2nd August.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-07-27T14:56:32.847" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-23T20:13:20.523" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="142" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-23T21:35:47.667" Score="2" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of us will have the ability to announce the existence of this site via email listservs. Can we come up with an email blurb that we can use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will write a sample email blurb as an answer. Feel free to edit it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-07-23T21:40:12.520" Title="Email Blurb for Public Beta" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="142" CreationDate="2010-07-23T21:40:12.520" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you have statistics related questions that you would like answers to? Do you often feel that you would be able to work more productively if you had access to a site which has high quality questions and answers on various statistics related topics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your answer is yes to the above two questions then click on: &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;http://stats.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This website is built on the very successful model of Questions &amp;amp; Answers pioneered by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;Stackoverflow&lt;/a&gt;. Please take a few minutes of your time to visit the site so that you can see for yourself how the site works. Please also read our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; to know more about the site works. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2010-07-23T21:40:12.520" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-23T21:40:12.520" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="128" CreationDate="2010-07-24T02:18:44.690" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whatever we agree on should go into the FAQ. I support the use of DOI links where available. If not, I think we should encourage links to a standard open access repository such as ArXiv, RePEc or SSRN. As a last resort, link to a personal website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastActivityDate="2010-07-24T02:18:44.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="145" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="149" CreationDate="2010-07-24T07:40:05.313" Score="1" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect this would be a break from other stackexchange sites, but might it be possible to accept more than one answer as correct?  For example, if a question is asked and one person answered it in good technical detail, but the answer is a bit unclear from a practical lay understanding while another person provided a good clear, short, practical answer - which one ought to be selected as &quot;the answer&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T19:27:29.087" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="What if the &quot;correct&quot; answer is spread among two responses?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="145" CreationDate="2010-07-24T08:01:25.357" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not in favor of allowing more than one answer. This will encourage multiple reformulation and at the end we will have thousand of times the reformulation of the same answer. In a sence we should vote down (I don't do it) reformulation answer because a comment on the first answer to ameliorate the first answer will clarify things for the reader. I strongly believe that the temptation to reformulate should not be encouraged. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastActivityDate="2010-07-24T08:01:25.357" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="145" CreationDate="2010-07-24T08:35:42.810" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you should accept the first one and upvote the rest of those which you like. And than you can add comments to reflect what you liked in which of answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-07-24T08:35:42.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="145" CreationDate="2010-07-24T08:35:59.017" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This ground was &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/28276/what-answer-to-accept&quot;&gt;covered&lt;/a&gt; on meta-stackoverflow some time back.  I think the advice in the first two responses are right: pick the earliest correct answer or simply the best answer.  Use your judgement, but also vote up any answers you think deserve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="251" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2010-07-26T16:59:29.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="145" CreationDate="2010-07-24T08:48:14.590" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, you should always accept the best answer for you, not looking to the date at all. An exception when answers are equally good for you. Than it is maybe nice to take the first one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of these site(s) is to have great questions and great answers. Therefore, edits, but also reformulated answers are very valuable in my opinion. They make the quality of the site better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Off course it is not nice if somebody almost copies your answer. However, if they make it a little something, then the site and future readers are helped by it. It &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the goal of these sites to have the best answer possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2010-07-26T18:02:37.513" LastActivityDate="2010-07-26T18:02:37.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="133" CreationDate="2010-07-24T11:15:14.520" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/215/graham-cookson&quot;&gt;Graham Cookson&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/users/215/graham-cookson&quot;&gt;meta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-07-24T11:15:14.520" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-24T11:15:14.520" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="120" CreationDate="2010-07-26T09:32:45.677" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag Synonym created&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[financial] (x1) -&gt; [finance] (x2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DONE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastEditorUserId="8" LastEditDate="2010-08-05T08:55:06.653" LastActivityDate="2010-08-05T08:55:06.653" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-26T09:32:45.677" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="120" CreationDate="2010-07-26T09:33:47.563" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag Synonym Created&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[homogeneity-of-variance] (x1) -&gt; [homogeneity] (x1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DONE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastEditorUserId="8" LastEditDate="2010-08-05T09:01:20.293" LastActivityDate="2010-08-05T09:01:20.293" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-26T09:33:47.563" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="120" CreationDate="2010-07-26T09:35:09.403" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag Synonym Created&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[pca] (x2) -&gt; [principal-components] (x1)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;DONE THE OPPOSITE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastEditorUserId="8" LastEditDate="2010-08-05T09:01:54.033" LastActivityDate="2010-08-05T09:01:54.033" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-26T09:35:09.403" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="157" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="160" CreationDate="2010-07-26T12:35:07.853" Score="1" ViewCount="608" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it would be of interest to some to post examples and/or counterexamples in Probability. Those could be posed as: &quot;is there an example of an object with properties A, B, C,..  that doesn't have property Z&quot;. However, a post like this could be more mathematical and of narrow interest than the typical post here. And maybe it could find a home on math overflow (where one can also post equations). Any suggestions/ recommendations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-03-30T09:02:40.273" LastActivityDate="2017-03-30T09:02:40.273" Title="Would asking for examples/counterexamples in probability be on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-04-01T09:21:25.027" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="120" CreationDate="2010-07-26T13:46:06.507" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dangling [image] and [processing] in [image-processing].&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;DONE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2010-07-26T13:52:22.247" LastActivityDate="2010-07-26T13:52:22.247" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-26T13:46:06.507" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="120" CreationDate="2010-07-26T13:47:46.253" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag Synonym created&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[model-choice] -&gt; [model-selection]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DONE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="8" LastEditDate="2010-08-05T08:59:57.347" LastActivityDate="2010-08-05T08:59:57.347" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-26T13:47:46.253" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="157" CreationDate="2010-07-26T13:49:39.257" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think basic probability examples belong to math.stackexchange.com whereas basic statistics examples belong on this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-07-26T13:49:39.257" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="120" CreationDate="2010-07-26T13:54:46.047" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag Synonym created&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not sure what to do with this, but a number of questions cover either &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/layman&quot;&gt;layman&lt;/a&gt;&quot; or &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/22/bayesian-and-frequentist-reasoning-in-plain-english&quot;&gt;plain english&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.  Should we just make these all into &quot;introductory&quot; or &quot;beginner&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DONE&lt;/strong&gt; (beginner is chosen)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2010-08-05T08:58:02.217" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-26T13:54:46.047" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="120" CreationDate="2010-07-26T13:57:11.080" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another one that has turned up a few times is &quot;Resources for learning &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (example &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/328/resources-for-learning-about-the-statistical-analysis-of-financial-data/&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/138/resources-for-learning-r/&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;).  Maybe also tag these as &quot;beginner&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DONE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2010-07-26T18:49:42.177" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-26T13:57:11.080" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="157" CreationDate="2010-07-26T14:10:24.870" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that, so long as it relates to data analysis in some way, it's relevant.  Regardless of whether it's probability, set theory, or a cutting-edge technique that few people would have heard of...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding equations: I believe that latex support is going to be implemented here.  So that shouldn't be a reason by itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-07-26T14:10:24.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="120" CreationDate="2010-07-26T14:17:27.383" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag Synonym Created&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[fundamentals] (x6) -&gt; [introductory] (x2) or [beginner]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: [beginner] is one of the most popular tags on SO, so not sure if it would be helpful to have some consistency across sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DONE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="8" LastEditDate="2010-08-05T08:54:06.657" LastActivityDate="2010-08-05T08:54:06.657" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-26T14:17:27.383" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="120" CreationDate="2010-07-26T17:00:38.960" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag Synonym Created&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[fa] -&gt; [factor-analysis]? This is much less common than PCA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DONE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="8" LastEditDate="2010-08-05T09:00:30.183" LastActivityDate="2010-08-05T09:00:30.183" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-26T17:00:38.960" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="120" CreationDate="2010-07-26T18:06:19.923" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TAG SYNONYM Created&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[modelling] (x3) == [modeling] (x9)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;RENAME DONE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="8" LastEditDate="2010-08-05T08:59:26.007" LastActivityDate="2010-08-05T08:59:26.007" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-26T18:06:19.923" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2010-07-26T19:40:22.383" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In fact, you should be looking into using MathJax instead of/as well as jsMath. It's written by the same people, recently had its first release, and is much more stable and flexible. Right now, however, it's actually a little slower than jsMath, but they anticipate improving this soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="308" LastActivityDate="2010-07-26T19:40:22.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2010-07-26T19:47:45.863" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, a solution should be found that displays the equations immediately, not after some seconds. Therefore, I vote for JS in the previews, but compiled tex when questions and answers are displayed!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2010-07-26T19:47:45.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="169" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-26T21:13:34.880" Score="6" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is some concern that this new site may bifurcate the statistical computing community that has been extremely active over the last several months at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/r&quot;&gt;Stackoverflow under the R tag&lt;/a&gt;. The thought is that some, or many, of the users asking and answering on SO may migrate here because their work is more closely related to the statistical interpretation of some R function, rather than purely programatic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that that part of this question was &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1/how-to-answer-r-questions&quot;&gt;already adressed here&lt;/a&gt;; however, it would be very useful if there were some integration between the two sites. I know that at some level the sites are integrated, but in an effort to keep the community unified it would be extremely beneficial if things like search and 'Related Questions' were integrated between the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is meant as more of a question for discussion, but if someone knows whether or not this is even possible I would appreciate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summary&lt;/strong&gt;: It would be nice to integrate &quot;search&quot; and &quot;related questions&quot; between this site and the [r] tag on stackoverflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="302" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T19:27:16.510" Title="Is it possible to integrate data from so.com/questions/tagged/r here?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|status-declined|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="170" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-26T22:11:07.050" Score="0" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mathoverflow has a number of unanswered statistics questions. Should they be bulk imported here to see if they get answers, or should we just wait to see if the questioners want to repost?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/unanswered/tagged?tagnames=st.statistics&amp;amp;page=1&amp;amp;tab=votes&quot;&gt;https://mathoverflow.net/unanswered/tagged?tagnames=st.statistics&amp;amp;page=1&amp;amp;tab=votes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:58:32.040" LastActivityDate="2010-07-27T15:18:38.900" Title="Bulk importing of unanswered questions from mathoverflow" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="170" CreationDate="2010-07-26T23:07:23.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say wait and see if the questioner's repost; perhaps leave them comments suggesting that they do so.  While it is nice to have a large database of questions and answers, if we do a bulk import it is possible that we'll find ourselves answering questions that benefit no one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastActivityDate="2010-07-26T23:07:23.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="172" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-26T23:51:09.890" Score="3" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm of the belief that tags should be used to describe the content in a way that is understood by everyone. The word &quot;beginner&quot; and similar words (I've seen &quot;fundamental&quot; and &quot;fundamentals&quot; thrown out as ideas, too) has no meaning that is shared across a population. What is a &quot;beginner&quot; question to you might be extremely complex to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically from a statistical standpoint, my strength is in engineering statistics - applying statistical methodologies to engineering problems, especially in the software engineering field through various metrics and measurements and analysis of this data. A lot of stuff that is very &quot;beginner&quot; to some people who specialize in statistical analysis is very complicated to me - I took one course on probability and statistics and one course in engineering statistics, everything else I know is self-taught. Other people are in similar boats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's just end this now and not use the &quot;beginner&quot; tag, but focus on quality questions that clearly state the level of previous understanding the asker as and amount of depth the asker expects from answers. This probably means using comments and editing questions (especially by people who aren't the author), but that's really the point of the ability to edit anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for hearing me out!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="110" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="I just want to take this on early: Can we please, please NOT use the [beginner] tag or any similar tags." Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="172" CreationDate="2010-07-27T00:26:51.143" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your point is well taken. However, there are also lots of questions which seek to ask for an explanation that can be understood by a person without statistical training. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/269/what-is-the-difference-between-a-population-and-a-sample&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question that seeks to find the difference between a population and a sample. Clearly, this question is as elementary as it can get in the field of statistics. I think the tag 'beginner' or some such equivalent will give people who want to understand the basics a means to search for questions that may be of some help to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is a tag like 'intro-statistics' better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2010-07-27T00:26:51.143" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-27T03:19:48.217" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;damnlies.com doesn't seem to be doing much&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="239" LastActivityDate="2010-07-27T03:19:48.217" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-27T03:19:48.217" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="172" CreationDate="2010-07-27T03:24:30.200" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First a link to a meta-thread that handles with this on SO: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/29501/tag-cleanup-request-please-get-rid-of-beginner&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/29501/tag-cleanup-request-please-get-rid-of-beginner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see value in the tag beginner. It indicates for people, where to start when they search for a topic on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your main concern is that people have a different opinion/view about beginner. I think this might be not the case. Until now it has been very clear when something is a beginner question or not. In general, a beginner question is something that asks for references or easy explanation of a statistical concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also on other sites (e.g. StackOverflow) it is mostly evident why something is tagged like that, and there people find it useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2010-07-27T03:24:30.200" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="36" CreationDate="2010-07-27T10:23:57.693" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I re-tagged all modelling tags to modeling. There were 3x as much with 1 l and it is nice to have it consistent now the public beta started. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If off course somebody has a good reason for wanting the double l version, we can retag them all at once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2010-07-27T10:23:57.693" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="179" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="184" CreationDate="2010-07-27T12:56:34.547" Score="2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Title about says it all; reliability calculations are &lt;em&gt;pretty&lt;/em&gt; much stats/probability questions, but the lingo is a bit different and of course there are other nuances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, are questions about X specifically (where X is a form of applied stats/probability/analysis) okay?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="452" LastActivityDate="2010-07-27T15:23:09.823" Title="Engineering reliability questions okay?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="133" CreationDate="2010-07-27T13:40:00.267" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/334/dirk-eddelbuettel&quot;&gt;Dirk Eddelbuettel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/users/334/dirk-eddelbuettel&quot;&gt;meta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-07-27T13:40:00.267" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-27T13:40:00.267" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="179" CreationDate="2010-07-27T15:10:57.927" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Give it a try, at least they will be closed. Still try to avoid jargon and give some references if possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-07-27T15:10:57.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-27T15:14:53.153" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;marginoferror.com&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, for the Car Guys fanciers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;margeinnovera.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="472" LastActivityDate="2010-07-27T15:14:53.153" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-27T15:14:53.153" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="170" CreationDate="2010-07-27T15:18:38.900" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think a naive bulk import would be a bad idea. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't think we are currently suffering from a shortage of questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think questions do better when the person posing the question can answer queries, provide initial up votes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The reason some of the questions may have been unanswered is because they are poor questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, I think it would be a good idea to &quot;cherry-pick&quot; a few very good question and post them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastActivityDate="2010-07-27T15:18:38.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="179" CreationDate="2010-07-27T15:23:09.823" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, please try. To the extent possible do make the question application agnostic and if providing the context is important to understand the question then do provide an explanation for the jargon that you are using.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-07-27T15:23:09.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="185" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="190" CreationDate="2010-07-27T15:54:12.243" Score="3" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent answer to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/305/when-conducting-a-t-test-why-would-one-prefer-to-assume-or-test-for-equal-varia&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; suggested a Bayesian approach to the t-test.  I am the sort who doesn't mind every now and again making more trouble for myself by using what I see as the &quot;better&quot; statistical approach even though it isn't common practice in my area yet.  However, this Bayesian approach is far enough outside of my area of expertise I would benefit from some elucidation as to why it might be preferred (or not) over a more standard approach.  Such clarification could allow me to make the relevant points in a publication in which I might use the method.  Is statistical analysis a reasonable place to ask for those kinds of arguments, clarifications and citations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2010-07-27T16:55:44.463" Title="Publishing questions okay?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="185" CreationDate="2010-07-27T16:06:57.837" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is surely ok to ask here for arguments, clarifications and citations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, off course don't copy stuff into your publications without the proper cc-wiki / citations. Also it is not smart to put things in publications that you don't understand yourself, so make really  sure you get and understand the methods before getting them into papers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the question format: try to keep it interesting questions, show where you are busy with and what you have and I think we are very happy to help you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2010-07-27T16:06:57.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2010-07-27T16:15:53.103" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another option is to use &lt;a href=&quot;http://mathurl.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://mathurl.com/&lt;/a&gt;, and then link to the picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://mathurl.com/2aswtnm.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.or-exchange.com/questions/219/what-file-format-for-problem-definition-is-suitable-for-or-exchange/224#224&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this discussion&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the site's about section:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This short link will now forever refer to your equation!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="5" LastEditDate="2010-07-27T16:22:12.380" LastActivityDate="2010-07-27T16:22:12.380" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="169" CreationDate="2010-07-27T16:31:41.343" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Drew, I have the same concern. I've watched the [r] tag community grow on Stack Overflow since the early first &quot;flash mobs&quot; where the site was seeded with good questions and answers. That effort even got mentioned as a &quot;good thing&quot; by Joel and Jeff in the Stack Overflow podcast. It took a long time to get enough good questions and answers on SO for it to be a useful resource. It's also beginning to bubble up good R results in Google, which is very valuable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being an economist I tend to look at Q/A sites as a market. For the market to clear there has to be 1) good questions 2) good answers 3) long term providers of 1 &amp;amp; 2. If any becomes absent then the market fails to clear. I define &quot;clearing&quot; loosely as &quot;questions get reasonable answers in a reasonable amount of time for the majority of users.&quot;  Some of those users won't have to type in the question because they come to the site, find the answer, maybe vote an answer and/or question up and then they go away with what they came for. That market just cleared. What has helped SO become a clearing market for [r] questions is the concentration of many good questions where lots of folks find answers before they type questions and lots of fast answers when users do type in a question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So coming back to Drew's comment: If the set of R users (which is very small compared to Python, Java Script, PHP, etc.) gets split across multiple Stack Exchange sites I'm concerned that the R questions on all of those sites will fail to clear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I was &quot;King of the Internet&quot; (registered trademark of Al Gore) I'd make all questions that are mostly syntactical go to Stack Overflow and let the ones that are more related about an algo go to a site devoted to that algo or concept. But even as King that would be a real bitch to do in practice. In SO R questions I see lots of questions that the asker thinks are about his field or his algorithm but, in reality, he's struggling with an R syntax or data structure problem. So expecting the user to understand what level of abstraction his question resides is not reasonable. So as King I would just move the question... assuming I could determine the appropriate level of abstraction, which I probably could not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm concerned that expecting this to 'self organize' may not be reasonable and we may neuter Stack Overflow as a source of good R questions and answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2010-07-27T16:31:41.343" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="169" CreationDate="2010-07-27T16:49:47.750" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another solution to this problem is a series of amazing applications that will be delivered along with the new &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Stackoverflow API&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.  It would be trivial to mix sites using this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:45.643" LastActivityDate="2010-07-27T16:49:47.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="185" CreationDate="2010-07-27T16:55:44.463" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the author of the &quot;Bayesian&quot; response I think that it is extremely reasonable to ask questions on details that you might not understand. But also, people who make these kind of &quot;alternative&quot; proposals should anticipate misunderstandings and difficulties from potential readers, and therefore provide details, or additional sources of information in their initial post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to put it short: &#xA;people should definitely ask, but the proponent should avoid the need of others to ask. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="447" LastActivityDate="2010-07-27T16:55:44.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="191" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-27T17:43:45.463" Score="2" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the moment I reached somehow my voting cap. Of course it is good to have some cap, but I'm feeling like it's a little low. Especially in the beginning of the site I'm very actively voting everything I think needs to be voted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe you can look to the rep of a user (total or gained that day) and relax or remove the limit in some cases? What is the limit at this moment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="6029" LastEditDate="2013-06-29T12:09:54.723" LastActivityDate="2013-06-29T12:09:54.723" Title="Why such low voting limit? Should it be higher?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="191" CreationDate="2010-07-27T19:14:24.750" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This limit is to make you consider what are you voting on; I have hit it once on SO. The random voting is to some extent desirable, because there are two badges that can be earned by casting 300 (silver Civic Duty) and 600 (golden Electorate) votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2010-07-29T20:39:02.743" LastActivityDate="2010-07-29T20:39:02.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="194" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="197" CreationDate="2010-07-27T19:44:36.473" Score="4" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;In SO, if you don't accept an answer after a few days, then the following phrase appears above the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Have you considered accepting an&#xA;  answer or starting a bounty for this&#xA;  question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this implement in this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T19:26:47.447" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T19:26:47.447" Title="Prompting to accept an answer" Tags="|feature-request|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="195" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="814" CreationDate="2010-07-27T19:57:02.807" Score="6" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/statistics&quot;&gt;statistics&lt;/a&gt; tag. If this tag was applied consistently to the site then (almost?) all questions would have this tag. Should it be deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest removing the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2015-12-01T16:06:09.567" Title="Should we have a &quot;statistics&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-deletion|blacklist-request|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="195" CreationDate="2010-07-27T20:21:45.137" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When it is about the whole science, as in 2 stats and ml questions it is ok IMO. In the other cases I agree.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The problem with this tag is that when you try to post a question it asks for some tags... and what is your first idea if you don't have any that makes sense? So I think it is something we will be still fighting with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-07-27T20:21:45.137" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="194" CreationDate="2010-07-28T00:36:05.670" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes; I've seen it for some of the question's I've asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastActivityDate="2010-07-28T00:36:05.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6" CreationDate="2010-07-28T01:51:32.430" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Something about &amp;quot;community wiki&amp;quot;. I know what a wiki is, but I have no idea why the phrase &amp;quot;community wiki&amp;quot; appears on this site, and when I should check that option.... Is that a separate site? More editing allowed in this site? Confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Community wiki questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community wiki questions and answers can be edited by any user with at least 100 reputation points. These are designed for the community to pool information about a topic. Usually, a community wiki question will be subjective and open-ended. For example, &amp;quot;What is the best introductory statistics textbook?&amp;quot; Also, please note that votes for any posts marked &amp;quot;community wiki&amp;quot; do not generate reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-08-06T16:49:09.673" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-28T01:51:56.097" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6" CreationDate="2010-07-28T02:52:23.407" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/128/how-should-we-include-paper-references&quot;&gt;How to include references to published papers and books.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suggested wording:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How to include citations&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When citing scholarly papers, please use the author-date system. For example, &quot;Cox (1992)&quot;.&#xA;It is not necessary to provide a complete reference provided you link to a suitable site that contains the details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For papers that have a DOI, please link to &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/thisisthedoi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://dx.doi.org/thisisthedoi&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Otherwise link to a public repository such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://jstor.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;JSTOR&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;arXiv&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://repec.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RePEc&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://ssrn.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SSRN&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Otherwise link to the publisher's page or some other source that provides a full citation and (if available) a link to the PDF.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When citing books, please use the author-date system and provide a link to the book on &lt;a href=&quot;http://amazon.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;amazon.com&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google books&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2010-08-02T14:10:21.520" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-03T01:12:55.370" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6" CreationDate="2010-07-28T08:05:25.703" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It should contain info about moderators. Such as who they are, what they do, and where they're based. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following mbq's comment, I would suggest just a list of the current (and past?) moderators. As mbq suggested, further information would be found in the user's page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="8" LastEditDate="2010-07-28T14:44:56.990" LastActivityDate="2010-07-28T14:44:56.990" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-05T00:20:00.320" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6" CreationDate="2010-07-28T09:31:34.077" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;That the scope contains Statistics, Machine learning, Data mining and Visualization, as goes form this discussion: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16/is-machine-learning-a-part-of-statistical-analysis&quot;&gt;Is machine learning a part of statistical analysis?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suggested wording:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What kinds of questions can I ask here?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is for statisticians, data miners, and anyone else doing data analysis. If you have a question about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;statistical analysis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;data mining and machine learning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;data visualization&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;statistical and data-driven computing (e.g., questions about R, SAS, SPSS, Stata and Minitab)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then you're in the right place to ask your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please do look around to see if your question has already been asked (and maybe even answered!) before you ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What kind of questions should I not ask here?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Avoid asking questions that are subjective, argumentative, or require extended discussion. This is not a discussion board, this is a place for questions that can be answered!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to talk about the site itself, please don't do it here. Visit our &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stats.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;meta-discussion site&lt;/a&gt; where you can talk about things like what questions are appropriate, what tags we should use, suggest a feature, or generally discuss how stats.stackexchange.com works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question is about …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Programming, ask on &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mathematics, ask on &lt;a href=&quot;http://math.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;math.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bugs in software, ask the people who produced the software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-08-06T07:51:38.450" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-05T00:20:00.320" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2010-07-28T09:47:27.683" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to note that MathML support is available in Firefox 4b2. And while syntax does seem quite cumbersome:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;math&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;mi&amp;gt;x&amp;lt;/mi&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;  &amp;lt;mo&amp;gt;=&amp;lt;/mo&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;mfrac&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;mrow&amp;gt;&#xA;      &amp;lt;mo&amp;gt;&amp;amp;minus;&amp;lt;/mo&amp;gt;&#xA;      &amp;lt;mi&amp;gt;b&amp;lt;/mi&amp;gt;&#xA;      &amp;lt;mo&amp;gt;&amp;amp;PlusMinus;&amp;lt;/mo&amp;gt;&#xA;      &amp;lt;msqrt&amp;gt;&#xA;        &amp;lt;msup&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;          &amp;lt;mi&amp;gt;b&amp;lt;/mi&amp;gt;&#xA;          &amp;lt;mn&amp;gt;2&amp;lt;/mn&amp;gt;&#xA;        &amp;lt;/msup&amp;gt;&#xA;        &amp;lt;mo&amp;gt;&amp;amp;minus;&amp;lt;/mo&amp;gt;&#xA;        &amp;lt;mn&amp;gt;4&amp;lt;/mn&amp;gt;&#xA;        &amp;lt;mo&amp;gt;&amp;amp;InvisibleTimes;&amp;lt;/mo&amp;gt;&#xA;        &amp;lt;mi&amp;gt;a&amp;lt;/mi&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;        &amp;lt;mo&amp;gt;&amp;amp;InvisibleTimes;&amp;lt;/mo&amp;gt;&#xA;        &amp;lt;mi&amp;gt;c&amp;lt;/mi&amp;gt;&#xA;      &amp;lt;/msqrt&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;/mrow&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;mrow&amp;gt;&#xA;      &amp;lt;mn&amp;gt;2&amp;lt;/mn&amp;gt;&#xA;      &amp;lt;mo&amp;gt;&amp;amp;InvisibleTimes;&amp;lt;/mo&amp;gt;&#xA;      &amp;lt;mi&amp;gt;a&amp;lt;/mi&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;    &amp;lt;/mrow&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;/mfrac&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/math&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be great if we could be allowed this tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;  x&#xA;  =&#xA;  &#xA;    &#xA;      &amp;minus;&#xA;      b&#xA;      &amp;PlusMinus;&#xA;      &#xA;        &#xA;          b&#xA;          2&#xA;        &#xA;        &amp;minus;&#xA;        4&#xA;        &amp;InvisibleTimes;&#xA;        a&#xA;        &amp;InvisibleTimes;&#xA;        c&#xA;      &#xA;    &#xA;    &#xA;      2&#xA;      &amp;InvisibleTimes;&#xA;      a&#xA;    &#xA;  &#xA;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="219" LastActivityDate="2010-07-28T09:47:27.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="195" CreationDate="2010-07-28T09:51:04.997" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It similar to &lt;code&gt;programming&lt;/code&gt; tag on SO, it tends to attract meta question about the topic. I think it's fine as long as a question passes usual criteria and is made a CW when appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="219" LastActivityDate="2010-07-28T09:51:04.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-28T15:17:58.913" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;StatsFaq.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I own this domain and would be happy to donate it. Nice and succinct, isn't it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also own the domains &lt;strong&gt;StatFaq.com&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;StatFaqs.com&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;StatsFaqs.com&lt;/strong&gt; as forwarding addresses, so anyone who omits or adds an &quot;s&quot; would wind up at the right site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="555" LastEditorDisplayName="svadali" LastEditDate="2010-08-20T14:34:27.617" LastActivityDate="2010-08-20T14:34:27.617" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-28T15:17:58.913" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-07-29T05:14:46.170" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;StatsExchange.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-08-20T16:38:09.057" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-29T05:14:46.170" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="67" CreationDate="2010-07-29T10:40:38.827" Score="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;You usually have to know what something is called before searching for it, and even then, some common names become impossible to search for without the right additional keywords. So just because you can quickly find the answer in google does not mean someone else with less knowledge can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="455" LastActivityDate="2010-07-29T10:40:38.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="172" CreationDate="2010-07-29T10:57:26.947" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some beginners, or learners, are easily overwhelmed; and some experts are easily bored by learners' questions.&#xA;Why not tags [learner] and virtual tag [not-learner] ?&#xA;Then people could browse either or both, as they please.&#xA;(Would virtual [not-xx] tags be an easy hack ?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="557" LastActivityDate="2010-07-29T10:57:26.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="209" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-29T11:51:16.153" Score="2" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently only 8 users can vote to close and a question needs 5 votes to be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to quickly see which questions have a high number of close votes (let's say, 2 or 3) so that you can help out on questions (off course if you agree)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Is there some way to see the questions with a certain number of close-votes" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="210" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-29T12:00:48.350" Score="7" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a possibility to close a question with a reason &quot;belong on [some site]&quot; where some site is replaced by any stack exchange site like math.stackexchange.com or stackoverflow.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest doing this like the exact duplicate link. Instead of showing an empty box maybe the top 3 of sites where questions are moved to. And off course after the first close vote, as a suggestion for others the selected site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of question that could be migrated is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/944/how-can-i-get-r-to-stop-autocompleting-my-quotes-parens&quot;&gt;How can I get R to stop autocompleting my quotes/parens?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ADDITION:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that the users of this site are experts on whether a question belongs here or not, but not on the question whether it really belongs on the target site. Therefore, there could be on the other site some feature that a 10k user or moderator has to accept the question into the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T19:42:39.783" Title="Can we have a &quot;belongs on [any se site]&quot; option" Tags="|feature-request|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="209" CreationDate="2010-07-29T12:55:07.320" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just found this &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/28391/search-for-vote-to-close&quot;&gt;answer on SO&lt;/a&gt;. Basically, once you get 10K rep you get super ninja tools. However, this doesn't help a new beta site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I presume that moderators will also get access to these tools (regardless of rep).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2010-07-29T12:55:07.320" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="209" CreationDate="2010-07-29T13:17:27.287" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;At least till we get temporary moderators we should consider open a thread on meta to debate closing questions. Perhaps, each answer to the question will be about a qn that we think should be closed and we can use the comments to debate the pros and cons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-07-29T13:17:27.287" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="213" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-29T13:19:45.517" Score="7" ViewCount="2897" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you feel a question should be closed please provide the link to the question as an answer along with a brief rationale. Also ensure that you link to this meta thread as a comment on the main question so that the poster get a chance to defend the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We have moderators now, so please use flags instead of posting answers to this question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2011-05-11T12:26:55.033" LastActivityDate="2011-05-11T12:26:55.033" Title="List of candidate questions to be closed" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2011-05-11T12:27:04.423" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-29T13:22:05.807" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="213" CreationDate="2010-07-29T21:15:46.880" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;See the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/871/correct-formatting-capitalization-italicization-hyphenation-of-p-value&quot;&gt;How to write p-value&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is offtopic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="svadali" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2010-08-04T09:58:00.117" CommentCount="9" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-29T21:15:46.880" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="218" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-07-29T22:48:12.583" Score="3" ViewCount="827" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/354/feedback-on-google-charts-for-tex-processing&quot;&gt;evaluating&lt;/a&gt; google charts to add TeX support on &lt;a href=&quot;http://math.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;http://math.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; and were interested to know if the stats community at large would be interested in this feature. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would you much rather see a version of a formula represented as:  $X^2$  or just X^2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To test this feature surround a formula with &lt;code&gt;$&amp;lt;/code&amp;gt;...&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;$&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;We have enabled TeX processing via the MathJax library.  Hopefully this helps for a lot of the edge cases that were reported in this thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;You should no longer need a sandbox to test MathJax - just stop typing for around 4 seconds and watch the conversion occur in the preview.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:22.773" LastActivityDate="2010-08-04T05:11:21.103" Title="TeX processing for Stats" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|math-display|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="218" CreationDate="2010-07-30T00:48:16.530" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;One issue that I have encountered is the lack of a preview feature. Mathoverflow has this nice preview feature which can be used to make sure that you do not have errors in your latex markup before you post your answer. I have had to do several edits to my answer before I could even post it properly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-07-30T00:48:16.530" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6" CreationDate="2010-07-30T04:02:37.783" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The FAQ should explain how this site works. What does it mean to vote up or down a questions or an answer? Why should we do so? When it is possible to edit someone else's answer? When does it make sense to comment on a prior answer vs. write a new one? All this basic stuff really should be explained. Some is obvious, some not so obvious to some. This stuff must be written up somewhere for StackOverflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25" LastActivityDate="2010-07-30T04:02:37.783" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-05T00:20:00.320" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="218" CreationDate="2010-07-30T07:02:13.050" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, we like Tex! To overcome the preview problem, maybe a not-live preview feature can be build? It doesn't have to do much, just after a click on the button replace the live preview with a server-generated preview. That would anyway be the best solution in my opinion (as a disliker of the js tex libraries)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2010-07-30T07:02:13.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="213" CreationDate="2010-07-30T10:25:50.813" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now Closed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/974/mi-in-regulatory-networks&quot;&gt;MI in regulatory networks&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1034/how-to-apply-dpi-to-mi-data&quot;&gt;How to apply DPI to MI data?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;both refer to MI. I asked for clarification, but was ignored, and got another question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="svadali" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2010-07-30T11:44:28.470" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-07-30T10:25:50.813" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="67" CreationDate="2010-07-30T13:20:11.387" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I consider that a case-by-case approach be used. You never know when an apparently trivial question will get a surprising or interesting answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that having too many questions will ever be a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="614" LastActivityDate="2010-07-30T13:20:11.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="218" CreationDate="2010-07-30T14:26:40.620" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reported by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/users/159/rob-hyndman&quot;&gt;Rob Hyndman&lt;/a&gt; on this thread: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5/what-typographic-support-is-available-to-support-display-of-statistical-formula&quot;&gt;What typographic support is available to support display of statistical formula?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The script is causing problems with R&#xA;  code that includes a dollar sign.&#xA;  e.g., the answer by PaulHurleyuk at&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/213/what-is-the-best-way-to-identify-outliers-in-multivariate-data&quot;&gt;What is the best way to identify outliers in multivariate data?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2010-07-30T14:26:40.620" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="210" CreationDate="2010-07-31T11:28:43.837" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only problem that I can see is that this won't work without your addition. And even between the existing Stack Exchange trilogy sites, I feel you need that &quot;accept the question&quot; component. For example, a lot of people vote to move questions about servers to ServerFault from StackOverflow, but ServerFault doesn't like to support individual desktop installations of software, which is what a lot of the questions on SO are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the best thing, in my opinion, would just be a general &quot;off-topic&quot; pool of questions. Someplace visible to high rep users and/or mods on every stack exchange. If they feel it belongs on theirs, they can cast an &quot;accept&quot; vote. Once it gets high enough (5 votes to accept to a particular site, perhaps), it gets moved. Questions can also vote to get deleted if they really don't belong anywhere. And also, stats can be collected to see if two StackExchanges are regularly voting to accept the same questions so that their boundaries can be better defined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="110" LastActivityDate="2010-07-31T11:28:43.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="218" CreationDate="2010-08-01T16:02:38.870" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I report a bug with comments; if you edit a comment with TeX inside, the TeX chunks disappear and must be written from scratch. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-08-01T16:02:38.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="218" CreationDate="2010-08-01T23:14:21.047" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried writing $\hat{C}_{t-1}$ in my (possibly off-topic?) question here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1095/&quot;&gt;Tonga: low rank approximation of the natural gradient, question regarding Le Roux et al. 2007&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;but the \hat seems to mess with the correct processing of the rest of the question, so I had to remove that hat. But hats work in the other formulas, wonder what is going on here? &#xA;Also would be nice if writing matries using \array would be supported...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2010-08-01T23:14:21.047" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="229" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="233" CreationDate="2010-08-02T23:24:17.233" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;Right now the down for maintenance page looks like key mappings for some sort of video game.  Shouldn't we have a more relevant down for maintenance page?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2010-08-03T01:35:24.613" LastActivityDate="2010-08-03T01:35:24.613" Title="Can we change the &quot;down for maintenance&quot; page?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="229" CreationDate="2010-08-02T23:34:41.727" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am guessing that what you see is a generic 'downtime page' that is common for all beta SE sites. Once we get out of beta then perhaps we will/can have our own customized page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-08-02T23:34:41.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="213" CreationDate="2010-08-02T23:45:11.973" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now closed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1115/linear-regression&quot;&gt;linear regression&lt;/a&gt; is unclear, and the author does not seem to do anything to improve it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2010-08-03T07:59:42.200" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-02T23:45:11.973" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="213" CreationDate="2010-08-02T23:49:33.120" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now closed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is impossible to say what &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/795/normalization-of-series&quot;&gt;normalization of series&lt;/a&gt; question is about.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2010-08-03T09:14:49.070" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-02T23:49:33.120" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="229" CreationDate="2010-08-03T01:35:19.013" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The offline page wasn't &lt;em&gt;intended&lt;/em&gt; to be site specific (was trying to show controls of arbitrary complexity) but it was interpreted that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have changed it to a simple flat grid background now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2010-08-03T01:35:19.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="213" CreationDate="2010-08-03T07:47:46.003" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now closed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1160/what-code-would-you-put-before-after-your-r-session&quot;&gt;What code would you put&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is off topic; it is a pool about personal preferences on using R, what's more it is not related to statistics.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2010-08-03T12:01:38.547" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-03T07:47:46.003" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="213" CreationDate="2010-08-04T00:37:26.500" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question closed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/109/power-of-holms-multiple-comparison-testing-compared-to-others&quot;&gt;Power of Holm’s multiple comparison testing compared to others&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no answers and the question asker has not responded to a request for clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2010-08-05T13:06:38.577" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-04T00:37:26.500" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="237" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="241" CreationDate="2010-08-04T07:49:11.710" Score="3" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;visit parent&quot; and &quot;visit meta&quot; send me to &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; instead of stats.exchange or meta.stats.stackexchange&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="246" LastEditDate="2010-08-04T17:33:01.403" LastActivityDate="2010-08-04T17:33:01.403" Title="&quot;Visit link&quot; problems" Tags="|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="239" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="240" CreationDate="2010-08-04T15:43:22.793" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently the process that we have tried to follow for closing questions is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Update the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/213/list-of-candidate-questions-to-be-closed&quot;&gt;List of candidate questions to be closed&lt;/a&gt;&quot; list with a link to the question that is proposed to be closed with some reasoning.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Provide a link on the question's comments to the meta thread so that the OP or anyone else who wants to give their input will have a say in closing the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;After a reasonable amount of time we either close the question or keep it open.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above process does add a lot of transparency to the question closing process but is a pain to implement (especially steps 1 and 2). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two key points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think it is desirable to maintain transparency so that the reasons for closing questions are clear and the community gets a chance to debate the merits of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, it is preferable that discussions about the merits of the question (reg closing or not) happen on the meta site to keep the question page itself uncluttered.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way in which we can simplify this process?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: If the above is too complex a process then we can simply abandon it and revert to a standard voting procedure. If someone (either the OP or someone else) needs to discuss some aspect of a closed question (e.g., clarify reasons for closing, request for re-opening etc) then they can open a meta thread for that purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2010-08-04T16:49:19.910" Title="How can we simplify the process of closing questions?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="239" CreationDate="2010-08-04T16:49:19.910" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the basic StackOverflow process - discussion in comments with votes to close - works well for the most part.  The current Meta process we're using is useful at this point because we're still hashing out what the closing criteria are and because relatively few people have hit 500 reputation (and so are able to vote to close), but I think it will be too burdensome as the volume of questions increases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, it seems to me that your desires for greater transparency and to minimize clutter on the question page are a bit in conflict with each other - moving things to Meta inherently makes them less visible, especially to people who aren't yet familiar with the Stack system.  Once we have more of a consensus about what to close, I think the comment discussions will become less... voluminous, so the clutter problem will hopefully diminish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I propose that we stick to the Meta system for now; once we have better agreement on what should be closed, we should switch to StackOverflow-style comments and vote-to-close on the question page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastActivityDate="2010-08-04T16:49:19.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="237" CreationDate="2010-08-04T17:31:25.260" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should now see a &quot;Stack Exchange&quot; logo instead of the previous parent/meta icon. If not, hit Ctrl-F5. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The parent/meta links are now located in the main title bar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/RDR9I.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246" LastActivityDate="2010-08-04T17:31:25.260" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="242" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="243" CreationDate="2010-08-04T19:39:04.303" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a site where I am placing heavy emphasis on UX and data visualization, as I have large sets of data that I'm looking to convey in a meaningful, easy-to-consume way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I feel it falls under the general topic of data visualization, which is indicated as an appropriate question for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the community might have other ideas so I wanted to check here first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="740" LastActivityDate="2010-08-04T20:40:15.790" Title="Is it appropriate to ask for suggestions/solicit ideas on data visualizations?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="242" CreationDate="2010-08-04T20:40:15.790" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's okay with us, I think.  See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/109/what-to-do-with-pure-visualization-questions&quot;&gt;What to do with pure visualization questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2010-08-04T20:40:15.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="244" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="246" CreationDate="2010-08-04T21:38:43.817" Score="1" ViewCount="327" Body="&lt;p&gt;As we enter the second week of the public beta, we desperately need members from the site whose focus is to engage the community, both in community-building issues and site management. That's why we select a few members from each community to act as temporary, provisional Moderators. You can read about the program here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/moderator-pro-tempore/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Moderators Pro Tempore&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am pleased to announce that these members have stepped up and generously volunteered their time to help us assure that each community’s issues are properly addressed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TKnfy.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot; /&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2acku.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot; /&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hcILm.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot; /&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZQDTb.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE: Welcome Shane as a new arrival! It took us a bit longer than the other candidates to get him online. So, welcome!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We want to make this site a huge success, and these members are great examples of exactly the type of people we need to make this site succeed. Please welcome them for the hard work and time they contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Did I overlook anyone?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost certainly. There are members who are actively involved and very deserving of recognition. My failure to account for everyone this early on is in &lt;em&gt;no way&lt;/em&gt; a slight against them. Ideally, Moderators are elected by the community and that's why &lt;strong&gt;you'll have your elections in several weeks.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of all, be respectful and understanding of the Moderators Pro Tem. Members of your community are volunteering their time and learning on the job. It’s a learning experience for everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2011-08-05T23:39:32.453" Title="Moderator Pro Tem Announcement" Tags="|discussion|moderation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2011-08-08T13:56:50.053" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="244" CreationDate="2010-08-04T23:01:40.417" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, people, start flagging! ;-) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-08-04T23:01:40.417" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="247" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-05T06:12:41.277" Score="8" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes maths seems to have strange and squashed spacing, but the problem is intermittent. For example, this is what &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1261/&quot;&gt;Fitting a fixed, exponential relationship between categories with categorical data&lt;/a&gt; looked like for a while on Chrome today:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://robjhyndman.com/Untitled.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;alt text http://robjhyndman.com/Untitled.png&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;But a few minutes later it looked fine. Is this a known problem and is someone working on it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T17:56:46.170" Title="TeX display problem" Tags="|bug|status-completed|math-display|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="248" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="250" CreationDate="2010-08-05T07:50:57.573" Score="0" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;Robin Girad commented in regards to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1256/how-can-one-speed-up-this-correlation-calculation-in-r-without-multicore&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the question in addition to the&#xA;  answers make me think this should be&#xA;  stackexchange... there should be a&#xA;  discussion on meta about questions&#xA;  with &quot;how to speed up&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I (obviously) disagree that stack exchange is the appropriate place for this question.  Per the consensus &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1/how-to-answer-r-questions&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/35/how-much-programming-here&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; it seems that programing questions with any statistical content should be welcome on this site.  Optimization of statistical calculations require consideration of the calculations being performed and assurances that their integrity is not going to be compromised.  Further, the sort of functions likely to be discussed will be familiar to the audience here but not on StackOverflow.  For example, in the reference question mbq quickly saw that using diag() was throwing away a lot of effort because he is familiar with R and the notion of taking the diagonal from a matrix.  Would I really have gotten an answer with that insight as rapidly elsewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we need to have further discussion on this issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2010-08-05T08:42:03.310" Title="&quot;How to speed up&quot; questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="210" CreationDate="2010-08-05T08:14:12.117" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone asked their question here - there is probably a reason they chose to post it here than on another StackExchange site.  Preferably that should make that reason clear in their question, but failing that it seems to be incumbent on the community to try to draw those reasons out in the comments.  It is a horrible precedent founded in the worst of socially rough clickish internet behavior to blithly say &quot;you belong over there&quot;.  From a user perspective, especially a new user, being told in such an impersonal manner without further interaction that your question is in the wrong place would be very off-putting.  I imagine it is somewhat like calling your bank with a problem and them transferring you to another department who then may very well transfers you back to the first department.  Questions that are getting bounced here to another site are likely cases in the margin, and especially while starting out we should embrace those margin cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastActivityDate="2010-08-05T08:14:12.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="248" CreationDate="2010-08-05T08:42:03.310" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm perfectly happy with &quot;how to speed up&quot; questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The people who would answer those questions at SO will be probably here as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The people who answer those questions here will (massive generalisation) not be experts in other areas. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastActivityDate="2010-08-05T08:42:03.310" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="36" CreationDate="2010-08-05T08:48:20.053" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've created a tag synonym so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;modelling -&gt; modeling&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastActivityDate="2010-08-05T08:48:20.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="252" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-05T11:12:10.817" Score="18" ViewCount="1085" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been thinking about whether this site should incorporate more computing questions. I think the current position of this site can be summarised by this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1/how-to-answer-r-questions&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; (which I asked!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why change&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I occasionally use Minitab, and when I do I struggle with basic macros. Where would I ask a computing question on Minitab. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SO: unlikely to be many Minitab users there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stats.exchange: Lots (I'm guessing) of Minitab users here, but the question would be offtopic and closed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This issue would also apply to SPSS and SAS questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, many answers to questions at this site include R code. However, if someone queried the programming aspects of the code they would have to do so at SO. Also the main people who answer R questions are already on this site - see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged?tagnames=r&amp;amp;sort=stats&amp;amp;pagesize=50&quot;&gt;stats on r questions&lt;/a&gt; at SO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposed change&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some languages are developed with statistics in mind. For example, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The best thing about R is that it was&#xA;  developed by statisticians. The worst&#xA;  thing about R is that it was developed by statisticians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bo Cowgill, Google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I propose that we allow computing questions for certain languages/applications. The obvious ones being: R, SAS, SPSS and Minitab. The languages would be stated in the FAQs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flame away!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2010-08-12T19:45:14.560" Title="Should we allow more computing questions" Tags="|discussion|r|software|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="252" CreationDate="2010-08-05T11:42:04.093" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm in favour of the change. We could add &quot;statistical computing&quot; to the site scope. Another language to add would be Stata.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The downside is that R questions will tend to be split between the stats.SE and SO sites. But that is happening already and our distinction of statistical questions here and programming questions on SO is rather fuzzy and almost impossible to moderate. Also, as somebody pointed out on another thread on meta, forcing people onto SO is not very friendly to newbies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastActivityDate="2010-08-05T11:42:04.093" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="213" CreationDate="2010-08-05T11:49:11.790" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Community wiki&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do others think about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1293/essential-reads-for-people-interested-in-actuary-and-actuarial-science&quot;&gt;Essential reads for people interested in Actuary and Actuarial science&lt;/a&gt;? An edge case or off-topic? I'm inclined to think it should be allowed, but thought it was worth asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2010-08-05T15:01:59.630" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-05T11:49:11.790" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="252" CreationDate="2010-08-05T12:03:31.970" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think all questions reg statistical programs should be allowed with perhaps one exception. Questions about possible bugs in software should go the vendor and not posted here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-08-05T12:03:31.970" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="256" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="257" CreationDate="2010-08-05T23:52:11.543" Score="3" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;We closed the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1314/what-are-some-possible-career-options-closed&quot;&gt;What are some possible career options?&lt;/a&gt; but not the one on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1293/essential-reads-for-people-interested-in-actuary-and-actuarial-science&quot;&gt;Essential reads for people interested in actuary and actuarial science&lt;/a&gt;. It seems to me that while the first one is explicitly about careers the second one is also fairly close to the topic of careers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my assessment makes sense to all of you then we either re-open the first one (and make career questions on-topic) or close the second one as well (and keep career questions off-topic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2010-08-06T00:06:12.190" Title="Inconsistency in closing questions." Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|policy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="256" CreationDate="2010-08-06T00:06:12.190" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The second one was specifically about books on actuarial science which has specific answers and should be CW. We've had other questions on what books are best on topic x before, and provided they are CW these seem to be helpful and appropriate. My only query on the question was whether actuarial science was within the scope, but elsewhere on meta the consensus seemed to be that it was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first question you mention was very vague and general about advice for someone wanting to become a statistician and whether doing a BS is appropriate. This seems to me to be a completely different sort of question and not really appropriate for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastActivityDate="2010-08-06T00:06:12.190" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="258" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-06T00:31:09.120" Score="3" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we should reflect there (this blue bar with &quot;got a question about the site...&quot;) the ongoing moderator and site name elections; both topics are dying with embarrassingly small number of votes, so maybe this will bring the community attention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: So I think the idea has some support; now what do you think about the text itself?&#xA;Rob is probably better in this kind of things, I would write:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hot topics on &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stats.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;meta&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/133/who-should-the-moderators-be&quot;&gt;Moderator election&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/21/what-should-our-site-be-called-what-should-our-domain-name-be&quot;&gt;voting on the site name&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/252/should-we-allow-more-computing-questions&quot;&gt;extending scope&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit2: Ok, the system message now changed. If you think it can be somewhat corrected or changed, suggest as an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2010-08-06T18:20:02.630" Title="Shall we advertise votings in the system message?" Tags="|discussion|moderation|site-name|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-06T13:19:29.720" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="252" CreationDate="2010-08-06T00:35:24.870" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;And I was afraid that the statistical part of the community would protest against it... I am of course in favor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-08-06T00:35:24.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="258" CreationDate="2010-08-06T00:39:02.210" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;But, we do not have an ongoing moderator election, do we? Yes, advertising the site name elections and in general motivating people to come to the meta is a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-08-06T00:39:02.210" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-06T13:19:29.720" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="252" CreationDate="2010-08-06T15:33:10.367" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there is a (small) risk issue here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We want to bring the statistical community into StatExchange and things are still to be constructed. The R tag on SO shows that the computer science community already have riched a critical sized. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have the feeling that allowing too many questions on computer science could create a flow of slight variantes of existing questions on SO such as &quot;how do I accelerate this code&quot;? &quot;how do I store my data&quot;?  I think these questions are very interesting for this site, but I think that now it could create the impression that modeling is marginal on this site. I'm very happy to see people that are so valuable comming from SO but I would suggest that they generate themselves an equilibrium between modelling and computing... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastActivityDate="2010-08-06T15:33:10.367" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="262" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-06T15:45:24.433" Score="3" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;There already exist tags for question. Is it possible to create tags for users profile? (with say less than 5 tag) ? this could help us to be able to characterize the community and create appropriate incentives... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess this goes a bit to far but I would like to have your feelings on that point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastEditorUserId="223" LastEditDate="2010-08-08T19:20:44.183" LastActivityDate="2010-08-08T19:20:44.183" Title="Is it possible to tag user profile" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="252" CreationDate="2010-08-06T19:47:07.233" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm in favor of the change too; these tools are critical to the discussion in many instances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-08-06T19:47:07.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="264" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="265" CreationDate="2010-08-07T12:37:30.483" Score="7" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;It did happen on SO, SU and SF: &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So shall we follow? &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/beginner&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;beginner&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;beginner&lt;/a&gt; is the most used tag here...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; Done. No more &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/beginner&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;beginner&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;beginner&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/subjective&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;subjective&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;subjective&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2015-12-06T16:57:26.157" LastActivityDate="2015-12-06T16:57:26.157" Title="The final death of meta-tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-deletion|meta-tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="264" CreationDate="2010-08-07T13:11:06.813" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tend to agree with Jeff. Some of the posts tagged &quot;beginner&quot; are not exactly easy questions. Tagging is most useful when you want to search for answers on a particular topic. Anyone searching &quot;beginner&quot; is not going to find the results very useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastActivityDate="2010-08-07T13:11:06.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="264" CreationDate="2010-08-08T05:58:06.403" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not in favor of a &quot;beginner&quot; tag (nor an &quot;advanced&quot; or &quot;intermediate&quot; tag for that matter). I think the use will be inconsistent--some people, perhaps new users might use the tag as a shorthand for &quot;pardon my ignorance, but....&quot; while the same question by someone who has an active history on this Site is probably not interested in seeing their tag profile with a whole bunch of beginner tags and so they stay away from them--likewise, for answering them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from that, some of the best answers i've seen on this Site are to questions that were or should have been tagged 'beginner'--the OP might have been a beginner, but clearly it was not a beginner who answered it. So why have a tag attached to that thread that is a synonym for &quot;easy?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="438" LastActivityDate="2010-08-08T05:58:06.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="35" CreationDate="2010-08-08T06:07:22.423" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;So if there were no Stack Overflow, then would the answer to the OP's question be different? My sense is yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yet the fact that SO already exists shouldn't in any way affect our charter. I have been an SO member for over a year but if I were not, and I came the stats site, asked a question and had it closed / migrated to SO, I doubt I would follow it. Let's make this site a one-stop shop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I agree with @Baltimark, why try and separate statistics from its principal technique? You can discuss descriptive stats without code, but what about topics like simulation or data visualization? Plus code is a very reliable way to distinguish good answers from bad ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="438" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2014-03-21T14:53:52.417" LastActivityDate="2014-03-21T14:53:52.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="269" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-09T04:12:18.623" Score="13" ViewCount="1097" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have the name (CrossValidated.com), now it is a good time to revive this topic. The final design will be made by &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/our-designer-in-residence-jin-yang/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Jin Yang&lt;/a&gt;, but we can give him some ideas. So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What ideas for a logo do you have?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Can be a description, visual concept, sketch; Jin prefers grayscale pictures, while they are not color-biased.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What should be the colour palette of the site?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This is a standard starting point; what is &quot;the colour of statistics&quot;? Amaranth? Light? Dark? Colorful? Cool? Warm? Is it also a colour of statistical computing?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What should be the design style?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Modern/old-school? Baroque/simple? Stack-overflowish/completely different?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What the design itself should resemble?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Random inspirations; data sheets, Gaussian curves, bookshelves, boxplots? Some pictures/photos can be also useful.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One answer per idea, so we can vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like our site name, it needs to be something that reflects the full scope of our site... statistical analysis, data mining, machine learning, probability, data visualization and statistical computing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastEditorUserId="159" LastEditDate="2010-11-05T01:10:23.370" LastActivityDate="2010-11-05T01:10:23.370" Title="What should our logo and site design look like?" Tags="|essential-questions|logo|" AnswerCount="19" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="120" CreationDate="2010-08-09T14:43:35.167" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag synonym created&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;distribution[*2] -&amp;gt; distributions[*23]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastActivityDate="2010-08-09T14:43:35.167" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-09T14:43:35.167" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="271" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="295" CreationDate="2010-08-09T19:14:53.650" Score="4" ViewCount="442" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I access stats exchange at home my browser doesn't process the LaTeX part of the posts. Instead, I just see &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Math Processing Error&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At home I use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ipod touch&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ubunto Linux with firefox 3.6.6&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2010-10-16T07:50:21.460" LastActivityDate="2010-10-16T07:50:21.460" Title="Latex error: &quot;Math Processing Error&quot;" Tags="|support|math-display|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="271" CreationDate="2010-08-09T22:39:28.673" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I get the same problem on my iPhone. I guess the mobile safari browser is not supported.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for firefox on linux, I think that should work. Do you have javascript enabled?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastActivityDate="2010-08-09T22:39:28.673" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="273" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="274" CreationDate="2010-08-10T00:23:51.193" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/252/should-we-allow-more-computing-questions&quot;&gt;Elsewhere&lt;/a&gt; in meta it seems like the consensus has arisen that generally questions related to statistical programing languages should be accepted here.  Yet, some users haven't gotten the memo and continue to redirect earnest question answers to StackOverflow.  When I see this behavior I've been adding comments redirecting them to the appropriate thread at meta.  However, with one repeat offender I simply flagged the comment.  What is the appropriate approach?  Is there a way to get all of the users on the parent site on the same page with meta?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2010-08-10T03:56:02.447" Title="What is the appropriate course of action dealing with overzealous redirection?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="273" CreationDate="2010-08-10T03:56:02.447" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we just have to keep adding comments and pointing to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/252/should-we-allow-more-computing-questions&quot;&gt;scope thread on meta&lt;/a&gt;. If you think it helps to have a moderator add the comment (although I'm not sure that it makes much difference), feel free to continue flagging posts or comments and one of us will respond ASAP. Unfortunately I don't think we can edit the faq yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2010-08-10T03:56:02.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-08-10T09:25:44.700" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;statsOracle.net&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="704" LastActivityDate="2010-08-10T09:25:44.700" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-10T09:25:44.700" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="276" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-10T14:31:14.477" Score="3" ViewCount="555" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following on from this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/252/should-we-allow-more-computing-questions&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; about extending scope, should we &quot;unclose&quot; previous computing questions. For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/944/how-can-i-get-r-to-stop-autocompleting-my-quotes-parens-closed&quot;&gt;How can I get R to stop autocompleting my quotes/parens?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1160/what-code-would-you-put-before-after-your-r-session-closed&quot;&gt;What code would you put before/after your R session&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that since there is only a few questions, we may as well open them. That way people searching the archives won't get confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've reopened the above questions. The only other question I found that could be reopened is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1239/ruby-statistical-gem-closed&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1239/ruby-statistical-gem-closed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I reopen this question? Are there other questions I've missed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2010-08-11T23:51:56.637" Title="Should we &quot;unclose&quot; computing questions" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="276" CreationDate="2010-08-10T14:41:26.387" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Makes sense to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-08-10T14:41:26.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="279" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-10T15:13:01.867" Score="3" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose that we create a deadline for the voting on the site name so that we can move onto the logo/look-and-feel question.  Does anyone know when this is supposed to be completed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to make the voting on this question clearer, let's put our proposed date as a header in the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="5" LastEditDate="2010-08-10T15:49:21.680" LastActivityDate="2010-08-17T17:33:39.480" Title="Deadline for site name?" Tags="|discussion|essential-questions|site-name|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="281" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-10T15:48:04.303" Score="1" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;In parallel with deciding on a name, should we also be thinking about a subtitle? For example, CrossValidated is winning right now, but that doesn't say everything that we need to have said about the scope of this site, e.g. CrossValidated: A collaboratively edited question and answer site for statistics, machine learning, and statistical programming?  Alternatively, do we need text to fill something like what is in the &quot;about&quot; box for unlogged in users at StackOverflow?  There they have &quot;StackOverflow is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastEditorUserId="196" LastEditDate="2010-08-10T16:15:06.053" LastActivityDate="2010-08-16T15:13:05.983" Title="Does the site also need a subtitle?" Tags="|discussion|site-name|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-10T15:48:04.303" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="279" CreationDate="2010-08-10T15:50:13.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;August 23rd&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;BR&gt;&#xA;I think that a deadline would be productive and is worth creating.  This date would give almost 2 weeks, and is on a Monday (which gives people an extra weekend).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-08-10T15:50:13.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="279" CreationDate="2010-08-10T17:12:21.740" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;X weeks before end of Public Beta&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;X must be such that the team at Stackoverflow has sufficient time to develop a logo and associated graphic elements to go with the new site name. I could be wrong but I am skeptical that we have the expertise to come up with a logo/graphics although we may have a sense of what looks good/acceptable etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps, someone at Stackoverflow can tell us what X is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: By the way as long as we know what X is I do not see any reason to hurry the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-08-10T17:12:21.740" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="276" CreationDate="2010-08-11T23:51:56.637" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What about this question?  Is there any change in the consensus here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/134/algorithms-to-compute-the-running-median&quot;&gt;Algorithms to compute the running median?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="251" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2010-08-11T23:51:56.637" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-08-12T11:27:22.113" Score="12" Body="&lt;h1&gt;ConfidenceRegion.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(domain name available)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="339" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-08-15T15:19:24.750" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-12T11:27:22.113" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="252" CreationDate="2010-08-12T19:45:14.560" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Strongly support! I would have loved this site when I was taking engineering statistics and wrestling with Minitab all day. Also, learning R is something that I've wanted to do for a while now, and I would rather learning a statistical analysis tool (even if it is a language) from statisticians rather than programmers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="110" LastActivityDate="2010-08-12T19:45:14.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="290" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-12T20:15:51.493" Score="13" ViewCount="2191" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have somewhat of an on-going problem in that &quot;community wiki&quot; is not perfectly defined (and even so far as it is defined in the stackoverflow world, it's conceivable that it should have a different meaning in our context).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1610/is-there-a-way-to-remember-the-definitions-of-type-i-and-type-ii-errors&quot;&gt;Is there a way to remember the definitions of Type I and Type II Errors?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/22/bayesian-and-frequentist-reasoning-in-plain-english&quot;&gt;Bayesian and frequentist reasoning in plain English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;do not have objective answers.  Yet, they &quot;feel&quot; different to me than questions like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/3/what-are-some-valuable-statistical-analysis-open-source-projects&quot;&gt;What are some valuable Statistical Analysis open source projects?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/726/famous-statistician-quotes&quot;&gt;Famous statistical quotations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question is: &lt;strong&gt;how should we define &quot;community wiki&quot; for our site?&lt;/strong&gt;  Should &quot;list&quot; questions be community wiki, but otherwise subjective questions that are looking for a general answer be left alone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One reason that I raise this is that making a question &quot;community wiki&quot; removes some of the incentive to provide great answers, but IMO questions such as the former two above require effort and good answers should be rewarded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2012-04-02T12:34:45.477" Title="What is community wiki?" Tags="|discussion|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="290" CreationDate="2010-08-12T20:26:09.160" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's my perspective:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the asker is looking for a singular right answer (even if that answer won't work for every user, such as in the case of my question, 1610), then it shouldn't be community wiki. In the case of my question, it shouldn't be community wiki from the get go since I (the asker) have the intention of selecting an answer as &quot;the right answer&quot; - it's the answer that solved my problem. Now, if it turns out that there truly isn't a right answer or a single answer that helps the asker, then it should be up to the asker to come back and make it a community wiki question to denote that there actually isn't a single right answer to solve the problem, but it's actually any (combination of) or all of the posted answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the asker is just looking for suggestions or a collection of resources, that should be community wiki. The asker isn't looking for a singular solution to his/her problem - the answer will be a collection, taken as a whole. People contributing answers aren't as an individual helping the asker reach an answer, but contributing a small piece of the puzzle (a single book, a quote, a tool, a software program). The asker might find a single answer that answers his/her question, but the answer really doesn't mean much by itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="110" LastActivityDate="2010-08-12T20:26:09.160" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="290" CreationDate="2010-08-12T21:50:52.357" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like what's been said already.  In general, I favor approaches that result in greater sharing of information.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that CW content tends to decline unless it's about jokes, quotes and such.  I'd rather see people contributing more for points or whatever.  I admit that I'm less concerned with subjectivity, etc.  It's especially hard for me to see statisticians or data analysts agreeing on the one view to bind them all.  Let downvoting do the work.  In the extreme cases where discussion begins to devolve to nonsensical proportions, I favor moderators acting to close the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very generally, my modest proposal is the following &lt;em&gt;guidelines&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;avoid a rush to judgement&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you think a question should be closed, err on the side of asking for it to go CW&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you think a question should go CW, err on the side of letting the community express disapproval through downvoting&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="251" LastActivityDate="2010-08-12T21:50:52.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6" CreationDate="2010-08-12T22:26:34.840" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/588/how-can-i-ask-a-good-question&quot;&gt;this question on meta.math.SX&lt;/a&gt; and in particular the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/588/how-can-i-ask-a-good-question/589#589&quot;&gt;excellent post by Pete L. Clark&lt;/a&gt; that inspired it, perhaps some equivalent question-optimisation hints should be in the FAQ here? Possibly as some sort of hybrid with or counterpart to the existing SX boilerplate &lt;strong&gt;What if I don't get a good answer?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the question might be along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How should I ask my question to increase my chances of getting good answers?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the answer would probably hit at least the following points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use as descriptive a title as possible&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use appropriate tags&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be specific: what do you want to know?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Put the question in context: &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; do you want to know?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be clear: explain acronyms, define any non-standard jargon, link to external sources.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Show that you care: what have you already done?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I can expand these into something less bullety if this seems like a worthwhile question, but everyone else should feel free to beat me to it!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-08-12T22:26:34.840" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-12T22:26:34.840" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="290" CreationDate="2010-08-13T06:11:12.340" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think Thomas's question should be community wiki, because it is a focused question. There can be more discussion on the other one. The main reason is that it is not a question. Indeed, as the question is formulated we see the author has already his answer and is interesed in getting people's &lt;strong&gt;view&lt;/strong&gt;. I think the question about bayesian is borderline, this other one is also borderline:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/130/clojure-versus-r-advantages-and-disadvantages-for-data-analysis&quot;&gt;Clojure versus R: advantages and disadvantages for data analysis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally I guess we should &lt;strong&gt;keep them as non CW&lt;/strong&gt; but remember that this is the border :)  (a question can't be less focused)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why a question asking for people's view (and not a question asking for an answer) should be CW is mechanic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It generates a lot of reactions because when you have an answer it si likely that everyone has an answer.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People are happy to find a place to talk and vote up. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;this type of question is encouraged (because you gain a lot of points) and thousands of answer are given. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;stat.stackoverflow becomes a forum. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we want a forum ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2010-08-13T06:11:12.340" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="271" CreationDate="2010-08-13T09:23:28.377" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found the solution. Clear the cache!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it still doesn't work with my ipod.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastActivityDate="2010-08-13T09:23:28.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="296" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5615" CreationDate="2010-08-13T17:23:06.837" Score="4" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pursuant to the recent apparent consensus (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/35/how-much-programming-here&quot;&gt;How much programming here?&lt;/a&gt;) that this site should accept &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; questions on programming statistical computations, I would like to inquire whether the site would be willing to take over the Q&amp;amp;A role currently served by the ggplot2 mailing list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, ggplot2 is the latest (and greatest, in my opinion) 2D visualization package for R, and the mailing list has almost 1000 subscribers, leaving the original ggplot2 maintainer unable to give his full attention to all posts (though there are others that have acquired expertise in ggplot2 that help out regularly). It has been suggested (&lt;a href=&quot;http://groups.google.com/group/ggplot2/browse_thread/thread/4a03a89fdf326ec6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link to ggplot2 mailing list&lt;/a&gt;) that a new forum for obtaining help with ggplot2 might be reasonable, and that either stackoverflow or a proposal for ggplot2's own stackexchange might be a useful solution. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, seeing that stats.stackexchange.com appears to be open to programatic questions, and anticipating that this might harken a move of most R-related questions from stackoverflow to stats.stackexchange.com, I wonder if a third option for providing help with ggplot2 might be to let ggplot2 questions be posted here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I'm not the head of the ggplot2 list; I simply thought I'd explore the acceptability of this option with you folks before reporting back to the ggplot2 list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that this may also relate to the questions (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/109/what-to-do-with-pure-visualization-questions&quot;&gt;What to do with pure visualization questions?&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/242/is-it-appropriate-to-ask-for-suggestions-solicit-ideas-on-data-visualizations&quot;&gt;Is it appropriate to ask for suggestions/solicit ideas on data visualizations?&lt;/a&gt;) on whether queries for advice on data visualization approaches are appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="364" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2019-03-28T08:15:39.007" LastActivityDate="2019-04-05T12:50:13.273" Title="Computing questions: ggplot2" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|closing-questions|software|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="297" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="299" CreationDate="2010-08-13T17:26:08.047" Score="3" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;Earlier today I asked a question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1649/using-mixed-effects-modelling-to-estimate-and-compare-variability&quot;&gt;Mixed Effects Models&lt;/a&gt;) and received a response. I want to post follow-up question that asks for R code to achieve the solution provided by the response, but is this type of solicitation appropriate for this site, or better left to stackoverflow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="364" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="svadali" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2010-08-13T19:13:46.817" Title="Refining the stance on computing questions" Tags="|discussion|software|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="297" CreationDate="2010-08-13T17:56:52.797" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMHO, asking for full fledged R code for your context is inappropriate. The ideal statistical computing question would be something along the following lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Explain model context / your goals etc&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Give some minimal example of R code that you are having trouble with&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask your question about the code (e.g., bugs, slow code etc that you have)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-08-13T17:56:52.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="296" CreationDate="2010-08-13T18:11:11.897" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a tricky question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I have not thought through the issues involved I am not sure if we should become a support site for statistical software. I am not sure I like to see all types of SAS, SPSS, MATLAB, R .... support questions coming to this site wholesale. For example, if posts on the R mailing list were to be posted here they are likely to drown all other questions. I could use tags to filter out the support questions, but still...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, at the same time our current policy allows for computing questions. So, the above feeling of mine (not being a support site) is inconsistent with our current policy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure how or where we should draw the line. Do we allow support questions for open source support software but not allow questions related to commercial software? I am not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2019-03-31T06:50:35.633" LastActivityDate="2019-03-31T06:50:35.633" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="297" CreationDate="2010-08-13T19:13:46.817" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question on Mixed effects models is fine. As for a follow-up question it would be OK to ask what R packages are available to fit your model. More than likely, someone would post some code that you could use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a questionnaire asks for a fully worked solution the OP can come across a bit lazy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastActivityDate="2010-08-13T19:13:46.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="296" CreationDate="2010-08-13T19:21:25.613" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have no problem with ggplot2 questions. I take Srikant's point about being overwhelmed by R or ggplot2 questions, but let's not forget that all the people doing R and ggplot2 programming are doing statistics/data analyses and so could add to the this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At present if someone asked a tricky ggplot2 question I would probably direct them to SO or the mailing list - but only because they would get a better answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2019-03-31T06:51:25.813" LastActivityDate="2019-03-31T06:51:25.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-08-13T19:45:52.373" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;ModelOverfit.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(available)&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/21/what-should-our-site-be-called-what-should-our-domain-name-be/51#51&quot;&gt;this discussion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-08-13T19:45:52.373" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-13T19:45:52.373" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-08-13T19:55:18.323" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;EnsembleMethods.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(available) This is a play on concept of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensemble_learning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ensemble learning&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In statistics and machine learning,&#xA;ensemble methods use multiple models&#xA;to obtain better predictive&#xA;performance than could be obtained&#xA;from any of the constituent models.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-08-13T19:55:18.323" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-13T19:55:18.323" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="307" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-13T20:13:31.870" Score="1" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a software engineer and I'm looking for recommendations for statistics books to further my knowledge in statistics. However, I'm not sure if I should phrase the question specifically about statistics books for software engineers, if I should group software engineers with other engineering disciplines, or if I should group books of interest to software engineers with computer scientists. My initial thought is to ask about books that would be of interest to computer scientists, software engineers, and information technologists rather than general engineering, but what type of question would best serve the community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I would appreciate it if no one else asked this question. I would like to use it to move my commitment to this exchange forward (I'm trying to free up a commitment slot so I can commit to my own proposal). Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="110" LastActivityDate="2010-08-13T22:22:41.767" Title="I want to ask a (community-wiki) question about books, but I'm not sure how to phrase it." Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="307" CreationDate="2010-08-13T22:22:41.767" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought about it over dinner, and I think I can justify two questions. One for engineering-related statistics - topics related to cost, safety, product quality, experimental design, process control, system reliability - and another for computer software statistics - data mining, machine learning, Markov chains, Monte Carlo methods, and neural networks (apparently they are related to statistics? I've never done any work in that area...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="110" LastActivityDate="2010-08-13T22:22:41.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="309" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="310" CreationDate="2010-08-14T01:01:46.223" Score="2" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been instances where the OP posts a vague question that cannot be answered without further specifics. In most such cases, we have been using comments to seek clarifications and have been providing answers once the OP clarifies the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there have been a few cases where we have been providing answers despite a lack of clarification via various devices such as making assumptions, offering generic answers etc. (I have also been guilty of this sub-optimal practice.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, I am not sure if such a practice is optimal. If we do provide answers to vague and unclear questions then the OP has no incentive to improve the question which results in poor quality content on our site. Thus, I propose the following convention/policy for the consideration of the community:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To the extent possible, do not provide answers to questions that are vague or unclear. However, we will seek clarifications via comments to the question so that the OP can improve the question till such time that it is focussed enough to provide specific answers. If the OP does not respond to comments seeking clarification we will close the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, we can tweak the above policy as desired. However, a fundamental question is: should we have something like the above as part of our policy? What do you think? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-08-18T14:49:16.740" Title="Should we answer questions that are vague and need clarification from the OP?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="309" CreationDate="2010-08-14T02:19:14.763" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure that a formal policy is necessary, but we should not answer these questions; they are a massive waste of time as they inevitably lead to revisions. In fact, I would suggest downvoting them since the OP did not put enough effort into the question, but then reverse the vote once the question is clarified. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of our role is to guide people toward asking good questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-08-14T02:19:14.763" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="309" CreationDate="2010-08-14T22:02:12.983" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I completely agree with Shane, but we have to be very careful that we don't put people off the site. A hasty comment could easily result in people not returning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I suspect that many of the questions may be from people with no formal statistics training. Therefore, the questions may be badly worded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastActivityDate="2010-08-14T22:02:12.983" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-08-15T11:26:54.457" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;MaximumLikelihood.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="339" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-08-15T15:20:06.547" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-15T11:26:54.457" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="314" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-16T01:30:04.747" Score="16" ViewCount="388" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question with the same exact title was posted on &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12/vote-early-and-often&quot;&gt;tex stackexchange&lt;/a&gt; by Scott Morrison. I think the point made by Scott is very insightful and we should strive to follow the advice given. What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your convenience, his post is quoted below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a moderator from MathOverflow, and this &amp;quot;question&amp;quot; is actually unsolicited advice, based on our experience from the initial launch of MathOverflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should encourage everyone to vote positively as often as possible!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every Stack Exchange site will eventually end up with a different &amp;quot;base level&amp;quot; of voting --- that is, the expected number of upvotes for a question of a given level of excellence. (This effect occurs because people see a good question, but already with a certain number of votes, and think &amp;quot;oh, I would have upvoted this, but it already has enough&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy for us to affect this &amp;quot;base level&amp;quot; by encouraging high levels of upvoting now. We're setting the standards, and this really will have an effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(On MathOverflow, we were very active about this early on, specifically encouraging all the initial round of users to vote early and often. You can compare statistics, and see that the average vote total for a MathOverflow question is much higher than on any of the other SE 1.0 sites.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case it's not obvious: the rationale for wanting this base level to be high is that it provides better positive feedback to good contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2023-05-04T14:03:01.883" Title="Vote early, vote often" Tags="|discussion|votes|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="314" CreationDate="2010-08-16T09:38:24.927" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that we should vote more often. However, we shouldn't up-vote on poorly worded questions. For example, this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1708/variation-in-pca-weights&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt; is pretty vague, yet at one point it had two up votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tend to downvote poorly worded questions, and then reverse that decision once (if?) the question is corrected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2010-08-16T09:38:24.927" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="314" CreationDate="2010-08-16T11:39:55.243" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Still, there is a problem of scope; one may give a brilliant answer to a question that is hardly interesting for a bulk of people and so lands with only an acceptation. On the other hand first useful (even not so well done) answer to a popular question will gather a lot of votes, especially when we would encourage voting on every answer that one thinks is nice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-08-16T11:39:55.243" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="314" CreationDate="2010-08-16T14:21:59.863" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since this is a stats website, I thought there really should be some graphs!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below are two graphs. In each plot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only users with a rep of 105 and who have upvoted more than 5 times are included.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Red dots are users with rep &amp;gt; 500.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Green dots are users with rep &amp;gt; 1000.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;x-axis is just an index of the remaining users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Figure 1: Ratio of Up votes against Reputation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zLcGS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zLcGS.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt tex&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Figure 2: Ratio of Down/up&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XfOqH.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2023-05-04T14:03:01.883" LastActivityDate="2023-05-04T14:03:01.883" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="314" CreationDate="2010-08-16T14:37:09.950" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another suggestion by Scott in the same thread:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A good rule of thumb: if you can be bother answering the question, it's good enough to upvote! Also, be kind, and upvote any good competing answers that exist when you give your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I plan to follow the above advice and scan all the questions I answered in order to upvote clear questions and clear answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-08-16T14:37:09.950" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="281" CreationDate="2010-08-16T15:13:05.983" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is something like this already developed by the SE team: &quot;Q&amp;amp;A for statisticians, data analysts, data miners and data visualization experts&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-08-16T15:13:05.983" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-16T15:13:05.983" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="296" CreationDate="2010-08-16T18:36:13.930" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the nice things about this site as opposed to a mailing list is the natural language search that happens automatically as you formulate a title for your question.  So long as we enforce appropriate tagging, so people can filter out questions they aren't interested in, and punish duplicates so we aren't overwhelmed, I see no problem taking ggplot2 questions here.  The key issue to keep in mind is that we are not an appropriate place for bug reports, feature requests, or discussions thereof.  Questions about ggplot2 (or other visualization software) asked here should stick to a simple: my data is this, I want it to look like this, how do I do that type of question.  Quickly the basics will be covered and the flow of ggplot2 questions will become manageable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2019-03-31T06:52:07.247" LastActivityDate="2019-03-31T06:52:07.247" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="67" CreationDate="2010-08-16T18:43:57.237" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I completely agree with Larry Wang.  I'd also add that if you see my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1749/how-can-you-approximate-the-number-of-trials-to-success-given-a-particular-prsuc&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; you'll see a good example of what he is talking about. I lacked the correct name, and my guesses as to what would be correct approach were off.  If you want to answer with a link to a wiki page, go ahead, but I'm not sure the question should be closed.  Besides, going out of our way to close a question that is simple, but otherwise within our scope is more trouble than it is worth.  Closing questions should be reserved for questions beyond our scope or that are otherwise unredeemable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2010-08-16T18:43:57.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="322" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-16T19:11:25.310" Score="1" ViewCount="1271" Body="&lt;p&gt;For some strange reason no one has made it before, so here it is:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.meta.stackoverflow.com/rooms/170/stats&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://chat.meta.stackoverflow.com/rooms/170/stats&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Probably it is a better place for our discussions than comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-08-16T20:47:47.927" Title="Chat room for Stats" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="322" CreationDate="2010-08-16T20:47:47.927" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This could be useful.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that we could do is to have &quot;office hours&quot; for the moderators to be online at certain times/days (for short time periods).  That would give others specific times to join the chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-08-16T20:47:47.927" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="324" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-17T07:14:42.077" Score="0" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hi all,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;shouldn't there be a &quot;Data mining&quot; subforum on stackexchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="976" OwnerDisplayName="lmsasu" LastActivityDate="2010-08-17T07:42:17.687" Title="Data mining forum" Tags="|data-mining|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-17T07:14:42.077" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="324" CreationDate="2010-08-17T07:19:11.067" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;See Area51: &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;http://area51.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion is that it should be covered here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-08-17T07:19:11.067" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-17T07:19:11.067" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="324" CreationDate="2010-08-17T07:42:17.687" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think stackexchange sites are meant to be forums?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My knowledge of &quot;Data mining&quot; is a bit limited, but what sort of questions would people ask that wouldn't be covered in the remit of this stackexchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastActivityDate="2010-08-17T07:42:17.687" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-17T07:42:17.687" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-08-17T12:07:55.603" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Statosphere.com&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="979" LastActivityDate="2010-08-17T12:07:55.603" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-17T12:07:55.603" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="328" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-17T14:26:15.407" Score="18" ViewCount="417" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on a conversation that started &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.meta.stackoverflow.com/rooms/170/stats&quot;&gt;in the chat room&lt;/a&gt; (and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/314/vote-early-vote-often/317#317&quot;&gt;some analysis that Colin did on voting patterns&lt;/a&gt;), I have posted the shell of an R StackExchange package here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://code.google.com/p/overflowr/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://code.google.com/p/overflowr/&lt;/a&gt;.  It can currently pull a list of tags, users, questions, etc. from any StackExchange site, but it needs a lot of work before it could be released.  The goal of the package is to make the cc-wiki text readily available for analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three of the moderators will be working on it.  Happy to invite others who have interest.  Otherwise, feel free to post your requests, use cases, etc. here or on the google code page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2011-03-05T08:21:05.313" Title="R StackExchange package" Tags="|discussion|r|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="279" CreationDate="2010-08-17T15:24:03.340" Score="7" Body="&lt;h1&gt;August 23rd...&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;BR&gt;&#xA;...and then a second round between best propositions, as proposed &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.meta.stackoverflow.com/chats/message/95398?offset=120&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;on chat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-08-17T15:24:03.340" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-08-17T23:40:59.203" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;StatsAnswers.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25" LastActivityDate="2010-08-17T23:40:59.203" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-17T23:40:59.203" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-08-17T23:42:26.640" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DataAnalysisAnswers.com&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25" LastEditorUserId="25" LastEditDate="2010-08-18T17:30:19.597" LastActivityDate="2010-08-18T17:30:19.597" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-17T23:42:26.640" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="309" CreationDate="2010-08-18T14:49:16.740" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree.  Sometimes when we attempt to answer an unclear question we make it more clear to the OP what it is they need to clarify than if we just commented asking questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastActivityDate="2010-08-18T14:49:16.740" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="333" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-18T20:19:18.987" Score="16" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am of the opinion that we should encourage downvoters to leave a comment as to why they downvoted. This is particularly important for questions as without a comment it is hard for the OP to figure out how to improve the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we encourage the above practice as a community norm then we will achieve several objectives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be nice to the OP so that they do not leave the site out of frustration.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It increases the chances that the qn actually gets edited and improved.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keep the quality of questions high.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-01-11T17:11:10.877" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T19:40:37.597" Title="Should we encourage downvoters to leave a comment for their downvote?" Tags="|discussion|comment|votes|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="333" CreationDate="2010-08-18T22:30:18.977" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why not leaving comment first? Bad questions are often casted by 1-rep users who are more interested in answer than rep, so downvoting won't make them large difference. Also stubborn ones can be then punished with close, if the question is very bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-08-18T22:30:18.977" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-08-19T05:15:09.923" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;RandomPatterns.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="850" LastEditorUserId="850" LastEditDate="2010-08-19T23:26:51.357" LastActivityDate="2010-08-19T23:26:51.357" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-19T05:15:09.923" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="336" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-19T11:39:15.427" Score="1" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found the question &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1883/revolutions-in-statistics-for-the-last-50-years&quot;&gt;Revolutions in statistics for the last 50 years?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;is both argumentative and will require extended discussion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should not construct our site upon that type of question. Note that if we continue with it, it will get a lot of answer, hence a lot of visibility (activity=visibility).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: also 3 people with rep&gt;500 choose to answer and did not vote for closing this certainly means that I am a bit too sensitive with subjectives question ? Am I :) ?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2010-08-19T15:09:20.577" Title="what is the limit in subjective argumentative questions." Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="336" CreationDate="2010-08-19T12:05:33.377" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a class of free-discussion topics, and they fill this &quot;blogging/forum&quot; part of SE. I think they should be left as CV as soon as they are able to raise some &lt;strong&gt;valuable&lt;/strong&gt; discussion in community -- reading answers may then lead to some interesting discoveries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2010-08-19T15:09:20.577" LastActivityDate="2010-08-19T15:09:20.577" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="336" CreationDate="2010-08-19T12:48:44.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think a grace period (of let's say - 1 day) should be given to such questions.  If no interest is shown by the community - it should be closed.  Otherwise, we might be getting a good discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the proportion of &quot;free discussion&quot; will accumulate to several a day - I would say this is a bad policy - I don't believe it will get there easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253" LastActivityDate="2010-08-19T12:48:44.990" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6" CreationDate="2010-08-19T13:31:04.730" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a proposed entry to the faq regarding community norms. The text in blockquotes is meant to be what we will include in the faq. Feel free to edit as necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first entry is discussed here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333/should-we-encourage-downvoters-to-leave-a-comment-for-their-downvote&quot;&gt;Should we encourage downvoters to leave a comment for their downvote?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are the community norms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The following are some norms that we as a community will follow. There will be occasions when we will not be able to follow the norms because of various reasons but to the extent possible we will try to follow thenm.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These norms are not cast in stone. If you wish to discuss any of these norms please open a meta thread at &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stats.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;http://meta.stats.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When we downvote a question we will leave a comment explaining to the OP the reasons for the downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Leaving a comment when downvoting achieves several objectives.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It increases the chances that that the OP does not leave the site out of frustration.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It increases the chances that the question actually gets edited and improved.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Keeps the quality of questions high. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2010-08-19T13:31:04.730" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-19T13:31:04.730" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="336" CreationDate="2010-08-19T13:32:38.173" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with you, as I said in my comment, but it's borderline.  It's borderline because of the usage of the word &quot;Revolution&quot; in my view (beyond that, it's basically ok).  A question like &quot;why is bayesian statistics the best&quot; is an obvious candidate to close, and I would do so immediately as a moderator.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would vote to close this one, but feel on a question like this that the community should decide.  A vote to close from a moderator results in the question being immediately closed.  I will vote to close once there are 4 other votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the day, &quot;good answers to a bad question &gt; no question&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-08-19T13:32:38.173" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="341" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-19T13:50:43.730" Score="5" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;What ideas do people have for promoting the site to a larger community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-08-30T19:13:51.020" Title="How to promote the site?" Tags="|essential-questions|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="12" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="341" CreationDate="2010-08-19T13:54:48.040" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about selling/giving away t-shirts with our logo/site url at conferences? See the following links for how mathoverflow does it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/logo&quot;&gt;https://mathoverflow.net/logo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;See Anton's shirt: &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/users/1/anton-geraschenko&quot;&gt;https://mathoverflow.net/users/1/anton-geraschenko&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:58:32.040" LastActivityDate="2010-08-19T13:54:48.040" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="341" CreationDate="2010-08-19T13:56:32.110" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Advertising via email listservs that each of us have access to. (e.g., R help list perhaps or would that be spam over there?). The following meta link is relevant for this answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/142/email-blurb-for-public-beta&quot;&gt;Email Blurb for Public Beta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2010-08-19T13:56:32.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="341" CreationDate="2010-08-19T14:09:24.823" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can request prominent bloggers to post on their blog discussing our website. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had requested &lt;a href=&quot;http://stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Andrew Gelman&lt;/a&gt; to write about this site on his &lt;a href=&quot;http://stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/blog/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt;. He replied to me a few days back and agreed to my request! The post is not yet up. I am hoping that it will be up soon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we make any such requests we should also actively monitor the blog post for comments so that we can address any issues raised by anyone appropriately. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Andrew has posted about the site on his blog. See this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2010/08/statoverflow.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorDisplayName="svadali" LastEditDate="2010-08-21T21:23:03.210" LastActivityDate="2010-08-21T21:23:03.210" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="341" CreationDate="2010-08-19T14:12:00.230" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can promote the site via various associations (graduate, academic and industry) as most 'experts'/'would be experts' will be members of these associations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a bit unsure at the moment what exactly we can achieve via this route but something to think of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorDisplayName="svadali" LastEditDate="2010-08-19T14:22:21.157" LastActivityDate="2010-08-19T14:22:21.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="336" CreationDate="2010-08-19T14:18:19.030" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The software that we have is very good for precise, focussed questions but not as much for 'subjective' discussion type of questions. The reason why it is not good for discussion is because of the voting mechanism, the comments/answers get sorted out of sequence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point to note is that it is very easy to ask discussion type of questions. While making them CW does reduce the opportunity for gaming the rep system the sheer volume of such questions that can be asked can drown other types of questions. Thus, I am of the opinion that we should discourage these types of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-08-19T14:18:19.030" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="341" CreationDate="2010-08-19T15:20:03.103" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Statistical software user groups seem a natural place to bring it up - perhaps during a presentation on how to find resources for [insert statistical software], or on a randomly interjected &quot;commercial break&quot; slide during an unrelated presentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or if there's money for it, sponsor a meeting with pizza, beer, and a prominent Exchange member as presenter.  Might not be cost-effective for my nascent R user group, but what about the SF/NY/Chicago RUGs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="71" LastEditDate="2010-08-20T22:14:40.060" LastActivityDate="2010-08-20T22:14:40.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-08-19T15:48:39.650" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;StandardDeviations.org&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;BR&gt;&#xA;(.com is unavailable)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-08-19T15:48:39.650" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-19T15:48:39.650" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-08-19T16:21:49.563" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;ModelConvergence.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-08-19T16:21:49.563" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-19T16:21:49.563" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-08-19T16:30:31.587" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;ExploratoryAnalysis.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-08-19T16:30:31.587" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-19T16:30:31.587" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-08-19T16:32:43.127" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;OptimumModel.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-08-19T16:32:43.127" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-19T16:32:43.127" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2010-08-19T17:54:22.050" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;ExplanatoryVariable.com&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174" LastActivityDate="2010-08-19T17:54:22.050" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-19T17:54:22.050" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="341" CreationDate="2010-08-20T16:38:02.817" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many of these sites have &quot;best of&quot; lists for books in their subject area.  We could create a small &quot;library&quot; (e.g. 5 books) including the top rated books, and package them with the site logo.  These could be either sold or offered as prizes/give-aways for different things.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-08-20T16:38:02.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="341" CreationDate="2010-08-21T18:36:46.960" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe we should promote a &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Stat flashmob week&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was something similar done about a year ago for stackoverflow (I wrote about it here: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.r-statistics.com/2009/09/r-flashmob/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.r-statistics.com/2009/09/r-flashmob/&lt;/a&gt;  but for one day only)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can give an excuse for bloggers to write about an actual call for action from their readers (go join the Q&amp;amp;A party!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also have a limited one week where they all aggressively advertise the site (banners on their sidebars, hangup signs in their University, and so on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An event like this should be known in advance by people, and promoted in many venues simultaneously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be coupled by approaching a leading figure(s) of some topic(s), who is currently outside the community (for example &quot;multiple comparisons&quot;, &quot;bootstrapping&quot;, and so on)  And this way to attract even more people.  Who to choose can be voted previously on the meta site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We might want to make such an event a yearly (or half yearly) event.  And only do it after the official website will be up (with a formal URL and logo).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, for something like this it would make sense to prepare a press release for the bloggers to use as a basis for their post.  And also have fliers/banner graphics prepared upfront.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also be glad to help through my blog ( &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.r-statistics.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.r-statistics.com&lt;/a&gt; ) and through &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.r-bloggers.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.r-bloggers.com&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253" LastActivityDate="2010-08-21T18:36:46.960" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="341" CreationDate="2010-08-22T03:41:18.747" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the last 3 years, ICML participants (Mark Reid?) have set up a site to discuss papers: &lt;a href=&quot;http://mldiscuss.appspot.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;2010&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.conflate.net/icml/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;2009 &amp;amp; 2008&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, we're not a discussion site, but it seems a lot of the actual &quot;discussion&quot; is quite amenable to a Q&amp;amp;A format.  I wonder if we could create tags before any upcoming conferences or workshops and encourage organizers/attendees to spread the word and ask questions about papers/concepts, etc that were presented on this site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two upcoming workshops I'm aware of are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lccc.eecs.berkeley.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;LCCC  :  NIPS 2010 Workshop on Learning on Cores, Clusters and Clouds&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://morrislab.med.utoronto.ca/~anna/networksnips2010/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Networks Across Disciplines in Theory and Applications&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Not sure how well those fit in with our mission statement, but there are also several conferences to consider in the threads started by Shane.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="251" LastActivityDate="2010-08-22T03:41:18.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="341" CreationDate="2010-08-22T08:38:43.303" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know anything about advertising, marketing, etc. but i do know a fair amount about web metrics, and for the past few years i've been using Google Analytics as my web metrics platform, which is what the Stack Exchange Sites use (at least the ones i've checked out, including this one). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we could get access to the relevant GA account (it's simple to &lt;em&gt;partition&lt;/em&gt; access so that you can grant access to a single 'profile', which in this case would just the this Site) then i would bet that we could quickly come up with some very good (and usually free) suggesting regarding how to 'promote' the Site (just by looking at e.g., referral sources segmented by number of new registrants and segmented by total traffic volume, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any event, i am happy to help with this effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="438" LastActivityDate="2010-08-22T08:38:43.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="357" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-22T09:55:45.543" Score="1" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/489/write-an-elevator-pitch-tagline&quot;&gt;Write an Elevator Pitch / Tagline&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Note:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are closing this domain naming thread. It is asking the &lt;em&gt;entirely&lt;/em&gt; wrong question. See this blog post for details: &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/10/domain-names-the-wrong-question/&quot;&gt;Domain Names: Wrong Question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're going to keep the name ******************************webapps.stackexchange.com. But we WILL be setting up redirects from the more &amp;quot;popular&amp;quot; domains names (e.g. seasonedadvice.com to cooking.stackexchange.com, basicallymoney.com to money.stackexchange.com, and others as we go through the list).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New question: &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Write and Elevator Pitch / Tagline!&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/489/write-an-elevator-pitch-tagline&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Click here to contribute ideas and vote.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[original message text below]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deadline is near (23rd), so we should decide what to do next. One proposal per answer, please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to note: we're currently having a discussion with the StackExchange team about conducting this as a blind poll.  Hoping to have an answer by tomorrow at which point we'll make a determination about the next step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-10-09T01:12:30.787" Title="How to make second round of voting for the site name?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2010-10-09T01:12:41.283" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-22T09:55:45.543" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="357" CreationDate="2010-08-22T10:02:18.020" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Each proposal in the second round is a suggestion of a logo (sketch, description) for one of the names that were elected in the first round. Then voting as usual (with downvotes), best proposal win.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This way we wouldn't have a problem that we have a nice name but we can't agree on logo for it. And we would have the full identification ready.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-08-22T10:02:18.020" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-22T10:02:18.020" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="357" CreationDate="2010-08-22T13:16:12.407" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest making this kind of blind poll (as done for the unix/ubuntu merge question) for the most popular names. Then let this run for a week and take the winner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no doubt that we will come to a consensus on the logo and style. Especially because we will get an expert helping us if we get out of beta phase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2010-08-22T13:16:12.407" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-22T13:16:12.407" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="357" CreationDate="2010-08-22T22:55:05.913" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that we should broaden the second round a little now that it's getting closer: maybe include the top 5 proposals?  Or take (anything) &gt;= 0.5 * (the top proposal)?  Or anything &gt;= the 75th percentile (of all proposals)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say the top 5 to keep it simple.  The rules on the second round should be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No new proposals allowed (one of the moderators will post the top proposals)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No downvoting allowed (I prefer just having people up-vote)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think that we need to find a way to avoid massive numbers of comments and conflict, so maybe we should make an additional question where people can lay out their case for why a specific proposal is best/worst.  In this, I would encourage people to describe a possible logo (or site appearance) along with the proposal (some proposals may be more suitable than others for this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-08-22T22:55:05.913" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-22T22:55:05.913" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6" CreationDate="2010-08-23T04:44:34.507" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are some good books / videos / software and resources to learn more about statistics / data mining / machine learning?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider browsing the questions and answers under the tags below.  There are a number of useful resources and recommended material gathered therein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/books&quot;&gt;Books&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/video&quot;&gt;Video&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/software&quot;&gt;Software&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/652/best-books-for-an-introduction-to-statistical-data-analysis&quot;&gt;Best Books for an Introduction to Statistical Data Analysis?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/421/what-book-would-you-recommend-for-non-statisticians&quot;&gt;What book would you recommend for non-statisticians?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/614/open-source-statistical-textbooks&quot;&gt;Open Source statistical textbooks?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/414/introduction-to-statistics-for-mathematicians&quot;&gt;Introduction to statistics for mathematicians&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/223/intro-to-statistics-for-an-md&quot;&gt;Intro to statistics for an MD?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1667/what-books-provide-an-overview-of-engineering-statistics&quot;&gt;What books provide an overview of engineering statistics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1668/what-books-provide-an-overview-of-computational-statistics-as-it-applies-to-compu&quot;&gt;What books provide an overview of computational statistics as it applies to computer science?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1761/statistics-probability-videos-for-beginners&quot;&gt;Statistics/Probability Videos for Beginners&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/485/mathematical-statistics-videos&quot;&gt;Mathematical Statistics Videos&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/138/resources-for-learning-r&quot;&gt;Resources for learning R&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="251" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2010-08-23T04:44:34.507" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-23T04:44:34.507" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="363" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-23T15:37:58.343" Score="3" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using IE7 (forced to by corporate policy unfortunately) and do not get any of the Latex rendered in questions. MathJax seems to work when I visit its home page, is that what is used on this site now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to do something to enable the rendering here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="229" LastActivityDate="2011-06-20T18:05:18.117" Title="Latex rendering in IE7" Tags="|support|math-display|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="363" CreationDate="2010-08-24T11:29:32.380" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Internet Options - Security tab - Internet zone - Custom Level...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ActiveX controls and plug-ins&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;- Allow Scriptlets (ENABLE)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="339" LastActivityDate="2010-08-24T11:29:32.380" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="366" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="368" CreationDate="2010-08-24T13:21:03.870" Score="1" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any policies regarding bibliographic entries and/or link to online articles?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There are many references circulating along the answers provided in this Q&amp;amp;A website, and I think they will constitute an interesting on-line collection as the site will grow up. Having a standardized way of cross-referencing and citing would be very useful, especially if one is interested in web scraping the site or enhancing his own library of papers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I usually display the references I found useful to support my answers following standard APA style (or something similar), but what about the many ways of citing/referencing external resources (standard http link, doi reference, etc.)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T19:44:01.717" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T19:44:01.717" Title="About bibliographic entries found throughout the Q&amp;A wiki" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="367" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="373" CreationDate="2010-08-24T13:36:40.017" Score="3" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just saw there is a &lt;code&gt;data&lt;/code&gt; tag around and do not understand what the possible meaning of this tag is and, therefore, would recommend to delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/data&quot;&gt;Right now, there are 8 questions with this tag&lt;/a&gt;. As far as I see it, they could all survive either without it or with some other tag (e.g., &lt;code&gt;missing-data&lt;/code&gt; which is non-existent so far).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In my understanding [data] is actually meaningless. By far most of the questions are related to data in any type so it is just useless to put a [data] tag on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope it is okay to post a new question, as I didn't find another question to put this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="442" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2010-08-30T15:22:33.810" Title="Suggestion: Delete [data]-tag, or is there something more to it, I don't see?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="366" CreationDate="2010-08-24T21:31:30.303" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;See the proposed entry to the faq: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6/what-should-our-faq-contain/199#199&quot;&gt;What should our FAQ contain?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2010-08-24T21:31:30.303" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="366" CreationDate="2010-08-25T17:52:49.533" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only way to keep it consistent would be to build in new features in the server. Now there are tools to enter links and images. Ideally, we'd like to have links also to enter an isbn for a book or a doi for an article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25" LastActivityDate="2010-08-25T17:52:49.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="341" CreationDate="2010-08-26T00:17:14.140" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that we should consider hosting a predictive data analysis contest.  We should come up with some kind of contemporary problem that has available data.  Here are examples of what I mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kdnuggets.com/datasets/competitions.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.kdnuggets.com/datasets/competitions.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-08-26T00:17:14.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="341" CreationDate="2010-08-26T13:13:29.397" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed the other day that when I did google scholar searches my citeulike bibliography came up as a result. If you guys are able to implement a site wide bibliography for when people cite articles related to their forum post (and then presumably have google index them) it would seem to me to drive up web traffic for an advanced academic crowd. This would be particularly good if the bibliography linked to forum posts in which the work was cited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2010-08-26T13:13:29.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="372" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-30T10:40:38.830" Score="7" ViewCount="246" Body="&lt;p&gt;As one can see, the functionality of tags has been extended lately; &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/new-tag-info-pages/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;blog post about it&lt;/a&gt;. One of the most important changes are the tag-wikis; now every tag can have a small description of a topic it covers.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Because it is pretty hard to gather enough reputation to edit wikis, in this question you can suggest wikis; those upvoted enough will be added to tags by me or other mods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2011-01-18T01:01:30.033" Title="What to write in tag wikis?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-30T10:40:38.830" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="367" CreationDate="2010-08-30T15:22:33.810" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;After unanimous agreement I deleted the &lt;code&gt;data&lt;/code&gt; tag from the following questions and, where it seemed reasonable, exchanged it with other tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/145/free-dataset-resources&quot;&gt;Free Dataset Resources?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/270/poisson-regression-with-large-data-is-it-wrong-to-change-the-unit-of-measurement&quot;&gt;Poisson regression with large data: is it wrong to change the unit of measurement?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/641/where-is-a-good-place-to-find-survey-results&quot;&gt;Where is a good place to find survey results?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/645/best-way-to-aggregate-and-analyze-data&quot;&gt;Best ways to aggregate and analyze data&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/715/dataset-for-multi-class-perceptron&quot;&gt;Dataset for multi class perceptron&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1358/intuition-for-higher-moments-in-circular-statistics&quot;&gt;Intuition for higher moments in circular statistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1385/techniques-for-handling-incomplete-missing-data&quot;&gt;Techniques for Handling Incomplete/Missing Data&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1822/test-for-poolability-of-individual-data-series&quot;&gt;Test for Poolability of Individual Data Series&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="442" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2010-08-30T15:22:33.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="374" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="376" CreationDate="2010-08-30T16:04:21.343" Score="1" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;We previously decided to break out the voting into a second round following the heated commentary between crossvalidated.com and statsoverflow.com.  One suggestion was to use a blind poll with the top five choices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, the StackExchange team has come through and we're ready to launch this.  Before I give them the green light, I wanted to ask again in the light of recent events:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that StatsOverflow.com is not an available domain name, &lt;strong&gt;would people rather re-open the former question (so people can vote in a normal fashion, and add new proposals), open a second round with the normal stackoverflow question format (downvoting, commentary, etc.), or launch the blind poll question?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's try to decide on this question &lt;strong&gt;by TODAY&lt;/strong&gt;, August 31, 2010.  I will accept the highest voted answer by this afternoon and start working on the new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as a reminder, the top 5 names were:  &lt;strong&gt;ConfidenceRegion&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;CrossValidated&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;OptimumModel&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;DegreesOfFreedom&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;ModelConvergence&lt;/strong&gt;. (&quot;DegreesofFreedom&quot; is a backordered domain, so it should be available at some point, but we should keep that in mind.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="5" LastEditDate="2010-08-31T13:15:04.263" LastActivityDate="2010-08-31T13:15:04.263" Title="Site name voting: decision time" Tags="|discussion|site-name|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-30T18:50:21.717" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="374" CreationDate="2010-08-30T16:04:33.853" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Re-open original question &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;( &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/21/what-should-our-site-be-called-what-should-our-domain-name-be-closed&quot;&gt;What should our site be called? / What should our domain name be?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2010-08-30T16:04:33.853" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-30T18:50:13.620" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="374" CreationDate="2010-08-30T16:05:17.830" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Blind poll question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(like this one: &lt;a href=&quot;https://unix.stackexchange.com/polls/2/should-unix-linux-and-ubuntu-merge&quot;&gt;https://unix.stackexchange.com/polls/2/should-unix-linux-and-ubuntu-merge&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:37:20.723" LastActivityDate="2010-08-30T16:05:17.830" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-30T18:49:52.433" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="374" CreationDate="2010-08-30T16:05:36.207" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Start new question with standard SO format&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/357/how-to-make-second-round-of-voting-for-the-site-name&quot;&gt;How to make second round of voting for the site name?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2010-08-30T16:05:36.207" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-30T18:50:07.863" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="341" CreationDate="2010-08-30T19:13:51.020" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been thinking a little more about how to give things away while getting a benefit from it (rather than just raffling stuff).  One thought:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At smaller events, we can give books away to the person who posts the most questions during the event.  That way we're getting some site traffic as part of the give-away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-08-30T19:13:51.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="379" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="605" CreationDate="2010-08-30T19:30:12.807" Score="5" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given everything, I'm inclined to request that we change our &quot;beta&quot; site name from &quot;Statistical Analysis&quot; to &quot;Data Analysis&quot;, and the respective subdomain from &quot;stats&quot; to &quot;data&quot;.  I think this would be more fitting for how the site has evolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-12-13T11:27:13.797" Title="Change the &quot;beta&quot; site name?" Tags="|discussion|site-name|beta|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="379" CreationDate="2010-08-31T00:25:37.727" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it worth it given that we move out of beta (and presumably to a new URL and site-name) in 48 days? The change will last about 6 weeks at most. It is obviously important that the new &lt;em&gt;permanent&lt;/em&gt; name and URL are seen to be inclusive of statisticians as well as those in the data mining community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastActivityDate="2010-08-31T00:25:37.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="383" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-31T00:41:06.083" Score="4" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the comments to the question on &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/341/how-to-promote-the-site&quot;&gt;How to promote the site?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, I suggested that we may want to do a market research study in order to choose a site name. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/5/shane&quot;&gt;Shane&lt;/a&gt; invited me to suggest some ways in which we can move such a study forward. This question is an attempt to get us moving in that direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By way of background, the wiki has the typical &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_research_process&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;steps involved in a market research process&lt;/a&gt;. It is not a perfect description but is enough to get us started. As you can see 'Problem Definition' is the first step in the process. The primary purpose of this stage is to ensure that we are solving the 'right' problem so that we do not waste resources by solving an 'incorrect' problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the above background in mind, I suggest that we expand the scope of the project (assuming that we really want to do one and that SO has the necessary funds to commit to the project). Expanding the scope may enable us to obtain additional insights that may help us evolve our site effectively. The current scope involves the following problem definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;What brand name should we choose for our site given the nature of our target audience (i.e, stats, ML, data mining folks)?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that a choice of site name + a logo is essentially a brand name decision.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What other issues/problems should we investigate? I suggest that we follow the following guidelines to post answers so that we can arrive at a consensus on what to do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One additional problem definition per answer so that the community consensus can float up.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An answer should consist of a one line question/statement that mentions the additional problem. Please add any additional justification/comments as a separate paragraph. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also including the original problem definition of site name as an answer so that if we feel that it is not relevant we can downvote it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also added an answer along the lines of: &quot;We should not do any market research project.&quot; Feel free to upvote this answer if you think a market research project is premature at this point in time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="svadali" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2010-09-01T17:20:18.160" Title="What problems should we investigate as part of potential market research project?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="383" CreationDate="2010-08-31T00:41:40.603" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;What brand name should we choose for our site given the nature of our target audience (i.e, stats, ML, data mining folks)?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the original problem we wanted to address via a market research project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-08-31T00:41:40.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="383" CreationDate="2010-08-31T00:55:30.510" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;We should not do any market research project.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvote this answer if you think a market research project is premature at this stage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Updated&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this is the leading answer currently I thought that it may be worthwhile to offer a push back so that if appropriate the upvoters can rethink their vote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a time that market research is needed for a site such as ours it is now rather than later. A successful site such as Stakoverflow or Mathoverflow does not really need market research (although it can certainly help) because they have strong statistics with respect to traffic, questions, answers, votes etc given their size of their target community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand we seem to be struggling a bit on traffic and there is clearly lots of users out there who have not heard about us or do not want to use the site. Perhaps, what we need is a bit of promotion but it will surely help us if we can understand better what would motivate our target audience to come in greater numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this, of course, assumes that we get the desired support from Stackoverflow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorDisplayName="svadali" LastEditDate="2010-09-01T17:20:18.160" LastActivityDate="2010-09-01T17:20:18.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="386" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-31T04:09:58.930" Score="3" ViewCount="703" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not listed in the full reference. But I have seen people insert latex code. Which tag is for latex?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="862" LastActivityDate="2010-08-31T05:28:48.053" Title="How do I insert latex tags in stackexchange?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="386" CreationDate="2010-08-31T05:28:48.053" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just put latex code between $ signs. Like this: &lt;code&gt;$\alpha$&lt;/code&gt; gives $\alpha$.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastActivityDate="2010-08-31T05:28:48.053" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="388" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-08-31T15:34:23.983" Score="2" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are almost half-way through our beta.  (As of today, there are 48 days left out of 90 total days.)  This seems like a good time to take a step back and see how we're doing overall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How is the site developing?  Are people happy with the community and the questions that are being asked?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any particular things that we should focus on for the remainder of the beta period?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How has the moderation been?  Any feedback is welcome.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="5" LastEditDate="2010-08-31T15:41:21.147" LastActivityDate="2010-09-01T10:59:49.010" Title="How are we doing so far?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-31T15:34:31.377" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="388" CreationDate="2010-08-31T15:48:18.930" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I could be wrong but the 'rate of question flow' seems to have slowed down off late. I think the quality of questions and answers is fine although voting levels still seems a bit low. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think for the remainder of the beta period we really should figure out how to increase traffic. Of the promotion ideas that we came up with on &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/341/how-to-promote-the-site&quot;&gt;How to promote the site?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, Tal's idea on &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/341/how-to-promote-the-site/354#354&quot;&gt;Stat flashmob week&lt;/a&gt;&quot; seems the easiest one to implement in the short term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could we compile a list of bloggers who may be receptive to the idea? (Andrew Gelman has already blogged about the site &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2010/08/statoverflow.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reg moderation- I do not think we have had any serious issues so far. So, your mettle as a mod has not yet been tested! :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2010-08-31T15:48:18.930" CommentCount="11" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-31T15:48:18.930" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="388" CreationDate="2010-08-31T15:51:04.523" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Site content, moderation, as well as aims and scope seem ok with me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am just wondering if it is/was planned to automatically tag the software refered to in each Q&amp;amp;A. &#xA;From what I already saw, the top used softwares are R (hopefully!), SPSS, Matlab; I don't consider MS Excel as a statistical software, though. Stata users seem not be very represented there; they have their own mailing-list, but R users too. It may be, however, interesting to see if solutions are available with different software, since it may increase the popularity of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2010-08-31T15:51:04.523" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-31T15:51:04.523" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="388" CreationDate="2010-08-31T20:47:00.583" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing that I've been a little disappointed by is the relative scarcity of real-data questions.  There are lots of questions about methods/tools for X and many others asking for clarification of some statistical concept; but not so many where we actually get to look at some data as a group.  If there's interest in that beyond me, maybe we could facilitate that by having a way to host data alongside a question (yeah, there are a million file hosts, but do people know how to use them?).  Maybe this isn't the right venue for that kind of question, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than this particular little desire, I agree with Srikant's post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastActivityDate="2010-08-31T20:47:00.583" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-31T20:47:00.583" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="372" CreationDate="2010-08-31T23:53:45.773" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;mixed-models:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Mixed models&quot; refers to a class of models that are variously known as: mixed-effects models, multilevel models, hierarchical linear models, [these things have about three different names per discipline, feel free to add your favorite].  This class of models was developed to account for correlation that may occur within nested data.  A classic example is the estimation of test scores of students: if test scores are correlated within classes, schools, districts, etc., mixed models allow the modeler to simultaneously estimate the differences between individual students and between the groups to which they belong (with the possibility of including covariates at all levels).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;StatsExchangers often recommend the following resources for learning more about mixed models: Venables and Ripley (2002), Laird and Ware (1982), Baayen (2008), Raudenbush and Bryk (2001), Gelman and Hill (2006), and Singer and Willett (2003).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mixed models are available in the following statistical packages: R (lme4 and nlme), SAS (PROC MIXED), MLwiN, Stata (xtreg and xtmixed), and HLM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please edit to improve - I just wanted to get the ball rolling on this one.  Thought I would throw out the book and package recommendations as those are likely to be asked often, but I'm not sure how we could come to a consensus about what books and packages should go there.  However, maybe the upkeep of those lists could be left to whomever has the rep and the interest, with disputes hashed out here on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="1036" LastEditDate="2010-09-03T03:10:11.190" LastActivityDate="2010-09-03T03:10:11.190" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-08-31T23:53:45.773" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="388" CreationDate="2010-09-01T10:59:49.010" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing I noticed is at least some kind of overlap between the stats and the stackoverflow for programming. There are some questions that appear on both sites in different forms; on stats the method is asked, and then on stackoverflow a correction of the code is asked. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example : on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2220/how-do-we-create-a-confidence-interval-for-the-parameter-of-a-permutation-test/2240#2240&quot;&gt;stats&lt;/a&gt; and on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3615718/bootstrapping-to-compare-two-groups/3615880#3615880&quot;&gt;stackoverflow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No clue as to how to solve this, as I believe it's not possible to merge questions from different sites. One solution is to direct all R questions to the stats, but that solution seems not satisfactory to me. For one, many questions on R are about data manipulation, and far from every question on statistics is asked by somebody who uses R. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the rest I am a happy user of stats. I didn't even realize it was a beta version :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2010-09-01T10:59:49.010" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-01T10:59:49.010" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="383" CreationDate="2010-09-01T11:12:28.253" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Can we attract enough knowledgeable statisticians for answers/discussion, and how to do that&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or formulated otherwise:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;What can we offer to seasoned statisticians as an extra value and how to show them?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the other SO sites, it is crucial to have enough people with a strong statistical background to provide answers and meaningful discussion. I have the feeling it'll be more difficult to convince statisticians than it is to convince programmers. stackoverflow has quite a number of &quot;hobby coders&quot;, teenagers and young adults that can have a serious knowledge about programming. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With statistics, this becomes a lot harder. You need the professionals, and you can expect an audience of students looking for cheap advice. This might be a prejudice, but it's likely to be a common idea among statisticians, especially when they're working at a university.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1124" LastActivityDate="2010-09-01T11:12:28.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="395" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="396" CreationDate="2010-09-01T16:44:45.823" Score="8" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose, you see a user's profile and notice the following pattern: Asked several questions, accepted a few answers but has not upvoted a single answer. The user is probably aware about the voting mechanism as the user's questions, answers to his/her questions have been upvoted by the community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we need to intervene and encourage the user to vote more often but I am unsure as to how to do this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any suggestions as to how to do achieve the above? I think diplomatic and gentle approaches are preferable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-09-01T16:47:41.623" Title="How can we encourage a user to vote for answers and questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="395" CreationDate="2010-09-01T16:47:41.623" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree, and leaving comments should be the first step.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that users should understand that if they don't participate and contribute back, people won't answer their questions as readily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-09-01T16:47:41.623" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="397" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-09-01T16:55:38.067" Score="-4" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now that we have a fair number of questions on the site, let's see if there are any additional ways that we should be organizing everything.  Please post one new tag idea per answer, along with an explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related threads: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/120/tag-rename-suggestions&quot;&gt;Tag rename suggestions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/264/the-final-death-of-meta-tags&quot;&gt;The final death of meta-tags?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2016-04-07T16:07:31.503" Title="New tag suggestions" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-01T16:55:38.067" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="397" CreationDate="2010-09-01T16:56:52.510" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;[big-list]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a fair number of list questions (books, conferences, comics, quotes, etc.).  A tag can be helpful to search for these separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag name is being used on Theoretical CS (based on MathOverflow's tags): &lt;a href=&quot;https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/big-list&quot;&gt;https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/big-list&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:32:33.743" LastActivityDate="2010-09-01T16:56:52.510" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-01T16:56:52.510" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="397" CreationDate="2010-09-01T17:18:29.557" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We might need to do a few things before adding new tags.  It would help me, and perhaps others, to have guidance on tagging principles: should we aim for more generality, thereby associating each tag with more threads and enriching their semantic web, or aim for more specificity, which risks &quot;Balkanizing&quot; otherwise related ideas?  Second, there seem to be plenty of redundant or potentially redundant tags, such as {book, books}, {computational-statistics, computing}, {discriminant, discriminative}, {distribution, distributions}, {modeling, modelling, explanatory-models}, {regression, linear-regression}, {pdf, distributions}, etc.  These could use some cleaning up or at least contributions to their wikis to disambiguate them.  Third, some tags seem to reference groups of ideas and perhaps should be broken up into multiple tags, like data-subjective, linear-regression, and perhaps a few others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2010-09-01T17:18:29.557" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-01T17:18:29.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="400" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-09-02T07:07:09.137" Score="5" ViewCount="418" Body="&lt;p&gt;Below question has been closed on Statistical Analysis web site. Is this really not a question for this site? I guess it the same as we ask Visual Studio question on stackoverflow, windows/mac questions on serverfault.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2269/access-tables-created-in-sas-enterprise-guide-client-into-sas-enterprise-miner-cl&quot;&gt;Access tables created in SAS Enterprise Guide Client into SAS Enterprise Miner Client?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or if I am wrong, do we need a separate web site for such question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="263" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2010-09-03T13:44:24.907" Title="Is this question really not related to &quot;Statistical Analysis&quot;?" Tags="|support|closing-questions|policy|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="400" CreationDate="2010-09-02T11:02:32.787" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it belongs on the site. As another example of a question similar to the SAS question, consider this question on how to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2162/r-how-to-draw-a-line-or-add-a-text-outside-of-the-plot-area&quot;&gt;use R&lt;/a&gt; to draw a particular type of plot. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both types of questions deal with how to use the software (R, SAS) to perform a type of operation (draw plot, import data) that is needed as part of a data analysis project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I voted to re-open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2010-09-02T11:02:32.787" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="400" CreationDate="2010-09-02T14:09:59.570" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think that questions that are strictly nuts-and-bolts software operation belong here.  As I've ranted about before, that's how things are done on the GIS StackExchange, and I think it's very detrimental - the vast majority of questions are technical questions that would be better answered by asking on StackOverflow, RTFM, checking with the software company, etc.  It's correspondingly very difficult to find questions that actually address interesting conceptual challenges.  Bluntly put, it's boring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the argument that there are plenty of R questions of a similar flavor, I suggest that many of those questions should also be booted over to StackOverflow (including the one Srikant mentions, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2271/how-to-plot-a-violin-scatter-boxplot-in-r&quot;&gt;this recent one about plotting&lt;/a&gt;).  We certainly have to address statistical software if we're going to talk about statistical analysis, but in order to attract and retain expert users, we need to have questions that expert users are going to be interested in &lt;strong&gt;on the front page&lt;/strong&gt;.  If it's 20 questions about how to read data into Software X to one question about actual analysis, they aren't going to stick around.  And if those who do stick around have to resort to using tags to sort through the data import questions, I suspect that we'll get many fewer eyes on each question as people select out only those questions that they &quot;know&quot; will be of interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, the StackOverflow R community has a wealth of questions that have already been answered, and a stable body of experts who frequently answer questions &lt;em&gt;within minutes&lt;/em&gt;.  The same isn't true of SAS, but SAS questions do get answered there and there are plenty of other community resources for SAS, STATA, etc. (and, as any programmer can tell you, community is also a feature).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2010-09-02T14:09:59.570" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="404" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-09-02T14:30:12.207" Score="2" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/252/should-we-allow-more-computing-questions&quot;&gt;Should we allow more computing questions&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed there are a few discussions already about whether or not to allow for programming questions, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/35/how-much-programming-here&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/252/should-we-allow-more-computing-questions&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. I assume most people currently on the side program either in R, Stata, SAS or SPSS. Yet, there is a multitude of other statistical software, and often researchers use the menus of any of those packages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I would allow for questions regarding software, including questions about data manipulation. For R it has been argued that this belongs on SO, but for SAS, SPSS, Stata, there is no room there. Let alone for questions related to Minitab, Phylip, and other more specialized packages. GIS for example is often used in spatial statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So not only questions like &quot;where can I find this type of analysis in software Y?&quot;, but also questions like &quot;I can't get my data read in, where am I going wrong?&quot;. I consider data manipulation an essential part of practical statistics, and would vote to allow those questions here as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, this also holds the risk of diluting interesting theoretical discussions about statistics. Then again, most researchers looking for statistical advice aren't really helped with a theoretical rant. They often need some intuitive explanation of the tool, and a guide on how to start performing the analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I add this question as I would like to extend the discussion (and decision) to all used software in statistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2010-09-02T21:03:09.057" Title="Extending the scope of the site to used software and manipulation of data?" Tags="|discussion|software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2010-09-06T18:45:57.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="404" CreationDate="2010-09-02T21:03:09.057" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like avoid actually answering your question here to briefly address your fourth paragraph, as I believe that's a paraphrase of my argument from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/400/is-this-question-really-not-related-to-statistical-analysis&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.  Please correct me if I'm mistaken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that the danger is that we'll dilute discussions about statistical theory.  There's a substantial middle ground between LaTeX-laden theoretical questions and &quot;How do I read my data into SAS?&quot; - questions where we actually &lt;em&gt;talk about doing analysis&lt;/em&gt;.  Not the deep-math theoretical aspects, not which tool to use or how to do X in Software Y, but actual analysis of data.  It's that middle ground that I'm most concerned about preserving.  I can read articles for theory, and I can RTFM for help with my software, but the only way I can get better at analysis is by getting feedback on my analyses and seeing what others are doing.  As I work in relative isolation, that's often tough for me to do; here, I can get people from all over the world advising me on how to model my data.  That's amazing.  That's a hell of a lot more amazing than tech support or theoretical discussion.  And that's what I want to preserve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sheesh, I feel like I'm posting political speeches today.  Sorry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2010-09-02T21:03:09.057" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="400" CreationDate="2010-09-03T13:37:10.930" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to close the question the OP is referring to, and I think it is innapropriate for this forum. While people on this forum could potentially answer the question, I think it is more appropriate to refer people to expert bodies specializing in those particular software packages. People are not only more likely to get a quick response, but should search through old posts on those sites to see if the question they have has already been answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fail to see how that question on importing data between different SAS products has anything to do with statistical analysis. If it wasn't SAS, and say a person was asking how to conduct a SQL query in Microsoft Access would the question be considered appropriate? The difference between that question and asking about visual studio on stack overflow is that statistical software has a broader range than statistical analysis, and that question falls squarely into what I would consider &quot;data management&quot;. Although as Srikant points out this is an essential tool to conduct analysis, I feel it is far enough removed from anything resembling statistical interpretation that it dilutes what I believe the intentions of the sight are (to promote discussion and learning of statistics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be alittle more sympathetic except for the fact that many of these software packages have user groups that individuals would be better addressing their questions towards (and searching their archives of past questions). I don't know for SAS, but if the software was SPSS I could refer the individual to several user groups where SPSS experts and even representatives of the software post responses to questions. I know Stata and R have similar listserves as well. Why should this site be redundant with these groups at the expense of this sites members time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="1036" LastEditDate="2010-09-03T13:44:24.907" LastActivityDate="2010-09-03T13:44:24.907" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="407" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-09-03T18:55:58.430" Score="6" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prompted by the &quot;new tag suggestions&quot; question, I wondered about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;guidance on tagging principles: should we aim for more generality, thereby associating each tag with more threads and enriching their semantic web, or aim for more specificity, which risks &quot;Balkanizing&quot; otherwise related ideas?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect general tags are better, because in appropriate combinations they can characterize any question precisely while linking it quite broadly with other questions.  What is the community's opinion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2010-09-08T10:31:53.767" Title="Guidance on creating and organizing tags" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-03T18:55:58.430" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="397" CreationDate="2010-09-03T19:24:57.057" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;[DACE]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Design and Analysis of Computer Experiments, for that weird subset of statistics problems which deals with data which are epistemologically random, but not aleatorically (or however you would put it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="795" LastActivityDate="2010-09-03T19:24:57.057" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-03T19:24:57.057" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="409" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-09-03T20:37:11.230" Score="10" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/290/what-is-community-wiki&quot;&gt;exact meaning of community wiki&lt;/a&gt; on stats.SE is not completely decided, it seems like the intention is that it should mostly be used for things that don't really have definite answers, like polls and &lt;code&gt;[big-list]&lt;/code&gt; questions. For such questions, it is invidious to expect that an answer should be &lt;strong&gt;accepted&lt;/strong&gt; as the One True Etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, SE etiquette is that you should accept an answer if a good one is given. For the non-CW questions this makes sense, since acceptance gives &lt;strong&gt;reputation&lt;/strong&gt; to the answerer. But that is not the case with CW questions. And for polls or lists, accepting an answer implies that the question is done, dusted, over, out and tied with a lacy bow -- which is usually not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what is the &quot;right&quot; way to deal with this situation? Failure to accept means a constant &lt;strong&gt;nag&lt;/strong&gt; on one's profile, which is trivially annoying but not important; but also a blight on one's &lt;strong&gt;accept rate&lt;/strong&gt;, which is potentially off-putting to people answering one's other non-CW questions. (Actually, I am not sure this is the true. &lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt; CW questions count towards one's accept rate?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that CW questions should be exempted from the expectation of acceptance. Does anyone have a good argument to the contrary (other than the implementation detail of it not working that way at present in SE)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2010-09-04T08:27:43.097" Title="Accepting answers on Community Wiki (potentially big-list) questions" Tags="|discussion|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="409" CreationDate="2010-09-03T20:56:35.663" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with you: where something does not have one correct answer, there should not be an accepted answer.  I personally don't accept answers on CW (list) questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="5" LastEditDate="2010-09-04T08:27:43.097" LastActivityDate="2010-09-04T08:27:43.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="411" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="413" CreationDate="2010-09-05T07:21:30.177" Score="4" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several blogging systems now includes an optional syntax highlighting scheme for most common languages, including Python, Perl, Ruby, R, Matlab, etc. Code chuncks are post-processed using &lt;a href=&quot;http://coderay.rubychan.de/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CodeRay&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://pygments.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pygments&lt;/a&gt;, for example. Using Markdown language, we just have to indicate one of the available lexers and we get a nice rendering of the code. There are also javascript alternatives. This may also be used to automatically tag the different languages that are circulating on the SE. However, one potential drawback is that it may rely on users goodwill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another idea for larger snippets of code would be to put them on GitHub, as &lt;a href=&quot;http://gist.github.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gist&lt;/a&gt;. Again, on some blogging systems or CMS, giving the Gist URL allows to directly embed the code in the web page, as seen below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/s2dgw.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is your opinion about this possibility, especially with respect to language auto-tagging?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2010-09-06T08:28:08.397" LastActivityDate="2010-09-06T08:28:37.193" Title="Syntax highlighting for code chunks" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="412" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="415" CreationDate="2010-09-05T14:49:31.267" Score="8" ViewCount="948" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/polls/2/what-should-our-domain-name-be&quot;&gt;second round of voting on the site name is &lt;strong&gt;now open&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.  This is a very important decision in the site's formation, so we appreciate everyone's contribution.  Keep the site's scope in mind as you make your decision:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;for statistical analysis, data mining,&#xA;  machine learning, data visualization&#xA;  and statistical computing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also consider how the site name might be used for creating a logo and site design.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poll will run for two weeks (until &lt;strong&gt;September 21, 2010&lt;/strong&gt;).  Each person may vote up to three times (out of five name choices), but &lt;strong&gt;all votes are final&lt;/strong&gt;, so be sure that you have given enough thought to your selections before voting.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please use this question to outline any discussion points that you think would be relevant to this process.  We have listed each name below along with a description of their meaning.&#xA;&lt;BR&gt;&lt;BR&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/polls/2/what-should-our-domain-name-be&quot;&gt;Click here to vote!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;BR&gt;&#xA;You can find more background on this process in these additional questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/21/what-should-our-site-be-called-what-should-our-domain-name-be-closed&quot;&gt;What should our site be called? / What should our domain name be?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/357/how-to-make-second-round-of-voting-for-the-site-name&quot;&gt;How to make second round of voting for the site name?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/374/site-name-voting-decision-time&quot;&gt;Site name voting: decision time&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2010-09-23T03:24:45.220" Title="Site name selection" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|site-name|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="10" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-05T14:49:31.267" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="411" CreationDate="2010-09-06T08:28:37.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;completed, but I don't know how well &lt;a href=&quot;http://code.google.com/p/google-code-prettify/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Google Prettify&lt;/a&gt; handles R code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2010-09-06T08:28:37.193" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="412" CreationDate="2010-09-07T12:59:24.027" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;confidenceregion.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Definition:&lt;/strong&gt; In statistics, a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_region&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;confidence region&lt;/a&gt; is a multi-dimensional generalization of a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_interval&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;confidence interval&lt;/a&gt;. It is a set of points in an n-dimensional space, often represented as an ellipsoid around a point which is an estimated solution to a problem. Model confidence is a measure of the reliability of an estimate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meta interpretation:&lt;/strong&gt; You can be confident that our site will identify the best answer to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Related stats questions:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2272/whats-the-difference-between-a-confidence-interval-and-a-credible-interval&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2220/how-do-we-create-a-confidence-interval-for-the-parameter-of-a-permutation-test&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1797/what-would-a-confidence-interval-around-a-predicted-value-from-a-mixed-effects-mo&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-09-09T16:40:56.080" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-07T12:59:24.027" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="412" CreationDate="2010-09-07T13:04:56.837" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;crossvalidated.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Definition:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-validation_(statistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cross validation&lt;/a&gt; is a technique to guard against &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;overfitting&lt;/a&gt; when optimizing a model, which involves using test and training subsets of data, and analyzing the same dataset repeatedly.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meta interpretation:&lt;/strong&gt; Our site allows the community to provide a range of answers and the best answer is then 'crossvalidated' by voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Related stats questions:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1826/cross-validation-in-plain-english&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2306/feature-selection-for-final-model-when-performing-cross-validation-in-machine-l&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Logo idea (mbq):&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sekDy.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2010-09-20T23:35:03.460" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-07T13:04:56.837" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="412" CreationDate="2010-09-07T13:10:00.633" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;degreesoffreedom.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Definition:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrees_of_freedom_(statistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Degrees of freedom&lt;/a&gt; represents the number of values in a final calculation that are free to vary.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meta interpretation:&lt;/strong&gt; There are a large number of users that are free to provide different answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; The degreesoffreedom.com domain name is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;backordered&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, which means that it may not be available right away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Related stats questions:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/884/what-are-degrees-of-freedom&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2010-09-08T00:29:46.923" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-07T13:10:00.633" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="412" CreationDate="2010-09-07T13:20:16.740" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;modelconvergence.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Definition:&lt;/strong&gt; In data analysis, a model typically represents a set of mathematical equations which describe the behavior of an object of study.  When the behavior is stochastic, the model may &quot;converge&quot; if a sequence of essentially random or unpredictable events settles into a pattern.  Convergence of an MCMC model also plays an important role in Bayesian statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meta interpretation:&lt;/strong&gt; The community converges to the best answer to a question by voting up answers that are useful/correct and voting down answers that are not useful/correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Related stats questions:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/507/what-is-the-best-method-for-checking-convergence-in-mcmc&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2230/convergence-in-probability-vs-almost-sure-convergence&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="svadali" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2010-09-07T14:12:37.927" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-07T13:20:16.740" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="412" CreationDate="2010-09-07T13:34:12.603" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;optimummodel.com&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Definition:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimization_(mathematics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Optimization&lt;/a&gt; is a general concept in mathematics, computer science, and data analysis which involves finding the best solution from all feasible solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meta interpretation:&lt;/strong&gt; A question on our site is a &amp;quot;model&amp;quot; and our answers find the optimal solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-09-07T14:26:49.553" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-07T13:34:12.603" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="419" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-09-07T17:20:48.180" Score="5" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of you may have heard about the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Gowers#Polymath_Project&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Polymath&lt;/a&gt; projects in research mathematics. Polymath is an approach that was conceptiualized by &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Gowers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Timothy Gowers&lt;/a&gt; to enable &amp;quot;massively collaborative research&amp;quot; in mathematics. Since the initial conception there are several polymath projects that the math community has started (some of which can be found at this &lt;a href=&quot;http://michaelnielsen.org/polymath1/index.php?title=Main_Page--1.1.2.3.4.BlockquoteBlockquote&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiki&lt;/a&gt; for polymath projects.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on my cursory outsider perspective of how these projects have evolved, it seems to me that SE software is not suitable for polymath projects for the following reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Multiple attempts to solve a math problem are often tried and a threaded discussion often becomes necessary to make sense of the different proposals.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Voting up/down solution ideas may be counter-productive as what may seem as a dead-end initially can be the 'winner' once the difficulties in the suggested solution are resolved after long back-and-forth discussions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Votes 'destroys' the threaded nature of comments/answers and in any case there is no downvoting possible for comments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I feel that the above disadvantages may not be necessarily hold for applied statistics projects. An applied statistics project typically has the following stages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Identify a research question and collect suitable data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Exploratory data analysis which drives model specification and further analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Choose several competing models that provide alternative answers to the research question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Perform analysis and select 'best' model&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Data visualizations to highlight aspects of the raw data and to highlight model fits etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that the SE software can be used for a Polystats project in the following manner. Since each phase of the typical statistics project is modular, we can ask a 'question' for each phase and let the community come up with different answers. For example, suppose that we want to address whether there is global warming (a potentially bad idea for our first polystats project) and that we have temperature data from some external source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first question would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here is the data reg global temperatures for the past xx years. What kinds of plots would help us in specifying a model? An actual plot would be an answer along with a brief explanation why that helps. (perhaps, it suggests a functional form, a data transformation etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once we have collectively exhausted the answers to the above question and reached consensus (e.g., via the two highest voted answers) we lock the question and move on to the next one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Given what we know from qn 1, what would be some appropriate model specifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again once we have consensus, we lock this question and move on to analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need to obviously establish some ground rules in order for this process to work well but first things first:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think about using the SE software to start a &amp;quot;Polystats Project&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-09-07T20:38:15.707" Title="How about starting a Polystats Project?" Tags="|discussion|polystats-project|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="419" CreationDate="2010-09-07T17:42:24.770" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am very interested to see how we can use this site for a greater purpose beyond individual Q&amp;amp;A.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding your proposal: I would be more interested in seeing a &quot;polystats project&quot; which tackles big open questions in statistics, rather than specific statistical projects.  Although I think the site could be used for both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There should be a higher-level aspect to this to make it cohesive (such as a group blog which would catalog the progress as a single thread).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://cstheory.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/188/how-can-we-collaboratively-investigate-open-problems&quot;&gt;this related discussion the CS Theory stackexchange site&lt;/a&gt;.  I had started a thread on that site &lt;a href=&quot;https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/174/major-unsolved-problems-in-theoretical-computer-science&quot;&gt;to identify a list of important questions&lt;/a&gt;, and similar thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2379/what-are-the-big-problems-in-statistics&quot;&gt;was started on here recently&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can also use the idea of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/341/how-to-promote-the-site/370#370&quot;&gt;data analysis competition&lt;/a&gt; in conjunction with this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After re-reading your question, I think that the question as you phrased it &lt;strong&gt;is a great idea&lt;/strong&gt;, and keeping it grounded in a real problem is the right approach.  We can build something like this in stages (as you are doing here) and open a meta thread that would ask &quot;what should our first project be&quot; where people can list proposals.  This kind of incremental solution to a data analysis project could be managed completely on SE without relying on any other third party software.  I propose that we tag these questions with [polystats-project].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All being said, there is of course nothing to stop someone from doing this currently without any meta-discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2010-09-07T20:38:15.707" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="407" CreationDate="2010-09-08T10:31:53.767" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think general tags are not very helpful especially since we can only have 5 tags per question. In addition, searching for questions via a combination of tags seems an additional step that is not user friendly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, creating a semantic network among tags is a good idea but this may need new functionality. I am not sure if changing how we tag (general instead of specific) is the best way to create a semantic web.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-09-08T10:31:53.767" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-08T10:31:53.767" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="423" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-09-08T21:05:16.203" Score="5" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We should start a meta discussion on&#xA;  this. Econometrics should be on topic&#xA;  (there are already several questions&#xA;  tagged in that subject area). In my&#xA;  view, this question's greatest sin is&#xA;  that it's a bad question (i.e. not&#xA;  enough detail, etc.).&#xA;  Shane in the discussion about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2488/global-cost-of-microsoft-updates-closed&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Off course econometrics has a place here, as far as I'm concerned. There's a great deal of very nice methods, questions and persons in that field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) But honestly, I can't see anybody in his right mind actually expect to get a serious answer on that question. It's an interesting question, but nobody's going to post half a year of research on an internet forum. Because that's what the site essentially is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that on SO a similar, even more random question appeared, makes me a bit suspicious about what the OP really wants, because he's obviously not looking for an answer. I couldn't even help thinking I've seen that kind of questions before...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your ideas on this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2010-09-08T23:03:19.823" Title="Econometrics and random questions: how to deal with them?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="423" CreationDate="2010-09-08T21:32:52.980" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a quick response, I think that we should focus on point (2) above because I presume everyone agrees that econometrics is on-topic: what should we do with bad questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view, I could have seen that question rephrased in such a way that it could have been interesting.  I was formulating an answer myself before the deluge of downvoting/close votes.  I would rather have given it some time asking for further clarification.  I see no evidence that the question was spam; at worst, it was a bad question.  But this isn't a good way to treat a new visitor to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-09-08T21:32:52.980" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="425" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="427" CreationDate="2010-09-08T22:40:01.947" Score="3" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm very grateful for the code function, as it makes it easy to illustrate some answers. Yet, I feel I for one have the risk of overloading my answer with R code. Good if you know R, but not always that easy to read for people not familiar with that language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I answered &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2492/nomality-testing-essentially-useless/2498#2498&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; recently and illustrated with a plot I drew quickly in R. I'd like to give the R code for it as well, but not in the text. Is there a way we could implement attachment of a code file? I could give it as a comment, but that looks so incredibly ugly...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So would it be feasible to allow attachment of -limited- code for illustration?&#xA;If so, in which form could this be done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T19:46:21.293" Title="Shall I attach pieces of code to my answers?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|status-declined|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="423" CreationDate="2010-09-08T23:03:19.823" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps, the earlier spam contributed to the quick closing of this particular question but as I said in my comment to that question I would vote to re-open if the question were to be edited to so that the relationship with econometrics/statistics is clear. In my opinion, the question as it stands now deserves to be closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reg treating new users, there are lots of cases where new users have been treated with respect as long as their questions have been reasonable and on-topic. See this question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2493/managing-error-with-gps-routes-theoretical-framework&quot;&gt;GPS routes&lt;/a&gt; as an example of what I mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2010-09-08T23:03:19.823" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="425" CreationDate="2010-09-09T12:58:32.603" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some begs for &quot;invisible&quot; tag, so that the part of the question can be enclosed in &quot;Show me more&quot; link that expands into hidden content when clicked; I was initially against, but this may be a good argument that it is indeed needed; kilometers of code make the whole topic harder to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-09-09T12:58:32.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="428" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="431" CreationDate="2010-09-09T22:46:39.453" Score="1" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;This feature is needed on Polystats projects that we are starting on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;stats.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;. See these threads for what they are: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2512/what-should-be-our-first-polystats-project&quot;&gt;What should be our first Polystats project?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/419/how-about-starting-a-polystats-project&quot;&gt;How about starting a Polystats Project?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By design, the questions related to Polystats projects are more about housekeeping to ensure that the project moves from one phase to the next. Thus, marking them as CW makes a lot of sense. However, we need to encourage users to provide good answers especially in the later phases of the project. Thus, awarding rep for answers makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, irrespective of whether this feature is implemented or not, is there a workaround to achieve the above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T19:47:36.003" Title="Can we have the option of making a question CW but let the answers be non-CW?" Tags="|feature-request|status-bydesign|polystats-project|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="425" CreationDate="2010-09-10T07:03:38.413" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would suggest to put extra code (e.g., that won't fit in an ordinary response) as dedicated &lt;a href=&quot;http://gist.github.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Gist&lt;/a&gt; on Github. Don't know if you could manage to hold a public repository for the whole site or if each individual shall create his own account. Anyway, this is very great to share code snippets, with automatic syntax highlighting, revision history, with support for comments in Markdown. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2010-09-10T07:03:38.413" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="428" CreationDate="2010-09-10T17:15:16.910" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, at least in this version of SE engine. But you are free to post such a request to meta.stackoverflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-09-10T17:15:16.910" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="428" CreationDate="2010-09-10T18:38:06.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One workaround is this: Post a question without marking it as CW but request users not to vote for the question but to vote up answers as appropriate. This is not a perfect solution because of two issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some users may still vote for the question and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More importantly, if the question is not voted up its prominence will go down over time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A solution to issue 2 would be to make dummy edits at some reasonable frequency (perhaps once in 2 days for a week's duration) to ensure that at periodic intervals the question comes to the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-09-10T18:38:06.293" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="432" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-09-14T03:22:03.033" Score="6" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;The FAQ gives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Statistical Analysis - Stack Exchange is for statistical analysis, data mining, machine learning, data visualization and statistical computing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, are questions about probability also welcome?  I have a feeling this is going to be a resounding yes, whence the next question I would ask is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why is does the word &quot;probability&quot; not appear in the FAQ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/665/whats-the-difference-between-probability-and-statistics&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the difference between probability and statistics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="386" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2017-03-30T09:01:12.310" Title="Are probability questions on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="432" CreationDate="2010-09-14T04:29:20.537" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends -- a lot of probability is very mathematical, and so MathOverflow may be a more appropriate place.  You'll simply get better answers there because each community has different interests and willingness to answer varies by the type of question.  On the other hand, probability is very much central in questions regarding data and may be entirely appropriate.  You may want to consult the questions tagged probability on this site and MathOverflow to get a sense of the difference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/probability&quot;&gt;Statistical Analysis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/pr.probability&quot;&gt;MathOverflow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that a lot of probability questions are answered here.  Maybe you can suggest appropriate wording for the FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6/what-should-our-faq-contain&quot;&gt;What should our FAQ contain?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the moderators or community can decide if it works well enough to modify the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="251" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:58:32.040" LastActivityDate="2010-09-14T04:29:20.537" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="432" CreationDate="2010-09-14T12:46:06.513" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that probability questions should be allowed here, and that it is simply an oversight that it is not included in the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However for more &quot;mathematical&quot; probability questions, the math SE may be more appropriate (in the same way that more computing questions are more appropriate for SO).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &quot;appropriate&quot; I really mean that you have a better chance of getting an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastActivityDate="2010-09-14T12:46:06.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="428" CreationDate="2010-09-14T20:49:41.027" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The other thing -- I am against leaving those questions non-CW. Reputation is not the only award for a good answer, there are also badges. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-09-14T20:49:41.027" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="432" CreationDate="2010-09-16T09:27:43.020" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now it is in FAQ; at least we will migrate too mathematical questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-09-16T09:27:43.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="437" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="439" CreationDate="2010-09-16T09:58:17.920" Score="6" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;The recent spate of re-tags initiated by mbq has pushed a lot of questions to the top of the site. Editing tags and re-tagging etc do not change the question content and hence I am not sure why the software is designed to push these questions to the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, is there way to re-tag/edit tags without the question bouncing to the top?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-09-16T17:50:05.670" Title="Is it possible to edit tags without bouncing the question to the top?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="437" CreationDate="2010-09-16T16:53:49.027" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;What can I say... sorry?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I am usually using Newest tab, so that the questions are ordered by the creation time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Now I see at least one question gathered new answer thanks to that ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-09-16T16:53:49.027" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="437" CreationDate="2010-09-16T17:50:05.670" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that we have a few ranking methods available -- the tabs on the right side of the page just above questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you sort by Active, then the re-tagged questions rise to the top. However ..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you sort by New, only new questions appear at the very top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you sort by Hottest, questions with activity other than re-tagging seem to appear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I think we're fine since the site is flexible enough to offer a few different views.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The remaining issue is what the front page of the site shows when the user has not performed any sorting or clicked on &quot;Questions&quot;.  In this case, maybe we could ask that the &quot;default view&quot; for the front page be the &quot;Hottest&quot; questions rather than &quot;Active&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd rather not exclude re-tagging entirely since it's nice to have the option to see that particular activity (since not only moderators can do this, and we'd like to catch mistaken re-tags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="251" LastActivityDate="2010-09-16T17:50:05.670" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="441" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-09-19T16:13:55.107" Score="8" ViewCount="457" Body="&lt;p&gt;One rule per answer, upvote if you agree, downvote if disagree. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2010-09-19T16:52:23.723" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="What should be rules for making and using tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="16" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-19T16:22:41.017" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="441" CreationDate="2010-09-19T16:16:30.923" Score="11" Body="&lt;h2&gt;There will be no [statistics] or [statistical-analysis]&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In theory it can be useful for pure statistical theory, but on the other hand it would be used by new users to tag almost all questions. On the other hand, [theory] can be used in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-09-19T16:16:30.923" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-19T16:22:41.017" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="441" CreationDate="2010-09-19T16:18:19.140" Score="13" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Each statistical application/programming language gets its own tag&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like [R], [stata], [ruby], [python], [statistica], ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-09-19T16:18:19.140" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-19T16:22:41.017" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="441" CreationDate="2010-09-19T16:24:14.247" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Shorter tags are better&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance [pca] instead of [principal-component-analysis]. Tags have length limit. Abbreviation conflicts can be fixed using synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-09-19T16:24:14.247" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-19T16:24:14.247" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="441" CreationDate="2010-09-19T16:31:22.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Each method gets its own tag&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... but on reasonable generality level, eg. [cross-validation] not [elevenfold-cross-validation-with-random-resampling-for-butter-taste-data].&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Reasonably general can be judged in such a way: we wait a month and see if any other question used the tag. Exception: if a [submethod] tags 100% of [method], we delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-09-19T16:31:22.107" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-19T16:31:22.107" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="441" CreationDate="2010-09-19T16:41:29.247" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Each notable term get its tag&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like [hetroscedasticity], [ordinal], [median], [categorical-data], ...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Some of those tags may be not fully justified, but they build some kind of context for questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-09-19T16:41:29.247" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-19T16:41:29.247" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="441" CreationDate="2010-09-19T16:44:04.320" Score="-4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Each retag needs a meta discussion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As question-closing thread during good old times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-09-19T16:44:04.320" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-19T16:44:04.320" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="441" CreationDate="2010-09-19T16:49:09.287" Score="-4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Each tag should have its 'caretaker'&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... that will know what the tag mean, protect it from blood-wanting moderators, write its wiki, suggest synonyms and make necessary retags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-09-19T16:49:09.287" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-19T16:49:09.287" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="441" CreationDate="2010-09-19T16:57:42.727" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Adding new tags by retag should be exceptional&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... in general, we should use those rules to cope with arriving tags from user questions, not to proliferate new tags to fulfill some rule and then glue it to existing questions.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Exception: merging, unexpected special issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-09-19T16:57:42.727" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-19T16:57:42.727" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="441" CreationDate="2010-09-19T18:25:11.760" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;(This will sound like a bunch of rules but it's really just one.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags should accurately reflect &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; the nature of the question &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the answers and comments that accompany it (&lt;em&gt;i.e.,&lt;/em&gt; tags need not describe only the question)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;... in such a way that each individual tag clearly discriminates the thread from other threads&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;... but so that the collection of tags almost uniquely identifies the particular thread to which it's associated&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;... without being too numerous.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When this is not possible to do using current tags, either a new tag (or tags) need to be generated or--with due care not to upset older threads and their tags--existing tags could be modified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2010-09-21T17:47:51.380" LastActivityDate="2010-09-21T17:47:51.380" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-19T18:25:11.760" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="441" CreationDate="2010-09-19T21:16:37.783" Score="12" Body="&lt;h2&gt;If you don't know what tag to use, use [for-retag]&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will be an invitation for (powerful enough) users to retag the question appropriately. Old ones can be fixed during some retag campaigns coupled with chat discussion.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On the other hand, we can discuss lowering the reputation threshold to make such retags with SE team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-09-19T21:16:37.783" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-19T21:16:37.783" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="441" CreationDate="2010-09-20T10:38:44.260" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Site-wide retags (aka massive retags) need community consensus unless they involve one or more of the following;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spelling errors&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Retags that leverage established renaming rules&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;A retag of an individual question need not have a corresponding meta thread unless it attracts controversy.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="svadali" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-09-23T11:35:19.110" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-20T10:38:44.260" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="441" CreationDate="2010-09-20T20:02:49.627" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Individual researchers/authors/etc. should not be tagged.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could actually go either way on this one, but the recent question on Nassim Taleb got me wondering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastActivityDate="2010-09-20T20:02:49.627" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-20T20:02:49.627" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="412" CreationDate="2010-09-22T00:20:25.180" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;datareduction.com&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea whether it is too late to enter a name in the &quot;competition&quot;, but the current entries don't quite do it for me. They are too specific. It seems that whether we are doing statistical analysis, data mining, machine learning, data visualization or statistical computing, what we are involved in is DATA REDUCTION, reducing the data deluge (datadeluge.com exists, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.datareduction.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.datareduction.com/&lt;/a&gt; is &quot;for purchase&quot;) into meaningful summaries, whether mathematical or visual. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="521" LastActivityDate="2010-09-22T00:20:25.180" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-22T00:20:25.180" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="455" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-09-23T02:54:41.607" Score="24" ViewCount="645" Body="&lt;p&gt;The voting for the site name has finished. In all, 68 people voted. There were five site names presented and each person voted for their first, second and third preference. The votes were as follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                     First Second Third  Weighted  Total&#xA;crossvalidated.com      29      6     4       103     39&#xA;confidenceregion.com    17     17     5        90     39&#xA;degreesoffreedom.com    15      9     5        68     29&#xA;optimummodel.com         6      3     2        26     11&#xA;modelconvergence.com     1      5     7        20     13&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just counting first preferences, CrossValidated.com is a clear winner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the votes are weighted (3pts for first, 2pts for second and 1pt for third), then CrossValidated.com is a clear winner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the total votes, regardless of preference, are counted, then it is a tie between CrossValidated.com and ConfidenceRegion.com. (Note that there was a bug in the software so that the total counts reported after you voted were incorrect.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, the new site name will be &lt;strong&gt;CrossValidated.com&lt;/strong&gt;. Thanks everyone for your participation. The next stage will be &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/269/159&quot;&gt;determining an appropriate logo&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those wanting to know more about cross-validation, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://robjhyndman.com/researchtips/crossvalidation/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why every statistician should know about cross-validation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T21:08:07.517" Title="Results of site name poll" Tags="|site-name|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="441" CreationDate="2010-09-23T14:27:32.827" Score="-2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Automatically kill tags that are too narrow where &amp;quot;too narrow = one question&amp;quot;.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless the narrow tag is supported by a high rep user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="251" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-09-23T14:27:32.827" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-09-23T14:27:32.827" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="269" CreationDate="2010-09-23T15:13:08.323" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about a motif that combines a 'cross' (e.g., &amp;#x2717;), a 'check mark' (e.g., &amp;#x2713;) and a question symbol (e.g. ?)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is that our site 'cross validates questions'. Too tacky? Too obvious?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-09-23T15:13:08.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="269" CreationDate="2010-09-23T15:50:16.000" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;One more in the same &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/269/what-should-our-logo-and-site-design-look-like/459#459&quot;&gt;fashion&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yI9OL.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xR0iX.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;     &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TQ65d.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2010-09-28T12:26:17.943" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="269" CreationDate="2010-09-23T16:08:39.253" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My first logo idea, already mentioned in the voting thread.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4a8JH.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general idea is to reproduce common illustrations of CV. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2010-09-23T16:22:08.223" LastActivityDate="2010-09-23T16:22:08.223" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="269" CreationDate="2010-09-23T16:28:18.367" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about a logo like @mbq's answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/269/what-should-our-logo-and-site-design-look-like/459#459&quot;&gt;wheel + check&lt;/a&gt; but with the following differences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No check mark&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The 'red' arc is changed to 'green'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just now noticed that mbq had posted the following logo (which follows the above idea) in the voting thread. See image below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VWd3j.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interpretation of the logo would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions are at the center of the wheel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The arcs represent various answers with green being the one that is actually selected as the 'correct' answer as indicated by the arrow that points to it from the center.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2010-09-28T12:12:37.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="269" CreationDate="2010-09-23T16:32:15.333" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inspired by Srikant's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/269/what-should-our-logo-and-site-design-look-like/457#457&quot;&gt;idea&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QypfD.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="svadali" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2010-09-23T16:35:01.590" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="455" CreationDate="2010-09-23T16:53:05.257" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thumbs up on crossvalidated.com. It was the catchiest, most mainstream name (even if the average person doesn't know what it means) of the lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246" LastActivityDate="2010-09-23T16:53:05.257" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="463" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-09-29T19:39:48.587" Score="2" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that we should at least collect some data to move our first polystats project forward. A little bit of data collection and doing some exploratory plots may really help with refining our project questions. I have spent the past two days looking around the API/data dump and am at a loss how to use them to extract the relevant data. Clearly I am out of my depth here!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone with some experience help in downloading some data for this project? We could use this thread to discuss the specifics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: Unlike other polystats project questions on the parent site I really do not have a statistics question here per se and hence I am posting on meta instead of the parent site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-10-01T12:57:18.553" Title="Can we have a volunteer to do some data collection via the SE API or data dump?" Tags="|discussion|polystats-project|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="464" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="467" CreationDate="2010-10-01T09:41:20.063" Score="6" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;A number of questions concern plotting/analysing large data sets. Therefore, it seems sensible to have a &quot;large-data&quot; tag. However, I don't like this name. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any suggestions for a better name - or is &quot;large-data&quot; OK?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've started tagging questions with the &quot;large-data&quot; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="8" LastEditDate="2010-10-08T16:04:37.180" LastActivityDate="2010-10-08T17:44:23.583" Title="New tag - large-data" Tags="|tags|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="464" CreationDate="2010-10-01T11:12:10.357" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;high-dimensional-data&quot; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2010-10-01T11:12:10.357" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="463" CreationDate="2010-10-01T12:57:18.553" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/users/1036/andy-w&quot;&gt;Andy&lt;/a&gt; has downloaded the file and cleaned it up a bit. You can download the file at the link given below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3385251/Export-090110.7z&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3385251/Export-090110.7z&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that the file format is xml and that it is a compressed file. Thanks Andy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2010-10-01T12:57:18.553" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-10-01T12:57:18.553" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="464" CreationDate="2010-10-01T16:33:31.613" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;One important consideration is that the OP should easily be able to find appropriate tags when posting their question.  The current interface is a text input box that performs a real-time prefix search of the tags.  When someone is concerned about a large dataset, what might they start typing to find appropriate tags?  Not &quot;high-dimensional,&quot; I don't think!  The prefix ought to be &quot;large&quot; or &quot;big&quot;--something simple like that.  But that presumes the tag system uses prefixes as modifiers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, create a set of tags that modify the word &quot;data&quot; with &lt;em&gt;suffixes&lt;/em&gt;.  In this scheme, an OP concerned specifically about data might type the word &quot;data&quot; to produce a short list of data-related tags, such as &quot;database&quot;, &quot;database-large&quot;, &quot;database-high-dimensional&quot;, &quot;data-format&quot;, etc., allowing them to choose appropriately from this list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2010-10-01T16:33:31.613" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="464" CreationDate="2010-10-01T17:30:05.093" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &quot;large-data&quot; is good.  I might have suggested &quot;big-data&quot;, but that tends to mean explicitly data that cannot be kept in memory and/or must be dispersed (e.g. MapReduce).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-10-01T17:30:05.093" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="269" CreationDate="2010-10-01T18:10:43.013" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the logo, another option would be to show a scatter plot with a best-fit line through it, possibly using a non-linear relationship (like loess) as &lt;a href=&quot;http://learnr.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/chapter05-05_09_r.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in this example&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kwna5.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has nothing to do with cross-validation, but it would certainly communicate the purpose of the site.  I prefer &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/269/what-should-our-logo-and-site-design-look-like/458#458&quot;&gt;the other option above&lt;/a&gt;, because beyond everything else it will be clearer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2010-10-01T18:10:43.013" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="464" CreationDate="2010-10-01T21:27:34.263" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;big-data&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... for voting purposes.  This is my preference, but it doesn't have the same bigger-than-memory connotation for me as it does for Shane, so best to put it to the collective mind...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastActivityDate="2010-10-01T21:27:34.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="269" CreationDate="2010-10-04T09:46:20.480" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why not posting a contest on &lt;a href=&quot;http://99designs.com/logo-design&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;99designs.com&lt;/a&gt; or the similar? This worked very well with stackoverflow.com. StackExchange should have no problem with finding a budget for this task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1496" LastActivityDate="2010-10-04T09:46:20.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="472" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="473" CreationDate="2010-10-04T11:13:34.690" Score="10" ViewCount="520" Body="&lt;p&gt;NothingToInstall.com has lost its name and got back to WebApps; there is ongoing discussion about it on Meta.SO &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66443/public-service-announcement-ongoing-offsite-discussion-about-area51-graduates&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and Meta WebApps &lt;a href=&quot;https://webapps.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/624/webapps-stackexchange-com-versus-nothingtoinstall-com&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;What do you think about it, especially in case of our site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: And we did it; thanks everybody for supporting the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2010-11-08T18:18:47.840" Title="Shall we defend CrossValidated?" Tags="|discussion|site-name|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="472" CreationDate="2010-10-04T13:15:52.400" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Absolutely&lt;/strong&gt;. We should have our own domain name specific to our community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-10-04T13:15:52.400" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="474" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="476" CreationDate="2010-10-05T10:12:54.297" Score="6" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just want to react to a recent question that was asked about the R &lt;code&gt;rank&lt;/code&gt; function:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/3321/930&quot;&gt;Rank in R - descending order&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my opinion, this is clearly &lt;em&gt;unrelated to statistical analysis&lt;/em&gt; and is purely a technical trick, specific of one particular language. From what I seem to remember, such questions were likely to be closed or downvoted one or two months ago. I know this has been discussed in the mean time, but there it seems a little googling would have been fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question is: Are we going to open the door to such questions, at the risk of &quot;obliterating&quot; real and interesting questions about statistical modeling?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I didn't donwvote it but I don't understand why it has been upvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2010-10-11T20:46:52.073" Title="print(&quot;Hello, world!\n&quot;)" Tags="|discussion|r|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="474" CreationDate="2010-10-05T10:56:36.013" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We agreed to welcome such questions, mainly because it is just hard to judge what is good and what is bad in this direction and we don't want to assume everybody here have also SO account. Altogether we have &quot;statistical computing&quot; in scope, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/35/how-much-programming-here&quot;&gt;How much programming here?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2010-10-05T10:56:36.013" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="474" CreationDate="2010-10-05T11:10:19.520" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that the question isn't particularly statistical. However I would just answer these questions and if no answer is forthcoming, then point them to SO. Not voting the question up for these types of questions will help too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's easier to allow a wider range of questions rather than endless debating whether questions are on or off topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also if we close questions too quickly, it can put off people returning to the site - first impressions last and all that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="159" LastEditDate="2010-10-06T02:03:53.347" LastActivityDate="2010-10-06T02:03:53.347" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="477" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="479" CreationDate="2010-10-05T13:23:44.573" Score="1" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is increasingly clear that: &lt;strong&gt;we will not have a unique domain name&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the following discussions on Meta.SO &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66443/public-service-announcement-ongoing-offsite-discussion-about-area51-graduates&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, Meta WebApps &lt;a href=&quot;https://webapps.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/624/webapps-stackexchange-com-versus-nothingtoinstall-com&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, see the recent blog &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/10/domain-names-the-wrong-question/&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; on the issue of domain name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our consensus so far is that: &lt;strong&gt;We should have our own unique domain name&lt;/strong&gt;. (See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/472/shall-we-defend-crossvalidated&quot;&gt;Shall we defend crossvalidated?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the above conflict in about SO's decision and our own preferences what if anything should we do about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2010-10-06T22:27:46.147" Title="What should we do about the absence of a unique domain name for our site?" Tags="|discussion|domain-name|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="477" CreationDate="2010-10-05T13:48:46.610" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;what if anything should we do about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short answer -- nothing. We (the community) had the possibility to set up an independent site using any freely available StackExchange-like engines (there are quite a few of them). Nevertheless, due to many reasons (reputation of SE, lack of an opinion leader, etc), we voted with our feet and came here, to StackExchange. By doing this we have to accept our hosts' conditions. We can ask them politely, but at the end of the day it's their call. And it is ours too. &quot;It's a free country&quot; -- anyone can set up a competing site and try convincing people use it, instead of SE. I'm very pessimistic about this option though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt; When I said &quot;it's a free country&quot;, I meant that we can move to another site as a block. But you know what? It's not gonna happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1496" LastEditorUserId="1496" LastEditDate="2010-10-06T06:02:35.530" LastActivityDate="2010-10-06T06:02:35.530" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="477" CreationDate="2010-10-05T14:02:03.517" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I mostly with @bgbg's answer, but disagree with the sentiment.  Yes, we could have started the community somewhere else to begin with, but we started it here with certain expectations for how this would be handled, and it has been an every-changing target.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that migrating makes sense.  A domain name is important, but not &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; important.  SE has the best software, infrastructure, etc.  And I really believe that their heart is in the right place.  Many of the other sites about to come out of beta have either (a) terrible names selected or (b) no name selected.  We are somewhat in a minority.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also don't think that the answer is to do nothing.  We should continue to push back on Robert Cartaino.  In my opinion, the sites that have selected good names, should get to use those names.  The sites that have not, should continue as blah.se.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And more generally, it would be good if the stackexchange team would follow through on their idea of including the communities in these decisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-10-05T14:02:03.517" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="477" CreationDate="2010-10-05T14:04:41.347" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't lose hope! We have a point to be an exception here. Better start gathering arguments why it should stay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="5" LastEditDate="2010-10-05T14:43:27.860" LastActivityDate="2010-10-05T14:43:27.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="474" CreationDate="2010-10-05T14:34:07.983" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As one of those who up-voted - I apologize - I was unaware of the disinterest in R questions.  I'm a C++ guy and working on a Stat PhD.  I up-voted because I saw it as a different perspective on a programming language which I'm still learning.  I would've expected the answer to use an option to the function, ordering=less, or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, I think the &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; was &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; statistical than the question because -- I think -- knowing the stats, @ucfagls, suggested simply flipping the sign.  Something intrinsically obvious to a statistician thinking about rank statistics, but not so much so to low-level programmer thinking about implementation specifics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, I would suggest you encourage R questions here for precisely this reason.  Being a language written with statistics in mind, I think the statistician can provide unique insight that a generalist or low-level programmer would miss.  However, I don't think &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; R questions should be moved here because certain interface aspects or databasing backend questions, etc., would probably be better answered by someone who has the generalist / low-level programmer insight who would probably frequent StackOverflow more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Noise:&lt;/strong&gt; I forgot to mention, that with voting, once someone has access to it you are probably going to get a bit of noise in the importance of a question/answer: &quot;+1 - Hey I didn't think of it that way&quot;,  &quot;+1 - That was cooool.&quot;,  &quot;+1 for use of the word Nefarious.&quot;. It's certainly limited because you have a max of 30 -- which I think is the correct limit -- but you're still going to get a few like me who up-voted and didn't know better or up-voted for the wrong reasons...  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/3342/recreating-rs-hist-functions-bin-counting&quot;&gt;smirk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the SO/SE gods were willing, we could consider a multivariate rating scale (perhaps one that's only visible above a certain reputation) so as not to confuse the newbies.  Then, perhaps like slashdot, you could set a threshold for fodder below which you have no interest in viewing it.  Slashdot has +1 funny, +1 insightful, probably don't want to encourage &quot;funny&quot; here, but what about &quot;+1 algorithm&quot;, &quot;+1 perspective&quot;, &quot;+1 wave to C.R. Rao for me...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1499" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2010-10-11T20:46:52.073" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="474" CreationDate="2010-10-05T19:21:57.750" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my second day using R. I've had some issues using it, and I'm not sure how appropriate it would be to ask those here, since they are not really statistic questions, but R usage ones. In FAQ there was nothing about allowed topics, I've thought of checking meta and noticed this question :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, after successfully doing some work yesterday, I started R today and I typed in &lt;code&gt;load(&quot;test.r&quot;)&lt;/code&gt;. R complained with &lt;code&gt;Error: bad restore file magic number (file may be corrupted) -- no data loaded&lt;/code&gt;. After some googling, I figured it out that I should use &lt;code&gt;source&lt;/code&gt; instead. But what if I hadn't find anything on google? How would such a question fit here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another issue I have converting some S-Plus code to R: I get this warning &lt;code&gt;'seriesData' is deprecated. Use 'series' instead.&lt;/code&gt; I'd like to know if it's safe to just replace &lt;code&gt;seriesData&lt;/code&gt; with &lt;code&gt;series&lt;/code&gt;, or if this can lead to some silent problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what I'm asking, should this site be a one-stop shop for R? I think it should be, it's quite unpleasant to subscribe to 'r-help' just to ask a basic question. This is why stack exchange sites were created for. But I can understand why statisticians would be bothered by such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the other extreme is mathoverflow.net, where I've seen people with 3000 reputation first request permission on meta to ask a borderline question. That gave me the impression that they view the site as some sort of a temple which they must not dirty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="749" LastActivityDate="2010-10-05T19:21:57.750" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="483" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="485" CreationDate="2010-10-06T21:50:18.667" Score="1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to A51 process.  Does the fact that SA is in a public beta mean that the beta badges are no longer being handed out?  Just curious.  Couldn't find anything about it in the A51 faq -- I can ask this there if that would be more appropriate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1499" LastActivityDate="2010-10-06T23:04:42.157" Title="Are beta badges no longer being handed out for Stat Analysis?" Tags="|discussion|beta|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="477" CreationDate="2010-10-06T22:27:46.147" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a noob -- so don't put too much in my opinion, but (to up credibility a little) I've been a computer engineer for about 10 years, read most of Joel's books, and tried this collaborative shtuff before -- so I'll toss in my two cents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like basically, Joel et. al. created this awesome building in which to house a library (now this isn't Wikipedia, but gimme a sec) and now they're letting us use it for &lt;strong&gt;free&lt;/strong&gt;. We (or I should say thankfully, &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt;) petitioned to create a new reading room and bookshelves called &quot;Statistical Analysis&quot;.  We meet here and talk about the things we want to talk about -- seems like the group is developing significant cohesion -- &lt;em&gt;but they aren't asking for us to pay rent&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now the question of a name comes up and it's like you want to move the reading room &amp;amp; bookshelves to a new building &lt;em&gt;which they have to build for us.&lt;/em&gt;  Now I know this is the web, a single address is cheap, we picked a good name, but it almost sounds like you're saying &lt;em&gt;we deserve our own identity, separate from the original initiative.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think they've done us a huge favor - I've already had several questions answered here, one I asked, a few I stumbled upon, and a few I discovered in trying to answer questions for others.  But I don't want to dissociate from the SO/SE brand because, IMO, the did a damn fine job making the site.  Further, because I can see the quality of Q&amp;amp;A on SO, I can come over here and expect &lt;em&gt;and receive&lt;/em&gt; the same level of quality. It's also really easy to wander to other rooms for those slightly off-topic questions...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That said&lt;/strong&gt;, if they're willing to purchase a website and redirect it to our room, stats.stackexchange.com, that would be great!  It's a bit of a mouthful to get out on the elevator ride up.  Then as @Srikant said, we don't need to go into a long explanation about SO, just say -- go to CrossValidated.com and get good shtuff.  :O)  I would liken this to saying -- hey, we've got a lot of traffic (any you know these walls are pretty thin right??) would you mind if we construct a new door?  We'll tell people about it, that way our traffic won't clog the front entrance.  Besides, this one's a little closer to the Stat department / a little more convenient for us to remember where it is (especially us noobs -- you know how freshmen are always getting lost..).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1499" LastActivityDate="2010-10-06T22:27:46.147" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="483" CreationDate="2010-10-06T23:04:42.157" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just from reading the description next to the badge, it does look like Beta badges were awarded for private beta only - which ended here quite some time ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastActivityDate="2010-10-06T23:04:42.157" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="486" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="487" CreationDate="2010-10-07T20:40:27.963" Score="6" ViewCount="782" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I'm trying to find a particular statistic. For example, I want to find the equivalent of the Gini coefficient, but for taxation instead of income. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can that sort of question be asked here? Or is it strictly about methodology and not about specific datasets?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1035" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2012-07-23T18:26:27.340" LastActivityDate="2012-07-23T18:26:27.340" Title="Suitable venue to help find specific statistical data?" Tags="|discussion|data|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="486" CreationDate="2010-10-07T22:29:13.897" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd call it off-topic.  During the site's definition phase on Area 51 (which is where StackExchange sites are born, if you don't know), there were a few questions of this flavor (you can read through them &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/33?phase=definition&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).  Vast majorities voted that they were off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best argument against these questions in my mind is that everybody who comes to this site is involved in data analysis somehow, and might be able to take a reasonable shot at answering most of the questions here.  But questions about a particular dataset aren't for data analysts, exactly - they're for economists/political scientists/biologists/other subject-area experts.  We certainly have some of those here, but that's not &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; they're here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastActivityDate="2010-10-07T22:29:13.897" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="464" CreationDate="2010-10-08T17:44:23.583" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;What about just &quot;big-n&quot;?  One could also envision related tags &quot;big-p-small-n&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;big-n-small-p&quot; -- not that the latter would be used all that much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1499" LastActivityDate="2010-10-08T17:44:23.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="489" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-10-09T01:09:32.200" Score="2" ViewCount="637" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;We closed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/21/what-should-our-site-be-called-what-shoud-our-domain-name-be&quot;&gt;domain naming thread (click for details)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, &lt;strong&gt;let's start with a killer &amp;quot;elevator pitch!&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; Joel will be blogging about the elevator pitch approach to naming, but to get you started:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Elevator Pitch&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't as easy as it sounds. Imagine the user who will never read your FAQ and you have two seconds to grab their attention. It should be catchy but descriptive. It should be thoroughly clear but painfully concise. &lt;strong&gt;Make every... word... count.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some creative examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gawker.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gawker&lt;/a&gt;: Daily Manhattan media news and gossip. Reporting live from the center of the universe.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gizmodo.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gizmodo&lt;/a&gt;: The gadget guide. So much in love with shiny new toys, it’s unnatural.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.autoblog.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Autoblog&lt;/a&gt;: We obsessively cover the auto industry.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dumblittleman.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DumbLittleMan&lt;/a&gt;: So what do we do here? Well, it’s simple. 15 to 20 times per week we provide tips that will save you money, increase your productivity, or simply keep you sane.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.needcoffee.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Needcoffee.com&lt;/a&gt;: We are the Internet equivalent of a triple espresso with whipped cream. Mmmm…whipped cream.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Use it as a Tagline&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A shorter elevator pitch &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be used as a tagline — something you can display in the header at the top of the page. If it doesn't fit, consider shortening it or creating a separate tagline. Here are some great examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://slashdot.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Slashdot&lt;/a&gt;: News for nerds. Stuff that matters.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lifehacker.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lifehacker&lt;/a&gt;: Don’t live to geek, geek to live!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thesimpledollar.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Simple Dollar&lt;/a&gt;: Financial talk for the rest of us.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Motto (don't forget your logo)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A logo begs for it own little, short tagline — like a motto. Maybe the tagline inspires the logo; Maybe it's the other way around. Mottos make good t-shirt, bumper stickers, and other marketing material. Either way, you'll recognize a good motto when you see it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just do it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Think Different.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Uncola.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Intel inside.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Like a rock.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The king of beers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;…and perhaps all this leads to a proper name and domain for your site… &lt;em&gt;eventually&lt;/em&gt;. So let's start from the basics. &lt;strong&gt;Come up with a killer elevator pitch, tagline, and/or motto!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-10-31T09:19:08.200" Title="Write an Elevator Pitch / Tagline" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="17" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="269" CreationDate="2010-10-09T12:15:42.783" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Boxplots! Everybody likes boxplots:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/D7bLM.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2010-10-09T12:21:58.450" LastActivityDate="2010-10-09T12:21:58.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="269" CreationDate="2010-10-09T12:20:53.663" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gaussians! Everybody likes gaussians:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RakFD.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;At least may be ok for accepted-answer mark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-10-09T12:20:53.663" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="492" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-10-09T13:03:49.200" Score="15" ViewCount="507" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please take a look at this proposal: &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/7607?tab=ontopic&amp;amp;phase=definition#tab-top&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Machine Learning &gt; On Topic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like your opinion if these on-topic questions would be welcomed on this site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am using a neural network with the backpropagation algorithm. How can I calculate significance of each input variable on the output?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the best software for performing Gaussian Process regression?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the best R package to use for support vector machines (SVMs)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Given a dataset, how do I determine the best ratio of training to test data for a supervised learning algorithm?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Generally, when are Hessian-based optimization methods preferable to first order methods?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I have an undirected, tree-structured model, what's the most efficient way to pull an exact sample from its distribution?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why does the kernelized support vector machine algorithm care that the kernel function be positive semi-definite? What happens if it isn't?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they are consistently on-topic, I will be closing that proposal as a duplicate and inviting those users to Stats.stackexchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246" LastActivityDate="2010-10-12T16:55:40.640" Title="Are the &quot;Machine Learning&quot; questions on topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="492" CreationDate="2010-10-09T15:23:35.153" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are all on-topic and already included in our FAQ.  We decided this a long time ago: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16/is-machine-learning-a-part-of-statistical-analysis&quot;&gt;Is machine learning a part of statistical analysis?&lt;/a&gt;.  It is one of the most popular tags on the main site: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&lt;/a&gt;.  Plus three of the four moderators have already said the same in comments on the machine learning proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our community will really benefit from this merger, and I believe that they will also benefit from the strength of the existing community here.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to entice that community further, I would be quite happy for @hadronzoo (the creator of that proposal) to take over my role as moderator (or to become a 5th moderator).  &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/users/3992/hadronzoo&quot;&gt;http://area51.stackexchange.com/users/3992/hadronzoo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2010-10-09T15:53:32.427" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="494" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-10-12T00:58:33.453" Score="11" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just browsing area51 and just happened to see the metrics (that are tracked by SO) for our proposal as of today. See the image below. Looks like we are doing fine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Updated Stats as of Oct 20 (In particular see the rep metrics)&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WVQjg.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorDisplayName="svadali" LastEditDate="2010-10-20T18:48:40.820" LastActivityDate="2010-10-20T21:46:20.217" Title="Our site's progress so far" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="494" CreationDate="2010-10-12T12:52:57.307" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hmm, I have noticed that there is a lot of people near 200 rep that have given some very good answers that I missed to upvote [-;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-10-12T12:52:57.307" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="494" CreationDate="2010-10-12T13:01:59.107" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;And we have some problems with Google traffic; from unseen moderators' source of ultimate knowledge: &#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jl9Mo.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can fix it by posting few (even trivial) questions that are possibly something that (real) people are typing in Google and trying to answer them in a novel and useful way (i.e. not Wikipedia link).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-10-12T13:01:59.107" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12" CreationDate="2010-10-12T13:08:29.110" Score="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;This issue came up at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/3474/919&quot;&gt;Finding marginal densities of $f (x,y) = c \sqrt{1 - x^2 - y^2}, x^2 + y^2 \leq 1$&lt;/a&gt; , for instance.  Let's look at the question constructively: how can we use homework questions to the benefit of this community?  These include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A good homework question can be a good question, period.  What does it matter if it is homework?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Often, the elementary nature of homework questions draws multiple different answers, which illustrates relationships among fundamental techniques and exposes the foundations of statistical theory.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A homework question is usually fairly specific (at least it can be), whereas questions arising in other circumstances frequently need considerable clarification before they can effectively be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The possibility, then, that homework questions can contribute to the site suggests they be allowed.  Furthermore,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If homework questions are not explicitly allowed, people will just be forced to disguise their homework questions, which typically makes them vaguer and requires more work to answer.  (We now have a &quot;homework&quot; tag.  Let's encourage its use.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning how to answer homework questions: I would beg this community, both collectively and individually, not to use &quot;contempt&quot; and &quot;sadism&quot; as a tool for anything.  That only leads to ill feelings, flame wars, and flagged posts.  We should be especially alert for the possibility that a badly constructed question (that perhaps looks like homework) is due to the questioner's unfamiliarity with English.  We should respect such questions more than most due to the effort required to formulate them.  (If you're not convinced of this, sit down for five minutes and write out a question about statistics in any language you are not fluent in.  Now think about posting this where the world can see it and potentially having to engage in a follow-on dialog in that language.  How does it feel?)  Accordingly, it is foolhardy and counterproductive to rush in with contemptuous or thinly veiled suggestions.  It's easy to get people to visit a site once but hard to get them to keep visiting it; a policy of gracious and courteous answers from the community will IMO promote return visits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nobody wants to spend their precious spare time just doing someone else's homework for them: that benefits neither party.  An approach frequently taken on the math site is to provide hints, a solution strategy, or a sketch of a solution (cgillespie's option 2).  Sometimes these get amplified into a full-blown solution in response to comments, but even then some respondents have modified the problem slightly (&lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt;, to use different constants in an expression) so that &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; work has to be done to answer the original question.  That strikes me as a good balance that addresses the positive aspects of answering homework while retaining the utility of the problem in helping the questioner learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, why don't we build consensus on this issue and get it expressed in the FAQ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2010-10-12T13:08:29.110" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="498" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="499" CreationDate="2010-10-12T14:00:22.920" Score="16" ViewCount="408" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since I'm still quite new to the site, I just wanted to poll what the general consensus is on voting down questions from people with very low rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, I don't think the OP from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/3516/binomial-test-for-a-binary-variable&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; really understands the difference between a categorical and a continuous variable.  I saw that some had voted the question up, but I personally wanted to vote it down (and did) because I feel the OP didn't understand what he or she was asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do you think this discourages new posters if they have their questions voted down?  (Even if perhaps they received answers that are voted up?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you answered yes to question 1, is there some &lt;em&gt;approximate&lt;/em&gt; metric, duration of account in days, or minimum rep before you believe a question should be voted down?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My motivation is that I really want to encourage my students to ask questions here, but I don't want to raise the noise level with questions that aren't well thought out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1499" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2017-04-07T13:54:21.980" Title="Is it OK to downvote newbies?" Tags="|discussion|votes|new-users|etiquette|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="498" CreationDate="2010-10-12T14:10:59.207" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not think we should downvote clear questions that merely reflect some confusion about some aspect of statistics. We should take the opportunity to clarify the confusion so that the OP learns something new and is on the way to become a better statistician.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summary: Downvote when we see: Spam, unclear questions, irrelevant answers, trolls&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-10-12T14:10:59.207" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="472" CreationDate="2010-10-12T14:46:31.127" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;How are &lt;a href=&quot;http://askubuntu.com&quot;&gt;AskUbuntu&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://superuser.com&quot;&gt;SuperUser&lt;/a&gt; an exception to the rule?  Perhaps this change just happened Sunday?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1499" LastActivityDate="2010-10-12T14:46:31.127" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="498" CreationDate="2010-10-12T15:30:44.087" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I almost never vote down a question that is asked in good conscience to expand knowledge.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, if a question is up-voted excessively, a down-vote can be used to offset.  I don't think that should discourage new user.  Especially if you follow the golden rule of down-voting: &lt;em&gt;always leave a comment so people understand how they can improve&lt;/em&gt;.  And equally important: if the OP &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; improve the question following your comment, switch over to an up-vote to reward the good behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="5" LastEditDate="2010-10-12T15:42:13.000" LastActivityDate="2010-10-12T15:42:13.000" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="492" CreationDate="2010-10-12T16:55:40.640" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see that the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/7607/machine-learning&quot;&gt;Machine Learning proposal was &lt;strong&gt;closed as a duplicate&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Robert Cartaino.  Let me just reiterate to anyone coming from that proposal that we want to make every effort to accommodate the community on this site, and invite suggestions about changes that can be made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-10-12T16:55:40.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="498" CreationDate="2010-10-13T18:43:03.700" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there should be a downvote period of grace for newbies (1 month/week?) until they get familiarised with the website, after that it should be the same as everybody else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1077" LastActivityDate="2010-10-13T18:43:03.700" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="505" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-10-14T08:51:28.750" Score="12" ViewCount="564" Body="&lt;p&gt;See this &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/10/new-question-migration-paths/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;blog post from Jeff&lt;/a&gt;. I suggest we need to allow migration to &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt; (the programming questions) and &lt;a href=&quot;http://math.statckexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;math.stackexchange&lt;/a&gt; (the more mathematical questions). What other migration paths do we need?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T19:47:49.513" LastActivityDate="2019-12-02T06:22:23.050" Title="What migration paths should we allow?" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="506" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-10-14T11:22:08.180" Score="0" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I provided an answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/555/why-is-anova-taught-used-as-if-it-is-a-different-research-methodology-compared/3548#3548&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; on a closed question asked on July and I would really like some feedback (I am not after reputation points!). Since it is already answered, it is unlikely to attract any people to comment. What is the best way to do this without nagging people and making a new question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1077" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T19:48:44.533" Title="Asking feedback on a new answer for an old/closed question" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="505" CreationDate="2010-10-14T11:38:35.367" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We also need the reverse paths I guess (i.e., SO --&gt; Stats, Math --&gt; Stats). I do not think we need anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-10-14T11:38:35.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="506" CreationDate="2010-10-14T11:48:02.950" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;That question is not closed. It is not possible to add answers to a question that is actually closed. See this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/3473/28&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; as an example of a closed question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question you linked to has an 'accepted answer' which does not prevent other users from adding answers as you yourself did. When a new answer is added to a question or a question is edited that question is bumped to the top of the active questions which enables others to see the new answers and/or question edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sure several users have seen your answer and would have left comments if they felt that they were confused about some aspect of your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2010-10-14T11:48:02.950" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="505" CreationDate="2010-10-14T12:49:42.810" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I participate in the GIS stackexchange community. There may be enough cross over in the future warrant this, but currently their is little need. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vast majority of questions are related to programming aspects of GIS software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2010-10-14T12:49:42.810" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="510" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="511" CreationDate="2010-10-14T17:12:47.577" Score="1" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;A comment of mine mysteriously disappeared on the question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/3575/28&quot;&gt;Is it “rows by columns” or “columns by rows”?&lt;/a&gt;. It is not a big deal as I had meant to delete it myself as the comment was no longer relevant to the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in order to satisfy my curiosity, I would like to know the answer to this mystery. Did one of the mods delete it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2011-03-17T19:51:16.973" Title="Disappearing comments" Tags="|discussion|comment|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="510" CreationDate="2010-10-14T17:19:14.017" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I deleted it since you said to delete it, and it was basically noise.  Sorry!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-10-14T17:19:14.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="247" CreationDate="2010-10-16T07:49:44.177" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't reproduce this -- how do we reproduce this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2010-10-16T07:49:44.177" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="472" CreationDate="2010-10-16T11:05:30.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Latest news in topic: Seasoned advice (former cooking.SE) has its own name but not its own domain (seasonedadvice.com redirects to cooking.stackexchange.com).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-10-16T11:05:30.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="472" CreationDate="2010-10-16T12:31:48.070" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;. it's not worth it and it's too much of a distraction. We should have our own &lt;em&gt;design&lt;/em&gt; eventually as the current one is deliberately designed to look &quot;sketchy&quot;, but i'm not convinced the name is that important. Personally, I'm not that bothered either way, but i want to see how many people will vote 'No' if given the chance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-10-16T12:31:48.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="489" CreationDate="2010-10-16T21:19:29.690" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-10-16T21:19:29.690" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="489" CreationDate="2010-10-16T21:20:43.087" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bootstrap your model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-10-16T21:20:43.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="489" CreationDate="2010-10-16T21:21:22.400" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;All models are wrong, but some are cross-validated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-10-16T21:21:22.400" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="489" CreationDate="2010-10-16T21:22:45.623" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Data, modeled .  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-10-16T21:22:45.623" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="489" CreationDate="2010-10-16T21:28:02.113" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Twisting theories to suit facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-10-16T21:28:02.113" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="489" CreationDate="2010-10-16T21:28:54.500" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Falsifying the no free lunch theorem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-10-16T21:28:54.500" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="489" CreationDate="2010-10-16T21:32:30.197" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Drowning in information and starving for knowledge&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-10-16T21:32:30.197" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="489" CreationDate="2010-10-16T21:36:54.923" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions and answers on statistical analysis, data mining, machine learning, data visualization, probability theory and statistical computing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-10-16T21:36:54.923" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="489" CreationDate="2010-10-16T21:42:40.713" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Data geeks, united.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-10-16T21:42:40.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="525" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="526" CreationDate="2010-10-18T03:47:08.197" Score="5" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;Despite being one of the guilty parties, I don't look favorably on the statistics that show a small number of people are collecting most of the points.  (&lt;em&gt;E.g.&lt;/em&gt;, look at the number of people with an increase in rep equal to at least half the &lt;em&gt;second place&lt;/em&gt; person [to provide some resistance to outliers]: 8 in July, 10 in August, 11 in September, only 4 in October.)  As part of a strategy of keeping and growing this community we should help make everyone feel welcome to contribute their ideas.  Perhaps we should value broader participation over providing quick responses.  How can we encourage that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that one of the SE metrics of community strength is the number of participants with 200+ reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2010-10-18T04:00:31.217" LastActivityDate="2010-10-18T21:52:20.443" Title="What can we do to encourage broader participation?" Tags="|discussion|policy|answers|new-users|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="525" CreationDate="2010-10-18T03:59:17.193" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if we have to do anything special apart from &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) promoting the site (discussed elsewhere), &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) encouraging voting for content (also discussed elsewhere) and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c) providing quality content (in terms of questions and answers). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that in the early days there will be a heavy skew to a few active users collecting the points but if the site takes off and gets greater numbers the number of high rep users will also broaden (both in terms of numbers and in terms of fields/abilities represented). A casual browsing of other beta SE sites shows a similar trend (few high rep-users).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Added Later&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should also add that another factor why we may not have broad base participation is that lots of statisticians/data mining/machine learning folks work in the industry where confidentiality considerations may prevent them from asking questions to resolve their issues on a public forum. This is not much of an issue for programming/software (as they can easily abstract away business info) or for math (as the questions there are mostly about pure math rather than applied).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorDisplayName="svadali" LastEditDate="2010-10-18T15:20:45.240" LastActivityDate="2010-10-18T15:20:45.240" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="525" CreationDate="2010-10-18T20:08:37.883" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Re recent change (whuber's comment to Srkikant's answer): There do appear to be a few less highly active contributors so far this month. I just looked at the number of users with month reputation over 200, adjusting for the fact that it's currently only 18 oct by looking at number over 200*18/31 = 116 for october:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;34 in July,&#xA;28 in August,&#xA;31 in September,&#xA;25 in October (part).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely this could have something to do with the start of the academic year in the Northern Hemisphere, though?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="449" LastEditDate="2010-10-18T21:52:20.443" LastActivityDate="2010-10-18T21:52:20.443" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="489" CreationDate="2010-10-18T20:48:54.553" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answers on analytics -- theory and practice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1191" LastActivityDate="2010-10-18T20:48:54.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="489" CreationDate="2010-10-18T22:05:42.103" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best Q&amp;amp;A site for data analysts in the world... Probably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(perhaps i'm showing my age though? Based a Carlsberg advertising campaign from rather more years ago than I care to remember. May not ring any bells for those for whom 40 is still a distant prospect rather than a painful reality.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-10-18T22:05:42.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="489" CreationDate="2010-10-19T02:34:22.533" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To sample or not to sample:  That is the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1499" LastActivityDate="2010-10-19T02:34:22.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="379" CreationDate="2010-10-19T02:36:00.837" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Agree with Q&lt;/strong&gt;. I honestly had precisely the same thought myself before I saw this Q.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's a good time to revive this topic, in light of more recent developments on the current likelihood or otherwise of changing the site name (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/472/449&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;), and as &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/33/statistical-analysis&quot;&gt;according to area51&lt;/a&gt; we've just finished our beta phase and &lt;em&gt;&quot;will be launching very soon&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (yey!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2010-10-19T02:36:00.837" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="269" CreationDate="2010-10-19T11:51:38.980" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about a dynamically and randomly generated plot (probably a scatter), generated on pageload and using the Google Charts API? Something like this logo submission to a previous contest: &lt;a href=&quot;http://arbitrarian.wordpress.com/2008/02/23/dynamic-logo/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://arbitrarian.wordpress.com/2008/02/23/dynamic-logo/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original idea changed based on the time of day, and the color of one of the lines changed as a function of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/43xFj.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This solution obviates the need to decide on a single static logo and color scheme, and a randomly-generated scatter plot seems to be consistent with this site's focus on data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TMR9Y.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1117" LastEditorUserId="1117" LastEditDate="2010-10-19T18:53:22.307" LastActivityDate="2010-10-19T18:53:22.307" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="489" CreationDate="2010-10-20T00:10:47.793" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like going to school for statistics, but it's free. And it doesn't suck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="795" LastActivityDate="2010-10-20T00:10:47.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="489" CreationDate="2010-10-20T07:37:58.343" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lost in the data mines? Let us come to your rescue!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-10-20T07:37:58.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="247" CreationDate="2010-10-20T11:53:11.963" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This morning I had the same problem in chrome for this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/3708/forecasting-unemployment-rate/3717#3717&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;, I checked and the tex did render correctly in IE version 8 (although I was surprised how much slower it was in IE than in Chrome, alot slower).&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eL3pd.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2010-10-20T11:53:11.963" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="247" CreationDate="2010-10-20T16:39:53.387" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not getting &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; equations at the moment. I see the TeX code for a few seconds, then this (Firefox 3.6.3 on Windows XP):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hOKvM.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;Failed to load&quot; message appears in the bottom left corner of the screen, but goes away before i have time to read or capture it. It was ok earlier today (i have restarted my PC since then though).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: Just rebooted my PC as I was having another, apparently unrelated, internet problem too (failing to contact the proxy server). It fixed that problem, but not this TeX display one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2ND UPDATE (Following morning): It's OK now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="449" LastEditDate="2010-10-21T09:22:35.937" LastActivityDate="2010-10-21T09:22:35.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="489" CreationDate="2010-10-20T17:16:41.050" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ask us a question about statistics or data mining - you can be 95% confident of receiving a satisfactory answer. &lt;sub&gt;Statistic based on &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/33/statistical-analysis&quot;&gt;1000 questions asked during the beta phase, of which 96% received an answer which was accepted by the questioner&lt;/a&gt;. Past performance is  no guarantee of future results.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="449" LastEditDate="2010-10-31T09:19:08.200" LastActivityDate="2010-10-31T09:19:08.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="269" CreationDate="2010-10-20T17:57:56.720" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My idea for logo below.....  Or squarer with black 'leading'? StackExchange icon for comparison:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/F230l.png&quot; alt=&quot;4x4 latin square in red and blues with white leading, curved edges and a speech bubble tail&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0Iajo.png&quot; alt=&quot;4x4 latin square in red and blues with black leading, curved edges and a speech bubble tail&quot;&gt;&#xA; &lt;img src=&quot;http://stackexchange.com//apple-touch-icon.png&quot; alt=&quot;StackExchange icon&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My idea is to combine mbq's 'crossvalidated' logo entry with a 4x4 &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_square&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Latin square&lt;/a&gt; and keep a family resemblance to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com//apple-touch-icon.png&quot;&gt;StackExchange icon&lt;/a&gt;. The Latin square illustrates &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_experiments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;design of experiments&lt;/a&gt;, and also references the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fisher-stainedglass-gonville-caius.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fisher window&lt;/a&gt; and hence the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Fisher&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. It could also be a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_map&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;heat map&lt;/a&gt; representation of a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/Contingency_table&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;contingency table&lt;/a&gt;. It needs a bit of tweaking and I'm not fixed on the colours - the present ones combine red/orange diagonal squares (like mbq's design) with various shades of blue (like the SE logo, and because, as everyone knows, &lt;em&gt;blue&lt;/em&gt; is the colour of statistics!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="449" LastEditDate="2010-10-22T20:21:36.513" LastActivityDate="2010-10-22T20:21:36.513" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="247" CreationDate="2010-10-20T20:06:13.580" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;same thing here (ubuntu+chrome==formula no show) since 'it' updated TO chrome 7.0.517.41&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: it all works perfectly on the same machine with FFox. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="603" LastEditorUserId="603" LastEditDate="2010-10-25T12:37:53.223" LastActivityDate="2010-10-25T12:37:53.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="494" CreationDate="2010-10-20T21:46:20.217" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fresh news about the site launch -- 90 days means nothing. We will be taken into account in more-less random time, yet faster the more Excellent marks we will manage to get.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Probably the rule of thumb is that the reputation spectrum of users must be suited to survive high (SO-like, see for instance &lt;a href=&quot;https://webapps.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;NTI faq&lt;/a&gt; for details) reputation thresholds.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:57:25.070" LastActivityDate="2010-10-20T21:46:20.217" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="489" CreationDate="2010-10-21T22:35:05.040" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't let numbers numb you - discover what they mean&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="226" LastActivityDate="2010-10-21T22:35:05.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="247" CreationDate="2010-10-22T10:27:57.103" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For me (Chrome 7.0.517.41 on Fedora 13) LaTeX inserts does not appear or appear in random places. On the same machine Firefox 3.6.10 manages to render it well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-10-22T10:27:57.103" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="543" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="545" CreationDate="2010-10-24T20:53:43.837" Score="6" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/3952/what-classes-nyc-area-would-you-recommend-for-statistical-analysis&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; was recently asked about statistical classes in the NYC area. I automatically thought that it should be closed as it was too localised - unsurprisingly the questioner disagrees ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My general thoughts are: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We could easily generate infinitely questions by changing the region. For example, change NYC to &quot;Yorkshire&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question is only useful for a small geographical area.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How large a geographical area is acceptable? A country, city, town?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do people think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've now closed the question as it seems that most people think the question is too localised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2013-07-28T10:14:03.833" Title="Is this question too local?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="543" CreationDate="2010-10-24T21:03:30.533" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My thinking for allowing the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it's on topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it's useful - not just for me, but for any future person in the NYC area &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it scales reasonably well - there are only so many places that the question can be asked. Boston, London, SF, etc&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there's no better place to get an answer to this question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="276" LastActivityDate="2010-10-24T21:03:30.533" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="543" CreationDate="2010-10-25T00:14:55.393" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I come to this site to ask and answer data analysis (broadly defined) questions and do not wish the site to allow career related questions. I think asking career related questions is or should be off-topic because of the following additional reasons (apart from it not being related to data analysis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Better alternatives exist for such questions (ask your friends, colleagues, previous profs etc).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Any &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; recommendations are likely to be very specific to your particular situation, skills and goals. Hence, asking random strangers on a website focussed on data analysis questions may not be the best idea. This point also suggests that the answers while helpful to you may not be helpful to another person because such advice is very much dependent on the person. Thus, the question is very 'localized'.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You could always visit the schools themselves, sit in a few classes, speak to current students etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the above I would agree that this question is too localized and is off-topic for this site. I have voted to close it as off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-10-25T00:14:55.393" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="546" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-10-26T07:44:04.960" Score="1" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hi, &#xA;I have been posting on this forum using a name without registrating. How can I register now?&#xA;The forum recognised my IP and I could accumulate points. But since yesterday I am not anymore logged, and it seams that I have lost my account. Is there a way to recover it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fred&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1709" OwnerDisplayName="Fred" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2010-10-26T09:50:16.503" LastActivityDate="2010-10-26T09:50:16.503" Title="I have been posting on this forum using a name without registrating. How can I register now?" Tags="|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="546" CreationDate="2010-10-26T08:30:27.487" Score="1" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did you log in using a gmail, hotmail or openid account?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What was your other user name.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastActivityDate="2010-10-26T08:30:27.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="546" CreationDate="2010-10-26T09:50:03.163" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems you were &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/1567/fred&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/1567/fred&lt;/a&gt; ; if so, go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/account-recovery&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/account-recovery&lt;/a&gt; and provide your Hotmail e-mail address. If it should not work, we will mere you with your new account &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/1709/fred&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/1709/fred&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2010-10-26T09:50:03.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="549" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="553" CreationDate="2010-10-26T14:34:35.650" Score="2" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;The image below shows the current number of close votes and re-open votes for two questions on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BwdQP.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see the first question shows that it has 2 close votes and the second one shows one re-open vote. But, when you actually look at the questions themselves you see that the first question has 3 votes to close and the second one has no votes to re-open. Is this a bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7hFME.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xvPq2.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2010-10-27T03:40:58.953" LastActivityDate="2010-10-27T03:40:58.953" Title="Counts of 'Close votes' and 'Reopen Votes' are not accurate" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="269" CreationDate="2010-10-26T17:08:15.260" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sans font. (more characters)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-10-26T17:08:15.260" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="269" CreationDate="2010-10-26T17:08:43.670" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Serif font. (more characters)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-10-26T17:08:43.670" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="549" CreationDate="2010-10-27T03:36:38.087" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The statistics on the meta pages always seem to lag those on the parent pages.  Evidently they are not updated immediately.  (You might have noticed that your reputation when viewed on the meta pages often is a little lower than its current value, too.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2010-10-27T03:36:38.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="549" CreationDate="2010-10-27T03:40:21.417" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This depends on the date range you have selected -- there are votes olde than the 2 day range you have selected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2010-10-27T03:40:21.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="269" CreationDate="2010-10-27T07:37:49.617" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;SOFU-like header:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OpUgT.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-10-27T07:37:49.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="269" CreationDate="2010-10-27T07:38:37.340" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;SeasonedAdvice-like header:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6nc5i.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-10-27T07:38:37.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="269" CreationDate="2010-10-27T11:55:02.187" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Blue&lt;/strong&gt; is the colour of statistics. I'm not synaesthetic but this somehow seems natural to me. Maybe a blue + grey + white palette, perhaps with very limited use of red for highlighting as in the current 'beta' design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="449" LastEditDate="2010-10-29T12:59:14.237" LastActivityDate="2010-10-29T12:59:14.237" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="269" CreationDate="2010-10-27T12:00:33.930" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mOqLI.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Hideous animated pseudo-3d bar-chart&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please no bar charts&lt;/strong&gt; in the logo or any other aspect of the design. They are horribly overused when other plots would be more appropriate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-10-27T12:00:33.930" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="489" CreationDate="2010-10-27T12:53:49.503" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Data Analyses&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Statistics, Machine Learning, Data Mining and Visualization&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With data.stackexchange.com as url instead of stats.se&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2010-10-27T17:24:12.627" LastActivityDate="2010-10-27T17:24:12.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="559" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-10-27T16:04:32.987" Score="12" ViewCount="344" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you see the comments to the question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/4025/28&quot;&gt;MLE for Naive Bayes in R&lt;/a&gt; you will notice that there is confusion about whether R questions should go to Stackoverflow or Stats Analysis. I am of the opinion that for the sake of consistency we should (in cooperation with the Stackoverflow community) adopt one consistent policy. Towards this end, I propose the following policy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;R questions should be asked on Stats Analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Any future R questions on SO should be migrated to Stats Analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above policy will achieve several objectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Posters will not have to post twice.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cross-posting will not happen thus avoiding splintering the knowledge base for R across two sites.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Less noise in comments both at Stackoverflow and at our site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt; reach &lt;em&gt;consensus&lt;/em&gt; on this issue perhaps we can ask the same question on meta.SO to ask what they wish to do about this issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2010-10-30T18:04:50.407" Title="Policy on R questions: Stackoverflow Vs Stats Analysis" Tags="|discussion|r|policy|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="441" CreationDate="2010-10-27T18:14:06.027" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;No tags for software-specific commands, functions, modules, packages&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe allow exceptions for a very few of most popular ones or wide-ranging such as &lt;code&gt;ggplot2&lt;/code&gt;, but otherwise (re-)tag questions with the name of the statistical software / application / programming language and a tag for the method rather than a tag for the name of the command/function/package/module implementing the method in that particular statistical software / language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-10-27T22:29:03.873" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-10-27T18:14:06.027" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="441" CreationDate="2010-10-27T21:04:12.773" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Popular packages/modules should have their own tags&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was the person that added the &lt;code&gt;e1071&lt;/code&gt;, so I obviously disagree with the i&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/441/what-should-be-rules-for-making-and-using-tags/560#560&quot;&gt;dea&lt;/a&gt; proposed by @onestop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/4025/mle-for-naive-bayes-in-r&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; being discussed currently has two tags: &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;code&gt;e1071&lt;/code&gt;. I would argue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just having the R tag by itself isn't particularly useful for any question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For this particular question, other tags don't really fit well, For example, &lt;code&gt;mle&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;Bayesian&lt;/code&gt; doesn't seem right. In the future the &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; person who will be interested in this question is someone who is using the &lt;code&gt;e1071&lt;/code&gt; package. Why not use it as a tag?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We can have up to five tags. Most questions only have 2 or 3 tags.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The R tag is the most popular and is currently used in 15% of posts. It seems like an obvious way to help searching for R is to use package names.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;@onstop suggests that only main packages have there own tags, i.e. &lt;code&gt;ggplot2&lt;/code&gt;. However,  &lt;code&gt;e1071&lt;/code&gt; is used by a number of bioconductor libraries. Therefore, (I would guess) it is probably used by more people than &lt;code&gt;ggplot2&lt;/code&gt;. Admittedly, most people don't know it ;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SO overflow use packages tags for searching. For example, an Rcpp tag exists.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/62851/process-for-deleting-poor-quality-tags&quot;&gt;tag is deleted&lt;/a&gt; after six months if it is an orphan.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most posts in this site suffer from a shortage of tags, why delete tags?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The R &amp;amp; c++ example seems strange. Again taking SO as an example, no Rcpp post has a c++ tag. It seems like obfuscation to remove the Rcpp tag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-10-27T22:27:30.897" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-10-27T21:04:12.773" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="441" CreationDate="2010-10-27T22:25:09.463" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Tag should be such its tag badge is reasonable&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users active in certain tags will be automatically awarded with tag badges (bronze and silver). We can't do anything with it, so the &amp;quot;senseness&amp;quot; of such badges should be an argument for tag existence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-10-27T22:25:09.463" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-10-27T22:25:09.463" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="559" CreationDate="2010-10-27T22:40:42.553" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is what I would like to happen, but many people (especially active in SO [R] tag) would rather believe in idealistic &quot;User should decide in her/his heart if it is  or  question and post it on SO or here accordingly. High-reps will be migrating misplaced questions.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I currently think that we should just live in the current chaos for a few more months and see what will happen. The flow of R questions here is visible now, so maybe this will happen organically... Or maybe the idealistic solution will justify and work well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-10-27T22:40:42.553" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="559" CreationDate="2010-10-28T00:37:01.440" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/400/is-this-question-really-not-related-to-statistical-analysis/402#402&quot;&gt;I strongly disagree with this approach&lt;/a&gt;.  I think that permitting programming questions here dilutes the actual statistical/machine learning/data viz content of the site.  I see three main problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It creates entire categories of questions that entire categories of users will not &lt;strong&gt;ever&lt;/strong&gt; care about.  I like STATA, I've used STATA, but it is incredibly unlikely that I'll ever see it again - and I definitely don't care about how to get extra digits in my p-values with it.  Conversely, I'm continually expanding my repertoire of statistical methods, so I'm always interested in reading the stats questions, even if they're not of immediate relevance - useful perspectives or approaches can come from almost anywhere, it seems.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It makes it tedious for people who are interested in both programming and analysis to sort out which questions they feel like checking out that day.  I'm rather partisan about R, but I still don't want to see questions about how to vectorize operation X every time I come here.  And what about people who are mostly interested in programming for R and not statistics?  They might exist!  I think a very relevant example of this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://gis.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;the GIS StackExchange&lt;/a&gt;, which is &lt;em&gt;extremely&lt;/em&gt; technical and is having &lt;a href=&quot;https://gis.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/164/progress-of-gis-stackexchange-2-stats-from-area-51&quot;&gt;an oddly parallel discussion on its meta&lt;/a&gt; about how not having so many software questions might be good for the site.  Disclaimer: I complain about this same stuff over there, too, so the discussions aren't exactly independent.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Permitting these questions here encourages duplication of past effort.  Deciding to move all R questioning here means that we're orphaning &gt; 2,300 questions that are already on StackOverflow (for reference, we've got 993 total questions here).  In fact, there are several well-established sources for technical help with R and even specific packages.  The same is true for the dozens of other statistical software programs out there.  It will take us incredible effort to duplicate that knowledge and lure those users here; wouldn't it make more sense to focus our efforts on the need that we actually do address - Q&amp;amp;A for data analysis itself?  This site is awesome because it &lt;strong&gt;provides new functionality to the Internet&lt;/strong&gt;... not because it could potentially reproduce existing functionality.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a very easy rule of thumb for identifying where a question will go is to ask: can the question be restated as &quot;How do I analyze X?&quot;  If so, it belongs here.  If the question is better restated as &quot;How do I program X?&quot;, then we (helpfully, knowledgeably, courteously) send it to SO or other appropriate resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There will always be questions that fall into the grey zone in between (e.g., algorithms for calculating statistics on streaming data or very large datasets), but just because we can't say definitively if a question belongs here or on SO doesn't mean that we should duplicate the entire functionality of SO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:33:47.217" LastActivityDate="2010-10-28T00:37:01.440" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="565" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-10-28T00:48:31.437" Score="4" ViewCount="390" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to get your ideas on the design for the site when it graduates from Beta. I really know nothing about statistics, besides the couple courses I took in college. So I'm definitely all ears! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I design a site, I design for a &quot;feeling.&quot; As in the feeling a brand new user visits the site, or a long term &quot;feeling&quot; seasoned users establish. For example, a person should know right away this is a &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cooking.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;cooking site&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; because it's warm and inviting, or this is a &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gaming.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;gaming site&lt;/a&gt;&quot; because of the 8bit retro graphics. etc etc. I also try not to let the visual elements get in the way of content, since they should fade in the background after repeated visits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what's that &quot;feeling&quot; for the statistical analysis page? I recently designed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Mathematics site&lt;/a&gt;. It uses a familiar grid pattern as the Beta theme, sans the &quot;sketchiness.&quot; The design goal was to make it clean and simple, but academic looking. Should the SA site be something similar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd love to hear your ideas. Normally if I know a subject matter somewhat, with some extra research I can pin down the correct feel. However in the case of Statistical Analysis, I'm rather lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: I have changed the post to only ask for over all design suggestions, for logo ideas, please use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/269/what-should-our-logo-and-site-design-look-like&quot;&gt;other thread&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE: design mockup screenshots&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your input on design ideas, both here and in the chatroom. The consensus was for a clean and simple design. Also, it seems we're pretty set on a logo design from the logo thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I learned from some of you that infographics falls under statistics too, which gave me some design ideas. I've been a long fan of &lt;a href=&quot;http://flowingdata.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://flowingdata.com&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://infosthetics.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://infosthetics.com&lt;/a&gt;. I decided to add some subtle infographics influenced elements to the design to spice it up a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Color wise, to go with the clean look, I decided to go with more muted and pastel colors that are soothing on the eye. Of course, picking the right colors that would please everyone is rather difficult. I believe the palette I chose is rather safe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are couple design mockups for both the home page and the question detailed page. (note: not all site elements are present, this is mostly for look and feel).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;click images for full resolution versions.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4Nd9U.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4Nd9U.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The faint graphics in the header and footer background are from &lt;a href=&quot;http://iographica.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a program&lt;/a&gt; that tracks and plots my mouse movement. I like the randomness of it and it gives that infographics feel. I'm using it for pure decoration purpose to keep the design from being too bland, since the body section is all text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PTdyz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PTdyz.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please let me know your thoughts. I'd love to get the site launched for you this week!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:33:38.007" LastActivityDate="2010-12-07T10:33:30.110" Title="Site design Ideas (updated with mockups)" Tags="|discussion|design|logo|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="379" CreationDate="2010-10-28T06:09:34.210" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think Data Analysis is a better name than Statistical Analysis. Even better is maybe &quot;Data Science&quot; what do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2010-10-28T06:09:34.210" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="565" CreationDate="2010-10-28T08:47:15.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/75xqy.png&quot; alt=&quot;Scatterplot with fitted straight line&quot;&gt;&#xA;Ok, well, here's a very sketchy logo idea, based on my comment to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/269/what-should-our-logo-and-site-design-look-like/469#469&quot;&gt;Shane's answer on the other thread&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I've started thinking a scatterplot with a fitted line is a good idea. As Shane said, it communicates the purpose of the site in a generally recognisable way. Clearly the [example posted by Shane] is too complex though. One with around 20 points would probably be good. Should be real data i think, preferably historic or iconic (in both senses!).&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not really suggesting this particular plot - it's a scatter of CO2 emissions per capita vs. GDP per capita for the 19 individual countries of the G20,. I'm sure someone could find a less potentially contentious data set, perhaps from a classic textbook?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2010-10-28T08:47:15.897" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="559" CreationDate="2010-10-28T08:50:20.707" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think programming questions related to (a particular) statistical analysis should be permitted on SE, irrespective of the tag (be it r, matlab...). We can be splitters (imagine, individual SE sites for linear regression, machine learning, assumption testing... :rolleyes:), but the lines has to be drawn somewhere. I suggest it be draw here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    you are here&#xA;|---------|ˇ---|&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;:)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="144" LastActivityDate="2010-10-28T08:50:20.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="565" CreationDate="2010-10-28T09:05:44.267" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Re similarity or otherwise to &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Mathematics StackExchange site&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the 'feel' should also be clean and fairly simple, but less academic looking than Mathematics. In particular, we seem have established a preference for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/269/what-should-our-logo-and-site-design-look-like/550#550&quot;&gt;Sans font&lt;/a&gt; rather than a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/269/what-should-our-logo-and-site-design-look-like/551#551&quot;&gt;Serif font&lt;/a&gt;. We make less use of TeX, so if the TeX font can't be Sans the mismatch is less of an issue here than it would be for Mathematics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:38.337" LastActivityDate="2010-10-28T09:05:44.267" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="570" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="571" CreationDate="2010-10-28T09:59:25.993" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to place my stats-stackexchange account on my personal website, like is done on the about page here:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/029QZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can't figure out how.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="442" LastActivityDate="2010-10-28T10:39:19.177" Title="How can I display my stats account at my personal webpage?" Tags="|support|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="570" CreationDate="2010-10-28T10:39:14.153" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Under your &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/users/442/henrik&quot;&gt;name&lt;/a&gt;, there is a &quot;Got flair?&quot; link. Click on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2010-10-28T10:39:14.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="559" CreationDate="2010-10-28T11:20:31.243" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree wholeheartedly with Matt Parker. Quite a few questions on R have hardly anything to do at all with statistics. There are two things I would like to see happening though:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It happens people ask the same question both here and on SO. That should be discouraged by actively merging those questions to either site, depending on the type of question (main focus on analysis or main focus on programming). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It happens people ask an obvious statistics question on SO. Mods should be able to migrate that one to this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that this can be done as long as stats is in beta, but once it is launched, this should definitely be added to the functionality. And when that is, I suggest strongly to apply the point of view Matt Parker explained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1124" LastActivityDate="2010-10-28T11:20:31.243" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="269" CreationDate="2010-10-28T12:16:23.750" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Violet (with green, possibly). Just because it has not been used yet among SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-10-28T12:16:23.750" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="575" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-10-28T19:09:08.593" Score="6" ViewCount="272" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems like a few of my questions have had their titles edited, either to add in capitalization, or to take it out (I've not yet seen both on the &lt;em&gt;same&lt;/em&gt; question, though ;). I'm not sure if my title should be &quot;Is There a Style Guide for Questions?&quot; or &quot;Is there a style guide for questions?&quot;, though I am now tending towards the latter (see above). (to get the wise-guy badge, you should edit the title of &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a general style guide for questions? Or are there side-by-side good Q/bad Q examples, either here or on meta? Things like: how to make your question specific, suggested limits on paragraph size, etc, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="795" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditorDisplayName="svadali" LastEditDate="2015-08-14T16:43:51.497" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T16:43:51.497" Title="What are the guidelines for writing good questions (and titles)?" Tags="|discussion|questions|title|" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="575" CreationDate="2010-10-28T19:49:24.363" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question title should follow sentence capitalization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exceptions to the above rule: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A proper noun in the question title/text should be capitalized.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorDisplayName="svadali" LastEditDate="2010-10-28T22:40:40.950" LastActivityDate="2010-10-28T22:40:40.950" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-10-28T19:49:24.363" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="575" CreationDate="2010-10-28T19:50:25.457" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If possible a question title should be an actual question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-10-28T19:50:25.457" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-10-28T19:50:25.457" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="575" CreationDate="2010-10-28T19:51:25.737" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If appropriate, to the extent possible, use mathematical notation/equations in the question text to lend precision to your question. You can use Tex for mathematical notation/equations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorDisplayName="svadali" LastEditDate="2010-10-28T19:56:31.220" LastActivityDate="2010-10-28T19:56:31.220" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-10-28T19:51:25.737" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="575" CreationDate="2010-10-28T19:53:14.703" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;If appropriate, provide sample data / sample code / reproducible example (with simulated data) in the question text along with a brief description of your data/code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorDisplayName="svadali" LastEditDate="2010-10-29T15:21:31.057" LastActivityDate="2010-10-29T15:21:31.057" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-10-28T19:53:14.703" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="575" CreationDate="2010-10-28T19:55:22.797" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Provide details of what you already tried / your thoughts on the question so that appropriate answers can be given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorDisplayName="svadali" LastEditDate="2010-10-30T13:50:58.843" LastActivityDate="2010-10-30T13:50:58.843" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-10-28T19:55:22.797" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="575" CreationDate="2010-10-28T20:00:17.847" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ideally, a question should be self-contained. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, readers should not have to download anything or search for anything to understand your question. Please provide links using the editor's link functionality and provide images using the image functionality to make the question self-contained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-10-28T20:00:17.847" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-10-28T20:00:17.847" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="582" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="583" CreationDate="2010-10-28T23:47:17.257" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just happened to check Area 51 and noticed that we've reached precisely 1000 questions! I think their counts can have a short lag though, so I'm not sure if the most recent question asked on Statistical Analysis was the thousandth question. Could someone (a moderator?) find out what was, if that's possible? (This is pure numerological curiousity and of course totally baseist. StackOverflow no doubt celebrated their 1024th question. Or even waited until the 65536th.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="449" LastEditDate="2010-10-28T23:54:41.170" LastActivityDate="2010-10-28T23:59:08.823" Title="Which was our thousandth question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="582" CreationDate="2010-10-28T23:59:08.823" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming the count is correct, the 1000th question was &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/4053/159&quot;&gt;How to know which probability distribution to expect?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2010-10-28T23:59:08.823" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="584" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-10-29T15:51:02.643" Score="3" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;The thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/559/28&quot;&gt;Policy on R questions: Stackoverflow vs Stats Analysis&lt;/a&gt; suggests that we have some difference of opinions as to how to approach this issue. To get to some sort of resolution I propose that we use this thread to offer several different proposals and let the votes decide what we should do. I would suggest that we follow the following ground rules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The suggested policy measures are mutually exclusive. So, please vote up the &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; policy that you think we should adopt.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do not downvote any proposal. I suggest that we do not count downvotes at the end of the polling period to decide what to do.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you wish to add another policy proposal feel free to do so with the caveat that your proposal must be distinct from the ones already existing.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us run the poll for one week i.e., till Nov 5th, 2010. The proposal with the highest number of upvotes will be the proposal we will adopt as far as R questions are concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2010-10-31T20:42:08.830" Title="Vote on policy for R questions" Tags="|discussion|r|policy|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="584" CreationDate="2010-10-29T15:55:01.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;All R questions that are &lt;em&gt;related to data analysis&lt;/em&gt; should be migrated from SO to our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prototype Examples For Migration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How should I do [stats test/plot/estimate a model/import data/..] in R?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What R packages can I use to perform [stats test/plot/estimate a model/import data/..]?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prototype Examples &lt;em&gt;Not&lt;/em&gt; For Migration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How can I speed up my R code?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How can I avoid loops in R?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How can I vectorize in R?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How can I use R to interface with Excel/Python/...?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-10-29T15:55:01.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="589" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="600" CreationDate="2010-10-29T16:45:58.737" Score="3" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;I originally posted these as answers to the recent question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/575/1036&quot;&gt;style guides for questions&lt;/a&gt; but realized it was addressing a separate issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what rules should we follow for editing other individuals content? Hopefully the answers we give here will also be helpful in guiding how individuals write responses to begin with. Also I think it would be helpful as no one has hurt feelings over a moderators edits to their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2010-10-30T19:16:22.630" Title="What should the guide be for editing questions, answers, and responses?" Tags="|discussion|moderation|formatting|style|editing|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2017-12-04T13:15:57.193" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="589" CreationDate="2010-10-29T16:46:32.433" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anyone who can edit questions can fix spelling and punctuation mistakes immediately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="1036" LastEditDate="2010-10-30T19:03:36.493" LastActivityDate="2010-10-30T19:03:36.493" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-10-29T16:46:32.433" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="589" CreationDate="2010-10-29T16:47:31.403" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This one may be a little more contentious (and what I'm going to suggest is actually not how it is done now)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For poor grammar the original poster will be asked to clean up their question/answer. If it is not done so within a day editors can take action to clean the question/answers content appropriately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally think we should let the OP's clean their own responses, but I think the actual question listed on the main page should be edited ASAP to be correct both for spelling and for grammar purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="1036" LastEditDate="2010-10-30T19:04:40.453" LastActivityDate="2010-10-30T19:04:40.453" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-10-29T16:47:31.403" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="589" CreationDate="2010-10-29T16:50:24.957" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Formatting relating to code samples, bulleted lists, indentation, and equations can be edited immediately to display how the editor feels would be most appropriate (or more appropriate than is currently displayed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="1036" LastEditDate="2010-10-30T19:04:57.227" LastActivityDate="2010-10-30T19:04:57.227" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-10-29T16:55:58.740" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="589" CreationDate="2010-10-29T16:55:41.487" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Editors can add hyperlinks immediately as appropriate. If the question relates around a topic that is not ubiquitous, a link to a general description of topic should be provided (such as wikipedia). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="1036" LastEditDate="2010-10-30T19:04:10.830" LastActivityDate="2010-10-30T19:04:10.830" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-10-29T16:55:41.487" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="565" CreationDate="2010-10-29T17:24:51.340" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a particular fan of the way the &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Math SE&lt;/a&gt; portrays when a question has an accepted answered as a faded checkmark. Specifically I don't like how the number of answers is portrayed in a similar green color, and I don't like how much it is faded into the background. I can see it but it isn't immediate recognition of an accepted answer like it is currently on the Stat site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like the way it is now with a entire green background, but MBQ had a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/269/what-should-our-logo-and-site-design-look-like/491#491&quot;&gt;suggestion&lt;/a&gt; of using a normal distribution as the accepted answer symbol which I think sounds pretty cool. We could also potentially incorporate many of those same cross validation logo ideas as an accepted background answer (hence the link back to cross validation again).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:38.337" LastActivityDate="2010-10-29T17:41:15.657" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="575" CreationDate="2010-10-29T21:37:16.957" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question titles shall follow &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_case#Headings_and_publication_titles----&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Title Case&lt;/a&gt; of some form, specifically capitalize all words except those 'closed class words' &lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Is There a Style Guide that Provides Guidelines for Question Title and Question Content?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;How Should I Normalize my Data?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="795" LastActivityDate="2010-10-29T21:37:16.957" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="575" CreationDate="2010-10-30T09:22:21.103" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't put a space before a closing bracket, comma, period or question/exclamation mark or after an opening bracket. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2013-08-07T10:30:59.667" LastActivityDate="2013-08-07T10:30:59.667" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="575" CreationDate="2010-10-30T09:26:03.627" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't add &quot;e-mail flags&quot; like [R], [newbie] or [svm] to your posts' titles. Use tags instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-10-30T09:26:03.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="559" CreationDate="2010-10-30T18:04:50.407" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why single out R?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;R, Stata, SAS, SPSS, Mathematica, etc. (and even Excel ;-) are (merely) &lt;em&gt;tools&lt;/em&gt; for understanding and resolving questions of statistical analysis.  From this point of view, the problem we are addressing here stems from how the original question is framed.  An alternative framing that appears more meaningful IMHO is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions about statistical analysis should be posted on Stats Analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions not about statistical analysis (but, presumably, about some aspect of programming) should be posted on SO or a programming-related site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isn't that the &lt;em&gt;status quo&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please, let's not make draconian statements involving &quot;must&quot;, &quot;have to&quot;, and forced migration.  If policies (characterizing what kinds of questions are best posted where) need to be clarified, we can discuss appropriate changes, but let's trust users to follow those policies.  Doing so, after all, is in their own interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2010-10-30T18:04:50.407" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="584" CreationDate="2010-10-30T18:19:06.487" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I vote that we not have any R-specific policy at all.  We are better off making policy related to the site's purpose rather than attempting to single out any particular software platform (which is just &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theoi.com/Ther/DrakonHydra.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cutting heads off the Hydra&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, I would like to suggest &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; migrating existing questions on any basis.  Let this site grow as it will, but leave the history of its growth unchanged. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further reasons are outlined in my response to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/559/policy-on-r-questions-stackoverflow-vs-stats-analysis/598#598&quot;&gt;antecedent thread&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2010-10-30T18:19:06.487" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="589" CreationDate="2010-10-30T19:16:22.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The site as is fine. If someone thinks a specific instance of editing is inappropriate they can ask a specific question on meta addressing the specific issue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We expect editors to use discretion wisely and in any circumstance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2010-10-30T19:16:22.630" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2010-10-30T19:18:49.710" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="601" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-10-30T19:26:42.513" Score="8" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;The official FAQ is intentionally minimal and concerned with how the site works.  In comments, we often point to questions on this meta site for guidelines, etc.  Taking a page from the SO/meta-SO book, perhaps we can take this a step further using the tags &amp;quot;faq&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;faq-proposed&amp;quot; to build a community FAQ.  See the following link:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7931/how-does-stack-overflow-work-the-official-faq&quot;&gt;FAQ for Stack Overflow, Server Fault, and Super User&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general process is to tag a question as &amp;quot;proposed-faq&amp;quot;.  If it evolves to an acceptable point, mark it community wiki, usually with a CW answer which is a synthesis of other answers rising to the top through voting.  Then change the tag to &amp;quot;faq&amp;quot; and place a link in the &amp;quot;master faq&amp;quot; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For details, please see the section &amp;quot;How should a question be added to this FAQ&amp;quot; at the link above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As examples, some questions that might be considered for this category include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/589/what-should-the-guide-be-for-editing-questions-answers-and-responses&quot;&gt;What should the guide be for editing questions, answers, and responses?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12/how-should-we-deal-with-obvious-homework-questions&quot;&gt;How should we deal with obvious homework questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we start doing something similar?  Does the process outlined on the meta-SO FAQ meet your approval?  Other thoughts, suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bumped to renew discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="251" LastEditorUserId="11887" LastEditDate="2020-11-24T20:05:02.270" LastActivityDate="2020-11-24T20:05:02.270" Title="Should we start maintaining a community FAQ?" Tags="|discussion|meta-faq|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="601" CreationDate="2010-10-31T10:17:42.447" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;, we should just link much more prominently to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7931/how-does-stack-overflow-work-the-official-faq&quot;&gt;FAQ for Stack Overflow, Server Fault and Super User&lt;/a&gt;. As far as i can see, virtually all of it applies equally well to &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the StackExchange sites (the only obvious exception being 'How do I get my code blocks formatted?', though that applies to stats.SE too). People have clearly put a lot of time and energy putting it together and I see no need to duplicate their effort, especially given our much smaller base of avid users. Perhaps we might politely ask its maintainers if they'd consider changing its name though?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2010-10-31T15:48:42.110" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="269" CreationDate="2010-10-31T15:22:03.797" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gaussian-like idea for &quot;voting component&quot;, so that it has a statistical interpretation:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/v7Am5.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-10-31T15:22:03.797" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="601" CreationDate="2010-11-01T13:31:31.353" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;, I think that we should.  It would make sense to do something like what &lt;a href=&quot;https://cstheory.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/225/official-faq-for-theoretical-computer-science&quot;&gt;we did on CS Theory&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:13.850" LastActivityDate="2010-11-01T14:11:55.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="379" CreationDate="2010-11-01T17:19:50.310" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry, &lt;code&gt;data&lt;/code&gt; is reserved for our network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We will be moving &lt;a href=&quot;http://odata.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://odata.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://data.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Data&quot; meaning, the creative commons data dumps of all sites in our network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;now complete, see:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/12/re-launching-stack-exchange-data-explorer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/12/re-launching-stack-exchange-data-explorer/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2010-12-13T11:27:13.797" LastActivityDate="2010-12-13T11:27:13.797" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="379" CreationDate="2010-11-02T07:49:49.867" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we can't have &lt;code&gt;data.&lt;/code&gt; then how about &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;data-anal.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Data Anal.&lt;/em&gt; is used as the abbreviation for &quot;data analysis&quot; in journal titles such as &lt;em&gt;Lifetime Data Analysis&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Intelligent Data Analysis&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Advances in Data Analysis and Classification&lt;/em&gt;, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-11-02T07:49:49.867" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="607" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-03T19:29:48.917" Score="4" ViewCount="307" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you have any suggestions on what the images on 404, CAPTCHA and Error pages should be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few examples from other sites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cooking site's 404:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bSQ7c.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gaming site's CAPTCHA&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PFoPH.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Photography site's 404&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EE8PW.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is to have these images somewhat light hearted, and reflect the theme of the site. What are your suggestions for this site? You can just tell me the concept and I can implement it graphically. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2010-11-15T23:49:58.937" LastActivityDate="2010-11-16T11:45:55.727" Title="404/CAPTCHA/Error images" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="607" CreationDate="2010-11-03T19:46:06.123" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We could take something from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/423/what-is-your-favorite-data-analysis-cartoon&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt;, such as this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.austinthirdgen.org/upload/piechart.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.austinthirdgen.org/upload/piechart.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2010-11-03T19:46:06.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="607" CreationDate="2010-11-03T19:47:07.870" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Or this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/random_number.png&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-11-03T19:47:07.870" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="607" CreationDate="2010-11-03T20:18:28.497" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the 404 page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have a pretty picture, but I have an idea: a standard normal distribution plot with everything &amp;lt; -4.04 shaded and -4.04 visible on the x-axis.  Then the words &quot;You are here&quot; with an arrow pointing to the shaded region.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1657" LastActivityDate="2010-11-03T20:18:28.497" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="565" CreationDate="2010-11-03T20:20:42.130" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Love the look of the normal distribution for the accepted answer, but I am not sure about it when it comes to the voting itself (2nd screenshot you posted). I understood that those were buttons to up/downvote because I know how stackoverflow (and related sites) work. But if I were a new user who was not familiar with the way the site works I wouldn't immediately recognise them as arrows to vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe red and green (for bottom and top respectively) border would help in that sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="582" LastEditorUserId="582" LastEditDate="2010-11-03T21:06:20.687" LastActivityDate="2010-11-03T21:06:20.687" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="565" CreationDate="2010-11-03T20:24:46.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Overall, I like the mock-up a lot - it's very easy on the eyes, the mouse-click background is a cool-yet-subtle effect, and you've made mbq's already-awesome logo look fantastic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did have a problem figuring out the up-and-down buttons in the question screen, however - first, I thought they were missing; then I realized they were these little green slivers.  After I thought about it for a moment, I realized that they must the tails of a normal distribution.  Only now, after mulling that over for hours and having my eyes dilated by my ophthalmalogist have I actually &lt;strong&gt;seen&lt;/strong&gt; the rest of the distribution behind the vote count.  It looks like you're using the same grey there that you put as the backing for the tags, etc. - it might be easier to see if it were darker, or perhaps a different color than grey (would it work to take the same green of the toggled up-vote and just use a lower alpha setting?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, looks fantastic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastActivityDate="2010-11-03T20:24:46.300" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="607" CreationDate="2010-11-04T04:12:28.880" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about a scatter plot with a clear outlier, marked 404. Also this one could be used for captcha, with on the axes speed and reputation and than an outlier with a high speed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regrettably, I'm not having time now for a mockup.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Drafts by mbq:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/V5zaO.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iOmYq.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2010-11-04T12:30:54.363" LastActivityDate="2010-11-04T12:30:54.363" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="607" CreationDate="2010-11-04T12:10:14.497" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe a NaN flow for error page? Like  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  [1] NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN&#xA; [19] NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN&#xA; [37] NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN&#xA; [55] NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN&#xA; [73] NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN&#xA; [91] NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN&#xA;[109] NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN&#xA;[127] NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN&#xA;[145] NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN&#xA;[163] NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN&#xA;[181] NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN&#xA;[199] NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN&#xA;[217] NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN&#xA;[235] NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN&#xA;[253] NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN&#xA;[271] NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN&#xA;[289] NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN&#xA;[307] NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN&#xA;[325] NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN&#xA;[343] NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN&#xA;[361] NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-11-04T12:10:14.497" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="615" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="616" CreationDate="2010-11-04T14:33:52.853" Score="5" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question on: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/4099/28&quot;&gt;VIF, Condition Index and eigen values&lt;/a&gt; has been closed as off-topic. I disagree with that decision. While I agree with some of the comments that the question can be improved the question itself is on-topic. I also agree that the OP in question has not demonstrated sufficient involvement (via voting) but do note that the OP has awarded rep by accepting an answer on one question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest the following resolution to the issue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Merge the unregistered, registered user ids of the OP. (Can a mod please help the OP here?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The OP or a moderator deletes the 'answer' posted on the question seeking help as that should be on meta as pointed out by whuber. Perhaps, the OP does not know about meta?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Once the OP's account issue is resolved and the OP votes up questions as appropriate, the question is opened up.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the above three steps have taken place, in the interest of a maximizing a clean site, perhaps most of the comments that are no longer relevant can be deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summary: Closing this question which is on-topic is not a resolution to the issue we have been having.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any thoughts on the above suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am giving below the history of comments for this question for posterity as we should delete those comments as the issue is nearly resolved:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@ayush At least, you should keep in mind that those that previously answered your questions are probably expecting a check from you about the usefulness of their answers to your questions. – chl Nov 1 at 10:27&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@chl..I have already checked many of those..including yours and non-stop. Please see it again..I know I am late but as I said earlier I was new to this community and still new. Having said that, I pledge to vote or tick for the answers I find useful. – ayush biyani Nov 1 at 11:02&#xA;3   up voted&#xA;@ayush What you call &quot;many&quot; actually stands for one accepted answer and no upvote. Anyway, the purpose of my comments was mainly that you should consider writing clear questions (they are interesting on their own), with one definitive issue, and reserve comments for additional infos relevant to your original question, not follow-up. BTW, &quot;non-stop&quot; should actually read @onestop. Let's stop that, this is definitely not the purpose of this SE, and I have no doubt about your willingness and enthusiasm to contribute to it. – chl Nov 1 at 11:37&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@chl finally I get a good comment..anyway I am wondering nobody's answering my recent question.. – ayush biyani Nov 1 at 11:46&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@ayush I suspect that @chl (and others) are gently trying to get you involved in more than asking questions on this site. That you haven't upvoted a single question suggests a lack of interest in this site or its subject matter. (This is characteristic of people fishing for answers to homework problems, for example.) Your contributions in the form of answers to other questions, voting on questions and responses (including responses to your own questions!), and comments would be valuable and welcome. – whuber Nov 1 at 15:04&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@whuber- I reiterate that I didnt know people vote(up and down) to people's answers. Frankly speaking now this is getting lil naging..I assure every people reading this post that I am more than just fishing for my answers in this site. People who are experienced in this site can kindly ask themselves this question as to how much did they contribute in their hey days in this site and you'd get some answers. Again...lets stop this thing and concentrate on statistics than each person repeating the same thing..sorry if I sound harsh but now this is getting over my last nerve... – ayush biyani Nov 2 at 7:04&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@chl- Can you please vouch for my interest in this site as you did in one of other's comments. I guess then whuber would take your word and leave me with clothes. – ayush biyani Nov 2 at 7:07&#xA;2   up voted&#xA;@ayush No nagging here. The repetition is warranted by your failure to change your behavior. Insinuations about other participants and their alleged histories with this site are neither appropriate nor constructive. Just read the FAQ, please; act accordingly; and nobody will bother you again about these issues. As I wrote earlier, you are warmly welcome on this site and I look forward to your active and productive participation. – whuber 2 days ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@whuber-- I respect your immense experience in the field of stats and with this site..But it seems that you havent read my full comment..you answered about the nagging part but you didnt answer the part which asks everyone how much did you contribute in the first 5 days of your membership ? and now since you have pointed out my failure to change my behavior can you please see the number of posts i have ticked and upvoted..that since I got the first comment from chl..I know alleged history of other participants are not constructive but u have to keep in mind before saying me again and again. – ayush biyani 2 days ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@whuber as I said earlier as well lets concentrate on the activities rather than digging the old potholes..I think our energy is getting diverted into something else.. – ayush biyani 2 days ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@ayush I'm afraid to say that you are misinterpreting our advices. I'm very keen to contribute to the development of this SE, not to waste my time trying to explain the FAQ or justifying every of my words. We all agree that your contribution on this Q&amp;amp;A is welcome, which means that we expect you to be involved in asking questions and providing responses, and voting in both cases. It may be that the responses you ticked were not recorded, because actually you still have 0 votes. Expecting a response from specific people in this SE is not encouraged since everybody can participate. – chl 2 days ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@chl I am very sure site is not recording it though why would it happen to me alone..anwyay..lets play our best shot. I assure you that I will not interpret your advice wrong way. – ayush biyani 2 days ago&#xA;@whuber @chl @ayush I may be mistaken but it seems that unregistered users cannot vote. So, perhaps, the answer to the problem is for ayush to register. – Srikant Vadali yesterday &#xA;3   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@ayush You have zero votes and now three questions. The simple request from others involved here is to vote on answers to your existing questions. Period. Regarding this current question: it could also be improved because it's asked many different questions without a clear common thread. Are you interested in multicollinearity in general? Or are you interested in VIF? It would be better to break these out for clarity. – Shane♦ yesterday&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Srikant-vadali But @ayush must be registered since he has rep. – csgillespie♦ yesterday&#xA;@csgillespie Nope. See his user profile. Apparently, you can get rep even if you are unregistered or so a cursory meta.SO search shows. I do not know how current my info is or if things have changed recently. – Srikant Vadali yesterday &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@csgillespie Isn't this user registered? He has a name. Non-registered users are something like user123412512... – Shane♦ yesterday&#xA;@shane I just now noticed that this user has two accounts. One registered and the other not. For some reason, the registered account did not show up earlier in the day. – Srikant Vadali yesterday&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="svadali" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2010-11-05T15:34:28.583" Title="Suggestion for question on: &quot;VIF, Condition Index and eigen values&quot;" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="615" CreationDate="2010-11-04T14:47:47.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that closing the question wasn't ideal, but it seemed like we would have another page worth of comments. And when comments weren't enough we would start to get responses as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/4099/vif-condition-index-and-eigen-values/4207#4207&quot;&gt;answers&lt;/a&gt;. The question was also starting to get flagged by users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, if the OP sorts out his voting/registration we can delete the comments and reopen the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically I see closing this question as &lt;em&gt;putting the question on hold&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that I didn't actually address your proposal. I agree with your three points above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've deleted the comments and reopened the question. Thanks to @Srikant-Vadali for coordinating this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2010-11-05T15:34:28.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="615" CreationDate="2010-11-04T15:24:50.760" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am happy to see the question closed, not because it is off-topic but because the associated comments that have been left are going to be a little bit off-topic themselves. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I initially flagged the question, just because I thought someone else should act as a &quot;moderator&quot;. Anyway, it seems the OP wasn't aware of the voting system, then wasn't able to vote because of his duplicated account or something like that. Myself, I'm not familiar with SEs, and I don't like judging an user about his/her behavior. Anyway, even without reading the FAQ, I think the principle of voting and/or accepting answer is not so outstanding... But more importantly, I was originally trying to suggest to this particular user that it is not very appropriate to use comments as a way to ask further questions (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/3984/aic-and-sc-value/&quot;&gt;Understanding AIC and Schwarz criterion&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/4075/how-to-perform-t-test-with-huge-samples/&quot;&gt;How to perform t-test with huge samples?&lt;/a&gt;); in the meantime, I realized that he didn't vote at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, the question is on-topic, but there's too much confusion around that question now. So it is better to start another question, and delete this one. I think everyone, including the OP, will agree with that proposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2010-11-04T15:24:50.760" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="618" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-04T19:22:12.507" Score="13" ViewCount="432" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hi all, as you can see, the new design went live both here and on the parent site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Congrats and thank you for your design input this week!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please let me know if you see any CSS or styling issues. Do &lt;strong&gt;start a new post&lt;/strong&gt; for bug reports, and tag it with &quot;design&quot; and &quot;bug&quot; so I can easily track them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. To make the new favicons show up in your browser, you can manually refresh if they're being cached. load the following URLs in your browser and hit control+F5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://sstatic.net/stats/img/favicon.ico&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://sstatic.net/stats/img/favicon.ico&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://sstatic.net/statsmeta/img/favicon.ico&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://sstatic.net/statsmeta/img/favicon.ico&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2010-12-07T10:33:17.817" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="New Design Launched" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="618" CreationDate="2010-11-04T21:55:13.623" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although I didn't participate to the extensive chat session, I must say that you've made a very neat job. Congrats!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, there's no probs with Safari 5.0.2 on a Mac OS 10.6.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2010-11-04T21:55:13.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="618" CreationDate="2010-11-04T23:42:48.897" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically, nice work and thank you. It all looks very professional and grown up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One minor detail I'm unsure about is the kerning in the logo -- &quot;alidated&quot; seems rather tight, while there's a bit much space after the V.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise I like it. Well done -- and congratulations to all who sail in her!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174" LastActivityDate="2010-11-04T23:42:48.897" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="618" CreationDate="2010-11-05T00:40:06.683" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Great job! Just one thing: can you please change the page titles (the title that appears in the browser titlebar) to &quot;Cross Validated&quot; or &quot;Cross Validated - Stack Exchange&quot;. It is still showing up as &quot;Statistical Analysis - Stack Exchange&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastActivityDate="2010-11-05T00:40:06.683" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="618" CreationDate="2010-11-05T03:36:44.863" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another thing I just noticed. The normal densities for the accepted answers have tails that are too short. The ones used for up and down votes look more normal. Can we make the green symbols for accepted answers more like these? The correct shape is given at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/269/what-should-our-logo-and-site-design-look-like/491#491&quot;&gt;What should our logo and site design look like?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2010-11-05T03:36:44.863" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="618" CreationDate="2010-11-05T07:01:18.423" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looks very nice on my desktop and laptop. Looks terrible on my PDA though - the background 'squared paper' image comes out much darker and makes the text virtually unreadable. My PDA is running Windows Mobile 6 Classic and whatever cut-down version Intenet Explorer came with that (can't find a version number). The beta design looked fine. I can turn images off once i remember, but then I have to turn them back on afterwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-11-05T07:01:18.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="624" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="625" CreationDate="2010-11-05T09:50:25.233" Score="9" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a bit puzzled by the fact that the reputation (but not the badges) is shared between CrossValidated and meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;StackOverflow has two different reputations for the parent and the meta website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this by design or is it a bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="582" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2010-11-11T11:15:05.583" LastActivityDate="2010-11-11T11:15:05.583" Title="Reputation in meta" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="624" CreationDate="2010-11-05T13:24:30.613" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/new-per-site-metas/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;by design&lt;/a&gt;. Up- and downvotes are usually used on meta to vote on proposals, and people could be scared to a) discuss an idea that could be controversial, in fear of losing rep, or b) downvoting an answer, because they think the &quot;punishment&quot; for the answerer is too harsh. So the rep you see on a site meta is always the rep of the parent site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the time this was implemented, the main Stack Exchange Meta was already too large, with such a distinct community, that it would be a big change to &quot;reset&quot; everyone's rep score to the main SO rep (and some people deliberately don't associate their SO and MSO accounts). So they were &quot;grandfathered in&quot; as a standalone site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1823" LastActivityDate="2010-11-05T13:24:30.613" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="626" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-05T17:30:06.243" Score="1" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hi All,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been using the new design. I like it. However I sometimes can't find the tab on the right, the one that says Newest/Featured/Hot/Votes/Active, I think it is because it is a little bit too small. Just my impression after using the app for a few hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps to phrase it as a question: what do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Carlos&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1540" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2011-02-07T07:42:28.627" LastActivityDate="2011-02-07T07:42:28.627" Title="Tabs on the right" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="618" CreationDate="2010-11-06T07:22:39.947" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One other thing: I've just posted an answer with some external URIs and was a bit disconcerted to see them display in red. To me, red links look like broken links or links to empty pages as this is the convention on Wikipedia and other wikis. Is this just me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-11-06T07:22:39.947" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="628" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-06T15:58:28.493" Score="0" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you see the image below the contrast between the background 'grey' and the 'white' content degrades as you go down vertically which I think strains the eyes. Towards the bottom I can hardly distinguish between the background and the main content area. Can we have consistent contrast along the vertical dimension? See the red highlighted region in the image below. You see the same issue on the main site as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EzHJm.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T17:57:17.683" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T17:57:17.683" Title="Contrast between background and main content degrades vertically" Tags="|support|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="618" CreationDate="2010-11-06T19:30:21.723" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The background image colors don't appear to match the CSS background colors on Windows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rn4sZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Might &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.viget.com/inspire/the-mysterious-save-for-web-color-shift/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; have something to do with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1875" LastActivityDate="2010-11-06T19:30:21.723" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="618" CreationDate="2010-11-08T09:17:58.013" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that the logo on stackexchange.com site lacks white bars:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Fvdy7.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-11-08T09:17:58.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="628" CreationDate="2010-11-08T17:18:24.160" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;But the content area where you are reading is solid. I have designed sites with this ambient background gradient and I think it is a pleasing effect. I'm not seeing this strain on the eyes but that's just my contrasting opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246" LastActivityDate="2010-11-08T17:18:24.160" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="626" CreationDate="2010-11-08T17:30:39.280" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of the &quot;problem&quot; is that the system message stretching across the screen is being used for routine messages. The &quot;system message&quot; was designed to be used only under extraordinary circumstances&amp;hellip; and it's supposed to &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; stand out. That drowns out the tab block just underneath it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Re-designing the top-right tabs to &lt;em&gt;out-scream&lt;/em&gt; the screaming system message isn't really a good answer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators are free to set the system message and many are using it to publicize routine aspects of the site. But when you &lt;em&gt;blast out&lt;/em&gt; a message on every single screen across the entire site, that's just too much. We simply need a better way to provide system-wide announcements/messages so they don't &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to use the Stack Exchange-equivalent of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_broadcast_system&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Emergency Broadcast System&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246" LastActivityDate="2010-11-08T17:30:39.280" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="633" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="634" CreationDate="2010-11-09T01:31:44.820" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actual screenshot: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dbNxw.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2010-11-09T15:03:24.557" LastActivityDate="2010-11-09T15:03:24.557" Title="Chat box in the right panel shows &quot;Could not access chat.&quot;" Tags="|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="633" CreationDate="2010-11-09T15:03:12.247" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a DNS error that will correct itself in 24 hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2010-11-09T15:03:12.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="635" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="637" CreationDate="2010-11-09T16:04:53.750" Score="4" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a question where I had posted separate answers to my own question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/4258/1381&quot;&gt;Can I semi-automate MCMC convergence diagnostics to set the burn-in length?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then was requested to combine them. Which is this the preferred approach?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1381" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2010-11-09T19:19:17.717" Title="As I research a question that I asked, is it appropriate to answer my own question multiple times?" Tags="|discussion|answers|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="618" CreationDate="2010-11-09T16:58:06.753" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Great job! One side comment however; i understand the desire to have tame colors, but it's very hard to see the difference in colors between the the links to the questions that have been visited already, and the links that have not been visited already (in the pages listing questions,i.e. for example on the main page). Can that be somehow accentuated ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="603" LastActivityDate="2010-11-09T16:58:06.753" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2010-11-09T19:19:17.717" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My opinion on this issue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you should provide only one answer. I cannot think of a reason to do otherwise. You can always split up the answer into sections such as &quot;Method 1&quot;, &quot;Theoretical Solution&quot;, &quot;Illustrative Code&quot; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-11-09T19:19:17.717" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="639" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-11-11T22:35:00.580" Score="2" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;For some reason, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/4445/159&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; is ignoring all paragraph breaks and formatting for the last 40% of the question. It looks ok in preview, but not after saving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2010-11-12T03:07:28.543" Title="Formatting problem" Tags="|bug|status-completed|formatting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="639" CreationDate="2010-11-12T03:07:20.103" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was a bug in our &quot;hoist out of the markdown parsing&quot; code for &lt;code&gt;$..$&lt;/code&gt; ranges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2010-11-12T03:07:20.103" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="607" CreationDate="2010-11-16T11:45:55.727" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another 404 idea:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4QP2M.png&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-11-16T11:45:55.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="505" CreationDate="2010-11-17T12:49:13.533" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Certainly physics.SE at some point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-11-17T12:49:13.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="505" CreationDate="2010-11-18T19:36:12.943" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To tex.SE? A lot less common than math.SE or StackOverflow, but seems worth considering to me. Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/4501/449&quot;&gt;Typographic conventions for width of figures in LaTeX data analysis reports&lt;/a&gt; Reverse path probably not needed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2010-11-18T19:36:12.943" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="505" CreationDate="2010-11-18T19:39:28.290" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking further ahead, we should consider adding &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/117/quantitative-finance&quot;&gt;Quantitative Finance&lt;/a&gt; if and when it comes out of beta (currently still in the 'commit' phase).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-11-18T19:39:28.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="646" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="651" CreationDate="2010-11-19T00:10:02.753" Score="4" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes formatting symbols are not recognized immediately after a TeX expression, as in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/4686/sampling-with-non-uniform-costs/4697#4697&quot;&gt;fourth paragraph here&lt;/a&gt;.  (This is not the only instance I have encountered.  A work-around is to put a single linefeed between the TeX and the ensuing characters.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the offending text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;**The error rate depends on the state of the population**.  I interpret the problem to require that the *expected* error size be assured of not exceeding the limit $k$  *no matter what the state of the population may be.*  We cannot remove the word &quot;expected&quot; here, because (except for nearly exhaustive samples), the maximum error size can be arbitrarily close to 1 for large populations.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the original the last group of asterisks, which should italicize a phrase, is rendered literally.  (It is interesting that they successfully create italicization within the 'PRE' block here!)  Finally, here is a copy of that paragraph.  It looks fine in editing mode preview but it is still rendered incorrectly in the standard view:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The error rate depends on the state of the population&lt;/strong&gt;.  I interpret the problem to require that the &lt;em&gt;expected&lt;/em&gt; error size be assured of not exceeding the limit $k$ &lt;em&gt;no matter what the state of the population may be.&lt;/em&gt;  We cannot remove the word &quot;expected&quot; here, because (except for nearly exhaustive samples), the maximum error size can be arbitrarily close to 1 for large populations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2013-07-27T23:01:52.220" Title="Formatting problem" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|formatting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="647" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="648" CreationDate="2010-11-19T11:02:23.147" Score="10" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a machine learner coming from computer science, I do not had a solid education in statistics. Frankly, my past data analysis experience is dominated by hands-on approaches. I have a solid knowledge about a bunch of algorithms, both ml and statistics (when to apply, properties which may affect the result etc.) , but my theoretical knowledge really has big gaps (I keep learning). Hence I am able to answer questions more in the sense of &quot;from my experience&quot; but not in the sense of &quot;I know that xy is definitely true&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will remain silent for most of the time, but sometimes certain question remain open, which I have the feeling I can provide some hints (e.g. this one: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/4606/averaged-continuous-kernel-density-estimates-in-lieu-of-a-discrete-kernel-density&quot;&gt;Averaged continuous Kernel Density Estimates in lieu of a discrete Kernel Density Estimate in Monte Carlo Proceedure&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my question: Should I please keep my mouth shut to not confuse the questioner or am I allowed to contribute to the best of my knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apologize if this question itself is not appropriate for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="264" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2010-11-19T17:57:23.077" Title="To the best of my knowledge vs exact knowledge" Tags="|discussion|new-users|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="647" CreationDate="2010-11-19T17:56:31.033" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect most of us struggle with this quandary most of the time.  When you can provide solid theoretical support for your response, of course that's good.  But even when you cannot, yet you are sharing experience, that can be just as valuable (or even more so), so please don't hesitate to contribute on that account.  (It helps to indicate what kinds and amounts of experience you have.)  I see this as involving some personal risk because it's possible that the experience I share could be based on a mistaken understanding or inferior approach and someone might point that out.  (This happens to me all the time on some other forums, I'm afraid.)  Well, so be it: it's humbling but it's a great learning opportunity!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2010-11-19T17:56:31.033" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="647" CreationDate="2010-11-19T17:57:23.077" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not see anything inappropriate in answering a question as long as it is relevant to the question at hand. If it is incorrect in some way it will be pointed out in the comments and that would enrich the experience for everyone (OP, the answerer and everyone else).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, be prepared to get your ego to be bruised a bit (via downvotes, corrections etc) but that is the price you pay for learning something new on the main site. I myself have given incorrect answers and edited them where I could to provide the correct answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-11-19T17:57:23.077" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="505" CreationDate="2010-11-19T19:35:46.420" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, I have now enabled:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;math --&gt; stats&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;stats --&gt; math&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;stats --&gt; stack overflow&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Srikant noted in his comment, we want migration paths to be based on &quot;happens in the wild frequently&quot;, not &quot;could theoretically happen at some unknown possible point in the future&quot;..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2010-11-19T19:35:46.420" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="646" CreationDate="2010-11-19T20:15:44.373" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looks like adding an extra space is a workaround for now (I added an extra space to your example above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2010-11-19T20:15:44.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="652" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="653" CreationDate="2010-11-20T00:54:50.503" Score="2" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I would like to quote multiple lines together, do I have to add &quot;&gt;&quot; at the beginning of every line and two spaces at the end of each line? Is there a way similar to [quote] ... [\quote]. By the way, what is [quote] ... [\quote] used for, and why it does not work here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarlly, is there something as convenient as to [code] ... [\code] to quote a snippet of code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1005" LastActivityDate="2010-11-20T01:41:46.887" Title="How to quote multiple lines" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="652" CreationDate="2010-11-20T01:41:46.887" Score="3" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To get quotes highlight the text and press &quot;Ctrl+Q&quot; (Q for quote). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For a code block, highlight the text and press &quot;Ctrl+K&quot; (K for Code).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-11-20T01:41:46.887" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="654" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="656" CreationDate="2010-11-24T15:05:05.713" Score="4" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does one merge tags?  Does it take a moderator?  (The &quot;multicolinearity&quot; tag is a misspelling of &quot;multicollinearity&quot;, for example, and should be removed permanently.  Or should we allow misspelled synonyms?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2010-11-24T21:34:25.710" Title="Correcting tag misspellings" Tags="|support|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="654" CreationDate="2010-11-24T15:12:41.767" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the we should follow the following general recipe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Misspellings like the one pointed out in the question should be fixed. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Misspellings because of a difference in usage across contexts (e.g., color vs colour) should not be fixed. Instead, we should use the synonym feature for these types of misspellings.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-11-24T15:12:41.767" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="654" CreationDate="2010-11-24T21:34:25.710" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer you general question, you can create a synonym when you have 10K rep or are a mod (see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/privileges&quot;&gt;privileges&lt;/a&gt; page).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding your particular question about multicollinearity, I agree with Srikant's suggestion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Misspellings should be fixed (as in this case).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Context differences should be handled with a synonym, e.g. modelling and modeling.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2010-11-24T21:34:25.710" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="657" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="658" CreationDate="2010-11-26T21:06:30.843" Score="7" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have seen some questions where, after an initial struggle, the poser elects to initiate a new thread in the guise of a new question.  For example, from today alone, we have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/4914/919&quot;&gt;Developing a Statistical Test to Ascertain a Better Fit&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/4945/919&quot;&gt;“Normalized” standard deviation&lt;/a&gt;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/4942/919&quot;&gt;Threshold for Fisher linear classifier&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/4949/919&quot;&gt;Calculating the error of Bayes classifier analytically&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are pros and cons for this approach.  One argument in favor is that sometimes a large body of eventually irrelevant comments accumulates, so starting off with a clean question might be clearer.  An opposing argument is that this can create a complex trail of closely related or essentially identical questions.  What are best practices in this regard, how are (or should they be) implemented, and by whom?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2010-11-29T16:52:47.247" Title="Coping with reformulated questions" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="657" CreationDate="2010-11-29T16:52:47.247" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be honest, I'm not really sure (hence the delay in this answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Discourage the opening of new questions.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If their are a large number of comments, well don't worry about it. The page only shows the top 5 anyway.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a new question is opened, then:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;delete the old question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;don't flame the questioner - they're probably new here. A simple comment stating that we discourage opening new questions, when the old question should have just been reworded.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastActivityDate="2010-11-29T16:52:47.247" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="659" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="662" CreationDate="2010-11-30T17:34:32.523" Score="3" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/users/429846/gavin-simpson&quot;&gt;Gavin Simpson&lt;/a&gt; mentioned to me that he gets the following when trying to post in the &quot;Ten Fold&quot; chat room:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I see &quot;This room is frozen; new&#xA;  messages cannot be added.&quot; where the&#xA;  message box would be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see this (presumably since I'm an admin).  The site chat room should not be frozen, regardless of how active it is.  Can this be fixed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2010-11-30T23:57:03.790" Title="Chat room is frozen?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="660" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="661" CreationDate="2010-11-30T21:54:54.853" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site's &lt;code&gt;404 not found&lt;/code&gt; image is not unique. It's shared with TeX SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/404&quot;&gt;https://tex.stackexchange.com/404&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/404&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/404&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's entirely possible that this is intentional, but since most sites don't have the same image, I thought it was reasonable to suspect that it was a bug.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sister bug report:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/745/the-404-not-found-image-is-not-unique&quot;&gt;on Meta TeX&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2204" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2010-12-02T14:54:09.047" Title="The 404 not found image is not unique" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="660" CreationDate="2010-11-30T23:31:42.383" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is intentional. There are no special 404 and CAPTCHA images for tex.stackexchange.org yet and apparently Jin (the designer of these sites) decided that the CrossValidated images make good placeholders for the TeX site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2207" LastActivityDate="2010-11-30T23:31:42.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="659" CreationDate="2010-11-30T23:56:52.370" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;See the &lt;code&gt;/faq&lt;/code&gt; for the rules, specifically&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/faq#retention&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/faq#retention&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rooms will exist indefinitely, so long as there is at least one person actively talking in the room. A room is considered worth retaining if it has more than 15 messages by at least 2 users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rooms not worth retaining which are inactive for 7 days will be deleted. &lt;strong&gt;Rooms worth retaining which are inactive for 14 days will be frozen.&lt;/strong&gt; Frozen rooms do not allow any new messages to be sent, and are not shown in the default room list to prevent cluttering the rooms interface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relevant bit bolded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-11-30T23:56:52.370" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="663" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="664" CreationDate="2010-12-07T20:59:31.600" Score="7" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, there are two tags for questions that are related (to some extent) to data visualization: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/data-visualization&quot;&gt;data-visualization&lt;/a&gt; (44) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/graphical-techniques&quot;&gt;graphical-techniques&lt;/a&gt; (37). What's the difference, if any?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe there are some subtle differences between them that I cannot grasp actually. From what has been posted so far, my understanding is as follows: &lt;em&gt;data visualization&lt;/em&gt; has to do with &quot;how to display data&quot; (broadly speaking) and &quot;what can I use to display my data&quot; (more of a software issue), whereas &lt;em&gt;graphical techniques&lt;/em&gt; is perhaps more related to &quot;how may I provide a visual explanation of my data structure&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am asking that question because I often feel confused when trying to retag some questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas or thoughts on that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2010-12-07T22:23:06.937" Title="How to deal with data visualization tags?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="663" CreationDate="2010-12-07T21:17:13.407" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there's a distinction it's not clear to me either, so i'd vote to merge them (or make one a synonym for the other, or do a batch rename, or whatever the appropriate terminology / process is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-12-07T21:17:13.407" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="663" CreationDate="2010-12-07T22:23:06.937" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I also don't see the distinction in those questions.  &lt;code&gt;graphical-techniques&lt;/code&gt; just makes me think of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_models&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;graphical models&lt;/a&gt; (for which we do have a tag), so perhaps removing it and having only &lt;code&gt;data-visualization&lt;/code&gt; would be best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only disadvantage of that is that when people have questions about plots, they're likely to try to tag it by typing &quot;plot&quot; or &quot;graph&quot; and hoping for an auto-complete; &lt;code&gt;data-visualization&lt;/code&gt; won't be of much use there.  Now, if we could get &quot;plot&quot; and &quot;graph&quot; to autocomplete to &lt;code&gt;data-visualization&lt;/code&gt;, we'd be set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastActivityDate="2010-12-07T22:23:06.937" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="666" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="670" CreationDate="2010-12-09T15:01:01.927" Score="4" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently merged [graphical-techniques] into [data-visualization].  I was expecting this to remove the graphical-techniques tags when the other tag already existed, but instead it added duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to dedupe these tags now, short of going through and deleting them manually?  Also, is this expected behavior?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2010-12-10T06:01:43.937" LastActivityDate="2010-12-10T06:02:29.163" Title="Merge tags -&gt; Duplicate tags" Tags="|bug|status-completed|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="667" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-12-09T15:49:28.573" Score="7" ViewCount="361" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have an &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/18/ten-fold&quot;&gt;awesome chat&lt;/a&gt; (yes, it is &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/12/talkative-and-precognitive-badges/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;awesome by design&lt;/a&gt;), and a small traffic there. Yet there is an idea to organize a periodic meetup to boost the chat popularity. Photo.SE has for instance photo critique sessions; we could have a some kind of journal club.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, two questions: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you think it is a good idea? (=Would you participate?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When could it be scheduled to gather maximal audience? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2010-12-10T16:43:50.980" Title="CV journal club?" Tags="|discussion|chat|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="667" CreationDate="2010-12-09T22:29:41.467" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I think it is a great idea providing JC content is defined and planned in advance (so that interested people can reserve some time). Maybe we could start with focused topics based on recent posts (where diverging opinions were expressed, or with large voting rate on Q or A), or more general ones (no idea about that), or users might suggest some topics based on recent literature/work that will be submitted to a voting process (JC participants or CV users).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea of a time that would best fit with everyone's agenda. It seems, however, that most users are somewhere between US and Europe (I must apologize for extrapolating this way), so 5pm in NYC means 11pm in France/Germany (a little bit late). So I guess we have to find a compromise, e.g. 1 or 2pm US time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About frequency, what is your idea? I won't expect a great audience on a daily basis, but maybe every 2 weeks or every month will be a reasonable starting point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2010-12-09T22:29:41.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="666" CreationDate="2010-12-09T23:00:10.123" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The [graphical-techniques] tag seems to have gone. Maybe it took a while for the merge to go through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastActivityDate="2010-12-09T23:00:10.123" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="666" CreationDate="2010-12-10T06:02:29.163" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I ran the deduplication process and cleaned up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Renaming does not actually deduplicate tags; if the rename creates a duplicate tag, the post will have duplicate tags..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2010-12-10T06:02:29.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="667" CreationDate="2010-12-10T16:09:17.493" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the idea.  And the chat room allows you to schedule events in there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on the frequency, timing, etc., I would participate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-12-10T16:09:17.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="667" CreationDate="2010-12-10T16:43:50.980" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I too like the idea. To maximise appeal it will useful to have a range of types of papers considered for the journal club; theoretical through to applied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know a lot of us are academics here, but how do we solve the issue of access to journals for those without subscriptions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would participate, though like @Shane, it would depend on timing and frequency. Once a month would be fine, any more than that and it will start eating into the day job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1390" LastActivityDate="2010-12-10T16:43:50.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="673" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="675" CreationDate="2010-12-11T06:50:22.643" Score="3" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;This problem was &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/1323/slow-processing-different-look-to-math-processing-problem-with-fonts-is-it-me&quot;&gt;first reported&lt;/a&gt; on Math.SE. I'm bring this to your attention since Stats.SE also uses Mathjax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, the latest build of Firefox version 3.6.13 has a known issue of messing up Mathjax font(to the point where the font doesn't load). The devs of Mathjax are &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax/issues#issue/22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;aware of this&lt;/a&gt;, and are working on a fix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2010-12-12T07:22:30.953" LastActivityDate="2010-12-12T07:22:56.040" Title="Firefox 3.6.13 messes up Mathjax" Tags="|bug|status-completed|math-display|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="674" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="677" CreationDate="2010-12-11T15:30:38.853" Score="10" ViewCount="774" Body="&lt;p&gt;EDIT3: CVJC1 finished; you can read the transcript &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/18/conversation/cross-validated-journal-club-1&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT2: I have still no response from the author, yet I think it should go as planned: 12/17/2010, 16:00UTC, we will discuss text mining in general basing on the article proposed by @onestop:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.i-journals.org/ss/viewarticle.php?id=16&amp;amp;layout=abstract&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jeffrey L. Solka. Text data mining: Theory and methods. Statistical Surveys 2008&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and possibly also text mining tools in R, after the paper proposed by @chl:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstatsoft.org/v25/i05&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ingo Feinerer, Kurt Hornik, David Meyer. Text Mining Infrastructure in R. JSS 2008&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to come, please &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/18/ten-fold?tab=schedule&quot;&gt;register to the event here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(This is not obligatory or necessary to participate, but you'll get an e-mail notification)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/667/cv-journal-club&quot;&gt;See also previous question.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/224007#224007&quot;&gt;discussion on the chat yesterday&lt;/a&gt; (thanks for chl, csgillespie, Gavin Simpson and Shane), the initial idea for this clarified.&#xA;So the CVJC:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;will be held monthly probably Fridays, maybe 16:00UTC (this may be changing so that each major time zone will have equal chance to be in a comfortable time)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the discussed article(s)&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;will be picked on a meta thread like this before the chat event&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;must be OpenAccess or preprints/reprints, so everyone could read them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we (mods) will try to contact the authors and invite them to join the discussion (their acceptance will be a required constrain to use a preprint)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;may also appear in a form of R package promotion event when package author shows a guided demo of its capabilities (this needs some further refinement of technical details)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So please, propose the articles as answers to this question. In a first approximation the first CVJC is scheduled for 16:00UTC 17.12.2010.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: To settle timetable, let's say the deadline for paper suggestions is 23:59UTC 14.12.2010.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2010-12-17T18:40:27.967" Title="First Cross Validated Journal Club" Tags="|discussion|chat|journal-club|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="673" CreationDate="2010-12-12T07:22:56.040" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;New OTF font files have been downloaded and applied to all installations where MathJax is used. If you are still having trouble clear your browser cache.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2010-12-12T07:22:56.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="674" CreationDate="2010-12-12T20:45:56.810" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about an article from &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.i-journals.org/ss/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Statistical Surveys&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, an open-access peer-reviewed journal that publishes what its title suggests?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one in the current volume caught my eye for some reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Arlot S, Celisse A. A survey of cross-validation procedures for model selection. &lt;em&gt;Statistical Surveys&lt;/em&gt; 2010; 4:40-79. DOI: &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-SS054&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;10.1214/09-SS054&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- but I haven't even checked the contents pages of the previous volumes so i'm open to other suggestions, especially ones with fewer than 40 pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-12-12T20:45:56.810" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="674" CreationDate="2010-12-13T14:03:06.020" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about this article from the same journal I suggested before?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jeffrey L. Solka. Text data mining: Theory and methods. &lt;em&gt;Statistical Surveys&lt;/em&gt; 2008; 2: 94-112. DOI: &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/07-SS016&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;10.1214/07-SS016&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons: open access, not very long (c. 12 pages of main text), not very mathematical (5 equations, no calculus or measure theory), seems quite a hot topic at the moment, I know nothing about it myself (so i'm not offering to 'present' it! In fact i doubt i can make the meeting this friday, sorry...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastActivityDate="2010-12-13T14:03:06.020" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="678" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="689" CreationDate="2010-12-13T17:45:14.800" Score="3" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;The font used to render code chunks (whoel paragraphs rather than in-line) is too large, and larger than on say SO. This makes it difficult to insert code chunks from languages such as R in Questions or Answers. Code chunks are then displayed with scrollbars. For example, a trivial bit of R code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; colnames(model.matrix(Y ~ Pred1*Pred2*Pred3*Pred4*Pred5 -1, data = DF))&#xA;     [1] &quot;Pred1&quot;                         &quot;Pred2&quot;                        &#xA;     [3] &quot;Pred3&quot;                         &quot;Pred4&quot;                        &#xA;     [5] &quot;Pred5&quot;                         &quot;Pred1:Pred2&quot;                  &#xA;     [7] &quot;Pred1:Pred3&quot;                   &quot;Pred2:Pred3&quot;                  &#xA;     [9] &quot;Pred1:Pred4&quot;                   &quot;Pred2:Pred4&quot;                  &#xA;    [11] &quot;Pred3:Pred4&quot;                   &quot;Pred1:Pred5&quot;                  &#xA;    [13] &quot;Pred2:Pred5&quot;                   &quot;Pred3:Pred5&quot;                  &#xA;    [15] &quot;Pred4:Pred5&quot;                   &quot;Pred1:Pred2:Pred3&quot;            &#xA;    [17] &quot;Pred1:Pred2:Pred4&quot;             &quot;Pred1:Pred3:Pred4&quot;            &#xA;    [19] &quot;Pred2:Pred3:Pred4&quot;             &quot;Pred1:Pred2:Pred5&quot;            &#xA;    [21] &quot;Pred1:Pred3:Pred5&quot;             &quot;Pred2:Pred3:Pred5&quot;            &#xA;    [23] &quot;Pred1:Pred4:Pred5&quot;             &quot;Pred2:Pred4:Pred5&quot;            &#xA;    [25] &quot;Pred3:Pred4:Pred5&quot;             &quot;Pred1:Pred2:Pred3:Pred4&quot;      &#xA;    [27] &quot;Pred1:Pred2:Pred3:Pred5&quot;       &quot;Pred1:Pred2:Pred4:Pred5&quot;      &#xA;    [29] &quot;Pred1:Pred3:Pred4:Pred5&quot;       &quot;Pred2:Pred3:Pred4:Pred5&quot;      &#xA;    [31] &quot;Pred1:Pred2:Pred3:Pred4:Pred5&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The font size on SO seems more useful in this respect, and the font doesn't need to bee that big for code anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1390" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T18:02:54.400" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T18:02:54.400" Title="Code chunks rendered in too large a font" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="679" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="681" CreationDate="2010-12-15T20:45:10.057" Score="4" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/5523/&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/5523/&lt;/a&gt; , for example, was quickly closed as &quot;pure advertising,&quot; which it is.  Nevertheless it still appears among the list of questions and thereby serves its intended purpose of spamming this community.  Thus closing appears to be an ineffective resolution.  What &lt;em&gt;effective&lt;/em&gt; options do we have to counter such abuses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2010-12-15T22:51:27.353" Title="At what point do closed questions disappear from general view?" Tags="|support|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="679" CreationDate="2010-12-15T20:55:40.313" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It will disappear from the main page after enough other questions have been edited to replace it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is actually a feature since it allows the community to &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; closed questions, and hence be part of the debate around whether they are on-topic, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-12-15T20:55:40.313" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="679" CreationDate="2010-12-15T22:35:50.930" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to admit that I would have deleted the question (and the possibly even the user) as it is blatant spam. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that we shouldn't just delete closed questions, but in this case it is just spam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastActivityDate="2010-12-15T22:35:50.930" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="679" CreationDate="2010-12-15T22:51:27.353" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If leaving the post around is harmful (i.e. language, illegal content, blatant spam, etc), it should be deleted by the moderator immediately. But if it is simply closed as something like off-topic, the ability to &quot;vote to delete&quot; will appear after a few days (10K user power).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246" LastActivityDate="2010-12-15T22:51:27.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="683" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-12-16T13:08:46.287" Score="0" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently when I copy code blocks from answers and questions, the end of line characters are not being copied too. This means that everything is copied in one line, and this can cause problems when being parsed. The only work around is to copy and paste each line separately, which can be tedious for large blocks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm using IE7 in Windows, which may be the culprit, but it didn't used to be an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="229" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T19:00:47.823" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Copying code blocks in Windows" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="685" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="687" CreationDate="2010-12-20T13:16:22.670" Score="15" ViewCount="1434" Body="&lt;p&gt;EVEN MORE FINAL EDIT: You can &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/18/conversation/cross-validated-journal-club-2&quot;&gt;find the transcript here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FINAL EDIT: All the details have been settled, so here is a brief summary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second CVJC will take place on 1.21.2011 (UTC -- this will start on 1.20 in some tzs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We will be discussing the paper suggested by Gavin Simpson, &lt;a href=&quot;http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/upload/2010/08/mcshane-and-wyner-2010.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;A Statistical Analysis of Multiple Temperature Proxies: Are Reconstructions of  Surface Temperatures Over the Last 1000 Years Reliable?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by B. B. McShane and A. J. Wyner and general statistical view on analyzing climate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The formula is such that the whole day (0:00UTC--23:59UTC) will be devoted to conversations about (and around) it, yet there will be three &quot;concentration&quot; sessions to seed the discussion -- each participant is expected to appear at at least one of them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A at  1:00UTC  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;B at  9:00UTC  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;C at 16:00UTC   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are planning to come, &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/18/ten-fold?tab=schedule&quot;&gt;please register on this page&lt;/a&gt;; you'll get an e-mail remainder and others would know who to expect and when.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ORIGINAL QUESTION:&#xA;There was not too crowdy on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/674/first-cross-validated-journal-club&quot;&gt;the first CVJC&lt;/a&gt;, so it is time to fix it with the second one ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To remind for those who are new to the idea:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CVJC is a &lt;strike&gt;hour-long&lt;/strike&gt; whole day meeting on &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/18/ten-fold&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; where we discuss some paper and its theoretical/practical surroundings.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The paper must be OpenAccess or a (p)reprint suggested previously on a meta thread like this one and selected in voting.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We (mods) would try to invite the author (it didn't work the first time, but we will keep trying).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, please suggest papers (each in one answer) and this time also time/date. Assuming about 2 week regime I would suggest somewhere between holidays and new year; and please take timezones into account. The deadline for the paper suggestions is 23:59UTC 12.26.2010.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Let's say it has been officially moved to the beginning of 2011. I'm going to arrange some precise time/date voting after the paper selection will be done, but please keep suggestions coming. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT2: Thanks to Shane, the new plan is to make CVJC whole day event full of smaller or longer discussions about the paper. Yet, there will be 3 &quot;concentration sessions&quot;, at 1:00UTC, 9:00UTC and 16:00UTC (each is selected so that people from 2 out of 3 main timezones may participate), to make people actually meet and start talking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT3: There was a tie in votes, so I have performed a fair coin roll and selected the climate one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2011-03-12T11:22:07.397" Title="Second Cross Validated Journal Club" Tags="|discussion|journal-club|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="685" CreationDate="2010-12-20T22:09:24.960" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;What about the following article on &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;collaborative filtering&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (from what I seem to remember, there were some questions dealing with that topic in the past)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Xiaoyuan Su and Taghi M. Khoshgoftaar,&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aai/2009/421425.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;A Survey of Collaborative Filtering&#xA;  Techniques&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Advances in Artificial&#xA;  Intelligence&lt;/em&gt;, Volume 2009 (2009).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/recommenderlab/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;recommenderlab&lt;/a&gt; R package, from Michael Hahsler, seems to implement some algorithms for recommendation systems (see also the accompanying &lt;a href=&quot;http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/recommenderlab/vignettes/recommenderlab.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;vignette&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About a possible date, I would suggest avoiding Friday the 31st. So, if the next CVJC has to be held next week, I would rather suggest Wednesday or Thursday. But maybe we could expect a better participation rate the week after; that is, Friday the 7th?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2010-12-20T22:50:33.283" LastActivityDate="2010-12-20T22:50:33.283" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="685" CreationDate="2010-12-22T10:42:38.487" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Something &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/12/responses-to-mcshane-and-wyner/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;topical&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://climateaudit.org/2010/12/14/mcshane-and-wyner-discussion-2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;controversial&lt;/a&gt; and statistical (and unashamedly from [close to] my field) is the Hockey-stick reconstruction of climate over the past 1500 years. A new paper by McShane and Wyner to be published in Annals of Applied Statistics has generated a lot of discussion and has been made a discussion paper, with 13 responses. All can be found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imstat.org/aoas/next_issue.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here and currently open-access&lt;/a&gt; (Scroll to bottom of page):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main paper and some of the discussions give R code to run the analyses. topic involves time series analysis and multivariate calibration. One potential downside, the main paper is somewhat lengthy and if we add in the discussion papers...!?, plus (at least to my non-statistician non-Bayesian brain) some parts of the main paper and discussion points are quite technical from the stats point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These works represent the first real coming together of statisticians and palaeoecologists to tackle a question of fundamental importance; does the climate of present differ substantially from that experienced in the recent past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for dates, I'd favour pushing the next session into early Jan (7th) as I might be hard pushed to get some free time between Christmas and New Year to contribute to whatever topic is chosen, but I am free on Jan 7th to contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1390" LastEditorUserId="1390" LastEditDate="2010-12-22T11:03:54.507" LastActivityDate="2010-12-22T11:03:54.507" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="685" CreationDate="2010-12-22T15:14:34.757" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thought would be a paper that does a statistical analysis of the holidays in some way, such as spending habits or New Year's resolutions.  I don't have any great ideas here.  One example is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.64.2288&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Seasonal Solow Residuals and Christmas: A Case for Labor Hoarding and Increasing Returns&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/2649&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Twas Four Weeks before Christmas: Retail Sales and the Length of the Christmas Shopping Season&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2010-12-22T15:14:34.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="678" CreationDate="2010-12-29T20:06:26.160" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry I missed this request. I have reduced the code font size a bit. The change will be in the next deployment. (The change applies to both the parent site and Meta)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12" LastActivityDate="2010-12-29T20:06:26.160" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="690" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-04T17:40:23.630" Score="1" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I entered various LaTex tags:&#xA;$\alpha$&#xA;$\log \Lambda_i$&#xA;$S_i$&#xA;and these all look great here in meta and in the preview. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when I enter the same in answering a question in parent, the preview never processes the LaTex tag and leaves them with the dollar signs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone seen this behavior?&#xA;Should I blindly submit the LaTeX and hope for the best?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This behavior occurs on both Firefox 3.0.19 and 3.6.13. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2591" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2011-01-15T19:03:51.587" LastActivityDate="2011-06-14T20:02:15.453" Title="LaTex works in meta but does not preview in parent" Tags="|support|math-display|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="691" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="692" CreationDate="2011-01-06T13:38:07.540" Score="4" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Last year we have chosen the topic for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/685/second-cross-validated-journal-club&quot;&gt;second CVJC&lt;/a&gt;, Global Warming and Hockey Stick Controversy -- now it is time to place it in the space-time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So please add your date suggestions as answers and vote for those that are convenient for you. Please note the new &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/685/second-cross-validated-journal-club&quot;&gt;full-day discussion + 3 concentration sessions organisation&lt;/a&gt;, which in theory should make it timezone-independent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2011-01-08T13:56:21.527" Title="Second Cross Validated Journal Club -- date" Tags="|discussion|journal-club|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="691" CreationDate="2011-01-07T02:09:42.577" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Friday, January 21st&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could also make it on-going as &quot;the third Friday each month&quot;, or something along that line (although this may be premature).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" LastActivityDate="2011-01-07T02:09:42.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="693" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="695" CreationDate="2011-01-10T08:45:30.820" Score="11" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding r tag to the question syntax highlights the R code present in the question or in the answers. Examples &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/3779/probability-of-not-drawing-a-word-from-a-bag-of-letters-in-scrabble&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/6111/the-probability-for-two-people-to-provide-identical-answers-on-survey-questions&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand questions tagged r imply that the question is related to R. So if somebody gives an example of R code in answer it is desirable that it should be highlighted, but it may be undesirable to tag the question with r tag, because the question is unrelated to R. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should the policy be in this case? Should we simply add r tag with explanation, or add explanation in r tag wiki? Or maybe there is other way to indicate that answer needs special highlighting without adding additional tag to the question? Note that this applies for other programming language tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Note that I am only asking for an opinion and not advocating one approach or another. I felt that my language was not very clear in expressing that, hence this update.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2116" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2019-03-21T08:44:18.007" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T14:35:11.867" Title="Syntax highlighting with r tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|policy|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="693" CreationDate="2011-01-10T09:01:23.157" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is it so essential that the R code be syntax highlighted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless the question owner specifically &lt;em&gt;asked&lt;/em&gt; for R code, adding the tag just for a bit of highlighting feels rather abusive to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you make the case that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;R is the only language code will ever be posted in here, and thus should be forced for all code blocks on all questions site-wide?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;all preformatted code blocks will be a recognizable language and default &quot;best guess&quot; code syntax highlighting should be performed?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note in the latter case in our experience, a LOT of preformatted &quot;code&quot; in the form of logfiles and so forth is actively &lt;em&gt;harmed&lt;/em&gt; by attempting to infer the syntax highlighting rules in every single code block.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2011-01-10T09:01:23.157" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="693" CreationDate="2011-01-10T09:39:22.150" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although I particularly appreciate users that provide R code (or any other language) to illustrate their response, I think that tags should actually reflect the question (or general subject matter) rather than individual responses. In some other cases, MC methods were used where analytical solutionw were provided. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should make a clear distinction between questions that are purely R-related (e.g., R tag often comes with data-visualization) from questions that are more theoretical in essence, or at least independent of software issues. Otherwise, there's a risk of over-representing the R software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2011-01-10T09:39:22.150" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="372" CreationDate="2011-01-10T16:49:52.210" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) is a proprietary cross-platform general-purpose statistical software package. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.spss.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SPSS's homepage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Versions 17 and 18 of SPSS were renamed with the acronym PASW (for Predictive Analytics SoftWare), but with version 19 it has been renamed to SPSS (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPSS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; for a history of the name changes). One unique aspect of SPSS software compared to other popular propriety software packages (such as Stata or SAS) is the built in functionality to call Python or R commands within syntax. Otherwise it is largely comparable to other general proprietary and freeware packages (such as R), although it differs in some advanced statistical capabilities and aspects of data manipulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suggested readings on using SPSS and learning the command syntax are two online PDF's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.spss.com/sites/dm-book/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Programming and Data Management for&#xA;IBM Statistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://szoc.tarstud.hu/upload/szoc_szakirany_programmingwithspsssyntaxandmacros.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Programming with&#xA;SPSS Syntax and Macros&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other useful print versions are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=mf8pEAAzN4gC&amp;amp;dq=An+Intermediate+Guide+to+SPSS+Programming%3a+Using+Syntax+for+Data+Management&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;An Intermediate Guide to SPSS&#xA;Programming: Using Syntax for Data&#xA;Management&lt;/a&gt; by Sarah Boslaugh (For&#xA;Data Management)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=a6FLF1YOqtsC&amp;amp;dq=discovering+statistics+using+SPSS&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Discovering statistics using SPSS: and sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll&lt;/a&gt;. by Andy Field (For Statistical Analysis)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other forums entirely devoted to the software are (and suggested material to search when encountering a problem with SPSS are):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://spssx-discussion.1045642.n5.nabble.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;University of Georgia SPSSX discussion list&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://groups.google.com/group/comp.soft-sys.stat.spss/topics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SPSS google group forum&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/spssdevcentral&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SPSS developer central&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other suggested webpages are &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;UCLA's Academic Technology Services &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/spss/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SPSS Resources webpage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://spsstools.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Raynald's SPSS tools&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://sites.google.com/a/lakeheadu.ca/bweaver/Home/statistics/spss/my-spss-page&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bruce Weaver's SPSS page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jeromyanglim.blogspot.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Jeromy Anglim's blog&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;PSPP&lt;/a&gt; is a free-ware, open source alternative largely mimicking the look and functionality of SPSS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="1036" LastEditDate="2011-01-18T01:01:30.033" LastActivityDate="2011-01-18T01:01:30.033" CommentCount="7" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-01-10T16:49:52.210" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="690" CreationDate="2011-01-15T19:03:46.763" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As others have suggested -- try clearing your browser cache.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2011-01-15T19:03:46.763" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="698" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="699" CreationDate="2011-01-18T00:08:53.210" Score="3" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;We now have tags 'k-nearest-neighbor' and 'nearest-neighbour'. I'm not familiar enough with this particular branch of statistics to be sure whether they mean more-or-less the same thing. There's also the American-British spelling thing - I don't know how we deal with that either. Merge? Synonyms? Does either/any solution require an admin or user with &gt;10k rep?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="795" LastEditDate="2011-01-23T05:53:45.280" LastActivityDate="2011-01-23T05:53:45.280" Title="(k)-nearest neighbo(u)r tags" Tags="|support|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="698" CreationDate="2011-01-18T04:33:58.293" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are the same thing. I've done the merge and maintained the spelling on the original k-NN tag. There should not be a need for a synonym here as anyone typing &quot;nearest&quot; will have the existing tag show up as a suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastActivityDate="2011-01-18T04:33:58.293" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="700" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-19T21:02:00.710" Score="3" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know where the &quot;list of trees&quot; is published for the tree ring data used in the analysis for the upcoming paper. I have played around with some of the controversial stuff (for instance, tree YAD061 and other &quot;Yamal trees&quot;), but so far, I haven't found a reliable source that lists the trees they kept and those they ditched when they generated the series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have the same question about the borehole temperature data and whatever else they used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit (01/20/2011) ==============================&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a better description of what I'm looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that what is about to be discussed is the analysis/processing of the &quot;incoming data&quot;.   However, a second issue is the &quot;incoming data&quot; itself, and can I (a mere mortal) duplicate what the authors have done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, something part of, or similar to the &quot;incoming data&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/yamal2009/sensit.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/yamal2009/sensit.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Figure A shows their &quot;hockey stick&quot;.  Then there's a description of the &quot;Regional Curve Standardisation&quot;, then a map showing the location of the trees, and believe it or not, an actual description of the raw data that was used.   The data sets are at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/yamal2009/data/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/yamal2009/data/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such that if you want to fool with the data for a specific tree, you can.   For example, I can download and play with tree YAD061 (from 1803 to 1996):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/yamal2009/data/YAD_RAW.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/yamal2009/data/YAD_RAW.txt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My goal is to understand what the authors did so I can get an idea of how reasonable the &quot;incoming data&quot; really is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2775" LastEditorUserId="2775" LastEditDate="2011-01-20T19:36:12.330" LastActivityDate="2011-01-20T19:36:12.330" Title="Second CV Journal Club question about the raw data that was selected" Tags="|discussion|journal-club|papers|data-mining|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="701" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="702" CreationDate="2011-01-24T11:21:10.927" Score="5" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have the following tags:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cart&quot;&gt;cart&lt;/a&gt; (4 questions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/classification-trees&quot;&gt;classification-trees&lt;/a&gt; (2 questions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/regression-trees&quot;&gt;regression-trees&lt;/a&gt; (1 question)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shall we merge them, or make them synonyms? (sorry I'm still not really sure of the distinction.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2011-01-24T13:52:43.720" Title="Merge 3 classification and regression tree tags?" Tags="|support|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="701" CreationDate="2011-01-24T13:50:59.577" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I would suggest to merge them all under &lt;code&gt;cart&lt;/code&gt;. Maybe we can add separate tags (&lt;code&gt;classification&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;regression&lt;/code&gt;) for the type of decision trees used, so that a classification tree might be found by looking at one tag or the other (&lt;code&gt;cart&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;classification&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2011-01-24T13:50:59.577" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="703" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-26T15:54:13.600" Score="6" ViewCount="382" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I write a question that has two distinct parts, when should I separate it into distinct questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a grey area, but one that could use some clarification. When there are truly distinct but related questions, keeping them together might have the advantage of letting readers ponder the set of questions at the same time; on the other hand it would have the disadvantage of requiring both answers in the same post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/2917/1381&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a question that I asked with multiple sub questions about distinct transformations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1381" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2011-02-03T05:37:25.760" Title="When should I divide a question into two separate questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="703" CreationDate="2011-01-27T11:08:14.360" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general it is ok-ish to have a question that has two &quot;sub-questions&quot; inside it. If they are &lt;em&gt;strongly&lt;/em&gt; related that is probably fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However what is not OK, is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://npx.autismspot.com/kitchen_sink.jpg&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the &lt;strong&gt;kitchen sink question&lt;/strong&gt; that has three or more totally unrelated questions buried inside it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2011-01-27T11:08:14.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="707" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="712" CreationDate="2011-01-27T14:59:47.763" Score="14" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any chance of making the 'r' tage display as 'R'? I think it would make its meaning clearer. Must confuse newbies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T19:52:00.147" LastActivityDate="2013-08-03T19:19:13.963" Title="Could 'r' tag be displayed as a capital 'R'?" Tags="|feature-request|status-bydesign|tags|r|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="708" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-01-27T15:27:37.647" Score="2" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a proposed community wiki to collect pictures of&#xA;unsupervised clustering of data sets, e.g. k-means&#xA;and ANN, approximate nearest neighbors.&#xA;Both pictures of clusters themselves, &#xA;and diagrams that help analyze / put numbers on clusterings,&#xA;are welcome. (Bad examples can be instructive too.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please give &lt;code&gt;N=&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;dim=&lt;/code&gt; (Nfeature) and &lt;code&gt;Ncluster=&lt;/code&gt; (k) next to each link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edited Monday 31Jan:&#xA;Given the many different kinds of clustering (text, images, amazon ...)&#xA;and people who do some aspect of clustering (programmers, algorithms guys,&#xA;PhDs with papers to write), this wish is naive;&#xA;don't see how to organize it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;On the other hand, it might cross-culture / get lots of hits from these different people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A meta question:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Could one make a picture gallery right on this page, within stats.stackexchange?&#xA;By that I mean uniform pictures say 250 pixels wide, instead of having to click each link separately:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;nice for users, seems nontrivial to implement, and maybe copyright issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="557" OwnerDisplayName="Denis" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T19:52:29.803" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T19:52:29.803" Title="Clustering picture gallery" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|data-visualization|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="707" CreationDate="2011-01-27T17:58:37.810" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well I agree with your point, but currently all tags are lower-case by design. And I don't think SE team will ever consider changing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2011-01-27T17:58:37.810" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="710" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="711" CreationDate="2011-01-27T23:48:15.363" Score="5" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to figure out how to configure R's proxy settings so I can download and install some packages. I know that stuff specific to R has been in the gray area for on-topic-ness in the past (and maybe it still is), so I want to know if this kind of question is on-topic enough for Cross Validated, or if I should instead take my chances asking it on Super User. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1583" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2011-01-28T01:26:44.297" LastActivityDate="2011-01-28T17:45:29.223" Title="Is a question about configuring R to use a proxy server off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|r|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="710" CreationDate="2011-01-28T17:45:29.223" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I'm one of those people who thinks that all R-focused questions should go to StackOverflow.  That is not the policy we decided on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this would be most appropriate at StackOverflow.  It's not &lt;em&gt;purely&lt;/em&gt; a programming question, but I can't imagine a question about CPAN (for example) getting turned away there.  There's tons of overlap between the StackOverflow R community and CV's, but I think the former is much more focused on R as software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Better to ask it here than at SuperUser, though.  SO &gt; CV &gt; SU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastActivityDate="2011-01-28T17:45:29.223" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="707" CreationDate="2011-01-31T10:40:13.377" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is fairly easy to make one or more tags show as uppercase for someone who has access to the CSS stylesheet which is used for the page layout.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This line in the CSS file or on the site would make the &lt;code&gt;r&lt;/code&gt; tag show as &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;a[href=&quot;questions/tagged/r&quot;] { text-transform: uppercase; }&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, until this is implemented, anyone who wants to view it this way on his/her Firefox browser can use one of the many &lt;a href=&quot;http://ask.metafilter.com/86080/Firefox-extension-to-change-page-style&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;custom stylesheet addons&lt;/a&gt;, some of which are also available for Google Chrome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2440" LastActivityDate="2011-01-31T10:40:13.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="703" CreationDate="2011-02-03T05:37:25.760" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The example question is well phrased: &quot;Here's a list ... I'm looking for feedback.&quot;  Even so, the list is a little long (an equation is worth a thousand words, right? ;-) and long questions can reduce viewership and intimidate people who might otherwise be interested and qualified to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be in the questioner's interest to separate a multipart question whenever &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The parts are not closely related &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Each part requires a separate explanation &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The parts are lengthy to state &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The parts are highly technical &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The answers to the parts are unlikely to build on or refer to each other &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There isn't much overhead needed to introduce the series of questions &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Two or more parts are likely to require lengthy responses &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Two or more parts might generate a long series of comments that are unrelated to each other &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Properly tagging all the parts would exceed the limit (currently 5) for the number of tags.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that by means of links and tags it is easy to create a trail backwards (and, retroactively, forwards) through a related series of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2011-02-03T05:37:25.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="328" CreationDate="2011-02-03T07:36:19.893" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hello Shane,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a great idea. I am wondering how can I contribute to it. I will be glad to help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1307" LastActivityDate="2011-02-03T07:36:19.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="715" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-03T07:44:26.527" Score="8" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes questions are asked, which can be roughly described as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A:&lt;/strong&gt; I have an unsorted heap of data (so it is sometimes more, sometimes less required to create predictors)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;B:&lt;/strong&gt; I have a target/response - variable (to create or already available) or a vague idea where I want to get&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Resulting question: How do I get from A to B ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/6653/logistic-regression-and-dataset-structure&quot;&gt;Logistic Regression and Dataset Structure&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/6777/how-should-i-deal-with-features-with-time-related-values-in-bayesian-network/&quot;&gt;How should I deal with features with time related values in Bayesian network?&lt;/a&gt; (which btw should be deleted anytime soon ... the discussion is leading nowhere)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/6783/failure-detection-method&quot;&gt;Failure detection method&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/7166/general-approaches-to-model-car-traffic-in-a-parking-garage&quot;&gt;General approaches to model car traffic in a parking garage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/7179/resources-for-beginners-how-to-determine-probability-of-user-action-based-on-ce&quot;&gt;Resources for beginners - how to determine probability of user action based on certain criteria?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope you get the point. From my experience on the rapidminer-forum, those questions are invitations for discussions and do not have something like a &quot;correct&quot;, but maybe a best answer. As far as I see, answers can only be suggestions to try this or that. Don't get me wrong: I really like this type of questions, because they link practical problems with algorithms/formulas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are those questions generally (or in most cases) cw ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to tag those questions (data-mining seems to be too broad) ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I added two more examples. Additionally, if no one cares to a) either a agree to my proposal or b) deny it and make another one, nothing will be changed. I am just not self-confident enough to accept my proposal and retag all questions of that kind. As far as I understand statsexchange, tags should be discussed instead of created spontaneously. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="264" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2011-02-14T09:52:15.923" Title="How to treat open data analysis questions" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="716" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="732" CreationDate="2011-02-03T18:20:42.073" Score="10" ViewCount="666" Body="&lt;p&gt;FINAL EDIT: You can find the transcript &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/18/conversation/cross-validated-journal-club-3&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is high time to continue the CVJC series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To remind for those who are new to the idea:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CVJC is a whole day meeting on &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/18/ten-fold&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; where we discuss some paper and its theoretical/practical surroundings.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned above the event is whole-day (00:00-23:59UTC), but there are three meet-up sessions at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1:00UTC = 19:00 on Thursday CST (session A)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;9:00UTC = 3:00CST (session B)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;16:00UTC = 10:00CST (session C)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;...on which most talking take place; they are spread over day to put at least one CVJC session in reach regardless of time zone.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The paper must be OpenAccess or a (p)reprint suggested previously on a meta thread like this one and selected in voting. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I would try to invite the author (it worked &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/685/second-cross-validated-journal-club&quot;&gt;last time&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, please suggest papers (each in one answer)! The deadline for suggestions is &lt;strike&gt;traditionally a week ahead, so 23:59UTC 2.11.2011&lt;/strike&gt; 23:59UTC 2.20.2011; &lt;strike&gt;the CVJC itself will probably take place at the 2.25.2011.&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT1: The CVJC3 will take place on 2011-03-11.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT2: You can register (highly encouraged; this way everybody will know the approximated traffic on each session and you will get an e-mail reminder prior to the event) &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/18/ten-fold?tab=schedule&quot;&gt;HERE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2011-03-12T11:23:48.927" Title="Third Cross Validated Journal Club" Tags="|discussion|journal-club|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="717" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-03T21:36:27.353" Score="7" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;In case anyone missed the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/moderator-messages/&quot;&gt;announcement&lt;/a&gt; on the Stack Overflow Blog, the moderator elections are scheduled to begin on the 14th February.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The election process&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way to get an idea of the election process is to check out another SE site. For example, here's the &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/election/1&quot;&gt;election page&lt;/a&gt; for the programmers SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does a moderator do?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's some general guidance on being a moderator at the top of the programmers election &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/election/1&quot;&gt;page&lt;/a&gt;. If you already visit the site almost every day, answer, edit and re-tag questions as appropriate, participate in meta when necessary, and vote to close/delete, then being a moderator will involve little extra work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site has never -- &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knocking_on_wood&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;touch wood&lt;/a&gt; -- had a problem with difficult users. We get the occasional SPAM message, but even that's fairly rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others mods - feel free to add or edit this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-07-31T19:41:44.717" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T19:41:44.717" Title="2011 Moderator Election begins shortly" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="716" CreationDate="2011-02-06T12:17:16.250" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In case nobody comes up with a good paper, I would suggest going through &lt;a href=&quot;http://strataconf.com/strata2011&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Strata 2011&lt;/a&gt; conference and discussing some of the main contributions. It's all about how to deal with &quot;big data&quot; (social networks, and the like) which might be of interest to many of us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2011-02-06T12:17:16.250" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="715" CreationDate="2011-02-06T16:39:09.060" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a proposal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because a) it is sometimes hard to tell whether such a question is cw or not  and b) to encourage more answers (yay, reputation), such questions generally should not be cw.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use the already existing tag &quot;modeling&quot; for such questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="264" LastActivityDate="2011-02-06T16:39:09.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="720" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="723" CreationDate="2011-02-06T23:54:36.267" Score="2" ViewCount="617" Body="&lt;p&gt;I sometimes browse the site on an iPad (16GB no 3G) using Safari and have noticed that many of the LaTeX equations are not rendered properly on stats.SE but are on other sites including the MathJax website and others: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2010/07/how-many-samples/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Example&lt;/a&gt; (chosen because it uses \hat which doesn't display properly on stats.SE). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a couple more examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$\hat{x}_n$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$\hat{\rho}_j$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$\langle x, y \rangle$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anybody reproduce this and is there any fix?&#xA;Is it due to a font choice on stats.SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: I checked math.SE and it has the same issue. MathOverflow does not. I'll try to post screenshots later if that would help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2970" LastEditorUserId="2" LastEditDate="2011-02-08T00:12:49.570" LastActivityDate="2011-02-08T00:13:27.073" Title="LaTeX display problem on iPad" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|math-display|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="720" CreationDate="2011-02-07T07:45:36.797" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I took a screenshot on my iPhone 4 to illustrate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PpZZA.png&quot; alt=&quot;iphone 4 math screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this render correctly, on, say, &lt;a href=&quot;http://math.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;math.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2011-02-07T07:45:36.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="720" CreationDate="2011-02-08T00:10:27.340" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm running Windows Internet Explorer 8.0 on a typical PC, and in &quot;normal view&quot; I get the first image below.  Under &quot;compatibility view&quot; I get the second image.   There may be Mathjax issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Lt6Ww.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AaeOV.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2775" LastActivityDate="2011-02-08T00:10:27.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="720" CreationDate="2011-02-08T00:13:27.073" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was intentional – there will be slight rendering issues with MathJax due to not wanting to take on the PNG dependency of the font renderings.  Adding the PNG folder would add 29,012 files, 317 folders and 114 MB of images to the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are not sure it’s worth it really for these small edge cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2" LastActivityDate="2011-02-08T00:13:27.073" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="724" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-09T12:40:02.027" Score="4" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/significance-test&quot;&gt;significance-test&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/statistical-significance&quot;&gt;statistical-significance&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;are very similar. The same thing occurs with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematics&quot;&gt;Mathematics&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-statistics&quot;&gt;mathematical-statistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess these should be merged. What do you think ? if you think merging is a good idea ? how do we merge ? I would propose to merge the smallest into the biggest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it seems that there is a &quot;deduplication process&quot; (see the Answer of Jeff Atwood &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/666/merge-tags-duplicate-tags&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA;Should we run that ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2011-02-14T08:19:26.393" Title="Merging tags, should we do it? How to do it significance-test/statistical-significance Mathematical-statistics/mathematic" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="725" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="727" CreationDate="2011-02-09T14:33:58.187" Score="3" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/6795/least-angle-regression-keeps-the-correlations-monotonically-decreasing-and-tied&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; which is a homework question. This is problem &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stanford.edu/~hastie/local.ftp/Springer/ESLII_print5.pdf#page=115&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3.23 on page 97 of Hastie et al., Elements of Statistical Learning, 2nd. ed. (5th printing)&lt;/a&gt;. There are several problems in my opinion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The poster does not mention that this is homework.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The poster rephrases the original problem by omitting some key definitions, but the questions he asks are from the original problem. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might be honest mistake, but I do feel somehow cheated, so I already downvoted the question. What I want to ask is whether I should edit the question to reflect that this a homework and to give the references. Also what is the policy for such type of questions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2116" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2011-02-09T21:52:40.013" Title="What to do with homework questions posed as non-homework?" Tags="|discussion|homework|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="725" CreationDate="2011-02-09T15:21:54.943" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we accept things like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/26/what-is-a-standard-deviation&quot;&gt;that about standard deviation&lt;/a&gt;  (upvoted 6 time, I think I have few questions that are so much upvoted :)) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess we can accept a question already asked in a book , if the book does not give the answer ...  The best you can do is editing the question (or ask to) with a reference to the book and an improvement with respect to the key definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2011-02-09T15:21:54.943" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="725" CreationDate="2011-02-09T17:25:55.963" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll answer your particular questions first:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Here's the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12/how-should-we-deal-with-obvious-homework-questions&quot;&gt;current homework policy&lt;/a&gt;. However, this was discussed sometime ago, and we've had many new users since then. Also the policy was discussed before we had experienced &quot;term time&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;@robin: I don't mind the standard deviation question - although I wouldn't up vote it. To my mind, someone unfamiliar with statistics could ask this question. However, statistics homework questions can be completely contrived - see the question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/6972/normal-distribution-and-weight-of-babies-problem&quot;&gt;birth weight&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I think that we may have to start closing homework questions. If you look at the recent questions by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/1833/queops&quot;&gt;queops&lt;/a&gt;, they are all blatant homework questions. One of the questions was closed, but only because it was a duplicate. If I didn't have mod powers, I would have probably voted to close quite a few of the recent questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my students asked their homework questions in this site, I would be rather annoyed that they just got the answer with little/no work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2011-02-09T17:25:55.963" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="724" CreationDate="2011-02-10T17:59:17.123" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a good place to make a general remark; SE engine has a special place for tags merging suggestions; go to tag page, then click &quot;about »&quot; and go to synonyms tab.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The merge happens if some synonym is voted up enough times or when mod pushes this through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2011-02-10T17:59:17.123" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="729" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-11T11:30:08.557" Score="1" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could a glossary or thesaurus of terms in statistics and machine learning,&#xA;with short examples and stats.se tags, help non-native speakers to frame questions and find answers?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In particular various areas of ML seem to me (non-expert) to have different jargons:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;the term is semi-supervised learning, not unsupervised learning&quot;.&#xA;Here a semi-supervised glossary would be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(By &quot;native speaker&quot; I mean &quot;fluent in statistics or ML lingo&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="557" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2011-02-13T21:12:58.350" LastActivityDate="2011-02-13T21:12:58.350" Title="Glossary or thesaurus of terms in statistics and machine learning?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="729" CreationDate="2011-02-12T15:45:28.240" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Possibly, though it would have to exist here on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A better solution might be to edit the tag wikis for the respective tags with explanations, assuming each term has a tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2011-02-12T15:45:28.240" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="213" CreationDate="2011-02-14T07:56:34.227" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question about how to remove zeros. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/7152/dealing-with-0-in-statistics&quot;&gt;How should you handle cell values equal to zero in a contingency table?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a duplicate of a question by Rob Hyndman. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2011-02-14T07:56:34.227" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-02-14T07:56:34.227" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="716" CreationDate="2011-02-14T12:57:34.797" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me suggest &lt;a href=&quot;http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS/Repository/1.0/Disseminate?view=body&amp;amp;id=pdf_1&amp;amp;handle=euclid.ss/1009213726&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures&lt;/a&gt; by Leo Breiman. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Abstract&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are two cultures in the use of&#xA;  statistical modeling to reach&#xA;  conclusions from data. One assumes&#xA;  that the data are generated by a given&#xA;  stochastic data model. The other uses&#xA;  algorithmic models and treats the data&#xA;  mechanism as unknown. The statistical&#xA;  community has been committed to the&#xA;  almost exclusive use of data models.&#xA;  This commitment has led to irrelevant&#xA;  theory, questionable conclusions, and&#xA;  has kept statisticians from working on&#xA;  a large range of interesting current&#xA;  problems. Algorithmic modeling, both&#xA;  in theory and practice, has developed&#xA;  rapidly in fields outside statistics.&#xA;  It can be used both on large complex&#xA;  data sets and as a more accurate and&#xA;  informative alternative to data&#xA;  modeling on smaller data sets. If our&#xA;  goal as a field is to use data to&#xA;  solve problems, then we need to move&#xA;  away from exclusive dependence on data&#xA;  models and adopt a more diverse set of&#xA;  tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1496" LastEditorUserId="795" LastEditDate="2011-02-16T19:20:09.600" LastActivityDate="2011-02-16T19:20:09.600" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="716" CreationDate="2011-02-14T12:59:55.683" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another suggestion: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~bioep740/yr2009/topics/Gigerenzer-jSoc-Econ-1994.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mindless Statistics&lt;/a&gt; by Gerd Gigerenzer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Abstract&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Statistical rituals largely eliminate statistical thinking in the social sciences. Rituals are indispensable&#xA;  for identification with social groups, but they should be the subject rather than the procedure of&#xA;  science. What I call the “null ritual” consists of three steps: (1) set up a statistical null hypothesis, but&#xA;  do not specify your own hypothesis nor any alternative hypothesis, (2) use the 5% significance level&#xA;  for rejecting the null and accepting your hypothesis, and (3) always perform this procedure. I report&#xA;  evidence of the resulting collective confusion and fears about sanctions on the part of students and&#xA;  teachers, researchers and editors, as well as textbook writers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1496" LastActivityDate="2011-02-14T12:59:55.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="734" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-14T20:22:52.690" Score="2" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 2011 Community Moderator Election is now underway!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community moderator elections have three phases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nomination phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Primary phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Election phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends how many candidates there are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please visit the official election page at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for more detail, and to participate!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/election&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;election&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;election&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-07-31T19:42:51.350" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T19:42:51.350" Title="2011 Community Moderator Election is underway" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-02-14T20:22:52.690" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="735" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="736" CreationDate="2011-02-16T12:37:53.110" Score="15" ViewCount="453" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the question title says, I was wondering if there is a good or accepted way of &quot;bumping&quot; old and unanswered questions to show up again on the questions list?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3014" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-03-30T17:13:17.110" LastActivityDate="2019-10-04T08:39:00.633" Title="Is there a polite /accepted way of &quot;bumping&quot; up questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="735" CreationDate="2011-02-16T17:57:33.777" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is, and it's even in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq#bounty&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; --&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What if I don’t get a good answer?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to get good answers, you have to put some effort into your question. Edit your question to provide status and progress updates. Document your own continued efforts to answer your question. This will naturally bump your question and get more people interested in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2011-02-16T17:57:33.777" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="737" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="738" CreationDate="2011-02-17T14:00:37.900" Score="4" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've now got over 5000 reputation, which I see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/privileges/approve-tag-wiki-edits&quot;&gt;means I can approve edits to tag wikis&lt;/a&gt;. However, I can't edit tag wikis until I reach 20000 reputation (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/distributions/info&quot;&gt;tag info for the 'distributions' tag&lt;/a&gt;, for example). Is this a mistake? If not, could someone explain the logic behind this? It seems completely back-to-front to me. I'm trusted to decide whether other people's edits to tag wikis are useful, but I'm not trusted enough to make edits to tag wikis myself. Huh?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2011-02-19T06:57:43.487" Title="Reputation required for editing tag wikis and approving edits" Tags="|support|tags|reputation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="737" CreationDate="2011-02-17T23:17:52.500" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Making an edit is like posting a reply (which should require some reputation); approving an edit is like voting a reply up (which requires no reputation at all).  Seems consistent to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I don't understand is why such a huge reputation (20K/5K) is needed to do anything with these wikis.  That precludes their development at this stage and effectively deprecates their value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Part of the problem here is that 20K rep is almost nothing on a site like SO where questions get hundreds of votes but is much harder to achieve on a site like this where questions average only four or so votes apiece.  But that's a bigger issue...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2011-02-17T23:17:52.500" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="716" CreationDate="2011-02-18T13:38:22.357" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest &quot;A Better Lemon Squeezer? Maximum Likelihood Regression with Beta distributed Dependent Variables&quot;  by Smithson and Verkuillen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;available at &lt;a href=&quot;http://psychology3.anu.edu.au/people/smithson/details/betareg/Smithson_Verkuilen06.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://psychology3.anu.edu.au/people/smithson/details/betareg/Smithson_Verkuilen06.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Abstract&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Uncorrectable skew and&#xA;  heteroscedasticity are among the&#xA;  “lemons” of psychological data, yet&#xA;  many important variables naturally&#xA;  exhibit these properties. For scales&#xA;  with a lower and upper bound, a&#xA;  suitable candidate for models is the&#xA;  beta distribution, which is very&#xA;  flexible and models skew quite well.&#xA;  The authors present maximum-likelihood&#xA;  regression models assuming that the&#xA;  dependent variable is conditionally&#xA;  beta distributed rather than Gaussian.&#xA;  The approach models both means&#xA;  (location) and variances (dispersion)&#xA;  with their own distinct sets of&#xA;  predictors (continuous and/or&#xA;  categorical), thereby modeling&#xA;  heteroscedasticity. The location&#xA;  submodel link function is the logit&#xA;  and thereby analogous to logistic&#xA;  regression, whereas the dispersion&#xA;  submodel is log linear. Real examples&#xA;  show that these models handle the&#xA;  independent observations case readily.&#xA;  The article discusses comparisons&#xA;  between beta regression and&#xA;  alternative techniques, model&#xA;  selection and interpretation,&#xA;  practical estimation, and software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2011-02-18T13:38:22.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="737" CreationDate="2011-02-19T06:57:43.487" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried editing wiki yesterday. I chose &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/econometrics/info&quot;&gt;econometrics&lt;/a&gt;. The process was quite painless, I was able to edit, but somebody else had to approve it. The question is who has the right to approve? If it is the moderators only then it is not good. If somebody with reputation over 5k, then it is no problem. Peer review is a good thing. The only question remains is of notification. From what I've read about new changes, the notifications of new edits are only for users with 10k of reputation. For tag wiki's there should be a better way of notifying users who can approve the edits. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2116" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2011-02-19T06:57:43.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="741" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-19T15:31:05.153" Score="5" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the title suggests, what are we supposed to do with articles that were proposed for JC but didn't get enough vote to be retained? Shall we list them in a separate thread (like was done for, e.g. list of freely available datasets)? This might be interesting for two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It will allow us to keep an history of all proposed articles (at term, I can imagine we can organize them by topic);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We still have the opportunity to choose one of them in case we are short of ideas for an upcoming JC.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the moment, I've listed them in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://gist.github.com/864758&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;public Gist&lt;/a&gt; (BibTeX format).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit2:&lt;/strong&gt; by mbq&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For even better Web2.0ness, I have made a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mendeley.com/groups/999241/crossvalidated-journal-club/papers/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;public Mendeley group&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2011-03-31T15:49:23.637" LastActivityDate="2011-03-31T15:49:23.637" Title="What do we do with articles proposed but not retained for CV Journal Club?" Tags="|discussion|journal-club|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="742" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="744" CreationDate="2011-02-20T09:49:35.187" Score="8" ViewCount="442" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had set my preferences to use MathML, but I've just realised it fails to display square root of fractions correctly. With MathML, &#xA;$$\sqrt{\frac{n-2}{1-r^2}}$$&#xA;looks almost the same as&#xA;$$\frac{ \sqrt{n-2}}{1-r^2}$$&#xA;In particular, the square-root encloses only the numerator, which changes the interpretation of the formula&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm using Firefox 3.6.10 under Windows XP Pro Service Pack 3. I selected MathML by right-clicking any displayed formula to display a context menu and selecting Settings =&gt; Math Renderer =&gt; MathML.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apologies if this is a MathML problem rather than a StackExchange problem. I don't know where to raise MathML bugs though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Snip of screenshot as requested:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t0teJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;wrongly displayed square-root of fraction under MathML&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T18:53:18.613" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T18:53:18.613" Title="MathML displays square roots of fractions incorrectly" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|math-display|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="363" CreationDate="2011-02-20T16:49:07.710" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using IE8 and have similar problems.  I have to update the screen in &quot;compatibility view&quot; (the little green button to the right of where the url's are displayed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it will replace all MathJax entries with [Math Processing Error].   When that happens, I close down IE8 and restart it, and try again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, under Tools, under Compatibility View Settings, I have experimented with adding/deleting certain websites that show up as &quot;compatible&quot; by default.   Sometimes it helps, sometimes not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2775" LastActivityDate="2011-02-20T16:49:07.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="742" CreationDate="2011-02-23T01:46:14.887" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's the fonts! I was able to replicate after I uninstalled &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.mozilla.org/@api/deki/files/4719/=STIX-mozilla1.9.zip&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;these&lt;/a&gt;. Hence installing the fonts renders the formula correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Via &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Mozilla_MathML_Project/Fonts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Mozilla_MathML_Project/Fonts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2011-02-23T01:46:14.887" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="745" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-02-27T17:00:29.260" Score="4" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not have enough reputation to make my own edits.&#xA;When I try to make an edit, e.g., to a title to clarify it, I get an error that I haven't made a change of at least six characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that this calculation is only happening to the body of the message and not to the title box, so this seems to be a &lt;strong&gt;bug&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The work-around I've used is to arbitrary add enough spaces at the end of a paragraph in the actual post. Interestingly, this is enough to fool the character-limit calculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: @waffles tests provided enough of a controlled experiment to pinpoint the problem. In the examples where I was getting an error, I was making large changes to the title and also making, e.g., a one-letter typo correction to the body. The small edit to the body overrode the fact I had made a change to the title. If titles are to be edited more freely, my opinion is that this should hold regardless of any edits to the body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2970" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2011-03-01T04:14:55.260" LastActivityDate="2011-03-01T04:14:55.260" Title="Bug: Character-limit calculation when editing." Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="746" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="748" CreationDate="2011-02-27T17:17:57.163" Score="4" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed a drop in my reputation today. Not that I mind, I have plenty, so I am asking why did it happen purely because maybe it is because of a bug. As far as I know reputation can get down because of the downvote, or because the person who chose the answer decided to choose another, or somebody decided to retract his or hers upvote. Although in the latter case there is some kind of lock after some period, so you cannot downvote if the answer did not change. My reputation dropped by 40 so this should amount to two reasigned answers and one retracted upvote. Not very likely for Sunday, hence the question. If this is a bug please retag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2116" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Ways of reputation to go down" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="746" CreationDate="2011-02-27T21:55:15.690" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;We did &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/80862/sudden-sharp-drop-in-reputation-find-out-reason-recalc/80865#80865&quot;&gt;a global recalc across all Stack Exchange sites&lt;/a&gt; today in preparation of some new features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1142" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2011-02-27T21:55:15.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="746" CreationDate="2011-02-28T04:37:03.873" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reputation score is denormalized, so it is expected for it to vary slightly from the &quot;real&quot; value over time.&lt;/strong&gt; We periodically recalculate everyone's reputation to bring it in sync, roughly once per year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some ways reputation can be affected without being updated live:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a user is deleted; this deletes all their votes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a post is deleted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a post is migrated to another site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can always check&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;/reputation&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to see the live calculation of your reputation, and optionally recalculate it to reflect the current, most correct, value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2011-02-28T04:37:03.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="745" CreationDate="2011-02-28T04:45:35.257" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The rules are different for suggested edits. Every edit must be approved by peers so they are not &quot;free&quot; and must be substantive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to freely make single character edits, earn 2k rep for editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said we feel that title is significant enough that small edit suggestions are allowed there. However, we want suggested body edits to be &lt;em&gt;substantive&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a rare post indeed that is so very perfect that less than 6 characters in it can be improved. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2011-02-28T04:45:35.257" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="750" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="751" CreationDate="2011-03-03T00:20:49.303" Score="12" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;This issue arose with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/7778/919&quot;&gt;question about gathering web page viewing statistics&lt;/a&gt; which was closed by three high-rep users and a moderator.  There were legitimate reasons for voting to close (it was not well formulated), but it makes me wonder: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does this community consider questions about collecting data to be germane?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If such questions aren't welcome here, then where should they appear?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own opinion is that designing data-collection activities as well as the practical and logistical details of collecting data are a traditional (and important) part of the statistical profession, so I am inclined to use a very light hand in moderating such questions, but I would like to know the sense of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2011-03-20T05:54:53.147" Title="Do we welcome questions on data collection methods?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="750" CreationDate="2011-03-03T04:56:33.000" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that data-collection is a core part of statistics. But the specific question seemed more of a technical question about how pageviews on websites are registered which would probably be more appropriate on &lt;a href=&quot;https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;webmasters.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:33:25.487" LastActivityDate="2011-03-20T05:54:53.147" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="752" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-04T17:08:55.570" Score="9" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;A user, @ran2, commented on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/7876/interpreting-range-bars-in-rs-plot-stl/7880#7880&quot;&gt;this question/answer&lt;/a&gt; that they found it difficult to determine that they had accepted an answer because of their colour blindness and the choice of colour for the accepted-tick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could the site designers adopt a different colour for such critical parts of the site and thus make the site more accessible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for considering this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1390" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T19:03:38.210" Title="Accessibility and site design -- acceptance tick and colour blindness" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2013-12-12T19:54:43.327" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="752" CreationDate="2011-03-04T17:39:28.833" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;When converted to greyscale, the intensity of the green check is fairly similar to the vote grey. So perhaps they're right:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3lLLu.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2011-03-04T17:39:28.833" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="752" CreationDate="2011-03-05T13:50:59.707" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/2143/minimaloverflow-a-themescript-for-stackexchange&quot;&gt;MinimalOverflow&lt;/a&gt; is some way to go; AFAIK it is considered to be implemented as SE-wide lightweight and accessible theme variant (there is a mobile common version already).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:45.643" LastActivityDate="2011-03-05T13:50:59.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="755" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="757" CreationDate="2011-03-06T17:43:52.713" Score="6" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen related questions regarding tag editing, but not editing of an actual response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a way to edit a response to a question without bumping it back up to the top?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find that I sometimes leave a few things unsaid, or find a typo, etc., in a previous post. I would like to update it in case anyone comes across the post later, but I often don't want it to be bumped all the way back to the top of the active list, especially if the thread is already &quot;stale&quot;. (This is mostly so as not to &quot;annoy&quot; other users by bumping up a post that may be a week or two old.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be handy for those of us that like to refine our answers over time when we think of something new, albeit minor, to add.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2970" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T19:52:41.567" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T19:52:41.567" Title="Feature to edit without bumping?" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="755" CreationDate="2011-03-06T22:04:33.657" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think so. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; tab shows questions in chronological order, though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I don't think this is annoying, especially when this is for fixing typos, adding clarification, etc. I think everybody will agree that doing so shows on the contrary that you are actually minding about the quality of your response. Moreover, updating the content of your response might result in additional upvotes (I guess this is not the motive, but it is still evidence that the community values your contribution).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2011-03-06T22:04:33.657" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="755" CreationDate="2011-03-06T23:53:00.980" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;What if you inadvertently change the meaning of your post?  E.g., you leave out a &quot;not&quot; in a statement or you add (or remove) an ambiguity.  The thread could stand for a long time (and perhaps be viewed and referenced by many visitors) before anybody noticed the change.  Because what you write is always in the context of a thread of replies, comments, and votes, people &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; have an opportunity to see that a change has occurred, no matter how seemingly minor, and be able to react appropriately.  The current system seems to be a gentle compromise between the advisability of such a mechanism and the need to keep the volume of system messages down to a manageable level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2011-03-06T23:53:00.980" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="759" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-15T13:40:08.950" Score="7" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;After three quite nice journal club events, it is high time to add more awesome. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus please, add ideas/thoughts/complaints as answers... and vote, as usual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2011-03-15T14:30:17.253" LastActivityDate="2011-04-11T19:30:11.480" Title="How to improve the journal club?" Tags="|discussion|journal-club|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="759" CreationDate="2011-03-15T21:47:39.117" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;An all-day affair is too (temporally) diffuse for the limited audience we have been attracting so far.  I would like to suggest reducing it to two definite sessions from three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2011-03-15T21:47:39.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="759" CreationDate="2011-03-15T21:52:34.867" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can encourage community members to formulate and post appropriate questions on the next paper a week or two beforehand.  This would serve to clarify ideas and perhaps interest more casual users of the site in the JC activity itself.  For example, questions about bagging and random forests could have been (and still would be!) of interest for the last JC (what are they, how do they compare with other methods, are there salient examples of their use in the literature, what software is available, what do you need to know to use them effectively, what advances have been made since Breiman wrote his &lt;em&gt;Two Cultures&lt;/em&gt; paper, and why do they work?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2011-03-15T21:52:34.867" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="762" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-15T23:09:56.267" Score="1" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;After trying four times to edit &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/8334/chow-test-or-not&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; to add the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/change-point&quot;&gt;change-point&lt;/a&gt;&quot; tag to it, which is associated with three existing questions, I have been unsuccessful: no matter how emphatically I type :-) it always gets converted to &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/changepoint&quot;&gt;changepoint&lt;/a&gt;&quot; &lt;em&gt;and this (unwanted) tag only links to the question itself!,&lt;/em&gt; not to the other questions.  Something's wrong here.  Am I misunderstanding how the tagging is supposed to work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2011-11-11T07:27:25.347" Title="Tagging bug?...." Tags="|support|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="762" CreationDate="2011-03-16T04:32:47.723" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sounds to me like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/change-point&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;change-point&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;change-point&lt;/a&gt; is set up as synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/changepoint&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;changepoint&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;changepoint&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms?tab=renames&amp;amp;filter=active&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms?tab=renames&amp;amp;filter=active&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2011-03-16T04:32:47.723" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="764" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="765" CreationDate="2011-03-17T19:50:59.267" Score="8" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;Occasionally I mistakenly upvote a comment.  There seems to be no way to undo this action.  Is this a bug?  A feature?  My missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2011-03-18T08:26:43.957" LastActivityDate="2011-03-18T08:26:43.957" Title="How to unvote on comments?" Tags="|bug|feature-request|status-bydesign|comment|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="764" CreationDate="2011-03-18T08:26:08.370" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no way to undo a comment upvote at this time, nor has there historically ever been a way to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2011-03-18T08:26:08.370" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12" CreationDate="2011-03-19T14:14:11.133" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to reopen this, it seems the current practice is often (2) &lt;em&gt;provide helpful hints&lt;/em&gt;, particularly in comments to the question.  My view is that after a suitable period of time it is worth giving a fuller answer, as I did with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/8033/normal-distribution-homework&quot;&gt;How to find percentiles of a Normal distribution?&lt;/a&gt; 10 days after the question was asked. Is that reasonable?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2958" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2011-03-19T14:14:11.133" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="767" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="768" CreationDate="2011-03-21T21:36:41.557" Score="0" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;(This more or less a question for the StackExchange team.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can imagine a few of the reasons why StackExchange would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; open a subcomponent for questions on sociology, political science, history and so on. But I wonder: has that possibility ever been submitted, and if so, what reasons led to dismissing it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance from a political scientist in training.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3582" LastActivityDate="2011-03-21T22:10:39.223" Title="Has a social.stackexchange.com subcomponent ever been considered?" Tags="|discussion|fundamentals|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="767" CreationDate="2011-03-21T22:10:39.223" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm honestly not sure, but if you can herd the proposal through our open, democratic Area 51 process ..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;http://area51.stackexchange.com/faq&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.. then it will get created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example I searched for &quot;sociology&quot; and got this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/30455/human-behavior&quot;&gt;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/30455/human-behavior&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There might be others around if you search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2011-03-21T22:10:39.223" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="769" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-22T19:42:22.950" Score="0" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;For some reason the LaTeX formulas do not work with IE9. On the top of the page I get a red bar saying &quot;Statistical Analysis Meta works best with JavaScript enabled&quot;. I have not disabled javascript so I guess the MathJax is not comptabile with IE9. Any workaround?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2020" LastEditorUserId="2020" LastEditDate="2011-03-23T09:17:38.880" LastActivityDate="2011-05-23T02:53:14.830" Title="LaTeX formulas do not work with IE9" Tags="|support|math-display|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="769" CreationDate="2011-03-24T01:50:59.673" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That message should only appear if javascript is disabled (it is enclosed in &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;noscript&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tags). To confirm this try the following steps:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Load the page that shows the message&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Go to the address bar in that same page&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Type &lt;code&gt;javascript:alert(&quot;hi&quot;)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this displays an alert message with contents &lt;code&gt;hi&lt;/code&gt; then javascript is enabled, otherwise disabled. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple of ideas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reset the browser (Tools-&gt;Internet Options-&gt;Advanced-&gt;Reset Browser settings)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you have any IE9 add-ons? They might be turning off scripting for certain pages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3876" LastActivityDate="2011-03-24T01:50:59.673" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="771" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-24T16:19:44.513" Score="20" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some situations come up frequently enough, especially with new users, that it seems useful to maintain a library of &lt;em&gt;polite&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;helpful&lt;/em&gt; responses we can offer.  Mods (and anyone else) can then copy and paste from this library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of this thread is to implement that library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intended structure is that each reply should offer one or more possible comments to respond to one defined situation.  (Thus, please feel free to edit an existing reply rather than create multiple replies for the same situation.)  Examples of such situations--which I have gleaned from recent moderator interventions--would include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Incomprehensible or vague/ambiguous questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Demands for homework solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Off-topic questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Self-serving replies or overt marketing in replies.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also hopeful that by making this library available here, the community can gradually improve these stock messages via direct edits or comments.  Possibly we could even add amplifications in the replies (such as more extended discussions of what actions are expected in response) and link to them directly where appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2011-03-24T16:30:06.033" LastActivityDate="2011-03-25T16:00:45.697" Title="Library of helpful responses" Tags="|discussion|moderation|comment|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="771" CreationDate="2011-03-24T16:20:29.160" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Homework Questions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please read the info for the &amp;quot;Homework&amp;quot; tag and restate your question accordingly. After editing it, you can re-open it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2011-03-24T16:20:29.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="771" CreationDate="2011-03-24T16:23:11.170" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Off-topic Questions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're leaving this thread open for a short while in the hope that you have a way to clarify it that is of statistical interest. If your interest is primarily in [&lt;strong&gt;fill in this blank&lt;/strong&gt;] we'll migrate it to the [&lt;strong&gt;blank&lt;/strong&gt;] site for you. If you don't do anything, we will need to  close it as off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2011-03-24T16:23:11.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="771" CreationDate="2011-03-24T16:24:45.490" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Inappropriate Replies&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a fine reply but [&lt;strong&gt;blank&lt;/strong&gt;] does not belong in it.  I do not want to presume too much by editing your reply myself, so I have provisionally closed it in the hope you will re-post it after making the necessary changes in the way you see fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2011-03-24T16:24:45.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="771" CreationDate="2011-03-24T18:14:18.827" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Incomplete information&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question concerning data analysis.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question looks interesting, but&#xA;it is difficult to get an idea of the&#xA;exact structure of your data. Without&#xA;knowing [&lt;strong&gt;blank&lt;/strong&gt;], it will be hard to&#xA;provide a definitive answer. Could you&#xA;provide additional information (e.g.,&#xA;[&lt;strong&gt;blank&lt;/strong&gt;])?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Theoretical question.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This topic might belong here but it is not yet possible to determine exactly what question is being asked.  Please clarify it and consider posting it on a site where it might be more relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2011-03-24T21:11:09.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="771" CreationDate="2011-03-24T18:21:35.403" Score="9" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Questions should be separated&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are asking several questions here.&#xA;Although they are clearly related, it&#xA;would be better to address them in&#xA;separate threads (with&#xA;cross-references if needed), for it&#xA;would be easier to focus on one issue&#xA;at a time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2011-03-24T18:21:35.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="771" CreationDate="2011-03-24T18:26:46.787" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Editing issues&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site supports Markdown syntax for&#xA;editing, and also &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\LaTeX$&lt;/span&gt; for&#xA;mathematical expressions. Further&#xA;information can be found here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/editing-help&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/editing-help&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\LaTeX$&lt;/span&gt; help can be found at&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Mathematics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LaTeX/Mathematics from the Wikibook&lt;/a&gt;,   &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tug.org/begin.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Getting Started with TeX, LaTeX, and Friends&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/info/gentle/gentle.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Michael Doob's &amp;quot;Gentle Introduction&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.math.harvard.edu/texman/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Harvard Math Dept's &amp;quot;Introduction&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2011-03-25T16:00:45.697" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="778" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="780" CreationDate="2011-03-30T03:56:22.677" Score="3" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand there were recent changes in SE engine, also MathJax version was updated. Now everytime I visit stats.SE, math.SE a message appears at the top of the page that MathJax is loading. It appears for a very short time, but it since it is on the top of the page it shifts all the page content down. So with each refresh (posted comment, clicking a link to a question) I get that page is jumping up and down. It is not a very big problem, but it is an annoying one. I use Chrome 10 on Mac OS X 10.6.6. I checked with Firefox 4, this message only appears first time you visit the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2116" LastEditorUserId="1142" LastEditDate="2011-03-30T06:29:15.413" LastActivityDate="2011-03-30T06:29:15.413" Title="Unnecessary message about MathJax loading" Tags="|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="779" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-03-30T04:00:43.327" Score="2" ViewCount="600" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not an actual bug, so I am tagging it as a feature-request, but after MathJax upgrade, all the fonts look more bold for me, as if too much antialiasing were applied. This happens both in Chrome 10 and Firefox 4 on Mac OS X 10.6.6. Can anybody confirm this, or is it just me? Should I empty some cache or there are some settings to tweak? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the example:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AtgS3.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem or a feature is that the mathematical text is too bold compared to normal text. This a new behaviour which was nor present before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2116" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T19:04:30.330" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T19:04:30.330" Title="Fonts too bold after recent MathJax upgrade?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|math-display|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="778" CreationDate="2011-03-30T06:28:58.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for pointing this out - it'll be fixed in the next deploy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1142" LastActivityDate="2011-03-30T06:28:58.830" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="781" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="782" CreationDate="2011-03-30T11:38:39.020" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to put a plot in my answer such as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/6907/an-adaptation-of-the-kullback-leibler-distance&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; but I don't know how.  Any suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2392" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2011-03-31T20:12:34.183" Title="How do I put an image in my answer?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="781" CreationDate="2011-03-30T15:20:50.990" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at the icons above the answer window where you enter text there is an icon that allows you to upload an image from either a url or a local drive.&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Paks6.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2011-03-30T15:20:50.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="783" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-09-09T15:00:32.733" Score="9" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This project has moved to the next phase. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/2662/28&quot;&gt;What should be the data collection strategy for our first Polystats Project?&lt;/a&gt;. I have asked the moderators to lock this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;End of Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of you may have heard about the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Gowers#Polymath_Project&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Polymath&lt;/a&gt; projects in research mathematics. Polymath is an approach that was conceptualized by &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Gowers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Timothy Gowers&lt;/a&gt; to enable &amp;quot;massively collaborative research&amp;quot; in mathematics. Since the initial conception there are several polymath projects that the math community has started (some of which can be found at this &lt;a href=&quot;http://michaelnielsen.org/polymath1/index.php?title=Main_Page1.Blockquote&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiki&lt;/a&gt; for polymath projects.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inspired by the success of polymath projects, I propose that we start a polystats project using the Q&amp;amp;A format provided by our site (polystats = &amp;quot;massively collaborative data analysis&amp;quot;). I envision the typical polystats project to follow the sequence of events outlined below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;First question appears on the site to select a project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the community reaches a consensus on what project we will focus on (via voting) we lock the question and move to the next question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Second question (with a link to the first question) appears on the site requesting potential exploratory data visualizations that may shed light on potential model specifications and tentative answers the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again once we reach consensus this question is locked and we move to an analysis phase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Third question (with a link to the second question) appears on the site requesting potential model specifications given what we know from questions 1 and 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once we reach consensus we lock this question and move to analysis phase. And so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the above ideas in mind I want to set the ball rolling and ask you the first question for our first polystats project:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should be our first polystats project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given below are some thoughts to what kinds of ideas may work well for our first polystats project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A potential answer should include the questions the project will answer along with a data source that is readily accessible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For our first project, it may make a lot of sense to choose an idea that is readily accessible to as many participants as possible. (to ensure wide participation)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in particular avoid projects (at least for now) that need specialized domain knowledge or alternatively the project must be such that the required domain knowledge can be acquired by quickly skimming an article or two on the wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In order to maximize our chances of success perhaps we should avoid controversial ideas (e.g., global warming) or politically sensitive issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a first attempt let us choose a project that is fairly non-controversial but complex enough that we can put our collective minds to find reasonable answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have marked this question CW so please feel free to upvote/downvote ideas so that the 'best' candidate floats up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that you open a thread on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; if you wish to open a discussion on the relative merits of some of these ideas or about anything else about the polystats project. You may also want to see the discussion on meta titled &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/419/how-about-starting-a-polystats-project1.&quot;&gt;How about starting a Polystats Project&lt;/a&gt;?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="What should be our first Polystats project?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="783" CreationDate="2010-09-09T15:58:57.437" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that it could be interesting as a first project to analyze the data from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;stackexchange sites&lt;/a&gt;.  The goal would be to characterize the communities and the question/answer process itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We will need to further narrow the scope, but some possible questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What makes a good question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What makes a good answer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do the various communities differ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The data is all &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cc-wiki&lt;/a&gt; and available both through the &lt;a href=&quot;http://odata.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;data dump&lt;/a&gt; and via the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/&quot;&gt;API&lt;/a&gt;.  For those people doing their analysis in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.r-project.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;R&lt;/a&gt;, we can make the data available through the open-source &lt;a href=&quot;http://code.google.com/p/overflowr/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;overflowr&lt;/code&gt; package&lt;/a&gt;, but several other languages/tools are also available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One nice thing about this project is that it opens the door for very different kinds of analysis that draws on our entire community, ranging from statistics to social network analysis and NLP/machine learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" OwnerDisplayName="Shane" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:45.643" LastActivityDate="2010-09-09T16:23:42.293" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="783" CreationDate="2010-09-09T18:05:41.343" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there reputation effects in SE communities and to what extent are reputation effects contingent on various variables such as size of the community, number of views per day, no of questions per day etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reputation effect: Everything else being equal questions/answers of high rep users are voted up much more relative to questions/answers of low rep users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Data source: See Shane's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2512/what-should-be-our-first-polystats-project/2514#2514&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2010-09-09T18:05:41.343" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="783" CreationDate="2010-09-09T19:58:21.890" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is one of the two projects identified by @whuber. Please vote up/down this particular idea depending on whether you want to this to be our first polystats project. I am going to post the other project as a separate answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Predictive Segmentation of Populations.&quot; Help improve clinical trials by distinguishing subpopulations of people into potential responders (to a treatment) and non-responders. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To spice it up a bit, what about engaging in a real problem &lt;em&gt;with a prize offered for the best solution&lt;/em&gt;?  Instances are easy to come by at places like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www2.innocentive.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www2.innocentive.com/&lt;/a&gt; .  Advantages include having a well-defined problem and ready access to appropriate data.  Disadvantages include a time limit (usually a few months) and figuring out what to do with a prize if it's won ;-).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" OwnerDisplayName="whuber" LastActivityDate="2010-09-11T00:52:42.443" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="783" CreationDate="2010-09-11T00:53:42.520" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the other project suggested by @whuber. Please vote up/down this particular idea depending on whether you want to this to be our first polystats project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Statistical Analysis of Genomic Variants.&quot; &quot;...determine the optimal method of processing a large number of Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) data&quot; (see the Wikipedia article on SNPs). There's a large synthetic dataset of 500,000 SNPs for 1000 patients available&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Original Context of @whuber's answer below:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To spice it up a bit, what about engaging in a real problem &lt;em&gt;with a prize offered for the best solution&lt;/em&gt;?  Instances are easy to come by at places like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www2.innocentive.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www2.innocentive.com/&lt;/a&gt; .  Advantages include having a well-defined problem and ready access to appropriate data.  Disadvantages include a time limit (usually a few months) and figuring out what to do with a prize if it's won ;-).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="svadali" LastActivityDate="2010-09-11T00:53:42.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="783" CreationDate="2010-09-12T15:10:23.800" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Answer inspired by Srikant Vadali's comments on this question: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/63387/does-herd-behavior-influence-the-so-sites&quot;&gt;Does herd behavior influence the SO sites?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - please read question before reading further.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this be measured? I suppose the hypothesis is something like &lt;strong&gt;The rate at which up votes are given is directly(?) proportional to the number of up votes it already has.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar corollary for down votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a statistician so this probably needs some refinement - please feel free to make the appropriate suggestions and changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; I very much doubt it is a &lt;strong&gt;direct&lt;/strong&gt; relationship because otherwise the number of votes would increase forever, but maybe some kind of predictable formula can emerge. (If you take number of edits (and hence visibility on active list) into consideration, it could become a complex, but very useful, formula.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1259" OwnerDisplayName="Wikis At Area 51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2010-09-13T09:58:02.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="781" CreationDate="2011-03-31T17:49:18.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @Andy said, it is much simpler to use the embedded editor, as it will, for example, automatically manage the list of hyperlinks and allow you to upload an image directly from your computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically, images are hosted on &lt;a href=&quot;http://imgur.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;imgur&lt;/a&gt;, after they have been loaded from your computer (the base address will be &lt;code&gt;https://i.stack.imgur.com/&lt;/code&gt;). In case you already have images on this web-sharing system, giving the URL works just fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Markdown syntax, embedding an image is as simple as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;![RLogo](http://www.r-project.org/Rlogo.jpg)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;![RLogo][1]&#xA;&#xA;[1]: http://www.r-project.org/Rlogo.jpg&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which produces&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://www.r-project.org/Rlogo.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;RLogo&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, this is basically the same idea as for a simple hyperlink, which when written as &lt;code&gt;[Here is the R logo](http://www.r-project.org/Rlogo.jpg)&lt;/code&gt; actually reads &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.r-project.org/Rlogo.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here is the R logo&lt;/a&gt;. We just need to prefix the hyperlink with a single &lt;code&gt;!&lt;/code&gt;. The rest of the syntax is pure Markdown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="930" LastEditDate="2011-03-31T20:12:34.183" LastActivityDate="2011-03-31T20:12:34.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="790" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-01T10:10:49.363" Score="2" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/9033/please-help-me-remember-a-formula&quot;&gt;edit this question&lt;/a&gt; to reflow the formula, and noticed that MathJax stopped rendering the latex code in preview window. I use Google Chrome 10 on Mac OS X 10.6.6 Also why does this valid formula does not render (I've checked it on TexLive-2010):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\begin{align*}&#xA;    -N-\frac{1}{N}\sum_{j=1}^N (2j-1) \left(\ln\left(\frac{1}{2}+\int_{\bar{x}}^{x_j}&#xA;\exp\left(-\frac{(t-\bar{x})^2}{2s^2}\right)\mathrm{dt}\right)\\\\&#xA;+\ln\left(\frac{1}{2}-\int_{\bar{x}}^{x_{N-j+1}}&#xA;\exp\left(-\frac{(t-\bar{x})^2}{2s^2}\right)\mathrm{dt}\right)\right)&#xA;\end{align*}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that it seems that &lt;code&gt;\left(&lt;/code&gt; requires the &lt;code&gt;right)&lt;/code&gt; without the line-break.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2116" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T19:05:18.177" Title="Preview of latex formulas not working?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="790" CreationDate="2011-04-01T10:25:38.367" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I follow. I've pasted that TeX below and it's rendering (albeit slowly) in the preview. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;\begin{align*}&#xA;    -N-\frac{1}{N}\sum_{j=1}^N (2j-1) \left(\ln\left(\frac{1}{2}+\int_{\bar{x}}^{x_j}&#xA;\exp\left(-\frac{(t-\bar{x})^2}{2s^2}\right)\mathrm{dt}\right) \&#xA;+\ln\left(\frac{1}{2}-\int_{\bar{x}}^{x_{N-j+1}}&#xA;\exp\left(-\frac{(t-\bar{x})^2}{2s^2}\right)\mathrm{dt}\right)\right)&#xA;\end{align*}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Probably the place to ask is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://groups.google.com/group/mathjax-users/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MathJaX Users Group&lt;/a&gt;. Something like this has &lt;a href=&quot;http://groups.google.com/group/mathjax-users/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;already been asked&lt;/a&gt; I guess that suggests one find another way of doing it (which you have already done and it is far more readable in my opinion). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3876" LastEditorUserId="3876" LastEditDate="2011-04-01T20:17:15.920" LastActivityDate="2011-04-01T20:17:15.920" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="790" CreationDate="2011-04-01T10:28:39.533" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hm here is my separate try, note that there should be 4 slashes, not 2:&#xA;\begin{align*}&#xA;    -N-\frac{1}{N}\sum_{j=1}^N (2j-1) \left(\ln\left(\frac{1}{2}+\int_{\bar{x}}^{x_j}&#xA;\exp\left(-\frac{(t-\bar{x})^2}{2s^2}\right)\mathrm{dt}\right)\\&#xA;+\ln\left(\frac{1}{2}-\int_{\bar{x}}^{x_{N-j+1}}&#xA;\exp\left(-\frac{(t-\bar{x})^2}{2s^2}\right)\mathrm{dt}\right)\right)&#xA;\end{align*}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2116" LastActivityDate="2011-04-01T10:28:39.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="793" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-01T19:07:47.320" Score="88" ViewCount="14545" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/400/919&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt; in fall 2010 considered the extent to which purely software-related questions would be welcome on this site.  It didn't really reach a conclusion, but one useful suggestion that arose is to &lt;strong&gt;collect a set of links to online support resources&lt;/strong&gt; (such as user groups and list servers) for the various statistical computing platforms.  I guess that would let us close some of these questions in a constructive and relatively guilt-free manner.  I, for one, would like to help the people who come by with questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/9013/string-replace-in-sas&quot;&gt;SAS macro syntax&lt;/a&gt; or  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2269/access-tables-created-in-sas-enterprise-guide-client-into-sas-enterprise-miner-cl&quot;&gt;table access&lt;/a&gt;, even though these questions have no direct statistical interest (and would interest only small subcommunities here) and therefore ought to be closed or migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Could we organize replies in the present thread by software platform?&lt;/strong&gt;  The ones of most immediate use are those that keep showing up: R, SAS, SPSS, Stata, Excel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2023-11-11T09:13:43.823" Title="Internet Support for Statistics Software" Tags="|discussion|faq|software|" AnswerCount="24" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-04-09T21:25:17.550" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="793" CreationDate="2011-04-01T19:08:46.353" Score="31" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Stata&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stata.com/statalist/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Statalist&lt;/a&gt; is the place to go with questions about how to do things in any version of Stata.  It is very active: Stata developers from StataCorp and many experienced users are leading members. Questions cover basic Stata use, Stata programming, and statistical practice. Before posting do study the FAQ Advice &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.statalist.org/forums/help&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. People are asked to use their real names. As a resource with very many answered questions and for its collective expertise, Statalist is ahead of all other forums.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about Stata syntax, programming and output are addressed on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/stata&quot;&gt;StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt;. It's best to note its aim of being a forum for professional and enthusiast programmers and its focus on specific problems with people's own code. That is, SO is not a good forum for questions that are entirely or mostly statistical, including why or how Stata commands work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reddit.com/r/stata/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reddit&lt;/a&gt; occasionally includes Stata questions. Beginner questions are common. The number of experienced users lurking there is far smaller than on Statalist and advice is variable. There is more tolerance there for students seeking advice or assistance with their assignments, a plus or minus depending on your status and your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much the same applies to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.talkstats.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Talk Stats&lt;/a&gt;, which appears to have faded away as a  forum for Stata questions. EDIT 12 May 2023 This site now appears defunct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these last two sites allow anonymous identifiers, a plus if that is your preference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stata-forum.de&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stata Forum.De&lt;/a&gt; is dedicated to Stata and is conducted in German. There is now little traffic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quora&lt;/a&gt; supports posting of opinions about Stata and its alternatives. Specific threads based on coding seem rare at best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.facebook.com/groups/statausersgroup/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stata Users Group on Facebook&lt;/a&gt;. It supports questions in Spanish as well as in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stata is often mentioned on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.twitter.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Twitter&lt;/a&gt; but only a few posts ask for or provide support on specific questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;official FAQs&lt;/a&gt; are extremely useful as well. The help files for specific commands are available online; for direct access, form the url as &lt;code&gt;http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?&lt;/code&gt; appended with the command name, like &lt;code&gt;regress&lt;/code&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?regress&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?regress&lt;/a&gt;. The full pdf documentation is also available &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stata.com/features/documentation/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;online&lt;/a&gt;, e.g., the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stata.com/manuals14/u.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;User Guide&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stata.com/manuals14/r.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reference&lt;/a&gt; manuals are usually a good place to start for general commands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;StataCorp also maintains a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/user/statacorp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;YouTube training channel&lt;/a&gt; and offers registered users free &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stata.com/support/tech-support/contact/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;technical support via e-mail&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ATS/UCLA has an &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.idre.ucla.edu/stata/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;entire section dedicated to Stata&lt;/a&gt;. Start from there with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.idre.ucla.edu/stata/modules/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;learning modules&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.idre.ucla.edu/stata/faq/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQs&lt;/a&gt; or the &amp;quot;links by topic.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The StataCorp website carries information on, and a way to purchase, books on Stata: see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stata.com/bookstore/books-on-stata/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditorDisplayName="user5644" LastEditDate="2023-05-12T09:35:43.150" LastActivityDate="2023-05-12T09:35:43.150" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-04-09T21:25:17.550" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="793" CreationDate="2011-04-01T20:09:20.517" Score="75" Body="&lt;h1&gt;R&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;R-help&lt;/a&gt;, and the various &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.R-project.org/mail.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;R Mailing Lists or SIGs&lt;/a&gt;, welcome any questions (provided they conform to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Posting Guide&lt;/a&gt;). Answers generally come within one or two days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.statmethods.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quick-R&lt;/a&gt; gives a gentle overview of most of the basic R syntax for people coming from SAS, SPSS, or Stata. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; also provides strong support for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/r&quot;&gt;R questions&lt;/a&gt;. Additionally, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rseek.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rseek.org&lt;/a&gt; provides a custom Google search that facilitates queries related to R code, packages, articles, etc. You can search the R documentation and package documentation using &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rdocumentation.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rdocumentation.org&lt;/a&gt; site. &lt;a href=&quot;https://r-universe.dev/search/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;r-universe&lt;/a&gt; features useful reviews of current packages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.oarc.ucla.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;UCLA Academic Technology Services&lt;/a&gt;provide&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.oarc.ucla.edu/r/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt; many worked examples of statistical analyses in R&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're looking for visualization ideas, visit the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.r-graph-gallery.com/all-graphs/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;R Graph gallery&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://learnr.wordpress.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Learn R blog&lt;/a&gt;, both of which feature a wide variety of plots and the accompanying code.  The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cookbook-r.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cookbook for R&lt;/a&gt; page provides multiple examples and recipes for plotting data (mostly using ggplot2) plus some additional information on using R.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To add the excellent resources list above, same have found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.r-tutor.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the R Tutorial web site&lt;/a&gt; to be helpful. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.r-bloggers.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;R bloggers&lt;/a&gt; is also a helpful feed. That has lots of useful posts from various bloggers and is an excellent way to keep up with new packages and new ways of using existing packages. If you're coming from SAS or SPSS, check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://r4stats.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;R for SAS and SPSS Users&lt;/a&gt;; there is a book with more information in it. An equivalent book for Stata users coming to R is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.springer.com/statistics/computanional+statistics/book/978-1-4419-1317-3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;R for Stata Users&lt;/a&gt;. Nice introductory tutorial can be found on &lt;a href=&quot;http://ww2.coastal.edu/kingw/statistics/R-tutorials/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;R Tutorials&lt;/a&gt; page – it covers introduction to basics of R, using statistical tools such as t-tests, ANOVA, regression and other topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also some resources listed on our site here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/138/resources-for-learning-r&quot;&gt;Free resources for learning R&lt;/a&gt;, and on our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/r/info&quot;&gt;R tag wiki&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For learning on more advanced topics in R programming the best resource that is available online is &lt;a href=&quot;http://adv-r.had.co.nz/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Advanced R&lt;/a&gt; site by Hadley Wickham. It is an online version of book under the same title. Another resource covering programming issues is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The R Inferno&lt;/a&gt; by Patrick Burns available as pdf file. Those two cover topics that are negligible to most people that use R for statistics but can be crucial if you do actual programming in R and can be helpful in understanding how R works 'under the hood'. If trying to understand better how some R function works, you can always &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19226816/how-can-i-view-the-source-code-for-a-function&quot;&gt;check their source code&lt;/a&gt; as R is open-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="44269" LastEditDate="2023-11-10T18:53:58.817" LastActivityDate="2023-11-10T18:53:58.817" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-04-09T21:25:17.550" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="796" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="797" CreationDate="2011-04-01T20:46:42.037" Score="4" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm learning everything I can about statistics and would love to have a &quot;surprise me&quot; button that would jump to a random question. (And of course, an easily-reachable &quot;surprise me&quot; button on that page, so I can keep jumping until something catches my eye.) I believe Wikipedia and Google have similar buttons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1764" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T19:56:09.160" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T19:56:09.160" Title="Will there ever be a &quot;random&quot; or &quot;surprise me&quot; button?" Tags="|feature-request|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="796" CreationDate="2011-04-01T21:09:32.807" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange network has a sister site, &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackapps.com&quot;&gt;Stack Apps&lt;/a&gt; for standalone applications that provide an alternative interface or functionality for the site, or browser userscripts that enhance the actual sites themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest searching there to see if something like exists, and if not, you could post a question asking.  Perhaps someone would be willing to whip up a userscript you could add to your browser.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most modern browsers support userscripts - you can see details on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/tags/script/info&quot;&gt;script tag wiki page&lt;/a&gt; for browser support and installation instruction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1142" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:45.643" LastActivityDate="2011-04-01T21:09:32.807" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="779" CreationDate="2011-04-02T02:03:12.447" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chrome 10 on Windows 7 I see this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/8942/estimating-noise-correlation-in-augmented-state-vector-kalman-filter&quot;&gt;Estimating noise correlation in augmented state vector Kalman filter&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cr739.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is this Mac specific?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2011-04-02T02:03:12.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="779" CreationDate="2011-04-02T19:10:20.213" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible for you to right click on a formula and click about for MathJax and paste in the results?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should look something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;MathJax v1.1&#xA;using TeX web fonts&#xA;&#xA;TeX Input Jax v1.1&#xA;HTML-CSS Output Jax v1.1&#xA;mml Element Jax v1.1&#xA;tex2jax Extension v1.1&#xA;MathZoom Extension v1.1&#xA;MathMenu Extension v1.1&#xA;TeX/noErrors Extension v1.0.1&#xA;TeX/noUndefined Extension v1.0.1&#xA;Firefox v3.6.16 — otf fonts&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2" LastActivityDate="2011-04-02T19:10:20.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="779" CreationDate="2011-04-03T09:20:26.510" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is my output:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;TeX Input Jax v1.1&#xA;HTML-CSS Output Jax v1.1&#xA;mml Element Jax v1.1&#xA;tex2jax Extension v1.1&#xA;MathZoom Extension v1.1&#xA;MathMenu Extension v1.1&#xA;TeX/noErrors Extension v1.0.1&#xA;TeX/noUndefined Extension v1.0.1&#xA;Chrome v10.0.648.204 — otf fonts&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this seems Mac OS X specific, maybe it is some antialiasing issue. I've already got used to it :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2116" LastActivityDate="2011-04-03T09:20:26.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="779" CreationDate="2011-04-03T10:24:12.127" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Font rendering looks fine to me. Anyway, for the record, here is mine with Safari (OS X):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;MathJax v1.1&#xA;using TeX web fonts&#xA;&#xA;TeX Input Jax v1.1&#xA;HTML-CSS Output Jax v1.1&#xA;mml Element Jax v1.1&#xA;tex2jax Extension v1.1&#xA;MathZoom Extension v1.1&#xA;MathMenu Extension v1.1&#xA;TeX/noErrors Extension v1.0.1&#xA;TeX/noUndefined Extension v1.0.1&#xA;Safari v5.0.4 — otf fonts&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2011-04-03T10:24:12.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="796" CreationDate="2011-04-03T21:01:19.657" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For start, you may &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags?tab=name&quot;&gt;browse by tags&lt;/a&gt;; topic organisation is pretty good way of getting rid of time bias.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2011-04-03T21:01:19.657" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="804" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="805" CreationDate="2011-04-04T22:59:06.647" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I flagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5545107/how-to-order-values-on-a-dotplot-produced-via-qplot&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; post as off-topic and more suitable for SO. I had a two-part comment that listed four possible duplicate questions on SO. When the question was migrated, the first half of my comment didn't make the transition leaving the second half in limbo-land.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was the first part of the comment deleted by a mod or is something not quite right with the transitions between sites?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="696" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2011-04-05T06:51:46.060" Title="Delete comments when migrating to other SE site" Tags="|support|comment|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="804" CreationDate="2011-04-05T06:51:46.060" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't really know what happened with your comments. Your first one is still visible, though. I checked myself some of the links you provided, before closing the question. I didn't delete your comments, and apparently they didn't migrate with the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that Hadley suggested to use &lt;code&gt;reorder()&lt;/code&gt; which was already proposed in the links you provided. Hence, your comments came very timely!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to add that I wouldn't have close it without clear indication of possible duplicates, because (a) a response was already provided, and (b) we welcome question on data visualization and ggplot2, although it's clearly better when they have something to do with information visualization and/or statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2011-04-05T06:51:46.060" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="806" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-06T03:02:33.830" Score="1" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/693/syntax-highlighting-with-r-tag&quot;&gt;Syntax highlighting with r tag&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've answered a question and included an example with R code. Shall I add the r tag to the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2011-04-06T03:02:33.830" Title="I've answered with R code. Shall I add the r tag to the question?" Tags="|discussion|r|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2011-04-06T04:09:12.617" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="793" CreationDate="2011-04-06T04:01:20.247" Score="16" Body="&lt;h1&gt;SPSS&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One forum devoted to SPSS software usage is;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://spssx-discussion.165.s1.nabble.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SPSSX discussion list&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SPSSX receives a fairly wide variety of data manipulation questions and questions related to statistical analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note as all things in time change, when I initially wrote this response 12 years ago, the other forums were somewhat active. This is not the case anymore, and so I have taken them off this answer (can see the historical edits).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SPSSX is the only one that has &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; activity that is not entirely spam (the google group) or has not been decommissioned (the IBM forum). And SPSSX is pretty sparse, about one question a month in 2023 so far -- I would not bet money that listserv will be around in another 10 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are still a few greybeards who answer questions on there (so it is not bad), but you may be better off at this point asking the questions about SPSS syntax on Stack overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make sure to check out the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/spss/info&quot;&gt;SPSS tag wiki&lt;/a&gt; for a more complete list of resources, many of which are freely accessible online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="1036" LastEditDate="2023-11-10T12:49:29.360" LastActivityDate="2023-11-10T12:49:29.360" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-04-07T15:55:21.197" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="809" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-10T17:14:44.423" Score="4" ViewCount="583" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be nice to have the option to use bordermatrix in MathJaX. See the bottom of the page &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.math.harvard.edu/texman/node25.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.math.harvard.edu/texman/node25.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3911" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T19:55:00.017" LastActivityDate="2013-09-02T16:49:40.067" Title="bordermatrix in MathJaX" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|math-display|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="793" CreationDate="2011-04-11T08:41:46.283" Score="13" Body="&lt;h1&gt;RapidMiner&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://community.rapidminer.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The one forum &lt;/a&gt; (rapid-i developers participate, too)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://sourceforge.net/projects/rapidminer/files/1.%20RapidMiner/5.1/rapidminer-5-manual-english_v1.0.pdf/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;User Manual for RM 5.x&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.rapidminer.com/latest/developers/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Developer Manual&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="264" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-11-09T11:25:19.617" LastActivityDate="2023-11-09T11:25:19.617" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-04-11T08:41:46.283" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="811" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="813" CreationDate="2011-04-11T18:20:09.557" Score="2" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;When replying to a question it's often useful to copy the $\LaTeX$ source of formulas in it by pressing the edit button and cp&amp;amp;p from the source text. (And eventually modify them in the answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes these formulas appear in comments, but editing them, thus also copying the formulas from them is only possible above the reputation of 2000.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My feature request is that (while keeping editing restricted to high reputation members) copying from the source was enabled for everybody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3911" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T19:54:47.990" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T19:54:47.990" Title="Copy formula from a comment" Tags="|feature-request|status-bydesign|math-display|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="759" CreationDate="2011-04-11T19:30:11.480" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to notify users of this website when a journal event is going to happen? I would be interested in attending as well but have only found out about them after they have occured. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="776" LastActivityDate="2011-04-11T19:30:11.480" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="811" CreationDate="2011-04-12T04:07:54.683" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I understand. You don't need to edit anything to see the source code for a formula; you can just right-click on the formula and choose the &quot;Show source&quot; option. I got this: $\LaTeX$ from your post, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1569" LastActivityDate="2011-04-12T04:07:54.683" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="195" CreationDate="2011-04-12T06:29:29.963" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do we still want this tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/statistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;statistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;statistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not seeing much value there and a lot of opportunities for bad tagging. I am favoring removal and adding to the intrinsic tags for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit: mbq asked me to &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/820842#820842&quot;&gt;remove this tag in chat&lt;/a&gt; so I did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2011-04-13T00:37:21.027" LastActivityDate="2011-04-13T00:37:21.027" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="195" CreationDate="2011-04-12T21:36:51.547" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Statistics&quot; has several senses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of them is overly general.  It's inappropriate on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within the field, though, a &quot;statistic&quot; is a summary of data.  Some questions have that as their primary focus: what &lt;em&gt;statistic&lt;/em&gt; would be appropriate for my situation?  What is the sampling distribution of this &lt;em&gt;statistic&lt;/em&gt;?  What are the pros and cons of using this or that &lt;em&gt;statistic&lt;/em&gt; in the analysis of my problem?  Etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently went through and removed many of the unwarranted &quot;statistics&quot; tags.  (Due to lack of time I didn't go all the way through the list, though.)  Some deserved to remain in the second sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps a good solution is to rename &quot;statistics&quot; to &quot;statistic&quot; and update its wiki appropriately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2011-04-12T21:36:51.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="793" CreationDate="2011-04-12T22:13:59.423" Score="21" Body="&lt;h1&gt;SAS&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SAS questions do get asked and answered on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/sas&quot;&gt;StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt;; SAS also runs a &lt;a href=&quot;https://communities.sas.com/community/support-communities&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;community forum&lt;/a&gt;, which is very active.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://support.sas.com/events/sasglobalforum/previous/online.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;proceedings of SUGI&lt;/a&gt; are a tremendous resource.  Also invaluable if you need material for a corny SAS stand-up comedy routine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.oarc.ucla.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;UCLA Advanced Research Computing&lt;/a&gt; provides &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.oarc.ucla.edu/sas/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;really fantastic resources for SAS&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another resource is &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20150109114008/https://listserv.uga.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=SAS-L&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SAS-L&lt;/a&gt; (site has archives and information on how to join).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://support.sas.com/documentation/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;online documentation at the SAS support page&lt;/a&gt; is a great resource.  It includes the SAS User's Guide which contains quite detailed information on SAS procedures, including syntax, theoretical details, and examples.  As an example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/statug/63347/HTML/default/viewer.htm#glm_toc.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here's&lt;/a&gt; the page for &lt;code&gt;proc glm&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lexjansen.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lex Jansen's site&lt;/a&gt; indexes not only all of SAS Global Forum (formerly SUGI) but the regional meetings as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-11-09T06:33:07.687" LastActivityDate="2023-11-09T06:33:07.687" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-04-12T22:13:59.423" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="817" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-15T03:39:00.053" Score="11" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;We're evaluating the feasibility of &lt;strong&gt;sponsoring a member of the statistics community to speak at a conference in 2011&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking is a relatively big &quot;ask&quot;, so this needs to be planned many months in advance. Let's get started! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We'd like the community to establish &lt;strong&gt;where&lt;/strong&gt; ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What relevant statistics conferences are coming up in 2011 that have open speaker slots or calls for papers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... and then &lt;strong&gt;who&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Which members of the community are strongly interested in being sponsored by Stack Exchange, Inc to speak at one of the above conferences in 2011?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, the speaker is free talk about anything he or she wants so long as it would be roughly on topic for this site -- with a quick acknowledgement of support from Stack Exchange and a mention of the community here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2011-04-17T03:28:58.053" LastActivityDate="2011-04-17T03:28:58.053" Title="Possible Conference Speaking Sponsorships -- 2011" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="818" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-15T20:15:54.577" Score="4" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it intentional that the HTML title for the CrossValidated site is &quot;Statistical Analysis&quot;?  Or is it a hold-over from the beta name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The HTML title is what determines the browser window title and the default bookmark title, which makes things seems a bit out of sync.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Just to clarify/expand after seeing mbq's answer, there are three prominent &quot;names&quot; for the site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;b&gt;stats.stackexchange.com&lt;/b&gt;: domain name in URL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;b&gt;Statistical Analysis&lt;/b&gt;: HTML title used in browser title and bookmarks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;b&gt;CrossValidated&lt;/b&gt;: internal name used in page headers&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand it's difficult to update a domain name (though not impossible), but I don't see why the HTML title (#2) shouldn't also be changed to &quot;CrossValidated&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1191" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T19:08:38.173" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T19:09:48.420" Title="Should the HTML title of this CrossValidated site still be &quot;Statistical Analysis&quot;?" Tags="|bug|status-completed|site-name|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="817" CreationDate="2011-04-15T21:11:21.227" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;We're too late for this year's annual JSM (in the US).  However, the ASA is starting a new &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amstat.org/meetings/csp/2012/index.cfm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Conference on Statistical Practice&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, to be held in early 2012, that seems closely aligned with this site's aims.  It would be especially good to attract well-qualified practitioners to answer questions.  It's not clear how one can participate as a speaker, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2011-04-15T21:11:21.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="820" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="827" CreationDate="2011-04-16T02:19:04.443" Score="4" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;The explanation of the Generalist badge is “Active in many different tags”. This explanation is less clear then the ones of other badges. Especially what does &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; mean here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3911" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2011-04-16T16:36:26.843" LastActivityDate="2011-04-19T07:13:48.207" Title="Explanation of the Generalist badge" Tags="|bug|status-completed|badges|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="820" CreationDate="2011-04-16T07:44:57.137" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unless I'm wrong, it means &quot;Provided non-wiki answers of 15 total score in 20 of top 40 tags&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2011-04-16T07:44:57.137" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="820" CreationDate="2011-04-16T09:12:50.680" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/badges/15/generalist&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/badges/15/generalist&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we failed to update the description on all the other sites. This is a bug.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2011-04-16T09:12:50.680" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="818" CreationDate="2011-04-16T16:20:07.363" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand, the general idea of SE team is just make everything a &lt;em&gt;topic&lt;/em&gt;.stackexchange.com to build a StackExchange brand. Statistical Analysis outside and CrossValidated inside is a kind of &lt;em&gt;status quo&lt;/em&gt; -- the same is with cooking, which is internally SeasonedAdvice, and Apple being AskDifferent.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I like CrossValidated as a name and I'm of course glad of this compromise, but honestly I don't know what are its terms, thus I don't know what are the odds of moving it in any direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway I'll repeat the most utilitarian reason why CV is better than Stats -- this is not a site about Statistical Analysis, but about statistical analysis, designing experiments, collecting data, data mining, machine learning, visualizing data, probability theory, mathematical statistics and statistical and data-driven computing. The only short statement to cover it is &quot;data science&quot;, but on the other hand this collides with SE data explorer.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;BTW the &quot;Q&amp;amp;A for statisticians, data analysts, data miners and data visualization experts&quot; line reflects the wide scope already, and it looks somewhat strange written below &quot;Statistical Analysis&quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2011-04-16T16:20:07.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="820" CreationDate="2011-04-16T16:24:08.617" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;All badge descriptions for the generalist badge have been updated to match Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2" LastActivityDate="2011-04-16T16:24:08.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="817" CreationDate="2011-04-16T17:05:46.127" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't really think this is a good idea in case of scientific conferences -- they are very different from business ones. First of all, they are effectively free (buy a laptop, you'll find Windows on it; work for an academia, they'll sent you to a conference for time to time), so we treat them mostly as an occasion to meet people and free food. Sponsored talks are treated as yadda yadda and in short real talk it is usually very hard to go off-topic. Backstage promotion seems a better option, but it is risky -- I doubt someone would honestly commit to do this for money. Final option is to support the conference itself -- it could be reasonably cheap in a scenario of few small conferences but I don't think it will generate significantly bigger traffic increase that we currently get organically. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2011-04-16T17:05:46.127" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="826" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-18T19:57:10.197" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;@JeffAtwood said &quot;But it is a very hard badge to get; much larger sites only have ~20 users with the badge.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why isn't this a gold badge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Nevermind.  In a case of &quot;I should've checked SO-meta first...&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/50925/the-generalist-badge-should-be-gold&quot;&gt;Here's the discussion from stackoverflow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1499" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2011-04-18T19:57:10.197" Title="Followup: Generalist Badge. Why not gold?" Tags="|discussion|badges|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="820" CreationDate="2011-04-19T07:13:48.207" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/05/generalist-badge-implemented/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;relevant information&lt;/a&gt; why nobody is awarded generalist badge in stats.SE. The &lt;strong&gt;top 40 tags must have at least 200 questions&lt;/strong&gt; for the badge to be awarded. So although there are people who satisfy the requirements of the badge, the stats.SE as a site does not, since currently only one tag &lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt; has more than 200 questions. So it will be quite a when this badge will be awarded, although when it does, quite a few people will immediately qualify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2116" LastActivityDate="2011-04-19T07:13:48.207" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="828" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="829" CreationDate="2011-04-19T16:44:45.147" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linking through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/multiple-comparisons&quot;&gt;multiple-comparisons&lt;/a&gt; tab gives a page listing 47 tagged questions (as of this moment).  The textbox in the upper right corner reads &quot;[multiple-comparisons]&quot;.  Typing in another search term, such as &quot;[multiple-comparisons] correlation&quot; and pressing &lt;strong&gt;Enter&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;restricts&lt;/em&gt; the search, in this case returning just 8 results.  The URL for these results is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=[multiple-comparisons]+correlation&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=[multiple-comparisons]+correlation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, using the &lt;em&gt;same&lt;/em&gt; URL for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bmultiple-comparisons%5D%20correlation&quot;&gt;link within a comment&lt;/a&gt; returns 390 search results!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If you link through the preceding line you will see 8 results.  If you link through the first comment below you will see all 390.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2011-04-19T21:54:18.990" Title="Inconsistent processing of search requests" Tags="|support|comment|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="828" CreationDate="2011-04-19T20:01:52.980" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hmm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bmultiple-comparisons%5D%20correlation&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bmultiple-comparisons%5D%20correlation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;8 results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/multiple-comparisons&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/multiple-comparisons&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;47 questions with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/multiple-comparisons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;multiple-comparisons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;multiple-comparisons&lt;/a&gt; tag, so that doesn't seem unreasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2011-04-19T20:01:52.980" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="830" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-22T07:13:38.927" Score="6" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently we have the following regression tags: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/regression&quot;&gt;regression&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/linear-regression&quot;&gt;linear-regression&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/logistic-regression&quot;&gt;logistic-regression&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nonlinear-regression&quot;&gt;nonlinear-regression&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/stepwise-regression&quot;&gt;stepwise-regression&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ridge-regression&quot;&gt;ridge-regression&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dynamic-regression&quot;&gt;dynamic-regression&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meta-regression&quot;&gt;meta-regression&lt;/a&gt;. This is perfectly normal, since there are a lot of questions related to the regression and separate tags makes a lot of sense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to propose however to remove multiple-regression tag, since usually all the regressions are multiple. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also propose standard formulation for all the specific regression tag wikis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Insert regression type] regression is a type of regression, where [insert some characterisation of the particular regression type]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example for linear regression would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Linear regression is a type of&#xA;  regression, where regression function&#xA;  is linear. This is the most widely&#xA;  used regression type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've already edited linear, logistic and dynamic regression tag wiki's, the edits will appear when they are approved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt; I see that linear regression tag was merged with regression tag. This seems a good thing. It would be also good to merge the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/multiple-regression&quot;&gt;multiple-regression&lt;/a&gt; tag with regression (by merging I mean making synonym or something to that effect). I looked at the questions tagged with this tag, they all mention linear regression. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2116" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2011-05-04T03:36:30.523" Title="Regression tags" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="831" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-23T00:57:20.613" Score="3" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tonight I completely lost my OpenID and credentials to sign in to stats.SE and math.SE. I was also unable to &quot;recover&quot; them via the &quot;Recover&quot; link on the myOpenID web sign-in and that site does not provide any support whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/88451/lost-my-openid-account&quot;&gt;I'm not the only one&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm suspecting this will be happening to other stats.SE users and so this is why I'm posting this information here.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fix is to simply sign up again for an account with the exactly the same information as before. Without needing to do any additional confirmation, my credentials were reestablished and my SE accounts were linked to everything properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This bug is not Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange related as far as I know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2970" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Lost myOpenID account and access: Here is the fix" Tags="|support|openid|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="832" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-24T19:53:05.360" Score="32" ViewCount="803" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related discussion on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/49563/promoting-comments-to-answers&quot;&gt;Meta.SO&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some kind of way that comments that are in fact answers to questions be moved from a comment section into the answer section? Ideally the user who asks the question should be able to do this or a mod.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would possibly decrease the number of unanswered questions a little and encourage people to be more careful to put answers where they should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3597" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2015-11-25T13:45:44.193" Title="Comments that are actually answers" Tags="|feature-request|status-bydesign|answers|comment|moderation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="832" CreationDate="2011-04-25T11:31:55.973" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;As chl said, even moderators can't do the comment-&gt;answer conversion. However I don't think it is reasonable to build tools that justify wrong behavior -- we should rather all start encouraging authors of comment-answers to repost them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't like the CW option since it is a lot of work, will generate clutter and become a reputation drain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2011-04-25T11:31:55.973" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="834" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="836" CreationDate="2011-04-25T19:29:14.990" Score="9" ViewCount="463" Body="&lt;p&gt;Time to continue the CVJC series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To remind for those who are new to the idea:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CVJC is a whole day meeting on &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/18/ten-fold&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; where we discuss some paper and its theoretical/practical surroundings.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As mentioned above the event is whole-day (00:00-23:59UTC), but there is a  meet-up session on which most talking take place.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The paper must be OpenAccess or a (p)reprint suggested previously on a meta thread like this one and selected in voting. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We will try to invite the author(s).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, please suggest papers (each in one answer)! The deadline for suggestions is traditionally a week ahead, so 23:59UTC 2.5.2011.&#xA;The CVJC4 will take place circa a week after that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: As you can see, we'll be talking about our beloved Impact Factor [=&lt;br&gt;&#xA; The journal club is scheduled for Friday, 27.5.2011. The event remains whole day, but this time there will be &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; meet-up session at 17:00UTC (12:00CDT, 19:00CEST) -- featuring at least one of the authors. See you then; and don't forget to register &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/18/ten-fold?tab=schedule&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2011-05-22T10:35:46.707" LastActivityDate="2011-05-22T10:35:46.707" Title="Fourth Cross Validated Journal Club" Tags="|discussion|journal-club|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="834" CreationDate="2011-04-26T09:53:18.330" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to suggest the following article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aliferis, C.F., Statnikov, A., Tsamardinos, I., Schildcrout, J.S., Shepherd, B.E., and Harrell, F.E. (2009). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3adoi/10.1371/journal.pone.0004922&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Factors Influencing the Statistical Power of Complex Data Analysis Protocols for Molecular Signature Development from Microarray Data&lt;/a&gt;. PLoS ONE 4(3): e4922.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2011-04-26T09:53:18.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="834" CreationDate="2011-04-27T13:41:03.580" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recent Impact Factor criticism:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Douglas N. Arnold, Kristine K. Fowler (2011). &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.0278&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Nefarious Numbers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Abstract:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We investigate the journal impact factor, focusing on the applied mathematics category. We discuss impact factor manipulation and demonstrate that the impact factor gives an inaccurate view of journal quality, which is poorly correlated with expert opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2011-04-27T13:41:03.580" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="837" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-29T11:00:03.697" Score="-6" ViewCount="587" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I spotted that on stats.stackexchange.com questions that request analytical solutions of statistical problems and answers that give nicely derived answers using mathematical calculus are not distinguished. I think it's useful to see a collection of mathematically derived answers while many other answers are opinions, collections, applications of well known methods, numerical approximations etc. I created the &lt;code&gt;analytical derivation&lt;/code&gt; tag, wrote a tag description, went through about 400 questions and answers, selected 60 that qualified, and tagged those that had not had already 5 tags. After receiving the taxonomist badge I went to bed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today I wanted to check if users received tag-badges who were particularly active asking such questions or giving such solutions and I wanted to continue tagging, however I had to see that all of my several hours of work has been reverted! This has been done without any discussion, not even a bit of explanation!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I view this as ruining the results of several hours of salutary efforts and given that the nullification of my work was done in secret (not contacting me, not discussing, not giving explanation, not suggesting a way to improve (if the destruction was related to a presumed imperfectness at all), not even raised on the stats meta) – I believe this was an abuse with their rights of a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please tell me how I can get my work restored, how I can continue with it, and how to go on with the moderator overriding their commission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3911" OwnerDisplayName="GaBorgulya" LastActivityDate="2011-04-29T13:43:43.697" Title="Many hours of work on tags reverted without discussion - moderator abusing their commission?" Tags="|support|moderation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="18" ClosedDate="2011-05-06T12:38:05.063" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="837" CreationDate="2011-04-29T12:26:14.800" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a copy the private message from the moderator that was sent after my post to the meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hello,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm writing in reference to your Statistical Analysis - Stack Exchange account:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/3911/gaborgulya&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/3911/gaborgulya&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It seems you have added a tag &quot;analytical-derivation&quot; to many questions. As you can see, this tag has been wiped out. There are two reasons why we did that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;This tag was a meta tag, and as such it was not making Internet a better place; this blog post explains it in detail: &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;SE is a collaborative site, and the organic growth of a tag is the only way to ensure that it is wanted and needed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For the future, if you think that some global editing action is required, propose it earlier as a meta thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Regards,&#xA;  XXXX&#xA;  Statistical Analysis - Stack Exchange moderator&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure the moderator wants to identify themselves so I substituted the name with XXXX.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2011-04-29T12:26:14.800" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="837" CreationDate="2011-04-29T12:59:02.713" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I sympathize with your efforts and have no doubt about your good intentions, I would like to draw your attention on two points. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, it would have been better to propose such big changes for discussion here, on Meta. This is the ideal place for discussing whether adding a new tag would be relevant or not, in the spirit of this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/830/regression-tags&quot;&gt;Regression tags&lt;/a&gt;, for example. It appears that such a tag might lead to some confusion, and while you coined the term &quot;mathematically derived answers&quot; to justify it, it's not obvious (to me at least) how it can be used in a search engine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, I would have appreciated that you posted this question on our Meta, rather than the SO Meta because we, users and mods, are the first concerned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I often found myself spending 2 to 4 hours (day and/or night) on stats.SE because I simply like the idea of sharing thoughts and experience on a wiki. Whenever I can contribute to it, I try my best. But be sure I'm not after rep, badges or whatever. I simply find it is a better opportunity to learn, exchange, and archive a lasting record of great solutions to specific questions, compared to mailing-lists. That's the purpose of the SE community, unless I missed something. So, this is what I was doing as a &quot;simple&quot; user, and that I try to keep going as a mod. Being a mod also means that I have to pay attention to how the site is going on, but I always try to think as a user, and when I'm flagging questions, answers, or when I make some edits, it is has an user, not a mod. Before closing a question or an inappropriate reply, I generally leave a message and wait for user action or others' opinions. We are not &quot;super-user&quot;, we are not here to control everything, because &lt;em&gt;this site is driven by its community of users&lt;/em&gt;. Frankly, I don't think there was any abuse from our moderation privileges in this particular case. As I said, it would have been better if you asked us before, and when I say &lt;em&gt;us&lt;/em&gt; it means &lt;em&gt;all users&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also we are fortunate enough to have protected a respectful, though punctilious, place since the beta stage. I hope this will continue, for the good of all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2011-04-29T12:59:02.713" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="837" CreationDate="2011-04-29T13:43:43.697" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am truly sorry that all that work has disappeared&lt;/strong&gt; and understand the shock you must have felt when that happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a result actually is a foreseeable consequence of &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; large-scale,unilateral action taken on an SE site.  These sites are &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt; run.  That does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; mean that individuals do as they will and then ask that others accept the consequences.  It means that members work together, collaborate, talk, test things out, and move forward with consensus.  Meta and chat are two of the (many) mechanisms to support these activities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I instigated the response to your actions&lt;/strong&gt; after (a) rejecting two requests from you for a wiki edit on your new &amp;quot;analytical-derivation&amp;quot; tag (the description was vague and incomplete) and (b) receiving a strong complaint from a highly respected member of the community about the wholesale retagging.  Those actions included:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Writing to the other stats mods about the retag-fest.  (It was very early a.m. their time so no immediate response was expected.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Consulting with mods on other sites and SE representatives via chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In response to their (unequivocal) advice, contacting the SE team by e-mail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In the email to the team&lt;/strong&gt; I gave the facts: we had an active, valued user who created a new tag and systematically retagged questions until he was notified of the &amp;quot;taxonomist&amp;quot; badge, then stopped.  I then shared my own impression:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sounds like abuse to me, although fairly harmless to the site. The tag would be potentially useful but IMHO has now been applied so indiscriminately that it's &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;pretty worthless now&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally I would like to have most of this tagging reversed but that could alienate this guy, who's pretty active.  I'm also wondering how to head off such abuse in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I did not specifically request any action:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I look forward to any suggestions you might have to offer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not want to make a unilateral decision because that would be unfair to you and the community.  I did &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; write to you because I felt that was premature: I was still seeking advice and guidance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moderators cannot (easily) remove a tag: I believe that was done by the SE team.  It is an outcome I thought was likely when I wrote them, so I take responsibility for it. &lt;strong&gt;The message you received (from another mod) was a courtesy&lt;/strong&gt; to let you know what had happened, why, and what to do in the future.  If now, knowing more of the history, you have constructive suggestions for how I could deal with similar situations in the future, please let me know: I needed help with this one and welcome help from anyone at any time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I can speak for many in saying &lt;strong&gt;we value your interest in and engagement with this site&lt;/strong&gt;.  That's not just empty words: in my opinion, the quality of your answers is increasing and they have become regular and welcome contributions.  However, as a relative newcomer, your experience with this &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt; is (necessarily) limited.  I'm sure you felt that what you were doing was another contribution, but due in part to this ignorance of how a community works, your efforts backfired for many reasons made abundantly clear on the current thread.  Unfortunately, your subsequent actions do you little credit: in the process of seeking to understand and correct what happened, you (a) indiscriminately attacked the moderators of this site and (b) did so &lt;em&gt;outside&lt;/em&gt; the usual forums provided for such discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your &amp;quot;several hours of salutary efforts&amp;quot; have not been wasted if it has helped you understand how this community works and how you can make constructive contributions in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2011-04-29T13:43:43.697" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="841" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-04-29T16:00:15.577" Score="-2" ViewCount="406" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several questions that request analytical solutions of statistical problems, and there are answers that give nicely derived equations using mathematical calculus. These are however not currently distinguished, so I propose the &lt;code&gt;analytical-derivation&lt;/code&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is it useful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This new tag could complement the existing &lt;code&gt;numerics&lt;/code&gt; tag and distinguish between questions that are opinions, collections, applications of well known methods, or numerical approximations – and symbolic, theoretical answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are questions that explicitly ask for deriving formulas.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some questions received both analytical and numerical solutions or numerical approximations as answers. Reading through multiple numerical solutions may give the key idea to solving a new problem. The same applies to this tag, reviewing calculus used in statistical problems may give examples, hints or solutions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some users are outstandingly active in deriving statistical formulas in their answers. Now they only receive reputation scores, but the new tag would honour their efforts with tag-badges, too.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatives: the above or similar goals can be achieved using other similar tag names, possible words include analytical, algebraic, symbolic, formal, mathematical, calculus, derivation, formula, equation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few answers to potential criticisms: It is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/26913&quot;&gt;OK to use a relevant tag to couple the question and answer together&lt;/a&gt;. This is not intended to be used as a meta tag (&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;tags that do not describe the content of the question, rather some other aspect of the question, like the author’s skill level, or the author’s motivation for asking it, or generally what “kind” of question it is (poll, how-to, etc.)&lt;/a&gt;), but where the application of the specific method of algebra/calculus to statistical formulas is a key to get to the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask for opinions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how the description of this tag should be compactly worded&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what should it cover and what shouldn't it cover&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if there is a better expression than &lt;code&gt;analytical-derivation&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;StackExchange is not static, so tags evolve even after a good amount of usage, but a good working definition will help launching the new tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3911" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2011-05-06T12:45:56.290" Title="The `analytical-derivation` tag" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="841" CreationDate="2011-04-29T16:30:20.153" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am sympathetic with the idea but believe it could not be used much.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most people asking questions on this site have &lt;em&gt;statistical&lt;/em&gt; concerns.  If they want derivations they usually begin (and end) on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;math.SE&lt;/a&gt; site (where &quot;analytical derivation&quot; would certainly be meta).  Moreover, your long list of putative synonyms belies the inherent ambiguity of the concept.  &quot;Analytical,&quot; &quot;algebraic,&quot; &quot;symbolic,&quot; &quot;formula,&quot; &quot;derivation,&quot; and &quot;calculus&quot; mean distinctly different things and have different applications and uses.  If somebody really did label a question here with any of those things, I suspect the high-rep community members would quickly migrate it to the math site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is especially telling that to date (3000+ questions) &lt;em&gt;nobody&lt;/em&gt; has ever attempted to tag their question here with something like &quot;analytical-derivation&quot; or &quot;symbolic&quot;, etc.   Although on occasion such a tag could usefully discriminate more theoretical questions from practical ones, it tells me your proposal is acting like a solution in search of a problem.  Why not wait until people with actual questions create tags like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I like your use of the word &quot;evolve&quot;:&lt;/strong&gt; that suggests that a tag should emerge from a few actual successful uses by questioners, become recognized through repeated use as legitimate, acquire a wiki entry, and accumulate a few followers or appear in searches.  At that point it would make sense to retroactively apply the &lt;em&gt;evolved&lt;/em&gt;, mature tag to older questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note that tags are applied to questions, not replies.&lt;/strong&gt;  It is tempting to retag questions in light of the answers received, but one should be cautious about such retroactive labeling.  It is appropriate to do so when the question itself is edited to reflect a new understanding of possible solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:38.337" LastActivityDate="2011-04-29T16:30:20.153" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="841" CreationDate="2011-04-29T19:51:31.320" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, so now we clearly see that you really want to supplement the tag system with a bunch of meta-tags describing what kind of answer does the OP want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Against official SE policy clearly formulated on blog. (I should stop now)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Redundant. It's like ordering books by cover colour -- it may look organised, but has no real value.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Complex. This is a whole, non-obvious system that must by manually managed. No new user would get an idea to follow it; also it has no homologue on other SEs, so it would be confusing for SE-aware new users too.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Revolutionary. Implementing it would require to manually (!) retag all the old questions, leading to a total chaos.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Short-circuiting. It gives user an option to tag the question with meta tag only, so effectively giving no topic tag. This leads either to the destruction of real tag system or necessity to make manual tagging. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It would make a properly used [numerics] a meta-tag. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2011-04-29T19:51:31.320" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="841" CreationDate="2011-05-03T08:06:21.563" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although it is OK to use a relevant tag to couple question and answer it is not obvious that this is a expected behaviour of the site.  The tags are shown only under question, so the natural implication is that they apply only to the question, not to answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the idea is nice, searching only for answers which are analytical for example might be useful, it requires changes to SE engine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coupled with the very good points raised by @whuber, I think this tag does not merit the major intervention needed to justify its creation. Starting to use it on question by question basis seems entirely appropriate.  I think any new tag must first of all be used only for new questions and then if it shows its usefulness it can be applied for previous questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2116" LastActivityDate="2011-05-03T08:06:21.563" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="830" CreationDate="2011-05-03T13:44:11.210" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/multiple-regression&quot;&gt;multiple-regression&lt;/a&gt; tag has a purpose, because there is a clear distinction maintained in textbooks and people's minds between &quot;simple&quot; regression models and &quot;multiple&quot; regression models.  A regression problem becomes overtly &quot;multiple&quot; when one has to grapple with the mutual relationships among the independent variables.  To clarify this, I have created a wiki entry for &lt;code&gt;multiple-regression&lt;/code&gt; to this effect.  As always, your suggestions about improving that are welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is likely that the distinction I am highlighting has not consistently been maintained by previous users of the &lt;code&gt;multiple-regression&lt;/code&gt; tag.  The fix is to retag such questions whenever you run across them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, one could argue that the combination of the &lt;code&gt;multivariate&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;regression&lt;/code&gt; tags achieves what my &lt;code&gt;multiple-regression&lt;/code&gt; proposal does.  I think such an argument is valid and am interested to hear what people find more useful or natural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2011-05-03T13:44:11.210" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="830" CreationDate="2011-05-04T03:36:30.523" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Initially I had thought that maintaining a separate tag for regression distinct from the other tags (e.g. multiple-regression, linear-regression, etc.) would be worthwhile. Mainly because I feel there are questions that are related to regression, but aren't intrinsically related to the more specific tags. For instance &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/9871/is-a-predictor-with-greater-variance-better&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; (whether a predictor with greater variance is better) is not inherently related to linear-regression, while &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/9825/changing-null-hypothesis-in-linear-regression&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; (Changing null hypothesis) is. But that being said, I suspect to maintain any type of fidelity between the regression and the linear-regression tags it would take heavy moderator involvement &lt;em&gt;forever&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to see as much discrimination between the tags as possible though. I see 10 questions have both the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/regression+logistic-regression&quot;&gt;regression and the logistic-regression tag&lt;/a&gt;, and I think all of them could effectively drop one of the tags. None of the other regression tags are used frequently enough to be concerned, but should we attempt to only tag questions with one of the regression tags in most situations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2011-05-04T03:36:30.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="831" CreationDate="2011-05-05T07:20:55.993" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As detailed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/88451/myopenid-account-mysteriously-vanished/88790#88790&quot;&gt;this answer on Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;, MyOpenId had issues caused by the Amazon outage.  Once that outage was resolved, accounts were restored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1142" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2011-05-05T07:20:55.993" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="848" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="849" CreationDate="2011-05-06T05:57:31.917" Score="11" ViewCount="263" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that user @svadali has disappeared from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users?tab=reputation&amp;amp;filter=all&quot;&gt;all reputation page&lt;/a&gt;. He had about 6000 reputation, but was inactive for quite a long time. It is possible to find references if you search for svadali in stackexchange.com, where his id is now substituted with user28 (28 was his user id). I would like to know what happened. Did he specifically ask to be removed, or this was some automatic clean-up procedure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2116" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2017-01-09T09:09:11.313" Title="User gone from stats.SE" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|deleted-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="848" CreationDate="2011-05-06T12:36:39.090" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;He asked to be removed; it just happens sometimes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;Anyway, there is no automatic cleaning system, so inactive users should not be worried ;-)&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-01-08T15:35:27.480" LastActivityDate="2017-01-08T15:35:27.480" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="852" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-10T18:53:35.460" Score="4" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/10594/converting-arbitrary-distribution-to-uniform-one&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; was cross-posted on math.SE. It got separate answers there and here (by me), both of them were accepted. After the merge, the one from the math.SE is shown to be accepted, but I still get 15 reputation from my answer. This is consistent with &lt;code&gt;/reputation&lt;/code&gt; page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; 2     10560 (10)&#xA; 2     10560 (10)&#xA; 2     10560 (10)&#xA; 2     10560 (10)&#xA; 2     10593 (10)&#xA; 1     10593 (15)&#xA; 2     10593 (10)&#xA;-- 2011-05-10 rep +75   = 6425 &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is a bug, i.e. I should have lost the 15 reputation points after the merge. Please fix it :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2116" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2011-05-16T20:02:19.987" Title="Reputation for the answer when the questions get merged" Tags="|discussion|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="213" CreationDate="2011-05-11T11:27:37.197" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vote for close (or merge ?)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1676/i-just-installed-the-latest-version-of-r-what-packages-should-i-obtain&quot;&gt;I just installed the latest version of R. What packages should I obtain?&lt;/a&gt; should be closed (or merged) as it is a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/73/what-r-packages-do-you-find-most-useful-in-your-daily-work/&quot;&gt;What R packages do you find most useful in your daily work?&lt;/a&gt;. Some upvoted comments in favor of closing have been dropped in the former question, but I couldn't find a conclusive statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="264" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2011-05-11T11:27:37.197" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-05-11T11:27:37.197" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="854" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-05-13T21:34:01.387" Score="8" ViewCount="337" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I totally agree with chl's decision to close &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/10781/what-is-the-best-site-to-hire-contract-or-permanent-stats-folks&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about where and how to hire statisticians, I noticed that this sort of career/personnel/hiring stuff isn't &lt;em&gt;explicitly&lt;/em&gt; forbidden by the FAQ.  If one only skims the FAQ, these might seem okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be appropriate to add a line or two to make that more obvious?  If this has been a problem in general, I haven't seen it.  But I also know that the temptation to post such questions can be great, especially if this is the asker's one connection to other statisticians.  Even I have considered trying to sneak one in now and then, but I'm holding out for our &lt;a href=&quot;http://programmers.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Programmers&lt;/a&gt; equivalent...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be worthwhile to add language to the FAQ regarding questions like these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2011-05-13T22:59:17.730" Title="Add career/hire prohibition to FAQ?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="854" CreationDate="2011-05-13T22:44:32.870" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;FWIW, some other SE sites find the business side of their interest to be worthy of discussion.  E.g., read the thread at &lt;a href=&quot;https://photo.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/614/questions-about-the-business-of-photography-on-or-off-topic&quot;&gt;https://photo.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/614/questions-about-the-business-of-photography-on-or-off-topic&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I'm happy with similar questions on CV, provided we can keep out the  headhunters and other riffraff who would abuse this opportunity.  (I have nothing against headhunters except when they violate community norms when conducting their business.)  Note, too, that all such questions would be subject to the usual SE rubric: if they are localized in time or space, they're off-topic.  So &amp;quot;who's hiring in my city&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;what do people charge&amp;quot; questions would not get a warm welcome, I believe.  But I suspect questions along the line of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;how does one get started as a consulting statistician/data miner/quantitative analyst,&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;how do you estimate the time needed to perform a study,&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;is there a code of ethics for professional statisticians,&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;what kinds of continuing education activities do statisticians engage in and which ones are really worthwhile&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;could find a broad audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the voting, replies, and comments in this thread give us a clear sense of what people want, it will be a simple matter to modify the FAQ accordingly, one way or the other.  Thanks for bringing up the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2011-05-13T22:44:32.870" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="854" CreationDate="2011-05-13T22:59:17.730" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've initially flagged this question as off-topic, until I realized somebody else did the same. I had the feeling that this question was too broad, or at least not covered in the topics described on the FAQ; moreover, I seem to remember a similar question was closed some months ago. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I may be wrong and I'm open to any suggestion regarding notifications in the FAQ, whether this question shall be reopen (as CW), or whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for raising this issue, here on our Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2011-05-13T22:59:17.730" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="857" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="858" CreationDate="2011-05-16T17:02:50.733" Score="5" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;: Do moderators receive any sort of notification when a vote to close is submitted by a user with 3000+ reputation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that if a user with 3000+ chooses to flag and picks &quot;doesn't belong here&quot;, then, instead of flagging, the software instead will &quot;automatically&quot; submit a vote to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, on many SE sites, this will work just fine and is probably the preferred behavior. However, on smallish sites, like stats.SE, where there are only 13 users with 3K+ rep (and at least one of them is MIA), this behavior seems less desirable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In essence, it is virtually impossible to gather the five necessary votes to close, even if the question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/10863/assignment-questions-on-transformation-convergence-inference&quot;&gt;indisputably and unboundedly bad&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can also &quot;flag&quot; a question surreptitiously by choosing &quot;other&quot; under &quot;needs moderator attention&quot; or something similar. But, I don't want to annoy the moderators with two notifications where one will suffice. Hence, my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2970" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T07:26:23.567" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T07:26:23.567" Title="Are moderators notified by votes to close a question?" Tags="|support|closing-questions|votes|moderation|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="857" CreationDate="2011-05-16T17:30:52.150" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, I don't remember receiving direct notification for votes to close, but we have (network-wide) instant access to flags, which remain the best way to draw our attention upon a question (IMO). About your second paragraph, I'm not sure so I'll let @mbq or @whuber answer as they probably have more experience than me in moderation tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with you: It is difficult to get five votes to close; and, we, as mods, cannot simply vote to close. Unless there is evidence (to me) that the question is bad or does not belong here, I generally wait for flags or votes or comments. But, I would like to encourage all users with enough rep to flag or vote whenever they feel necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2011-05-16T17:30:52.150" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="857" CreationDate="2011-05-17T02:50:38.347" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;From my experience flagging still works as expected after passing 3k reputation limit. The little box appears that says certain number of &lt;em&gt;close&lt;/em&gt; votes remain, but the question is actually flagged. I infer that, since usually moderators respond and then my flag weight goes up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most recent example of that is this &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/33617/a-sequence-of-order-statistics-from-an-iid-sequence/39391#39391&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;. After my bounty expired here I flagged it to move to math.SE. I had more than 3k reputation then. It might be that the behaviour of the site changed since then, but this must be reflected in &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;http://meta.stackoverflow.com&lt;/a&gt;. As far as I understand people care about their flag weight, so if there were recent changes there should be a lot of activity related to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I flagged the other question and realised that my answer is not entirely correct. When you flag the question there are several options available, one of the options might get converted to close vote. In this case if you really want to flag choose the option &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; and write the reasons for closing. This way moderators will certainly get informed, since flagging is done not only for reasons of closing. It will be a little abuse of the system, but for the greater good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2116" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:38.337" LastActivityDate="2011-05-17T03:16:51.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="860" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="861" CreationDate="2011-05-21T03:09:43.853" Score="5" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hi folks, I just posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/11070/request-for-help-modifying-r-simulation-analysis-code&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. I had trouble deciding whether it would be best posted here or math.stackexchange.com and would appreciate input. Also, how appropriate is it that it's a rather involved request (requiring the successful answerer to understand then modify some simulation/analysis code)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="364" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2011-05-21T18:57:52.350" Title="Is my question appropriate for stats.stackexchange.com?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="860" CreationDate="2011-05-21T18:57:52.350" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why math.SE? It looks fine to me because this is a clearly exposed problem, with an underlying model, and it appears clearly connected to statistics and &lt;em&gt;programming for statistics&lt;/em&gt; (hence my +1).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2011-05-21T18:57:52.350" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="862" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="864" CreationDate="2011-05-25T14:58:06.930" Score="16" ViewCount="279" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Trilogy&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.serverfault.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sites&lt;/a&gt; do have it, &lt;a href=&quot;http://gaming.blogoverflow.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gaming&lt;/a&gt; has one... shall we too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downsides are that few people must volunteer to provide some content on regular basis -- anyone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: As this topic seems to have some support, I think we should move forward and organize the details... maybe a chat meeting, say, &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/18/ten-fold?tab=schedule&quot;&gt;10 VI 2011, 16:00UTC&lt;/a&gt;? (Please either register or protest in comment.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Topic continues &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/870/we-are-making-the-community-blog&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2011-06-11T10:50:09.917" Title="Shall we have a community blog?" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="862" CreationDate="2011-05-26T07:20:45.317" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good idea. Would help greatly in promoting the site. I could volunteer to write one blog post a month :) But the main question is the one pointed out by @chl what would blog be about? I have few ideas for blog post, which I never found the time to post, but they are more R related. One is about my experience translating Eviews code to R, another about simple Rcpp example, another about how using R classes might help in writing simulation code. I feel though such blog posts would be  more about me showing off than anything else, which would not be helpful for community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2116" LastEditorUserId="2116" LastEditDate="2011-05-26T07:30:56.273" LastActivityDate="2011-05-26T07:30:56.273" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="862" CreationDate="2011-05-26T13:54:55.757" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've come across a host of blogs via individuals profiles on this site. Perhaps to get the ball rolling individuals who participate in the community would be willing to &quot;re-publish&quot; old blog posts to stimulate discussion on particular topics. If people are interested in disseminating their work I would think it would be a good venue to get more exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a list of a few blogs I've started to follow since participating on this site (note this is not exhaustive, simply what I've found through randomly looking at peoples profiles, and blogs that are not too mathematically challenging for me to follow):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/159/rob-hyndman&quot;&gt;Rob Hyndman&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/96/cyrus-s&quot;&gt;Cyrus Samii&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/2773/rick-wicklin&quot;&gt;Rick Wicklin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/1945/galit-shmueli&quot;&gt;Galit Shmueli&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/2669/rolando2&quot;&gt;Roland Stark&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/74/neil-mcguigan&quot;&gt;Neil McGuigan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/8/csgillespie&quot;&gt;Colin Gillespie&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/5/shane&quot;&gt;Shane&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/183/jeromy-anglim&quot;&gt;Jeromy Anglim&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/253/tal-galili&quot;&gt;Tal Galili&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/303/john-myles-white&quot;&gt;John Myles White&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking over the list I see many of the blogs have a large focus on various programming topics (which is of obvious interest to the community). But many have blogs posts relating to strictly statistical questions as well, and I think either would be perfectly reasonable within the scope of the site's blog. If people want more exposure re-hashing old posts for people who contribute to the site seems fair to me. Of course this is dependent on people volunteering their work for the community, but I'm just listing this as a potential option for generating content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also as a suggestion I think we could identify some particularly good questions and answers on the site, and then have the individuals expand those into full blog posts. Maybe not so much to add content to already excellent answers, but to simply garner more exposure for those particularly enlightening exchanges. Here are a few of my favorites;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/298/in-linear-regression-when-is-it-appropriate-to-use-the-log-of-an-independent-var&quot;&gt;In linear regression, when is it appropriate to use the log of an independent variable instead of the actual values?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/3559/1036&quot;&gt;Logistic Regression: Which pseudo R-squared measure is the one to report (Cox &amp;amp; Snell or Nagelkerke)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/3200/1036&quot;&gt;Is adjusting p-values in a multiple regression for multiple comparisons a good idea?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we identify recurring questions we could perhaps make a blog post to attempt to expand and identify key features of those recurring questions as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2011-05-26T14:00:45.927" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="865" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="867" CreationDate="2011-06-04T18:09:28.763" Score="6" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a user asks questions from old exams in preparation for an upcoming exam should we apply the &quot;homework&quot; tag, even if the old exams aren't necessarily assigned for a grade? I'm ambivalent; it's not really homework per se, but part of the value of the homework tag (to me) is as a flag that a good response might &lt;em&gt;lead&lt;/em&gt; to the correct answer instead of giving it, or include more detail on the initial steps of a solution, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Prompted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/11561/machine-learning-questions-questions&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question, which has other problems besides...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2011-06-04T19:42:25.483" Title="Homework tag for old exam questions?" Tags="|discussion|tags|homework|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="865" CreationDate="2011-06-04T18:32:31.853" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two separate issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Site quality. In general, good SE question is a question which can be also generated by an independent asker; exam questions and homeworks are usually too detailed or just useless in practice, what effectively makes them only a noise.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ethics. Giving a direct answer to current homework is obviously unfair, and so we have a (probably not too effective with a respect to people who want to cheat) policy that an asker should mark homeworks with homework tag and this should notify the answerers that they shouldn't give straight answer but only some hints.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case of the old exams, I'm mainly worried about the first one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2011-06-04T18:32:31.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="865" CreationDate="2011-06-04T19:42:25.483" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Searching just now for questions tagged homework I noticed the wiki: 'A routine question from a textbook, course, &lt;strong&gt;or test&lt;/strong&gt; used for a class &lt;strong&gt;or self-study&lt;/strong&gt;. This community's policy is to &quot;provide helpful hints.&quot;' (emphasis mine) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry, I should have checked that first!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26" LastActivityDate="2011-06-04T19:42:25.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="868" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-10T11:20:42.707" Score="1" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can anyone suggest a short tag for &quot;can be run on the web&quot; ?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For example, a site where students could run hands-on e.g. clustering on a standard dataset or two would be useful; a tag would help people looking for such. (There must be quite a few sites with downloadable R scripts and data and tutorial too, what tag for those ?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="557" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2011-06-11T10:24:30.647" LastActivityDate="2011-06-11T10:24:30.647" Title="A tag for &quot;can be run on the web&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="868" CreationDate="2011-06-10T13:32:48.587" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can create sets of synonyms if one tag alone is not obvious.  The two words that first come to my mind are &lt;code&gt;applet&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;web&lt;/code&gt;.  The latter sounds almost too generic to be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/841/the-analytical-derivation-tag&quot;&gt;learned painfully&lt;/a&gt; last month, it is not a good idea to create and apply tags in a wholesale fashion, retroactively.  Let a tag emerge from a specific question rather than an abstract sense that the tag might be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2011-06-10T13:32:48.587" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="870" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="905" CreationDate="2011-06-11T10:45:35.957" Score="9" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/862/shall-we-have-a-community-blog&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/18/conversation/community-blog-discussion&quot;&gt;this chat discussion&lt;/a&gt;, community blog begins to emerge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already have three committed contributors: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/1036/andy-w&quot;&gt;Andy W&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/26/jms&quot;&gt;JMS&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/2116/mpiktas&quot;&gt;mpiktas&lt;/a&gt;; kudos! (Of course anyone can join this group, even temporarily)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There will be a weekly survey for choosing a &lt;em&gt;Question of the Week&lt;/em&gt; which will be later discussed on the blog (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.superuser.com/questions/tagged/question-of-the-week&quot;&gt;similar idea on SuperUser&lt;/a&gt;). The first survey is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/871/the-question-of-the-week-1&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the details, questions, ideas, stuff have their place on the newly created chat room devoted exclusively to the CV blog: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/549/skewed-distribution&quot;&gt;Skewed distribution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2011-07-25T14:52:14.013" Title="We are making the community blog" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="871" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="872" CreationDate="2011-06-11T10:58:57.027" Score="6" ViewCount="433" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/870/we-are-making-the-community-blog&quot;&gt;making a community blog&lt;/a&gt;, and we want to use community-selected intriguing questions as one of the topic sources, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.superuser.com/questions/tagged/question-of-the-week?page=1&amp;amp;sort=newest&amp;amp;pagesize=15&quot;&gt;as it is done on SuperUser&lt;/a&gt;. The idea is to make it on a weekly basis so the whole would stay reasonably fresh. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, please propose and vote for questions from the last week you think deserve blogging about as answers to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T10:12:27.603" LastActivityDate="2011-06-14T13:54:34.490" Title="The Question of the Week #1" Tags="|discussion|blog|question-of-the-week|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="871" CreationDate="2011-06-11T15:04:47.753" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This one is kind of an oldie, but got a bump recently:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/5292/good-gui-for-r-suitable-for-a-beginner-wanting-to-learn-programming-in-r&quot;&gt;Good GUI for R suitable for a beginner wanting to learn  programming in R?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A post comparing some of the options might be nice. It may take more than one of us, given platform differences, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2011-06-11T15:04:47.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="871" CreationDate="2011-06-11T16:51:23.533" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;My vote would be for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/11659/1036&quot;&gt;Essential data checking tests&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pertinence of the topic to this community I think would be obvious. So for a few other reasons why I think this would be a good blog post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Its non-technical nature makes it accessible to a wide audience.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think it would be of interest to a wider audience across the stack.exchange sites, and so would be a good platform to gain stats.se some exposure to members of other sites.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2011-06-11T16:51:23.533" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="875" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="876" CreationDate="2011-06-12T13:37:40.003" Score="0" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't get any notify that someone give comment to me.&#xA;How to set the be alarmed?&#xA;Thank you~&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4898" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T19:53:26.493" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T19:53:26.493" Title="How to notify me when someone comment my question?" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|comment|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="875" CreationDate="2011-06-12T14:12:57.067" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should be getting on-site notifications -- in a form of a red dot next to  StackExchange logotype on the top-right. Clicking this and selecting Inbox tab will give you a list of all mentions of you and comments of your posts. (This mechanism does fail sometimes, but this should be quite rare) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AFAIK it is impossible to get some more visible form of notification like e-mail or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2011-06-12T14:12:57.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="871" CreationDate="2011-06-14T13:54:34.490" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this one is an interesting question with an excellent answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/11691/how-to-tell-if-data-is-clustered-enough-for-clustering-algorithms-to-produce-me&quot;&gt;How to tell if data is “clustered” enough for clustering algorithms to produce meaningful results?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I vote for this question because clustering is a very recurring topic, the idea behind clustering is simple but usually it is quite hard to get results in practice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question I proposed already has an accepted answer, and it deals with the gap statistic. The quality of the answer is outstanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2902" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2011-06-14T13:54:34.490" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="878" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-20T05:50:27.947" Score="10" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;We recently printed some business cards for our Stack Exchange employees and they turned out great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It got us thinking: our sites' moderators have been working hard to keep our sites high quality for the past few years. They may not be employees, per se, but great community moderators are why our communities are safe, sane, and worth visiting in the first place..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're a moderator on the main site, would you be interested in having your own  Cross Validated contact card? Would you find it useful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see them being handy to pass out during your local meetups or conferences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is a mockup:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(click on image to see full res version)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HHqKm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HHqKm.png&quot; alt=&quot;CrossValidated Moderator Cards&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course Twitter ID/phone# are optional. It can be Skype, AIM, URL etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Note: the text rendering in the mockup is slightly blurry. But when printed it will be crisp.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2011-08-04T04:23:54.270" LastActivityDate="2011-09-20T08:40:26.130" Title="Cross Validated Moderator Cards" Tags="|discussion|design|community|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="878" CreationDate="2011-06-20T14:08:02.113" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's a great idea.  It would be worth discussing the text on the back: it occurs to me that in its current form it could be misinterpreted as being an experts-only site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2011-06-20T14:08:02.113" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="880" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-06-21T08:00:44.660" Score="25" ViewCount="579" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a thank you for &lt;em&gt;being awesome&lt;/em&gt;, if you are on page 1 or page 2 of &amp;hellip;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users?tab=reputation&amp;amp;filter=all&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users?tab=reputation&amp;amp;filter=all&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;hellip; we'll be sending you a little care package shortly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cross Validated t-shirt in your size&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cross Validated die-cut, vinyl stickers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://shop.stackexchange.com/collections/frontpage/products/stack-exchange-sharpies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange sharpie&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://shop.stackexchange.com/products/stack-exchange-pens&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange pen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://shop.stackexchange.com/products/stack-exchange-network-stickers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange stickers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can expect to get an email soon with details on how to confirm and provide your mailing address and size preferences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;T-Shirt&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/k8dIa.png&quot; alt=&quot;stats.stackexchange.com Tshirt&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Sticker&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zRAiN.png&quot; alt=&quot;stats.stackexchange.com sticker&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the items you can view in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://shop.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange store&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash; direct links to &lt;a href=&quot;http://shop.stackexchange.com/collections/frontpage/products/stack-exchange-sharpies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sharpie&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://shop.stackexchange.com/products/stack-exchange-pens&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pens&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://shop.stackexchange.com/products/stack-exchange-network-stickers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stickers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Congratulations! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(for anyone else who wants this swag, but isn't on page 1 or page 2 of the all time top users -- the limited edition t-shirts and stickers will be available for purchase from the store soon as well)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2011-06-21T08:00:44.660" Title="Cross Validated swag for top users" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="881" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="883" CreationDate="2011-06-30T00:44:53.713" Score="3" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/auc&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;auc&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;auc&lt;/a&gt; should be a synonym for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/roc&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;roc&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;roc&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/auc&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;auc&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;auc&lt;/a&gt; was created only for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/12309&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1499" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2011-07-03T12:14:56.793" Title="Tag synonym: auc -&gt; roc?" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="881" CreationDate="2011-06-30T07:42:49.523" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not an expert, but from quick search on wikipedia I got an impression that though ROC and AUC are related concepts, but they are not synonyms. So I suggest leaving everything as it is. Maybe adding roc tag to the question would be more appropriate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2116" LastActivityDate="2011-06-30T07:42:49.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="881" CreationDate="2011-06-30T09:30:39.623" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with mpiktas -- those are divergent things. AUC can be done for PR curve for instance and sometimes one can be interested in ROC curve only, not its area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course we certainly should do some audit of those tags, because there is some chaos in that manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2011-06-30T09:30:39.623" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="884" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="887" CreationDate="2011-06-30T17:55:00.210" Score="4" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw a question that belongs more to quantitative-finance.SE than to stats.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a way to migrate questions across SE sites?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there isn't, is it appropriate to suggest the user ask on another forum?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3651" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2018-10-30T12:15:30.830" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T12:15:30.830" Title="Can I suggest that a question be migrated to another stack exchange site?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|status-completed|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="884" CreationDate="2011-06-30T19:15:55.230" Score="7" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes.  The best way is to flag the question (click on &lt;code&gt;flag&lt;/code&gt; beneath the question and fill out the form).  This alerts the moderators and passes your suggestion or concern along to them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, but please do not suggest that people cross-post messages.  It is best to have them migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2011-06-30T19:15:55.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="884" CreationDate="2011-07-01T05:42:09.563" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure -- flag it for moderator attention. When you flag, in the mod comment indicate which site you think the question should go to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is a common thing, we can &quot;unlock&quot; a migration path from one site to another so it shows up as one of up to 4 (+meta) default choices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2011-07-01T05:42:09.563" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="888" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="889" CreationDate="2011-07-02T03:51:31.270" Score="0" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of my posts was deleted and I couldn't find the reason for closure or whatever the last comments made on the thread were. Am I missing a piece of functionality? Or is that information gone for good?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see there is an &quot;Inbox&quot; in the upper left corner but I can't get it to load fullscreen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3651" LastEditorUserId="3651" LastEditDate="2011-07-02T04:06:00.773" LastActivityDate="2011-07-03T01:51:22.620" Title="&quot;messages&quot; from a deleted post? &quot;inbox&quot;?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="888" CreationDate="2011-07-03T01:51:22.620" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've looked into this, and I can't figure out why or how &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/12543/does-base-matter-in-ols-regression&quot;&gt;your question&lt;/a&gt; was deleted either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has no flags on it, nor does it have comments about closing or deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, I've reopened it: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/12543/does-base-matter-in-ols-regression&quot;&gt;Does base matter in OLS regression?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1403" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2011-07-03T01:51:22.620" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="890" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-06T12:52:33.343" Score="7" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixed-model&quot;&gt;mixed-model&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/multilevel-analysis&quot;&gt;multilevel-analysis&lt;/a&gt; seem to be entirely redundant upon a quick glance at the question lists. Should we only have one tag? (I'm not quite sure what the difference between tag synonyms and merging tags are.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2011-07-06T12:52:33.343" Title="Should mixed-model and multilevel-analysis be tag synonyms?" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ClosedDate="2015-10-23T15:43:39.743" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="891" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="892" CreationDate="2011-07-10T18:44:48.947" Score="9" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;While reading some extended and not-so-short answers with graphs and codes I came to a common forum-like idea of &lt;strong&gt;hiding/showing&lt;/strong&gt; an additional though probably useful content in the body of answers or questions. I would like to hear your opinion on the inclusion of such feature in the list of edit commands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2645" LastActivityDate="2011-07-12T13:58:46.470" Title="Do we need to hide some lengthy content in answers or questions?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="891" CreationDate="2011-07-12T13:58:46.470" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I think this is a great idea.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That feature is already used in the &quot;click to expand/collapse this section&quot; organization of all the FAQs.  Being able to mark up a reply to do the same thing could really streamline all the SE sites.  (I would love to collapse large blocks of code when reading through some of the lengthier replies, for instance.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, one approach could be to make some existing forms of marked up text automatically (and retroactively) collapsible.  This could include code blocks, quotations, images, and (maybe) lines of TeX.  It might even extend to blocks that are delimited by heading markup (even though that has rarely been used so far).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2011-07-12T13:58:46.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="893" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-07-19T04:53:21.760" Score="7" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1030/community-promotion-ads-1h-2012&quot;&gt;Community Promotion Ads - 1H 2012&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What in the Wide, Wide World of Sports is Going On Here?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR -- put images and links in the answers. If they get voted up enough, they will appear on the main site as community promotion ads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;But whyyyyyyy?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool site-related open source apps&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's twitter account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;scripts packs or power tools&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. And to click on it for great justice!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be &lt;strong&gt;220 x 250 pixels&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently 6) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.status.stackexchange.com/ads/display/893&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1142" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2012-05-23T20:51:42.823" Title="Community Promotion Ads - 2H 2011" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2012-05-24T13:53:48.727" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-07-19T04:54:40.493" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="893" CreationDate="2011-07-19T04:55:54.067" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/stackstats&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QfzXp.png&quot; alt=&quot;@StackStats&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1142" LastActivityDate="2011-07-19T04:55:54.067" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-07-19T04:55:54.067" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="893" CreationDate="2011-07-20T16:27:56.643" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably new tagline would be great, but for now I'll repost Shane's ad:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://cran.r-project.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4OMtd.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2011-07-20T16:27:56.643" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-07-20T16:27:56.643" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="896" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="897" CreationDate="2011-07-22T16:38:00.220" Score="3" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, if I want to reach a wider audience of potential answerers, is it acceptable to post the same question here, as well as on mathoverflow, and other sites that come up that are relevant?  Or is that considered a mild form of spamming?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5471" LastEditorUserId="32036" LastEditDate="2014-07-30T23:30:31.247" LastActivityDate="2014-07-30T23:30:31.247" Title="Is it acceptable to post the same question on multiple sites?" Tags="|discussion|policy|cross-posting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="896" CreationDate="2011-07-22T20:56:10.273" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/N34Z4.png&quot; alt=&quot;No&quot;&gt;. This is making chaos and irritates the answerers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are sure that the question is relevant on two SEs, it probably can be split in two separate parts with a gain in clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are not sure which place is more adequate, try on one site and let its community decide whether to keep it or migrate to a more suitable site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2011-07-22T20:56:10.273" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="900" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="901" CreationDate="2011-07-25T11:02:48.227" Score="0" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just tried to upload a 5kB GIF image to the question I'm composing but it is still saying 'Uploading ...' even after more than one minute! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5509" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2011-07-29T10:22:10.977" LastActivityDate="2011-07-29T10:22:10.977" Title="Uploading 5kB image takes more than a minute and without success" Tags="|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="900" CreationDate="2011-07-25T11:08:41.297" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was due to Adblock Plus Firefox plugin! When I disabled it for this particular site, the problem dissapeared!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I hadn't this problem with Stack Overflow site, which is quite confusing so I didn't come to the idea it could be caused by Adblock Plus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5509" LastActivityDate="2011-07-25T11:08:41.297" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="904" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="907" CreationDate="2011-07-25T14:44:41.910" Score="4" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;We had selected our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/871/the-question-of-the-week-1&quot;&gt;first Question of the Week&lt;/a&gt;, now, when the blog has finally started, is time to continue the series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, please propose and vote for recent questions you think deserve blogging about as answers to this question. The winning question will be selected next Monday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2011-07-25T17:47:29.307" Title="The Question of the Week #2" Tags="|discussion|blog|question-of-the-week|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="870" CreationDate="2011-07-25T14:52:14.013" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;And so &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.blogoverflow.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the blog&lt;/a&gt; is up and running. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2011-07-25T14:52:14.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="904" CreationDate="2011-07-25T14:53:33.910" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I am going to interpret &quot;recent&quot; liberally, in part because many of our questions and their answers will remain timely for years.  Why limit ourselves, then, to material posted only in the last few weeks?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A wonderful foil for an ongoing blog, in fact, would be a series of exegeses on the replies to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/726/famous-statistician-quotes&quot;&gt;Famous statistical quotations&lt;/a&gt; .  Read through them, pick a quotation that resonates with you (or with which you disagree sharply!), and share with the world the context in which it arose, what controversy it might have been involved in, what it means, how it connects with your statistical experience, and anything else you can offer to bring it to life and help us appreciate its interest and importance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2011-07-25T14:53:33.910" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="904" CreationDate="2011-07-25T17:47:29.307" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been several questions on the site that more or less ask about clustering longitudinal data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/3331/is-it-possible-to-do-time-series-clustering-based-on-curve-shape&quot;&gt;Is it possible to do time-series clustering based on curve shape?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/3238/time-series-clustering-in-r&quot;&gt;Time series 'clustering' in R&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2777/modelling-longitudinal-data-where-the-effect-of-time-varies-in-functional-form-be&quot;&gt;Modelling longitudinal data where the effect of time varies in functional form between individuals&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/13442/how-to-find-groupings-trajectories-among-longitudinal-data&quot;&gt;How to find groupings (trajectories) among longitudinal data?&lt;/a&gt; (This is the most recent question)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one may be another that could be quite large in scope (similar to the now series on R GUI's). Perhaps to reduce the workload we could get volunteers to write a brief abstract about different routines people have developed and applied examples. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Panel data that these techniques are applied to tend to be really complicated, and so it seems to me these clustering techniques can be really helpful for exploratory data analysis. The techniques being more complicated make it more difficult to make a blog post accessible to a wide audience, but I suspect the number of people working with similar panel data would make the post of interest to a large number of the members of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2011-07-25T17:47:29.307" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="908" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="919" CreationDate="2011-08-01T12:49:55.497" Score="6" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;The photo stack exchange site has a weekly submission (by community members) for &lt;a href=&quot;https://photo.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/featured-photo&quot;&gt;a photo of the week&lt;/a&gt;. I believe we could do a similar process, where community members submit a data visualization image to the site, the community votes on it, and the winning submission is posted on the newly created &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.blogoverflow.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't have to be weekly, nor does it have to conform to any of the conventions that the photo site has made for their photo of the week (although many offhand seem reasonable to apply here, and I think would be a reasonable comparison to see how it would work here on this site). I'm simply asking to see if the community is interested in partaking in such a project, and if so instigate some discussion about how we should go about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To further add to what I envision, I don't really expect anything different than what people have already posted for many answers on the site (hence why I did not think it would be much more effort, and would give the authors work more exposure).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a list of examples of visualizations that have been produced that I think would be wonderful additions to the blog;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2086/quickly-evaluate-visually-correlations-between-ordered-categorical-data-in-r/2087#2087&quot;&gt;Quickly evaluate (visually) correlations between ordered categorical data in R?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2067/follow-up-in-a-mixed-within-between-anova-plot-estimated-ses-or-actual-ses/2138#2138&quot;&gt;Follow up: In a mixed within-between ANOVA plot estimated SEs or actual SEs?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/7899/complex-regression-plot-in-r/7911#7911&quot;&gt;Complex regression plot in R&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/9477/r-interaction-plot-with-confidence-intervals/9480#9480&quot;&gt;R - interaction plot with confidence intervals?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/3921/visualizing-likert-item-response-data/3922#3922&quot;&gt;Visualizing Likert Item Response Data&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/7860/visualizing-a-million-pca-edition/7862#7862&quot;&gt;Visualizing a million, PCA edition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/3423/recommendations-for-visualization-type-when-data-has-an-extremely-wide-variance/3424#3424&quot;&gt;Recommendations for visualization type when data has an extremely wide variance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/12029/is-it-possible-to-create-parallel-sets-plot-using-r&quot;&gt;Is it possible to create “parallel sets” plot using R?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would just expect a short description, what it is supposed to convey (along with its potential usefulness or benifits over different approaches), plus some code to reproduce if possible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2011-08-04T11:10:18.840" Title="Weekly featured data visualization for the blog?" Tags="|discussion|data-visualization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="909" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="911" CreationDate="2011-08-02T08:59:17.733" Score="22" ViewCount="821" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has been &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/106/conversation/r-specific-se-sites&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt; over how more of the R community could be brought into the StackExchange fold. (See also this &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/100541/programming-language-specific-stack-exchange-sites&quot;&gt;Question&lt;/a&gt; on SO Meta.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were to sum-up feelings expressed thus far, we are split between proposing a new, all encompassing SE site for R (R.SE) or finding a bigger home here on CV. @mbq suggested that much of what we might do on R.SE would be perfectly at home on CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideas for the R.SE site include (but are not limited to):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Using/deploying R in a variety of situations (teaching, research etc)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Using the various interfaces to R, questions on RStudio, RevolutionR, Rapache, ... etc...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Domain specific Qs on R packages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Using R in a very general sense (not programming per se)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(anything covered by R-Help, R-Devel, and the SIG list, but we might off-load statistical Qs to CV and R programming to SO, where they were clearly a better fit.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Allow the more open style of Q&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do the users/mods of CV think about this? Would such questions find a welcoming home on CV or would we run the risk of drowning out the statistical Qs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any comments gratefully received, either way. At the moment we are deciding upon the best course of action, so anything you do say will help inform that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1390" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T21:11:27.737" Title="R-specific StackExchange site or greater integration of R community within CV?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|r|software|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="910" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-02T11:42:53.613" Score="3" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;We had selected our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/871/the-question-of-the-week-1&quot;&gt;first&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/904/the-question-of-the-week-2&quot;&gt;second Question of the Week&lt;/a&gt;, so is time to continue the series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, please propose and vote for recent questions you think deserve blogging about as answers to this question. The winning question will be selected next Monday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2011-08-03T17:04:00.203" Title="The Question of the Week #3" Tags="|discussion|blog|question-of-the-week|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="909" CreationDate="2011-08-02T13:21:25.643" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, some context, as I see it:&#xA;I think of CV being like the Physics, Electrical Engineering, and other knowledge-domain StackExchange sites.  I think of SO being a big programmer / developer / software-engineer-oriented site, i.e. people close to the coding and implementation of stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;R is a programming language that is accessed from multiple environments -- the standard R console, RStudio, Revolution R, Deducer, JGR, ESS, etc. -- and multiple R&amp;lt;--&gt;Other language/software connections (e.g. rJava, JRI, Rcpp, RExcel, RCOM, etc.).  As I stated on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/100541/programming-language-specific-stack-exchange-sites&quot;&gt;Meta page&lt;/a&gt;, I think that people may solve problems in R, but usually they're using R to solve a problem &lt;em&gt;from&lt;/em&gt; some other context (e.g. regression, visualization, etc.).  Because of that and other differences from working in C, Java, etc., it's not a typical cultural fit for SO - it's better to have a separate site like the Ubuntu, Linux, and other environment folks do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, grafting R onto CV is like grafting Matlab onto the Electrical Engineering site, except that R is a far more pervasive beastie and is evolving at a far more rapid rate than any other language.  Personally, I would like to use both sites (i.e. CV and a new R.SE site), and encourage questions to be submitted to the right site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5256" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2011-08-02T13:21:25.643" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="912" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="914" CreationDate="2011-08-02T17:14:15.697" Score="8" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that, lately, we have gotten a few essentially one-line answers of the form &quot;Look at &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;insert link&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, where good details are provided.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering what, if anything, should be done to address such answers. For example, do we&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Let the voting mechanism handle them, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Address them in the FAQ, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Actively manage and discourage such answers, or &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do nothing (because I'm completely off-base here)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My reason for asking is as follows.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While, certainly there are many outstanding internet resources that provide better information than could be detailed in a short stats.SE post, it seems to me that the ephemeral nature of much of the web means that a lot of these answers (which may be highly upvoted and/or accepted) may turn out to be essentially useless in the future if the link gets broken. If the goal of stats.SE is to provide a centralized community for addressing statistical problems, then it seems incumbent on us to ensure that the content is as stable as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My inclination would be to actively discourage such answers and suggest that an appropriate synopsis be placed in the body of the post with a link to the (potentially unstable) source. Likewise, for links to peer-reviewed references, answerers should be strongly encouraged to use stable links, as can be found on sites like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.projecteuclid.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;projecteuclid.org&lt;/a&gt; and other online repositories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do other community members think?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2970" LastEditorUserId="2970" LastEditDate="2011-08-02T17:38:52.577" LastActivityDate="2011-08-03T01:58:26.143" Title="Handling &quot;look at this link&quot; type of answers" Tags="|discussion|answers|hyperlinks|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="912" CreationDate="2011-08-02T17:32:23.557" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was guilty of this behavior in one of my first replies :-).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a mod, I hunt for such low-quality answers routinely (there's a tool that flags them temporarily) and I then post comments encouraging respondents to summarize or amplify.  There's no good mechanism for me to track these, though, so I don't always follow up in a timely manner.  (It's only polite to wait at least a day because not everyone visits the site all day long.)  When I do come across them again, if no change has occurred I usually downvote or vote to close, depending on how uninformative the reply has been.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would love to see more high-rep community members step up and take similar actions where warranted.  &lt;em&gt;Very&lt;/em&gt; few members flag or vote to close posts any more--or even downvote them, which is an excellent tool for encouraging changes in behavior.  (I figure that reflects faith in your moderators :-), but still...)  Just please remember to use such tools in a kind fashion by accompanying their use with positive, constructive comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2011-08-02T17:32:23.557" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="912" CreationDate="2011-08-03T01:58:26.143" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is technically covered in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/how-to-answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Provide context for links&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A link to a potential solution is always welcome, but please add context around the link so your fellow users will have some idea what it is and why it’s there . Always quote the most relevant part of an important link, in case the target site is unreachable or goes permanently offline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I generally try to edit in context when I see answers that are little more than a link with no context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2011-08-03T01:58:26.143" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="909" CreationDate="2011-08-03T12:45:55.793" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I still think that inviting R-help here is a better idea than it seems; both mailing lists and SE sites are really made to serve communities, not topics. This site is for general data science community, R-help is for data science community using R.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As can be seen from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;R-help archives&lt;/a&gt;, it is discussing very similar topics as we do here; yet this community is 1) large and very active, 2) certainly more engaged in R programming issues than ours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) will result in some overwhelming (my approximation is that it will be an equivalent of merging CV with a second site of more-less the same size). However, those people are statisticians and data miners, and there is a great chance they will start to ask more core questions and it finally only end in a bigger site with more-less original topic distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) might lead to a serious topic drift; however there is a solution, namely maintaining the existing SO/CV split of more &quot;sciency&quot; and more &quot;programmy&quot; R questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The smaller in size but also important issue are some discursive and big-list questions that are in fact against general SE rules. SO is very broad and thus SO mods will always kill such threads; here we can at least give it more thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2011-08-03T18:31:16.880" LastActivityDate="2011-08-03T18:31:16.880" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="910" CreationDate="2011-08-03T17:04:00.203" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/13690/how-to-compute-the-probability-associated-with-absurdly-large-z-scores/13809#13809&quot;&gt;network of cross-referenced posts&lt;/a&gt; by @Cardinal on &lt;strong&gt;estimating tail probabilities of the Normal distribution&lt;/strong&gt; is worth highlighting and memorializing: it's a clearly described, useful body of work.  To help us appreciate this better, a blog post could provide some background: why do we care about such tail probabilities, what are the applications, and what are the basic problems with computing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2011-08-03T17:04:00.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="917" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-03T21:20:18.357" Score="3" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should've asked this about three days ago.  But anyone still around &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amstat.org/meetings/jsm/2011/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;JSM&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1499" LastActivityDate="2011-08-04T10:44:47.333" Title="Anyone at JSM 2011?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="917" CreationDate="2011-08-04T10:44:47.333" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nope. However, if you're willing to share your thoughts about the conference, go join us at &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/549/skewed-distribution&quot;&gt;Skewed Distribution&lt;/a&gt;: It would be great to have a short summary of the most exciting talks on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.blogoverflow.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;community blog&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2011-08-04T10:44:47.333" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="908" CreationDate="2011-08-04T11:10:18.840" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is a great idea. I'd like to add that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We can extend the idea to anything related to &lt;a href=&quot;http://eagereyes.org/blog/2011/information-visualization-vs-statistical-graphics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Information Visualization vs. Statistical Graphics&lt;/a&gt;, see also the discussion echoed on &lt;a href=&quot;http://statisticsforum.wordpress.com/2011/07/28/robert-kosaras-infovis-example-illustrates-the-chris-rock-effect-a-pleasurable-intellectual-effort-spent-in-discovering-something-obvious-that-couldve-been-noticed-and-even-quantified-much-mor/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Statistics Forum&lt;/a&gt; (brief thoughts, comments, etc.). We already collected some good links on this thread: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/103/what-is-your-favorite-data-visualization-blog&quot;&gt;What is your favorite data visualization blog?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It can be based on past data viz. submitted here, but posts can also offer critical reviews of current (good and bad) practices for displaying statistical results (for descriptive purpose or more complex stuff). I would love to see something about Tukey's &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploratory_data_analysis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Exploratory Data Analysis&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We could think of &lt;em&gt;thematic issues&lt;/em&gt;, in the spirit of this past JSM on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stat-computing.org/events/2010-jsm/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Use of Graphics in Clinical Trials&lt;/a&gt;, where summary, opinions, or illustrations with various statistical packages would be welcome.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We could provide discussion about recent incorporation of new graphical displays in various software; it can be @Peter Flom's SAS &lt;code&gt;PROC SGPLOT&lt;/code&gt;, for example, where the Scatter plot with ellipse is closely related to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/7899/complex-regression-plot-in-r/7911#7911&quot;&gt;question you linked to&lt;/a&gt;. (More information can be found on his &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.statisticalanalysisconsulting.com/using-the-sg-procedures-to-create-and-enhance-scatter-plots/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;webpage for NESUG 2011&lt;/a&gt;.) Likewise, the newly released &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stata.com/stata12/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stata 12&lt;/a&gt; incorporates new graphical output.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2011-08-04T11:10:18.840" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="920" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="921" CreationDate="2011-08-11T17:08:48.650" Score="11" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have already been a few questions on the relationship among stats.SE, math.SE, and MO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that mathematical probability questions are equally acceptable on all three. &#xA;Some meta posts indicating this include:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/432/are-probability-questions-allowed&quot;&gt;Are Pr questions allowed&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/98/how-do-we-handle-overlap-with-mathoverflow&quot;&gt;How to handle overlap w/ MO&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distinction that MO is generally reserved for higher level questions is often made, however, there is, of course, a gray area for &quot;high level.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also posted this question on meta: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/896/is-it-acceptable-to-post-the-same-question-on-multiple-sites&quot;&gt;Is it acceptable to post the same question on multiple sites&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;which received a resounding &quot;No!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the audiences on each do appear to be different.  The probability tag on math.SE has 110 followers, and the probability tag on stats.SE has 17 followers (and I can't find a number on the pr.probability tag on MO).  The &quot;high users&quot; on each don't appear to have much overlap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, out of etiquette, one should only post on one site at a time. But if it is a question that is equally valid on all sites, it is more likely to get answered if more people are exposed to it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my questions are:  is there a way you can migrate your own question from one site to another if it hasn't been answered?  If so, what is the appropriate time frame to wait for an answer on the first site?  If not, is it appropriate to delete the original question entirely from the first site and then re-post it on another site? I don't want to remove a question that people might find interesting, esp. if it's gotten comments and interest.  But I would like to expose it to a wider audience if necessary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5471" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-03-30T09:03:50.570" LastActivityDate="2017-03-30T09:03:50.570" Title="Probability questions: reaching stats.SE, math.SE, and MO audiences" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="920" CreationDate="2011-08-11T17:18:17.233" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can migrate a question by flagging it yourself, which allows you to send a message to all moderators with your request.  It's hard to imagine a circumstance in which this would be denied (unless the question is too ill-posed, in which case it would just be closed anyway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, I wouldn't read too much into audience size.  My experience with the math and stats sites is that when stats questions involve &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; to do with actual data, you are far better off posting on the stats site.  When the questions are theoretical, as yours have been, it's hard to know where to go.  A clear, well-posed question will get attention on both sites.  If it turns out that the answer needs simulation, data analysis, or research, you're likely to get that answer here.  If it succumbs to purely mathematical techniques, math.SE is probably the best place for it.  But it's often hard to know in advance what the solution will look like.  In that case guess, wait a few days, and have the question migrated if there's no useful response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2011-08-11T17:18:17.233" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="922" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1017" CreationDate="2011-08-11T20:41:00.010" Score="11" ViewCount="333" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given no objections to my &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/908/1036&quot;&gt;previous suggestion&lt;/a&gt; for &quot;data visualization of the week&quot; for the blog, we might as well start collecting some examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to start, I simply ask that posters include an image of their own original work, along with a brief description of what the visualization is showing (plus any other interesting/insightful commentary). I ask that if your post is chosen as &quot;the one&quot;, you basically do the same thing in your post for the site's community blog. (As a note, people can post work they have already done in answering questions on the site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously this will be available to the public, so only post if you are willing to share your work with the public. I don't think reproducible code is necessary here (nor do you need to divulge your data to the world if you do not want to), but that would likely be something the community highly values (and I hope would accompany your work at some point). If you do not want to publish the data used to make the graphic, it shouldn't be too much work to simulate new data and test the code used to generate the graph on the new (fake) data. If the graphic was produced via point and click in some instances, just saying how it was approximately done is sufficient as well (you could hand draw it if you wanted too!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point we just need to accumulate a list of examples for members of the site to vote on. I do not have any other guidelines as of now (and as of now the length of time the thread will be open to posting and voting will be indefinite). In the future we may develop more rules (such as the photo site only asks people to vote on one entry, and asks people to not downvote any entries), but I hope such rules come by the collective decision of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So post entries, and the response with the most upvotes will be asked to make a blog post detailing their data visualization. Everything else is TBD in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2011-12-22T11:44:47.343" Title="Examples for weekly featured data visualization" Tags="|discussion|data-visualization|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="920" CreationDate="2011-08-12T11:43:48.323" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the example of &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/63134/a-sequence-of-order-statistics-from-an-iid-sequence&quot;&gt;one question&lt;/a&gt;. It was asked on stats.SE, I gave a bounty on it. After nobody answered it was migrated to math.SE, and then I gave bounty there. In the end I've posted it on MO, from my own account (I was not the one who asked the question in the first place). The question was finally answered on MO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my advice with the question for posting the question would the following. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pick either math.SE or stats.SE. Ask the question. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If nobody answers propose bounty.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If nobody answers then, ask the admins to migrate the question to either math.SE or stats.SE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If nobody asks then, ask it on MO, mentioning the history.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2116" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:58:32.040" LastActivityDate="2011-08-12T11:43:48.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="909" CreationDate="2011-08-12T14:03:53.147" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moving R away from stats would be a significant mistake in my view.  There are many statisticians using R who would be unlikely to want to keep up with a different site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2011-08-12T14:03:53.147" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="925" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="926" CreationDate="2011-08-12T23:31:07.307" Score="7" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I get stuck on a problem, I post it on SE to see if anyone can help me with it.  But, I continue to work on it on my own after I post it.  The sheer act of posting helps me clarify my thoughts.  Then, I'll often get comments on the question that help me clarify things further.  Post-posting, I end up with ideas about how to much better word things.  I think this is particularly true for me because I find myself needing to ask fairly complicated question in an area in which I am not familiar with conventional terminology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FAQ also says to update your question frequently with your own progress.  I think this is a good idea, as ideally my &quot;progress&quot; will help people better understand the question, and maybe give people ideas on how to answer, or at least contribute to the general body of knowledge on what &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I do not know how to best go about the updating.  I don't want to continually change the wording of a problem.  Sometimes I'll realize I could ask for a more general case, make more clear parameters, etc. and I'll want to add that clarity... but it's at the cost of confusing people who may have already attempted to start answering.  As for &quot;progress reports&quot; -- I don't want to question to get overly long.  I feel bad creating inconsistency by posting an update, then deleting it and replacing it with a different update altogether a few hours later -- but less bad than I'd feel with them both taking up space in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So.... my question to you is:  how do you balance improving your question and adding progress statements with keeping it consistent and manageable?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5471" LastEditorUserId="5471" LastEditDate="2011-08-12T23:39:29.327" LastActivityDate="2011-08-13T07:20:07.633" Title="How to manage posting progress/improvements on a question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="925" CreationDate="2011-08-13T07:20:07.633" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't want to continually change the wording of a problem&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is fine, so long as the question doesn't have answers, or if it has, say, one answer that can also be updated. But if there are 6 answers, all working against the assumptions in the original question, then that might be problematic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This of course also depends how radically you are &lt;em&gt;changing&lt;/em&gt; the question. Are you elaborating and adding more detail, or are you altering the basic premise of the question as you go?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Editing is &lt;em&gt;almost always a net good&lt;/em&gt;, but if you have reason to believe your question is built on shifting sands, better to keep it in draft form for a while until you solidify it a bit more. Otherwise your edits will undermine the very people who are so generously contributing their time to formulate answers to your question ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: it depends. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(and it's also possible to leave your question as-is and ask a followup question, too.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2011-08-13T07:20:07.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="927" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-16T07:47:18.980" Score="9" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;See this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/14226/given-the-power-of-computers-these-days-is-there-ever-a-reason-to-do-a-chi-squar/14230#14230&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;. The poster uses bibtex syntax to give the references to articles. It does not look nice, but if bibtex was supported, it would look fantastic. Citing articles using &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zotero.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zotero&lt;/a&gt; for example would be a breeze. Are there any plans for supporting this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2116" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2011-08-17T12:37:19.117" Title="Bibtex support in the answers or questions" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="927" CreationDate="2011-08-16T08:59:49.380" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a good idea; I wonder what the team will say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For now, one could use a paper sharing option from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mendeley.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mendeley&lt;/a&gt; -- it does not work too flawless for now (one has to go to the global paper catalog, find the paper, than click share -- plus the paper must be in someone's library), but an effect is a handy short link to the quite useful paper page like this &lt;a href=&quot;http://mnd.ly/rnrM7X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://mnd.ly/rnrM7X&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2011-08-16T08:59:49.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="927" CreationDate="2011-08-17T12:37:19.117" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is of far greater scope than your question, but I've thought about this somewhat in the past, so I figured I would share my opinion here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think direct editing of the questions, and heavy coaxing of users for a certain format is the only way we will have a standardized format across the site. Even if some UI existed for entering in say the ISBN of a book and out comes the citations meta data, I bet we would still need to edit citations a substantive amount of time. The same would apply to inserting a bibtex reference (either through a UI or directly) in the post. Even if such a UI existed I'm not sure how it would be appropriately woven into the body of text that encompasses the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is continual editing of references worth such effort?&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make posts readable, IMO it most definitely is. Even after the post you mentioned was edited to make the bibtex stand out by using the code blocking, it is still quite ugly and takes more effort than I would like to read. I would much prefer a short citation in text (e.g. Mpiktas, 2011), with a link to either a paper and/or a publicly available version of the document (preferebly with the link being a direct link in the text. e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/14226/given-the-power-of-computers-these-days-is-there-ever-a-reason-to-do-a-chi-squar/14230#14230&quot;&gt;like this&lt;/a&gt;). I agree that bibtex is simple enough to figure out where all the necessary material is needed (even if you are not familiar with what bibtex is), but it is difficult to read in that unnatural format. The breaking up the text to cite a work is very distracting as well, I would much prefer them listed as endnotes and/or short citations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is it worth the effort to have a standardized format across the site?&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is more debatable, but I think it is still worth the effort. Even if we had to edit every citation, I don't think we see that many citations that it would be overly burdensome (I could be wrong though, and it is easy for me to site here and make such a claim). I bet citations come more frequently by regular answerer's (perhaps most of the citations), which if a regular format was decided these users would be more likely to conform to that standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the reason why I believe it is more debatable is that the gains of standardization, above just making the post readable, might be of minimal utility to the community. Like I said earlier, a short citation plus a link to the reference is plenty sufficient to allow someone to figure out whom/what someone is citing, and adding in any more information to make a formal citation would be a pain. If someone cites work by adding in endnotes to their posts, do we need to edit in an external link? Is plain old bibtex acceptable, or should we edit the citation to look more like normal references? Should we always update with a link to a public pdf if it is available? These actions are slightly beneficial to the community, but not to any extent that the posts become much more useful with the additions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given all that, I will give two different suggestions for a standardized format for citations within this site; one being sufficient, and the other being comprehensive. These really aren't different than was suggested &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/128/1036&quot;&gt;in a past thread&lt;/a&gt;, although the community has largely self policed how they enter in citations (and here I'm suggesting we actively edit to make it conform to particular standards);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A sufficient citation format:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For short citations, besides author(s) and year the post would need some link either to a publicly available pdf or a website of the article abstract and volume information. In the case of books, a link to google books or amazon would work. As long as the url reference works, we should not really care what it is (pubmed, doi, direct abstract link by a publisher, etc.  would all work equally well). You really don't even need the short citation in text, and a link appropriately included in the right part of the text is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For long citations a minimum would be the author(s) plus the title of the work. Preferably it would include other stuff (like the same outside links necessary for a short citation, year, isbn for books, journal name + volume for an article) but these would really never be necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither would have a style guide, and all that would be necessary is that they have the information I listed above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A comprehensive citation format:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would require both in text short citations, and a reference list of long citations listed as endnotes to the post. When available, the citation should link to an outside source that will have a long living url (doi preferably for articles, google or amazon for books). A link to a publicly available pdf when available would be attached as well. The long citation format could be any format, it just simply needs to be standardized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the reason I have thought about this is because I would like to make a citeulike library cross-referencing citations and posts if I can think of a reasonable way to parse citations in answers. Part of the problem in this is the variety of ways people cite work currently on the site makes this a difficult task. Although I think this project would be a neat addition to the site, I would hardly think it would be of great enough utility to the sites members to justify the comprehensive citation format I am proposing above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically for me to be able to parse the posts to make such a library I would need to have every reference have either a doi, a pubmed id, or isbn for a book (frequently the abstract page from regular publishers would work as well, for example a page &lt;a href=&quot;http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2011.00231.x/abstract&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;like this&lt;/a&gt; would work). This reference needs to be in some type of standardized format for me to search the post and extract that information. A link to a pdf (without the other info) would not work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a final note, I don't think anything with the site currently needs to be changed (with the exception of the bibtex directly in the post in question, I really don't like that). These are just some thoughts and suggestions I have, although the way citations are typically handled on the site are perfectly fine. I currently don't have a suggestion for citations to things other than journal articles or books either (and for my theoretical citeulike library I wouldn't be able to automate their inclusion unless we made someone make a bibtex (or similar citation) formatted reference for them!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2011-08-17T12:37:19.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="909" CreationDate="2011-08-17T20:23:22.240" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it helps to get a different perspective.  What if, for instance, we were to replace every occurrence of &amp;quot;R&amp;quot; in this discussion by &amp;quot;SAS&amp;quot;?  In principle that shouldn't change the validity of any of the arguments pro or con.  To see what this would entail, think about what our site would be like if it were inundated with questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/14423/sas-proc-sql-create-column&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vertically joining data in two (or more) data sets using proc sql. If each data set represents data gathered in different years data_2000, data_2001, data_2002, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one wants to take a column from each file, but add a column populated with the year each row was taken from, creating the column is easy enough, but I don't know how to populate the values for each row.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to use a macro, give a list of files and years, let the macro generate the proc sql code to join given columns, et cetera&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, I'm not enthusiastic about that prospect.  I don't care whether such questions come from R, SAS, or whatever my favorite statistical computing platform happens to be at the moment: they are pedestrian and plainly &lt;em&gt;uninteresting.&lt;/em&gt;  They belong somewhere else so that we can focus on statistics and data mining here without such distractions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T18:34:28.997" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="931" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-08-19T05:54:40.650" Score="3" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hope I don't get flamed for this. I feel the community wiki aspect of stack* to be very confusing. Having just read &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/5026/what-is-the-difference-between-data-mining-statistics-machine-learning-and-ai&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, and then seeing the first 3 comments on it, has prompted me to post. It's something I've been wondering for a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So often you see people saying 'This should be CW', and I've often avoided asking questions knowing that that will be first comment if it is subjective. It sounds like the users can't make a question CW (now we're out of beta). Maybe there should be a 'vote to make CW' up down on each question, as the comment 'This should be CW' just adds clutter and often get's voted up earning people rep despite it being an obvious comment anyone who was first to read (and inclined) would make. Not that I have a problem with that, I'm just failing to see the logic. And the question I linked to is now a CW yet it sits in the question cue like any other, so I don't see the difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if I'm pointed to an explanation of CW vs question and then this is closed I'll have learned something. I have searched but am just not getting something...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4226" OwnerDisplayName="nzcoops" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2011-08-19T18:21:56.330" Title="This should be CW?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="931" CreationDate="2011-08-19T12:14:30.683" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;--- Benjamin Franklin, 1706–1790&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of SE sites is to collect responses to specific questions, and elect the best one so that future visitors facing similar dilemma will know what's the correct solution is. In the meantime, newcomers can add their thoughts and a &quot;correct answer&quot; might evolve. In my view, SE sites are dynamic systems; they will evolve as new technologies, new users, new contexts of use will emerge around them. Whenever a new question comes up, I'll expect from the &quot;best&quot; answer to truly &lt;em&gt;answer the question&lt;/em&gt;, but also to help the OP &lt;em&gt;learning from it&lt;/em&gt;; this may be about improving question, referring to well-acknowledged references, sharing one's experience with similar problem, stimulating his own interest in learning more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, questions are subjective--but within the scope defined in our FAQ--enough not to warrant a definitive answer: They merely call for one's opinion on a specific problem, ask for a (big-)list of references, or whatever might be considered on-topic here. This is what we consider as CW questions. There's simply no definitive, objective, or perfect answer, so let's collect a bunch of ideas or opinions in a thread. No one will earn reputation from that. But we are not here for that purpose; we all are here to learn from others, and share our own experience. The OP might be aware of that but isn't allowed to convert it as such. He can just &lt;em&gt;flag it for mod attention&lt;/em&gt;, or put an &lt;em&gt;addendum in his post&lt;/em&gt;. We as mods are likely to notice it within respectable delays. In fact, it is good when the OP himself thinks his question might be best suited as a CW question. Otherwise, let's let the community decide on its status. It is especially true about newcomers who don't necessarily know about SE guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, what I expect from you is to be aware of when one of your questions isn't really calling for a definitive response; otherwise, just ask the community: &quot;Is it a candidate question for a CW thread?&quot;, in your question or in a comment. The community will &quot;vote on it&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="930" LastEditDate="2011-08-19T18:21:56.330" LastActivityDate="2011-08-19T18:21:56.330" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="933" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-01T21:29:34.160" Score="5" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of the community members in here maintain some excellent blogs, complementing some of the expertise on here, discussing a range of CV topics from R to applied methods. Are community members interested in reviewing CV.SE on their blogs in their area of specialization?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6064" LastEditorUserId="6064" LastEditDate="2011-09-13T17:38:31.150" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T06:18:33.650" Title="Attention CV users with Statistics blogs: Review CV in your area of specialization" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="933" CreationDate="2011-09-02T00:36:55.003" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would be - my blog is mainly on applied research questions, with the occasional coding related posts in SAS or R.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5836" LastActivityDate="2011-09-02T00:36:55.003" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="935" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-02T17:21:44.063" Score="9" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;The top &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/unanswered&quot;&gt;unanswered questions&lt;/a&gt; haven't changed since I first started using CrossValidated. I'm tempted to post useless answers just to get these questions out of the way so I can actually use the unanswered questions feature. Should we do anything about this, and, if so, what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3874" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2011-09-07T19:21:24.813" Title="Can the unanswered questions change?" Tags="|discussion|support|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="936" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-02T17:55:47.830" Score="5" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just like to drop a note on who I am and what my team does. I'm Seth, and a member of the CHAOS team at SE headquarters in New York. We're lurking in the SE sites learning about the communities and helping out in raising the bar on quality posts. Much of our efforts are directed towards promoting the site and growing the community. Personally, I have a background in Psychology and Statistics and find CV an awesome resource and lively intellectual community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will post in the meta from time to time with ideas we have for promoting CV and engaging new users while attracting new groups as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to send me a note any time. Also, I will pop in to Skewed Distrubtion Chat for a couple hours each day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6064" LastActivityDate="2011-09-02T17:55:47.830" Title="Who is this person with a Ψ character and what is the CHAOS team?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="937" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="938" CreationDate="2011-09-02T20:00:06.660" Score="4" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I appreciate the ability to subscribe to tags that are of interest to me, and I would similarly like the ability to subscribe to answers from a specific user. Without naming names, I have noticed that there is a particular user whose answers are always well-thought-out and I'd love an easy way to follow them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3331" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T20:05:42.390" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T20:05:42.390" Title="Is it possible to subscribe to a specific user's answers?" Tags="|feature-request|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="937" CreationDate="2011-09-02T21:43:05.010" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can't you just subscribe to the RSS feed in your preferred RSS reader? Lookup the info page of an user; at the bottom, you will see a link &lt;code&gt;user feed&lt;/code&gt;. You'll get his/her answers and comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2011-09-02T21:43:05.010" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="935" CreationDate="2011-09-02T22:04:44.100" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is more a comment than an answer, but I don't want to promote the comment-answer trend (please note that I can understand why sometimes people leave comments rather than answer!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO, 'useless answers' are not the way to go. Because we expect answers to be on the point and useful for future visitors. Rather, we can bounce those questions from time to time (editing, retagging, etc.), and wait for users' reaction. If nothing happens then it's just that the question does not deserve that much attention, or nobody is qualified to respond to it. So what? We should expect unanswer{ed|able} questions from time to time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2011-09-02T22:04:44.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="940" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-03T06:44:27.053" Score="1" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't really a question as such, but rather an add for another stackexchange proposal which is likely of interest to at least a few of the users here. I know this is off topic, even for meta, so I'll understand if this gets closed/deleted. CSTheory and MathOverflow have been gracious enough to allow such posts, but of course I understand that every community is different, and this may not be acceptable here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the moment, there is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/23848/theoretical-physics?referrer=6MFJJ0ze0OFN-CahX8P22A2&quot;&gt;Theoretical Physics proposal&lt;/a&gt; on Area 51, which now at 86% commitment. There are already enough low rep users, but in order to progress to beta we still need more users with over 200 rep. Although there is currently a Physics.SE it is more on the level of Math.SE than MathOverflow, and so the current proposal is for a physics site made in the image of MathOverflow/CSTheory.SE which would be explicitly research level only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that there are a fair number of users on this site with physics backgrounds, who may be interested in the new proposal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, if this proposal sounds of interest to you, I hope you'll consider committing so that we can progress to beta soon and make the site a reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6152" LastActivityDate="2011-09-03T06:44:27.053" Title="Theoretical physics stack exchange site" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2011-12-14T17:05:41.210" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="941" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="945" CreationDate="2011-09-03T14:13:20.193" Score="9" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm aware that it's a no-no to post the same question on multiple Stack Exchange sites. I'm curious, however: what do people feel about posting the same question on non-SE sites, such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://metaoptimize.com/qa/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MetaOptimize&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.analyticbridge.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;AnalyticBridge&lt;/a&gt;?  These seem to be largely disjoint communities, so I don't &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; I'm bothering the same people more than once.  And if I get a good answer on one, I would plan to cross-post it to another so everyone benefits.  Still, I'm not sure what the community norms are for this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5729" LastEditorUserId="32036" LastEditDate="2014-07-30T23:24:42.603" LastActivityDate="2014-07-30T23:24:42.603" Title="Posting same question on other statistics forums in addition to Cross Validated" Tags="|discussion|policy|cross-posting|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="941" CreationDate="2011-09-03T14:32:19.400" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is OK, but nevertheless it is good to provide link to other questions/threads. This way the users of one site may still benefit from related content on the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2011-09-03T14:32:19.400" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="941" CreationDate="2011-09-05T09:43:59.957" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And if I get a good answer on one, I would plan to cross-post it to another so everyone benefits. Still I'm not sure what the community norms are for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is indeed the one requirement I have on this, so it seems you are on the right track.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Post a question to five different (non-se!) sites on the internet if you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt;, but you are now morally obligated to be responsible for the care and feeding of all five of those questions -- anything less is disrespectful to the audiences of those five sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2011-09-05T09:43:59.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="935" CreationDate="2011-09-06T17:10:40.513" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whatever you do, don't be posting junk answers! All that does is negative. The author will be notified of absolute junk, we still won't have an answer to that question, and the site will look pretty bad if we start having deliberately useless answers to the questions we get. That ain't a good image for the site - &quot;If we can't answer your question fast enough, we'll just troll you&quot;, that's what it says. The people in the community probably won't look to highly on you if you start posting useless answers (what good is an expert if he's just going to trash up the stuff he can't answer?), and consequently people will look down on this community for producing such trash.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if we put aside the social and visual aspects of it, there's also the mechanical aspect. The Unanswered Tab is no &lt;strong&gt;upvoted&lt;/strong&gt; answers. If you're posting a useless answer, you're not likely to get upvotes. If anything you're likely to get downvotes, and so not only will it stick around in the Unanswered tab, but you'll suffer for your folly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't think you have to be alone in answering these things. If you don't know the answer yourself, perhaps you might know of people outside the network who can lend a hand!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GCLsf.png&quot; alt=&quot;Image of sharing utilities&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is a snapshot from portions of one of these Unanswered questions. Marked in red are in-built sharing utilities. Using popular social networking tools you can distribute a link to the question so that you increase the visibility. Or, if you know people directly (or have better places to distribute), we provide a convenient link for you to direct people at the question. With more eyes, you can get people who can commit a true answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are even badges that are awarded if you use this link. The link contains a special query on it with your UserID here on Cross Validated. When people from external sites visit that link, you can earn the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/badges/59/announcer&quot;&gt;Announcer&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/badges/60/booster&quot;&gt;Booster&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/badges/61/publicist&quot;&gt;Publicist&lt;/a&gt; badges based on how many people you get to come over. Sure, you can also get these by promoting popular answered questions, but you can do double duty by sharing Unanswered questions - you'll be working towards getting the answers this site needs, while also helping promote the site as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's unanswered, the goal we should have is to get that question answered. With a real answer. You aren't limited to yourself in this endeavor - reach out to those around you to help bring conclusion to the problems that have yet to be solved!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5645" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2011-09-06T17:10:40.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="941" CreationDate="2011-09-06T17:25:19.023" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Depending on the site, you may want to consider sharing a link to the Stack Exchange question, instead of completely cross-posting it. In essence, this is less of a &quot;Here's my question, help me out&quot;, and more of a &quot;Hey, I'm part of this statistics Q&amp;amp;A over here, it's quite nice and you should try it out. (Oh, and help me)&quot; type of action. This is less of an option for Q&amp;amp;A sites that operate similar to ours (such as MetaOptimize), but for forums and other communities that you don't have discrete &quot;questions&quot;, then it is a viable route.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, promoting the site as a whole to attract new users to the site, while also attracting people who might be able to answer your question. It's also a pretty helpful thing to do - by sharing a question in need to those who can address it, you'll be attracting experts to the site who can assist, rather than spectators and other net-wanderers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also a set of badges you can earn if you use special links. If you click &lt;code&gt;link&lt;/code&gt; beneath the tags of your question (next to things like &lt;code&gt;edit&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;flag&lt;/code&gt;, you will get a special link that has your UserID associated with it. By sharing that with others, you can get badges like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/badges/59/announcer&quot;&gt;Announcer&lt;/a&gt; that reward the promotion of sites, all while still potentially getting an answer to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cross-posting remains a valid options, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/941/posting-same-question-on-other-statistics-forums-in-addition-to-cross-validated/943#943&quot;&gt;as Jeff recommends&lt;/a&gt;, make sure to stay on top of the developments on the sites. You don't want people of any site to end up wasting time providing an identical answer that you had gotten a couple days earlier from a different site altogether. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5645" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2011-09-06T17:57:08.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="935" CreationDate="2011-09-07T19:21:24.813" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are at least a few &quot;Unanswered&quot; questions with one or more non-upvoted answers. If you'd like to see this list change up, rather than posting useless or inaccurate answers (which as discussed above, won't do anything), considering going through them and up-voting answers that are correct, but haven't received any attention presumably because the OP has moved on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5836" LastActivityDate="2011-09-07T19:21:24.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="947" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-07T21:25:49.430" Score="9" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an effort to achieve more visibility within statistical communities, SE is thinking of writing about CV in an ASA (American Statistical Association) magazine, assuming the ASA would be interested.  This would potentially reach most university level stats teachers, researchers, and many professional statisticians in business, government, and consulting in the US.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please use this thread to offer your reactions, suggestions, and any other related ideas.  It would be useful to hear about what points you think ought to be made in such an article: why should statisticians be interested in participating?  What, in your opinion, is uniquely beneficial about this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are an ASA member and would be willing to be interviewed or quoted for an article, please contact Seth Rogers (seth@stackexchange.com).  This is low key: there's no commitment and you won't have to write anything (unless you want to help!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="5645" LastEditDate="2011-09-23T14:28:10.150" LastActivityDate="2011-09-30T14:45:08.420" Title="Looking for ASA members to interview about the usefulness of CV" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="948" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-09T18:36:08.173" Score="17" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;StackExchange is looking for students and teachers who might be interested in helping us kick off/formalize a pizza ambassador-type program. CrossValidated.StackExchange would like to sponsor university students (college or graduate) and faculty members who are excited about CrossValidated, statistics and pizza. Contact Seth Rogers for more details about the program and to get involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6064" LastEditorUserId="6064" LastEditDate="2011-09-15T14:48:21.713" LastActivityDate="2011-09-15T14:48:21.713" Title="Introducing CrossValidated.SE Pizza Ambassadors Program: calling students and teachers" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="949" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="987" CreationDate="2011-09-10T13:33:58.797" Score="15" ViewCount="650" Body="&lt;p&gt;Time to continue the CVJC series after holidays!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To remind for those who are new to the idea:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CVJC is a whole day meeting on &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/18/ten-fold&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; where we discuss some paper and its theoretical/practical surroundings.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As mentioned above the event is whole-day (00:00-23:59UTC), but there is a  meet-up session on which most talking take place.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The paper must be OpenAccess or a (p)reprint suggested previously on a meta thread like this one and selected in voting. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We will try to invite the author(s).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, please suggest papers (each in one answer)! The deadline for suggestions is traditionally a week ahead, so 23:59UTC 2.11.2011.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: The JC will certainly take place at &lt;strong&gt;18.11.2011&lt;/strong&gt;, with meet-up session at &lt;strong&gt;18:00UTC&lt;/strong&gt;. You can register &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/18/ten-fold?tab=schedule&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to get an e-mail reminder. One of the authors, Gregory Matthews, will join the discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT2: Here is &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/18/conversation/cross-validated-journal-club-5&quot;&gt;the transcript&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2011-11-18T19:35:42.697" LastActivityDate="2011-11-18T19:35:42.697" Title="Fifth Cross Validated Journal Club" Tags="|discussion|journal-club|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="950" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="951" CreationDate="2011-09-13T20:32:04.473" Score="6" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to ask a question in Cross Validated about book recommendations--specifically for statistics books for the mathematically literate (as opposed to many books that are aimed at the math-phobic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this an appropriate question to ask?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2636" LastActivityDate="2011-09-13T20:42:18.760" Title="Are reference requests okay?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="950" CreationDate="2011-09-13T20:42:18.760" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, they are OK. Tag it with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/books&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;books&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;books&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2011-09-13T20:42:18.760" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="952" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="953" CreationDate="2011-09-15T20:20:54.360" Score="8" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that you can delete a question that you post, so long as no one has answered it.  However, people may have commented on it, favorited it, or voted on it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you realize that you no longer need the answer to the question (say it was for a project you're no longer working on, or that you formulated to problem incorrectly to begin with)... is it better for the community to delete it, so as to not waste anyone's time or detract from people who really need answers... or is that actually more rude, to take something down that others may have thought was interesting?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5471" LastActivityDate="2011-09-15T20:53:55.570" Title="Should you delete unanswered questions that you no longer need the answer to?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="952" CreationDate="2011-09-15T20:53:46.453" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it offers &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; value to the community it should be left up. If it is ill-posed for some reason, it would benefit the community to edit the question (and answer it yourself if possible). I would think in some situations it is ok to leave it ill-posed and then answer it yourself, saying in the answer what was wrong with the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would take upvotes, favorites, views and comments as evidence that it is a noteworthy subject that is of interest to multiple parties. If it is misleading for some reason, the community should take action (in the form of comments or answers) to prevent misguided questions or answers for future viewers of the topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2011-09-15T20:53:46.453" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="952" CreationDate="2011-09-15T20:53:55.570" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As soon as someone provides an answer, comment, edit, or vote, the question has become the work of the community.  Poorly posed questions--non-questions--should be closed as such, and usually will be (by high-rep community members and/or moderators).  There's a gray area, such as the incorrect formulation you refer to, but in general any well-posed question that has generated non-trivial community interaction ought not to be closed without public discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2011-09-15T20:53:55.570" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="955" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="956" CreationDate="2011-09-16T11:00:55.070" Score="4" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some people are using spreadsheets for statistical analysis. I have noticed that there is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/excel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;excel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;excel&lt;/a&gt; tag. Or, some people use spreadsheets other than Excel. There are for instance questions related to LibreOffice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea to introduce a more generic &quot;Spreadsheet&quot; tag? This tag could be used for Excel related questions next to the &quot;Excel&quot; tag, but also for questions related to other spreadsheets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5644" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2011-09-16T12:16:45.190" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T12:18:01.587" Title="Spreadsheet Tag" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="955" CreationDate="2011-09-16T12:18:01.587" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say no, as your contemporary answer about Libre Office is not directly applicable to Excel. We could come close to extending the notion to almost all statistical software (e.g. although many answers ask for a solution in R, inevitably most of those same things could be accomplished in SAS, Stata, SPSS, etc.). I don't think a &lt;code&gt;stat-software&lt;/code&gt; tag would be very helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think their could be situations in which a spreadsheet tag is useful (such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/10700/1036&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question about using a spreadsheet for teaching purposes), but they are so few and far between its hard to see its usefulness (at this time). There are currently only 38 questions tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/excel&quot;&gt;Excel&lt;/a&gt; at this time. It is not much of a burden to peruse either the excel tag or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/calc&quot;&gt;calc&lt;/a&gt; tag to see if they have any information pertinent to spreadsheets in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T12:18:01.587" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="878" CreationDate="2011-09-20T08:40:26.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, moderators have officially been mailed the form to obtain the cards. Stay tuned!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2011-09-20T08:40:26.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="933" CreationDate="2011-09-21T06:18:33.650" Score="4" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I encourage research students to ask questions on the site. I direct &lt;a href=&quot;http://jeromyanglim.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-to-ask-me-statistics-question.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;my students to this page&lt;/a&gt; that outlines the benefits of using a site like Cross Validated. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T06:18:33.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="959" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-27T02:02:11.167" Score="12" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;CrossValidated would have been outrageously useful to me a few years ago when I'd only taken one statistics course and couldn't figure out how to learn to test what I wanted to test. I wound up reading a lot of books. (Amusingly, I also couldn't find the statistics courses at my university because none of them were in the statistics department.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also find the more basic questions on the content of a typical introductory statistics class to be the most fun to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would thus like to tell people taking introductory statistics courses about CrossValidated. I'm wondering&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does anyone think I/we shouldn't do this? And, if so, why?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What approach would I/we use to tell people?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My thoughts so far on how one might tell people&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you know people who are taking introductory statistics courses, tell them that they might find help on conceptual questions at CrossValidated.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you know people who are teaching introductory statistics courses, tell them to tell their students that they may find help on conceptual questions at CrossValidated in case they can't make office hours one week or whatever.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3874" LastActivityDate="2011-09-29T01:23:25.783" Title="Getting newly statistical users to the site" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="959" CreationDate="2011-09-28T04:20:20.197" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you know folks personally who can benefit from this site, by all means, let them know about us! But there are some indirect (but equally effective) ways of letting people know about this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The content itself is the main draw to this site. Now that school is back in session, there will be zillions of students with lots of questions. With the expertise on this site, Cross Validated should have as good a shot at having the best answer to any of those questions. Essentially, &lt;strong&gt;this is a great time to recruit new members!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What can you do to help?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As a student, if you have a particularly interesting and intriguing question (and it's a good fit, per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;faq&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;), make sure you ask it here. You're not the only one having that question. Thousands of other people will, too. Ask them even if you think you're going to be able to find the answer yourself… and if you do find the answer, go ahead and answer it yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When answering academic questions, do everything you can to overkill it. Don't just answer with a hyperlink to some other discussion group somewhere. Write a detailed, step-by-step, ultra-clear guide with illustrations and examples. Help us have the best possible answer to the common problems and questions people have in academia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a question comes in that is unclear, badly written, badly formatted, or in bad English, edit it into shape. We've always encouraged edits that improve spelling, grammar, and clarity. Make every question title as clear as possible!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a great opportunity to build up a body of answers to common statistics questions that will be super-popular in the coming weeks as the academic year reaches full swing. Those questions will bring in lots of traffic from search engines and if Cross Validated continues to have great answers like we have in the past, &lt;strong&gt;we stand a chance of attracting some great new users who will add value for years to come.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2011-09-29T01:23:25.783" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="961" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-28T18:37:54.083" Score="11" ViewCount="294" Body="&lt;p&gt;Science proposals need your help! Consider committing to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strike&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/12502/biology&quot;&gt;Biology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strike&gt; Beta, thanks!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strike&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/4964/chemistry&quot;&gt;Chemistry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strike&gt; Beta, thanks!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strike&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/28815/computational-science&quot;&gt;Computational Science&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strike&gt; Beta, thanks!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strike&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/2149/cognitive-science&quot;&gt;Cognitive Sciences&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strike&gt; Beta, thanks!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strike&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/3431/psychology&quot;&gt;Psychology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strike&gt; [Merged into Cognitive Science]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/34565/public-health-epidemiology&quot;&gt;Public Health &amp;amp; Epidemiology&lt;/a&gt; [Deleted]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strike&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/37304/mathematica&quot;&gt;Wolfram &lt;em&gt;Mathematica&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strike&gt; Beta, thanks!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is community wiki -- feel free to add other proposals worth mentioning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Most proposals from the list are now in Beta stage -- and still need your help in gaining traffic and content (= For more proposals, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/915/consider-supporting-proposals-of-other-se-science-sites&quot;&gt;Physics meta thread&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:38:02.680" LastActivityDate="2016-09-23T22:23:58.053" Title="Consider supporting proposals of other SE science sites" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-09-28T18:37:54.083" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="962" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-30T06:08:47.390" Score="2" ViewCount="411" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to get better at statistics.  Part of the struggle is figuring out what is important to know and spend time on learning.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I have some light experience with Time Series, and would like to learn more.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm considering going through either of these books &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0387886974&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Cowpertwait&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0387293175&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Shumway&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally we'd have a handful of people interested , and we could each choose an exercise from a chapter to do, and post that answer.. If you did your answer correct, we could upvote that answer, and thus you would increase your reputation.  I think this actually would add some motivation to do the problems and keep up with the course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm open to any suggestions for what I should do as far as wanting to learn more stats/ what books to learn from, etc.  I'm just putting an idea out there  that I think could possibly work.  I realize most of these ideas fizzle out, but I think with the possibility of having some clever fellow students to learn from, and validly increasing your reputation by solving some difficult problems, I think that it could work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also interested in learning about datamining and bayesian stuff as well.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have access to this book : &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0387922970&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bayes Computation&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and this book &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Elements of Statistical Learning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;at first glance, The elements of statistical learning looks useful but quite challenging.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6369" OwnerDisplayName="Adam" LastActivityDate="2011-11-11T15:27:35.047" Title="I'm interested in doing some exercises from some books I have, anyone interested in joining?" Tags="|discussion|r|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="947" CreationDate="2011-09-30T14:45:08.420" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Frank Harrell is obviously the biggest name statisticians would recognize. He does post on CV from time to time. Frankly, I am not sure as to who else would be highly visible in ASA. I am an ASA member, but if you look at what I do on CV you'd find out that I don't post and only reply -- I don't think that's the mode of presence that a median user would have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastActivityDate="2011-09-30T14:45:08.420" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="909" CreationDate="2011-09-30T16:07:24.457" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my first post on CrossValidated or Meta-CrossValidated, so I don't feel I'm a stakeholder here.  FWIW, I'm trying to learn R &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; statistics - but I come from an implementer's perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The situation right now is that R questions are split across StackOverflow and CrossValidated, with the unfortunate result that good questions go unanswered and good answers go unseen.  See, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7611169/intelligent-point-label-placement-in-r&quot;&gt;this StackOverflow question from today&lt;/a&gt;, which duplicates &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/16057/how-do-i-avoid-overlapping-labels-in-an-r-plot&quot;&gt;this CrossValidated question from four days ago&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what you/we want to do with these &quot;pedestrian&quot; questions in the long term, but in the short term, I'd suggest that &lt;strong&gt;it might be better for everyone if folks here were &quot;harsher&quot; about kicking plain R questions, like the one above, over to StackOverflow&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the argument that &quot;many statisticians using R who would be unlikely to want to keep up with a different site&quot; is valid here, simply because if they aren't looking on StackOverflow, they're &lt;em&gt;already&lt;/em&gt; missing (very roughly) two-thirds of the R traffic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are probably some nominally R-centric questions that are really statistics questions couched in R terminology - you might want to keep them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternative, outside-the-box solution would be if StackExchange provided a way for certain tags on one site to show up in searches for that tag on certain other sites.  This may be fraught with downsides and implementation difficulties, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6585" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2011-09-30T16:07:24.457" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="965" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-05T13:36:34.637" Score="4" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like to monitor the development of a question in which I'm involved in an RSS-reader. Often the interesting development is in the comments, though. Currently, a question's RSS feed includes only the question and any answers that are given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q:&lt;/strong&gt; Why are the comments not included in the feeds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6577" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2012-01-21T10:47:25.633" LastActivityDate="2012-01-21T10:47:25.633" Title="Why are comments not included in question-feeds?" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="247" CreationDate="2011-10-05T16:13:24.043" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see this problem with Chrome 14.0.835.186 on Ubuntu 11.04 (classic mode). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today is the first time it has occurred, but when it did, only one of two uses of &lt;code&gt;\sum()&lt;/code&gt; had smushed brackets (see below). The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/16508/calculating-likelihood-from-rmse&quot;&gt;Calculating likelihood from RMSE&lt;/a&gt; (I edited the first equation to &lt;code&gt;\sum\left(...\right)&lt;/code&gt; thinking it would help, but it didn't).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NJSkQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1381" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T16:13:24.043" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="961" CreationDate="2011-10-05T21:31:30.657" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to throw my own &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/34565/public-health-epidemiology&quot;&gt;Public Health and Epidemiology&lt;/a&gt; proposal into the ring. Admittedly, it's less developed than some of the other's on the list, but I think it probably has a pretty compelling overlap CrossValidate's audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My take on a few of the proposals, and why &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; support them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Biology: Half of what I do is probably better described as Biology. I think a question like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/16437/how-are-epidemic-models-simulated-in-case-of-mobility/16441#16441&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; on CV illustrates a situation I've been tangling with. Mathematical modeling - and by extension epidemic models - don't really have a logical home. MathOverflow is probably too theoretical at times, especially for models that don't have a pleasant analytical solution. I've also got my own issues with relying too much on the math-oriented community, but that's getting a bit far afield. Similarly, it doesn't &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; belong on CrossValidated. Rarely is are the problems statistical in nature. The people probably most familiar with the use and application of these models? Biologists.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Computational Science: &quot;When in doubt, simulate&quot; is probably one of my major guiding principles. It seems pretty clear how statisticians could benefit greatly from having an active community of people discussing how to throw more hardware at the problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5836" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T21:31:30.657" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-10-05T21:31:30.657" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="968" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-07T19:17:03.557" Score="11" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange will be introducing a Fellowship Program awarding grants for original and independent research projects. Undergraduate Honors Theses, Independent Study Projects, Masters Theses, and Dissertations are eligible projects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prospective fellows will be asked to demonstrate a commitment to the discipline, approval or guidance of faculty adviser, two page proposal of the project and abstract. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before officially introducing the Fellowship Program and calling for applications, we need experienced community members to volunteer to review applicants' two page proposals and abstracts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange Fellows will be in the following subjects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Statistics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Linguistics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Philosophy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interested in being a reviewer? Contact Seth Rogers (seth at stackexchange dot com).&#xA;Reviewers are honored as Committee Members and receive a small gift as our way of saying thank you. Keep in mind that this will not take significant amounts of your time as we are very respectful of everyone's busy schedules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6064" LastEditorUserId="6064" LastEditDate="2011-10-12T19:39:20.343" LastActivityDate="2011-10-12T19:39:20.343" Title="Stack Exchange Fellowship and Grant Program: Looking for reviewers to assess thesis proposals" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="969" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-07T19:33:37.263" Score="3" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate feedback on how to improve a recently asked question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/16547/without-multi-level-modeling-how-to-handle-within-study-replication-in-a-meta-an&quot;&gt;Without multi-level modeling, how to handle within-study replication in a meta-analysis, where the study is the unit of replication?&lt;/a&gt; would be appreciated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that the question itself is simple and straightforward, and for this reason am a little surprised that it has not yet been answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it clear? Does it have appropriate tags? How could I improve it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1381" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2011-10-08T08:39:08.427" Title="Seeking advice on how to improve a specific question, it seems simple but has not gotten a response (after 2 days)?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="969" CreationDate="2011-10-07T20:55:53.353" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not see any particular reason why you would not get an answer to your question (which is ok, IMO), provided someone knows what it is all about (I mean, someone having experience with meta-analytical studies). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may take some time for you to get an answer: usually few days, but we've seen accepted answers coming after 2 months or more! You have probably noticed that you got a comment, and some votes. That means that your question was read by some users on this site. Don't worry, someone will come with a good answer (not necessarily during the weekend, but who knows?)... If by the end of the next week you still haven't any response, you might try to update your question to add further information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="930" LastEditDate="2011-10-08T08:39:08.427" LastActivityDate="2011-10-08T08:39:08.427" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="961" CreationDate="2011-10-10T01:18:13.327" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made a proposal about future studies/futurology (forecasting roughly within 100 years range)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/34955/futurology&quot;&gt;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/34955/futurology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;based on personal interest and imho missing place on SE to ask questions concerning climate models (but hopefully climate modeling will just be on sub-topic of this site). It is not intended to ask questions, whether global warming exists etc. But to ask questions about underlying models of environmental/economic/demographic scenarios and assumptions (not more, not less) for forecasting of future developments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there wouldnt be math physics theophys sites on SE, i wouldnt have proposed it, as it would probably get a speculative mess with very low quality. So i would highly appreciate if some of the experts here would participate and help defining the site and draw the scope of answerable and good questions. Its hard, but imho for this topic can only work with a Q&amp;amp;A site with voting system. Ive posted a list of questions, feel free to copy paste some you agree with, so people can vote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your interest and input.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5066" LastActivityDate="2011-10-10T01:18:13.327" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-10-10T01:18:13.327" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="974" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="975" CreationDate="2011-10-12T04:15:21.447" Score="42" ViewCount="1191" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know why I ask questions -- to learn and to get help with problems I'm struggling with. And I have been incredibly impressed with the Stack Exchange community's knowledge, eloquence, and responsiveness. When I post a question, it almost always gets some response within 10 minutes. It's like having a bunch of statisticians and mathematicians hanging out at a water cooler to which I can walk around the corner when I get stuck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not surprised that some of my questions get answered. But I am (wonderfully) surprised that they almost ALL get answered, and almost immediately. What motivates enough people to spend enough time on this site is that there is almost always someone with specialized statistics training willing to write up and answer the question of a stranger -- often having to parse through the ill-formed/vague questions of beginners who may not know enough to know how to word a question. Even if you're an expert in the subject matter, it still takes time to write your thoughts and develop examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One explanation is real-world reputation, but so many people use aliases that I don't think that can explain much. I imagine some people get paid to answer, but I doubt that can be much of it. There is probably an intrinsic joy to teaching for some, but many of you are teachers by profession anyway. Is it truly altruism? (in the informal sense of the word)  Is it about building and being part of a community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am very appreciative of this site and the people who answer questions. I'm curious to hear your thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5471" LastEditorUserId="56940" LastEditDate="2024-03-01T20:53:02.770" LastActivityDate="2024-03-01T20:57:51.940" Title="What motivates people to answer questions?" Tags="|discussion|answers|participation|" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="974" CreationDate="2011-10-12T06:48:38.943" Score="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;For me, there are three real reasons I end up answering questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Something that could probably called professional pride. This is my job, and I'm an academic. I'm &lt;em&gt;supposed&lt;/em&gt; to help contribute to learning and knowledge in my chosen field.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It keeps my mind sharp. I'm away from my colleagues a great deal of the time, and for awhile I found myself in something of a bubble. CV...lets me walk amongst the data folk from time to time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Selfishness. I may one day have to read a paper written by someone who asked a question here - I'd rather read a methods section that doesn't make me cry.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5836" LastActivityDate="2011-10-12T06:48:38.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="974" CreationDate="2011-10-12T11:02:00.493" Score="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I use my real name, and consulting is what I do, so that's a little bit of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;strong&gt;like&lt;/strong&gt; answering questions. It keeps me thinking - or sometimes gets me thinking about something in a new way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I &lt;strong&gt;ask&lt;/strong&gt; questions (and I do) and get answers (and I do), then I feel it is my fair part to answer questions where I can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like seeing my reputation number increase.  :-).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2011-10-12T11:02:00.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="962" CreationDate="2011-10-12T15:03:09.110" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The area that you are talking about I'm too interested. I've gone through both time-series book &amp;amp; &quot;The Elements of Statistical Learning&quot;. The last book is a beauty. If you agree, we can start working on the problems soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rgds,&#xA;Ari&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4278" LastActivityDate="2011-10-12T15:03:09.110" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="978" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="979" CreationDate="2011-10-12T15:25:56.870" Score="11" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since all level questions are accepted, anyone can ask a question, but only those with training in statistics can answer.  As I mentioned in my &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/974/what-motivates-people-to-answer-questions&quot;&gt;last question&lt;/a&gt;, I am very impressed with how quickly my questions are answered.  And, I acknowledge the one-sidedness of my relationship with the community -- I ask questions.  I don't have the skill to answer the vast majority of questions asked (and for those I could answer, most people on the site could answer it better).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I am wondering:  how is this site (and others, like math.SE) not entirely overrun with unanswered questions?  There is a huge ratio of people trying to learn statistics to people at advanced levels.  Is it that currently the site is more well-known among the high-level statistics community than the general public, so it creates a natural balance?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this became commonplace in high school and colleges (e.g. listed as a default reference by teachers on syllabi) do you think the paradigm would break down?  Is a certain ratio of skill levels of participants required to maintain constructive activity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5471" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2011-10-12T16:16:24.420" Title="How is the supply and demand for answers kept in balance?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="978" CreationDate="2011-10-12T16:16:24.420" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The arithmetic of the balance is simple: most people ask just one or two questions, while a few regular contributors have answered hundreds.  Nobody has attempted to answer more than 10% of all questions.  You can see this information for yourself in many ways, such as by following links (such as to individual profiles or the &quot;users&quot; page) or through queries on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;data page&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tough issue concerns what happens to a site when (if) it becomes inundated with elementary questions.  So far, places where that seems to be happening, such as Math and English, are coping just fine.  &lt;strong&gt;The community helps tremendously&lt;/strong&gt;: by flagging bad questions and duplicate questions, we maintain a &quot;collective memory&quot; that keeps new questions genuinely new.  Another key aspect of this quality control is our &lt;strong&gt;treatment of homework-like problems&lt;/strong&gt;: the policy is not to answer them directly, but to provide guidance for people who show they are really working on the problems.  This keeps us from becoming just a repository of solved textbook questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2011-10-12T16:16:24.420" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="980" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-16T12:57:42.353" Score="9" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I find a interesting question asked by others, so I want to know what's the answer. However, this question has not been answered (or get a satisfactory answer), i want to know &quot;follow&quot; this question when there are new answers provided. So, this is my question! thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2011-10-16T13:17:49.000" LastActivityDate="2011-10-16T15:17:35.413" Title="Is there something like &quot;follow this question&quot;?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="980" CreationDate="2011-10-16T13:17:17.223" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;favorite question&quot; option (this star under voting arrows) is the closest to what you are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2011-10-16T13:17:17.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="980" CreationDate="2011-10-16T15:17:35.413" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Favorites are probably a good solution, but RSS feeds (and each question has one) are probably another alternative. Recently they have been updating the feeds based on edited content (e.g. a new answer added, an answer or the question edited). So you wouldn't know if a question has an accepted answer, but you would know if anybody has added anything new.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2011-10-16T15:17:35.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="983" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="984" CreationDate="2011-10-21T11:02:53.983" Score="0" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of questions are un-necessarily edited very quickly in terms of grammar and caps. I understand making some questions more readable. Is there a reason for this obsessionality in moderators? (Other than a Paroxetine deficiency?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6666" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2011-10-21T11:55:16.470" LastActivityDate="2011-11-24T03:33:21.043" Title="Why is there RampanT Grammar and CapiTalization correction?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="983" CreationDate="2011-10-21T12:18:16.700" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Officially it is because of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;broken windows rule&lt;/a&gt;; a clean site seems more reliable and appealing to the visitors. And it seems to be working, since even the raw questions here look much better than on other SEs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The truth is that I'm an obsessive editor (I've made a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election/1#post-7215&quot;&gt;disclaimer&lt;/a&gt; during the moderator election), but this is only a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users?tab=editors&amp;amp;filter=year&quot;&gt;part of the whole story&lt;/a&gt;, and I am still &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=editors&amp;amp;filter=year&quot;&gt;far from real records&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2011-10-21T12:18:16.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="985" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="986" CreationDate="2011-10-22T13:55:36.547" Score="2" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like a Psi, but it seems to be more closely related to a pitchfork.  :)  See &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/users/6064/seth-rogers&quot;&gt;Seth Rogers' profile&lt;/a&gt;.  Looks spooky to me and he's with a shady group called &quot;CHAOS&quot;, an &quot;evangelical&quot; group operating behind the scenes.  (Oh, and Halloween is just around the corner.  Boo!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all seriousness, does anyone want to explain the choice of Psi?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update 1: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/936/who-is-this-person-with-a-character-and-what-is-the-chaos-team&quot;&gt;This page&lt;/a&gt; has a bit more background on the pitchfork brigade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5256" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2011-10-23T22:06:46.090" Title="Why do moderators have pitchforks?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="985" CreationDate="2011-10-23T22:06:46.090" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;So that someone can answer this and thus it won't lurk forever in unanswered questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The background of the mysterious Seth, the sinister CHAOS and the outright menacing pitchfork are given here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/936/who-is-this-person-with-a-character-and-what-is-the-chaos-team&quot;&gt;Who is this person with a Ψ character and what is the CHAOS team?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reality is much less exciting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5836" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2011-10-23T22:06:46.090" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="949" CreationDate="2011-10-25T13:36:39.180" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This article was just posted on the Statistics Surveys website:  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.i-journals.org/ss/viewarticle.php?id=74&amp;amp;layout=abstract&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Data confidentiality: A review of methods for statistical disclosure limitation and methods for assessing privacy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This topic is becoming increasingly relevant and important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5594" LastActivityDate="2011-10-25T13:36:39.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="988" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-26T15:16:55.203" Score="14" ViewCount="403" Body="&lt;p&gt;The mission of Stack Exchange is to make the internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions. The Stack Exchange Fellowship Program aims to support students conducting research in subjects related to our academic Q&amp;amp;A sites in order to (a) increase the quality of information in a particular subject and (b) facilitate the exchange of information between experts in the field. Individual awards range from 250 to 1000 dollars (USD).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Applicants should be advanced undergraduate, graduate students or professionals pursuing research related to one the following Stack Exchange sites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Linguistics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Statistics  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Theoretical Physics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Theoretical Computer Science&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis starting immediately. For more details and to apply, check out the &lt;a href=&quot;http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37818223/SE%20Fellowship%20Application.docx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;application&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are also accepting volunteers from the community to help review applications. Volunteers should have some level of expertise in the subject area (professors and those who have or are pursuing advanced degrees are ideal candidates). Following the first wave of submissions, those selected to be Stack Exchange Fellows will be asked to review 3 to 4 new applications. To facilitate the review process, reviewers will rate applications on several scales instead of making judgments on funding. You can find the Reviewer Form &lt;a href=&quot;http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37818223/Reviewer%20Sheet.docx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reviewers and successful candidates are encouraged to customize the &quot;about me&quot; section of the user profile by including information on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Area of expertise and current occupation &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Key academic goals/milestones&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Role in the Fellowship program (applicant, reviewer, fellow, both)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SE grant project, if applicable &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any questions regarding the Fellowship Program, or would like more information about applying or becoming a reviewer, please email &lt;em&gt;academics@stackexchange.com&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edited: Applications accepted on a rolling basis until December 31, 2011. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6064" LastEditorUserId="6064" LastEditDate="2011-10-28T15:35:27.910" LastActivityDate="2011-10-28T15:35:27.910" Title="Introducing Stack Exchange Research Support and Fellowship Program" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="949" CreationDate="2011-10-27T02:39:36.823" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2172/8/27&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A guide to modern statistical analysis of immunological data&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Propose some questions to discuss:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Typical types of distributions in biomedical (immunology, etc.) sciences  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Substantiation for transforming raw data with a given frequency distribution to those with a normal one  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and some specific problems:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Percentages in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2851216/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;immunogram&lt;/a&gt; after angular (arc sin, &lt;a href=&quot;http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS?service=UI&amp;amp;version=1.0&amp;amp;verb=Display&amp;amp;handle=euclid.aoms/1177729756&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;$Freeman$ — $Tukey's$&lt;/a&gt;) transformation &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/12067/is-freeman-tukeys-transformation-appropriate-and-the-most-powerful-for-perce&quot;&gt;retain assymmetry&lt;/a&gt;. Only $Box$ — $Cox$ transformation sometimes helps well but power transformations for frequences (= percentages = proportions) is arbitrariness...  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Difficult asymetric, probably polymodal distributions (for example for cytokines) in some cases and almost bell-shaped ones in the others...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2011-10-29T02:03:54.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="990" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="993" CreationDate="2011-11-02T07:53:26.210" Score="4" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any way for a user with under 2.5k reputation to suggest synonym mergers? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6961" LastActivityDate="2011-11-02T08:25:51.413" Title="Synonym merging suggestion for users with under 2.5k?" Tags="|support|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="991" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="992" CreationDate="2011-11-02T07:59:14.410" Score="0" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;While fun, these kind of posts distort the reputation system; They credit their authors with disproportional rankings, not due to professionalism. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6961" LastActivityDate="2011-11-02T11:03:43.833" Title="Are jokes, caricatures and the sort appropriate?" Tags="|discussion|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="991" CreationDate="2011-11-02T08:24:27.110" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Those are relics from the first, happy weeks of the site and thus an exception from the general rules (this is kind of an element of SE folklore). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are marked as community wiki, so they give no reputation and do not disturb the reputation system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2011-11-02T11:03:43.833" LastActivityDate="2011-11-02T11:03:43.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="990" CreationDate="2011-11-02T08:25:51.413" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, by writing a meta post containing such suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2011-11-02T08:25:51.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="994" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-02T09:12:40.247" Score="4" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;The terms &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/multiple-comparisons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;multiple-comparisons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;multiple-comparisons&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/multiple-hypothesis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;multiple-hypothesis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;multiple-hypothesis&lt;/a&gt; are used interchangeably. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6961" LastEditorUserId="1036" LastEditDate="2011-11-02T11:55:59.977" LastActivityDate="2011-11-07T17:38:04.617" Title="Tag synonym suggestion: multiple-comparisons &lt;-&gt; multiple-hypothesis" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="995" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-02T12:39:41.927" Score="17" ViewCount="432" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any publications that were motivated by a CrossValidated post? Was the site acknowledged? Is there a badge for that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6961" LastEditorUserId="6961" LastEditDate="2013-07-19T08:55:57.413" LastActivityDate="2021-08-26T17:10:36.767" Title="Has any methodological research begun with a CrossValidated question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="995" CreationDate="2011-11-02T12:43:32.890" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;A badge for it would be tricky, as it's not an automatic thing that can be scraped from the site itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know of any methods research spawned by CV, but I haven't been here all that long, so someone may come and chime in. I have however used it to sanity check an idea or two that I've had. Though the one time CV did out-and-out answer the question, I had a better source provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5836" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2013-07-16T21:54:34.193" LastActivityDate="2013-07-16T21:54:34.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="997" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-03T02:58:12.613" Score="9" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;Did you know that the anniversary of Cross Validated's graduation is coming up on &lt;strong&gt;November 4th&lt;/strong&gt;? Congratulations!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How about a contest or some other fun activity to stir things up a little? After a year of great Q&amp;amp;A, &lt;strong&gt;we'd like the opportunity to &quot;give back&quot; for everyone's hard work.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anniversary events area a great way to spark some interest in the extracurricular activity in your site (more meta participation). An “anniversary event&quot; can be just about anything. Take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.superuser.com/2011/08/19/super-users-2nd-birthday-super-contest/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Super User’s 2nd Birthday Super Contest&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; for inspiration. It doesn’t have to be a contest. Dream up whatever &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; feel the community will find interesting, and go for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Start a meta post or chat event to work out the details. Rally support for your event and bring it to our attention (community@stackexchange.com). We're really interested in community-lead initiatives, so let’s just say, if you can work out the details, we’re very motivated to say “go for it!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246" LastActivityDate="2011-11-03T02:58:12.613" Title="Cross Validated Birthday Celebration?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="994" CreationDate="2011-11-07T17:01:08.357" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Task completed: new questions should see their &lt;code&gt;multiple-hypothesis&lt;/code&gt; tag remapped to &lt;code&gt;multiple-comparisons&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="930" LastEditDate="2011-11-07T17:38:04.617" LastActivityDate="2011-11-07T17:38:04.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1000" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-10T15:10:24.280" Score="15" ViewCount="364" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was playing with the idea of integrating CV as part of an advanced statistics course/workshop; Say, the students are required to achieve a reputation of 100 by the end of the semester. &#xA;The students would get experience in applied problems and a sense of community, and the community would benefit from some (hopefully) good answers. &#xA;I was wondering if anyone had any experience with this? Any pitfalls to be aware of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6961" LastActivityDate="2012-12-14T20:52:59.983" Title="Using CV as part of a statistics course" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1000" CreationDate="2011-11-10T15:50:20.223" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am sympathetic to the general idea of capitalizing on SE as a teaching tool but am concerned about the potential for abuse in this case.  Two people acting in collusion can easily generate thousands of points of reputation for each other merely by writing a lot of repetitive junk and upvoting each other's posts.  We can catch that behavior, but if the students are smart--and many are--they can mask this behavior through extensive voting for others as well, making automatic detection difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not theoretical speculation.  It has happened (and, in one notable case, is allowed to continue because it's benign and the perpetrators appear to have a net positive effect on the site, although as a result one of them has a noticeably inflated reputation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Requiring participation also threatens to reduce the quality of posts, especially towards the end of the semester (when demand usually goes up anyway), as procrastinators ever more desperately throw stuff on our proverbial wall hoping to reach the required minimum.  As a moderator I don't welcome the additional janitorial work that would entail and would look extremely unfavorably on anyone I suspected of instigating this.  In the worst case, you could wind up having no access at all to CV within your institution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure there are creative and constructive uses of this site for pedagogy, in addition to the obvious one of offering it as a resource for learners.  If you want to go in this direction, consider making participation &lt;em&gt;optional&lt;/em&gt; and offer extra credit for answers, comments, or questions that in &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; opinion are especially worthy.  In short, please do not delegate to this community your duty to motivate and assess the performance of your students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2011-11-10T15:50:20.223" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1002" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-10T21:25:05.813" Score="6" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the new monthly issues of your favorite journals are published, we want to remind you to ask those burning questions that pop into your head as you read through &lt;em&gt;novel approaches, methods and cutting edge or controversial findings&lt;/em&gt;. Stack Exchange consists of remarkably bright and talented researchers and our community benefits greatly from more current and relevant questions. &lt;strong&gt;When you flip through your favorite journal and are downright astonished by some findings or perplexed by a method, share that curiosity here.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Staying up to date in the field betters your own expertise and sharing those quandaries with your peers furthers the discipline as a whole. To encourage good ole fashioned journal reading (&lt;em&gt;winks at open access&lt;/em&gt;) &lt;strong&gt;users who ask questions about the current issues of whatever journal they like on the Stack are eligible for a drawing to win a year long subscription to a journal&lt;/strong&gt; of their choosing (excluding obscure journals only in print in Kazakhstan with a zillion dollar fee) or support to attend a conference. Before Christmas, all posts referencing (denoted with &quot;citation&quot;) a current publication will be entered in the drawing and a random winner of all winners will be announced (plus secondary prizes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Tag the posts with &quot;citation&quot; and 'journal name/source'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6064" LastEditorUserId="6064" LastEditDate="2011-11-11T18:38:00.237" LastActivityDate="2011-11-15T16:16:40.883" Title="Upcoming journal editions: read 'em and ask on the Stack (and get prizes)" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1003" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-14T21:55:10.113" Score="-4" ViewCount="334" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In response to the community's feedback on this contest, &lt;strong&gt;we've decided&#xA;  to cancel it.&lt;/strong&gt; We never intended to favor quantity over quality, but we&#xA;  can see how this contest missed the mark. We appreciate all the&#xA;  constructive criticism regarding this idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In case you haven't seen the contest yet and are interested, you can&#xA;  still read the announcement below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As more and more research-oriented sites pop up on Stack Exchange, we can’t help but be impressed with the amazing academic resource our users have created. We also can’t help but wonder... which academic community has the most Stack spirit? In an epic question-asking battle, would Math take down Statistics? Could Linguistics edge out English? If only there was a way to find out... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh wait! There is: an epic question-asking battle. Let’s do it! It’s getting close to the holidays after all, so now is a perfect time for us to say thank you by continuing our tradition of giving back. As such, the community that wins this battle will get 1000 USD to donate to a charity of their choice. Winners of each round will also get 100 USD to donate to charity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s how the battle will work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Participating sites are English, Math, Statistics, Theoretical Computer Science, Linguistics, Physics, Philosophy, and History.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Each round will last a week, and the contest will be single-elimination bracket-style. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To move on to the next round, the average number of questions each site asks per day during the round must exceed that site’s current average. Whichever site exceeds their average by more questions wins the round. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To determine who would face off in the first round, we seeded the sites according to past activity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you ready for this?! Here it is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DIyMj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few more notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Although this is a contest, a “Battle of the Sites” if you will, it’s all in the spirit of fundraising for charity and having fun. So while we understand (and encourage!) competitiveness, try to keep it friendly. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While we expect this contest to generate a lot of new questions, we&#xA;have full faith in the community’s ability to uphold its standards&#xA;and preference for good questions. If we find that a site is getting&#xA;a lot of bad questions during the contest, it will have to be&#xA;disqualified.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Round one starts now and ends Sunday 11/20 at 11:59 pm UTC. Ready. Set. &lt;em&gt;GO.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6124" LastEditorUserId="6124" LastEditDate="2011-11-15T15:21:46.843" LastActivityDate="2011-11-15T15:21:46.843" Title="Battle of the sites - cancelled" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1003" CreationDate="2011-11-15T00:57:04.683" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I doubt this is a good idea -- CV is about good questions and clever answers, not any virtual SE spirit measured in raw bytes of content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The form of the battle also doesn't seem right -- it is comparing incomparable based on irrelevant factor. If you really think there is enough of wild desire for doing charity by activity on CV, there are certainly better ways to harness it --  for instance promoting answering of unanswered questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2011-11-15T00:57:04.683" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1002" CreationDate="2011-11-15T16:16:40.883" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The initial statement I made about overlap with the journal club is simply that the questions your suggesting we prompt about some of the latest technical content in the field could be proposed as journal club articles as well. What follows is my opinion, and I can not say to what extent it is representative of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't necessarily think that having a journal club about very technical content is a good idea, nor do I necessarily think that aiming questions at the newest technical aspects of the field is a necessarily great fit within the community either. Don't get me wrong, such a question would likely be on topic, and could produce excellent responses (and have great value to the community), but that doesn't mean the community in large part will be able to partake in such a question/event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe, at this point the community still needs to foster growth. This, I think, would mean we should focus on content that is inclusive to the maximum number of members of the community. I think some of the recent journal clubs we have had do this very well. They incorporate somewhat broader topics (that are applicable to wide array of research fields), and are aimed to &lt;em&gt;introduce&lt;/em&gt; some statistical methodology. I don't doubt you need some more knowledge than an introductory stats course in college to participate, but they have been reasonable to follow along for applied researchers with some background knowledge (e.g. you don't need a PhD in mathematics or statistics to be able to follow along).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Content about highly advanced methodology does not do this. While I don't doubt many active people within the community &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; participate in such discussions, I'm skeptical to what extent it would happen. It isn't a trivial task to antiquate oneself with newest techniques in the field. Ultimately any technique/research methodology will have a pertinent historical context, which to fully understand would take knowledge of. It is not uncommon for me when I get introduced to a topic that it snowballs into reading another series of articles/books. I don't cozy up by the fireplace and read the latest edition of the &lt;em&gt;Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B&lt;/em&gt; for fun! (maybe other statisticians do, I don't know)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't mean we should discourage highly technical content. But I don't think having highly technical content for discussion on the site will foster it's growth at this point. IMO for the site to viable and sustainable we still need to grow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2011-11-15T16:16:40.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="983" CreationDate="2011-11-24T03:33:21.043" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason I contribute to the site is to create ongoing resources for future readers. Editing question so that they are clear helps achieve this goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183" LastActivityDate="2011-11-24T03:33:21.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1007" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1748" CreationDate="2011-11-26T16:40:23.610" Score="9" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Something's been bothering me (and it may just be me) about one category of our tags.  When someone asks for references for a particular topic, their choices for tags seems to be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;books&lt;/code&gt; - with synonyms &lt;code&gt;textbooks&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;textbook&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;book&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;video&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;tutorial&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;references&lt;/code&gt; - with no synonyms&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;resources&lt;/code&gt; - with no synonyms&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would think all of these would be &quot;synonyms&quot; of each other, and the &quot;mother tag&quot; (don't know if it has a term) should be the most general, say &lt;code&gt;references&lt;/code&gt; or (as in the Math.SE) &lt;code&gt;reference-request&lt;/code&gt;.  I have noted that the &quot;general vs. specific&quot; debate has been brought up here &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/407/5594&quot;&gt;before&lt;/a&gt;, but I think generality makes more sense in this situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FYI, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/121/5594&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; appears to be the post where &lt;code&gt;books&lt;/code&gt; was chosen as the &quot;mother&quot; of the synonyms listed above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, this just may be me who's bothered by this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5594" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-04-16T20:20:32.657" LastActivityDate="2017-04-16T20:20:32.657" Title="Synonymize various tags for reference requests" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|references|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1008" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-28T21:36:50.830" Score="3" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/988/6064&quot;&gt;SE Research Support and Fellowship Program&lt;/a&gt; launched recently with our very own experienced and highly respected users reviewing fellowship applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make the program a success, we need your help. Announce the program and request for proposals on your blog, website or listserv.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please let us know (academics@stackexchange.com) if you intend to call for applications so we can follow your announcement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6064" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2011-12-02T23:07:33.933" Title="Help us call for proposals for the SE Fellowship on your blog, site or listserv" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1010" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1011" CreationDate="2011-12-05T21:58:46.953" Score="11" ViewCount="429" Body="&lt;p&gt;My name is Will Jagy. I advised a youngster yesterday to ask his question here, and he did, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/19359/understanding-similarity-sensitive-hashing-algorithm-in-adaboost&quot;&gt;Understanding similarity sensitive hashing algorithm in AdaBoost&lt;/a&gt; so I suppose I am following up to see if he is in the correct place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More troubling was this case, &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/82499/what-is-the-step-by-step-procedure-for-classifying-a-new-data-point-with-an-rbf-k&quot;&gt;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/82499/what-is-the-step-by-step-procedure-for-classifying-a-new-data-point-with-an-rbf-k&lt;/a&gt;  where some angry words were exchanged. This still bothers me; I do think that EMS made an error in progressing from stackoverflow.com to MO rather than here. Eventually Suvrit, who did not want to be involved, commented &quot;recommend that you have a look at Section 7.4 of the book &quot;Learning with Kernels&quot; by Schölkopf and Smola&quot; which was an answer, plus it turned out that EMS had that book in his office. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the extent that I have a specific question in the latter case, it is: is the EMS question acceptable here, and would it have received an answer? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was little to no Latex, I should be able to post the entire title and question here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the step-by-step procedure for classifying a new data point&#xA;  with an RBF kernel SVM? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've read a ton of tutorials on non-linear SVMs and understand the&#xA;  'kernel trick' reasonably well. But one thing that is not explained is&#xA;  exactly what you do with some new data once you want to classify it.&#xA;  What do you compute the kernel function on? Suppose I have some data&#xA;  and that I extract a feature vector v. I have a list of coefficients&#xA;  for the higher-dimensional separating hyperplane (this is what the RBF&#xA;  kernel training determines). Now I need to take an inner product&#xA;  between that list of coefficients and something computed from the&#xA;  feature vector v. It's very unclear to me what that&#xA;  thing-computed-from-v is supposed to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Added: This non-programming question is partially motivated by wanting&#xA;  to reverse-engineer a function from scikits.learn, so I also asked on&#xA;  Stack Overflow. In tinkering with the scikits.learn code, I have&#xA;  gotten closer to an answer to my math question, so please also check&#xA;  that question too. It is linked here: &amp;lt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8360253/how-to-extract-info-from-scikits-learn-classifier-to-then-use-in-c-code&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8360253/how-to-extract-info-from-scikits-learn-classifier-to-then-use-in-c-code&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  &gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;oc.optimization-control     fa.functional-analysis    st.statistics &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;EMS    &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.seas.harvard.edu/~ely/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://people.seas.harvard.edu/~ely/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7816" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2011-12-08T03:18:39.180" Title="Is this the correct place for some questions that confused nearly everyone on MO , machine-learning" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1010" CreationDate="2011-12-07T13:08:29.967" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is appropriate, but whether it would have received the answer, I cannot say, since you never know. In general this question is definitely a better fit here than in MO, since it is more &quot;applied&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with  the question is that it can be answered only by researcher which is familiar with the terminology, although it seems that the author might really have problem with something simple. It always helps to make the question self-sufficient as possible. In this case if the exact procedure would have been outlined (something like: suppose we have the sample $X$, we use the model $M$, we seek to estimate the quantity $\theta$, with the following steps, and I do not get the idea in this exact step) then the question would not have been closed as too localised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general CrossValidated is less hostile place (in a sense that tolerance level is higher for poorly formulated questions) than MO, but looking at the comments and the attitude displayed by the author of the question, I suspect that the outcome might have been similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2116" LastEditorUserId="2116" LastEditDate="2011-12-08T03:18:39.180" LastActivityDate="2011-12-08T03:18:39.180" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1012" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-10T08:14:45.487" Score="3" ViewCount="1213" Body="&lt;p&gt;After 4 attempts at captcha images I finally managed to prove I'm a real person and have my answer posted. Is there any easier way to do it? Something that doesn't involve squinting at the screen to try to decipher badly printed letters? Right now I'm not interested in trying to answer any more questions. I'm sure the world contains other people with at least as good an understanding as I have, and with better eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed a comment on the post where I first answered a question, stating 1 reason the bounty went to the other answer was that it was posted 4 minutes earlier. I suspect if I had not had to go through 7 captcha challenges, my post would have been up before the other one.\&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please tell me there is some easier way to prove I'm not a robot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Now I'm really confused. When I tried to post this I got another captcha challenge, and I was so furious I just randomly typed something that approximated the images. And my post went through first go. Does this mean you thought I was a robot because I was taking time to look at the images and get the right answer? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7644" LastActivityDate="2011-12-13T23:03:05.913" Title="Is there an easier way to prove I'm not a robot?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1012" CreationDate="2011-12-12T17:29:07.660" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's your workflow for posting here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found that if I type my questions and answers into the text areas on the site and then hit submit I rarely (if ever) get the CAPTCHA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if I create my text in Notepad or Word etc. and then &lt;em&gt;paste&lt;/em&gt; into the text areas I almost always get the CAPTCHA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, if you take more time over your posts from when you first enter the text to the time you hit &quot;Post&quot; then you &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; find that you don't get the &quot;are you a human&quot; test. However, as Robert points out - don't take too long either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user7953" LastEditorDisplayName="user7953" LastEditDate="2011-12-13T23:03:05.913" LastActivityDate="2011-12-13T23:03:05.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1012" CreationDate="2011-12-12T17:30:17.773" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The captcha is difficult to make it also difficult for a robot to solve.  You can blame pimply adolescent script kiddies hacking in basements, and other scum of the earth, for your difficulties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ReCaptcha has two words.  One word requires an exact match, and the other word just requires a guess.  The match for the first word is based on what others have said the word is.  The guess word doesn't require you to be correct; it's there so that people typing in their guesses can serve as a &quot;poor man's OCR&quot; for the unknown image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some proxys make working with the captchas more difficult, because they screw up your post timing.  Also, there is a button on the captcha that you can press to get a new image, if the one you see is too difficult to decipher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2227" LastActivityDate="2011-12-12T17:30:17.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1015" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1016" CreationDate="2011-12-14T15:56:44.443" Score="5" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just made a tag wiki for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sas&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sas&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sas&lt;/a&gt;, and have previously made ones for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spss&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spss&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spss&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/excel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;excel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;excel&lt;/a&gt;. Within these I try to provide various resources &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; think posters who ask questions related to these specific software packages would be interested in, including blogs, other forums, and books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The excerpt for the tag-wiki (the short message that is provided when tagging a question) is sometimes used to give useful advice on how the tag should be used in our particular community. See SO's advice on &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/03/redesigned-tags-page/&quot;&gt;writing tag wiki excerpts&lt;/a&gt;. I believe we should &lt;strong&gt;discourage&lt;/strong&gt; writing questions in which the only tag is one of the statistical software packages. In the context of this community, IMO this amounts to being a &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;meta tag&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would a statement, within the tag wiki excerpt, stating this be appropriate? For an example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) is a proprietary&#xA;  cross-platform general-purpose statistical software package. While&#xA;  questions related to statistical analysis in SPSS are on topic, if the&#xA;  question is solely about programming aspects in SPSS, one is&#xA;  encouraged to visit several of the other forums presented in the tag&#xA;  wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure this statement can be improved (I think striving for a much shorter statement is preferable), but does the community agree with the concept of putting some sort of warning message to discourage only using stat software tags for questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, I would like to encourage everyone to contribute to these (and other tag wiki's) with resources that you feel are beneficial. If you don't like the sources I have provided, think I have omitted some important ones (or think I am being too verbose) feel free to edit it. It's not like I'm the boss!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2011-12-14T16:05:48.967" LastActivityDate="2011-12-14T16:05:48.967" Title="What should be included in tag wiki excerpt for statistical software?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1015" CreationDate="2011-12-14T16:04:53.743" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a good principle and am pleased that it is not specific to any software package.  Please note that our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, which directly addresses this issue, and the meta thread at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/793/internet-support-for-statistics-software&quot;&gt;Internet Support for Statistics Software&lt;/a&gt; both constitute linkable resources that could be included in such wikis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2011-12-14T16:04:53.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="922" CreationDate="2011-12-14T16:59:11.403" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that our site is devoted to questions and answers--and therefore is not ideal for blogging, curating collections, or other activities requiring regular contributions of material-&lt;strong&gt;-why don't we think instead about using material that is routinely created in the answers?&lt;/strong&gt;  The obvious place to look is in threads tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/data-visualization&quot;&gt;data-visualization&lt;/a&gt;.  Look, for instance, at the many and creative contributions in the highly voted thread at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/5278/how-to-visualize-what-anova-does&quot;&gt;How to visualize what ANOVA does?&lt;/a&gt;.  However, we shouldn't limit ourselves just to this tag: creative visualizations can appear almost anywhere as part of well-illustrated answers.  It's a matter of identifying them and somehow highlighting them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I don't think there will be such a flood of work that we need to vote on it.&lt;/strong&gt;  If someone wants to write a blog entry about a particular visualization (or any other topic, for that matter), they are always welcome to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This sort of stuff almost writes itself:&lt;/strong&gt; the blog posts, which do not have to appear routinely but only in response to great contributions on our main site, only have to point out interesting visualizations and explain why they are worth attention and study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2011-12-14T16:59:11.403" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1018" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-14T18:43:47.473" Score="3" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/5706/extrapolating-the-amount-of-data-missing-from-the-amount-of-data-partially-missi&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about a year ago, but it seems to somehow not have been associated with my account. Could someone please help me reclaim it as mine? That is, could you please merge no-longer-existant-for-some-reason User 2491 with me, User 2495?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2495" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2011-12-14T19:40:51.100" Title="Reclaiming my orphan question" Tags="|discussion|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1019" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1021" CreationDate="2011-12-17T02:24:34.820" Score="8" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;http://andrewgelman.com/2011/12/crossvalidated-a-place-to-post-your-statistics-questions/#comment-69746&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;prominent blogger&lt;/a&gt; made a post today giving our site a plug. The poster initially made a comment that he could not find the search bar, and it was later determined that the opaque notification bar that tells new users to visit the FAQ obstructed all the links and the search bar in the regular header of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible to make the header bar at least transparent enough to see that &lt;em&gt;some things&lt;/em&gt; exist underneath it, which would hopefully prompt the otherwise too busy to close the notification bar to get to those links (especially since the notification does not leave the browser until it is closed)? I assume this is possible, as it appears the Photography site has a semi-transparent header (see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/96951/150339&quot;&gt;screen shot in this meta so question&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is the screen shot the original blogger posted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/R5LpO.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/notification-bar&quot;&gt;notification bar&lt;/a&gt; is a contentious issue, and that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/43539/150339&quot;&gt;some have requested&lt;/a&gt; it be made more prominent. I post this here though as it seems to vary from site to site, and so this may only be an issue with our particular color choices. I don't think it is a big issue, and I see value in prodding users to check out the FAQ, but I think making the notification bar semi-transparent is a reasonable compromise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T20:05:13.657" Title="Make notification bar transparent enough to see links/search underneath" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1019" CreationDate="2011-12-20T13:26:00.667" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Jin stated in the comments above, this was recently fixed. Instead of the transparent bar though, the whole page is just shifted downwards (see screenshot below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LdKxC.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you to @Jin for being prompt!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2011-12-20T13:26:00.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1022" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-20T15:06:02.963" Score="6" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought that machine learning is a niche on stackoverflow until I have checked just for fun the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot;&gt;corresponding tag&lt;/a&gt;. It is true that some questions are more programming related than others, but I cannot get rid of the feeling that there are a lot of experts-by-practice with a solid background to answer more &quot;theoretical&quot; questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since then I have already flagged two questions to make the SO-mods move them to our site in the hope of attracting more users from there:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/19915/using-a-histogram-to-estimate-class-label-densities-in-a-tree-learner&quot;&gt;using-a-histogram-to-estimate-class-label-densities-in-a-tree-learner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/19996/data-mining-classification-competition&quot;&gt;data-mining-classification-competition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I wonder a) if this is a valid strategy and b) what else we can do to attract more machine learners. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Redirection to metaoptimize. What a heresy !(&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8238687/relational-fisher-kernel-implementation&quot;&gt;see for yourself&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="264" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2011-12-20T15:21:32.657" Title="How to get machine-learning contributors from stackoverflow to join our site" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1023" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-20T23:53:32.700" Score="4" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a valid question about normal distributions in higher dimensions to ask here.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But I can't -- it &quot;does not meet our quality standards&quot;. I can't find any reference to what these standards might be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here I'm asking a question that is general and site-specific, and does not belong solely with the tag I'm using. I can't create a tag like &quot;site-specific&quot; because I'm too much the newbie. Sigh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8123" OwnerDisplayName="omatai" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2011-12-21T00:17:56.707" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="How do I find out why &quot;a question here fails to meet quality standards&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1023" CreationDate="2011-12-21T00:17:03.913" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't blame the bot doing this -- he is only a mindless computer trying to fend off spammers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92074/what-can-i-do-when-getting-it-does-not-meet-our-quality-standards&quot;&gt;canonical answer&lt;/a&gt; to this problem -- in short, try to make the title represent the question topic, use proper capitalization, write in English and make it longer than one line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2011-12-21T00:17:03.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="922" CreationDate="2011-12-22T11:44:47.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if this is the correct place to post this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2076370/most-underused-data-visualization&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; which I liked very much because of the nice data visualisation tools. Of course I'd love to post a contribution to your blog - though I fear that my graphs are a) not yet finished fully (but i hope soon) and b) probably too standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8041" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2011-12-22T11:44:47.343" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="995" CreationDate="2011-12-28T15:19:02.027" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hopefully there will be at some point. I am performing an empirical study of Nelder-Mead simplex, gradient descent and grid-search methods for model selection for kernel machines, which was inspired by a question on &lt;a href=&quot;http://crossvalidated.com&quot;&gt;Cross Validated&lt;/a&gt; (which appropriately is also the model selection criterion ;o).  No paper yet though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="887" LastEditorUserId="930" LastEditDate="2011-12-29T21:47:48.620" LastActivityDate="2011-12-29T21:47:48.620" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="974" CreationDate="2011-12-29T08:35:33.767" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I, as @Peter Flom, also use my real name but I have similar motivations as @EpiGrad where I guess 1 &amp;amp; 2 are the ones I agree the most with since I'm not sure that those that really should visit the site do that (yes, I have recommended the site to many of my peers but I don't think I've seen any of them...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with Peter where the answers keep me thinking. I like to look up areas and dig into things that I think I might need to know in more detail in the future. I also get a great kick out of people voting up my answer or taking their time to comment on any flaws. I find often very interesting to see how my answers are judged by real pro's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess the initial drive for me to answer was to gain points so that I could give bounties and so that my questions perhaps &lt;em&gt;appeared&lt;/em&gt; more interesting when I've gained &quot;community trust&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5429" LastActivityDate="2011-12-29T08:35:33.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1029" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1038" CreationDate="2012-01-06T11:23:33.537" Score="8" ViewCount="592" Body="&lt;p&gt;Time to continue the CVJC series in 2012!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To remind for those who are new to the idea:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CVJC is a meeting on &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/18/ten-fold&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; where we discuss some paper and its theoretical/practical surroundings.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It usually takes place on Friday about 18:00UTC.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The paper must be OpenAccess or a (p)reprint suggested previously on a meta thread like this one and selected in voting. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We will try to invite the author(s).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, please suggest papers (each in one answer)! The deadline for suggestions is &lt;strike&gt;traditionally a week ahead, so 23:59UTC 13.1.2012&lt;/strike&gt; 23:59UTC 20.1.2012 (postponed due to a lack of paper proposals).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Current approximation of the spacetime coordinates is 24.2.2012 (Friday) 16:00UTC; you can (please do) register &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/18/ten-fold?tab=schedule&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: &lt;strike&gt;The author confirmed his presence at the event.&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FINAL EDIT: This time it was not too fruitful; yet here you can find the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/18/conversation/cross-validated-journal-club-6&quot;&gt;transcript&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2012-03-23T19:40:02.390" LastActivityDate="2012-03-23T19:40:02.390" Title="Sixth Cross Validated Journal Club" Tags="|discussion|journal-club|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1030" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-06T17:07:30.793" Score="8" ViewCount="336" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1500/community-promotion-ads-2013&quot;&gt;Community Promotion Ads - 2013&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's twitter account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources for home improvement&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interesting in-site activities and events &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be &lt;strong&gt;220 x 250 pixels&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently 6) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/1030&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5373" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2012-08-17T21:08:28.403" Title="Community Promotion Ads - 1H 2012" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2012-12-10T13:21:48.177" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-01-06T17:07:30.793" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1030" CreationDate="2012-01-06T17:11:34.547" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/StackStats&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TovHW.png&quot; alt=&quot;StackStats Twitter&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5373" LastActivityDate="2012-01-06T17:11:34.547" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-01-06T17:11:34.547" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1032" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1033" CreationDate="2012-01-09T00:55:48.620" Score="5" ViewCount="1990" Body="&lt;p&gt;Referencing this proposal on Area 51: &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/37195&quot;&gt;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/37195&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and this post here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/20788/what-is-the-income-distribution-in-the-u-s-in-1-increments&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/20788/what-is-the-income-distribution-in-the-u-s-in-1-increments&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have at least one mod (mbq) suggesting its a duplicate of CrossValidated (and thus would belong here) and IIRC comments to that effect from CV users and mods on the proposal before they got swept up by an Area 51 mod.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;whuber then closed the question because its off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is it, or isn't it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5836" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2012-01-09T23:52:01.040" Title="Data Sourcing: We need to make up our mind" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1032" CreationDate="2012-01-09T23:52:01.040" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought we'd &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/486/suitable-venue-to-help-find-specific-statistical-data/&quot;&gt;settled this one&lt;/a&gt; a &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/33/statistical-analysis/38#38&quot;&gt;couple of times&lt;/a&gt;, but it's a tough restriction to enforce when it isn't listed in the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still think these should be off-topic because of their potential to clog up the feed with questions that are likely to be irrelevant for many of our users.  I know we have tags for filtering questions, but I dislike that approach - within the domain of statistics and ML, there are all kinds of things that I don't yet know will interest me.  I love being able to open a random question here and learn something new.  I don't think I or anyone would get that same kind of surprise learning from data sourcing questions that aren't at least somewhat limited by field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think questions like these are best handled by the ever-expanding subject matter StackExchanges - even more so than a Data SE (in my opinion), because that strikes me as too diffuse a topic to really lure the multiple experts for each topic that you'd need for a high-quality community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2012-01-09T23:52:01.040" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1030" CreationDate="2012-01-10T12:40:08.443" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jyoCV.png&quot; alt=&quot;arXiv.org -- open access to over 700 000 e-prints&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="4764" LastEditDate="2012-05-24T09:28:05.283" LastActivityDate="2012-05-24T09:28:05.283" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-01-10T12:40:08.443" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1035" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-11T00:14:07.240" Score="22" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible to provide a facility to upload data, in a similar way that an image can be uploaded? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, although small samples of data can be pasted into the question, it could be a useful facility to have a way of uploading a file containing data (with a size limit). I don't know if an equivalent to imgur would work, but this would be a nice alternative to providing a link to an external website (such as a dropbox file in your public folder) as it would be less likely to expire. It would also make the process of learning about statistics more complete for future readers of the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Expanding a little more on this idea, say the data can be uploaded to a particular question, and then accessed through a suffix like &lt;code&gt;data.csv&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: &lt;code&gt;http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/20921/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Data Url for Question: &lt;code&gt;http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/20921/data.csv&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;code&gt;head&lt;/code&gt; section of the data (the first 5 lines and column headers) could be shown formatted by the site, similar to the way an image is displayed in browser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Storing data in this way would be particularly helpful for software programs that are command driven. Users of &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; for example could type the following to get access to the data referred to in the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;dataSample &amp;lt;- read.csv(&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/20921/data.csv&quot;)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could also be a useful function to have for questions on other StackOverflow type sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2635" LastEditorUserId="2" LastEditDate="2012-01-12T18:23:35.253" LastActivityDate="2012-01-12T19:10:47.377" Title="Uploading data to site?" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1035" CreationDate="2012-01-12T18:25:33.097" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of other sites that specialize in hosting files (DropBox, MediaFire, FileFactory to name a few...) that we support linking to.  We have never been in the business of hosting files ourselves due to the plethora of free services already available for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2" LastActivityDate="2012-01-12T18:25:33.097" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1035" CreationDate="2012-01-12T19:10:47.377" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is significant utility to this feature and I think it merits consideration. The fact that we have not historically allowed hosting data doesn't properly address why this feature shouldn't be looked at. If there are more solid logistical concerns with implementing it, that would make sense; however, leaving data hosting to other sites just because they do it and we don't is not solid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6064" LastActivityDate="2012-01-12T19:10:47.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1029" CreationDate="2012-01-17T15:51:10.790" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having been brought up as a frequentist, I'm now reading up on Bayesian methods (greatly enjoying increasing the size of my statistical toolbox!). While doing a literature search I recently stumbled upon the following paper, which I think could be interesting to discuss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fraser, D.A.S. (2011), Is Bayes Posterior just Quick and Dirty Confidence?, &lt;em&gt;Statistical Science&lt;/em&gt;, Vol. 26, No. 3, 299-316, &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.5582&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;arXiv:1112.5582v1 [stat.ME]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Discussions and rejoinders can be found on &lt;a href=&quot;http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ss/1320066918&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;projecteuclid&lt;/a&gt; for those who have access. For those that don't, below are some of the discussion and rejoinder papers collected from the authors' websites. Some of them may not be official final versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://basepub.dauphine.fr/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/6735/STS1106-004R0A0.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Discussion&lt;/a&gt; by Christian P. Robert (our own &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/7224/xian&quot;&gt;Xi'an&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stat.rutgers.edu/home/mxie/RCPapers/DiscussionsOnDrFraserStatSciPaperNew2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Discussion&lt;/a&gt; by K. Singh and M. Xie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ss/1320066921&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Discussion&lt;/a&gt; by L. Wasserman. (Not open access.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.0588&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Discussion&lt;/a&gt; by T. Zhang.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.0611&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rejoinder&lt;/a&gt; by D. A. S. Fraser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2012-01-21T23:26:23.447" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1039" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-17T21:54:49.433" Score="10" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the protocol about deleting an answer, especially an accepted answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the answers I posted today has run into a lot of flak from&#xA;people with high reputation.  I believe that I am correct in my&#xA;assertions, but am having difficulty stating my position in a way &#xA;that will satisfy others, and the back-and-forth in comments&#xA;seems not to be converging. I am contemplating simply deleting the&#xA;answer, and would have done so already if the answer had not been&#xA;accepted in the mean time. Any advice, especially from the moderators, &#xA;on how to proceed in this matter would be much appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6633" LastActivityDate="2012-01-22T11:18:41.817" Title="Protocol on deleting an answer" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1039" CreationDate="2012-01-17T23:15:34.853" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, it is better to edit the answer (either to fix it or to make more obvious it is correct) than directly answering others' comments -- this way you have more space and flexibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chat is in general a better place for discussions than comments -- system should have already suggested making a special room and inviting you and other participants of the comment exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the fact that the post is downvoted does not mean at all that you should/must delete it -- this place is for sharing ideas and opinions about them, not to build a repository of bullet-proof statistical truth. Delete is reserved for a total junk or post &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; want to withdraw. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2012-01-17T23:15:34.853" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="965" CreationDate="2012-01-21T10:47:12.857" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments are viewed as third-class citizens in Stack Exchange, as little &quot;post-it notes&quot; attached to the post. That is, truly &lt;em&gt;significant&lt;/em&gt; information should be edited into the body of the post, not buried in a comment somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've also been de-emphasizing RSS, meaning we probably won't be changing or improving the current level of RSS support for the forseeable future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Combining those two factors, it's not likely to be supported any time soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2012-01-21T10:47:12.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1039" CreationDate="2012-01-21T20:00:26.090" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please correct me if I am wrong, but I believe this question was prompted by the question on the main site entitled &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/21233/why-is-stouffers-method-often-used-with-one-tailed-p-values-rather-than-two-t&quot;&gt;Why is Stouffer's method often used with one-tailed p-values rather than two-tailed p-values?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;strong&gt;strongly&lt;/strong&gt; encourage you &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; to delete your answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have dithered for at least a couple of days regarding whether to post an answer here, partly because I initiated the comment stream at that question.&#xA;I have decided I would like to add my perspective and a couple of other thoughts. I hope nobody minds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that in this situation there are a number of viable options, and these options follow through in the general case as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Leave the answer as is.&lt;/strong&gt; If you feel you have answered the question correctly and clearly and there is nothing more to add, then, by all means you have no obligation to make any changes to reflect any of the comments and, perhaps, you shouldn't. This may be particularly true if only a single person is raising objections that you feel are unfounded. In part, I believe this is one reason the voting mechanism is present. It doesn't work perfectly, but to first order, it is reasonably useful.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Make edits to clarify your answer and reenforce your assertions.&lt;/strong&gt; If you feel you've answered the question correctly, but that, perhaps, part of the content is being inadvertently misinterpreted by others, then there may be ways to reword or restate things that will make what is clear to you more clear to others. This happens &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; frequently on this site and, at least in my opinion, generally leads to more complete and useful answers. Oftentimes, speaking solely from my own experience, I learn quite a bit from comments and the subsequent revisions to the question or answer that they generate. Finally, edits will &quot;bump&quot; the question back to the top of the queue, leading more users to view it and, hopefully, vote according to how the content has been revised.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Engage other users in chat or through another medium.&lt;/strong&gt; Comments have an upper bound of 500 characters. This forces them to be unnecessarily terse sometimes, especially if $\LaTeX$ or a link is included. We have generally not made good use of the &quot;chat&quot; mechanism on this site. For the most part it is unneeded in day-to-day situations and a lot of our discussions are facilitated by $\LaTeX$ which isn't natively supported there. However, if a comment stream is becoming extended, it can probably be useful and a persistent transcript can then be linked back to the answer. If that fails, as a last resort, email communication could be useful. But, my feeling is that that's generally undesirable except in the most extreme of circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Delete your answer&lt;/strong&gt;. My feeling is this should be absolutely the last resort and should only occur if you believe (a) your answer is obviously incorrect and (b) there is no reasonable hope of editing it in order to salvage it. This &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; occur, but it's rare and mostly happens when either (a) an answerer misreads a question and answers a different question instead or (b) the question gets edited in a way that completely changes its meaning, invalidating an answer in the process.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/965/why-are-comments-not-included-in-question-feeds&quot;&gt;noted recently&lt;/a&gt;, answers are the first-class citizens here and comments are rather looked down on by the site administrators. In fact, I believe answers are meant to be persistent and comments explicitly not. So, it's quite possible at some point that entire sets of comments could be wiped from the site, leaving only the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A (not so) brief aside on my own usage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a strong preference for utilizing comments on this site. This is mostly because I enjoy the engagement with other users and find that my own learning is more active that way. Occasionally, albeit rarely, the comments I post may be of some use to others as well. (I am also excruciatingly slow at formulating full-blown answers, which makes commenting a more efficient way for me to participate, generally speaking.) My opinion is it's generally better to have one very good answer than two very similar answers of less quality; commenting often achieves that goal. Others are likely not to agree with that philosophy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moderators have managed the tenor of this site &lt;strong&gt;perfectly&lt;/strong&gt; in my view and besides my interest in the content, this is one reason I spend more time here than other sites in the SE network that tend to have a little more &quot;edge&quot; to the communication. Unfortunately, the character limit on comments sometimes forces them to be unnecessarily terse. This makes the tone a bit more difficult to project. If the tone of my comments&amp;mdash;or those of others&amp;mdash;ever sounds off, I would encourage everyone to give the commenter the benefit of the doubt and seek clarification where appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2970" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2012-01-22T11:18:41.817" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="974" CreationDate="2012-01-23T18:38:26.230" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;I always use my real name in fora like this.  I see doing so as an honesty and integrity issue, plus I have as part of my role description to promote myself and my employer as up to speed with modern statistical practice and this is a small part of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do I answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) I discovered the site when I had a couple of questions myself and quickly got very useful answers.  A few weeks later I decided I should put back in some of what I got out - it's only fair to contribute.  I empathised with people struggling over questions, and saw a few cases where I could help.  Straightforward empathy and ethical duty to do something good for others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Once I started answering, I quickly found how useful it was for me as a form of professional development.  Answering even &quot;easy&quot; questions (is there such a thing? nearly every one has interesting philosophical implications if taken seriously) forces me to think things through a bit more clearly than is sometimes the case in my fast-paced applied world; and revisit the odd text or two that I thought I'd learnt and understood but needed refreshing on.  There are many more statisticians here to hold me to account than in my normal job, and I can feel my understanding and skills improving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) I think the reputation and badges system is well designed and frankly slightly addictive.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary - stack exchange has some of the addictive power of facebook, with much greater intellectual stimulation, many chances to learn, chances to help some people out, and hopefully reduce a few bad mistakes in published science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7972" LastActivityDate="2012-01-23T18:38:26.230" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1044" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-29T01:51:01.857" Score="3" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seem to be a number of tags that could be merged, e.g. there is &quot;book&quot; and &quot;books&quot; (hmm.. both with 16 followers, I wonder what the overlap is.. :) ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be an ongoing topic of conversation, and I was wondering if it would help to have a central repository of suggestions for which tags to merge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related point: I feel for the little orphan tags that are a tag with no description. Besides these tags feeling potentially unloved and alienated, then getting involved in a gang and dying in some street fight somewhere in a dark alley in the rain, there are tags here that I have no idea what they relate to, and I assume others are in the same position. I've been adding some text in to tags that are devoid of content, which I'm happy for moderators to accept/modify/reject as they see fit. Would the community like the tags to have content, rather than just the tag name itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8605" LastActivityDate="2012-01-30T13:32:46.957" Title="Cleaning up tags: merging" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1044" CreationDate="2012-01-29T13:18:12.547" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The text that goes with tags are called tag wiki's. And yes, many on the site do not have any description (and ones that do could surely be improved). The Stackoverflow blog has a post that is helpful when formulating &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/03/redesigned-tags-page/&quot;&gt;what should go into tag wiki's&lt;/a&gt;, and I believe any edits to tag-wiki's need to be approved by moderators at this point (probably only a few individuals on the site have sufficient reputation besides moderators to approve them). So I would say it is hard to imagine negative contribution(s) to the majority of tag-wiki's at this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as the other problem of tags that have trivial differences, this can be solved with (as mbq already mentioned) tag-synonyms. The general forum policy over time that that has evolved is just to present a thread in meta suggesting tag-synonyms (as only a few have the privileges to conduct such an action). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tag's are really what makes SO type sites awesome (compared to say email mailing lists). Surprisingly to me, considering the diversity of the people whom ask and answer questions (both in terms of exposure to statistics and differing applied fields), tags have organically grown into meaningful and well defined categories. (Note here I am mainly referring to the &lt;em&gt;creation&lt;/em&gt; of tags) While the community (in particular some key individual's) are instrumental to &quot;policing&quot; these tags, it is done so quickly that the interruption of bumping edited questions to the top of the list isn't very noticeable (the same goes for edits). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing to keep in mind (in general) is that this is a community, and so any action that an individual can take that unilaterally affects the community should be discussed with the community before-hand (such as mass re-tagging of questions, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/837/1036&quot;&gt;this prior incident on the site&lt;/a&gt; for an example of such an action). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tag-wiki's aren't as noxious though (and need approval from other individuals) so adding a bunch of tag wiki's is probably a good thing (as long as they are thoughtful and reflect how the tag is used in this particular community).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Mildly unrelated advice) If a particular discussion hasn't come up on the stats meta site, it is frequently good to check out the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;meta.So&lt;/a&gt;. It seems like every imaginable topic of discussion has come up there already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize I didn't answer your question! I don't see much need at this point for a central repository question for tag merges. Those types of pages (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/793/1036&quot;&gt;Internet support for stats software&lt;/a&gt;) I will speculate are best for content that is relatively static. Tag-synonym suggestions will continually grow with the site in time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T09:34:21.123" LastActivityDate="2012-01-30T13:32:46.957" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1046" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1047" CreationDate="2012-01-30T19:54:10.320" Score="8" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm fairly new to stackexchange so bear with me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a code review for some lines of matlab over at &lt;a href=&quot;https://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/8165/code-to-generate-graph-in-matlab-review-for-best-practice-or-speedup&quot;&gt;https://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/8165/code-to-generate-graph-in-matlab-review-for-best-practice-or-speedup&lt;/a&gt;. It's not had any replies, for whatever reason, and that's fine, of course. My instinct was to post it at stats.stackexchange originally because then it's much more likely to be seen my people who know their matlab (and r) but I went with code review because it appeared to be the sensible option - was this the correct action or would matlab/R based code-reviews be acceptable at stats.stackexchange? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8845" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:41:06.607" LastActivityDate="2012-02-08T00:22:42.833" Title="Can code-review be relevant here?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1046" CreationDate="2012-01-30T20:11:59.527" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hope our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; is clear on this: purely programming-related questions belong elsewhere.  Our site is for questions of statistical interest.  If that seems ambiguous, then we would be very glad of any suggestions to clarify it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, sometimes a little creative thinking can re-cast a question from one form to another.  If the issue concerns, say, running a simulation or visualization to answer a statistical question and the simulation (or whatever) is too slow to be practicable, then a question of the form &quot;I'm trying to solve this statistical question with a simulation (or whatever) but it's too slow; what can I do?&quot; &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; be on-topic here and in fact would be likely to elicit some out-of-the-box answers that might be far better than you would get just by trying to speed up the code.  In your case, the question you reference doesn't even tell us what statistical problem the code may be trying to solve, so you definitely need to rewrite it before it could be construed as statistically interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2012-01-30T20:11:59.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1048" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-31T19:41:31.527" Score="3" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you browse the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/online&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;online&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;online&lt;/a&gt; tag, you will see that most questions are about &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_algorithm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;online algorithms&lt;/a&gt; but a few are about online (as in internet) resources, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/18451/4872&quot;&gt;Statistics for online dating sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/12303/4872&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/12303/4872&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/5462/4872&quot;&gt;Is there a site to post my survey to so I can get a sample representative of the population?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/223/4872&quot;&gt;Intro to statistics for an MD?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am assuming that those are not suppose to have the online tag. To avoid future confusion, I propose to rename the online tag to online-algorithms (or something of the sort) and of course, to remove the online tag from the above 4 questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4872" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2012-01-31T19:45:11.473" Title="renaming the online tag to online-algorithms" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1048" CreationDate="2012-01-31T19:45:11.473" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good catch!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the majority of uses are of the algorithmic nature, it might be better to reserve the original &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/online&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;online&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;online&lt;/a&gt; for that meaning and disambiguate the other with something like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/online-internet&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;online-internet&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;online-internet&lt;/a&gt; or just &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/internet&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;internet&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;internet&lt;/a&gt;.  We will also need to complete the tag wikis for both so that people learn to use them as intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2012-01-31T19:45:11.473" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="974" CreationDate="2012-02-05T04:08:57.253" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;+1 to all the answerers.  I think all of these reasons play a role for me--at least somewhat.  The one point I would like to make is how much I've learned from this site and the CV community.  Of course, I've learned a lot by reading questions and answers posted by others.  But, although I'm only good enough to answer the easy questions, I've really learned a lot by answering them.  Hunting down webpages and pdf's, looking things up in my textbooks, and figuring out how to explain something clearly has led me to solidify and deepen my understanding of these issues that I find deeply fascinating.  I also &lt;em&gt;enjoy&lt;/em&gt; answering questions, and feeling like my statistical abilities and knowledge (such as they are...) are contributing something useful to the world in one more little way.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2012-02-05T04:08:57.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1051" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1452" CreationDate="2012-02-06T13:38:15.487" Score="2" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I search for e.g. &quot;p &gt;&gt; N&quot; -- are there escape characters, &quot;p\&gt;\&gt; N&quot; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="557" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T17:52:27.737" Title="What are escape characters to search for e.g. &quot;p &gt;&gt; N&quot;?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1046" CreationDate="2012-02-08T00:22:42.833" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In agreement with whuber, a base &quot;code review&quot; with no other information is probably off-topic, and more appropriate for Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, I can think of some code review/debugging questions that feel much more on topic for CrossValidated. Just off the top of my head:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As whuber said, questions involving really large data sets, slow code, etc. that might get at trying different methods that should approximate each other might be on topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Similarly, methods to get around convergence issues. There are whole types of regression that are notorious for convergence issues - binomial regression models and survival models using the generalized gamma distribution come to mind. Yet there are methods to getting around those.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I simulating/modeling what I think I'm simulating/modeling? This question would have to go beyond just &quot;have I done the code right&quot;, but I think could be on topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I'm getting the wrong answer, is it a code problem or a genuine statistical concern&quot; could, I think if written correctly, also be on topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5836" LastActivityDate="2012-02-08T00:22:42.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1053" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1054" CreationDate="2012-02-10T22:42:08.377" Score="0" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some questions related to No Free Lunch theorem, which is also discussed in machine learning. I am trying to understand the theorem in the setting of optimizing cost functions. I posted it on math.se &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/107700/how-shall-i-understand-this-simple-example-of-no-free-lunch-theorem&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/107088/understanding-no-free-lunch-theorem&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, but from my experience I have the feeling that few people there know about my questions. So I wonder if I can post them here to try some luck (not necessarily migrate but keep them at math.se, since some people just visit there and don't come here)? Or do you have some other suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks and regards! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1005" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:38.337" LastActivityDate="2012-02-11T00:39:45.640" Title="May I ask No Free Lunch theorem questions here that have been asked at math.se?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1053" CreationDate="2012-02-11T00:39:45.640" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cross-posting is a very bad practice; you should just migrate those questions. This way Math will still have a trace of them leading to Stats, so you shouldn't miss the chance to get an answer from someone from the Math community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2012-02-11T00:39:45.640" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1055" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1056" CreationDate="2012-02-15T22:02:18.777" Score="8" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've learned an incredible amount on this site from the many great contributors we have.  One situation that often occurs is that I notice a particularly insightful answer and I click on the user's name to navigate to their profile and then read other answers they've given (typically on similar topics).  Sometimes this makes me wonder which answer that individual would put forth as their best on the topic.  Similarly, I've made some responses that I thought were better than others, but they aren't all the ones that have been upvoted the most (although perhaps this is just because I'm poorly calibrated regarding the quality of my answers).  These considerations lead me to wonder if it would be valuable for contributors to be able to mark somehow a subset of their answers on their profile page as the ones where they think they addressed an issue particularly well.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt; Let me clarify what I have in mind.  My purposes, I'm afraid, are somewhat selfish.  My objective in this proposal is that I would like to be able to more efficiently learn from others.  Now, one way I can do this is to go to someone's page and read their answers on a particular topic, but many of our more prolific contributors have hundreds of answers--too many to read them all.  I could just focus on those that have been upvoted the most, but if I don't believe my top 5 answers would be the best overview, maybe they believe the same thing.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me give an example: sometimes in my answers I end up addressing similar things, for instance the apparently common belief that in regression the most important assumption is the normality of the residuals (which I think is a less important assumption). I've addressed this several times in different places, and maybe I think I did a better job in one answer than another.  If this is true for me, it might be true for others as well.  What I'm wondering is, would there be value for the community if, for example, for every badge someone earns, they could somehow mark their best 5 answers on that topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T20:01:27.373" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T20:01:27.373" Title="Should there be a way to indicate answers you're especially proud of on your user profile page?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|status-declined|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1055" CreationDate="2012-02-16T22:11:56.333" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Be sure I really appreciate your multiple contributions on this site, that are valuable on many fronts, and many other users probably do so. Now, here are some of my thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a little reserved about the usefulness of displaying such links, although I can understand that this might provide some clues about the field of interest or area of expertise for a particular user. Yet, we have access to tags ranking and recent activity so it's not really difficult to get an idea of where an user really excels.&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt; I, for one, follow several users on CV just because I know I will learn something sooner or later from their responses. Over time I've learned what questions these users are likely to respond, and so I can track questions, instead of users. For specific questions, I know who (of active users) might provide a relevant answer. It comes with time, of course. However, it is still a subjective approach; nobody's perfect (even somebody trained in psychometric methods)! But I don't need a complete curriculum in his/her profile, nor I need a self-ranked list of answers provided in the last 2 months (will this be updated in 1 year?); let me decide how I value his/her contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to answer the question &quot;if it would be valuable for contributors to be able to mark somehow a subset of their answers on their profile page as the ones where they think they addressed an issue particularly well&quot;, I would be inclined to say: Yes, please contribute to our &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.blogoverflow.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt; with dedicated posts on topics you like, statistical methods you feel comfortable with or potential applications you are aware off. You could reference any posts you like in it, including yours, and this will certainly enhance the hearing of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt;I do not speak of reputation because this is a tautology to say that it has almost nothing to do with time and investment devoted to replies, but that's community life! (Let me be clear: I'm not criticizing the voting system---subjective appraisal, personal interest, reputation effects, limited knowledge, expectations or reasons associated to CV visits are some of the factors that could potentially entail a biased assessment of one's response.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2012-02-16T22:11:56.333" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1057" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1058" CreationDate="2012-02-16T22:11:30.617" Score="16" ViewCount="490" Body="&lt;p&gt;The SE team apparently completely ignored us and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/492/are-the-machine-learning-questions-on-topic&quot;&gt;previous consensus&lt;/a&gt; and allowed &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/26434/machine-learning&quot;&gt;Machine Learning&lt;/a&gt; proposal to reach private beta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as expected, till now all questions I managed to sneak seems to would be perfectly fit here. Moreover, it has a very poor stats and it is likely to be shut down, according to its system message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qSVjS.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, do you think ML.SE should be merged into CV?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2012-02-24T11:01:19.300" Title="Should Machine Learning SE be merged with CrossValidated?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1057" CreationDate="2012-02-17T08:29:30.050" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I agree that the site should be merged into stats.SE, but no, I do not think that the ML folks will be happy with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, when I heard about crossvalidated the first time, I hoped that it would contain more ML then it currently does. It is certainly better now, but new ML users coming to this site will still mostly see stats-related questions. &#xA;A little bit disappointed by the slow growth (of ML), I signed up for ML.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now, looking at the questions and answers in the beta, I cannot get rid of the feeling that I had earlier, that most ML appliers (but certainly not all) on stackoverflow AND ML.SE are actually programmers who get excited by ML (which includes me), but cannot considered necessarily as &quot;experts&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So ... I think that ML should grow under the corresponding tag here on crossvalidated (and not on stackoverflow) until the critical mass is reached. Then one might consider another proposal, but not now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;HOWEVER, seeing that the active ML experts on ML.SE are fighting such a merge with tooth and nail, I am afraid they will wander off when the rebel colony is forced back into the empire (&lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/43/machine-learning-is-a-duplicate-of-crossvalidated&quot;&gt;Machine Learning is a duplicate of CrossValidated&lt;/a&gt;). All in all, I do not understand why they think that &quot;seeding&quot; ML questions here on crossvalidated.com is wrong but doing so on ML.SE is right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beside, I think that the stats- and ML-folks should learn more from each other. E.g., a little more statistical rigor in ML-validations will not hurt ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="264" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T08:41:05.607" LastActivityDate="2012-02-17T08:29:30.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1057" CreationDate="2012-02-20T05:59:12.230" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't agree with the merge, and my reasoning is this: there are quite a few places on SE where one could ask ML-related questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;programmers.stackexchange.com&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;stats.stackexchange.com&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;quant.stackexchange.com&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;math.stackexchange.com&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cstheory.stackexchange.com&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally immediately got confused as to where should I ask my ML questions for them to be best answered. And I was extremely relieved when I've heard about a dedicated MachineLearning site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although, unfortunately it doesn't go as well as some people expected it to! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9013" LastActivityDate="2012-02-20T05:59:12.230" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1057" CreationDate="2012-02-20T16:57:32.050" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could it be that the reason the the ML site is not going to well is because of &lt;a href=&quot;http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;meta optimize&lt;/a&gt; which handles these ML questions? It has a big community outside SE, as mathoverflow does as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found ML questions hard to place in SE as well. It does not even fit into scicomp.stackexchange.com/ that well. But people are right now placing questions about ML in sites like CV. I posted an ANN question a couple of days ago here because I am not part of the beta for ML, and have not had an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1098" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2012-02-20T16:57:32.050" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1061" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-20T19:53:22.490" Score="12" ViewCount="713" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/492/are-the-machine-learning-questions-on-topic&quot;&gt;strong support&lt;/a&gt; to officially &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1057/should-machine-learning-se-be-merged-with-crossvalidated&quot;&gt;merge Machine Learning with Cross Validated&lt;/a&gt;. Later this week, we will be migrating questions from the Machine Learning and making it an official part of this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I re-posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1062/246&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the Machine Learning announcement&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; as an &lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt; below, for your reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be prepared to integrate these questions and this subject into your site. You can close questions that are blatantly off topic, but be mindful &amp;mdash; this is a growing scope of questions looking for a best fit. We want to make every effort to accommodate the community on this site, and err towards being open-minded and make adjustments to accommodate the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2019-03-21T08:32:00.957" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T08:32:00.957" Title="Incoming... Machine Learning Questions" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1061" CreationDate="2012-02-20T19:54:36.480" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This is a re-post of the Machine Learning announcement (since it is still in private beta):&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Future of Machine Learning as a Stack Exchange Subject&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;Machine Learning&amp;quot; Stack Exchange started with a proposal in Area 51. A groups of experts propose a subject they felt were &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; found on the Stack Exchange Network. In the meantime, you have a Stats SE (&amp;quot;Cross Validated&amp;quot;) who &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/492/are-the-machine-learning-questions-on-topic&quot;&gt;claim that &amp;quot;Machine Learning&amp;quot; is explicitly on topic&lt;/a&gt; for that site. Still, the supporters of the ML site wonders if all machine learning topics are a good fit for Cross Validated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So what to do?&lt;/strong&gt; We're not experts in this domain, so we let the proposal continue to see how it develops in actual practice. As it turns out, about 85-95% of the questions being asked are a perfect fit for Cross Validated. Even now, there is still widespread support to welcome the Machine Learning questions on their site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1057/should-machine-learning-se-be-merged-with-crossvalidated&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should Machine Learning SE be merged with CrossValidated?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So be it. Around mid week, &lt;strong&gt;we are going to migrate the questions&lt;/strong&gt; from &amp;quot;Machine Learning&amp;quot; to the Cross Validated site. Some will be closed as off topic, but for the most part, they would love to see your Machine Language questions there. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Make&lt;/em&gt; Machine Learning a strong subject on the Cross Validated site&lt;/strong&gt; by asking your questions there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the smaller group of questions that do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; fit on that site, support the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/35636?phase=commitment&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Computer Science&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; proposal. Bring your questions to these sites and make your presence known in the tags you care about. There is no purpose in continuing a sub-site like this when the subject is well-covered elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A larger, more comprehensive site is a win-win to everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2012-02-20T19:54:36.480" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1063" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-21T08:40:22.693" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/23068/steps-to-figure-out-a-posterior-distribution-when-it-might-be-simple-enough-to-h&quot;&gt;Steps to figure out a posterior distribution when it might be simple enough to have an analytic form?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;leads me to idea we need &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/analytic-form&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;analytic-form&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;analytic-form&lt;/a&gt; tag. There might be plenty other similar questions asking on the analytic form of some bayesian posterior. I'd be interested in this group of questions; and I think they should be tagged somehow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5509" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2012-02-21T08:40:22.693" Title="Tag request: [tag:analytic-form]" Tags="|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1061" CreationDate="2012-02-22T21:01:45.313" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For informational purposes, the list of questions that were migrated were:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23335&quot;&gt;Classification with tall fat data&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23331&quot;&gt;Why is there an asymmetry between the training step and evaluation step?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23340&quot;&gt;Possible to get a better ANN by removing some connections?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23509&quot;&gt;Fast method for finding best metaparameters of SVM (that is faster than grid search)&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23507&quot;&gt;Creating a maximum entropy Markov model from an existing multi-input maximum entropy classifier&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23505&quot;&gt;What is a good method for designing an HTM network in terms of depth and breadth?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23502&quot;&gt;Domain-agnostic feature engineering that retains semantic meaning?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23501&quot;&gt;Probabilistic (Bayesian) vs Optimisation (Frequentist) methods in Machine Learning&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23497&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the correct way to test the significance of classification results&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23493&quot;&gt;What is the proper naming scheme for dataset parts?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23490&quot;&gt;Why do naive Bayesian classifiers perform so well?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23488&quot;&gt;Applying machine learning for DDoS filtering&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23486&quot;&gt;On what tasks does neuroevolution outperform basic application of neural networks or genetic algorithms?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23484&quot;&gt;What are alternatives to VC-dimension for measuring the complexity of neural networks?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23481&quot;&gt;Are there algorithms for computing &amp;quot;running&amp;quot; linear or logistic regression parameters?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23479&quot;&gt;Why do we assume that the error is normally distributed?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23472&quot;&gt;How to decide on the correct number of clusters?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23470&quot;&gt;Does a sparse training set adversely affect an SVM?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23468&quot;&gt;Problem specific regularization&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23465&quot;&gt;Probability and log probability in hidden Markov models&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23463&quot;&gt;Are machine learning techniques &amp;quot;approximation algorithms&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23459&quot;&gt;Is there a Project Euler-alike for machine learning?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23456&quot;&gt;Dealing with datasets with a variable number of features&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23454&quot;&gt;Are associative networks still pertinent for data mining applications?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23451&quot;&gt;What language to use for genetic programming&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23448&quot;&gt;How to create recommender system that integrates both collaborative filtering and content features?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23445&quot;&gt;Why does Natural Language Processing not fall under Machine Learning domain?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23439&quot;&gt;Modern neural networks that build their own topology&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23435&quot;&gt;How would you design a machine learning system to play Angry Birds?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23433&quot;&gt;Are MFCCs the optimal method of representing music to a retrieval system?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23431&quot;&gt;Fiducial Inference in Machine Learning&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23429&quot;&gt;At what n do n-grams become counterproductive?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23427&quot;&gt;Classification of observation symbols in a HMM?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23426&quot;&gt;Automatic feature selection for anomaly detection&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23423&quot;&gt;Multilayer neural networks for multivariate temporal data&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23420&quot;&gt;Is whitening always good?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23417&quot;&gt;Dynamic recommender systems&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23415&quot;&gt;Classifier success rate and confidence intervals&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23411&quot;&gt;How can I help ensure testing data does not leak into training data?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23409&quot;&gt;Decision trees and backward pruning&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23407&quot;&gt;Difference between dynamic programming and temporal difference learning in reinforcement learning&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23406&quot;&gt;Subtree replacement vs subtree raising&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23403&quot;&gt;Automatic data cleansing&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23402&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23402&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23399&quot;&gt;Approaches when learning from huge datasets?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23397&quot;&gt;Kernel matrix normalisation&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23395&quot;&gt;What is standing in the way of pulsed neural networks being used in applications?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23393&quot;&gt;CCA/KCCA for more than two views&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23391&quot;&gt;How does a Support Vector Machine (SVM) work?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23388&quot;&gt;In boosting, why are the learners &amp;quot;weak&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23386&quot;&gt;What is a kernel and what sets it apart from other functions&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23384&quot;&gt;Independence in classification&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23382&quot;&gt;Best bandit algorithm?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23380&quot;&gt;What are probabilistic approaches to finding the right number of clusters?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23377&quot;&gt;What is the Drosophila of AI now?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23375&quot;&gt;Are experts harmful?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23373&quot;&gt;Beyond Fisher kernels&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23371&quot;&gt;Dealing with very large time-series datasets&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23369&quot;&gt;Classification of conversations based on content&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23367&quot;&gt;Where do I find large face datasets?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23365&quot;&gt;Probabilistic outputs from SVMs&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23363&quot;&gt;Online clustering&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23360&quot;&gt;Viable distance metric for text articles&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23358&quot;&gt;Continuous Multistate Ada-boost method?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23357&quot;&gt;MRF MAP inference for non-submodular pairwise terms&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23355&quot;&gt;How to perform Gaussian process regression when  function being approximated changes over time? &lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23353&quot;&gt;PCA, LDA, CCA, and PLS&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23352&quot;&gt;Large performance variance when using back-propagation in neural networks for feature extraction&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23351&quot;&gt;Average case analysis of learning algorithms&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23348&quot;&gt;Dealing with mixed categorical data: e.g. Heritage Health Prize data&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23347&quot;&gt;Number of states and symbols in multi class Hidden Markov Model classifier&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1142" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2012-02-22T21:01:45.313" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1066" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-24T13:25:35.137" Score="5" ViewCount="251" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there much precedent or openness to Q&amp;amp;A on the public sphere issues involving statistical methods?  This question has three parts: a motivating example, a statistical perspective, and a perspective as it relates to utility of such questions on CV.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The motivating example comes from reading &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/education/ratings-of-new-york-city-teachers-to-be-released-friday.html?hp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; in the New York Times.  The gist is that someone, somewhere has produced a scoring of NYC teachers, based on a &quot;value added model&quot;, and the results of those evaluations will be made public.  I'd like to put aside issues regarding evaluation of teachers (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/opinion/for-teachers-shame-is-no-solution.html?_r=1&amp;amp;ref=opinion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bill Gates has addressed this&lt;/a&gt;) and any more general matters regarding education, and focus on the statistical issues.  This topic is in the public sphere: public resources and attention are shaped by the results of a statistical project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The statistical perspective is that there are several things that can be addressed: what &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the method that is employed?  What are its assumptions?  Where can one access the data?  What are alternative methods?  How can/did the authors check the assumptions?  What happens if the assumptions are wrong?  How sensitive is the model to errors in the data, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal isn't to make a judgement about either the utility of the practice nor to attack or defend the research.  Instead, the statistical questions, like all research and consulting projects, are based on utility and reproduceability.  Are the statistical questions well posed, do the data allow us to answer the questions, were the questions answered, and what may be done in a subsequent iteration (either of analyses, data collection, or application of the methodology in another context)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the CV perspective, there are some questions that seem quite at home here, such as: What is the statistical model that's used?  What are its assumptions?  There are other questions that are not so good, and are more opinion based: What's wrong with this paper?  What's good about this paper?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that outright opinion questions not appropriate.  Could they be reformulated?  Perhaps.  An example: what is the most suspect assumption of this application?  Time and again, I take a project, identify the key assumptions, and then determine which ones would not hold up to scrutiny in either the same context, using data from a different sample, or in a related context.  In other words, which assumptions &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; work this one time, for this one data set?  Those are particularly suspect assumptions.  Many other assumptions are tolerably false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, my opinion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that such questions could make CV quite attractive to a larger set of users and serve a serious educational and public benefit: people could learn about statistical methodology and engage in understanding a use of statistics in the public sphere.  I am not interested in potential questions that relate merely to reports on surveys and census results: these can be tar pits of debate over sampling methodologies.  Instead, I'm concerned with more methodological and model-based types of questions, where assumptions about data and models play a role.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have used such analyses of published works in the past to teach students statistical methods, and it has worked very well.  At some point, perhaps it would be of interest to expand to other published works, but I think that public sphere questions are a good start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5256" LastActivityDate="2012-03-03T00:57:57.610" Title="Public sphere statistical analyses" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1067" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-25T22:29:27.253" Score="27" ViewCount="305" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the community grows up, we face an increasing number of interesting questions, but we can see also, sometimes, some questions that should be closed because they just don't fit within this site. They need &lt;em&gt;five&lt;/em&gt; votes to be closed as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;exact duplicate&lt;/em&gt;: This question covers exactly the same ground as earlier questions on this topic; its answers may be merged with another identical question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;off topic&lt;/em&gt;: Questions on Statistical Analysis - Stack Exchange are expected to generally relate to statistics, within the scope defined in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;not constructive&lt;/em&gt;: This question is not a good fit to our Q&amp;amp;A format. We expect answers to generally involve facts, references, or specific expertise; this question will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;not a real question&lt;/em&gt;: It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;too localized&lt;/em&gt;: This question is unlikely to ever help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Few people actually have enough &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq#reputation&quot;&gt;reputation&lt;/a&gt; (3,000) to vote to close those questions, and our votes, as moderators on this site, are definitive: if we vote to close once, the question would just be closed. A &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23611/930&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt; has attracted two votes to close, which is a good thing because we are used to see only one such vote, not two. However, it cannot be closed by community members only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Voting and flagging are two ways of helping this site developing well&lt;/strong&gt;. As this site must reflect the entire community's opinion, I would like to encourage users with enough reputation to do so. I would also like to remind that everybody with 50+ reputation can &lt;em&gt;leave a comment&lt;/em&gt; to suggest that a particular question should be closed because it falls within one of the above category. You can further &lt;em&gt;flag a post&lt;/em&gt; ('Flag for moderator attention' needs only 15 rep) to draw our attention on this, or on a particular aspect of the question that you find potentially misleading. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/18/ten-fold&quot;&gt;Ten fold&lt;/a&gt; chat room might also be used to discuss such issues. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A last point: It might be a little bit disappointing for newcomers to see their response closed immediately or bombarded with negative comments. Please, simply explain what's wrong or point to possible duplicate(s). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2012-02-25T22:29:27.253" Title="Your votes are useful, use them!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1066" CreationDate="2012-02-26T13:21:31.570" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, I think this idea could be woven effectively into the site in various ways, and I agree it could be a great and valuable resource to both this community and to the general public. So, the question becomes appropriate implementation of such a task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it could be woven directly into the Q/A format of the site, I don't believe &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; this is the best venue for such a discussion for a few reasons;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question needs to be formulated in such a way that it fits within the purview of the site. It's possible, but it may entail asking several questions to limit the scope within reason for one question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I believe a satisfying response would be very large in scope compared to normal questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For these reasons, I think our blog is a potentially more appropriate venue for such an endeavor. But, the problem so far with the blog is getting more community involvement in the creation/editing of posts. That venue is available though if you personally want to take the initiative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When writing about any polarizing topic one needs to choose their words very wisely, so it may be difficult to recruit authors for such a task (in any form). It is on your shoulder's so to speak to start the task. Given your standing in the community and quality of your questions/answers I have no doubt you could accomplish such a task, but IMO you shouldn't assume  anyone else in the community will write a satisfying response given the nature and scope of what you are asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reply to @Iterator's comments. Just to reiterate, the main goal of my answer was to suggest that to get such a project underway it will likely need to be undertaken in large part by yourself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a more opinionated manner, I believe it could be woven into several questions on the site, although offhand I don't particularly like the prospect. It may be a useful hueristic for a reviewer to dichotomize any particular project into several smaller components, but I'm not sure if it is a good idea to evaluate any particular small slice of some work &lt;em&gt;in absentia&lt;/em&gt; of the other components of the research methodology. This is in addition to the fact that you have to constrain the original questions in such a way to fit within the scope of the site to begin with. Again I think it could be done, but I think it is better/easier just to write one all-inclusive opinion piece on the blog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said if your the one undertaking the project you have the academic freedom to pursue it in anyway you want. I have faith given your contributions here and on SO that you have enough understanding of the nature of the sites to attempt such a project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as how the blog works, so far basically we have published pretty much whatever we feel like! We have attempted a few thematic type series of posts, but participation has been too scarce to keep such contributions sustainable. &lt;strong&gt;Invitations are open to any member of the community to post a contribution to the blog if they want to.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO the blog is an excellent platform for things that don't quite fit into the Q/A of the site. My recent post on tables started as an answer to the site, then I realized it was just a pain to say what I wanted to say that directly answered the question. So instead of not saying what I wanted to say to fit within the scope of the site, I wrote a blog post. &lt;strong&gt;I think it is a bad idea to change the question you want an answer to just to fit within the status quo of the Q/A site.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="1036" LastEditDate="2012-02-27T13:24:51.670" LastActivityDate="2012-02-27T13:24:51.670" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1069" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1070" CreationDate="2012-02-26T23:23:12.607" Score="3" ViewCount="1452" Body="&lt;p&gt;I keep getting math processing errors. I've tried force refreshing the page and clearing the browser cache and cookies and that doesn't seem to have done anything. Is there a site-wide issue with MathJax rendering right now, or am I the only person having this issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've now tried this using the following OSs/browsers, hopefully confirming that this is not an issue on my end:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latest Linux Mint: Firefox, Chrome, Opera&#xA;Mac OS X Snow Leopard: Chrome, Safari&#xA;Mac OS X Lion: Chrome&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these show [Math Processing Error] for any MathJax equations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just so that no one thinks I'm yanking their chain, here are some images showing that MathJax works on math.stackexchange.com and doesn't work on stats.stackexchange.com.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rVhbq.png&quot; alt=&quot;Working MathJax&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tYa3G.png&quot; alt=&quot;Broken MathJax&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2660" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2012-02-28T09:39:12.693" LastActivityDate="2012-02-28T09:39:12.693" Title="Math processing error" Tags="|support|math-display|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1069" CreationDate="2012-02-27T16:27:34.917" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MathJax CDN was being updated from version 1.1a to version 2.0 yesterday and there was a glitch that prevented the old version from expiring properly, so there was a period of time when people were getting some files from version 1.1a and some from version 2.0, causing the math processing errors that you saw. If you were lucky, you got enough v2.0 files to process the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue was fully resolved about 8 hours ago (2:30AM EST), so if you are seeing further issues, try clearing your browser cache and reload the page. Some browsers may also need to be restarted to completely clear the cache.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9462" LastEditorUserId="9462" LastEditDate="2012-02-27T18:21:00.543" LastActivityDate="2012-02-27T18:21:00.543" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1071" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-28T00:11:29.157" Score="9" ViewCount="411" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1066/public-sphere-statistical-analyses&quot;&gt;another recent meta question&lt;/a&gt; it has been suggested that the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.blogoverflow.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;community blog&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; be used as a place for some more in-depth discussion and exposition of some topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brings up the following issue for me. Some very nice work is happening on the blog, but I feel that it is not prominently advertised enough on the main site. In particular, once a user logs in, I believe the only place to access the blog directly is via a link hidden on the bottom navigation bar. This makes it seem to be quite an afterthought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the questions I want to raise for discussion are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should we find a way to make the blog more visible from the main page?&lt;/strong&gt; The purpose of doing so would be to hopefully drive more traffic there, encourage additional contributions, and get the current contributors more recognition for the effort they are putting in.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What would be our options in terms of design in making the blog more prominent?&lt;/strong&gt; I suspect the page design is fairly heavily constrained by SE, but I don't know in what ways or by how much. I suspect a moderator or SE employee may have to answer this part.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally think there are ways that we can integrate the blog more tightly with the main site and, in doing so, create added value for all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2970" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2012-03-12T08:33:47.727" Title="Is there a way to make the blog more prominent? Should we?" Tags="|discussion|design|blog|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1072" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-29T17:45:24.540" Score="24" ViewCount="397" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I just figured out that stack exchange exists like 2 months ago and I am now just getting active in the wonderful world of cross validated and its great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing I came across just now is I spent 10 minutes trying to figure out why I could not accept an answer. I was thinking I did not have the privilege, but I looked at the list and it is not on there (why would it be, you should be able to accept answers if you can ask questions). Then I sorted out that I had accepted an answer, but the color change from the grayed out check mark to the accepted check mark does not tickle the cones in my eye enough for me to notice the difference (rather, one set of cones in my eye is on permanent vacation and the other cones can't be bothered to take over the work, slackers, I know). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that I can just hover over it and it will say accepted x amount of time ago, so its not the end of the world, but red/green color blindness is pretty common (other color blind folks would likely have an issue as well), so I was wondering if it would be possible to make it a different color (a darker more pronounced green would do it for me, though I can't speak for all color blind people). For an example of something that works, check out the darker green in stack overflow, that works just fine for me, though it might not fit the layout of cross validated as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess a color blind mode would solve the problem as well, but that seems like a bit of overkill, given that the only time it has bugged me so far is on the accept answer check.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your consideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9497" LastEditorUserId="8588" LastEditDate="2015-10-07T13:55:25.507" LastActivityDate="2015-10-07T13:55:25.507" Title="Could we change the color of the accepted answer check for color blind people?" Tags="|discussion|bug|design|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1073" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-01T00:20:31.477" Score="4" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;An energetic community member has proposed a substantial tag wiki for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nonparametric&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nonparametric&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nonparametric&lt;/a&gt; tag.  Because it includes so much, I thought it would benefit from the community participating in improving it here, rather than attempting to do so through the (extremely limited) wiki editing interface.  Then, once the language stabilizes, we can modify the wiki itself.  I am reluctant to approve it outright because, IMHO, not all the characterizations are as clear or correct as they ought to be for something intended as a general reference.  But it's such a good start and such a devoted effort that I think it deserves our attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suggestions can be made in the usual ways: replies, comments, and direct editing of this question itself.  (Direct editing might be cleanest, but I'm not sure everyone will be able to carry that out.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Nonparametric' is a fairly broad term for a wide range of statistical&#xA;  analysis procedures that will still yield accurate results when&#xA;  classical assumptions are violated. As the term implies, the original&#xA;  idea was to develop techniques that did not attempt to estimate&#xA;  properties of the parameters (e.g., confidence intervals of the means)&#xA;  of the populations from which the data were sampled. Instead, these&#xA;  techniques were often based on ranks of the data and thereby afforded&#xA;  the calculation of correct p-values. A prototypical example would be&#xA;  determining the central tendency of a highly skewed distribution--the&#xA;  assumption of normality is violated, but methods based on the median&#xA;  would be unaffected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Today the term is sometimes used to cover approaches (e.g.,&#xA;  bootstrapping) that work in very different ways and are often used to&#xA;  work with estimated population parameters. As such, the concept is&#xA;  somewhat fuzzy. Nonparametric techniques can be compared and&#xA;  contrasted with several other types of statistical procedures,&#xA;  including semi-parametric &amp;amp; generalized additive models (which combine&#xA;  elements of both parametric and nonparametric approaches) and robust&#xA;  statistics that use alternative loss functions to minimize the&#xA;  influence of outliers and excessive skewness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Assumption-free' and 'distribution-free' are sometimes used as&#xA;  synonyms. Note that these terms, taken literally, are inaccurate&#xA;  descriptors of nonparametric procedures: Nonparametric analyses do&#xA;  entail assumptions, just fewer and ones that are more likely to hold.&#xA;  Moreover, nonparametric techniques typically rely on the uniform&#xA;  distribution (e.g., for rank-based procedures) or on estimated&#xA;  distributions (e.g., for bootstrapping), just not the normal&#xA;  distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lastly, although nonparametric usually connotes alternative&#xA;  statistical tests, it can be used to indicate an alternative approach&#xA;  to modeling. For instance, the simplest model of a dataset (assuming&#xA;  normality) is simply to estimate the mean and standard deviation, but&#xA;  a model of the data could be generated by kernel density estimation&#xA;  without ever calculating a mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2012-03-03T00:23:06.123" Title="&quot;Nonparametric&quot; tag wiki" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-03-01T00:20:39.327" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1074" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-01T07:01:38.343" Score="1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have asked to close a question, but now it cannot be found anymore. It is not even on the list of my questions. Is there a way to recover it? The link is: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23529&quot;&gt;Generating likely populations given a subsample and control totals&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6432" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2012-11-25T18:02:42.323" Title="Recover a closed question?" Tags="|support|closing-questions|votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1075" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1076" CreationDate="2012-03-01T21:43:10.913" Score="0" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, stats.SE showed I had a rep of 503. Today, it shows I have a rep of 501. The missing 2 points are not listed in my activity anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, meta.stats.SE still indicates that I have a rep of 503.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's going on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1977" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Missing reputation?" Tags="|support|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1075" CreationDate="2012-03-01T21:57:39.440" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Reputation changed unexpectedly? Don't know where to turn? &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/123319/upcoming-reputation-history-changes&quot;&gt;We've moved heaven and earth to ensure your score is always correct!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per the system message currently showing at the top of the page, we have performed a global recalc of everyone's reputation.  As a result of the new changes, your rep will be in sync.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check out your &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/1977/jeff?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;reputation history&lt;/a&gt; for October 1, 2011.  You had a post that was deleted and the rep change came from that.  This is now visible in your reputation report and going forward will be less confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1142" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2012-03-01T21:57:39.440" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1073" CreationDate="2012-03-03T00:23:06.123" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it would be worth making it bullet pointed, and so somewhat more structured:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nonparametric exact test procedures based on ranks (the 1950s, reaching their apex with Mann-Whitney tests, and further in robustness theory with L-statisitcs; also, Kolmogorov-Smirnov test)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nonparametric inference procedures based on resampling (permutation tests)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nonparametric estimation procedures based on local approximations (kernel density, kernel regression, lowess)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other procedures that work without making strong assumptions about distribution of the data (design-based inference in survey statistics is sometimes referred to as non-parametric inference)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastActivityDate="2012-03-03T00:23:06.123" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-03-03T00:23:06.123" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1066" CreationDate="2012-03-03T00:57:57.610" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the folks that are old enough, and who happen to be present in the US, the 2000 presidential elections with contoversial measurement errors on the split ballot created a strong splash of analyses and re-analyses. My adviser, Richard Smith, took a little longer than others, probably three or four months (I've seen at least two dozen analyses, and that was yet in the era when you had to write plain HTML rather than hit a &quot;Post to blog&quot; button on your iPhone), and he produced a very nicely rounded paper with good regression influence diagnostics, various ways of modeling the outlier, Poisson regressions with demographics of the counties, etc. -- see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stat.unc.edu/faculty/rs/palmbeach.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.stat.unc.edu/faculty/rs/palmbeach.html&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somewhat similar uproar of grassroots statistical analyses was produced by the recent parliamentary election in Russia -- how many votes were actually fabricated? In normal elections, this would have been a plot with five Gaussian densities representing the votes cast for each of the participating parties: &lt;a href=&quot;http://oude-rus.livejournal.com/542295.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://oude-rus.livejournal.com/542295.html&lt;/a&gt; (the horizontal axis is the percent voted for a party, the vertical axis is the number of polling stations showing this percent, with a bin of 0.5%). I saw photos of protesters carrying this graph on rallies in Moscow and St. Petersburg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think the opportunities present themselves where moderately complicated statistical analysis can create some visual aids that would aid the public in understanding a phenomenon. Great examples are provided in the joint journal of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amstat.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ASA&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rss.org.uk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;RSS&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.significancemagazine.org/view/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Significance&lt;/a&gt;. For instance, they had an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.significancemagazine.org/details/magazine/1324531/Fear-and-numbers-in-Fukushima.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; about how difficult it is to visualize the radiation exposures that may differ by 9 orders of magnitude in a meaningful way, without expecting people to understand the &lt;code&gt;log=&quot;xy&quot;&lt;/code&gt; option. This was in a special issue on Fukushima in the fall of 2011, about half a year after the disaster. I don't think you can excite the general public by saying, &quot;Look, I've found a p-value of 0.0000001!&quot; (or, for that matter, &quot;I've found a Bayes factor of 1000000&quot;). It has to be easily digestible, without the need to explaining why Bayes factors are better than p-values because they respect the likelihood principle, and yada-yada-yada. It has to be a picture telling a story that's worth a thousand words. Journalists have their &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.poyi.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Picture of the Year&lt;/a&gt; international contests; may be we could launch &quot;Plot of the Year&quot; contest aiming at explaining a social phenomenon with numbers and figures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastActivityDate="2012-03-03T00:57:57.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1071" CreationDate="2012-03-04T07:36:00.757" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;+1. The blog is a nice feature of this site.  I would like to commend the posts that have been done by CV contributor @AndyW.  I think there is plenty of room for more contributions on the blog.  However, in general, I think that the blog is an odd fit for CV-as-being-a-question-&amp;amp;-answer-site, and I think that is part of the issue (although, I certainly acknowledge that the marketing is a big part as well).  All this is to say that I think there are several issues here: the marketing of the blog, and also the role the blog should play within CV.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will start with the marketing of the blog, since that is the question asked.  I do think the blog is currently treated as an afterthought--it was a long time before I realized it existed.  I agree that the blog should be made more visible.  My suggestion is to list the blog prominently running down the right side of the main page.  I would make it similar perhaps to the &quot;Visit Meta&quot; section, with some graphic element or icon and recent post titles listed below that.  It could be higher up the page (at least above &quot;Tags&quot;), but maybe could also move down below other features if it went inactive for some period of time.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I may broaden the discussion here, I do think the larger issue is thinking about how the blog is supposed to fit in with the rest of the site and the site's larger mission.  CV is, first and foremost, a question and answer site that affords practitioners an oportunity to ask people with more expertise specific questions in an unobtrusive way.  It is not clear how a blog is supposed to fit in with that.  Who would go to a blog post (assuming the marketing issue were resolved), and why would they go there?  Would questioners go to the blog to get information?  Are people answering questions supposed to go to the blog for info?  (I've linked to the blog in answers.)  How is what's posted there &lt;em&gt;supposed&lt;/em&gt; to relate to what exists elsewhere on the site.  In the linked meta question, @AndyW wrote:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My recent post on tables started as an answer to the site, then I&#xA;  realized it was just a pain to say what I wanted to say that directly&#xA;  answered the question. So instead of not saying what I wanted to say&#xA;  to fit within the scope of the site, I wrote a blog post. I think it&#xA;  is a bad idea to change the question you want an answer to just to fit&#xA;  within the status quo of the Q/A site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like this perspective, but my point isn't that people must agree with him or me.  Rather, my point is that we need to work out &lt;em&gt;policies&lt;/em&gt; for how information on the blog should be related to information elsewhere on the site (e.g., the FAQ lists policies for questions).  After that, we need infrastructure to encourage those policies.  I can think of several different kinds of infrastructure that could be brought to bear somehow, e.g.: the flags that pop up and mention that there are a lot of comments and you shouldn't have a conversation in comments, or that questions need votes too; the &quot;related&quot; links that run down the right side of published questions or suggest possibly related questions when you're composing a question; and more prominent marketing for the blog in general.  I think the blog will not be as useful as it could be until these issues are worked out.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2012-03-04T07:36:00.757" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1071" CreationDate="2012-03-12T08:33:01.067" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yea vote&lt;/strong&gt;: I am in favor of making the blog more prominent and integrated with the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Please upvote if you agree, adding qualifications, remarks or other comments below. Please don't simultaneously upvote this one and downvote its companion answer.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2970" LastActivityDate="2012-03-12T08:33:01.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1071" CreationDate="2012-03-12T08:33:47.727" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nay vote&lt;/strong&gt;: I am &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; in favor of making the blog more prominent and integrated with the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Please upvote if you agree, adding qualifications, remarks or other comments below. Please don't simultaneously upvote this one and downvote its companion answer.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2970" LastActivityDate="2012-03-12T08:33:47.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1082" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-13T16:03:36.007" Score="19" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ability to export a citation would make it easier for an author to cite a question or answer. It would also  increase the percieved legitimacy (to editors and authors) of citing a stats.SE question or answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1876/what-is-a-good-standard-for-publishing-a-reference-to-a-stackexchange-thread&quot;&gt;math.SE&lt;/a&gt; implementation of this feature:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jFW6A.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WvH1a.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1381" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2020-02-07T10:49:34.460" LastActivityDate="2020-02-07T10:49:34.460" Title="Support for bibtex / ams citation exports from stats.SE Q/A" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1083" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1084" CreationDate="2012-03-15T17:36:15.373" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;The accounts &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/9569/stat-r&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/9569/stat-r&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/9583/stat-r&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/9583/stat-r&lt;/a&gt; should probably be merged because they have been created from the same person, who asked about the merging on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/125758/i-was-about-to-merge-my-stackoverflow-account-how-to-protect-my-points&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2012-04-30T19:43:43.720" Title="Account merging" Tags="|support|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1083" CreationDate="2012-03-15T18:21:06.297" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks.  A better way to indicate such situations is to contact the mods directly.  One way simply is to flag any question; you'll get a textbox with space for a few hundred characters to explain what's going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, it does &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt; like these are the same user, but it's possible they are two different people who happen to have chosen the same moniker.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2012-03-15T18:21:06.297" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1085" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1086" CreationDate="2012-03-21T06:22:00.360" Score="6" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the moment there are two separate tags for questions relating to random forests, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/randomforest&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;randomforest&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;randomforest&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/random-forest&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;random-forest&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;random-forest&lt;/a&gt;. Should these be merged into one? If so, I suggest using &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/random-forest&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;random-forest&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;random-forest&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9975" LastEditorUserId="9975" LastEditDate="2012-03-22T20:30:27.120" LastActivityDate="2012-03-22T20:30:27.120" Title="Tags for random forests" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1085" CreationDate="2012-03-21T07:01:57.300" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have merged the two tags, keeping the older one (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/random-forest&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;random-forest&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;random-forest&lt;/a&gt;). Thanks for bringing this to the community attention!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2012-03-21T07:01:57.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1087" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-22T12:35:56.943" Score="3" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are lots of good questions on CV asking for references for self study, or for methods of learning, or other self study resources (a search for &lt;code&gt;learning -[machine-learning]&lt;/code&gt; turns up a few).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of these questions are highly relevant to someone like me, who has a basic first year uni intro-to-stats course as background, and would very much like to learn more, but is feeling a bit out of their depth. But many of these questions are quite hard to search for, or come at the topic from an angle that might not be immediately apparent, so having a tag to chuck them all under would be incredibly useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest &lt;code&gt;[self-study]&lt;/code&gt;, but there might be better options, like a more general &lt;code&gt;[education]&lt;/code&gt;, or just &lt;code&gt;[study]&lt;/code&gt; (although that's a little cryptic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I would tag this question &lt;code&gt;[tag-request]&lt;/code&gt;, but I don't have the rep)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9007" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T20:16:34.040" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T20:17:12.257" Title="Can we have a self-study tag?" Tags="|feature-request|status-bydesign|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1088" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1465" CreationDate="2012-03-23T19:44:00.773" Score="12" ViewCount="581" Body="&lt;p&gt;Time for the seventh iteration!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To remind for those who are new to the idea:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CVJC is a meeting on &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/18/ten-fold&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; where we discuss some paper and its theoretical/practical surroundings.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It usually takes place on Friday about 18:00UTC.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The paper must be OpenAccess or a (p)reprint suggested previously on a meta thread like this one and selected in voting. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We will try to invite the author(s).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, please suggest papers (each in one answer), and vote for your favourites!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I see there are new suggestions coming, so maybe it is time to call the whole thing rebooted and set a new deadline to 23:59UTC 11.11.2012. For a fair voting, chl's suggestion gets -5 vote normalisation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Paper selected; as usual I'll try to invite the authors and then schedule the meeting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: The 7th CVJC featuring &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.statisticalhorizons.com/wp-content/uploads/MissingDataByML.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Handling Missing Data by Maximum Likelihood&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Paul D. Allison will take place on Friday 12.14.2012 at 16:00 UTC. You can register &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/18/ten-fold?tab=schedule&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2012-12-13T14:14:52.290" LastActivityDate="2012-12-13T14:14:52.290" Title="Seventh Cross Validated Journal Club" Tags="|discussion|journal-club|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1089" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1093" CreationDate="2012-03-26T14:17:32.193" Score="4" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just tried to correct the R &lt;code&gt;data.frame&lt;/code&gt; output formatting in a question.  The markdown looked right: 4 spaces in for each line and a code block appeared.  It all looked correct in the preview.  However on the final site, both when it was at stats.stackexchange and now it's in overflow, the code lines are visually out of joint.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9870620/aggregating-restructuring-hourly-time-series-data-in-r&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  Press 'edit' to see what it looks like in preview.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this just me, or is there a problem with the markdown plugin, or perhaps an awkward interaction with R's dollars and dots?  Is there a work-around?  It's the second time I've seen this in a few days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1739" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2012-03-30T21:52:43.493" Title="How to avoid a quirk in formatted R output?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="793" CreationDate="2012-03-27T14:02:44.090" Score="44" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Python&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although this is not a statistical package &lt;em&gt;per se,&lt;/em&gt; it has extensive statistical capabilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://matplotlib.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Matplotlib&lt;/a&gt; is a library for visualization. It has an assortment of &lt;a href=&quot;https://matplotlib.org/stable/tutorials/index&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tutorials&lt;/a&gt; and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://matplotlib.org/stable/gallery/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gallery of examples&lt;/a&gt; in its documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.python.org/moin/FrontPage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Python Wiki&lt;/a&gt; is a gateway to Python.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.python.org/community/forums/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Python Forum&lt;/a&gt; is a Python-oriented Q&amp;amp;A site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From Python 3.4, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0450/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the &amp;quot;statistics&amp;quot; module&lt;/a&gt; will be added to the standard library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pingouin-stats.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pingouin&lt;/a&gt; is a &lt;code&gt;pandas&lt;/code&gt;-aware library which provides diagnostic plots, power analysis, and various statistical tests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pypi.org/project/statpy/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;StatPy&lt;/a&gt; (&amp;quot;special emphasis on astrostatistics&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Links to &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.python.org/moin/NumericAndScientific&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;numerical and scientific&lt;/a&gt; packages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://scikit-learn.org/stable/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Scikit-learn&lt;/a&gt; for machine learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/stats.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SciPy.stats&lt;/a&gt; contains numerous classes for probability distributions and statistical tests. Other submodules of SciPy also provide numerical integration and integral transforms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.01140&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SemoPy2&lt;/a&gt; provides trainable model classes for structural equation models. They support &lt;a href=&quot;https://semopy.com/efa.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;exploratory&lt;/a&gt; and confirmatory approaches, &lt;a href=&quot;https://semopy.com/mixed.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;random effects&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://semopy.com/factor_scores.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;latent factor scores&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://semopy.com/means.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mean components&lt;/a&gt;, among other features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.statsmodels.org/stable/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;statsmodels&lt;/a&gt;, for a variety of models including generalized linear models, Markov models, and autoregressive models. Support for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.statsmodels.org/dev/examples/notebooks/generated/robust_models_1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;M-estimation&lt;/a&gt;, generalized least squares, maximum-likelihood, and seemingly-unrelated regression are included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.sympy.org/latest/modules/stats.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SymPy.stats&lt;/a&gt; provides a basic computer algebra system for symbolic statistical computing. The main module also provides a variety of mathematical tools such as derivatives, integrals (including Fourier transforms), and other tools that are useful in mathematical statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://pandas.pydata.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pandas&lt;/a&gt;, for enhanced data structures, including time-series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, people who prefer Python for scripting, but would like access to &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt;'s wide-ranging statistical capabilities can call &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; from Python with &lt;a href=&quot;http://rpy.sourceforge.net/rpy2/doc-dev/html/introduction.html#getting-started&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rpy2&lt;/a&gt; (see also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20200412094634/https://sites.google.com/site/aslugsguidetopython/data-analysis/pandas/calling-r-from-python&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Slug's Guide to Python&lt;/a&gt; (archived)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-11-09T07:27:31.743" LastActivityDate="2023-11-09T07:27:31.743" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-03-27T14:02:44.090" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1091" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-27T23:05:49.853" Score="2" ViewCount="3040" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not 100% sure this is going to be on topic, so I apologize in advance if I'm doing the wrong thing.  However, I think this app may be of interest to people who are interested in statistics and Stack Exchange, and this seems to me like the best way to evangelize it :)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to let you folks who are major stats geeks know that I've been working on a Stack Exchange API app that can perform queries against Stack Exchange sites to gather question and answer data.  I run some really simplistic statistics against the data, which I find to be useful from time to time when trying to back up an assertion about the way people use the sites.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find it on StackApps &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/3180/statsexchange-low-friction-api-based-statistics-generator&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is similar to the way Data Explorer works, except for a) it's live data (ie, no month delay) and b) there's no requirement to be able to use or understand SQL.  Due to the limitations of the API, I can't do as many cool things right in your browser as Data Explorer, but if you want something with a bit less of a learning curve that operates on live data, you might be interested in this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today I added the ability to export the data gathered from a given query to a CSV format, which means it can be imported into the data analysis tool of your choice.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to provide feedback on StackApps, or you can come and corner me on Chat (you'll find me in Gaming rooms most often, as I'm a moderator there).  My background is in computer engineering and not statistics, so what I'm passing off as &quot;stats&quot; here is probably pretty simplistic by comparison to what I see you guys doing.  Still, I welcome feedback and feature requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10173" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:45.643" LastActivityDate="2012-03-27T23:05:49.853" Title="StatsExchange - low friction, API-based statistics generator" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1089" CreationDate="2012-03-29T22:23:36.667" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is due to mathjax parsing - $ is a special delimiter.  It appears to be fixed in the second revision of this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2" LastActivityDate="2012-03-29T22:23:36.667" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1094" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1095" CreationDate="2012-03-29T23:04:42.057" Score="1" ViewCount="396" Body="&lt;p&gt;A quick search for &quot;chat&quot; in the questions turns up &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/322/chat-room-for-stats&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;. But from what I interpret this is for meta-discussion. So, is there a chat room for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;stats&lt;/a&gt;? If not, can there be? I don't see a link at the top of the page (image stolen from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/faq&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow FAQ&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nEyIO.png&quot; alt=&quot;The Notifications Bar&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; This is the top of my page. Is there something I am missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CHrgP.png&quot; alt=&quot;My Notifications Bar&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10197" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2012-03-30T16:11:02.950" Title="Statistics Chat Room" Tags="|support|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1094" CreationDate="2012-03-29T23:16:25.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There should be links at the top &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; bottom of each screen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JKyfy.png&quot; alt=&quot;top line&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kk0PA.png&quot; alt=&quot;bottom line&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're still stuck, navigate to &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Edit&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An unfortunate &amp;quot;feature&amp;quot; of the current SE interface is that the &amp;quot;chat&amp;quot; link on the top bar is temporarily replaced by a &amp;quot;blog&amp;quot; link whenever a new blog article is posted.  (Don't get me going on how confusing it is to users when their interface morphs around...)  This appears to be the cause of this question.  Please note, though, that the &lt;em&gt;bottom&lt;/em&gt; links have been constant and do not seem to come and go in the same way: chat has always been available there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2012-03-30T16:11:02.950" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="290" CreationDate="2012-04-02T12:34:45.477" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://cooking.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/913/what-is-community-wiki&quot;&gt;the community wiki FAQ on cooking.SE&lt;/a&gt; answers this question excellently. Since both questions and answers can now be edited by anyone, regardless of rep (albeit with moderator approval for those of us with low rep), there is almost never a good reason to use community wiki. This even applies to most list questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering the ability for anyone to edit, &lt;strong&gt;the only value in community wiki is to deny reputation&lt;/strong&gt;. This is potentially useful for avoiding rep farming, and filling the site with relatively useless fun list questions. Many questions of this type should just be closed anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community wiki is also potentially detrimental for the same reason: once there is no rep gain, there is less incentive for someone to spend their time writing a good, detailed answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because community wiki can not be unapplied, it should be used judiciously. I would suggest that we adopt something like the cooking.SE guidelines linked above. Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9007" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:43:53.143" LastActivityDate="2012-04-02T12:34:45.477" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1097" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-03T17:47:22.683" Score="4" ViewCount="331" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I've had some discussions with @whuber about what constitutes appropriate use of the 'Not an answer' flag where I was referred to this thread: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/80269/to-flag-or-not-to-flag-and-a-request-for-auditing/80273#80273&quot;&gt;To flag or not to flag and a request for auditing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which essentially says that the only appropriate use of the 'Not an answer' flag are answers like &quot;Thanks!&quot; or &quot;I have the same problem&quot;. However, in another thread on a related subject a moderator on meta SO weighs in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/128953/what-should-i-not-use-flags-for&quot;&gt;What should I *not* use flags for?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where it is indicated that is it, in fact, appropriate for moderators to act on flags raised due to a completely irrelevant answer. Let's look and what is written in the flag box next to &quot;Not an answer&quot;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;This was posted as an answer, but it does not answer the question. It should possibly be an edit, a comment, another question, or deleted altogether.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How we go from that to 'only &quot;Thanks!&quot; and &quot;I have the same problem&quot; responses fall into that category' reflects a bit of a disconnect to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The discussion began on this thread: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/23974/how-much-does-quantizing-continuous-data-affect-power/23979#23979&quot;&gt;How much does quantizing continuous data affect power?&lt;/a&gt; where the question is asking about the consequences of categorizing continuous data according to the quantiles. The only answer (which I flagged and was declined) was about quantile regression, which relates to statistics but has nothing to do with the question. Another example that sparked my interest is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/25713/things-to-consider-about-masters-programs-in-statistics/28494#28494&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to open up a discussion about what exactly is wrong with something like this example being deemed &quot;not an answer&quot; and how that can be reconciled with the text written in the box under the 'not an answer' flag, possibly using the question above as an illustrative example. Perhaps the text should be changed? Or, the general consensus on what is and is not an answer needs to be clarified? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit (5/16/12):&lt;/strong&gt; After much discussion it appears the disconnect is that I'm approaching this with a very literal interpretation of the rules cited whereas the moderators approach this problem with more of a &quot;spirit of the rule&quot; type of interpretation, which leads to a cases that may be &quot;borderline&quot; in the sense that a rational individual may think an answer does fit with the spirit of the rule while others do not. This approach is less clear cut but may be for the best. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4856" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2012-05-16T16:34:14.443" Title="What is appropriate use of the 'Not an answer' flag?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1097" CreationDate="2012-04-03T19:13:10.987" Score="8" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Flagging and voting&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comments after the question ultimately focus on what does &amp;quot;not an answer&amp;quot; mean and what is the purpose of flags.  Perhaps this can be clarified by pointing out that &lt;em&gt;moderators do not adjudicate the correctness of answers.&lt;/em&gt;  We would like to have that breadth of knowledge, but I'm sure I don't and I suspect the other mods aren't omniscient, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what the site is asking you, the &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt;, to do, is to signal correctness, appropriateness, usefulness, suitability, and all those good things, by &lt;em&gt;voting.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;strong&gt;If you understand a reply (or a question), whether it's good or bad, then please vote on it!&lt;/strong&gt;   Don't leave any of our pages without at least considering placing a vote on the question and at least one reply (if not all of them).  As a statistically minded person, you know that a small number of votes is a highly uncertain indicator, whereas a large number--although imperfect, to be sure--tends on the whole to be more reliable.  &lt;strong&gt;Your vote counts.&lt;/strong&gt;  It is the means by which reputation is created, more power is given to the community to act, and the quality of the site is maintained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Moderators&lt;/strong&gt; are here to help when there is a &lt;em&gt;functional problem&lt;/em&gt; with some element of the site.  These are usually posts that either contain no information (&amp;quot;thanks, I liked that&amp;quot;), are misplaced (such as questions posted as replied), obnoxious (spam, flames, etc.), or simply incomprehensible (such as problems with the language, corrupted text, possible site bugs, etc.).  &lt;strong&gt;When you find such a problem, please flag it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, sometimes it's hard to distinguish a functional problem from a bad question or reply: if a reply is incomprehensible, should it be downvoted or deleted? (My tendency is to delete it whenever it becomes apparent that a large number of downvotes will be accumulated, out of compassion for the responsible party and their reputation.  I could easily be persuaded to adjust that policy: this is one of those gray areas.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that &lt;strong&gt;if you think a reply is wrong or misdirected&lt;/strong&gt;, then do some combination of (1) providing a constructive comment, (2) downvoting, (3) providing a counter-reply, (4) inviting the poster to discuss the issue with you in a chat room, and (5) leaving a comment encouraging other users to vote appropriately (in that order, as needed).  When this is done in a civil manner, moderators do not need to be involved and in fact won't be of any special help (except perhaps to help create a chat room or perform other supporting functions like that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Consistency of moderation&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;modus operandi&lt;/em&gt; of moderators are not completely uniform: we work in slightly different ways.  For example, some of us prefer to edit posts more than others; some of us post more comments (to encourage people to do their own editing, closing, deleting, etc.).  We have different levels of experience with other sites in the SE universe, which can affect our tendencies to migrate questions.  However, in the course of our work we naturally see much of what each other does and we check for inconsistencies.  We confer about problematic situations with each other (in a dedicated chat room) or with more than 200 mods across all the SE sites (in another dedicated chat room).  We bring these conversations public here on meta (or occasionally in comments) whenever we think the community might appreciate getting involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This constant contact helps assure a consistency in moderation &lt;em&gt;at any given time,&lt;/em&gt; but it also leads to our evolution &lt;em&gt;as a group&lt;/em&gt; as we learn from previous situations, mods on other sites, and the SE team.  Therefore you will indeed find inconsistencies between actions taken a while ago and today--but I hope that today's actions tend to be better and more consonant with SE policies overall than yesterday's were.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2012-04-03T21:18:15.407" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1099" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1100" CreationDate="2012-04-04T15:45:53.097" Score="8" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;So this site is for statisticians and people with an interest in the discipline, and covers amongst other things, applied statistical analysis and visualising data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Communicating statistics is a hot topic and one many statisticians are professionally involved in and personally passionate about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems like a good place for questions about communicating statistics, and I imagine many users of this site will have plenty to contribute. I'm also sure there will be some people who want to stick rigidly to mathematical statistical questions, who might find this too 'applied' for their tastes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, questions about statistical communication: On topic or off topic? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If on topic, it probably needs a tag or two since it's something some statisticians are passionate about and that others aren't interested in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If off topic, we probably need to be clear about why, where precisely we draw the line, and where statisticians and others who communicate and advocate statistics should go with such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/25850/stats-communications-how-to-help-people-understand-in-100-000&quot;&gt;simple practical example of a question&lt;/a&gt; which I posted here on the basis that it seemed to be relevant to enough people in this community to attract quality interesting answers. I've had a look on the FAQ and it's not addressed their directly. I went looking for communications related questions to see if there was any precedent, and found one: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/20977/most-confusing-statistical-terms&quot;&gt;this one with a lively discussion and plenty of upvotes&lt;/a&gt;, plus a few 'explanation' related questions that are part communications part teaching (which has a tag) &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/18058/how-would-you-explain-covariance-to-someone-who-understands-only-the-mean&quot;&gt;1,&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/17233/how-to-explain-linear-mixed-models-to-laypeople&quot;&gt;2,&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/17537/understanding-variance-intuitively&quot;&gt;3,&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8489" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2012-04-04T15:55:14.430" Title="Statistical communications questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1099" CreationDate="2012-04-04T15:55:14.430" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;You raise a great point.  I strongly advocate statistical communication as on topic.  As far as I know, we have accepted such questions and have never closed such a one as off topic.  Communication-related issues constantly crop up in comments and answers, so why not in questions, too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags naturally get created along with a question or a reply.  If you have a question in mind that needs a new tag, you can go ahead and create that tag when you post the question.  I notice that there already is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/intuition&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;intuition&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;intuition&lt;/a&gt; tag and 16 threads are graced with its presence.  Maybe this does (part of) the job?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FAQ attempts to be at once specific about this community's focus and vague about the details, precisely so that unexpected questions (such as those about communication) will have a chance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2012-04-04T15:55:14.430" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1101" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1110" CreationDate="2012-04-05T05:46:46.740" Score="2" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just attempted to change my favored answer to a new reply &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/25632/what-book-is-recommendable-to-start-learning-statistics-using-r-at-the-same-time&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and I got 2 points reduced reputation as not having an answer accepted. The context is that the answer was accepted before it turned to community wiki, thus reputation was given. If I change now, the system assumes that I unmarked the answer more appropriated like I did not choose any other, when in fact I am accepting other answer (after it turned wiki). The end result is deducing reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a glitch or was it intended to be like this? If it is intended to be like this, would someone mind explaining the reasoning? In a way it sort of kept me from moving my answer to a possible more appropriate one, it might keep other people to move the acceptable one as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just after changing answer after it turned to CW (notice the -2):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Kc2QW.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then if I click back on the original answer (notice the 2):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UM0v7.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Issue with accept answer after it turns to community wiki?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|reputation|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1102" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1103" CreationDate="2012-04-05T07:10:53.233" Score="2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.taverna.org.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Taverna Workbench&lt;/a&gt; has been more and more used, and can be very well used on data mining (I am using on my current research project). However, this also seem to go under a more specific question instead of conceptual, which thus can fall under the say 'too specific to be of use for the community'. I would like to know what the community think before posting anything related to it. I am aware of their mailing list, but it is sort of dead (god knows why). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate pointers to taverna boards or communities if you consider as a NO to questions related to this here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since up votes and down votes here are regarding opinion I think we can assume that for this question &lt;strong&gt;a up vote means &quot;I think Taverna workbench would be good to have on the community (maybe under a tag taverna workbench)&quot; and down vote would mean &quot;No I think this would not be appropriate for the community&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastEditorUserId="9887" LastEditDate="2012-04-05T14:48:23.127" LastActivityDate="2012-04-05T14:48:23.127" Title="Would questions about Taverna Workbench be appropriate here?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1102" CreationDate="2012-04-05T14:30:09.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please re-read our FAQ, especially the second section beginning &quot;There are certain subjects that will probably get better responses on our sister sites.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The principle at work here is that when a question is about concepts and the practice of &lt;em&gt;statistics&lt;/em&gt; and allied fields (like machine learning, AI, data mining, etc.), it is welcome here.  When it is specifically about how to use or program a particular piece of software, it probably belongs elsewhere.  That would apply to Taverna as well as it does to R, SAS, and all the rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I invite you to update the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/793/internet-support-for-statistics-software&quot;&gt;list of software-specific resources&lt;/a&gt; we maintain on these pages.  (The list is linked from the FAQ.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2012-04-05T14:30:09.033" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="793" CreationDate="2012-04-05T15:08:13.727" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Taverna Workbench&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a open source tool that has been more used for helping in data mining recently. In other words, you can create pieces of the workflow to code extracting data from different databases, analyze them, do some processing and it also supports output in R.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.taverna.org.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Taverna is an open source and domain-independent Workflow Management System – a suite of tools used to design and execute scientific workflows and aid in silica experimentation&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.taverna.org.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Taverna Website&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.taverna.org.uk/introduction/taverna-features/myexperiment-integration/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;my Experiment - Social networking and workflow sharing environment for scientists&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.taverna.org.uk/introduction/taverna-features/biocatalogue-integration/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Curated catalogue of Web services for Life Sciences&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.taverna.org.uk/about/contact-us/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mailing List&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastEditorUserId="9887" LastEditDate="2012-04-05T15:23:35.050" LastActivityDate="2012-04-05T15:23:35.050" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-04-05T15:08:13.727" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1105" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-05T15:19:12.043" Score="7" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seem this in other boards systems (although this is not actually a board). Maybe it would be helpful to offer a list of the previous answers so you can read what was stated while editing? I thought this would be good for two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1st. It would encourage users to quote the answer instead of just rewriting with their own words making it difficult for the reader to notice and find which answer he is talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2nd. I wouldn't need to memorize the name of the person in my head or open two tabs to mention that person X suggested something. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think? I will understand that a up vote here would mean this feature wold be appreciated and down voted otherwise. If not, I would appreciate know why. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The functionality is already available but only for those who have edit privileges. Question is now a matter of why it could not be available for everyone. Please see below on the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9887" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T20:17:56.200" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T20:17:56.200" Title="Seeing answers while editing question" Tags="|feature-request|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1101" CreationDate="2012-04-05T15:58:30.580" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure I understand your question correctly, so please leave a comment if I'm completely off track. Community-wiki owned threads do not allow you, or your answerers, to earn reputation; this apply as soon as the CW mark has been checked. In this case, accepting an answer allows it to stay on top of the responses queue but nobody will earn any reputation (+2 for OP, +15 for answerer) following that action. I don't see any loss of reputation in your history:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NBTFp.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However it happened that your post has been turned to CW automatically because of your numerous edits. Please, consult &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/11740/150510&quot;&gt;What are “Community Wiki” posts?&lt;/a&gt; for more information. &#xA;Note that all relevant badges apply in this case (nice question, popular question, nice answer, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, I would encourage you to read our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; and get familiar with how this site works. In particular, you can use the &lt;em&gt;comment box&lt;/em&gt; to leave specific reply to your answerers, rather than updating your question with a lot of edits that are just comments. Editing a question is useful to provide additional information when it is requested through, e.g., a general comment, or when it sounds like the question hasn't been understood the way it should. Vote on replies you found useful; that will allow the system to rank them by relevance. Mark an answer as accepted if you think that solved your problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2012-04-05T15:58:30.580" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1105" CreationDate="2012-04-05T19:43:26.513" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a person has edit privileges, the screen for editing questions appears as @whuber describes - all answers and comments remain visible.  If you don't have edit privileges, you can only see your own question, as in the question.  I have edit privileges on StackOverflow but not here on CV, and here's the difference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A random question on StackOverflow, where I have edit privileges:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZDfeH.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own question on CrossValidated, where I do not have edit privileges:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BzpGM.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... which raises the question of why that difference exists at all.  It seems like viewing answers and comments would be equally useful for anybody editing a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="71" LastEditDate="2012-04-06T18:24:35.363" LastActivityDate="2012-04-06T18:24:35.363" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1109" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-06T13:05:24.463" Score="10" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some recent discussion on meta brought up whether (and how) the blog should be integrated with the site, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1071/1036&quot;&gt;&quot;Is there a way to make the blog more prominent? Should we?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Part of my biggest concern isn't &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; how the blog is integrated with the main site (we can figure that out as it goes along IMO), but I am concerned about getting the community to participate more in writing posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mainly we have had several started projects which ended up fizzling out due to lack of participation. These include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/polystats-project-1&quot;&gt;polystats project&lt;/a&gt; on reputation effects.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/question-of-the-week&quot;&gt;Question of the week&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And a suggestion that never got beyond two meta posts, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/922/1036&quot;&gt;Weekly featured data visualization for the blog?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here we had community agreement on agenda for the blog, but lack of participation prevents us from moving forward. I would like it here, if several individuals simply volunteered to contribute to the blog. I know it is scary volunteering without being specific about the content, but in response I would say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The scope of any post does not have to be large (e.g. you don't have to write a paper to make a post). For example, I think many of the example &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/908/1036&quot;&gt;data visualizations I listed&lt;/a&gt; could be almost copy and pasted into blog posts. Also I don't want the time monikers we've attached to previous endeavors to scare anyone off (we don't need to do anything per week, or month, or on a schedule at all).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm not going to jump through your computer screen and make you write a post you don't want to nor ask you to write a post that you do not feel qualified for.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We are likely pretty flexible in the material for the blog at the moment. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/864/1036&quot;&gt;I've suggested in the past&lt;/a&gt; that other bloggers could re-blog their material on our site. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm hoping getting individuals to volunteer will give alittle push/motivation for individuals to become more active. There is plenty of old material we said we would blog about but have not, and we are open to new ideas. If anybody has any other thoughts feel free to share them here, or stop by over at the chat room devoted to the blog, &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/549/skewed-distribution&quot;&gt;skewed distribution&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2012-04-06T13:07:00.983" Title="A call for participation on the Cross Validated Blog" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1101" CreationDate="2012-04-10T02:37:18.603" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is by-design.  There is no reputation conferred to you when accepting an answer that is community-wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is more important than rep is if the answer best answers your question - if you feel it does, then you should mark it as the accepted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't get too hung up on not gaining +2 points for accepting the CW answer; as you contribute  quality posts (which you are doing!), you'll get this back many times over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3" LastActivityDate="2012-04-10T02:37:18.603" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1101" CreationDate="2012-04-10T21:09:13.343" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll make a value judgement (which the other posters seem to be reluctant to do): in my opinion, this is probably a misfeature or undesirable consequence of the way CW works.  The site sometimes feels a bit too aggressive in turning something to CW, and that has unexpected consequences that create weird incentives, as you outlined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the grand scope of things, it is a minor problem, so the answer is to just live with it; it's only two points, and we don't want people to get &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; obsessed over points anyway.  But I just wanted you to know that I hear you.  I think your confusion and puzzlement over why you lost reputation is entirely valid and understandable.  I think the current behavior is probably less than ideal, though I do understand it is a tradeoff between many factors.  In any case, I'd guess it's probably not going to get changed, given that it has a relatively small effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2921" LastActivityDate="2012-04-10T21:09:13.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1088" CreationDate="2012-04-13T07:18:31.150" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to propose the following article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sheehan NA, Didelez V, Burton PR, Tobin MD (2008) &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3adoi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050177&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mendelian&#xA;  Randomisation and Causal Inference in Observational Epidemiology&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;  PLoS Med 5(8): e177. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0050177&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This paper is of some interest in relation to some threads on this site, in particular those related to inferring causality from observational studies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2012-04-13T07:18:31.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1113" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1114" CreationDate="2012-04-17T03:26:50.873" Score="3" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;When choosing tags for the question: &quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/26580/is-there-a-difference-between-the-maximum-probability-and-the-mode-of-a-para&quot;&gt;Is there a difference between the &amp;quot;maximum probability&amp;quot; and the &amp;quot;mode&amp;quot; of a parameter?&lt;/a&gt; &quot; I was surprised to find no &quot;parameter&quot; tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hesitate to add an unwanted (or unuseful) tag.&#xA; Is there a reason for the absence of a &quot;parameter&quot; tag, e.g. it is ambiguous? Would it make a valid synonym?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1381" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2012-04-17T06:16:42.907" Title="Why is there no &quot;parameter&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1113" CreationDate="2012-04-17T06:00:49.743" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most sites avoid (or even overtly ban) tags that add no or almost no information, such as &quot;statistics&quot; here.  More than half our questions deal with a &quot;parameter&quot; either explicitly (more than 11% of them) or implicitly (because they involve a model, a distribution, something to be estimated, etc: another 40+%).  Please consider choosing a more descriptive tag such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/estimation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;estimation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;estimation&lt;/a&gt; and/or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bayesian&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bayesian&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bayesian&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2012-04-17T06:16:42.907" LastActivityDate="2012-04-17T06:16:42.907" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1115" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1116" CreationDate="2012-04-17T11:55:58.250" Score="3" ViewCount="550" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reviewing the &quot;kernel&quot; tag and this tag may refer to several different items.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In statistics, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_%28statistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kernel&lt;/a&gt; has a particular meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a commonly encountered use of the term kernel in the forum is related to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_trick&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kernel Trick&lt;/a&gt;, especially common in questions related to SVMs and Machine learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to separate these meanings for the same tag? Or should a different tag &quot;Kernel-Trick&quot; be created?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10322" LastActivityDate="2012-04-18T07:03:16.007" Title="What does the kernel tag refer to?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-10-19T12:49:54.823" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1115" CreationDate="2012-04-18T07:03:16.007" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, this raises a question how deep we should dive in decomposing this word -- even if you strip ML use, it is still pretty ambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second issue is that it seems hard to maintain. New users usually heavily pollute enforced tag policies, and it is certainly not obvious that stamping SVM kernel question with [kernel] is wrong in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2012-04-18T07:03:16.007" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1117" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-26T15:03:39.627" Score="18" ViewCount="298" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hadn't even heard that there was an &lt;a href=&quot;https://economics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Economics Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site before I learned that &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/04/when-a-site-grows-quiet/&quot;&gt;it will be closed down next week&lt;/a&gt; along with a bunch of other quiescent beta sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; As planned, the original Economics Stack Exchange was shut down shortly after I posted this back in 2012.  A few years later, in 2014, a &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; Economics site was created at the same URL, and as of 2019 seems to be doing fine.  This meta post is thus now only a historical curiosity.  Sorry for any confusion!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;As a side effect of shutting down the site and recreating it from scratch, the database (including all post and user IDs) was reset.  Thus, any links to questions on the old Economics site below will, if clicked, now take you to a random question (or answer) on the new site that just happens to have the same ID number.  I have &lt;s&gt;struck out&lt;/s&gt; such broken links in this post.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It now looks like many of the other sites are going to be fully or partially &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/130342/salvage-questions-on-closed-sites-via-migration&quot;&gt;absorbed into more active SE sites&lt;/a&gt; with overlapping topics, where their questions can remain on the web and receive the tender care of an active community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already suggested that &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4049/economics-se-is-closing-can-we-salvage-some-of-the-questions&quot;&gt;Math.SE might want some of the Econ.SE questions&lt;/a&gt;, but it strikes me that others (particularly those on &lt;a href=&quot;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/econometrics&quot;&gt;econometrics&lt;/a&gt;) might fit better here.  What do you folks think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've &lt;s&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://economics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/165/salvaging-questions-by-migration&quot;&gt;posted about this on the Economics meta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/s&gt;, where I've also listed several other sites that might want some of the questions, but I'd like to request opinions and help from the Statistics community here.  If you'd like to help in keeping the more statistical questions from Economics.SE on the web, here's what you can do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Express your support for migrating these questions here, so that the SE folks can tell that the community here is (as I hope, at least) in favor of it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Go through the list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;questions on Economics.SE&lt;/a&gt; and look for ones that would be on topic here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Collect links to the questions here, so that we can point an Economics mod at them before the site closes (&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1746/literature-is-closing-what-questions-should-we-migrate-here&quot;&gt;example of such a list at SF&amp;amp;F meta&lt;/a&gt;).  Or you could just flag the questions for migration directly, but this way we avoid needless duplicate flags.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there are only 412 questions total on Economics.SE, so having someone who knows the topic review them all would not necessarily be an overwhelming task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Personal disclaimer: I'm neither an economist not a statistician, and I haven't been active on either of these sites.  I do have a passing interest in both topics, and I feel like I should at least make an effort to salvage some of these questions before they end up just gathering digital dust in a compressed archive somewhere.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9808" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2019-02-08T09:04:12.407" Title="Economics.SE is closing, can we salvage some of the questions?" Tags="|discussion|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2019-02-08T12:19:05.430" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1117" CreationDate="2012-04-26T16:34:18.163" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Among the first page of newest questions and the first page of highest-voted questions (with almost no overlap) I was able to find exactly one question that might be of interest here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There isn't even a &quot;statistics&quot; tag on that site!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an &quot;econometrics&quot; tag gracing 31 of the questions.  About a third of those might be suitable for migration here (and wouldn't duplicate an existing post):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/154/what-are-the-major-philosophical-methodological-and-terminological-differences&quot;&gt;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/154/what-are-the-major-philosophical-methodological-and-terminological-differences&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/202/does-it-make-sense-to-cluster-when-you-use-a-regression-discontinuity&quot;&gt;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/202/does-it-make-sense-to-cluster-when-you-use-a-regression-discontinuity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/621/when-should-one-consider-using-gmm&quot;&gt;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/621/when-should-one-consider-using-gmm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/1072/estimating-demand-elasticity-econometrically&quot;&gt;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/1072/estimating-demand-elasticity-econometrically&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/346/example-of-estimation-vs-calibration&quot;&gt;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/346/example-of-estimation-vs-calibration&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/304/in-structural-econometrics-what-is-meant-by-simulation-variance&quot;&gt;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/304/in-structural-econometrics-what-is-meant-by-simulation-variance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/192/if-you-have-a-really-big-n-is-using-a-regular-vs-an-m-n-bootstrap-ever-a-good&quot;&gt;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/192/if-you-have-a-really-big-n-is-using-a-regular-vs-an-m-n-bootstrap-ever-a-good&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/191/fixed-effects-models-vs-models-where-years-serve-as-instruments&quot;&gt;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/191/fixed-effects-models-vs-models-where-years-serve-as-instruments&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/1153/regressing-price-on-volume&quot;&gt;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/1153/regressing-price-on-volume&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/1143/what-is-the-reason-why-we-use-natural-logarithm-ln-rather-than-log-to-base-10&quot;&gt;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/1143/what-is-the-reason-why-we-use-natural-logarithm-ln-rather-than-log-to-base-10&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/853/vector-autoregression-number-of-variables-to-use&quot;&gt;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/853/vector-autoregression-number-of-variables-to-use&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/1224/how-to-hypothesis-test-a-fraction-of-two-coefficients&quot;&gt;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/1224/how-to-hypothesis-test-a-fraction-of-two-coefficients&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/1057/would-it-make-sense-to-do-a-2sls-regression-for-nominal-gdp-and-money-supply&quot;&gt;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/1057/would-it-make-sense-to-do-a-2sls-regression-for-nominal-gdp-and-money-supply&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a generous list: it includes anything that looked reasonable based on the title and first couple of lines.  It would be fine if they were migrated but little would be lost if they weren't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:51:38.237" LastActivityDate="2012-04-26T16:34:18.163" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1120" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-02T18:01:32.717" Score="3" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this is a bug or expected behavior, but I find it a little hard to do reviews for posts including Latex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically when I go to the &lt;em&gt;review&lt;/em&gt; screen and see the list of all possible posts to review, the posts show just fine with the Latex correctly formatted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when I click on &quot;review answer&quot; and it expands the post, I find the Latex code shows up raw with no formatting, and the \$...\$ appear. This makes it hard to review if you want to verify some equations or check that the OP formatted his Latex correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any thoughts, is this expected behavior, or a bug? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10683" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T19:22:32.710" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T19:24:53.910" Title="Latex not formatted under review tab" Tags="|discussion|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1122" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1136" CreationDate="2012-05-07T03:02:40.257" Score="16" ViewCount="340" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please note that I searched on the keywords &quot;duplicate&quot; and &quot;exact-duplicate&quot; before posting this :-)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to be a point of pride for some that this site has hosted so many thousand Qs.  But this counter produces rather empty numbers since a great many of these Qs are duplicates.  Almost daily we receive new questions that are variants of &quot;How can I analyze data from survey rating items?&quot; or &quot;How should I choose predictors for my model?&quot;  To deal with this, should we...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...find a way to make the FAQ more prominent? &#xA;...prominently display links to keyword searches for the most popular terms, such as Likert and Variable-selection?&#xA;...ask people to affirm that they have read the FAQ and/or conducted a keyword search before allowing them to pose a Q?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that some people will object to anything that acts a disincentive to participation by new people.  But think about what this site is becoming when we allow these duplicates or near-duplicates to populate so much of it.  It makes it harder for the answers to stand out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2669" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T20:18:12.210" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T20:18:12.210" Title="How to stem the tide of duplicate Qs" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1122" CreationDate="2012-05-07T11:36:03.987" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is simple, however it is also an appeal for everyone -- rather giving the same answer again, use &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;close as an exact duplicate&lt;/a&gt; option or (if you can't) flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2012-05-07T11:36:03.987" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1124" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1125" CreationDate="2012-05-09T00:52:55.353" Score="9" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;I set a bounty of 50 points &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/27293/testing-for-trends-in-partial-proportional-odds-models&quot;&gt;on one of my questions last week&lt;/a&gt;. Unfortunately, it was never answered. After the bounty expired, shouldn't the points have come back to my account, since it was offered only if someone answered the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are non-claimed bounties lost forever, even if they are awarded to no one? It seems counter-intuitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6250" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-10-15T13:23:55.577" Title="Unclaimed bounty points: where did they go?" Tags="|support|reputation|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1124" CreationDate="2012-05-09T01:15:45.783" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;A link from our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq#bounty&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; was provided when you created the bounty:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do not award your bounty within 7 days (plus the grace period),&#xA;the highest voted answer created after the bounty started with at&#xA;least 2 upvotes will be awarded half the bounty amount. If there's no&#xA;answer meeting that criteria, the bounty is not awarded to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If&#xA;the bounty was started by the question owner, and the question owner&#xA;accepts an answer during the bounty period, and the bounty expires&#xA;without an explicit award – we assume the bounty owner liked the&#xA;answer they accepted and award it the full bounty amount at the time&#xA;of bounty expiration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, &lt;strong&gt;you will always give up the amount of reputation&#xA;specified in the bounty&lt;/strong&gt;, so if you start a bounty, be sure to follow&#xA;up and award your bounty to the best answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Emphasis added.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2012-05-09T01:15:45.783" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1122" CreationDate="2012-05-09T12:19:05.930" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments on questions are so regular I think it is reasonable to suggest the OP to search some of the prior questions on the site (of course in addition to closing the question if a duplicate is known).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might include re-tagging with more appropriate tags, which should change the list of related questions on the right hand side I believe, or being even more explicit (e.g. you should peruse the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/likert&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;likert&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;likert&lt;/a&gt; for similar questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course such comments can be taken in a negative light depending on inferred tone (whether malice was intended or not). Perhaps we can add to our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/771/1036&quot;&gt;library of helpful responses&lt;/a&gt; a response for such a situation. My first stab at a response is;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your question on &lt;code&gt;?X?&lt;/code&gt; is fairly broad, and has likely been covered in&#xA;  previous questions on the site. Have you perused the related questions&#xA;  on the site? See for instance &lt;code&gt;[tag:your-tag-here]&lt;/code&gt; and/or &lt;code&gt;[link to&#xA;  some search term](your link here)&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree it can be annoying, but it just seems to be another part of the community moderation in an attempt to up-keep the site. This isn't terribly helpful in deciding when such prodding should be undertaken, but I guess I will leave that to the better judgement of regular contributors to particular topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2012-05-09T12:19:05.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1127" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-09T14:51:22.730" Score="19" ViewCount="1198" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am only in my second week with this site and I have enjoyed many of the questions and answers and discussions but as I get to understand the purpose of the site and how it is being used, I have some concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The site provides experts in all disciplines prepared to answer technical questions.  The experts strive to provide the best possible answers.  My experience with Cross Validated is that there are a lot of smart people with specialized expertise in R, classification/machine learning and many other important applied areas in statistics.  This provides a great opportunity for someone who is stumped on a problem to get top-notch consulting advice for free.  So I ask whether this is really a good thing since it could take away work people who do professional consulting for a living.  Also are we encouraging laziness as someone who has a problem they find to be difficult might instead of thinking out the problem and doing their own research to find the solution decides it is much easier to raise the question here and just see all the great ideas poor out with practically no effort.  We even help them reformulate poorly posed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some students come here for free tutoring.  There seems to be an awareness here that this poses problems.  Students should study the course material and try to solve the problems themselves.  Cross Validated asks that these questions be labelled as homework and the approach to answering is to give guidance rather than a complete solution.  Nevertheless doesn't this also also encourage laziness as the student can just pose it here or in several places on StackExchange to get as much help as possible before doing any of the work on their own?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" OwnerDisplayName="Michael Chernick" LastEditorUserId="11032" LastEditDate="2012-05-09T18:32:25.233" LastActivityDate="2012-06-19T22:56:13.723" Title="Is Stackexchange a good idea?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="12" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1127" CreationDate="2012-05-09T14:59:12.127" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing that comes to mind is that this site doesn't really provide &quot;full service&quot; consulting - we answer conceptual questions, and leave it to the poster to do the more time consuming work (e.g. implementation, writing up the results, making it all into a coherent story for a manuscript). If we were full service consultants, and commanding a large hourly rate, we'd likely be doing all of that work as well, which makes it sort of fundamentally different in my opinion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saying that we provide free tutoring reflects a pretty broad definition of tutoring - many of the homework questions presented here are ones many of us can answer at a glance, so simply asking leading questions (which is generally how homework is approached) requires very little effort on our part, and, in my opinion is not close to as involved as actually tutoring someone. In the case where the poster doesn't have the background to understand the leading questions, the question sort of &quot;dies&quot; - if we were tutoring, that would be the time where we'd have to step back and review more basic concepts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4856" LastEditorUserId="4856" LastEditDate="2012-05-09T15:04:59.390" LastActivityDate="2012-05-09T15:04:59.390" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1127" CreationDate="2012-05-09T15:08:49.900" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I do not think this site can replace a consultant. It's more of pointing learners and other experts into the right direction and discussing with them. If you are concerned about career implications, the problem might be more that you help rivals for jobs and consultancy opportunities. But to compete with you with just the help of this site, they have to be already more or less in the same league. No company needing statistical consultancy will be able to just use this site instead, it might just help their resident expert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for laziness on the part of students, well, in my experience there are always ways anyway. They can write off from co-students or try to find the answers in textbook... If they post here either they are terribly lazy and people will notice and probably not give full answers (that's my experience) or they will format the question carefully, explain where they are stumped and get valuable advice from which they actually learn something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10524" LastActivityDate="2012-05-09T15:08:49.900" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1122" CreationDate="2012-05-09T16:38:27.977" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that when I start writing a question there is an automatic list of &quot;similar questions&quot; based on the words I use in my question.  This can be helpful in not duplicating questions when the association of my word to words in other posts is good but it doesn't always work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastActivityDate="2012-05-09T16:38:27.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1127" CreationDate="2012-05-09T17:48:47.600" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see any problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any site where people can learn will be targeted by the lazy as well as the diligent, the homework-answer-seekers as well as the professional and hobbiest. Nothing can be done about that except community self-policing. Which seems, in my opinion, to be remarkably effective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of stealing business from consultants, none of the questions I've asked over time have any budget to hire a consultant to answer. I'm a student and hobbiest in statistics, and if there were any budget for what I do, it would be for university classes or a new computer, not a statistical consultant. (Unless there were an absolute statistical expert in my area who for some charitable reason would tutor me for a fee I could afford.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also do my best to answer questions that I have learned about or have experience in. (I'm an Artificial Intelligence guy by training.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my answer is &quot;Yes&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1764" LastActivityDate="2012-05-09T17:48:47.600" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1127" CreationDate="2012-05-09T17:53:57.160" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I strongly agree with @Erik and @Macro, but I wanted to point out something else that is intended to answer your question in the title of this question: &lt;strong&gt;&quot;is Stackexchange a good idea?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I have a privileged view of what you are intending to say because of my background. I'm not a statistician myself and my background is astrophysics (I only have a Bs. Cs. and if everything goes ok, I'll be in grad school next month). However, here in Chile the college curriculum is in some ways way behind those of the top universities: in my case, &lt;strong&gt;we don't even have basic statistic courses&lt;/strong&gt;, so I've pretty much learned all by myself (reading books, papers, etc.). Think of my status: here in my area, only the professors with who I work have a working understanding of statistics. Everyone else thinks that statistics is some magic &quot;trick-bag&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of all of the above, I think I'm pretty much on the middle. In one hand, it is true that I'm not a professional statistician, but I think I can help with some topics that I've studied for the work I do. On the other hand, I also have used this site to get some advice or simply when I get stuck on something. However, there is something nicer that I found here: since I discovered this site two months ago, my knowledge on probability and statistics have improved enormously. I think that's the beauty of this site: it provides not just question and answers, but train of thoughts. I think that's a little different from consultancy, where you just give out a report citing sources and trying to put in simple words to your clients something that you did that in fact requieres a profound understanding on probability and statistics. If you hire a consultant is simply because of (a) you don't have the neccesary background to work a problem by yourself (or not have the time to learn it) or (b) you just need results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in this site that knowledge of the background is somewhat implicit (ok, very explicit in some cases), because you wouldn't get a lot of what is said here if you haven't studied or worked on the area. With this in mind you have two options when an answer to your problem pops out: (1) you try to understand an answer and, therefore, if you don't have the neccesary background you'll have to study it (which is not needed with a consultant around), (2) if you happen to understand what to do you can just take the reply and use it without knowing what you are doing (which is a common mistake in every area but this time, unlike with a consultant, you don't have a safe source to rely on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your point with students, well, I think you can never really avoid lazyness. You could say the same with problems solved in textbooks. I've seen a lot of people that when they see a problem set, they inmediately search on the web for the solution to the problem and when they find it, they just copy the solution don't even understanding what they are doing. However, as I said, here you are unlikely to find solutions. You are more likely to find train of thoughts and from there get to the solutions by yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my answer is yes: it is a &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9174" LastEditorUserId="9174" LastEditDate="2012-05-09T17:59:55.670" LastActivityDate="2012-05-09T17:59:55.670" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1127" CreationDate="2012-05-09T17:56:33.930" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;May rather be a comment, but there evolves a discussion here (which shouldn't happen anyways...) so my &quot;answers&quot; try to sort the different lines in the discussion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But I see plenty of people enter the site who are very naive in statistics but have a project at work that they need help with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what is their alternative? Usually not to ask the fully-grown statistician next door - I guess most people would do that rather than typing in the questions if they had the possibility. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the pro of this is that statistics knowledge is spead among people who do not have a statistician at hand. Also, sometimes people are told to go and find a statistician to consult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the naive questions: if you're coming from another field you may use a very different language than what is common in statistics. This may add a lot to the naive sound of a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4598" LastActivityDate="2012-05-09T17:56:33.930" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1127" CreationDate="2012-05-09T21:38:44.657" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;People are using it, ergo it is a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2012-05-09T21:38:44.657" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1127" CreationDate="2012-05-09T23:08:03.570" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Small chipping in: There were similar arguments as brought forth by @MichaelChernick when R started to gain momentum with version 1.0.0. I guess it's just a fundamental issue with community effort like open source software, open access journals, open data initiatives or community-driven open knowledge spaces as this one. Much has been written on what makes contributors tick and how commons influence for-profit competition, so I won't reiterate here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for me it is clear: A site like this serves the common good, one way or another. Reputation is the currency and fun and new insights the reward. That's why (most) of us probably do this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Background: I am an outside professionalist and editor of an open source journal and R contributor and here on cross validated. I don't see my work threatened. If anything, I feel like I learn a lot here that will benefit my clients and my work.      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8413" LastActivityDate="2012-05-09T23:08:03.570" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1122" CreationDate="2012-05-09T23:28:51.223" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of our &quot;sister sites&quot; in the SE network currently receive &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; more traffic and there may be lessons learned that we can transfer here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some that come to mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Judicious use of the &lt;code&gt;faq&lt;/code&gt; tag&lt;/strong&gt;. We don't appear to have a &lt;code&gt;faq&lt;/code&gt; tag. But, the math website has taken to marking &lt;em&gt;particularly common&lt;/em&gt; questions with &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faq&quot;&gt;this tag&lt;/a&gt; in order to facilitate quick identification of the most common duplicates. All such tagged questions also show up on a special tab to the right of the &quot;featured&quot; tab on their site. We could potentially use such an approach here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meta list to track major topics and the most common questions within each topic&lt;/strong&gt;. Again, this comes from the math site and I find it to be a pretty useful feature, as long as you know it exists. The thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1868/list-of-generalizations-of-common-questions&quot;&gt;List of Generalizations of Common Questions&lt;/a&gt; contains the generalized versions of the most common questions by topic. (They even have a &quot;statistics&quot; topic, though the questions there are closer to elementary probability.) I think if we wanted to do something similar on this site, we'd probably want to adapt it a bit, but we get &lt;em&gt;lots&lt;/em&gt; of repeat questions on linear regression, AN(C)OVA, Likert scales, basic time-series, etc. It would take some work on the front end to put together, but once started would be fairly easily updated. Note that each such question is also supposed to be marked &lt;code&gt;faq&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Searching on tags and keywords&lt;/strong&gt;. The tags can at least help narrow down the topic when searching for duplicates, but it's not easy, especially, e.g., if you're looking for something under &lt;code&gt;r&lt;/code&gt; or a similarly popular tag. The search facilities are pretty poor, in my opinion, but whuber and others have some nice tricks for squeezing as much out of them as possible. (&lt;strong&gt;Helpful hint&lt;/strong&gt;: Doing an &lt;em&gt;empty&lt;/em&gt; search via the search box reveals lots of handy options on how to narrow your search.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Google&lt;/strong&gt;. The built-in search facilities being what they are, often a good Google search can uncover a duplicate pretty quickly. One particularly useful feature is to enter &lt;code&gt;site:stats.stackexchange.com&lt;/code&gt; at the end of your search to limit the search to our domain. I've used this pretty often to find a duplicate for which I vaguely recall some feature (like an interesting phrase), but not the authors or title.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not see an easy solution to more rapidly acclimating new users. They all have different incentives and different experiences with technology. Some come seeking immediate help and wouldn't be bothered to look at the FAQ anyway. I fear that is a problem that will persist. Asking politely whether they've searched for duplicates can help, but ultimately I suspect the burden will be on the active members to identify duplicates and vote to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, I believe our most productive angle is to try to have some simple tools and procedures that accelerate our work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2970" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:38.337" LastActivityDate="2012-05-09T23:28:51.223" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1122" CreationDate="2012-05-10T02:34:39.667" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do see your point, but I guess it doesn't bother me as much as it does you.  I also suspect that it's pretty easy to overestimate the number of questioners who are 'lazy' and not scanning through enough of the suggested 'related questions', although there's no doubt that happens.  Moreover, I'm disinclined to vote to close questions that aren't egregious (ironically, I have done so several times over the last few days, though).  Among other things, I suspect you're right that it would become a disincentive.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that part of the issue here is that there is an unavoidable tension between the simple question-and-answer nature of the site, and the intention to have the site build up a repository of information over time.  Some of this is indicated by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt; of how CV sees itself; there's a lot of overlap between this site and other venues on the internet.  We want to build a lasting knowledge base, but a lot of new and one-time users will necessarily see this as a place to ask a simple question without thinking of those questions as something that gets stored for posterity.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, two strategies are appropriate.  I agree with @AndyW and others who suggest using comments that suggest other questions.  Setting aside the effect this has on the questioner, it's been tremendously helpful for me.  I can't count how many times I've gone to a question, and seen the comment '[this] question is pretty similar and has some really good answers', and then navigated over to the other question, and learned a lot more about the topic than whatever I would have said.  Again, maybe that questioner never goes there, but that doesn't bother me; maybe a subsequent person ends up stumbling across the link and does end up reading the good question with the comprehensive answers.  If nothing else, having lots of links pointing towards the best of CV helps Google to find the most helpful discussions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is definitely true that certain types of questions / issues come up over and over.  Since I only know 3 or 4 things about statistics, I often end up over time with lists of questions on just a few topics where I've given similar answers.  Eventually, I put together what I think of as my clearest and fullest statement on the issue.  Afterwards, when those questions still arise, I can give a perfunctory answer and link to where I've discussed the topic more thoroughly.  (I have also linked to other contributors' answers, of course, but I'm most familiar with what I've written.)  For me at least, having tried to answer a question several times helps the ideas 'gel' in my head--I may well not have been able to give my best answer the first time.  Furthermore, I think this process does tend to elevate better questions and answers over time, and is part of the resolution of the tension I mentioned.  I guess what I'm saying is that I think the process is actually fairly healthy and organic, even though I can appreciate the frustration in the interim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2012-05-10T02:34:39.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1138" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1139" CreationDate="2012-05-10T15:10:33.293" Score="4" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;This appears to be an issue in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/28086/how-to-draw-a-side-by-side-plot-mentioned-in-graphical-display-as-an-aid-to-ana&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.  Note that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/11196/kh-kim&quot;&gt;questioner&lt;/a&gt; has rep=1, but a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/11209/kh-kim&quot;&gt;person&lt;/a&gt; answering the question (inappropriately, it's a really comment responding to another comment) has the same name and flair, but with rep=36.  The writing style and content also implies to me that they are the same person.  I'm not sure that any harm is coming from this, but it's definitely weird, and maybe we should have some kind of policy (or maybe we already do, I don't know).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2012-05-10T15:14:55.147" Title="Does SE have a policy on people with multiple accounts?" Tags="|discussion|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1138" CreationDate="2012-05-10T15:14:23.257" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, we do: we try to keep single accounts.  When you notice a duplication (thank you!), please just flag a moderator for attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2012-05-10T15:14:23.257" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1127" CreationDate="2012-05-12T05:03:51.600" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Clients who have money find it more reasonable to just pay a statistician and be able to hold him/her accountable for the deliverable, and get it on the agreed time. The CV site provides a rough product, at best, that the OP may or may not use, at their own risk. One cannot always share the complete data set; the posts where the OPs would refer to the data on their webpages are not very frequent, so the answer will inevitably be incomplete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On top of these reasons against CV being a threat for professional consulting, the OP may or may not be able to discern a good answer from a lousy one if they don't have good enough clue about it to begin with. Professional statisticians are likely deliver concordant answers... except in situations when there's an insurmountable paradigm difference between Bayesians, data miners and/or mainstreamers, for the lack of better terminology. Voting scheme is fundamentally stupid: 10 voices of a rep-1 person are not worth 1 vote of whuber or Michael Chernick, but the system does not allow whuber's vote to be worth 10 points (which has a reverse wisdom, in the sense that whuber still provides professional rather than populist answers). Bad answers rarely receive good scores, but sometimes not-so-great answers receive higher scores than answers that I consider to be a much better fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember there was a passing discussion of the mailing list of the Statistical Consulting Section of ASA, and there was no sense of a threat coming from this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a way, the website works as an integrator/referer: a lot of my posts would be a reference to Wikipedia and an explanation, in my own words, how the Wikipedia material applies to the original question. It also works as a filter: the task of finding the right paper on arXiv would be absolutely daunting, but there may be somebody on the site who just read it, and can point to it. So it mostly saves the search time, rather than solves the problem fully; and most users are fine with that, and are able to take it from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastActivityDate="2012-05-12T05:03:51.600" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1143" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-12T22:40:10.827" Score="7" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/832/comments-that-are-actually-answers&quot;&gt;Comments that are actually answers&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that there are many examples of people providing partial answers or pointers in the comments to a question instead of attempting to answer the question. I find this practice confusing and detrimental to the organization of the site. Wouldn't the community prefer to have comments that answer parts of the question posted as proper answers instead. They could then be voted up or down and their contribution would be easier to assess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion is to emphasize this more within the community and the FAQs and to let the comments be just that: comments &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; a question or answer, not an attempt at answering the original question. It should be acceptable to give brief or partial answers only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another suggestion is to add a verification step when posting comments to the &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; question where the purpose of comments is made clear to the commenter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11195" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2012-05-12T22:40:10.827" Title="Why are people providing answers in comments?" Tags="|discussion|comment|answers|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2012-05-13T08:06:56.827" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1144" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1145" CreationDate="2012-05-15T01:55:57.283" Score="2" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I edit a question to add tags, when the question is re-posted, the tags are shuffled from the order in which they had appeared.  Is there some principle that governs the resulting order?  I can't fathom what it might be.  Maybe I'm making too much of this, but it's weird, and sometimes it might be helpful to put the tags in some specific order, such as having the most important tag first.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T19:20:42.777" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Is there any rhyme or reason in how the tags are ordered?" Tags="|support|status-bydesign|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1144" CreationDate="2012-05-15T11:42:18.697" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tags sort by popularity: see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/74593/166924&quot;&gt;this reply&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2012-05-15T11:42:18.697" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1097" CreationDate="2012-05-16T14:49:36.563" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me share some thoughts on this thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently dismissed one of your flag on a reply to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/631/standard-deviation-of-standard-deviation/640#640&quot;&gt;Standard deviation of standard deviation&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;You may have noticed that I added a personal message explaining why. Below is a copy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4zHxB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The incriminated post can be considered as a response as it specifically points to a reference that might not be easily found with naive Google queries, at least for someone totally new to the subject. Users coming across this thread may well find in this reply a first start. Some of the other responses on this thread, including yours, demonstrate that more technical points can be made. Now, whether this is a good response or not is a matter of voting, not flagging. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About &quot;barely more than a link&quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;List of possible reasons for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq#deletion&quot;&gt;post removal&lt;/a&gt; is headed with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Answers &lt;strong&gt;that do not fundamentally answer the question&lt;/strong&gt; may be removed  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis is mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site aims to build a collection of self-contained and sustainable responses to specific questions. &quot;Dangling&quot; links or pointers to ephemeral resources should be avoided; link to authoritative references are to be preferred (I'm not saying that Wikipedia falls under this category). If a reply correctly points to a perennial source (that's the case for Wikipedia), and answers the question in an unambiguous manner, then I do not see why it would not be judged as a &lt;em&gt;valid response&lt;/em&gt;. If users do not consider it as a &lt;em&gt;good response&lt;/em&gt;, it is likely it won't attract many upvotes. (We even have badges for highly contrasted votes on question and answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I for one prefer more elaborated replies, even if they are built around an external reference (when it is appropriately quoted). But I am not the only user on this site, and other users may express a different opinion on what constitutes a good response, when to vote up, etc. Let's go for it: community voting is not perfect, but it certainly helps to filter good replies. If you feel that an answer has low quality, you can leave a comment and/or propose a better response, and express your opinion with your vote. I hope this point was made clear by @whuber in his first reply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case, the supplied answer (from a very active user in the first 6 months of CV life) seems acceptable, yet it might be improved. Users with 2k rep can edit posts, by the way. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq#editing&quot;&gt;Community edits&lt;/a&gt; are one way to enhance the quality of this site. In all cases, community voting is the way to regulate a thread or moderate older ones to account for new replies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2012-05-16T14:49:36.563" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1127" CreationDate="2012-05-16T19:23:32.630" Score="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your notion of stealing business from consultants is predicated on the weird but commonly-held notion that the work is theirs to begin with.  To me, that's akin to saying that people who have potluck dinners are stealing business from caterers.  It's not their business in the first place but rather a task that is outsourced to them when it's convenient, and any caterer who blames potlucks for their lousy business probably has much greater problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The very first step into commercial food provision entails a very significant amount of work - finding a trustworthy company, agreeing on contract terms, payment method, coming up with the cash, conveying accurately what you want done, etc.  That initial cost gets easier to swallow as the scale of the project grows, but for small questions it's absurd.  Potlucks mostly just need a venue (conveniently provided for us by Atwood and Co.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Potlucks also have all kinds of benefits that aren't really available in the market - a greater variety of dishes is possible (some good, some bad); the satisfaction of human connection, community, reputation; an opportunity for people who can't or won't be caterers (which can be for many reasons other than skill) to share their talents; cooking for the simple joy of it.  I bet most professional cooks love potlucks - it provides an opportunity to experiment outside of work, get new ideas from others, cast aside the restrictions that constrain commercial cooking, and do something they enjoy in a low-pressure environment.  Is there a risk for freeloading?  Sure - but the community can regulate that without contracts and legal enforcement of obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bottom line is that this site provides something that consultants do not, which is low-friction, zero-cost access to a diverse body of self-validating experts who do this for the love of it, with great potential for learning, reciprocity, pride, community.  Whether this site exists or not, that's a service that can't be bought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastActivityDate="2012-05-16T19:23:32.630" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1149" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1150" CreationDate="2012-05-17T23:59:32.693" Score="15" ViewCount="332" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking of this exchange here &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/28642/finding-the-best-two-predictor-variables-used-conjointly-and-levels-of-each/28648#comment53795_28648&quot;&gt;Finding the best two predictor variables used conjointly, and levels of each&lt;/a&gt; - both in the comments on the original question (and now in the edits to the question) and to my answer.  Obviously a good approach as individuals is to stay calm and keep away, but how should we act as a community?  I'd like to see a clear message that this sort of behavior is not welcome on the site.  But having said that the question is clearly within scope and so should not be closed on any of the usual grounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I was surprised to find not much discussion on rudeness in the meta, am I maybe looking in the wrong place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2012-05-20T17:15:36.327" Title="What's the best thing to do about rudeness in questions / comments?" Tags="|discussion|etiquette|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1149" CreationDate="2012-05-18T00:44:41.307" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is heavily downvoted, and I think anybody who has seen it would think twice before putting time into answering additional questions from the OP (assuming he ever comes back to ask all of us idiots another question).  That's probably enough of a message.  That kind of asinine behavior is in violation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq#etiquette&quot;&gt;our etiquette&lt;/a&gt;, so I'd say it is indeed fair game for downvotes or closure (whether or not that's a listed reason - the software guides how we manage the community but shouldn't dictate).  You unfortunately caught the brunt of the nastiness, but it looks to me like the system is working basically as planned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2012-05-18T00:44:41.307" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1151" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1159" CreationDate="2012-05-18T17:25:14.223" Score="10" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that deleting one's own question is not encouraged on this site but I'm curious about this situation. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/28740/linear-regression-lm-predict-lwr-upr&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; prompted this inquiry. This began as a simple question about how to interpret the &lt;code&gt;predict.lm()&lt;/code&gt; function in R. As Michael Chernick and I continued to question the original poster to get clarification, it turns out he was using OLS to model a proportion, which is usually a poor approximation. After Michael and I both agreed that he, at least, needed to transform the response, a new line of questioning began. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, the question was pretty much unrelated to the original question, and I suggested that he start a new question and consider deleting this one - is this the correct recommendation? He's surely no longer interested in the question he was originally asking and there were no answers, although I suppose a future person &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be interested (although in this case simply reading the help page would've done the job). How about when there are answers to the question but they are now obsolete given the modification? Perhaps in that case we would just start a new question but keep the old one? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; It turns out the original poster did delete the question per my suggestion. My question still stands - was this bad advice? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4856" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="What to do when the original question is transformed considerably after getting clarification?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1154" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-18T21:19:32.710" Score="7" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've asked a question in the main forum that got one answer, and it's been followed up and improved via the comments section (there was an initial downgrade due to a poor title which was my fault and a subsequent upvote). In short it has now reached 11 comments after the initial question and answer (in part to avoid answering my own question which I figured was inappropriate). I have now been given the option to take this to chat, and my question is; is this the correct/polite thing to do for this site (I'm very mindful to try and obey the etiquette of the site but I don't have the appropriate background so I am not always getting things right). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the other person that is commenting is contributing more (as they have a far superior knowledge of the subject than me) and is in a different timezone (US to UK) I'm not sure if this is the best way forward and I wouldn't want to burden the other person. I would greatly appreciate any advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many thanks, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8812" LastActivityDate="2012-05-24T15:13:11.780" Title="At the 11 comments mark do I need to move my question to chat?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1154" CreationDate="2012-05-18T21:23:47.993" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Take the offer as a suggestion&lt;/strong&gt; rather than an obligation.  Some things to note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can continue to post more comments, but the system may automatically do some nasty things once 20 or more comments appear.  (I believe the thread will automatically become &quot;community wiki,&quot; for instance.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you want to take advantage of the chat room offer, please do so at the first opportunity.  The option will not always be repeated and (so far) mods do not have the capability to migrate a comment thread into chat.  The automated offer is the only way to accomplish this.  (Mods and high-rep users can create chat rooms any time, but the comments will not be migrated into the chat thread when they do that.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Be aware that some people are behind firewalls that inhibit chatting.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The site does prefer to limit the amount of commenting, so you should favor the chat mechanism if an extended discussion looks likely.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2012-05-18T21:23:47.993" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1154" CreationDate="2012-05-18T21:25:32.617" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me there is no hard rule about when you should move something to chat (e.g. after the 11 comment mark) but I can tell you my perspective as someone who enters a question to see a long thread of comments-- &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The common sense approach would tell me that you should move it to chat if you don't see the back-and-forth ending in the very near future, since this would end up leading to potentially dozens of comments. In that situation a new person entering the question would need to read through a long list of comments before they can figure out what is going on. To me personally, that is off-putting and will make me less likely to participate in the question at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing to note: if the thread of comments/chat ends up leading to a useful conclusion and/or a significant change to the question at hand, you should consider making corresponding edits to the question, so new people entering don't have to read through the entire discussion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4856" LastEditorUserId="4856" LastEditDate="2012-05-18T21:31:26.727" LastActivityDate="2012-05-18T21:31:26.727" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1157" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1158" CreationDate="2012-05-19T02:47:37.550" Score="1" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comment dialogue under the OP in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/28601/how-to-run-two-way-anova-on-data-with-neither-normality-nor-equality-of-variance&quot;&gt;How to run two-way ANOVA on data with neither normality nor equality of variance in R?&lt;/a&gt; would be much more clear and relevant if the comments made by myself and Henrik were moved to below my answer, which is where the discussion originally took place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was migrated from SO and merged with its duplicate. I had to repost my answer (as described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1153/why-was-my-answer-not-migrated-with-a-question&quot;&gt;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1153/why-was-my-answer-not-migrated-with-a-question&lt;/a&gt;) But the original comments were put under the OP, and now the two exchanges are mixed up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1381" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2012-05-20T10:42:55.443" Title="Need help un-mixing mixed up comments in a migrated question" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1157" CreationDate="2012-05-19T20:39:47.170" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have moved four comments (you $\leftrightarrow$ @Henrik) beneath your response.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(Sorry for the inconvenience, we can't do more.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="930" LastEditDate="2012-05-20T10:42:55.443" LastActivityDate="2012-05-20T10:42:55.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1151" CreationDate="2012-05-19T21:08:57.883" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as no answer was provided to the question (but see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/25088/150510&quot;&gt;How can I delete my post on Stack Overflow?&lt;/a&gt;), I think there's no real problem if the OP deletes his question and asks a new one; and it is not forbidden to delete one's question. However, no cross-reference can be made with the initial post, and comments will be lost for others (at least users &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/109329/150510&quot;&gt;below 10k rep&lt;/a&gt; won't see them). If the comments thread has demonstrated that the question, as originally posed, was really off the mark, then it is probably good to start a fresh question, and maybe summarize the main points raised in those comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also possible to simply update the question in case there were some missing piece of information, or actual comments suggested the original question should undergo major revision. This way, we can always refer to comments and post revisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question is really about recording a trace of comments, and I don't think they are worth to be kept if the question turns out to be completely different in light of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I think you were of good advice by suggesting to start a new thread there.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2012-05-19T21:08:57.883" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1160" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1162" CreationDate="2012-05-20T14:33:26.580" Score="6" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've found some information on the meta about merging tags by proposing synonyms, but what about the case where the asker of a question creates a tag whose necessity is debatable? If this does overlap with the content of a previous thread I'd appreciate a link (I looked and couldn't find one)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example that made me think of this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/28630/linear-mixed-effects-modeling-with-twin-study-data&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, where the tag &lt;code&gt;twin&lt;/code&gt; has been created. This tag isn't really statistical and will most likely never be used again. I suppose it could be merged with something like &lt;code&gt;multivariate&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;clustered&lt;/code&gt;. In looking at the list of tags, there are many other examples like this. What is the recommended action here?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4856" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2012-05-20T17:37:15.660" Title="What to do with unnecessary tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1149" CreationDate="2012-05-20T17:15:36.327" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to second what others have said here, which is that Macro and you behaved with admirable maturity in the face of this situation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do think it's perfectly acceptable to close or delete a question [answer, comment] if someone's behavior is obnoxious.  I think this may be sufficient sometimes to chastise someone and get them to follow simple courtesy.  (I actually loosely remember an example in which I flagged someone's comment, it was deleted, and the poster was more appropriate thereafter, but I wouldn't be able to find the thread again now.)  However, that won't always work.  The individual in question seems dedicated to behaving this way (you can check his other question, and his website).  Should these posts have been closed, I suspect more nastiness, possibly via alternate accounts registered under pseudonyms would follow.  Unfortunately, the nature of the internet is such that this is destined to occur occasionally, and there's no ultimate solution besides walking away and ignoring it.  Thus, I think @MattParker is right that the system worked basically as well as can be hoped.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2012-05-20T17:15:36.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1160" CreationDate="2012-05-20T17:37:15.660" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tags that aren't used by at least 1 other question within 6 months are deleted according to SE policy (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/privileges/create-tags&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2012-05-20T17:37:15.660" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1163" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1167" CreationDate="2012-05-23T18:30:40.447" Score="6" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just asked the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/29025/how-to-label-a-constant-y-axis-in-a-grid-of-plots&quot;&gt;How to label a constant y-axis in a grid of plots?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically, it is about 'visualizing data', and I expect that cv.SE users would have good answers, but I am not sure if it is actually on topic since it deals specifically with labeling a figure - perhaps it would be more on topic at &lt;a href=&quot;https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;graphicdesign.SE&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1381" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:46:19.653" LastActivityDate="2012-05-24T13:42:52.110" Title="Is a question about formatting a figure on topic here?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1164" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-23T19:35:45.740" Score="3" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I may have partly solved my own query in the main forum (another person asked me to come back with a QQ plot in comments and the QQ plot suggests a normal distribution) and to find out if I have understood this (I don't have a great statistics background but I've done some research) I would like to paste the plot which I've put together in Excel straight into the question (1 answer with 11 follow-up comments). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can data be pasted into a comment or do I have to answer my own question so that I can paste the data in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an easy way to do this? The reason why I ask is that I have copied spreadsheet data in to questions in the past I haven't got the formatting right and as a result it has been difficult to read the data. I have tried looking through the markdown editing help and have not really understood what I am supposed to do (but I am figuring that you can't just copy and paste in?). With regard to images (which essentially is what the chart/plot will be) can you paste these in directly if there is no link behind them (the advice implies that you need to add a ! in front and then a link?). I apologise for the basic nature of the question but I am just keen to do things appropriately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many thanks, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8812" LastActivityDate="2012-05-23T19:56:25.387" Title="Advice when regarding pasting data into questions and can it be done in comments or just answers?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1164" CreationDate="2012-05-23T19:48:50.733" Score="4" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Comments don't support much formatting.  Data and images will not work well with them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's probably best to post a reply to your own question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Spreadsheet stuff comes with tabs and extra spaces that confound the markup here.  One solution is to paste from the spreadsheet into a word processor, convert all tabs to spaces, and then paste that into a reply.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It believe you need a higher reputation to post images.  As a workaround you can upload an image on the Web and include a link to it in your post.  A higher-rep user will likely come along to turn that link into an embedded image.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2012-05-23T19:56:25.387" LastActivityDate="2012-05-23T19:56:25.387" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="893" CreationDate="2012-05-23T20:51:42.823" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NddzD.png&quot; alt=&quot;Help this community grow!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:10.070" LastActivityDate="2012-05-23T20:51:42.823" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-05-23T20:51:42.823" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1163" CreationDate="2012-05-23T21:36:34.093" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's overlap, of course.  I mean to cast no aspersions on our graphic design site--I wasn't even aware of its existence and I'm sure its users are wise and experienced--but in general I would actively avoid advice from graphic designers concerning the design of statistical graphics unless they had statistical credentials as well.  And even then I would be cautious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(My favorite example of how far wrong you can go is Bounford's &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0823015726&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Digital Diagrams&lt;/a&gt; book.  Written by a well-established graphic designer and promoting itself as &quot;effective design and presentation of statistical information,&quot; this book consistently provides hundreds of examples of everything Cleveland, Tufte, Wainer, &lt;em&gt;et al.&lt;/em&gt; have shown to be truly awful approaches: an atlas of chartjunk and other distracting embellishments of all kinds guaranteed to obscure and warp any information that might have been present in the data.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, when questions come along even about seemingly trivial elements of the design of statistical (or scientific) visualizations, I believe they are very much on topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vqiJ8.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="1381" LastEditDate="2012-05-23T21:47:31.480" LastActivityDate="2012-05-23T21:47:31.480" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1163" CreationDate="2012-05-24T03:07:19.507" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm really going to have to agree with @whuber here. I think asking graphic designers who lack much statistical knowledge is to court danger.  (Although I will acknowledge that I don't know anything about the SE site, and they may have contributors with statistical expertise.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I did want to add is that such a question (albeit not yours, I just checked) may do well on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;.  Here, we occasionally get questions about how to do something with software (typically in &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt;, but possibly using other languages) that have little actual statistical content.  If the question is &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; about how to get software to do something, I think it may be best asked elsewhere.  Whereas if the bulk of the question has statistical content, and the software how-to component is the lesser half, I think it primarily belongs here.  (Since your question squarely falls in the latter category--it's not about how to get the software to do anything--I think it fits here well.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2012-05-24T13:42:52.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1030" CreationDate="2012-05-24T13:53:15.670" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/d64R1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Help this community grow!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:10.070" LastActivityDate="2012-07-18T20:03:54.567" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-05-24T13:53:15.670" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1154" CreationDate="2012-05-24T15:13:11.780" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been in this situation on several other SE sites, usually not meta (the meta seem to be more tolerant of many comments, as they are often discussions anyway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only system initiated action that I am certain of is that the comments will be collapsed at a certain point, for brevity. In other words, the first n are displayed, and the remainder are visible only after clicking a system generated &quot;more&quot; or similar. Then these are uncollapsed and visible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been prompted by the system to move to chat, for comments on answers, but that was a very long time ago, and I haven't found an FAQ on meta SO for details. Etiquette seems to be for someone to suggest a transition to chat, particularly if each comment is multiple lines and there are five or more comments. So many comments on questions truly is to be avoided, as it makes it confusing and tiresome to read all of them before answering, sifting through the relevant and the less so. For comments on answers, it is less of a problem, but still should be limited. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider this option, if possible: Delete any of your prior comments, if they were truly extraneous or mistakes, e.g. ooops, I mean this, and replaced by a second comment that corrects and replaces the earlier one. That can happen easily enough due to the five minute time limit on comment edits. Just as long as the flow of the thread is not broken by the comment deletion (you can delete using the little x at the end of your comment), that may be helpful for preventing a trail of comment debris. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also helps avoid the need to move to chat. Nothing wrong with chat, but as someone else mentioned, that is not always possible for every user, depending on firewall status, possibly other factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5505" LastActivityDate="2012-05-24T15:13:11.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1172" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1173" CreationDate="2012-05-25T20:29:57.623" Score="12" ViewCount="471" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is related to, but not a duplicate of, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12/how-should-we-deal-with-obvious-homework-questions&quot;&gt;How should we deal with obvious homework questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Homework questions have certain characteristics - vague, sample data, inclusion of instructions meant for the student, labeled parts, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it appropriate to go ahead and re-tag such questions as homework based on such clues and/or subjective assessment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have this on a recent question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/29168/1381&quot;&gt;How to calculate expected value and standard deviation if I have 100 values divided into 15 groups (normal distribution)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1381" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2012-09-29T01:38:04.137" Title="Should we tag questions that smell like homework?" Tags="|discussion|homework|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1172" CreationDate="2012-05-25T20:33:37.147" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's fine to retag (without comment) as long as it is &lt;em&gt;perfectly clear&lt;/em&gt; that the problem is homework.  In my experience, around half of the questions the community initially believes to be homework turn out, in fact, not to be so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Supplement&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us bear in mind the description in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; wiki excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A routine question from a textbook, course, or test used for a class or self-study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking a somewhat selfish view--that is, with an attitude of discerning what is best for our &lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt;, rather than the original proposer (O.P.)--it seems that &amp;quot;routine&amp;quot; is the operative word.  (Sometimes we can identify the source of a question--but not in a reliable or consistent manner--and it would be presumptuous to suppose we can tell what the purpose of a question is in the mind of its asker!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Routine&amp;quot; questions differ from those we are really interested in for several reasons, including&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They tend not to have any specific application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If any data are included, they are artificial (and often cannot be further explained by the O.P., who knows nothing of their genesis).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They tend not to have any &lt;em&gt;context&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Loading the site with a gallery of such questions potentially diminishes the value of searches and other uses of the site as a reference and ongoing resource.  &lt;strong&gt;Tagging routine questions with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; is one way to help future researchers to get great answers to the questions they may face.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These considerations take us away from having to guess why somebody has posed a question and move us toward &lt;em&gt;evaluating the question on its own merits.&lt;/em&gt;  I will immediately grant that this does not resolve the issue of what constitutes &amp;quot;homework,&amp;quot; because one reader's &amp;quot;routine&amp;quot; question could be difficult or unusual for another.  I suspect, though, that some questions will be so &lt;em&gt;evidently&lt;/em&gt; routine that we should not hesitate to tag them accordingly.  Some of the indications of &amp;quot;routineness&amp;quot; would include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question has appeared in almost the same form on a previous thread and has a similar solution that requires straightforward substitutions of numerical values in its statement.  (Example: almost any question calling for using the Normal distribution to convert between z values and p values.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question is entirely theoretical, without any applied context.  (Consider whether to migrate such questions to the Math.SE site.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Solutions are readily available elsewhere on the Web by means of an &amp;quot;obvious&amp;quot; search.  (&amp;quot;Obviousness,&amp;quot; once again, is personal, but I would claim that a search based, say, solely on a question's tags which turns up a solution in the first page would qualify as &amp;quot;obvious.&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question is expressed in a test-like format, such as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1399/&quot;&gt;multiple choice&lt;/a&gt; or to fill in a blank.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The language is imperious, as in &amp;quot;Find the answer,...,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;State why,...,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Prove that,&amp;quot; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In such cases, readers (with sufficient reputation) ought to consider immediately adding the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2012-09-26T20:44:47.610" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="832" CreationDate="2012-05-26T06:06:21.153" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems as though @Parbury and @cardinal tried to address this problem over a year ago, in April 2011. It was not resolved, and @Cardinal politely tried to broach the matter again, more recently. However, that question was closed as a duplicate, and referred back here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't believe that conversion to Community Wiki is a good idea. The answer given by  @mbq (and the answer comments that followed) address that adequately already. Situations like this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/832/comments-that-are-actually-answers#comment2366_832&quot;&gt;Comments that are actually answers&lt;/a&gt; need to be resolved though. Otherwise, there will be more of this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/832/comments-that-are-actually-answers#comment2368_832&quot;&gt;Comments that are actually answers&lt;/a&gt; which benefits no one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My suggestion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Whenever one notices a good answer to a question in the question comments, and then notices it again the next day/week/year (no, that isn't well quantified, I realize), one should feel free, though not obliged, to use that comment as the basis for an answer. It would be appropriate to mention the user name of the person who made the comment initially. The answer should be written up decently, not just a copy and paste or a link. Expanding on it a little would be nice, but not mandatory. Community policy should then be to up vote said answer if it is worthy. Voting should not be biased by the fact that the original idea was provided by someone else. There should be no shame brought to bear on the person wrote up the answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators don't have time to fix everything. And points are often earned in far less productive ways! While there are not a large number of situations as the one described by @naught101 in my second paragraph, they &lt;strong&gt;will&lt;/strong&gt; accrue over time. This course of action will prevent future build-up. Perhaps it will have the secondary effect of encouraging users to post answers rather than question comments. The goal is to encourage the users who have a good answer in mind, but are hesitant due to shyness, or awareness of the time required to write up a decent quality answer. I feel both, quite often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No, I am not being quarrelsome! I strongly agree with this:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/832/comments-that-are-actually-answers#comment1586_832&quot;&gt;Comments that are actually answers&lt;/a&gt; as the reason there is such an abundance of comments that fully answer questions. I mostly attribute that behavior to the fact that users of this website, and many other StackExchange sites, have uncommonly high levels of moral and intellectual integrity. &lt;strong&gt;Don't any of you deny it! You know it is true.&lt;/strong&gt;  Well, &quot;moral integrity&quot; is an overstatement. &lt;strong&gt;Better&lt;/strong&gt;: A sense of fairness, or merit-based preference. Possibly a tendency toward modesty, maybe antipathy for the seeming-appearance of &quot;glory hogging&quot; behavior. I have some basis for my conjecture. It is empirical, personal observation, I admit. Given the difficulty in quantifying human behavior, I am willing to go out on a limb. There are Q&amp;amp;A sites where network homophily and contagion (not that there is anything wrong with that, for a more &quot;social&quot; site...) is much more in evidence than SE. On such sites, I have observed that comments on questions are few and far between. Incidence of comments that answer the question are close to nil. This is true, despite the fact that comments on questions are allowed. They aren't implicitly discouraged by site policy, either. (It becomes problematic when questions are not closed, as dozens of answers pile up, over time.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5505" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2012-05-26T06:06:21.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1175" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1192" CreationDate="2012-05-28T22:34:11.313" Score="13" ViewCount="248" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have several times used the search function to see if someone has previously asked a question I am interested in, with no positive result. I then start asking my question and then very quickly the suggested 'Questions that may already have your answer' finds more or less the answers I was looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tool seems really well implemented, I like that it keeps updating as you type so you can see instantly the different results obtained by changing words (useful for me since I come from a field that uses some non-standard terminology so I'm always fishing for the correct term).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess my question is why is the search function so clunky in comparison? I've simply given up using search and now launch straight into asking a question, even when I'm sure the question exists somewhere, just because it is easier to find answers that way.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10354" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Does anyone use 'search'?" Tags="|discussion|search|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1176" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1177" CreationDate="2012-05-30T22:31:02.497" Score="9" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd imagine this information is somewhere but I looked for a while and couldn't find anything in the FAQ or in a previous question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have any information about how exactly Community decides which posts to bump and when? I got the idea that it bumps posts that have no accepted answers but beyond that its algorithm is a mystery to me. The reason I asked is that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/10718/steels-method-for-nonparametric-multiple-comparison-with-control&quot;&gt;most recent&lt;/a&gt; bump seemed to me to be a pretty low quality post that only lacks an &quot;accepted&quot; answer because the OP abandoned the question and never accepted a pretty definitive answer (although the 'definitive answer' is pretty vacuous since the OP could've just googled in the first place to find this out, which leads me back to the 'low quality post' comment). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is it just a random selection from the list of questions without accepted answers or is it something more sophisticated? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4856" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="How exactly does 'Community' randomly decide to bump posts?" Tags="|discussion|community|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1176" CreationDate="2012-05-31T12:03:58.773" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, all the info about the SE engine itself is on The Meta, i.e. &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;meta.stackoverflow.com&lt;/a&gt;. An answer to your question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/99690/148927&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2012-05-31T12:03:58.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1178" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1179" CreationDate="2012-05-31T16:29:12.347" Score="1" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have observed many times that people ask questions that have the specificity to be solved by a Google search.  Yet they come to us and ask us.  Often it could be fro a reference on a statistical method.  Sometimes I refer them to Google and at other times I will answer the question after finding the answer through a Google search and people will reward me with reputation points for that! Why are we relied on so much in situations where the OP could easily get the answer through Google or Wikipedia?  Is it just that we older folks haven't got the hang of search engines yet?  Do people not understand how quickly google can come up with thousands of references of which many of the early ones will be very useful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastActivityDate="2012-05-31T17:40:54.340" Title="Why does it seem that many people here don't know how to use Google" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1178" CreationDate="2012-05-31T17:40:54.340" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this question was meant to be humorous Michael, but I'll take it as a serious question. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've noticed this a lot and I tend to ignore questions like this and let someone else handle it because I think at least some of those who post such questions are just being lazy. Occasionally I'll flatly say something like &quot;Have you looked at the help file&quot; or &quot;Have you googled '....'&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Giving these posters the benefit of the doubt and supposing they're not just being lazy, I'd attribute this phenomena to people not being fluent enough with statistical terminology (or not confident with their fluency) to correctly search or, if they have found something, to determine if this is the thing they should've been looking for. They are relying on someone who knows more about statistics to give it their &quot;seal of approval&quot; that this is indeed what they should be looking for. I don't think this is such a bad thing, since this, overall, leads to better use of statistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4856" LastActivityDate="2012-05-31T17:40:54.340" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1151" CreationDate="2012-06-01T16:49:51.393" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've struggled with this on some of my questions. Seems like there are three choices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Totally edit and rework the original question, perhaps keeping the original question text at the end of the newly reworked question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Keep the original question, but edit it to say something like &quot;Lesson learned, mistaken question, see the new question at &lt;strong&gt;_&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. Make a new question and link to it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Delete the original question and make a new one.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One question for those among us who know how things actually work around here: If a question is deleted, do people who got credit for answers or up-voting retain that credit? I don't think deleting the original is a good idea if those who participated lose credit for their efforts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that I've thought about it for a while, I think the best answer is option #2. Create a new, better question, then edit the old question to put a cavaet at the top and a link to the new question. That preserves the &quot;lesson learned&quot; aspect so people can see how the question was mistaken and learn, it preserves the work of those who contributed to the thread, and it gives a clean break so the improved question can be more clear and valuable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The old question remains for when you search, but won't be upvoted, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1764" LastActivityDate="2012-06-01T16:49:51.393" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1181" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-01T18:53:16.687" Score="3" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed a rather odd phenomena with the site on a number of occasions: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I'm posting an answer for the first time, the draft is continually saved and so, if the page happens to crash while I'm posting the answer (which happens rather often for me, for whatever reason), then I can just go &quot;back&quot;, and pick up where I left off. However, when I'm editing an existing answer, and the same thing happens, my progress has not been saved and I have to start all over again. This can be pretty frustrating if the edit involved a lot of formatting. What I've been doing up to this point has been to paste my edits into a .txt file and paste them all in at once when I'm finished. This works fine but seems to be a somewhat cumbersome workaround for a wonky problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone else noticed this before? Does anyone know why the site doesn't maintain the copy the same way it does when you're originally posting the question? Is there any way to save your progress along the way without posting the edits? I've found that if you edit 10 or more times then the post changes to a community wiki, so saving the edit periodically may not be such a hot idea if you want reputation points for the answer (plus it would be rather confusing for someone coming upon the post while you're halfway through editing it). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;p.s. sorry if this was discussed elsewhere - I checked before posting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4856" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2012-06-01T18:55:39.263" LastActivityDate="2012-06-01T18:55:39.263" Title="When the page crashes while you're posting/editing an answer" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1127" CreationDate="2012-06-02T13:10:13.300" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Students should study the course material and try to solve the problems themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's notion is wrong. The point of university isn't to teach students to be able to solve problems by looking in a lecture script or their notes from the lecture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;University is supposed to teach students to learn something that will help them in their future lives. &#xA;In today's world using the internet is a central part of learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I do homework and have a problem with some strange R syntax and spend an half an hour trying to figure it out then it makes no sense to stay offline and reread &quot;course material&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a perfect world I should be able to solve my R synatx problem by running a Google search and finding some explanation of how that specific R function works. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that approach doesn't work it makes sense to condense the syntax question to a question on stackexchange. It helps my with my problem.&#xA;It however also makes the internet a better place. If another person has problems with the same syntax he can now find my question on stackexchange with answers to the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3807" LastEditorUserId="3807" LastEditDate="2012-06-03T19:35:26.293" LastActivityDate="2012-06-03T19:35:26.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1127" CreationDate="2012-06-04T09:11:18.130" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can only speak for myself, but I think stats.SE is a great idea for a third category of people you might not have considered as such: self-learners!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a Computer Scientist without any background in statistics, and I am learning lots on my own as part of my recent efforts to get into machine learning. &#xA;I can hardly go to a consultant when I don't understand a description in a stats book, or when one of my toy algorithms isn't behaving as it should. I don't have a practical problem I need solving, just trying to understand some concept/algorithm.&#xA;On the other hand, I'm also not a student who has a study group of peers and/or professors I might discuss my issues with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should someone like me do? Give up machine learning and all things statistics and leave it to the consultants? :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10040" LastActivityDate="2012-06-04T09:11:18.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1151" CreationDate="2012-06-04T18:05:21.657" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there's been some good discussion here.  Let me add 1 small point / suggestion.  If the original question were kept (e.g., @Wayne's option #2), the community moderator will keep popping up the question from time to time, which can be kind of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1176/how-exactly-does-community-randomly-decide-to-bump-posts&quot;&gt;annoying&lt;/a&gt;.  If the question constitutes a misunderstanding that people may make again in the future, and the comments lead to a sufficient clarification, then those comments could be summarized as an answer and the answer marked as 'community wiki'.  In this way, the clarification will become more salient to someone who stumbles across the post in the future, the post will remain as a permanent record (as we prefer), you wouldn't be stealing someone else's credit, and it wouldn't keep popping up just because there isn't an 'answer'.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2012-06-04T18:05:21.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1185" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1209" CreationDate="2012-06-04T22:26:43.210" Score="3" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; The grace period on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/29218/inference-on-a-probabilistic-graphical-model-with-observed-continuous-variable&quot;&gt;this bounty&lt;/a&gt; ended around around 7 hours ago with no automatic award per the rule mentioned in the original post so I'm wondering if there is (a) a significant lag between the time the grace period ends and the time the bounty is auto-awarded and/or (b) a glitch in the bounty auto-award system. Does anybody know from experience?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I've edited the title to reflect this modified aim - this reflects somewhat of a shift in the direction of the question but I didn't think it was different enough to warrant creation of a new question&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Original post:&lt;/strong&gt; I recently answered a question with a bounty on it and the owner of the bounty (also the asker of the question) accepted my answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/29218/inference-on-a-probabilistic-graphical-model-with-observed-continuous-variable&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. There are no other answers to the question but the owner did not manually award me the bounty. Now, I've found in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/56789/bounty-award-after-accepted-answer&quot;&gt;this thread on meta SO&lt;/a&gt; and in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq#bounty&quot;&gt;the bounty FAQ&lt;/a&gt; the following: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;If ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the bounty was started by the question owner&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the question owner accepts an answer during the bounty period&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the bounty award period expires without an explicit award&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... then we assume the question owner liked your answer when they accepted it, and it gets the full amount of the bounty &lt;strong&gt;at time of bounty expiration&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bolded part (which was bolded in the thread I'm quoting) is what my question is about. The bounty expired a couple of hours ago and meets the three conditions but was not awarded to me at the time of expiration. I'm not worried because it appears I will get the bounty after the grace period, but I guess what I'm asking is: was this an error, or was the poster on Meta SO taking the FAQ material too literally? I'd also be curious to know what would happen if the bounty owner were to unaccept my answer now - are all bets off or does it only matter that it was accepted at the time the bounty closed? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4856" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Is this a bug or is there a large lag between the time the grace period ends and the time a bounty is automatically awarded?" Tags="|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1185" CreationDate="2012-06-05T03:15:42.540" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing the poster on meta was taking the FAQ too literally.  What would be the point of giving the bounty owner a grace period otherwise?  Incidentally, the same thing happened to me a while ago, and the bounty was given to me by SE after the grace period ended--not by the bounty owner.  (In addition, I don't think it was right at 24 hours--maybe a couple of days later--I don't really remember.)   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the OP unaccepted your answer, I'm not sure what would happen.  As I read the FAQ, the owner would lose the points, but you would not get them (at least as it stands now), because there isn't an answer with $\ge2$ upvotes.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2012-06-05T03:15:42.540" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1187" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1189" CreationDate="2012-06-05T17:55:49.957" Score="29" ViewCount="1670" Body="&lt;p&gt;I previously asked a question as to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1127/is-stackexchange-a-good-idea&quot;&gt;whether or not StackExchange hurts a consultant's business&lt;/a&gt; because of all the free advice one can readily obtain here.  Some felt that the advice given was for basic things and not of the nature of a true consultation.  I think there is some merit to that view and now I am wondering if the opposite might be true. Do potential consulting customers actually hire consultants because they met them through StackExchange? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have only been on for slightly over 1 month but I helped out someone with problems related to the binomial distribution and he subsequently contacted me to see if I would be interested in possibly doing some consulting for him in the future.  I don't know if this proposed offer will ever come to fruition but it does lead me to believe that maybe some of you, particularly if you have been with StackExchange for over one year, have gotten any consulting jobs through StackExchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2017-08-18T19:13:13.710" LastActivityDate="2017-08-18T19:13:13.710" Title="Does being on StackExchange help get consulting jobs?" Tags="|discussion|careers|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1188" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1191" CreationDate="2012-06-05T18:33:27.943" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a query regarding being able to comment in all posts? Currently my reputation only allows me a privilege of being able to comment in the main forum on certain posts (the level is about 44% for being able to comment on all posts I think, so I presume this only allows me to comment in my own posts?). Can I ask at what level do I need to get to, to be able to comment in all posts? The reason why I ask is that I have been quite open since I have been here that I don't have as strong a background as most users that post here and I have seen a topic that I can contribute to and yet I can't comment. I can answer the question (but can't comment) but I don't feel that the answer would be strong enough to warrant an answer (in the main forum) and it would be more suitable as a comment initially. I'm just wondering what level do I have to get to before I am in a position to contribute (as ironically I feel that it would perhaps add to my reputation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for any advice on the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8812" LastActivityDate="2012-06-05T19:22:37.820" Title="What level of reputation do you have to get to, to be able to comment in all posts?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1187" CreationDate="2012-06-05T18:42:35.140" Score="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Good marketing is long-term.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long ago I learned a new discipline (GIS, if anyone's curious) partly by participating actively first on a listserver (1996), then with my own listservers (1999), and finally on a Web-based Q&amp;amp;A forum (2002).  I can trace a small amount of my consulting business (about 5% annually) directly to those contacts--but only beginning after four years of constant activity.  However, I can trace a much larger amount (almost 100% in one year) to work obtained due to the &lt;em&gt;reputation&lt;/em&gt; established in that fashion.  That work has taken me physically to other continents and professionally it has allowed me to enter radically different application areas (ranging from the environment to telecommunications to real estate to medical studies).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I do not expect to make any direct business contacts through my activities on SE,&lt;/strong&gt; but I do expect that if I generate a sufficient stream of &lt;em&gt;high quality, visible, and memorable&lt;/em&gt; contributions over 4-5 years or longer, then people I would never otherwise contact may come to me with interesting consulting engagements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost 30 years ago, when I left academia to start this journey, I worked for a struggling small company that almost daily asked, &quot;What do we want to do?  Why are we here?&quot; This was both a corporate and a personal question. My personal answer always was, &quot;I want to have the door to my office open so anybody can drop in and ask questions.  &lt;strong&gt;I want to help them solve their problems.&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;  The Internet has enabled that to come true.  On SE, my door is always open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2012-06-05T18:42:35.140" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1190" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-05T18:22:25.447" Score="7" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;(This question first appeared on our main site).  It tests a hypothesis about user notification.  We were wondering whether inserting an &quot;@&quot; when &lt;em&gt;editing&lt;/em&gt; a question would cause the user to be notified.  Because notifications work differently on the meta site (where this thread belongs), it is crucial to post it (albeit temporarily) on our main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@jbowman, concerning your comment at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/29835/frequentism-and-priors#comment57017_29835&quot;&gt;Frequentism and priors&lt;/a&gt;: have you been notified now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@whuber, this is a self-notification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;chl and mbq, you are mentioned without an &quot;@&quot; in case we need to re-test the editing mechanism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" OwnerDisplayName="whuber" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2012-06-05T18:47:22.310" Title="Test of notification mechanisms" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1188" CreationDate="2012-06-05T19:22:37.820" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anyone can comment on their own posts, it takes 50 points to comment globally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq#reputation&quot;&gt;This information in the FAQ, under &quot;Reputation&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1381" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2012-06-05T19:22:37.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1175" CreationDate="2012-06-05T19:27:27.143" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to a SO meta post from 2010, the results returned when asking a question are simply from searches with &quot;intitle:1&quot; added to the query ( &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/39362/why-does-intitle1-show-questions-whose-titles-dont-have-all-my-search-terms&quot;&gt;Why does intitle:1 show questions whose titles don&amp;#39;t have all my search terms?&lt;/a&gt; ).  However, the &quot;intitle&quot; operator appears to have been deprecated.  Another 2010 SO meta post suggests pre-pending a query with &quot;title:&quot; will return results more similar to the &quot;ask a question&quot; search.  For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;what is confounding&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=what+is+confounding&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=what+is+confounding&lt;/a&gt; returns 4,981 results.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;prepend intitle:1&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=intitle%3A1+what+is+confounding&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=intitle%3A1+what+is+confounding&lt;/a&gt; returns 4,981&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;prepend title:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=title%3Awhat+is+confounding&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=title%3Awhat+is+confounding&lt;/a&gt; returns 950 results, which seem to be mostly in the same order as typing &quot;what is confounding&quot; into the ask a question page.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;prepend title: to each term&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=title%3Awhat+title%3Ais+title%3Aconfounding&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=title%3Awhat+title%3Ais+title%3Aconfounding&lt;/a&gt; returns 940 results.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what the technical difference is between 3. and 4., probably slight differences in the weighting, but the results do not differ enough to justify prepending &quot;title:&quot; before each term.  More information on advanced search operators is available: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And some more discussion of SE search from the blog:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/10/stack-overflow-search-now-51-less-crappy/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/10/stack-overflow-search-now-51-less-crappy/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/07/stack-overflow-search-now-61-less-crappy/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/07/stack-overflow-search-now-61-less-crappy/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/stack-overflow-search-now-81-less-crappy/&quot;&gt;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/stack-overflow-search-now-81-less-crappy/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To summarize:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone with a better understanding of the inner workings of search on SE is needed to provide a definitive answer. However, the probable reason that you have more success with the &quot;ask a question&quot; searches is because they are more limited in scope, searching only question titles. The main search function, while it gives more weight to hits in question titles, still returns many more results that have the query in the body of questions and answers.  Incidentally, I think the main search tends to ignore comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2981" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2012-06-05T21:52:26.900" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1185" CreationDate="2012-06-06T13:48:33.153" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I've determined the answer to my revised question. I'll post it here since I was unable to find a satisfactory answer on Meta SO or any of the other meta sites that popped up when I did a google search of this problem. It's still not clear what would happen if the bounty holder had unaccepted my answer during the grace period.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to &quot;updated&quot; question above is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there can be a substantial delay after the grace period before the bounty is auto-awarded. In this case there was around a 16 hour delay. You can tell whether the bounty was auto-awarded (or won't be) once the bounty label is removed from the bottom of the question (where it goes along the bottom border). Before this border is removed, the bounty is not &quot;resolved&quot; yet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4856" LastActivityDate="2012-06-06T13:48:33.153" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1194" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-06T15:51:21.450" Score="3" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a question is at the intersection of many fields, is it possible a crosspost on different stackexchange sites? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if I formulate a question that could involve knowledge from Physics, Math and Statistics, can I show this question in all the three sites of stackexchange simultaneously?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10017" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T20:19:40.880" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Crossposting on the stackexchange network" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1194" CreationDate="2012-06-06T16:37:52.657" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In general, it is considered poor etiquette to simultaneously crosspost an identical question to several sites in the SE network.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are enough people that peruse multiple sites that it's likely to get noticed rather quickly. Some other sites are much quicker at closing such questions, and you may risk (at times, heavy) downvoting for this behavior on those sites. Such downvoting doesn't seem to happen here on stats.SE, though, as far as I can recall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In lieu of crossposting, it is preferable to pick the one site that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; matches the scope of the question. If you don't get a satisfactory answer after some time (say, a few days), you can flag it and have it migrated to a different site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you ask different, but closely related, questions on multiple sites, I would suggest you provide links in each question to each of the other question(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might also look at the following question on meta.SO, which seems to be the quasi-official site-wide policy on this topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64068/is-cross-posting-a-question-on-multiple-stack-exchange-sites-permitted-if-the-qu&quot;&gt;Is cross-posting a question on multiple Stack Exchange sites permitted if the question is on-topic for each site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2970" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2012-06-06T16:46:47.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1196" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1197" CreationDate="2012-06-06T17:01:28.850" Score="11" ViewCount="884" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if questions about statistics in the context of clinical trials belong to cross validated, especially if regulatory aspects come into play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example for such a question would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Before the database lock in a (blinded) clinical trial the&#xA;  statistician does a blinded data review (BDR). The statistician is&#xA;  blinded by replacing the treatment group assignments by &quot;random&#xA;  variates&quot;. One task during the blinded data review is checking&#xA;  distributional assumptions. And here comes the question: What does&#xA;  &quot;random variates&quot; exactly mean? Does it mean that in a trial of&#xA;  medication versus surgery, the term &quot;medication&quot; is replaced by a&#xA;  random number, say 7, and &quot;surgery&quot; by another random number, say 42,&#xA;  so that 7 &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; stands for &quot;medication&quot; and 42 &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; for&#xA;  &quot;surgery&quot;? Or does it mean that a long random series of 0's and 1's&#xA;  are produced and copied over the original treatment variable? The 0&#xA;  could mean &quot;medication&quot; sometimes and sometimes it could mean&#xA;  &quot;surgery&quot; (same for 1).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The point of this distinction is: If the first replacement is done,&#xA;  the groups are preserved but they are only masked by a new name. If&#xA;  the second replacement is done, groups are not preserved. In the&#xA;  second case I don't see how to check e.g. a normality assumption, as&#xA;  the 0-group and the 1-group are potentially mixed from 2 distinct&#xA;  normal distributions and therefore no more look like normal&#xA;  distributions. So the second approach doesn't make much sense to me&#xA;  but it would keep the blinding more effectively because the masked&#xA;  groups could easily be unmasked if one could see other variables which&#xA;  could take on only special values in one group, e.g. the variable&#xA;  &quot;complications during surgery yes/no&quot; could unmask the 0/1-group&#xA;  variable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Maybe someone even knows what's to be done because there is a&#xA;  clearer guideline on that somewhere...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you guys think that questions like this should be posted on CV? Should there be a special tag for them? Should there be a new CV-spinoff on SE (I personally find this a bad idea as it would create a too closely related ressource)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1573" LastActivityDate="2012-06-19T17:43:12.007" Title="Where to ask clinical trial / regulatory questions relating to (medical) statistics?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1196" CreationDate="2012-06-06T17:34:40.900" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your example question seems to be one of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;experimental design and &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;applied statistical analysis, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;both of which are listed as appropriate topics in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt;.  CV is the appropriate place to ask such a question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, also consider weighing in on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/34565/public-health-epidemiology&quot;&gt;Public Health &amp;amp; Epidemiology&lt;/a&gt; proposal on Area51. While CV is currently the best place to ask your question, I find it reasonable to argue that the concerns, methodology, and terminology of public health practice and research are sufficiently specialized to warrant a specific Q&amp;amp;A community (see a &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2562/why-a-public-health-and-epidemiology-site&quot;&gt;discussion by EpiGrad&lt;/a&gt;). Also, there is more to public health than the applied statistics used in the field of epidemiology. For example, questions of health law (e.g. IRB and FDA concerns for your example study) and health policy (e.g. how to use the results of your example study to affect medical practice) are not appropriate on CV nor, so far, any other SE site. Unfortunately, interest in the Public Health &amp;amp; Epidemiology proposal has plateaued for now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2981" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T08:41:05.607" LastActivityDate="2012-06-06T17:56:57.843" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1198" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1199" CreationDate="2012-06-07T15:32:45.107" Score="5" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should the &lt;code&gt;data-visualization&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;figures&lt;/code&gt; tags be merged?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no wiki description for &lt;code&gt;figures&lt;/code&gt;, and the tag only has 2 questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1381" LastEditorUserId="1381" LastEditDate="2012-06-07T15:59:51.070" LastActivityDate="2012-06-07T15:59:51.070" Title="Should the data-visualization and figure tags be merged?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1198" CreationDate="2012-06-07T15:37:09.950" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I vote yes; I don't see much point in having a lot of finely-differentiated tags. It will make it harder for people to find things later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2012-06-07T15:37:09.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1200" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-07T16:45:36.073" Score="33" ViewCount="3615" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please post your tag synonym suggestions as new answers in this thread, one answer per suggestion.  Upvote answers where you believe that the suggested tags should be made synonyms, and downvote answers where you believe the tags should remain separate.  Well upvoted suggestions will be eventually implemented by the moderators (and then the corresponding answers will be deleted).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2015-12-10T17:03:13.907" LastActivityDate="2024-03-01T02:47:18.200" Title="Current tag synonym candidates" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1206" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1207" CreationDate="2012-06-08T14:17:30.997" Score="7" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;My &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/29986/residual-variance-in-glmm&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; didn't get any comment or answer, so I'm just wondering:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it an appropriate question for this site ? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How might I improve it to make it more answerable ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11405" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2012-06-08T15:47:38.077" Title="How can I improve my question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1206" CreationDate="2012-06-08T15:13:56.137" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few  things I can see from looking at the question are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it does look on-topic for the website &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;it looks very long and dense - is there any way to get across your question without using so much space? I know the most popular questions and answers are clear and not overly verbose&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if questions simply must be very long, it's most effective when they have the sections of the question/answer broken up into parts in an effective way. For an example, look at an answer by @whuber, which are often very long but are not off-putting because they are thoughtfully organized. For me personally, I tend to ignore questions or answers that are very long without a clear organizational structure - it's just too daunting when you have to focus just to try and organize, for yourself, what exactly is being asked. There may be great questions/answers hiding in such posts but I'll rarely find out unless the title/topic is very appealing to me, which leads me to another point - &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;your title is not very informative - I personally don't click on every question I see and I will almost never click on a question with an extremely vague title. Is there some other 1-line way of describing the problem that may draw people in? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4856" LastEditorUserId="4856" LastEditDate="2012-06-08T15:47:38.077" LastActivityDate="2012-06-08T15:47:38.077" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1187" CreationDate="2012-06-08T22:27:52.627" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I endorse @whuber's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition - in my role I am a hirer of consultants rather than looking for such work myself.  I would be unlikely to go directly to someone on SE and ask them to do a consultancy task, as we have other ways of sourcing such people and SE is explicitly not set up for this purpose.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But hiring consultants (or staff for that matter) is difficult and high risk.  If we were looking at several candidates, and one had a range of consultant-like work available on SE, I would certainly take the quality of this into account.  If they were a high frequency SE contributor whose name I recognised I would certainly do so.  I have been known to search for people on SE (and elsewhere on the web) to see examples of their statistical work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7972" LastActivityDate="2012-06-08T22:27:52.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1185" CreationDate="2012-06-11T12:48:30.160" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Expired bounties are awarded hourly. In addition, we wait for another hour after the grace period has ended (just to make sure that e.g. rounded time values don't cause a user to be two minutes too late). Note that this is just the documentation of &lt;em&gt;current&lt;/em&gt; behavior; obviously don't rely on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summing up these two, there &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; thus be a delay of up to two hours between the end of the grace period and the auto-awarding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1185/is-this-a-bug-or-is-there-a-large-lag-between-the-time-the-grace-period-ends-and/1193#1193&quot;&gt;16 hour delay&lt;/a&gt; that happened in this very case is not supposed to happen; it was due to the fact that the service responsible for scheduled tasks (like auto-awarding bounties) &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/134743/very-unusual-number-of-users-logged-into-the-chat/134749#134749&quot;&gt;was down for while&lt;/a&gt;. The bounty was awarded as soon as I had brought that service back online (if you compare the time stamps, you'll notice that I posted my answer on Meta.SO shortly after the bounty was awarded).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2012-06-11T12:48:30.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1210" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1211" CreationDate="2012-06-12T13:18:56.633" Score="9" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;Will there be a community &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election/1&quot;&gt;moderator election&lt;/a&gt; for CrossValidated this year?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm asking out of curiosity. I think that the current moderators do a great job! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8507" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-07-31T19:43:04.803" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T19:43:04.803" Title="Will there be a 2012 moderator election?" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1210" CreationDate="2012-06-12T14:28:15.710" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The SE powers-that-be make those decisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know their policy, but Jeff Atwood, in his role as an SE representative, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/984&quot;&gt;asked a similar question on meta&lt;/a&gt; three years ago.  It, and the ensuing replies, are part of the SE FAQ, so presumably it's a good guide as to what to expect.  Although it's not conclusive about the meaning of &quot;regular elections,&quot; on the whole, &quot;regular&quot; looks like it depends on the community's size and rate of growth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2012-06-12T14:28:15.710" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1213" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1214" CreationDate="2012-06-13T14:28:34.850" Score="10" ViewCount="422" Body="&lt;p&gt;I try to learn and follow the rules of this site.  The moderators are given very broad authority to edit responses, close questions, and move answers to comments.  This is done sparingly and most of the time seems to be appropriate to me.  However sometimes I disagree and say so openly in discussion.  Is this frowned upon?  If so why?  I found that my latest criticism led to a moderator contacting me directly to admonish me for this.  What is the community's opinion on this.  I welcome comments from anyone ioncluding moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastActivityDate="2012-06-17T09:43:57.137" Title="Are we allowed to criticize moderators on this site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1213" CreationDate="2012-06-13T14:45:47.340" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Absolutely.&lt;/strong&gt;  How else can the moderators improve?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question should remind us that criticism of &lt;em&gt;ideas&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;actions&lt;/em&gt; is an essential part of our site, but criticism of &lt;em&gt;people&lt;/em&gt; is not. It is important to keep the two separated. Everyone in our community is dedicated, knowledgeable, and well-meaning--I firmly believe that as an article of faith, which I find daily confirmed in all the posts on this site--but sometimes we disagree about things and sometimes our actions have unintended consequences. Let's take care not to offend each other in our efforts to resolve differences and make the site better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may also be a good place to clarify some assumptions in the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;All&lt;/em&gt; community members of sufficiently high reputation, not just moderators, have authority to edit answers, close questions, and even delete answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Community members (again depending on reputation) can vote to &lt;em&gt;undo&lt;/em&gt; the preceding actions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Moderators acquire their authority by means of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election/1&quot;&gt;community elections&lt;/a&gt;; it is not something that is just arbitrarily given.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Discussion about how we all interact with the site belongs here on the meta pages. Discussion &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; within the replies and even the comments on the main pages is pretty strongly discouraged by SE policy, &lt;em&gt;except&lt;/em&gt; when it aims to clarify a particular question.  (This is a policy honored more in the breach than in practice, I admit, but it's still an ideal to aim at.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2012-06-13T14:45:47.340" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1213" CreationDate="2012-06-15T07:51:53.973" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;As someone who has been involved with Cross Validated since day one, I have always found the moderators on Cross Validated to be highly competent, diligent, and reasonable. This is an impressive feat given the very open nature of Stack Exchange sites, and the many varied challenges that can arise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally questioning moderator action is welcome and encouraged. The site has many mechanisms to encourage discussion of site policies and decisions. The effective way to do this is in a respectful way.  Moderators typically have a great deal of knowledge about how the Stack Exchange sites work and the many challenges involved. Thus, when a new user dislikes a decision made by a moderator, it is often worth considering why the decision was made and how that fits into the broader goals of the stack exchange network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183" LastActivityDate="2012-06-15T07:51:53.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1196" CreationDate="2012-06-15T07:54:58.337" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is only directed towards a subset of clinical trial related questions, but if the question pertains to psychology or psychiatry, then it would be on topic at &lt;a href=&quot;http://cogsci.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;http://cogsci.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183" LastActivityDate="2012-06-15T07:54:58.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1213" CreationDate="2012-06-17T09:43:57.137" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, you have the right to criticize our actions&lt;/strong&gt;: I'm all ears for criticism and suggestions to improve my daily work on this site. Three moderators have been elected to ensure that this site remains live and esteemed, and we pay a particular attention to questions about site management, our FAQ, Q&amp;amp;A appropriateness, tagging or voting activity. Those questions belong here, on our Meta, because this is the best way to gather ideas or opinions from the whole community, in a collegial manner. We all want this site to be a nice place to ask questions and to provide our users and visitors with a strong and enduring knowledge base for &quot;statisticians, data miners, and anyone else doing data analysis or interested in it as a discipline.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Moderator messages are never sent without valid reasons&lt;/strong&gt;, and they have to be taken with consideration, especially &lt;em&gt;when they concern posting rules&lt;/em&gt; which apply to all registered users on Stack Exchange sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2012-06-17T09:43:57.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1218" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1244" CreationDate="2012-06-18T17:21:01.767" Score="5" ViewCount="509" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many statistics computed on the StackExchange websites that could be used to evaluate how well a person is performing at answering questions.  We have (1) total reputation points (2) reputation points per question posted (3) number of answers accepted (4) percentage of answers accepted, (5) number of answers downvoted (as a negative) (6) percentage of answers downvoted and more.  What do you think are the best measures and why do you think they are the best.  High reputation point totals can be indicative of good answers but they may also be affected by the activity level or the amount of time the individual has been posting on StackExchange.  Points per question may be better in that regard but number of upvoted on a question can be low just because the question was not interesting and only a few people looked at it.  If the OP accepts the answer maybe that should carry some weight.  Let me know what you think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastActivityDate="2012-06-21T23:19:02.647" Title="How should performance answering questions best be evaluated" Tags="|discussion|answers|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1218" CreationDate="2012-06-19T10:53:11.963" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is there a need to evaluate answering performance? A person's reputation on this site - in the everyday sense of the word - is not determined by metrics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is certainly a purpose to the reputation system (write good answers =&gt; get more privileges) and to the badges (making people want to achieve goals that are good for the community), but what I (at least) think of people here is determined by their behaviour and their answers and not by those numbers. Using a different metric will not change that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8507" LastActivityDate="2012-06-19T10:53:11.963" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1196" CreationDate="2012-06-19T14:59:07.523" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that not only is it acceptable to ask questions about clinical trials and regulatory issues but also that there are many people here with the required experience to provide good answers. I for one and probably several others on CV have experience working in medical device and pharamaceutical industries and have a lot of experience working on clinical trials and facing FDA regulatory issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastEditorUserId="11032" LastEditDate="2012-06-19T17:43:12.007" LastActivityDate="2012-06-19T17:43:12.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1221" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1229" CreationDate="2010-09-23T00:45:19.997" Score="6" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our first polystats project research question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are there reputation effects in SE communities and to what extent are reputation effects contingent on various variables such as size of the community, number of views per day, no of questions per day etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/2867/28&quot;&gt;Which one of the following questions should we address for our first Polystats Project?&lt;/a&gt; for votes on various proposed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am posting below some issues pertaining to data collection. As soon as reach consensus on these issues we can proceed to the exploratory data analysis phase of the project. Feel free to post any proposals that may occur to you and on which you think we need consensus. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar to the previous question, this poll will be open for 3 days till Sep 25th 00 hrs UTC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please vote up or down vote as appropriate as this is a CW question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Previous Questions reg Polystats-Project-1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question 1: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/2512/28&quot;&gt;What should be our first Polystats Project?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Question 2: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/2662/28&quot;&gt;What should be the data collection strategy for our first Polystats Project?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Question 3: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/2867/28&quot;&gt;Which one of the following questions should we address for our first Polystats Project?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relevant Meta Thread:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/419/28Blockquote&quot;&gt;How about starting a Polystats Project?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2012-06-19T19:07:09.680" Title="Poll on data collection issues for our first Polystats Project" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="1222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1221" CreationDate="2010-09-23T00:46:51.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should restrict data collection to Stackoverflow, Server Fault and Super User only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user28" LastActivityDate="2010-09-23T00:46:51.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="1223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1221" CreationDate="2010-09-23T00:47:30.523" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should restrict data collection to SE 2.0 beta communities only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user28" LastActivityDate="2010-09-23T00:47:30.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="1224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1221" CreationDate="2010-09-23T00:48:36.840" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Data should be collected for all SE 2.0 beta communities, Stackoverflow, Server Fault and Super User.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user28" LastActivityDate="2010-09-23T00:48:36.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="1225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1221" CreationDate="2010-09-23T00:49:33.047" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;All of us should analyze the same dataset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user28" LastActivityDate="2010-09-23T00:49:33.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="1226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1221" CreationDate="2010-09-23T00:50:57.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should collect a representative sample of the data as downloading the entire data (especially for Stackoverflow, SuperUser and Server Fault) is impractical. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you vote for this please suggest a sampling strategy as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user28" LastActivityDate="2010-09-23T00:50:57.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="1227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1221" CreationDate="2010-09-23T01:00:26.677" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following variables are available from the data dump:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;POSTS &#xA;Id PostTypeId AcceptedAnswerId CreationDate Score ViewCount Body &#xA;OwnerUserId LastEditorUserId LastEditDate LastActivityDate Title Tags &#xA;AnswerCount CommentCount FavoriteCount ClosedDate ParentId CommunityOwnedDate &#xA;&#xA;USERS &#xA;Id Reputation EmailHash CreationDate DisplayName LastAccessDate WebsiteUrl &#xA;Location Age AboutMe Views UpVotes DownVotes &#xA;&#xA;COMMENTS &#xA;Id PostId Score Text CreationDate UserId BADGES Id UserId Name Date &#xA;&#xA;POSTTAGS &#xA;PostId TagId TAGS Id TagName VOTES Id PostId VoteTypeId CreationDate &#xA;BountyAmount UserId VoteTypes Id Name&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; need to download comments and tags. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the users table, we need:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ID Reputation CreationDate Upvotes Downvotes Views&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the posts table we need:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ID PostTypeID OwnerUserID CreationDate Score ViewCount AnswerCount&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For each one of the sites, we need:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;SiteName NoOfUsers CreationDate VariousSummaryStats (No of views per day etc)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit this 'answer' to add data that you think we will require for our analysis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user28" LastActivityDate="2010-09-23T01:00:26.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="1228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1221" CreationDate="2010-09-23T01:01:31.027" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Data should be in CSV format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you disagree suggest an alternative format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user28" LastActivityDate="2010-09-23T01:01:31.027" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="1229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1221" CreationDate="2010-09-23T13:57:26.397" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the many different responses in this thread already attest, it would be helpful to address some preliminary issues before asking this question.  The important ones include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The study question itself ought to be well defined.  Exactly what is a &quot;reputation effect&quot;?  (I have followed all the referenced threads, and have quickly reviewed them again, but can find no description or definition of this term.  Am I the only one who doesn't know precisely what it means?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Guidance from previous work can be helpful.  E.g., does anyone know of any specific examples of &quot;reputation effects&quot;?  Is there some background literature describing a theory of such effects?  If so, what does it suggest about effect sizes, important covariates, explanatory factors, appropriate ways to measure them, and so on?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What do we hope the scope of the study will be?  Do we aim do draw conclusions about all &quot;SE Communities&quot; or only about the ones whose data will be studied?  Is there any intent or hope of drawing more general conclusions about &quot;reputation&quot; itself?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Because this appears to be research &lt;em&gt;ab initio&lt;/em&gt;--that is, not building on or relying on previous studies--we will need a preliminary EDA phase.  It may be difficult to recommend a good sampling plan until some EDA is accomplished.  Indeed, a minimum of three phases of sampling seems to be required: some sampling--not necessarily even random--to conduct EDA, followed by more formal randomized sampling to obtain a small representative subset of data whose aim is to estimate effect sizes and variances well enough to determine how much more data will be needed to test the study questions to given degrees of confidence.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;...which implies we need to establish some targets for confidence in the study results.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Those targets may have to be adjusted to account for multiple comparisons.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We cannot do any such adjusting until a set of specific hypotheses has been established, which is one of the aims of the EDA.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can we be more specific about the actual cost (or its equivalent in volunteer effort) of sampling the data?  This would help us make tradeoffs between the desire for high confidence (achieved by larger sample sizes) and the pain of gathering the data needed to achieve such confidence.  If necessary, addressing this question can be delayed until after the EDA or preliminary sampling phase.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once these questions have been answered it should be straightforward do specify a sampling protocol.  I don't imagine these questions will be difficult to answer, but the answers ought to be given and documented somewhere.  Such formalities seem especially important in light of the collaborative, distributed nature of the proposed research, so that a common understanding is established (and not just assumed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apropos this last point, it's starting to look like developing a study protocol and all its documentation solely as a set of threads on this site will quickly become unwieldy.  Who wants to wade through a long set of links to questions/comments/answers in order to look up basic information?  It would be &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; useful to have a central location in which a small number of key documents are dynamically maintained.  These would eventually include a statement of the study goals (including background information), the study protocol, a data dictionary, and the various datasets themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" OwnerDisplayName="whuber" LastActivityDate="2010-09-23T13:57:26.397" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="1230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1221" CreationDate="2010-09-23T15:30:32.440" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;We need a few volunteers to get this project moving into high-gear. Building on @whuber's excellent &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2990/poll-on-data-collection-issues-for-our-first-polystats-project/3020#3020&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to this question I have identified a few tasks that we need to do. I have divided up the tasks in such a way that they should not take up too much of any one person's time. Please edit this answer and write your name against a task if you wish to do that task. Please update this answer also with relevant pointers/answers to each task under its respective bullet point. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Setting up a wiki - Shane has volunteered to set this up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wiki link is at: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.statalgo.com/polystatsproject/wiki/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.statalgo.com/polystatsproject/wiki/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We need a definition for reputation as used by various fields and what it means in the context of Q&amp;amp;A communities. Some preliminary definitions from the top of my head:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reputation = &quot;Expertise in a specific domain&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reputation = &quot;Trustworthiness&quot;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wiki has a section on '&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation#Online_Reputation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Online Reputation&lt;/a&gt;'  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As per this sites &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; &quot;Reputation is a rough measurement of how much the community trusts you.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can someone find out if there is a formal definition of reputation effect? (Srikant)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) Reputation Effect as Analogy to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Network effects&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wiki states: &quot;In economics and business, a network effect (also called network  externality) is the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people. &lt;strong&gt;When network effect is present, the value of a product or service increases as more people use it.&lt;/strong&gt;[Emphasis added]&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, in our context, reputation effect would be: &quot;When reputation effects are present the reputation of a user increases faster the higher his/her reputation is.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) Another definition would be what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Changing the unit of analysis to answers/questions as opposed to people) A reputation effect would be: &quot;When an individual has a higher reputation, their questions/answers receive more up-votes, ceteris paribus to answers by individuals with lower reputation&quot;.&#xA;Added by Andy W&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can a few people dig up at a few references relevant to the project? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Andy has set up a link at: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.citeulike.org/groupfunc/14031/home&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.citeulike.org/groupfunc/14031/home&lt;/a&gt; which will have a list of references for our project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another reference: &lt;a href=&quot;http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0167923605000849&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A survey of trust and reputation systems for online service provision&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What theoretical framework(s) would be appropriate for this project? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Anything else we need to do please add as additional items.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2010-09-24T17:10:13.087" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="1231" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1232" CreationDate="2010-09-20T00:20:26.977" Score="4" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have requested this thread to be locked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;End of update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am listing the four answers that came up in the thread &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/2512/28&quot;&gt;What should be our first Polystats Project?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; as separate answers in this question. Please vote up or downvote the answers depending on which one question you think we should consider for our first project. BTW, this question is CW so that downvotes and upvotes have no rep consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We all should contribute to the project even if our favorite project question is not chosen by the community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I will keep the poll question open for 3 days (i.e., till 22nd September, 00 hours UTC) at which time I will ask the mods to lock the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there is a tie I will flip a coin to choose the specific question that we will look at.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Previous Questions reg Polystats-Project-1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question 1: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/2512/28&quot;&gt;What should be our first Polystats Project?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Question 2: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/2662/28&quot;&gt;What should be the data collection strategy for our first Polystats Project?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relevant Meta Thread:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/419/28&quot;&gt;How about starting a Polystats Project?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2012-06-19T19:07:31.813" Title="Which one of the following questions should we address for our first Polystats Project?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="1232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1231" CreationDate="2010-09-20T00:20:54.603" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there reputation effects in SE communities and to what extent are reputation effects contingent on various variables such as size of the community, number of views per day, no of questions per day etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user28" LastActivityDate="2010-09-20T00:20:54.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="1233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1231" CreationDate="2010-09-20T00:21:22.840" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quantify the quality of answers and questions (what makes a question/answer a good one?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user28" LastActivityDate="2010-09-20T00:21:22.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="1234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1231" CreationDate="2010-09-20T00:21:47.970" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Classify how the communities differ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user28" LastActivityDate="2010-09-20T00:21:47.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="1235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1231" CreationDate="2010-09-20T00:22:16.237" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any evidence for herd behavior? (i.e., Is the probability of a question/answer being voted up/down dependent on the existing up/down totals?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user28" LastActivityDate="2010-09-20T00:22:16.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="1236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1231" CreationDate="2010-09-20T05:10:45.747" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can we predict how long a user will remain active on the site? (nice Survival Analysis exercise.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="795" OwnerDisplayName="shabbychef" LastActivityDate="2010-09-20T05:10:45.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="1237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1231" CreationDate="2010-09-20T05:12:02.297" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can we cluster the tags somehow, or construct a similarity between them? (with an eye towards identifying redundant tags, perhaps.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="795" OwnerDisplayName="shabbychef" LastActivityDate="2010-09-20T05:12:02.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="1238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1231" CreationDate="2010-09-20T05:17:01.317" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Create a better metric than '% accept rate' to identify users who 'give back to the community'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="795" OwnerDisplayName="shabbychef" LastActivityDate="2010-09-20T05:17:01.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="1239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1231" CreationDate="2010-09-20T05:23:55.793" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does rep really correspond to expertise? (I guess this is similar to the other question, &quot;are there rep effects?&quot; or &quot;snowball effect&quot;, but one possible outcome of this research would be a new way to compute rep.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="795" OwnerDisplayName="shabbychef" LastActivityDate="2010-09-20T05:23:55.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="1240" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2010-09-14T18:13:16.813" Score="1" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have asked the mods to lock this thread. I will post a question which will be a poll on what specific project question we want to investigate as part of the first project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;End of update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;strong&gt;Important Meta Note&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please do not vote-up this question as this question is a housekeeping type of question designed to move the polystats project to the next phase of the project. However, do vote up answers depending on their quality. I will add dummy edits at some regular frequency to push this question to the top from time to time. You may also wish to see this meta thread on the issue of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/428/28&quot;&gt;rep and polystats project&lt;/a&gt;.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The consensus (based on the votes/answers) to the first question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/2512/28&quot;&gt;What should be our first Polystats Project&lt;/a&gt; seems to be indicate that our first project would use Stackexchange data to answer several type of questions. The following summarizes the project ideas of that thread:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are there reputation effects in SE communities and to what extent are reputation effects contingent on various variables such as size of the community, number of views per day, no of questions per day etc?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Quantify the quality of answers and questions (what makes a question/answer a good one?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Classify how the communities differ.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there any evidence for herd behavior? (i.e., Is the probability of a question/answer being voted up/down dependent on the existing up/down totals?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is my interpretation of the suggestions made in that thread. While we can debate the merits of the above questions on various dimensions (e.g., which ones are interesting, doable etc), I would like the focus of this question to be on our data collection strategy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, there exist three main SE sites (Stackoverflow, Superuser and ServerFault) and a whole bunch of beta sites including our site (I am not counting meta.SE and SE 1.0 sites). It seems to me that the beta sites are not well established enough for us to answer any of the questions we have in a reasonable way. Thus, I propose that we restrict attention to Stackoverflow, Superuser and Server Fault.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the amount of data that is available on these sites is staggering. The following is a snapshot of the current statistics for these three sites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pD8jR.pngBlockquote&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, we cannot download all the data to work with and need some form of sampling strategy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the above background, my questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do you agree with the restriction to Stackoverflow, Superuser and Serverfault?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What data sampling strategy would you recommend that we follow?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do you think that all of us should work with the same dataset (to ensure that we can reproduce each other's results/bugs)? If so, where/how should we store it?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What variables do you like to see in the data dump? The following shows the data that we can potentially download using the API/data-dump provided by SE. Table names are in capital letters with corresponding fields below the table name.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&#xA;    POSTS&#xA;    Id&#xA;    PostTypeId&#xA;    AcceptedAnswerId&#xA;    CreationDate&#xA;    Score&#xA;    ViewCount&#xA;    Body&#xA;    OwnerUserId&#xA;    LastEditorUserId&#xA;    LastEditDate&#xA;    LastActivityDate&#xA;    Title&#xA;    Tags&#xA;    AnswerCount&#xA;    CommentCount&#xA;    FavoriteCount&#xA;    ClosedDate&#xA;    ParentId&#xA;    CommunityOwnedDate&#xA;    USERS&#xA;    Id&#xA;    Reputation&#xA;    EmailHash&#xA;    CreationDate&#xA;    DisplayName&#xA;    LastAccessDate&#xA;    WebsiteUrl&#xA;    Location&#xA;    Age&#xA;    AboutMe&#xA;    Views&#xA;    UpVotes&#xA;    DownVotes&#xA;    COMMENTS&#xA;    Id&#xA;    PostId&#xA;    Score&#xA;    Text&#xA;    CreationDate&#xA;    UserId&#xA;    BADGES&#xA;    Id&#xA;    UserId&#xA;    Name&#xA;    Date&#xA;    POSTTAGS&#xA;    PostId&#xA;    TagId&#xA;    TAGS&#xA;    Id&#xA;    TagName&#xA;    VOTES&#xA;    Id&#xA;    PostId&#xA;    VoteTypeId&#xA;    CreationDate&#xA;    BountyAmount&#xA;    UserId&#xA;    VoteTypes&#xA;    Id&#xA;    Name&#xA;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2012-06-19T19:07:49.817" Title="What should be the data collection strategy for our first Polystats Project?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="1241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1240" CreationDate="2010-09-14T20:38:15.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I agree that we should either (a) restrict to those sites or else (b) do everything but them.  The latter option would give more variety in the communities so I think that it could be more interesting, and it would give a picture of communities at much different stages of development and in completely different fields.  So we can get a nice picture of community development and decay.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that we should necessarily need to sample initially based on doing step 1.  People can then engage in dimension reduction or sampling exercises as part of the actual analysis if there is too much data, although I'm optimistic that we can make available all of the data given the restriction from 1.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm happy to act as the &quot;data tsar&quot; to get that started (or someone else can), and post a complete dataset in a readable format (or at least provide a script to get it).  That being said, I think the data processing part of this task could be part of what someone's value add in this whole project.  So long as everyone has access to the same data (which they do already), then whether everyone &lt;em&gt;uses&lt;/em&gt; the same data isn't especially important in my view.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Clearly what data one uses will depend on what question they're trying to address.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I myself am interested in describing how the communities differ.  For that, I would probably start with basic descriptive statistics about questions, users, votes (I'm somewhat less interested in the comments and badges tables), look at some of the distributions (I'm sure that most voting patterns follow a power law, for instance).  Maybe we can use a gini coefficient to classify the inequality of the various communities.  And I would also want to look at social network relationships (e.g. connectedness)?  Is there a stagnation effect as communities grow older (we seem to casually observed this)?  Do new users behave differently than old users?  Needless to say, there are a very large number of interesting questions that can be asked of this data.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, to answer the &quot;what makes a good question/answer&quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://garr.posterous.com/how-to-create-a-guaranteed-killer-ted-talk-wi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;we can do something like this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5" OwnerDisplayName="Shane" LastActivityDate="2010-09-14T21:53:11.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="1242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1240" CreationDate="2010-09-16T13:13:42.507" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Shane for everything but I will put in my responses as well. I think it will be useful though because I have seperate interests in the project than Shane. I am solely interested in the question &quot;Are there repuation effects in SE communities&quot; (not because the other things aren't interesting, simply because that is how I personally like to pursue topics in a simple, counter-factual framework).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1- Restricting to Stackoverflow, Superuser and Serverfault is fine to answer my question, but if people want to consider a wider array of topics it is benificial to have a broader range of communities (its necessary to examine between community variation). It also doesn't hinder my quest to only consider every other community than these three as Shane suggests (I don't have any theoretical reasons to expect differences between reputation effects in different communities apriori). So I concur with Shane's suggestion of every other community besides Stackoverflow, Superuser and Serverfault.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 - I agree with Shane as well, and I think more data is better at this point. If people need to reduce the data to either make it more manageable or address particular questions they can do it on their own. If we had more refined goals I wouldn't disagree with a sampling strategy, but I don't want to limit potential projects before we get started.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3 - Again I agree with Shane, and I think it will be simpler to manage if we all work with the same data dump. This will allow easier replication and I think will make trouble shooting easier to handle (although if people use different sampling schemes this will become more difficult). I could volunteer some space either in my Dropbox account or google docs and publish the link (as long as people are fine with delimited text I don't see any space problems on my end). I suppose in the future we may want to think about how to store results/code in a manageable and retrievable fashion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4 - I'll come back to this when I take a closer look at the variables and what information is contained. Although we may want to include everything just so it does not limit anyones ability to answer different questions at this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sounds like a really cool project, and I hope it gets some really good user input from the community. I am really interested to see how different people approach the subject. I think I may use this as personal motivation to learn some more R so I can disseminate results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" OwnerDisplayName="Andy W" LastActivityDate="2010-09-16T13:13:42.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="1243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1240" CreationDate="2010-09-16T19:50:38.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, a meta point- We probably should not have moved to this phase without finalizing the project question. So, I will wait a few days for any more opinions to come in and then get this thread locked. The next question will focus on which one of the four ideas we should work on our first project. Ideally, all of us should commit to working on the most voted idea (even if it is not our personal favorite) to maximize participation and to divide-and-conquer the project. After all, the point of Polystats Projects = 'massively collaborative data analysis'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are my answers to my four questions from the top:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Depending on the project selected we should use data from the SO, SU and SF OR the data from the beta sites OR perhaps all sites. I think the answer to this is dependent on the question we select.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;IMO, if we select SO, SU and SF we definitely need a sampling strategy. If we want to maximize contribution then it would make sense to work with 'small' datasets as the community will have different computing limitations (e.g., some folks may not have the RAM to load all the data in memory etc). We want to be as inclusive as possible and hence large datasets are a negative as far as this issue is concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps, we can do some sort of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratified_sampling&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stratified sampling&lt;/a&gt; with the strata being: time period, No of votes for qns during a time period (high, medium, low etc), rep of users during a time period (again high, medium, low etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, we should work with the same dataset. Not only does this help with reproducibility but it would also ensure that we are on the same page. One advantage here is that if we use different methods (machine learning, stats, data mining etc) to investigate the same question then we can attribute any differences in conclusions to the methods used rather than any idiosyncrasies of the data we used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some form of delimited, text file is ideal (perhaps, csv). Storage is much less of an issue as long as it is a stable link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What data we need to extract is dependent on the questions we seek to investigate. So, I will defer answering this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user28" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2010-09-16T19:50:38.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="1244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1218" CreationDate="2012-06-19T19:53:47.630" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will take this question seriously, which may or may not be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps you are familiar with the discipline of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;psychometrics&lt;/a&gt; (which is the study of how to accurately measure psychological constructs).  You will need to work out a theory of what it is you want to measure and how it is related to other theoretical constructs (or at least, available measures of those constructs).  Often it is not possible to directly measure the target of your theorizing, but a variety of indirect measures can be found.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.psych.cornell.edu/darlington/factor.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Factor analysis&lt;/a&gt; is typically used to assess if the indirect measures really do 'hang together', and if they are unitary.  From there, you can work on building a measurement system, and checking its &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_%28psychometric%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;reliability&lt;/a&gt;, and convergent and discriminant &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Validity_%28statistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;validity&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With some basics mentioned, let me throw out some specific thoughts.  Raw values (e.g., reputation scores and badge counts) are rarely considered very useful.  For instance, consider the total reputation score, an analogy can be made between it and p-values:  Just as p-values measure effect size and $N$ simultaneously, and thus are often not a good thing to focus on (depending on what you want to know), so reputation measures both level of quality and amount of activity.  Even mean upvotes minus downvotes &lt;em&gt;per question&lt;/em&gt; is confounded with the amount of attention each question has received as you recognized.  So a decent first pass at the typical quality of someone's (answering) efforts might be a weighted mean vote total, with the weights determined by each question's views.  We can, of course, always push further.  For example, some people may be only inclined to answer a question if they are confident they can give a really good answer, whereas others may answer anything where they suspect their marginal contribution is above zero (think of how some people are more talkative than others).  Is that something that you want to capture in the measurement, or is it a contaminant you want to filter out?  Note that we can run through analogous considerations with badges.  For what it's worth, I agree with MansT (+1).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2012-06-19T19:53:47.630" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1127" CreationDate="2012-06-19T22:56:13.723" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;To address various problems brought up by your question in turn, from my perspective:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;it could take away work people who do professional consulting for a living.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, if the services of a particular statistical consultant can be replaced by a few questions on CrossValidated or StackExchange, they're not providing enough service for their clients for me to feel bad. Beyond that, there are a considerable number of answers on CV that amount to &quot;You're in over your head. Go find a statistician, use these words, and they'll be able to help.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Also are we encouraging laziness as someone who has a problem they&#xA;  find to be difficult might instead of thinking out the problem and&#xA;  doing their own research to find the solution decides it is much&#xA;  easier to raise the question here and just see all the great ideas&#xA;  poor out with practically no effort. We even help them reformulate&#xA;  poorly posed questions.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible, but if they don't put the effort in, they'll get little lasting knowledge from 'Give Me the Code' questions. For example, I on occasion post questions like that, but generally it's &quot;I don't even know where to start with x...&quot; and the question is meant to be something I can build off of and learn from. It's very hard to distinguish between that and a 'lazy' question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that, being neither their boss, professor or mother, &lt;em&gt;I don't care&lt;/em&gt;. Laziness as a vice is a particularly...puritanical notion. If someone just wants to get their plot, p-value or test name and go away, it's little enough to me. And I'd rather tolerate that than turn away someone genuinely floundering who could use a hand to produce a meaningful, robust and thoughtful analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some students come here for free tutoring. There seems to be an&#xA;  awareness here that this poses problems. Students should study the&#xA;  course material and try to solve the problems themselves. Cross&#xA;  Validated asks that these questions be labelled as homework and the&#xA;  approach to answering is to give guidance rather than a complete&#xA;  solution. Nevertheless doesn't this also also encourage laziness as&#xA;  the student can just pose it here or in several places on&#xA;  StackExchange to get as much help as possible before doing any of the&#xA;  work on their own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Students also come here to ask questions when they don't have access to teaching resources, are trying to self-learn and have run aground, or are looking for a deeper understanding. I'd suggest the problem of a freeloading student is relatively minor compared to those things - especially as CV is fairly adept at not giving complete solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Students being able to get &quot;as much help as possible&quot; while they learn isn't a bug. It's a feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5836" LastActivityDate="2012-06-19T22:56:13.723" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1246" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-20T23:08:00.520" Score="10" ViewCount="392" Body="&lt;p&gt;See that mini job board in the right panel on your site? We are testing out a new feature on a couple Stack Exchange sites. It's a jobs widget that displays several geo-targeted job postings specific to your community. These job posts are contained in a small (we hope unobtrusive) display below the Community Bulletin on the sidebar. For this early version, job listings are provided from the database at Indeed.com. If your area of interest is not represented or the level of expertise of roles presented doesn't match what you'd find most useful, we want to know. This is very much a work in progress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We think Cross Validated is the ideal candidate to try out this early version. You have specialized skills, your skills are in demand, and we suspect that many of you may be interested in exploring new career opportunities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please let us know what you think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6064" LastEditorUserId="6064" LastEditDate="2012-06-21T14:36:18.197" LastActivityDate="2012-07-13T02:37:24.977" Title="Introducing: Jobs in your Sidebar" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1246" CreationDate="2012-06-21T05:43:31.153" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please excuse me for promoting this, but I think our search also makes a good case study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;amp;ion=1#q=%22scientific+web+programmer%22+urbana+pecanproject&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;newwindow=1&amp;amp;safe=off&amp;amp;nfpr=1&amp;amp;prmd=imvns&amp;amp;ei=Ki3jT6KbO6i42wXvpoW7Cw&amp;amp;start=0&amp;amp;sa=N&amp;amp;filter=0&amp;amp;fp=1&amp;amp;ion=1&amp;amp;biw=1080&amp;amp;bih=1834&amp;amp;bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&amp;amp;cad=b&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;broad advertisement&lt;/a&gt;, on sites including &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=%22scientific+web+programmer%22&amp;amp;l=urbana%2C+il&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;indeed.com&lt;/a&gt;,  our opening for a web programmer has had a low response. perhaps it could use better targeting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, I suspect the ad could benefit from good placement on a SE site. By good placement, I mean not only geo-targeted, but also tag targeted, content-targeted, and user targeted - many things that I am not familiar with, but the ad would appear to users based on a combination of tags and text in the page being viewed, and the tags and content of the users' contributions. I'd like any person with a history of posting good questions and answers to questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ruby-on-rails&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;ruby-on-rails&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; to see the ad. Also, it would be good if it appeared on popular &lt;code&gt;ruby-on-rails&lt;/code&gt; tagged questions. In addition to targeting the ruby-on-rails tag, I'd also like to target users who visited questions related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/rest&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;REST&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/mvc&quot;&gt;MVC&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/sql&quot;&gt;SQL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed that you are using Indeed.com; what is required to get an ad from there advertised on SE? For example, on indeed, our ad is any of the three identical results for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.indeed.com/m/jobs?q=%22Scientific+web+programmer%22&amp;amp;l=61801&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;scientific web programmer&quot; Urbana, IL&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: I just noticed that the job advert appeared in the sidebar of stats.SE! I am not sure how the behind-the-scenes targeting works, or if it has anything to do with this post or cookies in my browser, but it is nice to see. Although this isn't my target audience, it is nice to see the ad get some air. I can tell that there is some current targeting because I get different results when viewed in chrome's &quot;incognito mode&quot; than when I am logged in. In fact, in incognito mode, I don't see it the ad at all, and there appears to be little recycling (same ads throughout my browsing in both logged-in and incognito mode). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an image of the site with my ad. I am curious what ads other people see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ktwMK.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1381" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2012-06-21T18:27:47.413" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1218" CreationDate="2012-06-21T16:30:17.643" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's look at the question a little differently.  &lt;strong&gt;What strategy would you like to use for answering questions?&lt;/strong&gt;  Lots of quick answers or a few well-crafted answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A look at this quarter's activity shows that some users have had to post (on the average) &lt;em&gt;five or more&lt;/em&gt; answers in order to accrue the same number of upvotes and acceptances that a few other users acquire with a single answer.  Often &lt;strong&gt;that single answer is clear, authoritative, correct, definitive, well-illustrated, linked to appropriate references, at most lightly edited, and even...&quot;pretty.&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; It is almost never downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Although I could name many community members who have posted such answers, I would offer many of the posts by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/930/chl?tab=answers&amp;amp;sort=votes&quot;&gt;chl&lt;/a&gt; as examples: they have established a standard for us to aspire to.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By comparison, those five quick answers--although they frequently convey useful replies--tend to be murky or technical (due to their brevity), lack references, occasionally err (at least originally), need extensive comments for clarification, have no illustrations or links, and have to be heavily edited for readability and $\TeX$ markup. They tend to collect anonymous downvotes and flags (which the community does not see but the moderators have to deal with, alas).  A large minority of them collect only one vote, or no votes, or end up deleted altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine it takes about the same amount of time and effort to create one good answer as to toss off five quick ones, especially once one becomes familiar with the tools provided by this site for linking, importing graphics, marking up text, and so on, which expedite the production of quality posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it is difficult to pin down any statistic that consistently distinguishes the two strategies--and both produce contributions that are valued and appreciated--&lt;strong&gt;SE encourages the first kind of answer:&lt;/strong&gt; it stands the test of time, it attracts searches from outside, and in the best cases it informs, delights, and inspires readers.  I urge all in our community to aspire to that kind of contribution, even though I know it cannot be done all the time (and is not even appropriate for certain kinds of routine questions).  Yet I also know, from having read almost all the posts on our site, that a great many of you have demonstrated this capability.  So when deciding whether to spend your valuable time rushing to answer a lot of questions or answering a single one &lt;em&gt;really well,&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;I urge you to consider expressing your expertise and insight in a high-quality, well-crafted answer whenever you can.&lt;/strong&gt;  The reputation, badges, and other statistics will then take care of themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2012-06-21T23:19:02.647" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1249" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1252" CreationDate="2012-06-22T09:27:07.643" Score="10" ViewCount="407" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need to buy a new computer because tasks I am running with R are taking 2-4 days to run (MCMC, multiple imputations) so I am looking for some advice on what to prioritise - more RAM, faster CPU speed, more L3 cache, etc. Is it OK to ask about this ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11405" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2015-05-19T20:56:34.977" LastActivityDate="2015-05-19T20:56:34.977" Title="Can I ask about computer hardware?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1250" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1251" CreationDate="2012-06-22T12:39:01.120" Score="7" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry if I am stupid but I don't find how to send a private message to a user. Isn't it possible ? I took a look at the user's profile as well as the faq.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8402" LastActivityDate="2012-06-22T13:39:14.227" Title="How to contact a user?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1250" CreationDate="2012-06-22T13:39:14.227" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;SE creates Q&amp;amp;A threads that are focused, undergo constant improvement, display evaluation by a qualified community, and permanently exist as references and search targets.  Ephemeral exchanges, highly localized discussions, and (undocumented, unwitnessed) offline dialog work against that effort and are therefore actively discouraged and--when they do occur--are quickly removed by the community.  Therefore efforts to engage in offline contact within the Q&amp;amp;A threads (including comments) are not supported and not appreciated when they do occur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless it's easy to contact people you meet here: check out their user profile.  If they want to be reached, they will include enough information to let you do that.  Another option is to use the chat facility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2012-06-22T13:39:14.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1249" CreationDate="2012-06-23T00:03:05.243" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to be asking a hardware question requiring statistical programming knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://superuser.com/faq&quot;&gt;SuperUser's faq&lt;/a&gt; explicitly states that hardware-related topics are on-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;CrossValidated's faq&lt;/a&gt; makes no mention of hardware-related questions as being on-topic. The closest it gets is to say that programming questions requiring &lt;em&gt;statistical expertise&lt;/em&gt; to understand or answer are on-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/faq&quot;&gt;StackOverflow's faq&lt;/a&gt; makes no explicit mention of hardware-related questions as being on-topic, but does state that &quot;practical, answerable problems that are unique to the programming profession&quot; are on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scicomp.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;Computational Science's faq&lt;/a&gt; states that &quot;computational methods used in technical disciplines&quot; are on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is certainly on-topic at SuperUser, but because it requires statistical programming knowledge, it might not be exposed to an audience with the expertise that you desire. For CrossValidated, your question is a hardware question requiring statistical programming knowledge, as opposed to a programming question requiring statistical programming knowledge. I think it is technically off-topic. For StackOverflow, since your question is a hardware question requiring statistical programming expertise, it is unique to the programming profession. I think this makes it on-topic. Finally, Computational Science's faq is a bit vague to me, but a search for &quot;hardware&quot; on that site brings up a few questions in the same vein as yours (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://scicomp.stackexchange.com/q/1376/903&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://scicomp.stackexchange.com/q/2146/903&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://scicomp.stackexchange.com/q/2192/903&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before Computational Science went into beta, I probably would have asked a question like yours on StackOverflow. You likely still can and will get good answers.  However, Computational Science seems more geared toward your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2981" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2012-06-23T13:39:21.620" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1246" CreationDate="2012-06-25T12:40:27.587" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to see ads which are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; geo-targeted at one's current location? I am actually looking for a job, but I'm not wed on my current city. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7250" LastActivityDate="2012-06-25T12:40:27.587" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1254" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1255" CreationDate="2012-06-26T21:19:51.207" Score="4" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I lost 60 reputation point and the message just read &quot;user removed&quot;. Does that mean that a user was taken off the system and that when that is done the persons votes get removed from the system?  Seems like I lost a lot of point this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="How do you lose reputation points by &quot;User removed&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="27" ClosedDate="2017-04-17T16:11:46.623" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1254" CreationDate="2012-06-26T22:52:36.683" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I found a clue&lt;/strong&gt; on meta SO in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/125989/strange-unupvote-pattern-across-multiple-users/125993#comment340838_125993&quot;&gt;comment posted by an SE employee&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We've always removed votes when deleting a user, this is absolutely&#xA;  not new behavior, it's happened from day 1. ... The immense&#xA;  complication it introduces by not doing that...wow, I don't even want&#xA;  to think about that on a weekend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, although there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/125740/dont-throw-away-all-votes-when-a-user-is-deleted&quot;&gt;good arguments for not removing votes&lt;/a&gt;, we are told there are significant programming difficulties in making that happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2012-06-26T22:52:36.683" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1249" CreationDate="2012-06-27T14:37:40.293" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Joe, you are a statistician, and must have taken courses on experiment design. Design an experiment to see how your programs scale on the existing architecture first: take a typical data set, decrease it in size by factors of 3 and 10, and increase it in size by factors of 3 and 10. Likewise, find a way to wary the computational complexity. This may not be so easy, although increasing/decreasing number of variables in MI and number of parameters in MCMC should be a step in that direction. Come up with a factorial design and time it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One would naturally expect the computational time to grow with the problem size and difficulty. My experience timing &lt;a href=&quot;http://stata-journal.com/article.html?article=st0169&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;my own Stata factor analysis code&lt;/a&gt; was that $$T \sim n^{0.7} p^{2.3}$$ where $n$ was the sample size and $p$ was the dimensionality of the problem. The exponent for the latter is actually the best existing rate for matrix inversion which is one of the intense tasks in the program. The exponent on the sample size is intriguing, as I was expecting the time to be linear in the sample size; this may have to do with the small sample likelihoods being more weird and difficult to optimize, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you start seeing huge increases in computing time beyond these natural power laws, you must be hitting the memory limits, which would be an indication that you need larger RAM. If you don't see any issues with the memory size, for the problems you will likely be working on, you would be far much better off buying a faster chip with more parallel threads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastActivityDate="2012-06-27T14:37:40.293" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1257" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1258" CreationDate="2012-06-27T16:43:40.130" Score="1" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;all. I deleted a question right before someone answered it and now I am trying to undelete it, but can't because I don't have enough reputation. I reposted an identical question on math.stackexchange.com because I thought the question might fit better there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's name, in both cases is &quot;Does it matter how you pull marbles out of this vat?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone please undelete this question for me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10461" LastActivityDate="2012-06-27T19:47:11.857" Title="Undelete request" Tags="|support|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1257" CreationDate="2012-06-27T16:55:49.367" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/31226/930&quot;&gt;Done&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case you wonder about the appropriateness of your question, it is good to ask the community or a moderator, which is what you did in your comment (I deleted it, btw), and &lt;em&gt;wait some time&lt;/em&gt; before deleting and reposting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2012-06-27T19:47:11.857" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1259" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-27T17:41:23.403" Score="15" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/31219/930&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; and got a very good response. However, the response made me wish I had asked the question in a slightly different way. This would have been a very small change - basically adding one line at the end of the question asking what the answer would be if one of my assumptions were reversed. What's the best way to ask this slightly different question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit the original question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comment on the original question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comment on the answer that prompted the modified question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post a new question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Something else?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12244" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2012-06-27T20:26:55.740" Title="What is the best way to ask a follow up or slightly revised question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1259" CreationDate="2012-06-27T19:44:37.380" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The third solution--commenting on the answer--is probably the better choice. If, say, this is just a matter of altering initial conditions or hypotheses to see what happens, the answerer could easily reply in a comment (for a short response) or as an edit to his reply (for a longer discussion). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If existing response(s) are suggestive of a lack of information or precision in your question, update your question; answerers will be able to update their responses as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case the question is really altered, it should be better to start a new thread with proper reference to the original one, but see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1151/930&quot;&gt;What to do when the original question is transformed considerably after getting clarification?&lt;/a&gt; I do not think this applies in the present case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2012-06-27T19:44:37.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1259" CreationDate="2012-06-27T20:26:55.740" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reply you got to the question implicitly assumes a formulation of the problem that does not comport with the information you gave. Comments are appropriate for carrying out discussions aimed at clarifying the problem so that you (the asker) and potential respondents have a shared understanding of it. This process should culminate in edits to the question that clarify it, without appreciably changing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2012-06-27T20:26:55.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="505" CreationDate="2012-06-27T20:46:09.097" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scicomp.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Computation Science&lt;/a&gt;?   There's certainly some overlap of subject matter with CrossValidated. It's still in beta, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/28815/computational-science&quot;&gt;needs more questions if it's ever to get past beta&lt;/a&gt;. I'm not clear if migration to/from beta sites is allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:53:55.003" LastActivityDate="2012-06-27T21:24:43.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1263" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-02T16:22:17.197" Score="12" ViewCount="317" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/31400/12258&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, there is a factual error about the documentation in R. I believe the actual question being asked is a useful one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I correct the factual error, or leave the correction as a comment, as I have already done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2012-07-08T00:46:43.113" Title="Should I edit a factual error?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1264" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1266" CreationDate="2012-07-03T12:02:18.180" Score="3" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noted that the vote mechanism assign the same score for one vote up/down independently by the user score. In my opinion this is not fairly as high scored users has a deeper understanding of the subject discussed. I think that a better way would be assign a score by this formula&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;vote up/down = +/- int(log(user score))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10017" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T20:20:00.387" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T22:46:59.057" Title="   Weighted vote mechanism" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1264" CreationDate="2012-07-03T13:58:46.943" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is natural to apply such a weighting and I like the idea, but consider the challenge that the reputation a user has earned is bound to the tags of the answered questions. This can be included into the score model by setting the weight of a user vote to 0 if no reputation has been earned in this tag and normalization per tag otherwise, but what shall be done in case of rare tags ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What shall be done if a question has multiple tags and the user has not earned (enough) reputation in all of these ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, such a change, although appealing and certainly more correct, might introduce more problems than it does solve (occam's razor).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another solution could be to drive more responsible users to this site. If every question get the attention it deserves it is not necessary anymore to apply weighting to improve the meaning of answers with a small number of votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="264" LastActivityDate="2012-07-03T13:58:46.943" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1264" CreationDate="2012-07-03T15:06:05.503" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;The proposal is intuitive and appealing.  It appears predicated, though, on the implicit assumption that high-rep people provide better information than low-rep people about the quality of questions and answers.  This appears derived from equating reputation with knowledge, capability, or capacity for judgment.  That equation is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1218&quot;&gt;debatable&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(On our site there are users with enough reputation &lt;em&gt;through sheer activity alone&lt;/em&gt; to have earned tag badges in subjects where they are not very knowledgeable.  I will, with some diffidence, hold myself out as example number one: purely because many questions are tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;r&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;r&lt;/a&gt;, I earned a tag badge for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;r&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;r&lt;/a&gt; before knowing enough about that software to even offer an R-based answer to any question!  On the face of it, then, my votes on R-tagged questions and answers ought to count less, not more, than those of experienced R programmers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A deeper concern I have is that differential voting power could create an insular clique of high-rep people who effectively control the scores of questions and answers. I worry that this could narrow the site to reflect only the interests of its most active users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When proposing significant changes to how this site works, we should always ask ourselves, what higher purpose would the change achieve? In this case, would we attract or retain more users? Probably not. Attract high-quality users? On the contrary, such people might be put off by having relatively little influence despite attaining demonstrably high levels of expertise. Improve the ratings of questions and answers? Perhaps--although that depends on assuming reputation (which measures activity) reflects the capacity to judge quality, as I discussed in the opening paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interesting way to pursue the original idea would be to implement an alternative reputation/score measure &lt;em&gt;in parallel with the existing one.&lt;/em&gt;  At first this could be done invisibly and experimentally (by making the measure visible only to a few experimenters).  If at some point evidence arose that the alternative were beneficial, then the alternative scores could be displayed to the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2012-07-03T15:06:05.503" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1267" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1268" CreationDate="2012-07-03T17:20:14.507" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11315918/manipulating-results-of-summarymodel&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; about using R , which I already posted on stackoverflow, but then I realised it might be better to post here - though I'm not really sure where is best ? Should I ask to migrate it ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11405" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2012-07-03T17:25:17.220" Title="Question about R (manipulating model output)" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1267" CreationDate="2012-07-03T17:25:17.220" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;That question seems to be in the best location already, because it asks about how to manipulate some R objects and does not appear to require any statistical expertise or thinking for an answer: that's the criterion we apply to decide where the best fit is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it does not get a satisfactory answer within a reasonable time--give it a day or two--then consider flagging it for migration here.  It might get a few votes to close--it's really in a gray area--but in the meantime it could also get a useful comment or reply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2012-07-03T17:25:17.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1263" CreationDate="2012-07-03T19:47:22.877" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;So based on 2 comments worth of community input, here's a proposed &quot;best practice&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Point out the inaccuracy in a comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the writer has not corrected after 24 hours, downvote the question, OR &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit the question to correct the error as long as it does not&#xA;materially change the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12258" LastActivityDate="2012-07-03T19:47:22.877" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1270" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1271" CreationDate="2012-07-04T11:02:25.983" Score="4" ViewCount="498" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about the &lt;code&gt;mice&lt;/code&gt; package in R for multiple imputation. It is giving me an error message that I don't understand and have not been able to find information about so far on the internet. The error only occurs when I include a categorical variable with more than 2 levels with imputation method &lt;code&gt;polyreg&lt;/code&gt;, so I wondered if I should ask here or on stackoverflow ? Frankly I prefer to ask here if possible because people here seem a bit more friendly !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I'm slightly concerned about asking because ideally I would like to make a reproducable example, but there is a lot of data, plus the code, plus the predictor matrix, and the fact that my school probably would not be happy if I posted the data they gave me for private study on the internet. I suppose I could try to modify the data in slight ways to get around the last point. Is there any guidance for making examples (including how/where to post the data) ? Is it necessary to do make a working example ?  Could I just ask the question first (maybe some experts know the answer off the top of their heads) with the proviso that I will make an working example if requested (and given some guidance for doing so). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry for the long posting !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11405" LastActivityDate="2012-07-04T19:51:25.387" Title="Question about use of R package `mice`" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1270" CreationDate="2012-07-04T19:51:25.387" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like there always have been some problems inherent to the use of the &lt;code&gt;mice&lt;/code&gt; package, although this really is a good package. (Sometimes, this is just a matter of reading the doc, but sometimes not.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest to post your question here, because multiple imputation is a statistical problem, that can be dealt with several statistical packages, including R. We can migrate it to Stack Overflow if it happens it will be better suited there. It is always difficult to choose between either sites when the question is about a statistical question that is closely linked to a particular software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About how to make a reproducible example, I am aware of this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/5963269/420055&quot;&gt;How to make a great R reproducible example?&lt;/a&gt; If you are concerned with data confidentiality, try to provide a simulated dataset that closely match yours. If this is not possible, consider giving as much information as you can, and report issues with data disclosure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2012-07-04T19:51:25.387" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1263" CreationDate="2012-07-08T00:46:43.113" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I generally only lurk here at CrossValidated, but based on my experience at StackOverflow, I believe that the crucial point here is whether the factual error is in a &lt;strong&gt;question&lt;/strong&gt; or an &lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One will frequently see something that seems obviously wrong or mistaken in a question. If the asker wasn't confused about &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; they probably wouldn't be asking a question, would they?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rule I follow is that I will &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; &quot;fix&quot; mistakes in questions unilaterally. The mistake in the question may be the very source of their confusion and hence would be essential to answering the question. Instead, I always leave a comment pointing out the error and asking for clarification. But even then, I would let the OP fix any errors. Even if they fail to respond after a week, there is too much danger that editing to &quot;fix&quot; the error would radically alter the meaning and intent of the question. My comment would remain visible, though, to alert others readers of the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if I spot an error in an &lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt; I would adopt an approach more like what is sketched out in @atiretoo's answer: leave a comment, possibly downvote, and wait. If there's no response in a suitable amount of time, perform the edit myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, this obviously applies primarily to errors in &lt;strong&gt;content&lt;/strong&gt;, rather than &lt;strong&gt;style&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5055" LastActivityDate="2012-07-08T00:46:43.113" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1277" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1278" CreationDate="2012-07-10T18:02:15.990" Score="10" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/31966&quot;&gt;answered a question&lt;/a&gt; that seemed to address the original question's issue (i.e. how to visualize some data).  Then, in the comments, there was an implied follow-on question about how the visualization was created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this an appropriate time to create a new question (e.g. how was the visualization created?) and answer it?  Or, would the community be better served by adding onto the answer to the original question?  I'm particularly curious about cases where answering the second comment/question will be lengthy and probably off-target from the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10217" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T17:12:26.710" Title="What happens when an answer's comments evolve into another question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1277" CreationDate="2012-07-10T20:24:26.793" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMO in your situation I would just add the response into your current answer. While I don't disagree with the answers to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1151/what-to-do-when-the-original-question-is-transformed-considerably-after-getting&quot;&gt;linked question Macro provided&lt;/a&gt; in the comment to this meta question, I don't think the discussion has diverged enough from the original topic to justifying splitting the question/answer(s) across two different threads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will say &quot;what is diverged enough&quot; to justify splitting into a separate question is quite vague, but it happens infrequently enough I don't see much reason in trying to layout bureaucratic norms for when it should happen. So the interested parties should just use their discretion to determine if such a threshold has been met.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2012-07-10T21:30:25.443" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1246" CreationDate="2012-07-13T02:37:24.977" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to be sure this is working, are there &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; jobs outside the US being advertised? I'm in Australia and I'd love to see any relevant jobs, but the nearest ones are in California (according to the jobs bar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10354" LastActivityDate="2012-07-13T02:37:24.977" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1280" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-14T09:46:45.150" Score="7" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/170442/differentiating-the-posterior-distribution-function&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt; on stats.se yesterday but it was moved to maths. I actually thought about putting it on maths.se first, but since it was mathematical statistics, I thought I would post it here. I can understand there is a grey area, and probably my question /is/ better suited on maths.se because it can (I imagine) be answered by a mathematician who doesn't know anything about statistics. Is that the right way to view it ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I also thought that, since there is a conditional distribution involved (which I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; is irrelevant to the answer, but not completely sure about that) it might get better answers on stats.se ? FWIW, the answer I got on math.se isn't completely satisfactory to me (no disrespect to the answerer of course, I'm pretty sure it's trivial to him/her and it's just me who can't see the wood for the trees, and will hopefully come back later with a follow-up), which also makes me wonder if it might be better here....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11405" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:38.337" LastActivityDate="2012-07-16T12:35:05.957" Title="When is a mathematical statistics question better on math.se?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1280" CreationDate="2012-07-16T12:35:05.957" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, that's the right way to view it:&lt;/strong&gt; questions are migrated to sites where they are (a) on topic and (b) likeliest to get a great answer in a timely fashion.  Sometimes, as in this case, the very act of migration gives a clue as to how the question can be answered!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your moderators frequently have to field questions of mathematical statistics, or other theoretical questions, that ultimately have purely mathematical answers. My philosophy as a moderator is to keep the question here if it or any of its answers can be construed as having some statistical interest (such as in using statistical thinking to motivate a particular line of attack).  If the question otherwise is (for example) purely one about how to perform a particular mathematical manipulation, such as (in this case) how to apply the Chain Rule or (as in other common cases) how to apply optimization software, then migration seems the best course of action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2012-07-16T12:35:05.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1282" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-16T19:44:32.347" Score="11" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some differences of opinion have cropped up concerning how to go about clarifying a less than perfectly formulated question.  Because comment threads on our main site are not the best venue for airing these opinions, please let us discuss them here on meta.  Should people just jump in to provide answers?  Should we prefer first using comments to elicit clarifying information from the OPs and offer answers only when a question becomes unambiguously clear?  How far should we go to help an OP reformulate a highly ambiguous or broad question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are important issues for &lt;em&gt;our&lt;/em&gt; site that other sites do not confront to such a degree.  They occur because statistical problems often arise out of such ambiguities; people from many disciplines use statistical procedures but do not have the terminology to talk about them; and because people often ask the wrong question at the outset and need guidance to ask the question that really matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In replying, please consider also offering your views about how best our community can help improve the questions and the site as a whole by employing its power to upvote, downvote, close, and delete questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2012-07-18T07:11:08.293" Title="How can we best help to improve the questions asked on our site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1282" CreationDate="2012-07-16T21:13:02.667" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Overall, I think that more effort, as a community, needs to be put into raising the quality of the answers and not answering low quality questions. My point can be summarized as: &lt;strong&gt;It seems to me that only bad things can come from answering a question that two rational individuals can interpret completely differently.&lt;/strong&gt; In situations like that, posting an answer without clarifying does more harm than good, as it can easily mislead future readers of the question. &lt;em&gt;We are all statistics experts and can tell when a question matches that criteria&lt;/em&gt;. In that case, my suggestion is seek a minimal amount of clarification from the OP to the point where the question no longer meets that criteria &lt;strong&gt;(before answering)&lt;/strong&gt; and close voting (which seldom happens, see cardinal's data below) if that is unsuccessful rather than just ignoring the question or answering one possible interpretation of it. There are a handful of high-rep users who do this quite well and, I think, lead by example (that's where I learned to do this) but there are others that take little/no role in improving this aspect of the site and their help could improve things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some other thoughts I have on the subject: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a major issue with this site, as opposed to other more populated sites like stackoverflow, is that the close system basically doesn't work here because we have relatively few members with 3000+ rep and even fewer who actively use their close votes. I think I can say, without hyperbole, that I've only observed &lt;em&gt;maybe&lt;/em&gt; 10 users cast a close votes (obviously this is biased low, since I only see the votes that result in a closure) other than moderators. This propagates the existence of low-quality questions on the site since - let's face it - the mods are not omniscient. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A second issue, that I can understand happening with inexperienced users of the site but seems less excusable when we're talking about a high-rep user, is that there occasionally is an &quot;post an answer first, ask questions later&quot; attitude, which can result in answers being posted that actually answers a radically different question than the one posed, and, if the question is never clarified by the OP (which happens a fair amount of the time when the OP is a one-time user) can serve as a misleading direction for future readers of the question who interpreted it differently. For this reason, my opinion is that it's important to &lt;strong&gt;clarify first, answer second&lt;/strong&gt;, rather than the other way around. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in the question which motivated this meta thread - &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/32393/binary-logistic-regression-analysis-method-enter-model-has-all-beta-values-are&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; - it is my opinion that much more information is required to answer the question correctly. The answer posted there &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be correct, but we have no way of knowing and, if a future reader interpreted the question differently from the answerer, such an answer may mislead them, since there's no mention of the scope of the answer at all. So, another suggestion I may offer is: &lt;strong&gt;If you're going to answer a vague question, at least clarify what your interpretion of the question was&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4856" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2012-07-17T12:54:27.683" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1284" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1285" CreationDate="2012-07-17T16:35:38.477" Score="19" ViewCount="399" Body="&lt;p&gt;I looked a bit but, surprisingly, couldn't find an answer to this here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users with edit-privileges have the ability to approve suggested edits from those under 2000 rep. Recently, I've been approving a lot of edit requests and have found that it appears that my threshold for edit approval is very different from others. I've basically been approving anything that is reasonable, including edits that are nothing more than fixing someone's $\LaTeX$ typesetting. But, I've seen similar edits rejected by others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there specific guidelines for this kind of thing (I haven't been able to find any)? If so, do these same guidelines apply to what 2000+ people &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be doing when we edit posts? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm bumping this thread, with some examples, because lately it appears that some things are being approved that were not quite addressed by this question, originally. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/11841&quot;&gt;This one&lt;/a&gt; did nothing but add a tag that I think is questionable at best. The question is a conceptual one and I don't see what the &lt;code&gt;spss&lt;/code&gt; tag adds. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/11843&quot;&gt;This one&lt;/a&gt; TeXified a file name (huh?) and made other trivial edits (I suppose adding the &lt;code&gt;regression&lt;/code&gt; tag doesn't hurt). An important note: this edit did not fix the rather glaring spelling error in the title. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/11840&quot;&gt;This one&lt;/a&gt; did do some constructive things (formatted a line of code) but, again, TeXified computer code. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) seems to be in the original spirit of the question - approve trivial edits or not? - so I guess we don't need to go there, since it's been discussed below. (2) and (3) lead to some other issues - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the edit still leaves a glaring error (like 2 above), approve or reject it? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the edit does some good things but also some not-so-good things (like 3 above), reject or approve?    &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal opinion to examples like (2) and (3) is to reject then edit it correctly immediately afterwards, since I don't want encourage rather sloppy edits by awarding points to the suggester. But, obviously other veteran users disagree, so it seems that a consensus should be reached, particularly since we have a very active edit suggester :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4856" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Handling &quot;suggested edits&quot; to posts" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1284" CreationDate="2012-07-17T17:41:22.620" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Opinions differ, but &lt;strong&gt;SE's official position on this question&lt;/strong&gt; appears to be reflected in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/82865/should-tiny-edits-be-accepted-or-rejected-in-review&quot;&gt;Jeff Atwood answer on SO Meta last year&lt;/a&gt;, concerning &quot;tiny edit[s], like capitalising a single letter, or removing only the salutation from a post.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I completely agree -- reject them, with extreme prejudice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;strong&gt;subtle implications&lt;/strong&gt; of edits that reviewers should be aware of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Users are awarded badges for making lots of edits, editing old posts, etc. Do you want to encourage abusers who make dozens or hundreds of trivial edits in pursuit of a silver or gold star?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Any edit opens a post up to re-voting: existing votes can freely be removed by the people who made them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes even a tiny edit materially changes the correctness or meaning of a post. When that happens, trouble brews.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Edited posts become &quot;active&quot; and appear in the list of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the last reason alone, any edit made to a post really ought to be of sufficient import to make the post worthy to be re-read by community members.  (It's annoying to check out a reactivated post only to find that somebody merely turned a &quot;1&quot; into a &quot;$1$&quot;, or capitalized a keyword, or whatever.)  The penultimate reason implies that conscientious editors and reviewers are expending considerable time and effort: let's not unduly increase those demands for the sake of an unattainable perfection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2012-07-17T17:41:22.620" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1282" CreationDate="2012-07-18T07:11:08.293" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess that I'm mostly just repeating what others have already said, but here are my scattered thoughts on this...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are different kinds of questions on this site. I think that questions from non-statisticians that are trying to apply statistics (ranging from &quot;can I use the t-test for my data?!&quot;-type questions to thorough descriptions of their application) are the ones that usually require clarification and reformulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I meet a non-statistician for a consulting session, I like to start by discussing their research problem (they are usually researchers) without talking about statistics. It is important to understand the actual problem instead of letting oneself be confused by the client's attempt to describe their problem in statistical terms. As most of you undoubtably know, it is not uncommon that instead of answering &quot;yes, you can use the t-test&quot; the statistician finds herself saying &quot;you're not really interested in comparing means!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess that my goal when I work as a consultant boils down to the following statement: &lt;strong&gt;make sure that both you and the client (OP) understand the problem.&lt;/strong&gt; On CV, that sometimes requires lots of comments. Sometimes it requires a well-written and well thought-out answer. It seldom requires a quick answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;StackExchange sites do not lend themselves well to the kind of dialogue that is essential for statistical discussions.&lt;/strong&gt; We leave comments. Sometimes we forget to check back on the thread, because the OP didn't know how to use the @ function. Sometimes we don't get any replies at all. Sometimes someone else writes a good answer before there is a reply to the comment. Sometimes someone writes a bad answer without waiting for the clarification, which may cause all kinds of headaches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the reputation/badge system being what it is, I don't see quickly written answers going away anytime soon. That being said, when we write our answers, we should at least try to be clear about how we interpreted the question. It seems obvious that we should try to avoid implicit assumptions in our answers, especially when the question is vague or perhaps even in error. Indeed, this should always be done in statistical communication - CrossValidated is no exception!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes clarity even more important is that months and years from now, people will still find the questions and answers posted here in Google searches. &lt;strong&gt;We write our answers not only to the OP, but to the non-statisticians of tomorrow as well.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I don't think that votes is a very good way of handling questions that need clarification or improvement. &lt;strong&gt;Downvoting questions by low-rep users can be counter-productive&lt;/strong&gt; in that it causes the user to flee the site without clarifying their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8507" LastActivityDate="2012-07-18T07:11:08.293" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1287" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-18T09:18:38.823" Score="8" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;@whuber &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1284/handling-suggested-edits-to-posts&quot;&gt;recently&lt;/a&gt; gave some reason as to why we should avoid trivial edits to questions/answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Users are awarded badges for making lots of edits, editing old posts, etc. Do you want to encourage abusers who make dozens or hundreds of trivial edits in pursuit of a silver or gold star?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Any edit opens a post up to re-voting: existing votes can freely be removed by the people who made them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes even a tiny edit materially changes the correctness or meaning of a post. When that happens, trouble brews.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Edited posts become &amp;quot;active&amp;quot; and appear in the list of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the remark that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because question titles appear everywhere, a good case could be made for even tiny cosmetic edits to titles [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that retagging recent questions is very similar to editing titles of recent questions: the purpose is to clarify things and make the question easier to find in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But what about retagging old posts?&lt;/strong&gt; On the one hand, it makes the questions easier to find. On the other hand, we don't want to be flooded by old questions resurfacing because someone added a tag to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the best practice for this? Only retag questions without (good) answers? Only retag a question if you've made a substantial other edit to it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2018-11-16T20:51:52.610" Title="What is our policy on retagging old questions?" Tags="|discussion|tags|editing|policy|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1287" CreationDate="2012-07-18T12:25:49.567" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a little hesitant to write this &quot;answer&quot;, but let me explore a question of a slightly broader nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tagging&lt;/strong&gt;. In my view, a tag should be indicative of the subject matter and we should avoid so-called &quot;meta tags&quot; (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;) insofar as possible and reasonable. I've seen the resurgence of a couple that seem borderline cases of this recently. I recommend asking yourself the question: &lt;em&gt;Is it likely that a user would come to this site and want to learn everything they can about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/x&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;x&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;x&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/em&gt; If not, then &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/x&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;x&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;x&lt;/a&gt; is probably a poor candidate for a useful tag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Retagging old questions&lt;/strong&gt;. This can be a useful community service, but it needs to be done with care. Like anything, when taken to its logical extreme, it can be disruptive. We had just such a case of this about a year ago when an active user unilaterally created a tag and retagged somewhere between 60&amp;ndash;100 questions in a single sitting with this tag (which, to boot, was essentially a &quot;meta&quot; tag). It unfortunately generated one of the more acrimonious exchanges on &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stats.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;meta.stats.SE&lt;/a&gt; that I've seen and the retagger ended up leaving the site over it. My thoughts are that if you're going to retag several old questions, please get community input if it requires the creation of a new tag, and please try to do it during &quot;off-peak hours&quot; as much as possible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Persistent editing&lt;/strong&gt;. This leads in to a related item. Many of us naturally suffer from cases of &lt;em&gt;perfectionicitis&lt;/em&gt; (inflammation of the &lt;em&gt;perfectionix&lt;/em&gt;, an organ that has apparently developed over fairly recent human history). Some cases are more chronic and/or acute than others. Thankfully it is nonfatal. When making edits, we need to keep in mind the residual consequences and be respectful of other users and the space on the main page. Try to condense and collate edits as much as possible. If you're going to make an edit that is substantial, (&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;) think it through as carefully as possible first, (&lt;strong&gt;b&lt;/strong&gt;) look at what else on the page may need to be updated and (&lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;) make all the changes in batch. I've noticed a somewhat recent uptick in cases of the same questions rising to the top 4, 5, 6, 7, or even more than 10 times over the span of a few days with several separate edits to an answer, later a title change to a question, then later adding (or removing) a single tag to the question, etc. &lt;strong&gt;This can be (largely) avoided with a little extra planning and with no real drawbacks to content creation and management.&lt;/strong&gt; Taken to &lt;em&gt;its&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4652/7003&quot;&gt;logical extreme&lt;/a&gt;, it can generate significant discontent that is unnecessary and completely avoidable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2970" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:22.773" LastActivityDate="2012-07-18T12:25:49.567" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1289" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-19T07:17:15.570" Score="4" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2076370/most-underused-data-visualization&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2076370/most-underused-data-visualization&lt;/a&gt; is an awesome question. It's not particularly suited to stack overflow though. I think it is definitely suited to CV, although it could probably be asked more precisely. I asked the moderators on SO to move it here, and the response was &quot;declined - No, I think it would be too subjective there too. You can try re-asking it, but I won't migrate it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I re-ask this question, or would it be worth re-trying to get it moved over, or should I not bother, because this question (or one like it) likely to be closed on CV as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9007" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Can I duplicate a SO question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1289" CreationDate="2012-07-19T11:04:16.497" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't recommend reposting this question on Cross Validated. First, cross-posting is not the way to go. Second, it is overly broad and does not focus on specific issues related to data analysis. &lt;code&gt;big-list&lt;/code&gt;-like questions are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/98366/150510&quot;&gt;not a good fit for this type of Q&amp;amp;A site&lt;/a&gt;, which is probably why the question was closed on SO despite the huge traffic there. Another reason not to migrate is that it was posted long ago and it is has attracted a large number of upvotes on SO. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not saying that responses were bad, or that the question itself might not be interesting (provided it was more firmly delineated: e.g., &quot;what are good alternatives to scatterplot when one wants to study covariation between skewed numerical variables&quot;, or &quot;beside scatterplot, what are good way to highlight a trend between two series of hourly measurement&quot;, or &quot;under which conditions does it help to also display marginal densities in a scatterplot&quot;, etc.--where discussions on pros and cons, and on-line references, are expected). As it stands, this question just call for a list of nice visual displays which are unlikely to help future users with a specific problem in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2012-07-19T11:04:16.497" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1291" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1293" CreationDate="2012-07-19T13:10:28.360" Score="18" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that most of the questions in Cross Validated come from new users who, for a number of reasons, do not read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; section and do not know about the upvoting and accepting-an-answer system. Sometimes the OP is satistified with an answer but does not accept it because does not know about this. I believe that commenting &quot;you can upvote/accept my answer if you like it&quot; is a bit embarrasing for the answerer/responder as it can be seen as a pressure for doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that these rewards motivate people to write good answers (or even &lt;em&gt;writing&lt;/em&gt; an answer in this context), I was thinking that an automatic message/comment (such as &quot;consider upvoting/accepting useful answers&quot; with a link to FAQ) on new user's questions might be useful and would not put more charge on moderator's bag of responsibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think about this? Please, feel free to suggest a better option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10525" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="How reasonable is to inform new users about upvotes and accepting answers through an automatic message?" Tags="|discussion|votes|accepted-answer|new-users|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1287" CreationDate="2012-07-19T15:14:16.687" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to add another thought here, which hopefully isn't too far afield to be off topic (it depends on what &quot;old&quot; means). One thing I regularly do is scan the list of new badges every day to catch what have been considered the best questions &amp;amp; answers of CV that I may have missed.  When I come across a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/badges/40/tumbleweed&quot;&gt;tumbleweed&lt;/a&gt;, I also check those out. Now some questions don't get much attention because they don't have much merit, but once in a while I think a question does have merit.  In such a case, I often edit &amp;amp; retag it explicitly for the sake of bumping it back to the top of the queue, and with tags / title / keywords etc., so that it may have the opportunity to get more attention.  Moreover, I gather this is the point of SE's having the tumbleweed badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2012-07-19T15:14:16.687" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1291" CreationDate="2012-07-19T22:49:59.243" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like some other users, Moderators do this occasionally (and manually!), when we notice that some users have a very low acceptance rate and almost no voting activity. Most of the times, our message are written on the fly (as far as I am concerned, at least), although we could resort on our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/771/930&quot;&gt;Library of helpful responses&lt;/a&gt;. This is done in accordance with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq#howtoask&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This lets other people know that you have received a good answer to your question. Doing this is helpful because it shows other people that you’re getting value from the community. (And if you don’t do this, people will often politely ask you to go back and accept answers for more of your questions!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do have 'post notice' to signal lack of reference or insufficient explanation, but nothing regarding vote or green mark.&#xA;The idea of flagging automatically question with such incentive remark is nice, but I think it is already implemented unless I am wrong (I haven't asked a question for a while): &quot;Consider accepting an answer&quot; should appear in the list of questions on the user profile, although it &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/14594/150510&quot;&gt;disappear after one month&lt;/a&gt;. Moreover, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/87767/150510&quot;&gt;accepting an answer is not an obligation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other Meta SO threads of interest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/10672/150510&quot;&gt;Encourage users to select 'Accepted Answer' for old Questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/8692/150510&quot;&gt;Force Accepted Answers on Questions by Inactive Users&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/12543/150510&quot;&gt;Is it bad form to prompt new questioners to formally accept your answer?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/14994/150510&quot;&gt;Do you feel dirty if you nudge new users to accept your answer when they indicate you've answered their question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/12583/150510&quot;&gt;Do I always have to accept an answer?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2012-07-19T22:49:59.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1294" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-20T18:44:37.573" Score="-2" ViewCount="456" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I noticed that a person answered his own question.  That didn't concern me so much because it looked like he honestly didn't know the answer but found it as he did more research.  But what really bothered me was that he was able to give a check mark to his own answer. Does that mean that he awarded himself 15 reputation points?  I think reputation is only to be given by others in the community to show that they respect your knwoledge and the quality of the answer (in the case of an answer). Is this what actually happened or am I in a stew over nothing? Could it be that you are allowed to check your own answer but are not awarded the 15 points?  I have never tried this so I don't know.  If you can give yourself point this way I think it should be stopped for the integrity of the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T20:21:01.603" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T20:21:01.603" Title="Is it possible to give yourself reputation points?" Tags="|support|answers|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1284" CreationDate="2012-07-21T18:02:05.527" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that whuber has covered the major issues just fine, but I think I can add a little bit of practical advice that may be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As has been pointed out, there is a lot of material out there on various meta sites with advice and guidelines for when an edit should or should not be rejected for being too minor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when the rubber hits the road, and you're sitting there staring at a suggested edit, I initially found it difficult to synthesize it all into a rubric for what action to take. (I can approve edits on SO, but not here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I have settled on is basically this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My threshold for when an edit is too minor is &lt;strong&gt;inversely related to the age of the question&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Before approving &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; edit, check if more could be done.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is very recent, I am more likely to let a minimal edit through. The older the question is, the higher my standards become. Obviously, I don't follow this literally: if a question was posted 3 seconds ago, I wouldn't approve a single capitalization fix! But if a question was posted within the last hour, and I see a suggested edit that only removes a &quot;Thanks!&quot; tagline, &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; I don't see anything else worthwhile to be done, I will generally approve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I settled on this approach was because it seemed to me that the largest cost to editing questions is the fourth point that whuber lists: that the question is bumped to the top of the active list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I haven't seen the revoting issue become a really widespread problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if someone is making dozens or hundreds of minor edits, it will be obvious. You will very quickly say, &quot;WTF? Why is the suggested edit queue filled with edits from this one user?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This happens pretty regularly on SO. For instance, someone will simply search for a commonly misspelled word in titles and just dive in.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In those cases, I typically recommend rejecting them en masse (regardless of whether you agree with the validity of the edit) and raising the issue on meta. Massive serial editing ventures should be organized by the entire community, not a single individual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5055" LastActivityDate="2012-07-21T18:02:05.527" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1294" CreationDate="2012-07-21T22:24:53.510" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I'm the OP, assuming the post in question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/26249/investigator-intention-and-thresholds-p-values/27195#27195&quot;&gt;this one.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had a question about something on John Kruschke's  &quot;Doing Bayesian Data Analysis&quot; slides. Two weeks later, while looking for something else entirely, I found a paper in which Dr. Kruschke discussed the topic more comprehensively. Since no one had answered the question, I wrote up a little summary and linked to the paper. I accepted it since the matter was now resolved to my satisfaction[*] and I didn't want to clutter up the unanswered queue (or look lazy with a 0% acceptance rate). Also, if I may brag, it was a pretty decent answer; I would have gladly accepted it had someone else posted it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the present case, this is all moot anyway. Last night, John Kruschke himself posted a few links to papers on that topic. Since he is undisputedly the expert on what his own slides mean, switched my &quot;accept&quot; to his answer instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry for causing a fuss and, worse, not even noticing it was going on. I defended my dissertation yesterday(!) and have slowly been catching up on the rest of the world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[*] That said, I actually would like more feedback on whether people care, or should care, about the issue raised in the original post. I guess checking &quot;accept&quot; does often put a damper on people's willingness to answer a question and maybe I should have held off longer. If anyone wants to post or chat about it, that'd be great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7250" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2012-07-21T22:24:53.510" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1298" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-23T17:39:55.650" Score="10" ViewCount="669" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to figure out where the line is for acceptable questions about sources of data and what is the best way to deal with such questions. In my mind, this is a special case of data collection queries, and constitutes &quot;practical, answerable questions based on actual problems&quot;. For example, the GIS stackexchange folks seem perfectly happy to answer such questions, but that is a niche area and not all questions could be redirected there. There are also many data source questions where issues of sampling and estimation seem relevant (where can I find block level data on consumer expenditures or ACS vs long form census). There are also questions about comparing potential data sources where folks on this forum have substantial amount of domain expertise that would be valuable and cannot be found elsewhere. Finally, I have not found links to zanran and infochimps to be particularly helpful in my own searches. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7071" LastActivityDate="2014-01-04T23:10:32.093" Title="What is a good place for &quot;how/where do I get data on X&quot; questions?" Tags="|discussion|data|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1299" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-24T20:58:41.390" Score="3" ViewCount="464" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes when I load CrossValidated, I get an error that the page has a redirect loop.  I can always resolve this by going to meta.stats.stackexchange.com and then reloading stats.stackexchange.com.  Sometimes the problem is reversed - the redirect loop is on meta.stats.se and can be fixed by going to stats.se.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've only experienced in on CrossValidated - not on SO or any of the other SE sites I drop in on occasionally.  It also only happens at work, so it's most likely a consequence of some weird little bit of code unique to this site interacting with my organization's web security.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't expect this to be fixed for my sake - I can't even reproduce it reliably - but I thought I'd put my experience down for the record.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;TLDR:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Redirect loop prevents pages from loading&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fixed by loading meta.stats.se if stats.se is redirecting, and vice versa&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only at work&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only on stats.stackexchange.com and meta.stats.stackexchange.com&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chrome 20.0.1132.57 m&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Windows XP Pro, Version 2002, SP 3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the Chrome error:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This webpage has a redirect loop&#xA;The webpage at http://stats.stackexchange.com/ has resulted in too many redirects. Clearing your cookies for this site or allowing third-party cookies may fix the problem. If not, it is possibly a server configuration issue and not a problem with your computer.&#xA;Here are some suggestions:&#xA;Reload this webpage later.&#xA;Learn more about this problem.&#xA;Error 310 (net::ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS): There were too many redirects.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearing cookies does fix it, but only temporarily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="71" LastEditDate="2012-07-24T23:07:18.757" LastActivityDate="2012-07-24T23:07:18.757" Title="&quot;This webpage has a redirect loop&quot;" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1298" CreationDate="2012-07-24T21:01:57.640" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess it depends on what you mean by &quot;X&quot;.  If the question is, 'where can I get data on US state-by-state unemployment rates?' (answer: &lt;a href=&quot;http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/release?rid=112&amp;amp;ob=u&amp;amp;od=asc&amp;amp;filter%5B0%5D=&amp;amp;filter%5B1%5D=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FRED&lt;/a&gt;), then I don't think it belongs here just as was decided previously in the question @whuber links.  I further agree with @Procrastinator that the proposed data Q&amp;amp;A site is a good idea for stuff like that where someone is looking for a &lt;em&gt;particular&lt;/em&gt; public data set, but is having trouble finding it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there could be a different version of this question that I think &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be worthwhile for CV.  Specifically, I have often thought of asking a CW question to have a place where links for statistical data sets of different kinds for demonstrating statistical properties or practicing different kinds of analyses could be listed (an example link would be to &lt;a href=&quot;http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/DASL/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DASL&lt;/a&gt;).  The idea is that it would serve as a recourse similar to &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0412399202&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Handbook of Small Data Sets&lt;/a&gt;.  We &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/138/resources-for-learning-r&quot;&gt;have&lt;/a&gt; such a repository of links to resources for learning R, for example, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/12670/data-apis-feeds-available-as-packages-in-r&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt; for R packages that can read data from feeds.  My idea would be analogous to those, but I've never asked because I've never been sure it it's really appropriate.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is what @Dimitriy means, then I do think there could be real value in such a thing, although I recognize that the community is ambivalent on this type of stuff.  For what it's worth, we do have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/16130/datasets-for-data-visualization-examples-teaching-and-research&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, which is also similar but more focused and doesn't have the open-ended 'big-list' quality to it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; I don't know how I had missed it, but it turns out we do have something like this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/7/locating-freely-available-data-samples&quot;&gt;Locating freely available data samples&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2012-08-12T16:57:46.523" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1301" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-25T16:48:37.040" Score="3" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/32994/lme4-vs-mcmcglmm-what-are-r-structure-g-structure-in-a-glmm&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt;, I had an answer that wasn't understandable (for me) but in the comments to that answer and also the comments to the original question, I got some very useful info, although it made me more confused ! So now I think the way forward is to post a reproducible example with &lt;code&gt;lme4&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;glmer()&lt;/code&gt;) and &lt;code&gt;MCMCglmm()&lt;/code&gt; operating on the same data and ask about the differences in the results (specifically about the R-structure). I have now made a reproducible example. So should I amend the question (which will make many of the comments redundant, but possibly not the one answer) or should I ask a new question ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11405" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2012-07-25T16:48:37.040" Title="Should I ask a new question (lme4 vs MCMCglmm)?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1302" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-26T00:11:02.583" Score="0" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to attach a file such as .txt or .xlsx to my question? If not then what no-cost alternatives do I have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW I work at a high security national laboratory so I can not post it online here and provide a link to it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11944" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T17:48:21.080" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Is there a way to attach a file?" Tags="|support|status-declined|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1303" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-26T12:18:17.463" Score="14" ViewCount="619" Body="&lt;p&gt;I got a notice in my &quot;inbox&quot; about a chat message, but it's in a room I never heard of and never entered before.  What's going on and what does that mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2012-07-26T12:18:17.463" Title="What is a &quot;super-ping&quot; and what does it mean if I get one?" Tags="|discussion|comment|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1303" CreationDate="2012-07-26T12:18:17.463" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;Pinging&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; is a mechanism to draw somebody's attention to a comment or remark in a chat room.  Whenever someone &lt;em&gt;has already participated&lt;/em&gt; in a comment thread or chat room, the appearance of their user name prefixed with an &quot;@&quot; will cause a notice to appear in their in-box along with a link to that appearance, making it easy to read and respond.  Anybody can use this mechanism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Available to moderators is an extension of this, called &quot;&lt;strong&gt;super-pinging&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot; With it we can notify anyone, anywhere on SE, that their participation in a chat room is requested, whether or not they have participated in that room (or even on our site) before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until recently, the only mechanism moderators have had for private interaction with users about site issues has been &lt;strong&gt;private contact by email&lt;/strong&gt;. This is strictly controlled: the format is boilerplate provided by StackExchange; email addresses are hidden to maintain anonymity; and--most importantly--a large number of SE employees are automatically copied. We are admonished to use this mechanism only&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to address serious behavior problems: consistently low quality, improper voting, being abusive to others, using signatures or taglines, excessive self-promotion, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually the outcome of such contact is either an immediate change in how the user behaves or, if not, separation from the community for a period of time to &quot;cool off.&quot;  (Separation is enforced by suspending the user account, preventing active participation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In seeking a gentler, less formal way to contact users about problems, your moderators have found that &lt;em&gt;creating a private chat room&lt;/em&gt; and then &lt;em&gt;super-pinging a user&lt;/em&gt; to join us for a conversation can work well. We can communicate back and forth in a friendly constructive manner, in strict privacy, without fear of offending someone else, of getting downvoted, or of any other kind of retribution.  &lt;strong&gt;If you are contacted in this way&lt;/strong&gt; it might mean you are perceived to be part of a problem that we need to address, but it can also mean that we are merely trying to resolve a possible misunderstanding or that we are seeking your advice about a sensitive matter which is best discussed privately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We respect your privacy and time and therefore do not intend to use this mechanism extensively.  Our hope is that we can identify issues and discuss them with interested and involved parties in order to develop effective, collegial solutions before these issues become serious problems.  So, &lt;strong&gt;if you are super-pinged, please respond&lt;/strong&gt;; if you do not, we will either need to act without your valuable advice or we may be obliged to contact you privately by email, with all that implies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2012-07-26T12:18:17.463" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1305" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-26T17:52:06.663" Score="24" ViewCount="406" Body="&lt;p&gt;Greetings from your friendly neighbors who frequent the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;r&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;r&lt;/a&gt; tag over at StackOverflow!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are all familiar with the fact that questions involving R will often straddle the two sites, and so a certain amount of migration between the two is to be expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a few of us over at SO have noticed that recently it seems as though R questions are being migrated to SO regardless of their quality. The latest example was &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/11674737/324364&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question. (A few more examples of what I would consider low quality &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/11475818/324364&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/11225743/324364&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/11213414/324364&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.) That question is both rather unclear and certainly does not display any research effort on the part of the asker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would just like to remind everyone, whenever possible: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/82986/164376&quot;&gt;never migrate crap&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, it may be better to try to encourage the OP to improve the question on your site, and if they do, &lt;strong&gt;then&lt;/strong&gt; feel free to migrate it. Otherwise, just close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question is why are these low quality questions be migrated at all?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(None of this is meant to imply that low quality questions are never migrated in the other direction, from SO to CV. Please feel free to pop into the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/106/r&quot;&gt;R chat room&lt;/a&gt; at SO to give us feedback on any low quality migrations. I simply felt like I'd seen more low quality migrations than usual recently, so I thought I'd mention it, just as a reminder.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5055" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Please do not migrate low quality questions" Tags="|discussion|r|migration|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1305" CreationDate="2012-07-26T19:30:30.160" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'm quite sympathetic&lt;/strong&gt;--as a mod, I don't like bad questions from other sites landing here, either. I greatly appreciate your reaching out to us with your concern (and not just swearing under your breath at the boneheads over on CV... :-).  Your reminder will cause me to pause a little longer in the future before hitting that &quot;migrate to SO&quot; button.  But please forgive me for replying with some questions of my own, because it seems like some implicit assumptions are operating here and, in the interest of good mutual understanding, we ought to unveil them and briefly examine their implications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When a question is off topic here, then why should we make an effort to improve it before closing or migration?  Nevertheless we usually do, but at the point it becomes clear that a question belongs on another site, then &lt;em&gt;the norms of the target site apply&lt;/em&gt;.  Wouldn't it then be presumptuous of us to continue to work on the question?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Following up on that one, it seems to me that if we simply close an off topic question (but not brusquely: of course we would give a reason and it would be that the question is off topic here and it might include some additional constructive comments), then any sentient asker who is still breathing will just head over to another site and re-ask their question there, anyway.  So you guys get to start over without the benefit of any comments or suggestions we would have made along the way.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The main reason certain questions are being characterized as &quot;low quality&quot; appears to be that they are RTFMs.  This has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2686/how-should-you-respond-to-give-me-a-fish-rtfm-questions&quot;&gt;debated on SO meta&lt;/a&gt;.  My read is that (a) these are acceptable questions unless (b) the asker is a serial abuser.  Are you then suggesting that CV community members should research the asker's history on the target site before voting to migrate?  This seems like it would be asking a little much, and most of us don't have adequate privileges to do this anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; documentation in particular is notoriously bad: it is not a trivial matter to find the right parameter in the right function in the right package to do what you want and even then the manual pages may be opaque (to be generous about it).  I agree that providing evidence of research makes for a great question.  But it seems like a lot to insist that &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; questions &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; document a fruitless search in order to be asked.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I look at the four examples offered I agree that none of them is a great question.  Yet none of them are on topic here; all are on topic on SO; and three of them are clearly formulated and have answers demonstrating these aren't completely trivial to solve.  That &quot;latest example&quot; is quite clear, IMHO, and the answer requires not only research of the correct parameter, but also knowledge of string handling in &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; (via &lt;code&gt;sprintf&lt;/code&gt;) to solve. Trivial for you and anyone reasonably familiar with &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; to answer; certainly. So it seems the main objection here is that &quot;easy to answer&quot; = &quot;crap.&quot;  Fair enough, if that's the norm on SO (but I suspect not), yet it doesn't seem possible to turn that sentiment into actionable criteria that this community can be reasonably expected to follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the same lights, although (IMHO) the majority of questions migrated &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; CV are garbage, we understand that it would be unfair and unreasonable to ask the SO community or moderators to vet statistical questions for clarity or meaningfulness: you cannot be expected to have the knowledge or interest to do this.  (We close a lot of them right away.)  &lt;strong&gt;But please keep sending them&lt;/strong&gt;: helping people improve statistical questions is something we are good at and we want to be the ones deciding which questions are worth keeping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2012-07-26T19:30:30.160" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1305" CreationDate="2012-07-26T20:01:51.347" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a fair reminder and an interesting occasion to discuss how to&#xA;handle such question. When the question has to do with statistical&#xA;analysis or related techniques (including visualization when the purpose&#xA;is to answer a statistical question)--as per our FAQ--it belongs here.&#xA;Low quality questions are either closed or subjected to a request for&#xA;clarification. This is an important aspect of Stack Exchange of giving&#xA;the opportunity to the OP to clarify anything that might be&#xA;misinterpreted, or to enhance the quality of his post to fit within SE&#xA;guidelines. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case of R questions has been debated more than once on our Meta,&#xA;and the older thread probably started during the beta: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1/930&quot;&gt;How to answer R&#xA;questions&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;Purely programming questions are generally sent over Stack Overflow. Low&#xA;quality questions, however, should not. Apparently, the question that is&#xA;referenced in your question is part of this category, according to your&#xA;criteria which are certainly well founded, given your experience, and&#xA;that of Andrie, on SO. It is, however, hard for some of us to help the&#xA;OP reformulate his question so that it sounds acceptable to you, as a&#xA;community. Asking SO moderators before migrating is one option and CV moderators do&#xA;that on some occasions. Given the large part devoted to the use of R in&#xA;statistics on this site, many questions are likely candidates for SO&#xA;when they really don't have anything to do with statistics &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;, but I&#xA;think it would be hard to ask SO moderators each time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would love having a well defined set of criteria that a question must&#xA;fullfill before it is considered as belonging on Stack Overflow and not&#xA;any other site. But it is worth noting that qualifying a question as&#xA;crappy is risky: After all, very simple but well posed question are&#xA;eligible according to our common FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual&#xA;  problems that you face (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, you and I know how it can be difficult to judge the&#xA;quality of a question when we are not following a site on a very regular&#xA;basis (this is my case as a user on SO, at least). It is even harder to&#xA;decide whether to close a question as a duplicate, or simply as a badly&#xA;worded question when it happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up, I would be happy to have some concrete illustrations of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is considered strictly OT on SO and should be closed immediately&#xA;(possibly, with a sensible comment to accompany such action).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is considered as a ready-to-migrate question, i.e. without any&#xA;intervention from our part.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, since you are active on both sites, what would you suggest we put in our FAQ to help users decide on the best site for their question, even if many new users probably don't visit our FAQ before asking their first question :(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2012-07-26T20:01:51.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1298" CreationDate="2012-07-26T20:14:14.177" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I still oppose this.  I really sympathize with the difficulties in getting quality information about data sources, but I don't believe that this site is the appropriate venue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a reason why the Data StackExchange site is failing: data sourcing questions are boring. People don't want to open up a screen full of questions like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Where can I get data on X?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Where can I get data on X, but from 1970-1978?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Where can I get data on X in HDF5?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site works because there's a good probability that any user can click on any question and either be able to answer it or be able to learn something from it. Domain-specific data sourcing questions are, by definition, useless to users outside of that domain. The same could be said of language-specific programming questions, which is why we have a similar policy for migrating those elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following on your bar analogy, opening Stats.SE to data sourcing questions would be like bringing busloads of grandparents to the bar. I love my grandma, but there's no way I want her and forty of her dearest friends in my favorite pub. They'll take up too much room, distract me from what I'm there for, and eventually change the very nature of the place into something I don't enjoy. Sure, they'll love it for a while - until all their grandkids stop showing up!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the reason why GIS and other domain Q&amp;amp;A sites are more open to and (I believe) the correct venues for these types of questions is that they only have to deal with their own grannies. That keeps the volume to a manageable level and lets the site carry on its main purposes. We have no basis for limiting the volume or topic of those requests here, so they might just inundate us (especially around final exam time, I suspect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, the key struggle of this site is &lt;strong&gt;keeping the experts interested&lt;/strong&gt;.  And the key to that is, I think, following this fundamental guideline in our FAQ: &quot;If the question requires statistical expertise to be answered, ask it here&quot;. Data sourcing questions usually require a wholly different, domain-specific sorts of expertise. It happens that many of our excellent members have expertise in many domains (programming, too), but that's not why they're here - so even though it might be a useful and convenient place to ask data sourcing or programming questions, I think we have to honor the purpose of this venue to preserve its quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastActivityDate="2012-07-26T20:14:14.177" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1309" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1311" CreationDate="2012-07-27T01:35:06.017" Score="3" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;The JSM starts in San Diego this weekend.  I am going on Saturday. I started here three months ago and have participated for all 87 days.  I have sveral things to do at the meetings and may not get on every day.  It occurred to me thatt many of you may be going and that it could slow down on questions and answers.  Is there usually a lull during the JSM and what about other big meetings like the Royal Statistical Society meetings or other major meeting in Europe?  If you choose to answer could you tell me whether or not you are going and if so how will it affect your participation on StackExchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastActivityDate="2012-07-31T11:47:30.893" Title="Does CV slow down during big meetings like the JSM in the US?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1305" CreationDate="2012-07-27T04:19:56.767" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I appreciate the thoughtful responses from both @chl and @whuber.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing I'd like to clear up right away is that the issue is most certainly &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; that we don't like simple, or trivial questions over at SO. For instance, take &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/11677685/324364&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question from just earlier today. That was extremely trivial to answer (and answered by one of the highest rep R tag SO users!), but I think everyone over at SO would be &lt;em&gt;delighted&lt;/em&gt; if all our questions were like that one. The asker provided a clear, reproducible presentation of their data and code, and clearly described the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there are two general categories of questions that some of us find disagreeable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I have this data. I want a graph that looks like X, Y and Z. How do I do it?&quot; with no code, and the data isn't provided using something reproducible, like &lt;code&gt;dput&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Just generally unanswerable, like one of my &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/11475818/324364&quot;&gt;examples&lt;/a&gt; above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have 2 variables that, when combined, uniquely identify a product&#xA;  (barcode id and catalog descriptions). Barcode numbers and catalog&#xA;  descriptions have drifted over time, but not at the same time (e.g.&#xA;  barcode value for one product changed in May, then catalog description&#xA;  slightly changed in December). I would like to create some kind of&#xA;  object to identify these drifts (e.g. when barcode value xxxxxxx,&#xA;  connect all catalog descriptions, then with all catalog descriptions,&#xA;  connect all barcode values, then continue until no more matches).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Any idea how to implement this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with questions like in (1) is that they break the Q&amp;amp;A model. The questioner is no longer asking for &lt;em&gt;help&lt;/em&gt; with a specific problem, they are asking someone to do something &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; them. This type of thing seems to be happening more and more regularly with data visualization questions. The problems with (2) should be pretty apparent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for solutions, I think both @chl and @whuber make some good points regarding the difficulty for CV users to magically fix questions before migrating them, and the fact that askers will always be able to simply re-ask a closed question elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an ideal world, I would like R questions that are migrated to SO to at least demonstrate some level of research effort. This could take many forms. Example code that illustrates the undesired outcome and data (ideally reproducible) would be best, of course. But really anything that reasonably illustrates what the asker has tried, and why it didn't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Returning to my &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11674737/how-do-you-add-dollars-signs-to-axis-labels-in-a-base-graphics-plot&quot;&gt;first&lt;/a&gt; example above, in its original form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have plotted some numbers in a scatterplot in R and want to add&#xA;  dollar signs to the numbers. How would I do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could quibble about just how clear this is: dollar signs where? The axis title? The axis tick labels? Or did you plot numbers as text in the scatterplot itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if they had at least shown the code they'd tried up to that point, most of those questions would be moot. And even a few cursory comments along the lines of &quot;I looked in &lt;code&gt;?plot&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;?points&lt;/code&gt; but didn't find anything helpful&quot; would be an improvement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I recognize that it may be difficult for your community to do all the work to improve questions prior to migrating. I'd settle for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;just not migrating the truly horrible questions (i.e. the obvious cases, like (2) above), and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;when you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; migrate a question that &quot;needs work&quot;, send it over with a polite comment suggesting they edit their question following the guidelines &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/5963269/324364&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. I know it seems like a trivial thing, but if the question &lt;em&gt;already&lt;/em&gt; has a comment along those lines, it's a lot easier for folks who are easily annoyed to simply ignore it, and it saves some work for those of us who want to be helpful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, and this is mostly an aside, I think there's sort of an Urban/Rural divide going on here between SO and CV. A lot of behaviors that can seem rude or abrupt in an urban setting are natural adaptations to coexisting with a much higher population density. I think that SO can seem a lot harsher about issues like this than on other smaller StackExchange sites, but it's not &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; because we're just big meanies over on SO. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5055" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2012-07-27T04:19:56.767" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1309" CreationDate="2012-07-27T13:46:23.500" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site started up around the 2010 JSM and naturally had a strong peak of interest, so there's no reliable data there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 2011 there is a tiny dip in the Q&amp;amp;A rates for the JSM (7/30 through 8/4), but it's no different than comparable dips observed before (e.g., 6/15, 7/3) and after (9/13), each of about 20% less than a longer-term moving average.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are a strongly international site peopled primarily by working statisticians, consultants, and people in related fields with strong statistical interests.  In my experience (a) JSM is primarily a US conference and (b) academic participation is far higher than private participation.  Accordingly, until our site attracts more of these kinds of statisticians (we would love to have them), I would expect to see no measurable changes during JSM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;With one exception&lt;/strong&gt;: If any CV member attending JSM were to make a point of talking about us--such as a mention during a talk or panel session, for instance--we might see a significant &lt;em&gt;jump&lt;/em&gt; in activity during and following the meeting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2012-07-27T13:46:23.500" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1313" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1314" CreationDate="2012-07-28T15:55:22.970" Score="2" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just in browsing (I hadn't been to the site in a while) I've noticed one of my previous questions has been nudged by Community onto the list of latest questions. The question itself was answered but through a comment and not an answer and hence I can't mark it answered. This didn't trouble me, but now it does somewhat (the only answer provided didn't work for me as it was using techniques that I wasn't using if that makes sense to work my data up). In short is there a way of closing the question, as the answer was there (the original data I posted answered the question but due to my lack of knowledge/understanding I didn't realise it at the time). Thanks to some friendly nudges in the right direction I got there myself (it wasn't a complicated question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8812" LastActivityDate="2012-07-28T18:05:42.527" Title="I have a question answered through a comment and not an answer" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1313" CreationDate="2012-07-28T18:05:42.527" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, just to be clear, it appears that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/21914/calculating-total-probabilities-from-a-poisson-random-variable#comment39601_21917&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt; is what you are taking as an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good way to close out a situation like this is to post your own answer incorporating (and even referencing) the comment and then accept that answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your concern about the quality of our site!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2012-07-28T18:05:42.527" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1315" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-28T19:39:00.557" Score="4" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I save my favorite users in the profile? Why would it be possible to mark &quot;favorite&quot; questions but not users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7795" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="How to save favorite users?" Tags="|support|users|bookmarks|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1315" CreationDate="2012-07-28T20:30:33.370" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is possible to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/937/930&quot;&gt;subscribe to a specific user's answers&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, I believe the response is no: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/94033/150510&quot;&gt;Is there a way to add a user as favorite at StackOverFlow?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2012-07-28T20:30:33.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1309" CreationDate="2012-07-31T11:47:30.893" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a follow-up on this question, I am at the 2012 JSM for the past two days.  I am still finding ways to participate on CV but my daily rep points are down to around 30 point a day for the past two days.  Of course this is mostly because of lack of time to read and answer a lot of questions.  However, I have also noticed that when I look at the top rep point getters for this week everyones totals seem to be down quite a bit.  So I think there is reduced activity in questions asked, questions answered and the rating of answers (i.e. upvote and downvote activities).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastActivityDate="2012-07-31T11:47:30.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1319" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1951" CreationDate="2012-07-31T12:05:29.047" Score="23" ViewCount="1046" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that if there is an awareness of the statisticians of the professional societies of the purpose and success of StackExchange CV many would want to help out.  In the ASA quantitative literacy has been our goal to improve.  Incoming ASA President Marie Davidian gave a presentation yesterday on a grant program she has to teach basic statistics for the aim of getting more American born students interested in pursuing a career in statistics or a related field.  There is a recognition of the ever-growing need for statistics to handle big data problems and the Obama administration commitment to find research in these quantitative areas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The great thing that CV does is to get the experts to teach the novices some basic statistics in the context of problems they are working on.  The accumulation from many examples improves everyone's knowledge of good statistical practice including the experts'.  If the ASA leadership could see how effective we are and have some assurance that the final accepted answers are sound I am sure they would feel an obligation to participate or at least encourage others to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who should we approach (ASA president, Presidents Elect, Past Presidents, other society leaders)? Would there be any changes to our system that would increase the participation of ASA members?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastEditorUserId="2970" LastEditDate="2012-07-31T16:43:54.600" LastActivityDate="2014-02-07T15:10:42.303" Title="Can we recruit more statisticians to participate in CV?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="54" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1320" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1323" CreationDate="2012-07-31T20:14:33.767" Score="10" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/549/skewed-distribution&quot;&gt;skewed distribution community chat room&lt;/a&gt; it was brought up about whether book reviews would be on topic &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.blogoverflow.com/?blb=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;for the blog&lt;/a&gt;. A few of us in the room agreed it would be fine for the blog, but to get greater community input I ask here: &lt;strong&gt;Does anyone have objections to using the Cross Validated blog as a platform for community member written book reviews?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as I have your attention,  I'd like to note that any member of the community is invited to contribute to the blog. I've said in the past that I would like to see more &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.blogoverflow.com/2012/03/increasing-visibility-of-the-cv-blog-and-why-pie-charts-kind-of-suck/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;community members giving input and writing posts&lt;/a&gt;, and these can be really any topic related to the community (not just book reviews). IMO we need more fodder for the blog, and I think critical and objective book reviews could be excellent topics of interest to the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So does anybody want to write a book review? It also appears &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/7250/matt-krause&quot;&gt;Matt Krause&lt;/a&gt; is taking recommendations for machine learning books to review if your interested in giving a suggestion (getting ahead of myself and assuming the community will not object to them in the first place!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2012-08-03T13:13:31.350" Title="Would the community like to see book reviews on the blog?" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1321" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1322" CreationDate="2012-07-31T21:58:46.897" Score="5" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am just double-checking on this. If I have a followup question to an existing question where I already have accepted an answer. I should post it as a new question right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example asking to clarify if a Gains or lift chart's deciles are based on top propensity scores for either classification in the case of a binary target. This would be branching of this original &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/33148/what-do-lift-and-gain-charts-state-in-the-context-of-an-employee-turnover-model&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like I should just add it to the comments but think no one will respond since the question is already answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11944" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2012-08-01T10:07:24.013" Title="Follow-up question to a question with an accepted answer" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1321" CreationDate="2012-08-01T10:07:24.013" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your followup question is really different, just ask a new question with a link to the older thread. I would say it is better to have some supporting data or updated context for this, so that it doesn't look like a duplicate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might also want to take a look at this related question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1259/930&quot;&gt;What is the best way to ask a follow up or slightly revised question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I feel like I should just add it to the comments but think no one will&#xA;  respond since the question is already answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can slightly edit your question so that it will bump up in the queue of active questions and upvote new comments so that they remain visible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2012-08-01T10:07:24.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1320" CreationDate="2012-08-01T14:00:31.067" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think book reviews are a great idea. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder, though, if there's an implicit requirement to review &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; books only. (Certainly, you couldn't submit a review of a book from 1979 to a publication.) The issue here is that, when people ask for book recommendations on CV, the books that end up being recommended are always the classics, as those are generally the most appropriate for typical users / situations. So, while I recognize it's an odd suggestion, I think it might be best if often &lt;em&gt;old&lt;/em&gt; books are the ones reviewed.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point worth bearing in mind, is that a lot of information is already available about many books on the internet (Amazon book descriptions &amp;amp; user reviews, info at the publisher's website, &amp;amp; published book reviews can sometimes be freely accessed).  So I think we should think about what makes CV (&amp;amp; potential CV blog readers, in particular) distinctive as a target audience, and explicitly try to cater to that.  For instance, there are many book reviews in statistical publications and may have a more sophisticated audience in mind, whereas my impression of the typical OP on CV is someone without a strong statistical background.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2012-08-01T14:00:31.067" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1320" CreationDate="2012-08-01T20:51:28.147" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You might consider using CV itself to write a review.&lt;/strong&gt;  For instance, if you would like to review an old book, ask a question like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What made John Tukey's &lt;em&gt;EDA&lt;/em&gt; (1977) a classic?  What's it all about, what influence did it have, and is it still worth reading?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then answer it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I still don't really get the point of a separate blog, unless it is to summarize things happening on our site. Don't we have enough to do by asking good questions and providing great answers?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2012-08-01T20:51:28.147" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1325" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-01T23:52:00.847" Score="12" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have come into the stats/machine learning field due to a sideways shift from computational physics. I'm not in an academic environment at the moment but feel as though I achieve good practical results even if they way I work is a bit of a hack; I need results rather than theoretical rigour (not that I'm suggesting theoretical rigour is a bad thing). My knowledge of the literature in the field is not comprehensive, so I often feel I'm reinventing a wheel that must have been published somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, that long winded intro is just to give this question some context. I've developed/am developing a technique (or a series of techniques) for optimising hyper-parameters for machine learning algorithms. It seems to produce better results and run more efficiently than what I understand are standard approaches, based on some literature I have read published in the last year or two. I would like to know if a similar approach has in fact been published, since there may be some improvements I've yet to work out myself. I'd also like to know if there is some obvious flaw that I'm not seeing in the approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I could ask a question along these lines in the main site, but I'm not sure how appropriate it would be for the site. I am concerned that in order to give sufficient details, the question would be very long, essentially a mini academic paper and therefore so specific that is doesn't contribute to a good database of Q&amp;amp;As, even if I receive good answers that help me. It may require a significant investment of time for people to read and comprehend for content that could turn out to be flawed or simply banal. I'm also very slightly concerned that if this is in fact a useful idea then the question may prejudice any later attempts to publish. I don't think that's too likely though, it's not exactly an earth shattering result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, are questions along the lines of &quot;Here is a new idea I have, is it any good?&quot; useful and appropriate questions here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10354" LastEditorUserId="10354" LastEditDate="2012-08-02T00:43:53.183" LastActivityDate="2012-08-06T15:14:17.523" Title="Is it appropriate to ask whether an idea you have is good and original?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1325" CreationDate="2012-08-02T08:55:48.510" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As always, it depends on what do you expect -- duplicates of older works and &quot;obvious problems&quot; (i.e. those you instantly see after sitting merely 10 years in a topic) are likely to be spotted fast and accurately, but a 3-page proof will end in oblivion. Whether it would get an attention also depends on how innovative the stuff is -- scientists are by-design being amused by dealing with something intriguing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus I think it is a good idea provided that you will not have too high expectations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the length -- you can just actually write a mini paper, publish on arXiv or viXra and simply put a link here. Moreover, this way makes it easier to split your doubts in a separate questions (for a better clarity) without sacrificing context. And you can withdraw the mini paper from both (from viXra more completely).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2012-08-02T08:55:48.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1329" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-08-03T11:35:49.973" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Warning&lt;/strong&gt;: this tag serves the purpose to label discussions related to statistics about main site. Use the main site for other statistical questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2014-12-02T09:21:08.760" LastActivityDate="2014-12-02T09:21:08.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1330" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-08-03T11:35:49.973" Score="0" Body="Questions about sizes and other quantities of Cross Validated Stack Exchange site. E.g. number of unanswered questions, response/question rate, GB/day transferred, etc." OwnerUserId="12710" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-02T08:38:08.037" LastActivityDate="2014-12-02T08:38:08.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1325" CreationDate="2012-08-03T13:04:49.050" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you were in the competitive world of publish or perish, the very thought of doing this would be considered crazy because someone might steal your idea and publish ahead of you.  Sometimes in the environment of academic pressure ethics goes out the window.  I remember when I was a graduate student many people would be highly secretive about their research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even without rigor your work could be publishable as you may have examples that you can compare it with other techniques where your method proves to be better.  Great ideas often have started that way.  A recent good example is boosting.  Often a supporting theory is developed later.  The bootstrap is a really great example of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not difficult to research the outside literature with all the technical advantages the internet now provides.  But asking on this site could give you a quick answer but may not necessarily.  Your idea is not protected doing it this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course I get the impression that you just want to know if it is original or if anyone else has done something like it.  In that case go ahead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastActivityDate="2012-08-03T13:04:49.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1320" CreationDate="2012-08-03T13:13:31.350" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I write many book reviews on amazon. CV may be a better online place to do it as it would be focussed.  Whenever I go to stat meetings it always astonishes me that people recognize my name because of my book reviews and comments on the ASA egroups rather than my own books and other publications.  I also have done many book reviews for journals including Significance and Technometrics.  I have an incentive there because they give me the book for free to review.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On amazon there is a rating system that caan be used to vote on their customer reviews.  Our upvote/downvote serves a similar purpose on a grosser scale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastActivityDate="2012-08-03T13:13:31.350" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1333" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1455" CreationDate="2012-08-03T16:21:50.203" Score="5" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a bounty that's owned by Community on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/33185/difference-between-naive-bayes-multinomial-naive-bayes&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; in which the original asker's account seems to be intact.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was the bounty taken out by a second party whose account was deleted, or is this a bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9vL8K.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3826" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Was Community meant to own this bounty?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1319" CreationDate="2012-08-03T20:56:43.467" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;As we are close to exhausting the comment thread, I will add my voice&#xA;here. This is a personal take as a two-year member on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought the original idea was to do some brainstorming on how to bring the&#xA;attention of ASA members, and probably statisticians from other societies,&#xA;to this site, Cross Validated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The great thing that CV does is to get the experts to teach the novices some&#xA;  basic statistics in the context of problems they are working on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is true that we see a lot of good answers from working statisticians&#xA;or consultants to working problems, but there are also many interesting&#xA;exchanges between experts themselves. I don't think 'teaching novices' may&#xA;really motivate professional statisticians to visit this site. Instead we&#xA;need to clearly define what they can expect from this site (compared to ASA&#xA;listserver, for example) and what benefit they can derive for themselves and&#xA;for the community. In my view, an open platform for exchanges like this is an&#xA;unique opportunity to give his voice to anyone interested in statistics, and&#xA;share his opinion with others, whatever their level of expertise. It is&#xA;close to the idea of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_science&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open&#xA;Science&lt;/a&gt;, and in any case it&#xA;offers new perspectives for experts and casual users to become acquainted&#xA;with specific problems and engage in fruitful discussions. Who are the experts&#xA;on this site? Everyone that provided the right answer to a nice question is&#xA;a candidate. Everyone who consistently provides good answers to specific&#xA;questions associated to a specific tag is certainly an expert, and he is&#xA;probably perceived as such by the community. Other professional&#xA;statisticians might enjoy exchanging with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We are a community of benevolent users.&lt;/strong&gt; The purpose of this site, and&#xA;more generally any sites in the Stack Exchange network, is to provide users&#xA;with a repository of knowledgeable and long-lasting answers to specific and&#xA;well-thought questions. Nothing more. We do not ask users who they are: they&#xA;are free to add some personal information in their public profile. We do not&#xA;ask users to be online everyday, but we expect they will be kind enough to&#xA;follow questions and answers in which they are involved, and contribute to&#xA;the community by voting, flagging, and helping the community as a whole (and&#xA;writing blog posts if they have some free time :-). People involved in QAs&#xA;get reputation and badges, as recognition of their participation. With&#xA;higher reputation comes higher power to boost this site. No rating system is&#xA;perfect, but the one which was chosen is generally doing its job: good&#xA;answers get higher votes, active members get higher reputation. This&#xA;reflects the opinion of the community, which is composed of experts and&#xA;students in applied and theoretical statistics, casual users of statistics&#xA;or &quot;anyone else doing data analysis or interested in it as a discipline.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We ask questions and propose answers.&lt;/strong&gt; New users can &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/privileges/vote-up&quot;&gt;vote&#xA;up&lt;/a&gt; when they have 15&#xA;rep. Starting with 125 rep, they can &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/privileges/vote-down&quot;&gt;vote&#xA;down&lt;/a&gt;. They are always&#xA;free to accept an answer: this is their very own decision to mark an answer&#xA;as useful with respect to the question they asked. Finally, askers can&#xA;always change their mind if a new and better answer is offered. Again, this&#xA;decision is that of the user. When the OP vote up and accept an answer, that&#xA;makes up a total of 25 points to the respondent. Other users can cast their&#xA;votes, in either direction, which offers an obvious counterbalance to this&#xA;individual decision. Most importantly, votes help to sort out good&#xA;questions and promote good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We need votes.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/10/vote-early-vote-often/&quot;&gt;Voting is one of the bases of this&#xA;site&lt;/a&gt;. However,&#xA;as has been said on&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tex.blogoverflow.com/2012/04/voting-up-voting-down/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tex.SE&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&quot;content should always be the key.&quot; Everybody on this site can participate,&#xA;and with growing reputation users get more privileges (retagging, voting to&#xA;close, voting to reopen, wiki edits, etc.) to help to maintain this site in&#xA;good health. &#xA;Earning reputation in recognition of exemplary participation on SE has no&#xA;other goal than allowing users to weigh in site management and expression of&#xA;the user community. In the end, they become &lt;em&gt;trusted users&lt;/em&gt;, and, certainly,&#xA;they have always been willing to share their knowledge and expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We elect moderators.&lt;/strong&gt; Moderators are not elected to dictate anything on&#xA;SE sites, but to help the community of users with specific tasks, in&#xA;particular they &quot;look at every flagged post, and take action if necessary,&quot;&#xA;as described in &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of&#xA;Moderation&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;As high-rep users often do, they also remind users with SE policy, provide&#xA;guidelines for a better interaction on this wiki. It is important to&#xA;remember that they are part of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This site is really a good opportunity for us.&lt;/strong&gt; I believe everyone here would agree that we try our best to promote best&#xA;practices in statistical data analysis by providing authoritative and&#xA;meticulous answers. Users do their best, taking into account&#xA;the purpose of this site. Moreover, the SE system offers great facilities&#xA;for live edits, updates, and add support for rich formatting of text. This&#xA;is something that is clearly impossible on listserver. Professional&#xA;statisticians might see this as a great opportunity to have more interactive and perennial exchanges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To meet a higher purposes the judges of answers should be certified&#xA;  experts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who will decide on that? Does that mean that we have to exhibit a blue/white&#xA;card attesting our level of knowledge, thereby allowing a weighted voting&#xA;process? I think this reflects a misunderstanding of the purpose of Stack&#xA;Exchange sites. &quot;Professional statisticians&quot; can decide to participate or&#xA;not, as they do when interacting on dedicated mailing-lists, maintaining&#xA;software, or providing up to date material on their own websites. We won't&#xA;ask them what's their level of expertise is; we just ask them to provide the&#xA;best possible answer, in the spirit of Stack Exchange community-driven&#xA;sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sympathetic with any suggestion to extend this network of professional&#xA;statisticians and people interested in statistics as a discipline. Surely,&#xA;everybody will be happy with accredited statisticians visiting our site from&#xA;time to time, but to challenge the actual quality of this site, as the&#xA;following comment of yours might suggest&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the system needs structure and consistency it seems to me to lack. A system&#xA;  that is based on reputation points assigned inconsistently by members who&#xA;  are novices and have no expertise to judge the correctness or incorrectness&#xA;  of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;runs counter to the motivations of Stack Exchange sites where everyone can&#xA;contribute. Interested professionals are invited to participate, to the&#xA;extent of their availability and their own interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;CrossValidated is for statisticians, data miners, and anyone else doing data&#xA;  analysis or interested in it as a discipline. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anyone interested in contributing to this site is welcome. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Contributions made by professional statisticians are greatly appreciated. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This site promotes well-crafted and useful answers to specific problems,&#xA;and it is driven by a community of benevolent users who all aspire to high&#xA;quality.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2012-08-03T20:56:43.467" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1335" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-04T11:13:29.097" Score="19" ViewCount="852" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the place of the R software in applied statistics, we expect that&#xA;questions related to this statistical package will regularly come on this&#xA;site, as has been done in the past. As a follow-up on an earlier discussion on this topic, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1/930&quot;&gt;How to answer R questions&lt;/a&gt;, here are some guidelines on &lt;strong&gt;how to ask good questions&lt;/strong&gt; related to the use of R and &lt;strong&gt;what's the best place to ask&lt;/strong&gt; such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our FAQ states that programming questions should be asked on&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;, but&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the language is statistically oriented (such as R, SAS, Stata, SPSS,&#xA;  etc.), then decide based on the nature of your question: if it needs&#xA;  statistical expertise to understand or answer, ask it here; if it's about an&#xA;  algorithm, routine data processing, or details of the language, then please&#xA;  refer to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/793/internet-support-for-statistics-software&quot;&gt;collection of links to&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  resources&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  we maintain. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, posts that are not related to a statistical question are&#xA;migrated to Stack Overflow, through the close voting mechanism. However,&#xA;Stack Overflow members also expect high quality questions, in accordance&#xA;with rules of good practices on all Stack Exchange sites. For additional&#xA;information, see this related thread:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1305/930&quot;&gt;Please do not migrate low quality questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up, in order to facilitate migration between the two sites, &lt;strong&gt;it is expected that R questions demonstrate some level of research effort and provide working illustrations&lt;/strong&gt; or a&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/5963269/420055&quot;&gt;reproducible example&lt;/a&gt;, whenever possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following illustrations are prototypical examples of questions that&#xA;would be considered off-topic on SO and CV, questions that are on-topic on&#xA;SO but need to be improved, and questions that are ready to be migrated over&#xA;Stack Overflow. For the first two cases, a post notice (moderators only) and/or a comment in the spirit of our&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/771/930&quot;&gt;Library of helpful responses&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;are given to inform the original poster of the reasons why his post is not&#xA;acceptable as is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2013-01-21T06:39:42.763" Title="How to ask question related to the use of R?" Tags="|discussion|r|migration|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1335" CreationDate="2012-08-04T11:27:01.793" Score="8" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have hourly measurements of temperature collected in different sites&#xA;  over the past three years. How to plot my data with R?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Issues:&lt;/strong&gt; Not enough context, no statistical question, no indication on the purpose of this graphical display.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Outcome:&lt;/strong&gt; Not suitable [CV and SO].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question is unclear. You need to say what you intend to do/show&#xA;  and what you have tried (or what is your level of expertise with R). A&#xA;  reproducible example would be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OtFav.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2012-08-04T11:27:01.793" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-04T11:27:01.793" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1337" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-05T11:59:49.150" Score="8" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't get any answers or comments to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/33596/how-can-i-pool-the-results-from-mcmcglmm-after-multiple-imputation&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt;. On reflection, I wondered whether I made a mistake by talking about MCMCglmm, which as far as I can tell is not a well known R package, and probably isn't cucial to my question. Should I perhaps re-write it to simply say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have used multiple imputation to obtain a number of completed datasets&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have used Bayesian methods on each of the completed datasets to obtain posterior distributions for a parameter (a random effect).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I combine / pool the results for this parameter ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or would this be too vague ? Please advise how I can improve my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11405" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2012-08-05T19:15:37.700" Title="Is my question too specialised?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1337" CreationDate="2012-08-05T12:21:07.837" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would perhaps just put your quoted text at the beginning of the question, and leave your other information afterwards. Also if you edit it gets bumped back to the top of the feed, so it may attract more attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your concerned about MCMCglmm scaring people off, I would suggest &lt;em&gt;changing your title&lt;/em&gt;, perhaps something along the lines of &lt;code&gt;How can I pool posterior means and credible intervals after multiple imputation?&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You shouldn't be too worried about the content of the question being responsible for not getting answers (IMO it is well written and concise). More complicated questions are harder to answer though, and given the complexity of the question you shouldn't hold your breath waiting for an answer. You asked it two days ago, have you found any information to help guide you? You can always answer your own question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2012-08-05T12:21:07.837" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1319" CreationDate="2012-08-05T16:20:40.997" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;My forecast is pessimistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community of academic statisticians (aka ASA members) produces fantastic initiatives that would greatly enhance the discipline as a whole. Unfortunately, most of them are one-man uphill battles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Jim Pitman was the President of IMS, he &lt;a href=&quot;http://stat-www.berkeley.edu/users/pitman/ims_pres_address.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;actively promoted&lt;/a&gt; the idea of having more publications in open access. There were many good points in his presentations and articles on this (of which the most tangilbe outcomes is posting the Annals contents in arxiv.org). An obvious one is that it is cheaper for the end user -- why should one pay the commercial publisher for essentially zero added value? We submit a properly formatted, camera-ready paper (although I've had a number of examples of publishers who retyped my LaTeX into Word... it is difficult to desribe how furious I was fixing their typoes and furmatting errars); why paying somebody $1000/year to access five papers from this journal? Another idea had to do with incentives in evaluation of faculty: OK, we all understand that you need to publish in JASA and Annals to get tenured. But once you are there, why don't give more consideration to free online journals? Let the young faculty play in these high impact journals. People know who Peter Hall or David Dunson is if they've opened more than three issues of JASA or Annals over the last five years, and you don't need to continue proving yourself anymore to get promoted any further. Make your work accessible to non-academic researchers and the third world. Wonderful ideas; how much of that has changed over the past five years? None.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;David Banks visited what then was my department of statistics, and gave a talk that analyzed whether &lt;a href=&quot;http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470315262.ch5/summary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia is complete&lt;/a&gt;, in the sense of having every topic covered. In the end of the presentation, he urged the members of the audience to contribute to wikipedia and help improving it. Wonderful ideas; how many statisticians have contributed to Wikipedia over the past five years? A handful, I guess; and we probably have all of them on this site of benevolent statisticians, as chl put it. (I do list my contributions in my curriculum vitae, just in case I were to run across another benevolent statistician at the evaluating end.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, just looking at our website, of the big names in statistics (defined as people who would get an immediate recognition from about half of the attendees at the JSM... or whatever the analogue is in Europe -- sorry, my view is totally obstructed by the US borders), we have Michael Chernick and Frank Harrell, who does not seem to be very active recently. That's a very low hit rate -- I guess I could put another hundred or so names into this hat of the authors of the important books and papers who would fit the above definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the existing statistics cultures, only consulting (represented wonderfully by whuber) may have any incentives to contribute actively to CV. Academic statisticians need to publish their papers in as highly ranked journals as possible, and CV does not have an impact factor. Industry statisticians need to report their hours, and CV is not a paying client. Consultants may seek to extend their business, so CV may indeed be an engine. Once the criteria for promotion IN ALL DEPARTMENTS would include maintaing a 1000 rep/year on CV and maintaining at least three wikipedia pages in your expertise area, making at least one edit a year in each of them, the situation will change, and we'll all be crowded out by people who are better statisticians than StasK is. (I've heard of people who made contributing to CV a requirement for their consulting classes, though.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a little bit of the silver lining. The faculty search committees would benefit from CV in the parts of evaluating the communication abilities of their candidates: if a person can explain things well on CV to statistically un- (or under-) prepared audience, chances are they will succeed in the classroom or in the consulting function, too. This is the only realistic selling point I see as a way of explaining how CV can be useful to the statistical community, the way it exists and functions right now. If young faculty were to work on CV and to bring this kind of culture into their classes, we might see the paradigm shift in the nexts twenty or so years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastActivityDate="2012-08-05T16:20:40.997" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1325" CreationDate="2012-08-06T15:14:17.523" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the idea is highly specific to the field, so that there are ~20 people who would really understand it, then you should write a paper, put in into arXiv, and circulate the link to those 20 people. And start pushing it into journals and conferences if you are interested in publishing it, or make a patent -- that process I have no clue about though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastActivityDate="2012-08-06T15:14:17.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1335" CreationDate="2012-08-07T04:07:55.720" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have a dataset with foreign characters that I would like to read into SAS, work with, and then read it out. When I currently try to do this, the foreign characters come up as question marks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Issues&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No statistical issues, so Off Topic on CV. On SO would be Not A Real Question as it is currently posed. The asker has not provided minimal information needed: code, a small portion of the data itself, nor the locale+character encoding information for their OS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Outcome&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suitable on SO only if edited to include the additional information described above. Otherwise, should be closed as Not A Real Question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5055" LastActivityDate="2012-08-07T04:07:55.720" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-07T04:18:16.867" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1335" CreationDate="2012-08-07T04:18:06.197" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it possible to write values of different datatypes to a file in R?&#xA;  Currently, I am using a simple vector as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; vect = c (1,2, &quot;string&quot;)&#xA;&amp;gt; vect&#xA;[1] &quot;1&quot;     &quot;2&quot;     &quot;string&quot;&#xA;&amp;gt; write.table(vect, file=&quot;/home/sampleuser/sample.txt&quot;, &#xA;              append= FALSE, sep= &quot;|&quot;)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, since &lt;code&gt;vect&lt;/code&gt; is a vector of string now, opening the file has&#xA;  following contents being in quoted form as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;x&quot;&#xA;&quot;1&quot;|&quot;1&quot;&#xA;&quot;2&quot;|&quot;2&quot;&#xA;&quot;3&quot;|&quot;string&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it not possible to restore the data types of entries &lt;code&gt;1&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;2&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;  being treated as numeric value instead of string. So my expected&#xA;  result is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;x&quot;&#xA;&quot;1&quot;|1&#xA;&quot;2&quot;|2&#xA;&quot;3&quot;|&quot;string&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;also, I am assuming the left side values &quot;1&quot;, &quot;2&quot; and &quot;3&quot; are vector&#xA;  indexes? I did not understand how the first line is &quot;x&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Issues&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No statistical issues, so Off Topic on CV. On topic on SO, and a good candidate for migration, as the OP has provided a clear explanation of the problem, and simple example code that is easily runnable by others that demonstrates their problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Outcome&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Migrate to SO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5055" LastActivityDate="2012-08-07T04:18:06.197" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-07T04:18:06.197" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1344" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1345" CreationDate="2012-08-07T12:48:21.857" Score="7" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stats.SE seems to have a few ambiguous / synonymous tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/test&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;test&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;test&lt;/a&gt; x 49&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/testing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;testing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;testing&lt;/a&gt; x 23&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hypothesis-testing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hypothesis-testing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hypothesis-testing&lt;/a&gt; x 497&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The former two are even missing a description. I'll leave merging and creating appropriate tag wikis to you, but I thought I would mention it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1205" LastActivityDate="2012-08-10T15:41:34.447" Title="Synonyms for the &quot;Test&quot; tags" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1344" CreationDate="2012-08-07T14:17:15.033" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/privileges/suggest-tag-synonyms&quot;&gt;You need 2500 rep&lt;/a&gt; to suggest a tag synonym.  However, I fully agree with you.  I vote that both &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/test&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;test&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;test&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/testing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;testing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;testing&lt;/a&gt; should become synonyms for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hypothesis-testing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hypothesis-testing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hypothesis-testing&lt;/a&gt;.  As &lt;em&gt;test&lt;/em&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;em&gt;testing&lt;/em&gt; don't have tag wiki excerpts to help determine their proper scope, and as they are less utilized, they should become synonyms in this case, in my opinion.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, I think maintaining the optimal organization and usability of the site will require some amount of continuous effort.  Much of the organization is driven by the tags, so they need to be created, merged, and (at a minimum) have tag wiki excerpts to guide their usage.  Unfortunately, I also don't think the synonym suggestion system works very well on CV, because we are a smaller and younger site.  There are relatively few users with the needed rep and number of upvotes on a given tag to suggest synonyms and to vote on the suggestions of others.  Frankly, I doubt that anyone regularly checks the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms&quot;&gt;synonyms page&lt;/a&gt; to see whether any are pending and to vote on them.  Certainly, I'm guilty of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2012-08-07T14:23:42.230" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1344" CreationDate="2012-08-10T15:41:34.447" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to my conception &lt;em&gt;hypothesis-testing&lt;/em&gt; means &lt;em&gt;Test of Statistical Hypothesis&lt;/em&gt;. A test of a statistical hypothesis $H$ is a rule or procedure deciding whether to reject $H$ or accept $H$ based on a given sample from the population.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In statistics I think &lt;strong&gt;test&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;testing&lt;/strong&gt; means &lt;strong&gt;hypothesis-testing&lt;/strong&gt;.So, there is no need of these two &lt;em&gt;tags&lt;/em&gt; whenever there present the &lt;em&gt;hypothesis-testing&lt;/em&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12710" LastActivityDate="2012-08-10T15:41:34.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1335" CreationDate="2012-08-13T20:20:10.353" Score="9" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Cleaned up version from a real question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/11941178/892313&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/q/11941178/892313&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have a &lt;code&gt;data.frame&lt;/code&gt; with numeric columns. How can I write it to a file, using &lt;code&gt;write.table&lt;/code&gt;,  such that R writes the full number 40000000 instead of 4e+07?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Issues&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No statistical issues, so Off Topic on CV. It does involve programming issues, so it is on topic for SO. It does not include a reproducible example but the description of the problem is clear enough that an answer can be given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Outcome&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Migrate to SO. Once migrated to SO, it will be closed as an exact duplicate. On CV, those deciding to migrate to SO need not know that there is duplicate question; even if they were aware, it is not possible to close a question as a duplicate question on a different site. On SO, an appropriate duplicate (if any) can be found and it can be closed appropriately. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5880" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2012-08-13T20:20:10.353" CommentCount="9" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-13T20:20:10.353" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1348" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1349" CreationDate="2012-08-15T02:43:43.457" Score="4" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently starting an online course for social sequence analysis using the R package TraMineR. We plan to use stats.stackexchange.com to support the course and the evolving social sequence analysis community. However, as of now there is no tag for either sequencing, sequence-analysis, or traminer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be suitable to add these tags? If so, can anyone with enough reputation add these tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information about the course:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.orgdna.net/traminer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.orgdna.net/traminer/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information about the R package TraMineR:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://mephisto.unige.ch/traminer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://mephisto.unige.ch/traminer/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10598" LastActivityDate="2012-08-15T18:29:27.063" Title="Add tags for sequencing, sequence analysis or TraMineR?" Tags="|discussion|tags|r|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1348" CreationDate="2012-08-15T12:58:57.990" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tags are added at the time a question is asked and, on occasion, when an answer suggests a tag.  AFAIK, the original proposer (OP) of a question can add whatever new tag they need (although the site strongly encourages using existing tags when they suffice).  In this fashion tags develop organically to reflect the interests of the site's users.  If a subcommunity of users interested in a particular topic appears, appropriate tags ought to emerge automatically from the questions they ask and the answers that are given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Edit&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments indicate a user needs 300+ reputation to create a new tag.  I have therefore created tags for &lt;code&gt;sequence-analysis&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;traminer&lt;/code&gt; and wrote wiki entries to distinguish &lt;code&gt;sequence-analysis&lt;/code&gt; from &lt;code&gt;sequential-analysis&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good method for low-rep users to create tags is to flag their questions for moderator attention: the flagging dialog allows a couple hundred characters to make a request.  Another method is to start a new thread here in meta, but IMHO that's best when the tag might need community discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Low-rep and new users can also provisionally edit tag wikis themselves: those will be reviewed by higher-rep users or moderators for approval.  Because even the highest-rep users will not necessarily have the knowledge to write wikis, we welcome and encourage people to write and edit wikis for subjects in which they have expert knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2012-08-15T18:29:27.063" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1350" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-16T10:11:05.217" Score="1" ViewCount="247" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/974/what-motivates-people-to-answer-questions&quot;&gt;What motivates people to answer questions?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have participated here for about 3 and 1/2 months.  Over that time I have wonder why so many offer high quality professional tutoring on a voluntary basis and do so much of it without any compensation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently I was contacted by Tutors.com inviting me to apply.  I am not sure how they got my name but I decided to look into it.  To qualify as a tutor there you have to pass at least two exams in your subject area.  Passing requires a score of 88% or higher.  After that ypu have to provide a writing sample explaining how you would approach tutoring.  Then you fill out some forms and do some mock tutoring sessions before you are hired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It strikes me that except for the fact that students have 600+ tutors here compared to one to one tutoring at Tutors.com the two sites provide roughly the same service except that employees at Tutors.com are compensated.  I have a good job and a side consulting business but I also have a wife and two sons in college and have difficulty making ends meet.  I assume many others here are in similar situations.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So my question is&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;Why do we provide so much service free of charge?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2012-08-17T15:45:05.157" Title="Tutor.com vs StackExchange: Professional services Salaried vs Voluntary" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2012-08-16T18:06:44.340" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1350" CreationDate="2012-08-16T11:33:10.713" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In principle, this site is based on a barter of knowledge, similar to the rest of the &quot;real&quot; internet -- it works way better than than material one because duplicating information practically costs nothing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are of course leeches and people that contribute more due to various reasons (academic spirit, hobby, gaining reputation, making world better, you name it), but this basically averages out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2012-08-16T11:33:10.713" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1030" CreationDate="2012-08-17T21:08:28.403" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.statistics2013.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ipdD1.png&quot; alt=&quot;International Year of Statistics 2013&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2012-08-17T21:08:28.403" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-08-17T21:08:28.403" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1355" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-19T18:29:39.080" Score="10" ViewCount="345" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted what with hindsight I now see is a controversial question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/34107/elementary-statistics-for-jurors?answertab=votes&quot;&gt;Elementary statistics for jurors&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the question is controversial in the sorts of answers to the&#xA;question that it's appropriate to give, and perhaps also in the legal status that providing answers to it&#xA;might entail.  I'm no SE insider, but I get the impression that controversial&#xA;questions are frowned upon.  Some answers were deleted.  I think the deleted answers were not controversial in their statistical content.  Rather, it was controversial more along the lines of whether it is appropriate to provide any direct answer at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The four or so answers that were deleted discussed relevant&#xA;statistical ideas.  Of the two answers that remain, neither discusses&#xA;statistics.  Instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One (the top-voted answer that remains) gives -- what to me as a&#xA;layperson is -- legal advice (not legal advice in any legal&#xA;technical sense, because I don't know how that is defined).  That&#xA;advice appears to be incorrect for my country.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The other gives a controversial opinion about how the legal system&#xA;does or should work.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think those remaining answers are poor, for the reasons above, and&#xA;also give the misleading sense that they reflect a consensus view.&#xA;The deleted answers make clear that this is not a consensus view.&#xA;Rather than leaving the question in its current state, I think it&#xA;would be better if the question and all of the answers were deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I have two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can I / should I delete the question?  Might it come back again in&#xA;some partial form (for example, with only some of the answers&#xA;present, as now)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How can I find out why and by whom the answers were deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13216" OwnerDisplayName="Croad Langshan" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="How to handle controversial question with deleted answers?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1284" CreationDate="2012-08-20T10:51:52.233" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just as a specific example, can I suggest that single letter edits to two year old posts simply to change &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; British spelling to the US equivalent are exactly the sort of thing that should be rejected out of hand?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what CV policy is in general on the international vagaries of English orthography, but it's hard to see merit in that kind of dredge through ancient history. If I were to wade through old answers changing &quot;color&quot; to &quot;colour&quot; I think people would rightly consider it an abuse. Please think twice before approving such trivial edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174" LastActivityDate="2012-08-20T10:51:52.233" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1355" CreationDate="2012-08-20T17:52:53.233" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think your question was controversial. In my opinion, the only thing questionable was whether or not the question was &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;on topic&lt;/a&gt; for the site. In particular, the question almost seems to require more legal expertise than statistical expertise. As such, the types of answers you're likely to get on the statistics stackexchange will probably be pretty subjective and more akin to what is normally a community wiki (which is, I think, why it got converted). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding your specific queries: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Can I / should I delete the question? Might it come back again in some partial form (for example, with only some of the answers present, as now)?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal opinion is: &lt;em&gt;No, the question shouldn't be deleted&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is arguably off topic but special circumstances sometimes allow somewhat &quot;off topic&quot; questions to remain (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1337/statistics-jokes&quot;&gt;the Statistics Jokes thread&lt;/a&gt;. See whuber's comment there) due to popular demand which your's may fit under, since it has so many upvotes. I invite the moderators (and other members) to correct/augment that last statement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;How can I find out why and by whom the answers were deleted?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, you can't. If you have over 10K rep you can see deleted answers, where you can also see who deleted the answer. You can also see answers that you personally deleted. Other than that, only moderators can see deleted posts. Posters are not required to give reasons for deletion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4856" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2012-08-20T18:07:36.697" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1355" CreationDate="2012-08-20T20:33:07.030" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I certainly find it a valid question. Also, a quick search for &quot;introductory statistics&quot; revealed that there a whole lot of questions that are concerned with getting advise on reading on a very basic level of statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure where this would be on-topic but I find the two answers together with the comments (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/34128/4598&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/34128/4598&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/34109/4598&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/34109/4598&lt;/a&gt;) actually quite shocking: the message is that someone who wants to brush up his rusty statistics knowledge is actively discouraged from doing so.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I'd always object to such an attitude, I find it particularly bad in this case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4598" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2012-08-20T20:33:07.030" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1361" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1362" CreationDate="2012-08-22T09:32:41.703" Score="16" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to ask a question about how to teach a specific statistical concept (sampling distributions) to a specific group of students (social science undergraduates), something that has proved difficult in the past. Is this appropriate? I browsed through the teaching tag and most questions there are about teaching statistics in general or about resources for doing it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I'm asking about it here first is because of the potential for responses to become a list which people seem not to like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is it okay to ask such a question? If yes, I'm interested in any advice about framing such a question so that it solicits constructive responses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9249" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2019-03-28T08:16:24.970" LastActivityDate="2019-03-30T09:03:19.807" Title="Are questions about teaching specific concepts appropriate?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1361" CreationDate="2012-08-22T12:28:56.380" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think answering such a question would require statistical expertise so I'd call it on topic. Also, as you've pointed out, there is a  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/teaching&quot;&gt;teaching tag&lt;/a&gt; and it has 46 questions tagged, which gives further evidence that such things are on topic.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the answers may be somewhat subjective and there may not be one objectively &quot;right&quot; answer - it's for questions like these we have the designation of &quot;community wiki&quot;, which is often what happens with these &quot;list&quot; type questions. I don't think whether or not something is/should be a community wiki detracts from whether or not the question is OK to ask. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others may have better advice to give regarding your last sentence but I'd say an appropriate way to frame the question may be to describe a bit why teaching sampling distributions to non-statistics majors is challenging and soliciting what others suggest or have done in the past to make this material more accessible while remaining true to the statistical niceties of the subject. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4856" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2012-08-22T12:28:56.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1361" CreationDate="2012-08-22T12:34:34.530" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I say yay to allowing &lt;em&gt;specifically pedagogical&lt;/em&gt; questions to be on topic. To support my support:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't believe it is much of a stretch that similar examples currently exist on the site. See, for instance, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/18082/1036&quot;&gt;How would you explain the difference between correlation and covariance?&lt;/a&gt; As Macro said in comments as well, having a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/teaching&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;teaching&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;teaching&lt;/a&gt; tag gives further evidence of precedents on the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We are in essence trying to teach every time we write an answer. A goal we should all strive for is to present the information in an accessible manner. This is just slightly more specific in that it is asking how to present a concept to a very specific intended audience (which is a good thing!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Such topics could have widespread use for the community. Many of the members of the forum teach to a wide variety of audiences. This includes not only students in the class room, but also people who have paid us as consultants and people who read our reports.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can make any topic overly broad or unanswerable by asking a vague question, but I don't see why this is any more problematic for these types of questions than any others. The usual rules apply to these questions in that the scope should be well defined. The site's usual mechanisms to deal with this should be sufficient, and as long as the question is well thought out I highly doubt it will be problematic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2019-03-30T09:03:19.807" LastActivityDate="2019-03-30T09:03:19.807" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1364" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1485" CreationDate="2012-08-23T13:28:17.707" Score="20" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seven questions are tagged with &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/output&quot;&gt;output&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.  To me it seems this tag is ambiguous, without any special meaning or use, and in fact it may often signal that a question should be migrated (in the cases where &quot;output&quot; is meant in the sense of &quot;how do I get this software to output such-and-such&quot;).  &lt;strong&gt;I would like to delete and blacklist this tag.&lt;/strong&gt;  (A blacklisted tag cannot be used, ever.  The only one blacklisted here so far is &quot;statistics&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before moving ahead, &lt;strong&gt;I seek the community's advice&lt;/strong&gt;. Upvotes to this question will signal tacit approvals of the proposal and downvotes, disapprovals.  If you have time or inclination to write something in an answer or comment, I would be grateful to learn of the reasons for disapproval: what am I missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-11-30T11:13:07.050" Title="Blacklist the &quot;output&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-deletion|blacklist-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1365" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-24T16:02:53.753" Score="20" ViewCount="437" Body="&lt;p&gt;My name is Katey and I work in community development at Stack Exchange. I've been studying stats.se for a few weeks, trying to figure out ways to improve this (already pretty great) site. My coworker Brett White and I have been emailing users on sites we've identified as having great content and engaged, awesome users but less than stellar overall voting activity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I emailed a few users last week and got some great feedback -- particularly that it can be difficult to know whether a question is good or bad if you aren't familiar enough with the subject, software or field that is being asked about. That makes sense, Statistics is a huge and varied field, and I wouldn't want to ask someone to vote on material they were wholly unfamiliar with. However, I don't think it's helpful to the site to be too hesitant to cast votes on questions just because we think we might not know enough, if that makes sense. I also don't think that voting for voting's sake is going to be helpful, but there may be a happy medium in there somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, here is a document that Brett put together focusing on &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.google.com/a/stackoverflow.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArYLbq29rqM2dFlsWnE1UGxYTGcyaV9EaGFhZ2RWS2c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;90 low-vote questions on the site&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially we want to make sure that questions that are getting a lot of search engine traffic are quality questions that are well-representative of the site and community. Take a look at these and see if they're questions you hadn't had a chance to decide on voting on either way. It's entirely possible that you've already looked at them, but this seemed like a good place to start evaluating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep an eye on new questions as the come in, as well, since it's possible that some of these low-voted questions are just slipping through the cracks when they're first asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the first step in what we're doing to help make Cross-Validated an even more useful and awesome site, so please discuss other ideas to improve the site and community on meta and in your chat rooms!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6125" LastActivityDate="2012-09-01T22:46:29.380" Title="Cross Validated - Voting Improvement and Community Development" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1366" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1367" CreationDate="2012-08-24T18:43:18.680" Score="14" ViewCount="410" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course I really don't think that there are so few good statistical questions left to exhaust all questions, I have noticed that I will answer a question and find someone else saying that the question shouldn't be answered because it is the same as a previously answered question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am relatively new to the site and don't know a lot of the history but I find that very oftn it is happening that a question is a repeat of something from 6 months or 1 year or more in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should a new member do?  When a question comes in should I be searching the site to see if it has been answered previously before I give my own answer?  When asking questions should we be searching the site to make sure it is a new question before we ask it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also like to know what the community members think of answering a question that is a repeat.  I have done this on occasion and see no harm in it.  If the answer is simple and brief isn't it better to help the OP by giving the answer rather than to ask them to search the site for the answer? I know that some moderators feel that duplicate questions should be closed immediately and the OP should be directed to the previous questions.  The argument is that answering these questions puts too much repetition and clutter on the site.  But isn't good service to the OP more important than the tidiness of the site.  Some of the clutter and repetition could be cleaned up later.  I expect that some or many of you will disagree with me.  So let me hear it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2012-08-24T19:17:10.120" LastActivityDate="2012-08-27T01:48:13.573" Title="Will we soon exhaust questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1366" CreationDate="2012-08-24T19:16:15.830" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a good set of questions; perhaps many people, especially our newer users, are wondering about these things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need to point out that &lt;strong&gt;the policy about closing duplicates isn't a matter of &quot;what some moderators feel:&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; it's part of the very structure of StackExchange. When you consult an encyclopedia or dictionary or even Amazon.com for information, for instance, you don't want to have to look in multiple places: you expect, and deserve, that what you're looking up will be in one place and it will be cross-referenced to any related (but &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt;) places, so that you don't have to go skipping around to find what you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our site provides great tools to help the asker of questions identify similar threads. In principle, this should resolve many such issues before they ever appear, and everybody is happy.  But many askers cannot recognize the similarities because they do not know the terminology or they are not knowledgeable or imaginative enough to see them.  &lt;strong&gt;That's where the community comes in.&lt;/strong&gt;  We hope and expect that when experienced members first read a new question, they will reflect about whether they have encountered something similar and whether something similar &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; have been encountered by now that more than ten thousand questions have appeared.  For instance, a question that asks how to do a t-test should already have been asked and answered, so a quick search for that answer is in order before going any further. Just as we ask of questioners that they do some research before posting a question, we ask of answerers that they do some research too. &lt;strong&gt;Think before you post!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you find a clear duplicate question, then &lt;strong&gt;immediately closing the new one is the best thing you can do all around:&lt;/strong&gt; it directs the asker to an existing solution; it prevents unnecessary duplication of threads; and it prevents unwary newcomers from investing time in formulating answers that have already appeared elsewhere.  (Please note, too, that duplicate material complicates all future searches, actually making it &lt;em&gt;harder&lt;/em&gt; for new users to ask questions and &lt;em&gt;harder&lt;/em&gt; for experienced users to make connections among questions.)  If you find a &quot;perhaps&quot; duplicate, then a quick discussion with the OP (using the comment mechanism) will determine whether they have a new question or not.  Once again, if you ascertain that their question is a duplicate, then closing it and directing the asker to the existing thread is the fastest way to serve them and usually gives them more information then most people can hope to produce in a single quick reply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This community has &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;more objectives&lt;/a&gt; than merely dishing out answers to all and sundry.  The &quot;tidiness of the site&quot; is intimately connected to its usability and value far into the future. Moreover, as one who has done a heck of a lot of it, I can attest that cleaning up &quot;clutter and repetition&quot; is time consuming, complicated, sometimes painful, and rarely gets completely done: &lt;strong&gt;far better is it to avoid such noise in the first place.&lt;/strong&gt;  For that reason, everyone posting answers here is constantly encouraged to provide &lt;em&gt;clear, well-formulated, objectively reasoned, carefully supported&lt;/em&gt; answers: we want them &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; to be great.  If users visit our site and see ragged, disorganized collections of hasty, careless, and mediocre answers, they're unlikely to return or participate.  Leave that junk for yahoo (pretty well named, isn't it? -:) or answers.com or the myriad other generic Q&amp;amp;A forums that come and go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In summary,&lt;/strong&gt; if anyone has arrived here interested chiefly in participating in a question mill with little regard for quality or curating the site, then your services would be better appreciated elsewhere: Cross Validated probably holds little future for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2012-08-24T19:16:15.830" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1366" CreationDate="2012-08-27T01:48:13.573" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Whuber's excellent answer, I'd just make a further point. The question isn't really about stats.stackexchange since you could ask essentially the same thing on any stack exchange site meta. This question really is asking about the stack overflow/exchange model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the questions talks about 'providing a service to the OP' this is something that you get on a forum, not a Q&amp;amp;A site. The service that a well run site like this should provide first and foremost is a great place to go to find the information you need (often via a Google search) from good answers to previously asked questions. Actually asking a question should not be the default way to use this site. Duplicate questions with 'something is better than nothing' answers clutter the place up, clog search results and encourage more duplicate/poor questions and more poorly thought out answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you are used to using forums, it takes a while to get your head around the stack exchange model. These issues were hammered out in the early days of stack overflow but the eventual success of that original site shows the value of the format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way to build a strong Q&amp;amp;A site is for the community, questioners and answerers, to commit to the format. Otherwise everyone pulls in a different direction and the whole thing becomes a mess. This does means losing members from both sides of the Q&amp;amp;A fence who find they don't like the format. That is a necessary growing pain along the road to building a trustable, quality over quantity repository of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10354" LastActivityDate="2012-08-27T01:48:13.573" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1369" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1371" CreationDate="2012-08-28T13:33:38.957" Score="12" ViewCount="318" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/35231/how-to-interpret-a-random-intercept&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; came up that I felt had several redundant tags for variants of multilevel or mixed-effects models. As far as I can tell, there are six tags I can find that are related to this topic some of which have tag wikis and some do not (for whatever that's worth): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/multilevel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;multilevel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;multilevel&lt;/a&gt; (no tag wiki)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/multilevel-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;multilevel-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;multilevel-analysis&lt;/a&gt; (has a tag wiki and has &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hierarchical-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hierarchical-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hierarchical-analysis&lt;/a&gt; as a synonym)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixed-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixed-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixed-model&lt;/a&gt; (informative tag wiki)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixed-effect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixed-effect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixed-effect&lt;/a&gt; (only four questions tagged, and oldest less than a month ago; no tag wiki)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/random-effects-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;random-effects-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;random-effects-model&lt;/a&gt; (no tag wiki)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/glmm&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;glmm&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;glmm&lt;/a&gt; (only four tagged questions, but has an informative wiki)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also (at least) two related software tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lmer&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lmer&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lmer&lt;/a&gt; (informative tag wiki)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lme&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lme&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lme&lt;/a&gt; (no tag wiki)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This point &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/890/should-mixed-model-and-multilevel-analysis-be-tag-synonyms&quot;&gt;has been discussed in a previous meta post by Andy W&lt;/a&gt;, but it doesn't seem to have resolved everything; or, perhaps, new developments have arisen in the meantime. I realize there are methodological and semantic differences between some of these terms (as chl and Andy W discussed in the comments of that post), but it still seems like an awful lot of tags...! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suggestions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/multilevel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;multilevel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;multilevel&lt;/a&gt;and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/multilevel-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;multilevel-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;multilevel-analysis&lt;/a&gt; should be merged.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixed-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixed-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixed-model&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixed-effect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixed-effect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixed-effect&lt;/a&gt; should be together as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/glmm&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;glmm&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;glmm&lt;/a&gt; could be merged into the appropriate one of those categories and then also given a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/generalized-linear-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;generalized-linear-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;generalized-linear-model&lt;/a&gt; tag? There are probably questions that are not marked as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/glmm&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;glmm&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;glmm&lt;/a&gt; that should be though...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/random-effects-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;random-effects-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;random-effects-model&lt;/a&gt; tag deserves a tag wiki. Unless someone else would contribute something more detailed, I would propose something like &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Parameters associated with the particular levels of a covariate are&#xA;  sometimes called the “effects” of the levels. If the levels that are&#xA;  observed represent a random sample from the set of all possible levels&#xA;  we call these effects &quot;random.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is a paraphrase from &lt;a href=&quot;http://lme4.r-forge.r-project.org/book/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Douglas Bates' book&lt;/a&gt;. (I think unpublished or in press at this point.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9249" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2012-09-01T15:03:49.063" Title="Redundant tags: mixed effects and related models" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1369" CreationDate="2012-08-28T20:11:11.557" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have long believed that organizing tags optimally will require some level of constant maintenance, and is one of the most important aspects of enhancing the usability of the site, and maintaining it more generally.  Personally, I tend to be in favor of merging tags more aggressively than seems to be the case, although I certainly agree it could go too far.  Basically, I think tags should be merged unless it is easy to think of questions (whether or not anyone has actually asked them yet) that clearly fall under one of the tags, but not the other.  Moreover, I don't mean terminological issues in the sense that something is called by one name in one discipline &amp;amp; another name in a different discipline.  In such a case, the two tags should exist, but the lower-frequency variant should become a synonym for the higher-frequency variant.  That way, when someone searches on the name they know, something will show up, but it will be remapped to the standard version.  In the referenced discussion, for example, both @AndyW and @chl seem to agree that there isn't a substantive difference between the tags they are discussing, but that they do often connote different things to some people.  In a case like that, I say &lt;em&gt;merge&lt;/em&gt;.  As a result of these considerations, I would argue that all 4 tags in suggestions 1 &amp;amp; 2 should be merged into &lt;code&gt;mixed-model&lt;/code&gt;, which is the most commonly used, and has a wiki excerpt that explains it is used for a bunch of different names for the same thing.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do think &lt;code&gt;glmm&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;random-effects-model&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; stay, because I can imagine questions that fit better under them than mixed / multilevel etc.  Some examples could be questions about glmms vs. gee, or the referenced question about the interpretation of the meaning of the random intercept.  (For the record, I think &lt;code&gt;random-effect&lt;/code&gt; would be better for this than &lt;code&gt;random-effects-model&lt;/code&gt;.)  I acknowledge that these questions could go without these tags, and just have &lt;code&gt;mixed-model&lt;/code&gt;, but I think something would be lost in a way that wouldn't occur if someone asked about students within classes within schools and clicked on the &lt;code&gt;multilevel-analysis&lt;/code&gt; tag, but ended up with &lt;code&gt;mixed-model&lt;/code&gt; instead.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have a strong sense of what should be done with the R tags (&lt;code&gt;lme&lt;/code&gt;, &amp;amp; &lt;code&gt;lmer&lt;/code&gt;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also strongly believe that &lt;em&gt;all tags should have wiki excerpts&lt;/em&gt; at a minimum.  (I'm fairly indifferent to whether they have full tag wiki entries--I doubt anyone even reads them.)  I think that excerpts would best include a little about the topic, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; a little guidance on the appropriate usage of the tag.  One thing to note is that the wiki excerpt give you a certain limit of characters, but not all of them will show up when possible tag matches are displayed on a question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I approve of your suggested excerpt for &lt;code&gt;random-effects-model&lt;/code&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2012-08-28T20:11:11.557" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1369" CreationDate="2012-08-29T14:09:55.107" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;While &lt;code&gt;multilevel&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;multilevel-analysis&lt;/code&gt; are probably easily mergeable, some of the others are genuine terminology differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Random effects&quot; to economists is the GLS estimator of the random intercept model in the &lt;code&gt;panel-data&lt;/code&gt; models. The &quot;fixed effect&quot; is a conditional estimator that only uses the within-cluster variability. I am sure that whatever is done with the &lt;code&gt;random-effects-model&lt;/code&gt; tag will create confusion. Sometimes, economists do say that (what they understand as) the random effect model is valid when you have the random sample of clusters, but generally what they worry about is the correlation between the regressors and the random effects, which rather has to do with how complete your model is. So some of the &lt;code&gt;random-effects-model&lt;/code&gt; entries may in fact have to be moved to &lt;code&gt;panel-data&lt;/code&gt; if we are to clean this. May be  there should be &lt;code&gt;random-effects-model-econometrics&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;fixed-effects-model-econometrics&lt;/code&gt; subtags.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GLMM stands for generalized linear mixed models, and while related to the GLM (generalized linear model, not the terrible &quot;general linear model acronym&quot; coined by SAS, I believe), it is different enough that these tags should live independently of one another.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;R packages have somewhat different functionality. Since CV is very heavily R-oriented, it is probably fine that these tags exist as they are, but if you are subscribed to the multilevel list, you will see way many more questions about software packages like HLM, Mplus and Stata (in particular, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gllamm.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GLLAMM&lt;/a&gt; package that beats most other ones except for speed). Social scientists tend to go to these lists rather than to some geeky website ;). So to be generalists, should we go ahead and create the tags for all of these other packages???&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is also &lt;code&gt;hierarchical-analysis&lt;/code&gt; tag. The phrase is again used in a number of different contexts. Social scientists who use the HLM package would mean the multilevel analysis/mixed models that we are discussing here, while Bayesian statisticians would mean a model with priors and hyperpriors, which may or may not be involve the random effects of the multilevel models.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was an earlier &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1441903178&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Pinheiro &amp;amp; Bates&lt;/a&gt; book, so may be there is a published version of that quote, if needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good course of action might be to elect a mixed-models officer who'd be cleaning these tags from time to time as they see fit. Otherwise, we'd be just lost in discussing what needs to be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastActivityDate="2012-08-29T14:09:55.107" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1365" CreationDate="2012-09-01T14:26:18.700" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being a moderator on Stack Overflow (and sometime contributor here), I can definitely emphasize the importance of upvoting good content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While voting for answers requires more detailed understanding of the question at hand (after all, voting on an answer is somewhat based on the veracity of the information in the answer), voting on questions doesn't carry such a high bar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions imply that there is a lack of understanding on the part of the asker (and that's ok); what's important when voting on questions is whether or not the person put the effort into conveying their problem, their understanding of what it is they don't know, along with any other information needed to contribute to getting a quality answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why mods on Stack Overflow and other sites are qualified to instantly close questions when they don't have intimate knowledge of the topic; if we see a question that a user put obvious effort into creating with the purpose of getting a well-defined answer to a problem then it qualifies as a quality question and is not only deserving of staying open, but generally of an upvote as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="740" LastEditorUserId="740" LastEditDate="2012-09-01T22:46:29.380" LastActivityDate="2012-09-01T22:46:29.380" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1369" CreationDate="2012-09-01T15:03:49.063" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think most of these tags should stay, because people search on all (or nearly all) of them. I don't see how a WIKI about them will help, but maybe I am missing something. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2012-09-01T15:03:49.063" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1374" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-02T14:34:55.043" Score="3" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;My original question was closed due to 'possible duplicate'. This was by accident because the question I meant to ask was not the question that I asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I edited my question by wording it better. As far as I know, and I've searched, there are no duplicates. Can/Does my edited question become &quot;unclosed&quot;? If so, when?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the link to my question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/24163/prove-one-standard-deviation-lies-on-inflection-points&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/24163/prove-one-standard-deviation-lies-on-inflection-points&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9625" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2012-09-02T15:38:44.040" Title="How does a question become unclosed?" Tags="|support|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1374" CreationDate="2012-09-02T15:38:44.040" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Much of the information relevant to this question can be gained by reading about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;SE privilege to cast close &amp;amp; reopen votes&lt;/a&gt; after gaining 3k reputation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, I have now cast a reopen vote for your edited question. It still requires 4 more reopen votes from &gt;3k rep users, or a vote from a moderator.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2012-09-02T15:38:44.040" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1377" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-03T18:38:26.817" Score="10" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;I follow (with interest) questions and answers that talk about pre-post experimental or quasi-experimental research designs. I have noted quite a few questions that ask about this particular research design (not surprising, it is a common design), although IMO our current set of tags are lacking in uniformity, and so here I want to talk about &lt;em&gt;what tags should we assign to related pre-post design questions?&lt;/em&gt; Example questions that I am aware of are;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/3466/1036&quot;&gt;Best practice when analysing pre-post treatment-control designs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/35617/1036&quot;&gt;How to correct for correlation at baseline between predictor and “DV”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/17724/1036&quot;&gt;How should one control for group and individual differences in pre-treatment scores in a randomised controlled trial?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/26529/1036&quot;&gt;Help with change scores and/or ANCOVA design&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/15713/1036&quot;&gt;Is it valid to include a baseline measure as control variable when testing the effect of an independent variable on change scores?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/26505/1036&quot;&gt;How to assess differences between three groups in a pretest - posttest design using SPSS?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/15104/1036&quot;&gt;Should the difference between control and treatment be modelled explicitly or implicitly?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/35643/1036&quot;&gt;What analysis to use with two groups, a pre- and post-test, and three outcomes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/32208/1036&quot;&gt;Pre, Post, and Change predictors all in the same model&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure others exist and would appreciate comments/answers pointing to other examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Current (relevant) tags in the list of questions are;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;repeated measures&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;change scores&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;clinical trial&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anova&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ancova&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;regression&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;least squares&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;linear model&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;intervention-analysis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I bold &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/repeated-measures&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;repeated-measures&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;repeated-measures&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/change-scores&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;change-scores&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;change-scores&lt;/a&gt; because they may serve as reasonable tags already in place that &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be added to all of the questions (the others are included to highlight how little the current set of tags connect the related questions). I say could because I don't necessarily think either is a great idea. The change scores tag implies a particular type of analysis (which is not always appropriate nor endorsed). Repeated measures is a terminology not frequently associated with fields I am more familiar with (sociology, criminology, economics). For instance, economists difference in difference models (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2118030&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Card &amp;amp; Krueger, 1994&lt;/a&gt;) are really one type of change score models. I don't think I've ever heard repeated measures used by an economist though (much related to the panel data terminology rants @Stask has mentioned in some of his answers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to this (my opinions aside) I would suggest we reference &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/3467/1036&quot;&gt;this answer by chl&lt;/a&gt; as a canonical response to related questions. It is not too much of a stretch to say it is still an open debate, and as such references to other literature with discussion about nuances would almost always be appropriate. As such this question in particular should be given the tag(s) we expect such questions to have in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So before getting ahead of myself, should these questions all have at least one tag in common? How about a tag for &lt;code&gt;pre-post-design&lt;/code&gt;? In additon should we cut some of the tags from these questions? Any thoughts on the subject (and how we should proceed in the future) are welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2012-09-26T20:27:52.810" Title="Should we have a tag for questions about pre-post treatment designs?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1379" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-13T21:08:09.640" Score="10" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel like I'm being a nuisance here as I've posted similar questions on meta before. It's been a few days and there have been no comments or answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/35955/propensity-score-matching-after-multiple-imputation&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt;. It's just a bit frustrating. I know I can offer a bounty - I did that for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/33596/how-can-i-pool-posterior-means-and-credible-intervals-after-multiple-imputation&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, but to no avail so I'm reticent to do it again and give up my hard-earned rep !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I improve my question ? I spent a long time researching it and I thought I wrote it OK ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or maybe it's just that my questions are a bit stupid / naive ? Everyone has to start somewhere, right ? Even a suggestion to point me in the right direction would be great !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11405" OwnerDisplayName="Joe King" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2012-09-19T11:35:18.387" Title="No comments - no answers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1381" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1738" CreationDate="2012-09-17T19:43:42.853" Score="14" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Preliminary question: Is our FAQ editable at this point? If so:)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have recently started being more active in reviewing.  Mostly, of course, you review a new user's first questions, and are often called upon to comment to help familiarize the user with the site's operation and features.  It is common to point the user to our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; for info on asking questions (I'm also quite enamored of this blog post by @PeterFlom: &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20160407121308/http://www.statisticalanalysisconsulting.com/how-to-ask-a-statistics-question/comment-page-1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How to ask a statistics question&lt;/a&gt;, which does a good job of covering material not included in the FAQ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, however, I review a new user's &lt;em&gt;first answer&lt;/em&gt;, and feel obliged to comment in an  analogous manner.  Unfortunately, there seems to be less available to point people to.  You can still recommend reading the FAQ (it certainly doesn't hurt), but that information is more geared towards question askers, rather than answerers.  Sometimes I think the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;about page&lt;/a&gt; might be helpful, if only because the figure can spark the idea that we don't simply want to help answer the OP's question, but that an ideal answer spans all four types of content / goals.  Nonetheless, that page is pretty sparse, and not oriented towards informing new answerers about what makes for a good answer, etc.  I am aware that there are some meta threads (both &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1218/how-should-performance-answering-questions-best-be-evaluated/1248#1248&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/136294/what-makes-an-outstanding-answer&quot;&gt;SO&lt;/a&gt;), and perhaps some SE blog posts, that are pertinent to answering questions well, but the mere fact that there are several means that that information is not centralized.  In addition, they are not very accessible to someone who wants to throw out a quick (but hopefully helpful) comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should we include such information in our FAQ?  Can we?  What should that / those sections contain?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note that the following meta thread exists: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6/what-should-our-faq-contain&quot;&gt;What should our FAQ contain?&lt;/a&gt;, but I thought it better to ask a new and focused question, rather than add this idea to the list of old answers there.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2023-03-04T13:05:08.013" LastActivityDate="2023-03-04T13:05:08.013" Title="Should our FAQ include information about answering questions?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1382" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-18T03:25:54.993" Score="15" ViewCount="357" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I think about how to craft better questions, I wonder if the length of a question influences the probability of receiving an answer?  Or increases the time to receive answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know as a community we are simply not just interested in providing answers.  However, I have often noticed long questions that provide a lot of information about the problem seem to receive less attention than short questions where the problem is less clear.  Further, I often see those short question get a lot of comments, which help the questioner edit/develop a better question.  As a result of this iterative process, it seems an answer is provided.  Perhaps this is simply some sort of &quot;confirmation bias&quot; on my part, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12318" LastEditorUserId="12318" LastEditDate="2012-09-18T20:08:52.727" LastActivityDate="2012-09-30T17:58:30.820" Title="Does length of a question influence probability of receiving an answer?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1382" CreationDate="2012-09-18T07:20:27.067" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMO this is because long questions take longer to read, which exhausts the attention before the main matter is stated.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A good lengthy SE question is also possible, but it should follow &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;question ~&gt; details ~&gt; more details &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;scheme rather than &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;details ~&gt;  previous results ~&gt; more details ~&gt; version of software ~&gt; self-assessment of desperation ~&gt; ... ~&gt; question*.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(*) Nothing personal, general inspiration.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2012-09-18T07:20:27.067" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1384" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1385" CreationDate="2012-09-18T21:36:54.887" Score="14" ViewCount="1203" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a dummy piece of R code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;pca &amp;lt;- prcomp(matrix(rnorm(10*10), ncol=10))&#xA;pca$x&#xA;    pca$rotation&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third line appears indented, whereas it is not in the source. Removing the &lt;code&gt;$&lt;/code&gt; sign from the line unindents it, so it looks like a collision between MathJax and Markdwon (at least Showdown).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I use the &lt;code&gt;$&lt;/code&gt; notation in R code while avoiding this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10849" LastActivityDate="2012-09-20T01:53:56.593" Title="Markdown, R code and dollar sign?" Tags="|support|r|markdown|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1384" CreationDate="2012-09-18T22:44:22.843" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a bug.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One work-around (which applies only to code not broken across lines) is to include an end-of-line comment containing an additional dollar sign: they cancel each other in pairs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g., &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;pca &amp;lt;- prcomp(matrix(rnorm(10*10), ncol=10))&#xA;pca$x                                   # This dollar sign works around the mathjax bug: $&#xA;pca$rotation&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2012-09-20T01:53:56.593" LastActivityDate="2012-09-20T01:53:56.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1386" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1389" CreationDate="2012-09-19T11:15:16.790" Score="1" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;Last night I lost 125 rep points because a user was removed.  I suspect that other users of CV also lost many point because of this, particularly the high rep users.  This is very unfair.  A few days ago Macro a long time user who is currently ranked 5th in reputation on CV announced that he was taking a vacation form the site.  Macro has been a heavy user of this site and has reward many community members with upvotes on questions and answers.  If a highly respected user like Macro quits the site tons of votes would be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't see how this rule could be considered sensible or fair.  I think it should be modified or dropped.  What are your thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T20:21:49.410" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T20:21:49.410" Title="Maybe it is time to change the rule to delete rep votes when users are removed" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|status-bydesign|reputation|votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1382" CreationDate="2012-09-19T11:20:48.857" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a member who tries to answer as many good questions as I can I find that I sometimes give up on very long questions.  I would say keep the question to the point and concise.  Further clarification can be brought up later in discussion if you find it necessary.  Sometimes long questions with figures and/or R code may be necessary.  If a long question is essential I would follow mbq's guidelines in his answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastEditorUserId="11032" LastEditDate="2012-09-19T15:22:00.787" LastActivityDate="2012-09-19T15:22:00.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1386" CreationDate="2012-09-19T13:42:25.250" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cannot determine this for sure, and had no hand in it (even moderators have very limited abilities to see votes and no powers to change them), but I can find indications that this user had been abusing the voting system.  For instance, a few of our most active participants lost one vote each; you lost a lot.  Such dedicated voting at best reflects a narrow interest and lack of judgment, and at worst indicates a sock puppet or other fraud. In any case, removing such votes improves the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2012-09-19T13:42:25.250" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1390" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1391" CreationDate="2012-09-19T14:08:14.393" Score="22" ViewCount="716" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Following on my previous question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1381/should-our-faq-include-information-about-answering-questions&quot;&gt;Should our FAQ include information about answering questions&lt;/a&gt;, and the subsequent discussion in the comments there, this question is intended to elicit discussion from community members with the goal being to develop a set of suggestions that can be linked to from the main site's FAQ.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The central question can be conceived of several ways:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What advice should we provide a new user who is largely unfamiliar with Cross-Validated, but wants to help out answering questions here?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What constitutes a great answer on Cross-Validated?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To what ideal should our answers aspire?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2017-01-13T12:27:37.307" Title="How should questions be answered on Cross Validated?" Tags="|discussion|faq|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1390" CreationDate="2012-09-19T14:33:11.237" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;As noted in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20121219143638/https://stats.stackexchange.com/about&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;about page&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;our about page has changed since this was written--it's more useful now, but don't be confused if the following description seems out of place&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;edited again: the link goes to an archived version of the page as it was when the answer was first written&lt;/em&gt;), Cross-Validated is understood, by design, to overlap somewhat with other types of sites that already exist on the internet (specifically: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wikipedia.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;; blogs--e.g., statistics blogs like &lt;a href=&quot;http://robjhyndman.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rob Hyndman's&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://jeromyanglim.blogspot.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jeromy Anglim's&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.johndcook.com/blog/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Cook's&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.statisticalanalysisconsulting.com/blog/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Peter Flom's&lt;/a&gt; etc., and possibly &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.r-bloggers.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;R-bloggers&lt;/a&gt;, although CV is not to be confused with an R programming site; statistics forums--e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.statisticsforum.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;statisticsforum.com&lt;/a&gt;, or perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.talkstats.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;talk stats&lt;/a&gt;; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://digg.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Digg&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reddit.com/r/statistics/search?q=statistics&amp;amp;sort=relevance&amp;amp;restrict_sr=on&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reddit&lt;/a&gt;).  This fact makes it difficult to write the 'perfect' CV answer--there is no formula or set of boxes that, if checked off, will be guaranteed to produce the best answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, some guidelines can be given:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer the original poster's question:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is a question and answer site: we do not just provide information about statistical topics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your answer should be written such that the OP will be able to understand it (given their current level of statistical sophistication, as best you can divine) and utilize that information to accomplish their goals  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the question is not clear enough for you to be able to answer in this manner, you can comment on the question to ask the OP for more information  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be respectful of the OP.  Many people have math anxiety, and many questioners here clearly feel uncomfortable (I can't count how many questions I've seen that start with 'I'm sorry if my question is stupid, I don't get stats...').  Bear in mind that many questioners do not speak English as their native language; think of how difficult it is to learn a foreign language, and then imagine trying to ask, and understand the answers provided to, a very technical question in a language you are not comfortable with.  Realize that sooner or later, you will be frustrated with an OP for some reason; &lt;em&gt;always maintain a tone of respect and civility&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make sure your answer is readable: Be sure your answer is edited thoroughly, uses complete sentences, etc. You may also want to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/editing-help&quot;&gt;our formatting options&lt;/a&gt; such as numbering and/or bullet points in some cases.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Check back on your answer from time to time initially.  The OP, or other users, may have left a comment requesting clarification etc.  Comments that are posted to your answer will show up in your inbox and so you should notice them (assuming you log on), but may also be posted elsewhere by users less familiar with the site, and something worth your attention may occur elsewhere on the thread.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Provide information that is authoritative and comprehensive:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We intend for this site to build up a permanent repository of information about statistics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your answer should not just help the OP, but future information seekers who will visit the site (or search Google) with a similar question  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answers that are well connected to other information can be more helpful in both of the above respects:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is ideal to be able to cite scientific references (e.g., papers published in the statistical literature, or books from academic publishers) to back up factual claims that are made  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Links to other resources on the internet can be very helpful, but due to the mismatch between our goal of permanence and the Internet's dynamic nature (e.g., link rot), you should &lt;em&gt;always include enough information in your answer that it would still be useful if the link went dead.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We prefer that you do not simply copy and paste from an authoritative source, however.  It is best to provide some additional information to introduce or otherwise connect the quoted material to the current question.  Moreover, if you do quote from another source, you need to clearly mark the quoted material as such, and cite the source.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is often most helpful to illustrate your answer:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Once your reputation is above 10, you will be able to upload images into your answer.  If you cannot do that now, if you can upload your figure anywhere else on the internet and post a link to it, a higher-rep user can upload your figure for you and post it in your answer.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Simulations can often be helpful to illustrate a point, so code (such as R code) can be helpful.  However, try to make your code as transparent as possible (e.g., comment more than you think is necessary), bear in mind that not everyone will be knowledgeable regarding your favored language, and make it reproduceable (e.g., be sure to set / fix the random seed).  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mathematical proofs are often invaluable (note that CV supports TeXification via mathjax), especially for the subset of questions on mathematical statistics.  However, make sure that your proofs are clear enough to be understandable by the OP and likely future readers of the thread.  (That is, mathematicians often skip steps that they think are obvious, but what's obvious to you may not be to the OP; also make sure your surrounding discussion adequately motivates and explicates the proof.)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Things to avoid:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be aware that the ordering of the answers will fluctuate over time as they are voted on, so it's better to refer to another answer by that answer's username, not 'the answer above'.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Please avoid providing answers that only amount to 'me too!', or that duplicate existing answers on the thread&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Please don't use the answer field to ask for clarification from the OP, to comment on the question or another answer or respond to others' comments, for help from the community, or to ask an entirely new question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please bear in mind that, although we believe the quality of an answer will correlate with the number of upvotes it receives, the vote total your answer gets is a random variable.  Many of the most highly voted answers on CV are jokes, quotes, cartoons, etc., in part because they attract a lot of page views.  It does happen that there are truly superb answers on CV with very few votes because few people end up reading the thread in question, and thus there are few opportunities for votes.  In addition, many readers (perhaps unfortunately) will neither upvote nor downvote an answer.  Rest assured that we appreciate the help you provide to the OP, and to making CV great.  And recognize that even good answers sometimes pick up anonymous downvotes for reasons that are unknowable.  Try not to let such things bother you, and maintain civility at all times.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2017-01-13T12:27:37.307" CommentCount="8" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-06-05T14:30:52.757" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1382" CreationDate="2012-09-20T01:34:02.367" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There must be an optimal length of a question, assuming there is a smooth relation between the length of the question and the likelihood of the answer. Clearly, questions of zero length cannot receive valid answers, as there is not enough information to formulate a response. Likewise, infinitely long questions cannot receive an answer, either, because one's lifetime span would run out while reading the question, and one won't be able to apprehend all of the information contained in the question. Let us now apply Rolle's theorem: there must exist a point where the derivative of the likelihood of the answer is zero. The derivative is not identically zero on the positive semi-line, however, since we observe some questions that do get answered, so the probability is strictly positive for some nonzero lengths. By smoothness assumption, one of the critical points with the derivative = 0 must correspond to a global maximum of the probability of receiving a response wrt to a question of a certain length. QED.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is an old joke, initially formulated by a physicist Paul Dirac with regards to an optimal distance to admire a female face: from zero distance, you see something like a wall of flesh, and cannot really see anything; at infinity, that's just a small dot, and you can't see anything either, so there must exist an optimal distance. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dirac.ch/PaulDirac.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.dirac.ch/PaulDirac.html&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastActivityDate="2012-09-20T01:34:02.367" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1393" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-20T11:40:23.370" Score="10" ViewCount="545" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is just a general esthetic question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/35530/latent-variables-overparameterization-and-mcmc-convergence-in-bayesian-models#comment71221_35530&quot;&gt;a random question&lt;/a&gt;, I recommended somebody to come up with a better name than user57892 or whatever generic automatically generated name that was, and they basically told me to piss off as they contribute the content without the need to come up even with an approximate name like StatGuruJoe. I mulled over this for a little while, and while I recognize there may be no SE policy on this, there are at least two issues that bother me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I went into enough trouble to come up with my user name and fill the tiny bio; if this guy hasn't, why should I go into the trouble answering his question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you believe in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;infinite monkey theorem&lt;/a&gt;, then this guy looks like the 57892th monkey typing randomly on the keyboard. I guess the statistical application would be that a monkey typing at random will at some point provide SAS/R/Stata code for a rigorous analysis of any existing data set, and type up all of the answers to the CV questions. So, again, why should I bother?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following up on RioRaider's question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1382/does-length-of-a-question-influence-probability-of-receiving-an-answer&quot;&gt;relation between the question length and the likelihood of a good answer&lt;/a&gt;, there's apparently a relation between a user's reputation and how human-readable their names are. It only takes a mouseover + right click to Google more about Michael Chernick, Peter Flom or Jeromy Anglim; whuber or StasK may require a little bit more digging, and frankly I've been somewhat frustrated at being unable to match the name and face regarding Macro and cardinal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May be I am growing older. When I was in college, I was fine referring to my friends using their FIDO aliases (if anybody still remembers this offline message exchange network), where mine was something like 2:5020/486.41, as in, &quot;Have you met 2:5020/317.1? He really is a fine guy.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2013-07-28T11:28:08.333" Title="Do user57892 names bother you?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1393" CreationDate="2012-09-20T12:26:13.390" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, but only for a very short moment. I agree that it &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; indicate sloppiness, but in general I agree with the fictional Prof. Smith&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UX5VI.gif&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1399&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PHD Comics&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only harm the user[0-9]{1,n} causes is, that I will not remember him because I am not able to recognize him in different threads. To me, all these names are the same. But that's it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="264" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2013-07-28T11:28:08.333" LastActivityDate="2013-07-28T11:28:08.333" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1393" CreationDate="2012-09-20T12:44:15.667" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;StasK I prefer real names to pseudonyms. Now the clever pseudonyms are amusing but still have the drawback of lack of identifiability.  I don't know why community members choose to be anonymous and put no bio or a  very uninformative one.  But that is how SE does it and most users behave.  But the name userxxxx doesn't really bother me anymore than any other pseudonym and I answer questions based on my ability to answer and interest and quality and length of the question.  The users name never enters into it for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An exception might be if the user becomes a regular and I want to get to know two members with name userxxxx for some numbers xxxx.  then it would be hard to remember them without possibly confusing them.  Names like StasK, Macro and Cardinal are names that I now associate with high rep users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastEditorUserId="11032" LastEditDate="2012-09-20T20:53:38.367" LastActivityDate="2012-09-20T20:53:38.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1393" CreationDate="2012-09-20T15:48:57.850" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Excuse me if I'm stating the obvious but doesn't it imply that the user is either lazy or is paranoid about revealing his identity for some reason ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to answer your question: no it doesn't bother me, but then again, I am just extremely grateful that this site exists and that someone takes their time to answer my questions. In the future if I am in a position to answer other people's questions maybe I would think differently.....hmmmmmm :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, another thing sprung to mind: perhaps the people who reveal their identity are show-offs - nothing wrong with that of course - if you've got it, flaunt it (I wish I had it !)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11405" LastActivityDate="2012-09-20T15:48:57.850" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1397" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-20T21:16:50.097" Score="6" ViewCount="882" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that the common and most acceptable way to deal with poorly posed questions is to point the OP to ways to better ask questions and to probe for clarification in comments.  This issue comes up a lot and it is not always the OPs fault.  We want people to participate when they are interested in statistics even if their background is limited.  Also this is a global community and many community members that ask questions have to do it in English when English is not their first language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I ask a lot of probing questions such as how I helped with Joe King's question today.  But other times the question is just missing something.  it is ambiguous but I can make an educated guess at the OPs intended question.  I choose to answer the what I think the intended question is.  If i am right we may have the correct solution much faster than to wait for some clarification(s) to be made.  If I am wrong the OP gets to see how I have misinterpreted the question and sometimes can give give the appropriate clarification through amending  the question.  When this second possibility happens I can delete my answer or amend it to answer the right question.  i think this is a good approach.  Their could be other less favorable scenarios that can happen but my experience is that this seems to work well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, I have been criticized by more than one person for answering too quickly.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;My question is:  Do you agree with my position or do you see something wrong to my approach.  If you think it is wrong could you please give your reasoning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastActivityDate="2012-10-03T18:36:26.690" Title="Strategies for answering questions that may be unclear" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1398" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-23T13:18:09.363" Score="5" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;CV has tons of badges. Some require that you do XXXX task XXXX times (e.g. edit 500 posts). Is there a way to see your progress toward these goals?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T20:23:23.910" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Is there a way to see your progress toward badges?" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1399" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-25T12:08:39.433" Score="2" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently answered a multiple choice question on CV and although the OP did not label it homework it obviously was.  Should we try to give hints?  I had a hard time finding a way to suggest an answer without providing my rationale for picking a specific choice.  A moderator thought that my answer violated policy.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/37940/probability-model-question/37942#37942&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is the post. Community memebr gung edited the question and presumably added the homework tag that was missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should be done?  Should we just not respond to multiple choice questions?  Is there a way to be helpful with questions like this one without answering it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" OwnerDisplayName="Michael Chernick" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2012-09-29T01:37:49.193" Title="Can we help with multiple choice homework without violating site policy?" Tags="|discussion|homework|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1399" CreationDate="2012-09-25T19:46:42.707" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about &quot;provid[ing] helpful hints&quot; as suggested by @csgillespie and follow @whuber's suggestion on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/12/930&quot;&gt;one of the thread&lt;/a&gt; @Procrastinator referenced in his comment: &quot;How can we use homework questions to the benefit of this community?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this question, in particular, I would have sketched briefly the distinction between continuous and discrete outcomes, with a particular emphasis on the Binomial and Poisson law and, maybe, how they relate one to the other. The OP also favored one of the option, and ruled out option D; we could rely on this and propose further discussion on probability distributions. This is what you did here and there in your post, but your third sentence already suggested a solution which leaves little room to arouse curiosity and thinking on the side of the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, I believe we should not feel embarrassed by how a question is formatted (many HW questions could easily be recasted as MCQ, IMO), and follow usual advice to answer homework questions, as suggested in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2012-09-25T19:46:42.707" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1401" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-25T21:38:55.483" Score="7" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/weighted-sampling/info&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/weighted-sampling/info&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no term &quot;weighted sampling&quot; in survey statistics world. Not at least that I know of. It is like &quot;use Excel to prepare a JASA paper&quot;. I guess people meant &quot;unequal probability sampling&quot; when they tag their questions with this dubious phrase, and then it just propagates like &quot;Free Wi-Fi&quot; network in the airports (if you don't know this urban legend: somebody just created an ad-hoc network called &quot;Free Wi-Fi&quot;, a bunch of stupid computers connected to non-discriminantly, and so after a little while this network used to be found in every US airport for a few years, even though there was no Internet access or anything; sort of performance-degrading virus).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I hate this tag, and would like to kill it. Any comments on this wild desire? My understanding is that I would have to retag all of these questions though. A more generic &lt;code&gt;sampling&lt;/code&gt; would be a better fit for most of them (and I believe I worked on that tag earlier).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2012-09-28T13:12:30.630" Title="to kill a tag: weighted-sampling" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1377" CreationDate="2012-09-26T20:27:52.810" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am happy with your suggestion to create a &lt;code&gt;pre-post-design&lt;/code&gt; tag which may be helpful to better identify questions dealing with specific experimental designs. (In passing I noticed we don't even have a tag for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/quasiexp.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;quasi-experimental designs&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the &lt;code&gt;repeated-measures&lt;/code&gt; tag does not necessarily cover exactly the same topic as it can be associated to longitudinal data, or repeated measurements in designed experiments (e.g., in psychology), to name a few. As such, pre-post design would just belong or be a sub-category of that more general tag. Also, &lt;code&gt;change-scores&lt;/code&gt; are more alike 'derived variables', as stated in plain English, while they are also suggestive of a statistical technique for analyzing two-group parallel design, which is &lt;a href=&quot;http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/wiki/Main/MeasureChange&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;not necessarily the way to go&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2012-09-26T20:27:52.810" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1403" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-27T10:09:39.653" Score="14" ViewCount="369" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is voting activity so low? I am surprised by the low number of votes my questions and answers get. Is this a reflection of the quality of my content or an artifact of this forum?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11030" LastActivityDate="2012-10-08T14:51:22.557" Title="Why is voting activity so low?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1404" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-21T04:25:55.797" Score="4" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;Has there been any research done on this?  I have recently noticed that if CV notices suspicious upvotes, they will negate these upvotes.  But, if a user gets say almost 1600 reputation points in upvotes, and the site negates exactly 1600 reputation points, isn't this actually the bare minimum of the reputation points they received?  Shouldn't they be penalized beyond this?  I believe this is the bare minimum since I think the reputation points have a snowball effect.  As their reputation grows bigger, people are more likely to assume this person knows what they are talking about.  I realize some of this might be for meta, at the same time, it could require some statistical analysis.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would this be determined?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6369" OwnerDisplayName="Adam" LastActivityDate="2012-09-27T15:22:42.887" Title="What is the effect of reputation on upvotes?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1401" CreationDate="2012-09-28T13:12:30.630" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I must disclose that I don't know anything about surveys, but in other areas &quot;weighted sampling&quot; is quite a common and well established term, to the point that there are more concurrent meanings in need for disambiguation. Think e.g. about sampling with a measure change (of which importance sampling can be seen as a special case). Or WLS in a simulation setting. Also &quot;Weighted Monte Carlo&quot; has atleast two different well defined meanings in quantitative finance, both of which are sometimes confusingly traded for &quot;weighted sampling&quot;. Maybe by &quot;unequal probability sampling&quot; you meant just a measure change, but for many people (atleast all of us into simulation) such term rings no bell at all and is worse than obscure w.r.t. referencing (despite its obvious interpretation). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand your concern though, and we should discuss it more extensively, what I suggest is just not to generalize to the whole forum a fix fit for a few areas only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot offer a solution right away, but certainly removing the tag altogether would cause additional problems, worse than the single relatively specific/limited issue solved. Those &quot;misbehaving&quot; posters should be advised to stay away from improper tagging instead, and on the other hand a disambiguation guideline would also help a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the proper uses I am even thinking about subtagging (&quot;xxx weighted sampling&quot; vs &quot;yyy weighted sampling&quot;) where reasonable disambiguation synonyms cannot be found, so far from killing the term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14463" LastActivityDate="2012-09-28T13:12:30.630" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1408" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1410" CreationDate="2012-09-29T15:42:21.057" Score="4" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know if there are any user located near me geographically. Is there a way to view users by city/country?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11030" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T20:23:41.887" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T20:23:41.887" Title="Is there a way to view users by city/country?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1409" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-29T16:01:57.780" Score="10" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I've started reviewing more this question keeps occurring to me.  In my judgment there are three ordered categories of question quality: &lt;em&gt;should definitely stay open&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;should definitely be closed&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;lies in the gray area&lt;/em&gt;.  (I'm sure everyone has the same categories, although the category boundaries will differ.)  The first two are obvious, but some decision rule is required for the third.  Consider a hypothetical new question that may be &lt;em&gt;somewhat&lt;/em&gt; (i.e., a gray area case) &quot;ambiguous, vague, incomplete&quot; (etc.) and may be difficult to answer.  My policy in this situation is to give the OP the benefit of the doubt.  In addition, I would probably comment and ask for more details to be provided.  Now consider such a question that is bumped by the community user (for example, but I might also stumble across it via a different route), it has been around for months and has garnered no answers, or no answers worthy of an upvote.  I look at it and wonder if it will ever get a decent answer (it still might).  If I tend to fold the grays into the 'stay open' category for new questions, &lt;strong&gt;is it reasonable to default to 'close' for old questions?&lt;/strong&gt;  The danger is that the site seems to have an awful lot of such questions floating around, and this process could easily become fairly assertive and fill up the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review-beta/close&quot;&gt;close votes queue&lt;/a&gt; in the review system.  Another way of putting this is, &lt;strong&gt;do we want to eliminate many of the old, inactive questions that seem to be going nowhere (i.e., no answers or no upvoted answers)?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2012-09-29T16:01:57.780" Title="Should the standards for closing questions be relaxed somewhat for old questions?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1408" CreationDate="2012-09-29T17:18:59.063" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/queries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt; for this. The data is updated fairly regularly. (It's supposed to be monthly, but as of the posting of this answer, the last update was on June 27, 2012.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/81275&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is an example query I made for you, which you could modify to your liking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;select * from Users&#xA;where Location like '%Ireland%'&#xA;order by reputation desc&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, of course, only shows users that actually provide a location in their profiles and it may not be accurate since it is self-reported and not authenticated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2970" LastEditorUserId="2970" LastEditDate="2012-09-29T17:36:47.777" LastActivityDate="2012-09-29T17:36:47.777" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1382" CreationDate="2012-09-29T19:32:05.723" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think question length alone is the key. If I was trying to model the likelihood of response, I would include measures of question length, question complexity and question novelty, together with their interactions (at least 2 way), along with question answerability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know of objective ways to measure complexity or novelty of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But some complex questions &lt;em&gt;demand&lt;/em&gt; a long question.  Also, if the question involves code, it's nice to see the code. Very short questions cannot possibly include context, but context is often key. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, while I am probably more toward the &quot;keep&quot; than &quot;close&quot; end of the continuum on question novelty, it is tiresome (and unproductive) to answer a question that has been asked already in the same way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2012-09-29T19:32:05.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1412" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1415" CreationDate="2012-09-29T21:58:23.753" Score="5" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just looked at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/regression/info&quot;&gt;wiki&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;code&gt;regression&lt;/code&gt; and it only discusses linear regression (OLS). Should it include a list of, links to, or even text about other forms? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2012-10-01T16:49:05.043" Title="Should the WIKI for regression include links to other forms of regression?" Tags="|discussion|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1408" CreationDate="2012-09-30T14:40:33.000" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using the Stack Exchange data API, a user created an online map, &lt;a href=&quot;http://johndbritton.com/stackmaps/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;StackMaps&lt;/a&gt;,  that takes the information from the user self supplied location and places them on a world map. One can then pan, zoom and select the balloons to see particular users at any location.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Caveat Emptor&lt;/em&gt;, when using such a map one needs not be only aware that users locations are self-supplied (and hence may be false), one needs to be aware that the process of geocoding is not guaranteed to produce reliable results. Now, I will start by saying &lt;em&gt;I'm sure I couldn't do any better&lt;/em&gt;, but given all the grief Apple has been given over their recent maps, I figured poking fun at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/3367/stackmaps-interactive-maps-of-stack-exchange-communities&quot;&gt;google&lt;/a&gt; is not entirely out of place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As cardinal mentioned in the comments, parsing of only country names seems to be alittle out of place, as you can see here a user from Russia is assigned to the northern parts of Quebec.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3AqXd.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the points that far north in North America appear to be either misplaced or just generally not useful (a few who put Canada were geocoded to what I am guessing is the centroid of Canada in the UTM projection, another who listed the North Pole is given a location in Alaska). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you zoom in to the balloon in Alaska you will see there is a place actually called the North Pole, and in this instance the geocoding engine was likely alittle too liberal in actually assigning that point. Another example can be found that the Kingdom of Zhao is somewhere in rural upstate NY between Albany and Syracuse (if you zoom in you will see that there is a Kingdom road it is assigned to).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6xZwr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last but not least, we have some sea-faring posters. I assume Michelle is located at a &lt;em&gt;New&lt;/em&gt; New Zealand that I was not previously aware of. You can also see one indvidual who put Chile as their location was placed in the Pacific, I wonder offhand if this is a projection messup/centroid out of the polygon snafu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0vA5z.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:45.643" LastActivityDate="2012-09-30T14:40:33.000" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1382" CreationDate="2012-09-30T17:58:30.820" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been going on a bit of a &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/queries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;data explorer&lt;/a&gt; binge recently, so here are a few stats to bear on the discussion. &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/81340/length-of-post-vs-answered&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is query I used to pull the data for these tables and graphs. Of most note, I proxy &quot;length of question&quot; via the number of characters (in html) per question (i.e. the QLength variable in the query).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this is certainly an imperfect proxy, and I encourage others to do some text munging and improve upon it. But to proceed with imperfection ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distribution of question length comparing questions with an accepted answer vs no accepted answer is amazingly similar. Below is a table of some summary statistics, and following that a chart of boxplots for accepted answers and not accepted answers (with question length on a log scale). Labels in the box plots are post ids. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kPSwS.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Z6Zbp.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a length of question too long to answer, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/13845&quot;&gt;we have not yet reached it&lt;/a&gt;! (That question is a good example of how character length of the html fails as well, it is only long because of a long code snippet, not because the actual question is long, a better procedure would not count such things in question length) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might also consider not only if the post has an accepted answer, but the number of actual answers the post has received. Again (surprisingly to me) there appears to be little to no relationship between the question length and the number of answers. Below the graph is plotted on what SPSS calls &quot;Safe Log&quot; scale, where values of 0 are assigned to zero on the log scale. The points are also jittered because of extreme striation in the lower count values (over 90% of questions have answer counts 3 or fewer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a bit strange to plot answers on a log scale, but it ends up producing a usefully weird separation in the point cloud. Points near the bottom are posts with no answers, and above have one or more answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XutGg.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I encourage everyone to download the data themselves and improve upon my analysis! An easy improvement may be just eliminating code snippets from the question length and seeing if the same results still hold. One might also include a host of other characteristics of the questions in analysis as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2012-09-30T17:58:30.820" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1412" CreationDate="2012-09-30T22:27:50.180" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is what the current &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/regression&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;regression&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;regression&lt;/a&gt; tag wiki excerpt says:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Techniques for analyzing the relationship between one (or more) &quot;dependent&quot; variables and &quot;independent&quot; variables.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be fine with amending this to something like:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Refers to techniques for analyzing the relationship between one (or more) independent and dependent variables using ordinary least squares (OLS). &quot;Regression&quot; is sometimes used loosely to include other types of models (logistic regression, Poisson reg., etc). For these, please consider: generalized-linear-model, logistic, probit, nonlinear-regression, etc, instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the full wiki, I'm less concerned, as I think they are rarely read.  (As a case in point, I gather you have only just read it, even though you've been a member for &gt;2 years, and with &gt;10k rep*.)  Of course, that doesn't mean we should feel free to have just anything there, but I see no reason why some additional paragraphs couldn't be added (&lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; what currently exists) stating that people sometimes include things like logistic regression under the the rubric of regression and linking to Wikipedia or other tag wikis.  For what it's worth, I also tend to think of logistic regression as falling under some general heading of 'regression', which is ironic, since OLS regression is a special case of the GLiM instead.  That is probably a misconception worth clarifying in the full wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*This is in no way a criticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="930" LastEditDate="2012-10-01T16:48:18.570" LastActivityDate="2012-10-01T16:48:18.570" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1397" CreationDate="2012-10-03T15:20:36.477" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think one problem with your approach is that people who are not that knowledgeable about statistics may 1) Be asking very unreasonable things, so your educated guesses could be way off, since they assume reasonability  and 2) These same people may not recognize when you make assumptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am reminded of a quote from Abraham Lincoln:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I had 6 hours to chop down a tree, I would spend 4 of them&#xA;  sharpening my axe&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With my clients, I often spend a LOT of time figuring out what they want. (Perhaps you do too). I have never found that this time is wasted; indeed, I sometimes still err by not spending enough time doing this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2012-10-03T15:20:36.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1397" CreationDate="2012-10-03T18:36:26.690" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't necessarily have a problem with your default strategy.  However, I do want to note (as I have several times on meta), that CV is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;intended to fulfill multiple goals&lt;/a&gt;.  One of which is to simply help questioners get answers, and I think your strategy is likely to satisfy that goal (although, @PeterFlom's point that questioners might not be able to recognize that you provided a correct answer to a different question than the one the would have wanted to ask, if they had been able, is worth bearing in mind here).  However, another goal is to build a permanent repository of statistical information.  Here again, there is some utility to your approach, but it is clearly not as optimal as finding out exactly what the OP actually needs to know, and then providing a comprehensive, clear answer and / or pointing them to other resources where they can get the information they need.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2012-10-03T18:36:26.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1403" CreationDate="2012-10-05T02:24:53.687" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that except for the minority of the people who really answer questions (and have a fabulous rep of 100+), most users think of themselves as statistically illiterate, and not being able to distinguish a good question from a bad question. Or simply don't look beyond the question they just asked and got answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all, this isn't a very large community, to begin with. There's probably 20 really active people that really do something on the site. Besides, not all of the questions would be that interesting; I personally pass by most of the questions because I don't seem to have much to say on them (or rather that the time I would have to spend to find a good answer way exceeds the expected the satisfaction of the +20 rep I could get from it). On those that I do open, I upvote may be a half, and upvote good answers. So if 20 is a right number of active users, and other active users behave like me (which would be terrible), then votes from the active users should follow a Poisson with the rate of 2 or 3. Plus some random upvotes from irregular users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the sad demographics of this site. If I were teaching a consulting class, I would make gaining a rep of 1000 a requirement for getting a passing grade, and be serious about it. Ah well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastActivityDate="2012-10-05T02:24:53.687" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1419" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-05T17:57:10.293" Score="61" ViewCount="128100" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible for Stack Exchange to make available $\LaTeX$ abbreviations for &lt;code&gt;\mathrm{E}&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;\mathrm{Var}&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;\mathrm{Cov}&lt;/code&gt; (possibly with new commands &lt;code&gt;\E&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;\Var&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;\Cov&lt;/code&gt;)? The problem is that things like $\mathrm{Var}[X\mid Y]$ look much better than $Var[X\mid Y]$, but we end up losing a lot of time typing that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9394" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-09-10T15:55:25.827" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T14:36:48.173" Title="$\LaTeX$ macros for expectation, variance and covariance?" Tags="|support|math-display|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1419" CreationDate="2012-10-06T00:56:39.477" Score="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;$\newcommand{\E}{\mathrm{E}}$ $\newcommand{\Var}{\mathrm{Var}}$ $\newcommand{\Cov}{\mathrm{Cov}}$ $\newcommand{\Expect}{{\rm I\kern-.3em E}}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is cardinal's solution. At the beginning of your answer type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;$\newcommand{\E}{\mathrm{E}}$&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;$\newcommand{\Var}{\mathrm{Var}}$&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;$\newcommand{\Cov}{\mathrm{Cov}}$&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that, just use it. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$&#xA;  \Var[X] = \E[\Var[X\mid Y]] + \Var[[\E\mid X]]&#xA;$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$&#xA;  \Cov[X,Y] = \E[XY] - \E[X]\E[Y]&#xA;$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stask suggested&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;$\newcommand{\Expect}{{\rm I\kern-.3em E}}$&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$\Expect[X]$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which looks pretty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9394" LastEditorUserId="9394" LastEditDate="2012-10-06T05:31:28.010" LastActivityDate="2012-10-06T05:31:28.010" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1421" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-07T20:04:56.313" Score="5" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some little used tags that have synonyms. It is hard to get 5 reputation in these tags (they are little used!) but synonyms could still be useful. Indeed, they might be especially useful as ways to combine tiny tags. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the system be modified so that people can add tag synonyms without 5 reputation in the tag itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="686" LastEditDate="2012-10-08T11:04:07.073" LastActivityDate="2012-10-08T11:04:07.073" Title="Ability to suggest tag synonyms without 5 in the tag" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1422" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1423" CreationDate="2012-10-08T00:14:27.377" Score="-6" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/38819/what-is-a-good-clean-brief-big-picture-outline-of-all-the-types-of-regression&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/38819/what-is-a-good-clean-brief-big-picture-outline-of-all-the-types-of-regression&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it's just asking for an outline (aka overview) since there isnt one on the entire Web&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13898" OwnerDisplayName="kittensatplay" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2012-10-08T15:25:33.607" Title="what exactly was needing clarification on this closed and deleted question?" Tags="|discussion|data-visualization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1422" CreationDate="2012-10-08T06:58:13.483" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you mean this request to reopen your old questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if some don't do something differently, then they can be arranged by&#xA;  the conditions needed to use them&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;question dervied from these:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/35827/how-does-regression-analysis-help-one-understand-how-the-typical-value-of-the-de&quot;&gt;How does regression analysis help one understand how the typical value of the dependent variable change?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/35824/explain-regression-to-7-years-old&quot;&gt;Explain regression to 7 years old&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;these questions should be &lt;strong&gt;kept&lt;/strong&gt; as they show what good answers are&#xA;  apart from the merely decent, though unsufficient, ones (and they&#xA;  didnt even have any werid math symbols in them! :) A golden +&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, basically it contains 0 data science questions, which is below the established acceptable limit on this site (1).  Please consult our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; for information about what kinds of questions are acceptable here and how to ask them well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2012-10-08T15:25:33.607" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1403" CreationDate="2012-10-08T14:51:22.557" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;One explaining factor might be that many question here are either long&#xA;or complicated for those unfamilliar with the field.&#xA;Thus many questions are read in details only by a few and mostly&#xA;skimmed by the majority of users.&#xA;For my part, I am always reluctant to vote for a question or answer I&#xA;feel I have not really understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9534" LastActivityDate="2012-10-08T14:51:22.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1425" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-08T16:47:25.133" Score="19" ViewCount="852" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/38928/2485&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; seeking example datasets was recently closed as off-topic.  Per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about &lt;strong&gt;obtaining particular datasets&lt;/strong&gt; are off-topic (they are too specialized).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I interpret things though, that does not apply in this case.  The FAQ seems concerned with questions like &quot;Where can I find historical data about stock prices for the S&amp;amp;P 500?&quot; or &quot;Where I can find economic data about the GDP of every country in 2012?&quot;.  Those questions are indeed about particular datasets and not really about data analysis, so those are the types of outlawed questions that I imagine when reading the FAQ.  I believe those types were also the focus of these related Meta questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/486/suitable-venue-to-help-find-specific-statistical-data&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1298/what-is-a-good-place-for-how-where-do-i-get-data-on-x-questions&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the linked question &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; about data analysis.  In particular, the asker is trying to develop new types of data analysis and asks for help in evaluating new algorithms.  The asker is not looking for &lt;em&gt;particular&lt;/em&gt; datasets but rather datasets with particular attributes as they relate to machine learning.  Nothing in the FAQ forbids this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There also seems to be a precedent that this type of question is actually fine.  See &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/7/locating-freely-available-data-samples&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/38874/classification-datasets-with-categorical-features-and-a-lot-of-classes&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/24261/benchmark-dataset-for-decision-tree-algorithm&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for a few examples.  Of course this is not a duplicate of those as this question has specific requirements (lots of attributes and suitable for regression).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So should this question be re-opened?  I think it is useful, interesting, and within the scope and therefore should be re-opened.  If it should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be re-opened, then the FAQ needs to be clarified and lots of other questions need to be closed as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2485" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2018-11-06T08:00:53.573" LastActivityDate="2018-11-06T08:00:53.573" Title="What's wrong with this question about datasets?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|closing-questions|data|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1426" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-08T22:53:20.567" Score="14" ViewCount="333" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following on from the recent question about upvoting (or the lack of it), here is a specific example where I'm not sure what we 'should' be doing with regards to upvoting. I provided a short answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/38523/what-is-the-correct-sequence-of-subjects-and-sources-need-to-be-mastered-to-be-a&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, but didn't upvote because it isn't a great question for the reasons Cardinal points out in a comment. None the less I hoped my quick answer might be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, upvoting a question says 'this is a good question worth reading' which I don't think is true in this case. However I've taken the time (admittedly a very short time) to provide an answer. Is that inconsistent? By providing an answer am I encouraging poor questions? In my view this isn't worthy of a downvote, just not an upvote. Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10354" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2012-10-12T06:42:50.610" Title="If a question is good enough for you to answer, should you up vote it?" Tags="|discussion|answers|votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1426" CreationDate="2012-10-09T02:58:31.963" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;+1, great question.  I'll admit that I often don't really know what it means for a question to be a really good question.  I mean, it's clear what a really good answer is (e.g., they are, '&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1218/how-should-performance-answering-questions-best-be-evaluated/1248#1248&quot;&gt;clear, authoritative, correct, definitive, well-illustrated, linked to appropriate references, at most lightly edited, and even...&quot;pretty&quot;&lt;/a&gt;').  You can just &lt;em&gt;recognize&lt;/em&gt; a really good answer when you see it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what is a good question?  At first blush it would seem that questions can't be &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt;, because by definition, if you are asking a question, you don't understand something, and it doesn't seem clear how you go about not understanding something particularly well.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, a question can &quot;show research effort&quot;, and be &quot;useful and clear&quot;, as @Aarthi points out.  However, that's an &lt;code&gt;and&lt;/code&gt; function--all three conditions must be met.  Moreover, if you want to be strict about it, it can be difficult to meet &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; of those conditions.  If someone really does a lot of research before asking their question, there's a decent chance they will have stumbled across the answer somewhere else and never post their question here in the first place.  Furthermore, what is &quot;useful&quot; supposed to mean?  I would guess it means the question will help many other people in the future, but what about an otherwise good question on a highly specialized, esoteric topic?  We do get some of those here, and I wouldn't want to exclude them out of hand.  &quot;Clear&quot; seems like it would be the easiest criterion to meet, but consider that many (maybe more than half, maybe less, I have no idea) of the askers on CV don't speak English as their native language.  It's impressive to me that someone can ask a highly technical question in a second language in the first place; requiring that it be asked 'clearly' may be a high hurdle to jump.  I don't want to take this too far, certainly there are many questions that meet all three criteria.  But if someone wants to be strict about it, it's probably less than half and clearly the idea isn't to have only a few questions with upvotes.  (When I was starting out on this site, I would mostly just vote on answers, and this little yellow flag would pop up saying &quot;I notice you've been voting on a lot of answers recently, you know questions need votes, too&quot;.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest, I'm still not always sure whether a question is good (aside from those cases where the official criteria are met).  My resolution is to also upvote those questions that afford good &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt;.  Think of it this way: when someone searches the site, what's listed are question titles along with their tags and their total vote count.  Having a higher vote total on the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; is one of the signals that that thread contains useful information (i.e., the whole thread--the question and the answers).  So if there's a really good answer on a thread, I'll usually upvote the question, even if the question may not quite meet all the official criteria.  One result of this is that I usually upvote questions that I answer (albeit not always--there are cases where I think the answer might help the OP, but isn't necessarily great and won't be of much interest to anyone else).  Thus, I advocate an &lt;code&gt;or&lt;/code&gt; function here: if the question meets the cut on it's merits, or if any answer on the thread is particularly good, or if I think the thread will be helpful for people in the future; or even if there aren't any such answers &lt;em&gt;yet&lt;/em&gt;, but I suspect there will be, I will typically upvote.  (Disclaimer: I'm under the impression that I may upvote &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users?tab=voters&amp;amp;filter=all&quot;&gt;more than most&lt;/a&gt;, so take that fact into consideration.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2012-10-09T02:58:31.963" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1428" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1429" CreationDate="2012-10-10T22:07:43.667" Score="1" ViewCount="1559" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the last few days I have twice tried to use \cases in $\LaTeX$ and gotten nowhere.  Why does it not work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, if it does, how does it work? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T20:25:16.543" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T20:25:16.543" Title="Why does the $\LaTeX$ cases environment not work?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1428" CreationDate="2012-10-11T02:53:31.877" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Care to share an example, below taken from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.math.uiuc.edu/~hildebr/tex/displays.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; appears to be displaying correctly for me here on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;\begin{equation*}&#xA;|x|= &#xA;\begin{cases} x &amp;amp; \text{if $x≥0$,}&#xA;\\&#xA;-x &amp;amp;\text{if $x\le 0$.}&#xA;\end{cases}&#xA;\end{equation*}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Code used to generate this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\begin{equation*}&#xA;    |x|= &#xA;    \begin{cases} x &amp;amp; \text{if $x≥0$,}&#xA;    \\&#xA;    -x &amp;amp;\text{if $x\le 0$.}&#xA;    \end{cases}&#xA;    \end{equation*}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2012-10-11T02:53:31.877" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1426" CreationDate="2012-10-12T06:42:50.610" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I have voted up $100$ questions and $119$ answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there are plenty of questions which are worth answering which are obviously flawed. Perhaps no motivation or definitions were given for obscure terms, but I happen to recognize them anyway. Perhaps the question is needlessly ambiguous, and I think one interpretation is interesting. Sometimes it is possible to take even more time to fix the question, but I think answering without voting the question up is reasonable. That there are answers already draws attention to the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11981" LastActivityDate="2012-10-12T06:42:50.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1425" CreationDate="2012-10-12T21:04:51.540" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I've probably been the most vocal opponent of data-finding questions on CrossValidated, but this one seems fine to me.  My &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/486/suitable-venue-to-help-find-specific-statistical-data/487#487&quot;&gt;main&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1032/data-sourcing-we-need-to-make-up-our-mind/1033#1033&quot;&gt;complaint&lt;/a&gt; has been that these questions need answers from subject-matter experts, not statistical experts, and are therefore simultaneously not very educational for CV users outside of that subject matter expertise, and more likely to get better responses from a subject-matter StackExchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That complaint doesn't apply here. CV users from just about any field have a reasonable chance of being able to answer the question, and could provide additional pointers for the process of evaluating novel methods against known datasets.  That's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;&quot;statistical analysis, applied or theoretical&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a very interesting question?  No.  But I'd vote to re-open if I had the rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2012-10-12T21:04:51.540" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1432" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1433" CreationDate="2012-10-17T02:57:04.017" Score="5" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have asked about the disadvantage of hyperplanes for the linear congruent random number generator, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/38328/hyperplane-problem-in-linear-congruent-generator&quot;&gt;the post&lt;/a&gt; has received 4 votes as off-topic, one away from being closed. So I wonder if the closed votes are unreasonable? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1005" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T11:58:14.623" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T11:58:14.623" Title="Is this question off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1432" CreationDate="2012-10-17T08:45:49.447" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, basically pseudorandom generators are a topic for either discrete mathematics (theoretical part) or something I used to call &quot;computational science&quot; (practical part) -- there is a SE for both (&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Math.SE&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://scicomp.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;SciComp.SE&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question seems to be more theoretical, so it might get a better attention on Math.SE; in fact this is what close-voters think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:53:55.003" LastActivityDate="2012-10-17T08:45:49.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1434" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-17T14:13:02.030" Score="1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a quick note on point totals when a recent question was migrated.   Here's the link:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/8164/revisions&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/8164/revisions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the migration, my total dropped 175 points in Cross Validated, and rose 60 points in Stackoverflow.   I'm not a point-hound, so it's not a problem.    However, in case someone is keeping track of this stuff, I thought I'd let you know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2775" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2012-10-17T14:13:02.030" Title="Feedback on Migrating Questions" Tags="|discussion|migration|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2012-10-17T15:09:11.513" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1291" CreationDate="2012-10-20T18:11:11.500" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's another idea: When people sign up  at the site, how about automatically sending them the FAQ in an e-mail? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2012-10-20T18:11:11.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1425" CreationDate="2012-10-20T18:55:10.730" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way this question is phrased, it's Not Constructive by the vast majority of the Stack Exchange sites.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/qa-is-hard-lets-go-shopping/&quot;&gt;&quot;Q&amp;amp;A is Hard, Let's Go Shopping&quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The former question provides the path of least resistance: a laundry&#xA;  list of products I can buy without thinking about it too much. But&#xA;  that answer will only be valid for a year at best. The latter question&#xA;  may take some thinking, but its answer will be valid forever&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way this question is phrased, it is an example of the former question in the quote above, which is of the form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are/where can I find/what is the best/etc items of type &amp;lt;X&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are problematic for a number of reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The voting mechanism doesn't work well for these items.  Since the initial question is overly broad, the upvotes are being used to compare apples to oranges.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It tends to attract a number of links to sources (with little accompanying them), &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/8259/140951&quot;&gt;which are not real answers&lt;/a&gt;; link-rot is a &lt;em&gt;huge&lt;/em&gt; concern here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People don't maintain the lists properly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it's been suggested on &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; (the town hall for all of the Stack Exchange sites) many times that lists should be maintained somewhere else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't mean list questions can't live here, but it's &lt;em&gt;strongly&lt;/em&gt; encouraged that Stack Exchange sites have &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; strict guidelines around them so as to not have your site filled with reference lists instead of real questions and answers (remember, Stack Exchange sites are question and answer sites).  We want other sites in Stack Exchange to benefit from the experiences that sites preceding them have experienced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="740" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2012-10-22T00:04:49.053" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1438" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-20T21:22:48.533" Score="9" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tags are often more useful with WIKIs attached. Is there  a way to see only the tags that are not defined? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-10-26T20:28:34.100" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T20:28:34.100" Title="Is there a way to see tags that have no wiki?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1439" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1440" CreationDate="2012-10-21T11:50:14.947" Score="1" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/users/1445301/joe-king?tab=accounts&quot;&gt;http://stackexchange.com/users/1445301/joe-king?tab=accounts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My meta account for SO shows up, but not for CV - is there a reason for that ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11405" LastActivityDate="2012-10-22T16:23:10.897" Title="Why doesn't my meta account show up in my network profile?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1439" CreationDate="2012-10-21T15:56:12.120" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Meta.StackOverflow is a little different - it's run as a separate site because it's the meta for the whole StackExchange network in addition to SO, and also for some historical reasons.  On the other site metas, the account is a sort of subaccount of the main account, which is, for example, why you don't accrue reputation for upvotes on Meta.CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/new-per-site-metas/&quot;&gt;blog post&lt;/a&gt; introducing the per-site metas goes into some detail on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And incorporating Aarthi's comment, which I did not know, on the users page of the per-site child metas, users are listed by their activity, not their reputation.  Which makes sense, as otherwise the users page would just be a replica of the main site page, and not very useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="527" LastEditorUserId="527" LastEditDate="2012-10-22T16:23:10.897" LastActivityDate="2012-10-22T16:23:10.897" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1438" CreationDate="2012-10-21T23:34:15.940" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I appreciate the work you've been doing making sure that tags have at least a wiki excerpt.  I agree that that makes them more useful.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to see which tags don't have wiki's is to click on the gray &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;TAGS&lt;/a&gt; button at the top of the page.  You can see the top 36 most used tags ever on CV; you can also sort alphabetically or by recently added.  Below the tags a portion of the wiki excerpt is displayed.  On the first page, all the tags have wiki's, but those are also the most important to have wiki's.  If you keep going through the pages to less frequently used tags, you will start to see some that don't have a wiki excerpt. At the time of this writing, 'experiment-design' is the most frequently used tag without a wiki excerpt; it's on the second page.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know of a way to determine which tags don't have full wiki's, other than clicking on them &amp;amp; navigating to it, but I also think the full wiki's are less important than the wiki excerpts.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2012-10-21T23:34:15.940" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1442" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-22T02:37:02.390" Score="7" ViewCount="667" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this question was closed incorrectly: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/40808/how-to-get-an-introductory-understanding-of-machine-learning/&quot;&gt;Is a strong background in maths a total requisite for ML?&lt;/a&gt; This asked, &quot;Is a strong background in maths a total requisite for ML? Should I try and fill in the blanks of my maths before continuing with ML? Can self learning really work for just a developer without any hard computer science background?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was closed as an exact duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/18973/can-you-recommend-a-book-to-read-before-elements-of-statistical-learning&quot;&gt;Book for reading before Elements of Statistical Learning?&lt;/a&gt; This asked, &quot;I want to digest Elements of Statistical Learning... I don't have enough knowledge to understand it. Can you recommend a book that is a better introduction to the topics in the book?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the new question asks, &quot;Is X something I need to do first?&quot; The old question says &quot;I have decided I need to use method Y to do Z. Please help me find the resources to do method Y.&quot; They seem quite different to me even if you assume X=Z and that there is only one method Y for accomplishing this. Neither my answer nor the comment by John Moeller made those assumptions, and these would not have fit the previous question. The answers to the previous question might be helpful, but they are not answers to the new question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what was gained by closing this question? What was lost was the ability for people to add other answers to the new question which don't fit the old question. Please reopen this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11981" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2012-10-22T21:22:52.167" Title="Exact duplicate or not: Recent question on mathematics needed for ML" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1442" CreationDate="2012-10-22T09:32:38.780" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have voted to close the question as duplicate, because it seems to me that both say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I have a hard time to understand ML. Can you point me to a gentle introduction&lt;/em&gt; (where one OP names the gaps and one does not).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already have a couple of introductory reference questions on our site and I am a little bit tired of seeing new ones popping up again and again ... meanwhile many users seem to be eager to answer those questions instead of closing them as duplicate. Everyone has a different background, but does it really make sense to allow one question per profession / degree of knowlege ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;BUT:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;If the focus on the question is explicitly &lt;em&gt;&quot;Is a strong background in maths a total requisite for ML?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (so this is also the title of the question) and we downvote answers which only provide references to introductory material to Machine Learning (because this answers belongs to the current duplicate) and upvote those who provide insights to the question and/or introductory material to &quot;learn math the right way&quot;-material, I am totally fine reopening it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I admit that I was too trigger happy (when using the close-cannon). Thanks for raising this !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="264" LastActivityDate="2012-10-22T09:32:38.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1442" CreationDate="2012-10-22T10:46:43.697" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to re-open.  That's my tendency. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a site serves several purposes (as this one does) some actions that are best suited for one purpose will be ill suited for another. One function of this site is to be a sort of encyclopedia of statistics answers - although, of course, there already is &lt;a href=&quot;http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/book/10.1002/0471667196&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences&lt;/a&gt;, many will not have access to it, it's expensive, and it isn't exactly what we are.  There is, of course, also Google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another purpose is to the individual who asks the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To serve the first purpose, closing is natural. To serve the second, leaving things open is natural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2012-10-22T10:46:43.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1442" CreationDate="2012-10-22T12:55:11.250" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Context&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The duplicate question states, &amp;quot;I don't have enough knowledge to understand [&lt;em&gt;Elements of Statistical Learning&lt;/em&gt;]&amp;quot; and asks (therefore) for more suitable introductions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closed question does not have such a clear focus.  Its title, &amp;quot;How to get an introductory understanding of Machine Learning,&amp;quot; appears to duplicate the former one.  Its text asks something different, phrased as three questions.  They all are variants of &amp;quot;Is a strong background in maths a total requisite for ML?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I interpreted these two as broadly asking the same thing: references to resources for learning about ML for people without the requisite background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;About Duplicates&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Duplicate&amp;quot; questions are not supposed to be &lt;em&gt;exact&lt;/em&gt; duplicates of each other, but only duplicates of the &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt;: &amp;quot;This question covers exactly the same content as earlier questions on this topic.&amp;quot;  As far as I can tell, the two questions we are discussing are duplicates in this sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing a question as a duplicate is good for &lt;em&gt;everybody&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It keeps topics clearly organized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It enhances searching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It speeds up finding answers by limiting the places one has to look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It consolidates closely related material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The person asking the question &lt;em&gt;immediately&lt;/em&gt; gets answers--usually with votes and comments to help evaluate their quality or usefulness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One motivation to keep a question open might be to help its respondents continue to accumulate reputation for their replies.  This can just as well be accomplished by merging the threads.  Merging, however, is more difficult to undo than closing (I am not aware of any way to completely reverse a merge) and can be performed only by moderators.  Therefore it seems wise to delay merges in any case where two questions are not clearly &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Resolutions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this question is re-opened, I recommend it should be done so only if accompanied by edits to give it a clear focus.  Depending on those edits, it perhaps also ought to be made CW, because this is one of those peripheral, possibly useful, topics that are not likely to have any objectively correct or best answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2012-10-22T12:55:11.250" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1438" CreationDate="2012-10-22T14:46:48.393" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/82928/tags-with-no-wiki&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;is a query&lt;/a&gt; that produces tags with no wiki from the Stack Exchange data dump. These are sorted descendingly by the number of questions that have that tag, hence tags that need wiki's and are used the most. I include the length as a potential indicator that a wiki, even if it has some text, can be potentially expanded upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately the data dump can not keep up with your recent work! But hopefully this is useful enough to see potential candidates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that a tag wiki and a tag wiki excerpt are different, and you can have wiki excerpt without a full tag wiki (it appears all tags with wiki's have an excerpt, I assume this is by design). Included in the query are the tag wiki excerpts, so you can filter them out as well. I include length so one can also see short wiki's that are potentially candidates to be expanded upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="1036" LastEditDate="2012-10-22T19:09:03.260" LastActivityDate="2012-10-22T19:09:03.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1442" CreationDate="2012-10-22T21:22:52.167" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This strikes me as a good and productive conversation (+1 to everybody).  I just want to offer another option for dealing with these situations, and that is to comment on the main question leaving a link to other questions with related information / material.  (Of course, when someone votes to close as a duplicate, this is done automatically.)  I'm not saying we need to always go this route, but it's a nice option to hold in mind.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This approach will offer many of the advantages listed by @whuber.  Among other things, it will also help Google find the best answers on CV, because there will be more links pointing to the best threads.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another issue is that I often find there are subtle differences in questions that are listed as duplicates, which can invite differing, but equally valid, answers.  As a case in point, there was a question a while back where the OP said that they had taken a log transformation of a covariate to approximate normality, but found that they could no longer interpret it, and asked how to interpret a log transformed variable.  This was merged with another question on how to interpret log transformed variables, but before it was merged, I had answered that the distribution of covariates didn't matter.  My answer no longer made any sense in the new context, so I deleted it.  (For the record, I'm not complaining here, I'm perfectly fine with the questions having been merged.)  Should a case like this exist, commenting and linking is another option that can be considered.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With respect to the thread in question, I had voted not to close, and later to reopen.  However, I'm open to the idea that I'm wrong on that one.  I have also noticed times in the past when I voted to close a question, but others voted to keep them open.  I suspect it is only natural that there will be cases where opinions vary.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2012-10-22T21:22:52.167" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1448" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-25T20:52:02.420" Score="1" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, in error, I have accidentally posted a comment which was not well formatted. Since then I have tried to remove it, but owing to the nature of the formatting, the delete button has been obscured by the 'Related' section. As a result, I am unable to remove the comment.&#xA;Are there any means through which a moderator can be contacted or, indeed, are there more direct means of removing this comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question (and aforementioned comment) can be found at:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/41127/using-the-rejection-sampling-with-the-method-of-inversion&quot;&gt;Using the rejection sampling with the method of inversion&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9171" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2012-10-25T20:57:21.047" Title="Removing Obscured Comment" Tags="|support|comment|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1448" CreationDate="2012-10-25T20:56:31.393" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators can best be contacted by flagging the question (or answer).  A link for flagging appears immediately beneath every question and every answer.  This is explained in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq#flagging&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2012-10-25T20:56:31.393" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1302" CreationDate="2012-10-26T17:48:14.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it is not possible to post a file into a question, at least not directly into the SE software. It's largely because this would post a security risk -- the file could be corrupted or infected, and we'd need to include some sort of virus check for each file. This, in turn, would affect our performance. Please see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4637/please-add-a-system-to-allow-file-uploads-attached-to-questions-and-answers&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt; for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said: you're free to link to Google Docs or some other file hosting service should you need to include a file with your question for whatever reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5373" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T17:48:14.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1074" CreationDate="2012-10-26T17:51:10.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For completeness sake: Your question was restored (as &lt;strong&gt;whuber&lt;/strong&gt; mentioned above) and the privilege for seeing deleted questions is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;available as tool for 10k users&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5373" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T17:51:10.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1051" CreationDate="2012-10-26T17:52:27.737" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have you tried searching the LaTeX breakdown?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, you may be better off using Google/Bing for this type of search. Lucene doesn't really handle TeX well, in my admittedly limited experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5373" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T17:52:27.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="683" CreationDate="2012-10-26T19:00:40.133" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, you're experiencing this because we don't provide support for IE7 anymore. You can see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/56161/which-browsers-are-officially-supported-and-what-else-do-i-need&quot;&gt;which browsers we officially support&lt;/a&gt; at that link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I urge you to, if your office is STILL using IE7, to suggest they upgrade due to security concerns and an increased lack of compatibility Internet-wide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5373" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T19:00:40.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="818" CreationDate="2012-10-26T19:09:48.420" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few months ago, we went and updated most of the HTML for the named sites. Now, &lt;code&gt;Cross Validated&lt;/code&gt; should appear in the title text of the page / in the tab you have the site open in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5373" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T19:09:48.420" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1333" CreationDate="2012-10-26T19:17:28.410" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As &lt;strong&gt;Procrastinator&lt;/strong&gt; was kind enough to mention in comments, this is standard practice when a user has deleted him/herself while the bounty was open. For further reading, consider these links: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/115503/destroying-a-user-can-leave-a-bounty-open-on-a-deleted-question&quot;&gt;Destroying a user can leave a bounty open on a deleted question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/63873/why-was-this-bounty-awarded-by-community&quot;&gt;Why was this bounty awarded by community?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5373" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T19:17:28.410" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1120" CreationDate="2012-10-26T19:24:53.910" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The new review system solves this issue and renders MathJax correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5373" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T19:24:53.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1087" CreationDate="2012-10-26T20:17:12.257" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It appears we already have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/references&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;references&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;references&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/books&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;books&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;books&lt;/a&gt;, which would cover the majority of needs of a self-learner. As such, I'm marking this &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-bydesign&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-bydesign&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-bydesign&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5373" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T20:17:12.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1398" CreationDate="2012-10-26T20:23:16.627" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, this is something that has been declined for a long time. For more information, please see this post: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3230/badge-progress-reports&quot;&gt;Badge progress reports&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, &lt;strong&gt;cardinal&lt;/strong&gt; linked to the data query that serves in a pinch!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5373" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T20:23:16.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1459" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-27T12:52:33.147" Score="3" ViewCount="348" Body="&lt;p&gt;Right now the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/homework/info&quot;&gt;homework tag&lt;/a&gt; says &quot;a routine question....&quot;. To me, this implies a simple question, probably from an elementary text. Many homework tagged questions are, indeed, just like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But some are not. There are some homework tagged questions that involve quite complex reasoning; or long reports; or involved analysis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the tag be changed? I think so, by deleting the word &quot;routine&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user10525" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T16:22:23.830" Title="The homework tag and homework policy (is it indeed &quot;a routine question&quot;?)" Tags="|discussion|tags|homework|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1460" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-27T20:02:36.123" Score="3" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if the Stats.SE community would know of a more compact way of writing $$(X_1, X_2, \dots, X_n) \sim F$$ since I use it so often, but there's nothing inherently difficult about the question that would require statistical knowledge.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For that reason, I'm unsure whether it is considered relevant here. Are questions regarding &quot;good notation&quot; fair game for Stats.SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1118" LastActivityDate="2013-01-20T20:21:56.733" Title="Are notation questions off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1460" CreationDate="2012-10-27T20:27:50.333" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;They seem to be on topic, as attested by 17 questions already bearing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/notation&quot;&gt;notation tag&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2013-01-20T20:21:56.733" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1460" CreationDate="2012-10-29T18:05:27.007" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think they should be on-topic here. Notation can greatly assist clarity (or, in some cases, retard it). One good bit of advice I got on reading about models is to follow the subscripts. But that, of course, necessitates that the subscripts are correctly written in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, the professor who taught ANOVA to me (and many others) was not aided in his exposition by the fact that, on the board, his i's and j's (and sometimes his k's) all looked identical. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2012-10-29T18:05:27.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1463" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1464" CreationDate="2012-10-31T15:16:21.427" Score="2" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/41600/930&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; that I think would qualify on &lt;a href=&quot;http://math.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;http://math.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/tags/soft-question/info&quot;&gt;soft question&lt;/a&gt; (it relates to general methods for survey data).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be worth creating a &quot;soft question&quot; tag for such cases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that such questions have value, but they won't necessarily get a formula or theorem as their answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7883" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Do we need a soft question tag?" Tags="|feature-request|status-deferred|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1463" CreationDate="2012-10-31T15:35:27.720" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think so since its tag excerpt (as it reads on math.se) may suggest endless discussion or personal opinion, with no accepted answer, which does not fit well with QAs sites like this. We also have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/11740/150510&quot;&gt;community-owned&lt;/a&gt; option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, you may well end up with an acceptable answer for this particular question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2012-10-31T15:35:27.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1088" CreationDate="2012-10-31T22:11:37.303" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to propose the following article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Paper 312-2012 &#xA;Handling Missing Data by Maximum Likelihood  &#xA;Paul D. Allison, Statistical Horizons, Haverford, PA, USA&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.statisticalhorizons.com/wp-content/uploads/MissingDataByML.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.statisticalhorizons.com/wp-content/uploads/MissingDataByML.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Missing data seems to be an area in which all applied statisticians are, or should be, interested (I hope this is not a controversial statement!), and perhaps some theoreticians are interested also :-) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11405" LastActivityDate="2012-10-31T22:11:37.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1463" CreationDate="2012-11-01T03:58:19.700" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to @chl's good answer, it's worth noting that such a tag would be a (so-called) 'meta tag'.  (A &lt;em&gt;meta tag&lt;/em&gt; is a tag about a property of the question, rather than categorizing its content; the only meta tag left is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;.)  Stack Exchange explicitly discourages meta tags.  You can read the official statement here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;The death of meta tags&lt;/a&gt;, and about it's adoption on CV here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/264/&quot;&gt;the-final-death-of-meta-tags&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2012-11-01T03:58:19.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1467" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-01T14:19:08.363" Score="25" ViewCount="457" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just made a map of tags for &lt;strong&gt;CrossValidated&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: tag size is related to tag popularity and edges are related to tag co-occurrences in questions (or more precisely: the observed/expected ratio, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/40977/is-there-a-term-for-pa-cap-b-papb&quot;&gt;Is there a term for $P(A\cap B)/[P(A)P(B)]$?&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me it looks as a &amp;quot;snapshot&amp;quot; of topics and scope of this SE site. So if you want to you it in any way to promote Stats.SE - feel free!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if you have comments how to improve its usefulness or niceness to our community, I would appreciate them (but bear in mind that I have no color esthetics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/F4kdP.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Tag Map for Stats.SE&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Links:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kaggle.com/c/predict-closed-questions-on-stack-overflow/prospector#211&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An entry for StackExchange vis competition at Kaggle&lt;/a&gt; (please vote if you like it :), it ends on Nov 3)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/stared/tag-graph-map-of-stackexchange&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Recipe, code and images at GitHub&lt;/a&gt; (e.g. tweak the plot to your taste; feel invited to co-develop)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6552" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2012-11-01T14:19:08.363" Title="Tag Map for CrossValidated" Tags="|discussion|tags|site-promotion|data-visualization|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1088" CreationDate="2012-11-02T11:54:32.813" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to suggest: &lt;a href=&quot;http://psychology3.anu.edu.au/people/smithson/details/betareg/Smithson_Verkuilen06.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;A Better Lemon Squeezer: Maximum Likelihood Regression with Beta-Distributed Dependent Variables&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will be especially useful for DVs that have ceiling or floor effects or that are bounded, it is also useful when the variance may differ as a result of the IVs. But the paper gets kind of technical. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2012-11-02T11:54:32.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1469" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-02T21:48:35.353" Score="2" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;This interesting question was closed at Skeptics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/q/8926/5337&quot;&gt;Is owning a handgun for personal protection justifiable under risk analysis?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question involves quite a bit of statistics. Is such &lt;em&gt;applied statistics&lt;/em&gt; on-topic on CrossValidated? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12615" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:46:46.267" LastActivityDate="2012-11-23T08:17:15.077" Title="Would this question (closed on Skeptics) on firearms risks be on-topic on CrossValidated?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1470" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1471" CreationDate="2012-11-03T00:14:28.117" Score="4" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, how would one obtain such a distribution and its evolution with time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, what kind of inferences can be drawn from such a distribution? (I could try this, if I knew answer to previous question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13107" LastActivityDate="2012-11-03T11:18:06.130" Title="What does a reputation distribution, and its evolution with time, tell us about a particular SE site?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1470" CreationDate="2012-11-03T11:08:34.043" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;When it comes to getting the data - just go &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;StackExchange Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt; and write a SQL query (or find one, or ask me if you have problems with that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other alternatives like parsing &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.clearbits.net/creators/146-stack-exchange-data-dump&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;StackExchange Data Dump&lt;/a&gt; (but requires download a large file and parsing it) or using &lt;a href=&quot;http://api.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;StackExchange API&lt;/a&gt; (but is not that fast, so for such queries it only makes sense for small sites; e.g. beta sites, as they are not covered in neither the Data Explorer nor the Data Dumps).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To some extent SE measures such reputation distributions - see sites at &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Area51&lt;/a&gt;. For fresh sites, it count number of users with &lt;code&gt;rep&amp;gt;=200&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;rep&amp;gt;=2000&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;rep&amp;gt;=3000&lt;/code&gt;, just to see if there are both &quot;normal&quot; users (who ask or answer more than one or two questions) and some very dedicated ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for older sites, reputations (as it is cumulative) may be not as informational (unless you cont it in the last 3 months or so).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6552" LastEditorUserId="6552" LastEditDate="2012-11-03T11:18:06.130" LastActivityDate="2012-11-03T11:18:06.130" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1469" CreationDate="2012-11-03T11:15:08.673" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I would like to see such questions on CrossValidated. (But I may be biased.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this particular question asks 4 questions in one. So either there will be partial answers, or it needs to be split. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, for such issues we need to be very clear (a label like for cigarettes?) that &quot;correlation is not causation&quot; not to make people think that the results mean sth more (or even worse: that we have scientifically proven that weapon (not-) ownership makes someone life longer&quot;. This obvious for people here may not be for the general audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6552" LastActivityDate="2012-11-03T11:15:08.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1469" CreationDate="2012-11-03T12:15:09.750" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there's a subtle distinction to be made here:  This seems like a substantive question that would require statistical analyses to be answered well, rather than a question about statistical analyses and how they can be used to answer substantive questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that it's off-topic for Cross Validated.  (Although that doesn't mean it's a bad question.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2012-11-03T12:15:09.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1474" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1475" CreationDate="2012-11-05T10:33:23.733" Score="2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know it is stupid question, but honestly, I can't find any link that would point me there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it doesn't exist in a way I expect it to find? Maybe there is no wiki per se, and one makes entry to wiki just by putting some special tag to the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10069" LastEditorUserId="10069" LastEditDate="2012-11-05T10:49:59.247" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="How to find community wiki" Tags="|support|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1474" CreationDate="2012-11-05T10:47:00.193" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11740/what-are-community-wiki-posts&quot;&gt;Community-wiki&lt;/a&gt; status (this is not a tag) is generally added by moderators, so the best way to indicate that your post should be converted to CW is to &lt;em&gt;flag your question&lt;/em&gt; for moderator attention. There are some cases where a post will turn to CW automagically (see examples in the previous link). Answers can be made CW by the user directly (by checking the box in the bottom right of the response panel in editing mode).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2012-11-05T10:47:00.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1476" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1477" CreationDate="2012-11-05T14:33:05.430" Score="6" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that there are both tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/average&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;average&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;average&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/averages&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;averages&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;averages&lt;/a&gt;.  Is there any subtle difference in meaning between the two?   That plural form of the tag doesn't have a tag wiki, so I'd suggest making it a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/average&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;average&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;average&lt;/a&gt; if it is redundant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="615" LastActivityDate="2012-11-05T15:59:17.737" Title="Tag merge: average and averages" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1476" CreationDate="2012-11-05T15:59:17.737" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have converted all occurrences of &lt;code&gt;averages&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;average&lt;/code&gt;. They should now be synonyms in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2012-11-05T15:59:17.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1478" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1490" CreationDate="2012-11-05T16:31:29.570" Score="1" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I write in the response to the comments of moderator @chl on this queston: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/41906/methods-for-multiple-comparisons-correction-with-bootstrap-for-multiple-glm-mode#comment82644_41906&quot;&gt;Methods for multiple comparisons correction with bootstrap for multiple glm models&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please tell me, why it is not apropriate as a Wiki? My question is quite broad (without simple answer) and I can't find any resource on the web on this topic, so I believe it might be in public interest to have it here instead on my personal blog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10069" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user10525" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2012-11-29T17:41:39.057" Title="Why the this question is not eligible for being a wiki?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1479" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-05T18:25:11.280" Score="49" ViewCount="3582" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all please note that I have been a user on SE sites for over two years now; more than 20 months on CV. While active on StackOverflow and Sports.SE I never quite managed to get going here, despite my best efforts. It is clear to me that I am experiencing a communication problem with members of the community, perhaps due to the fact that I am not a statistician by education. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/3014/posdef?tab=questions&quot;&gt;my previous questions&lt;/a&gt; (there are only 8), and you can perhaps see that I have been trying best to explain my background and question as clearly as possible. That being the case, more often then not, I get questions in return, and sometimes even dismissive remarks. In most cases questions end up turning into endless swamps; more I try to salvage something, more I get stuck on comments/questions that lead nowhere. To make matters worse, I seem to have similar problems with (bio)statisticians I meet at conferences. Needless to say, I find this very frustrating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question(s)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the background I have mentioned above, I realized that I am here to learn and improve on my half-forgotten understanding of statistics. So I would really appreciate if you could help me phrase my questions better, so that I can hopefully get more useful answers in the future, or better yet, so that I can make better use of the answers I get to my questions. (Note that this is an attempt to make a good FAQ entry for new members as well, we are currently trying out something like this for Sports.SE.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How can I make it clear that my understanding of statistics is not complete (i.e. I might be experienced in some subjects but might have completely forgotten/misunderstood some fundamentals)? This is important to avoid being overwhelmed/confused by the answers from more advanced members of the community. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How can I make sure that the answers/comments I get are to the point of what's being asked? (more often than not I do not see the relevance of the comments/questions I get to my questions) Misunderstandings occur often, and are usually a major part of the problem, IMHO.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What are some characteristics of a good CV question?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the problems that I have been experiencing are due to the fact that I am not a statistician, is this site ONLY aimed at statisticians, or for people that want to get answers to their questions on statistics? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apologize for the long post and hope that you can provide some insights on this matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disclaimer:&lt;/strong&gt; I wrote and rewrote my title several times, not being happy with the way it sounds... If you don't think that the title accurately reflects the content please feel free to comment/edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; I got some nice comments, thanks to @whuber and @Procrastinator. I would really like it if the input was given in answers rather than comments, so that I could refer to/comment back to individual suggestions instead of having a long chain of comments to the question at hand...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3014" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2016-07-29T20:02:29.750" Title="How to ask a &quot;good&quot; question on CrossValidated?" Tags="|discussion|faq|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1480" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-11-07T12:56:13.540" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A tag is a keyword or label that categorizes your question with other, similar questions.  Using the right tags makes it easier for others to find and answer your question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--http://stats.stackexchange.com/tags&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2012-11-13T21:40:13.643" LastActivityDate="2012-11-13T21:40:13.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1481" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-11-07T12:56:13.540" Score="0" Body="Questions, concerns, or suggestions about a tag or about the way tags are used on our site." OwnerUserId="16318" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-04-17T19:27:34.717" LastActivityDate="2017-04-17T19:27:34.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1479" CreationDate="2012-11-23T06:38:48.070" Score="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some good comments, which partially cover your questions. I'll try to cover them methodically here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What makes a good Cross Validated question?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this order, or similar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A clear introductory statement of what you are trying to achieve: what point you are trying to get across?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why are you doing it? Homework? Part of your job? Self-education?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A brief, clear description of the data you have. Describe each variable. Ideally, provide a couple of rows of data, so people can see the format it's in. Say what programming language you're using.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If, and only if, you can see a good way to generalise the question (other projects you plan on doing, using similar concepts or something), then put it out there. Otherwise, just assume that the people who come after you are not stupid and they will be able to generalise it themselves. Everyone is used to doing this, as this is the most common way we learn: by example.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clarification of your experience (see next section), but only if you feel it's necessary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A clear statement of your question or questions. You are best off sticking to &lt;strong&gt;one clear statement of your core question&lt;/strong&gt;, rather than multiple questions or multiple formulations of the same question. Those questions may seem related to you but there's a chance they won't seem so to others. You can always post follow-up questions to clarify certain aspects. Doing so and linking back to the original question will make it easier for people to pick up what you're trying to communicate. If you think that you have side-questions that aren't suitable as separate posts, then feel free to add them, but make sure to indicate that they are less important. One way you could do this is to make your main question statement bold.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Re-read your question and remove all guff. You don't need to apologise for your perceived inadequacies nor do you need to thank people for anything. Anything that doesn't add relevant information is only detracting from your communication effectiveness.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Style&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are few stylistic restrictions: write naturally and use a language familiar to you rather than one you think statisticians might speak.  Work to make your question stand by itself and be understood by everyone.  In particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Define or explain any technical terms and mathematical symbols you use.  Do not assume everyone uses your terms in the same way (statistics applies to a huge variety of disciplines) nor that a given symbol invariably stands for one thing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Explicitly write out, in full, the first occurrence of any abbreviation or acronym.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Strive for standard appropriate English usage, grammar, and spelling.  It's easy: pay attention to the automatic spell-checker markup when you're writing. You need not be as formal as, say, an academic journal, but don't be too chatty either. Avoid abbreviations or calculated misspellings used in texting (e.g. u or U for you). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use the highlighting tools (found immediately above the textbox) to create headers, emphasize text, and inset code and quotations.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Format mathematical expressions using $\TeX$ enclosed between dollar signs $\$$ (or double dollar signs $\$\$$ for centered expressions).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some things to avoid:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do not beg for help. We know you would like a great answer as soon as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do not include identifying information such as your name or e-mail address--we will remove it if it appears, anyway. You can place those into your user profile for all to see.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do not solicit offline or private responses: questions and answers are posted here for &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;We are more than (just) a Q&amp;amp;A site!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Clarifying your experience&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take your lesson here from the master, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiPe1OiKQuk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Donald Rumsfeld&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Known knowns: State any relevant information that you already understand, as concisely as possible. Say why it's relevant. Feel free to say something about how experienced you are in stats.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Known unknowns: If you're aware of certain methodologies, theorems, tools, etc. that you think you might need, but are not familiar or comfortable with, say so, and say why you think they're relevant. People can pull you up here, if necessary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unknown unknowns: You don't know about these, so don't fret about them. If someone brings some up, then you can add them to the previous category.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't do much better than that. Don't labour over it, and keep it as short as possible, or people will get bored and leave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone mentions something for which you require clarification, ask in the comments. If it changes the question substantially and answers have already appeared, you may be better off keeping the question unaltered (out of respect for the material already posted) and starting again with your new information. Otherwise, you can just edit the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Avoiding Misunderstandings&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Misunderstandings, in my experience, occur because of lack of context. Statistical concepts are hard to communicate clearly and it's easy for someone reading your question to completely miss what you're trying to get at.  A good way to add context is to provide a solid example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't understand the relevance of a comment, say so, and state clearly &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; you think it is not relevant, so that the answerer/commenter can get a better handle on where you're coming from. This will allow them to give &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; more targeted context for &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Do I need to be a statistician?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. Certainly not. The site is aimed at people interested in statistics, practice or theory. You just need to be open to learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also helps to be a good communicator and to know your audience. This is difficult to learn in any situation, let alone one in which most conversations are unintelligible due to lack of experience (I've been hanging around here for almost a year, and I still don't know WTF most people are talking about;)). Remember that people here come from all different backgrounds (different languages, different areas of study, different levels of experience with stats) and you can't assume that anyone knows what you're talking about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The great thing about StackExchange is that it's really hard to be a troll here, so no-one bothers much. If it looks like someone's being narky, it's probably best to assume that they're just not communicating well, and ask for clarification. Above all, please be patient and give everyone the benefit of the doubt: we're here to help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9007" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2014-10-08T17:51:35.393" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1469" CreationDate="2012-11-23T08:17:15.077" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with gung here, the question isn't suitable. The study would be interesting, and there are a few parts: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Come up with some good questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Design your analysis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Get some appropriate data&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Perform analysis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Communicate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question covers only the first part. Stats.SE covers questions related to the second and 4th part, and perhaps  aspects of the 3rd and 5th part. Stats.SE would welcome questions pertaining to how best to gather data related to given questions, and how to analyse that data, but as it stands, the question is about the appropriateness of sociological questions, and that's not something related to statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9007" LastActivityDate="2012-11-23T08:17:15.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1364" CreationDate="2012-11-23T15:13:30.607" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;output&lt;/code&gt; tag still exists, but&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Has been removed from all existing posts,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Has been made synonymous with &lt;code&gt;interpretation&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Its tag wiki asks people not to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That ought to do the trick.  Thank you all for your comments and votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2012-11-23T15:13:30.607" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1486" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1487" CreationDate="2012-11-26T22:41:02.550" Score="16" ViewCount="481" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange team is organizing an original event, in the spirit of the one organized last year on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gaming.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Gaming&lt;/a&gt; site, called &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.gaming.stackexchange.com/2011/12/holiday-2011-hat-dash-the-hattening/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hat Dash&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, where users earned &quot;hats&quot; for their gravatars by completing certain tasks (analogous to badges). Certain actions would trigger the user receiving a hat, which their gravatar could then &quot;wear&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This event will run from 19 December 2012 to 4 January 2013.&#xA;Individual users who don’t want to participate, don’t want to see hats, and/or are generally  anti-hat will have an &quot;I hate hats&quot; option available. &#xA;The only visual change to the site itself will be the presence of the hats and the &quot;I hate hats&quot; button in the footer.&#xA;Participation on one site does not affect accounts on other SE sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following two answers aim to collect votes for a community poll: Please, indicate whether you think &lt;em&gt;Cross Validated&lt;/em&gt; should participate to this event or not (1 vote per user). Responses from the community users are due by November, 28 (sorry for the short delay), and moderators will inform the SE team of our collective decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:10:04.747" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T09:22:38.903" Title="Should Cross Validated participate in the “Winter Bash” Holiday hats promotion (2012)?" Tags="|discussion|winterbash|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1486" CreationDate="2012-11-26T22:41:42.867" Score="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;, Cross Validated should participate in Winter Bash 2012.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2012-11-26T22:41:42.867" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1486" CreationDate="2012-11-26T22:42:35.367" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;, Cross Validated should not participate in Winter Bash 2012.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2012-11-26T22:42:35.367" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1489" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-29T14:50:41.787" Score="9" ViewCount="918" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if anyone knew how I could produce upright greek letters on stats.SE? In my documents, I usually do this using the $\LaTeX$ &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ctan.org/pkg/upgreek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;upgreek package&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Edit&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am uploading an image of what I hope the upright greek letters look like. The $\LaTeX$ code to produce this document is included below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rH5FB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\documentclass{article}&#xA;\usepackage[table]{xcolor}&#xA;\usepackage{amsmath, upgreek, booktabs, tabularx, colortbl}&#xA;\usepackage[active, tightpage]{preview}&#xA;\begin{document}&#xA;\begin{table}[htbp]&#xA;\begin{preview}&#xA;\begin{tabular}{ccc}&#xA;\toprule&#xA; &amp;amp; Deterministic &amp;amp; Non-deterministic \\&#xA;\midrule&#xA;Scalar &amp;amp; $\alpha, \beta, \gamma$ &amp;amp; $X, Y, Z$ \\&#xA;Vector &amp;amp; $\boldsymbol{\alpha}, \boldsymbol{\beta}, \boldsymbol{\gamma}$ &amp;amp; $\boldsymbol{X}, \boldsymbol{Y} \boldsymbol{Z}$ \\&#xA;Matrix &amp;amp; \cellcolor{blue!25}$\boldsymbol{\upalpha}, \boldsymbol{\upbeta}, \boldsymbol{\upgamma}$ &amp;amp; $\mathbf{X}, \mathbf{Y}, \mathbf{Z}$ \\&#xA;\bottomrule&#xA;\end{tabular}&#xA;\end{preview}&#xA;\end{table}&#xA;\end{document}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8141" LastEditorUserId="8141" LastEditDate="2012-11-30T15:15:45.660" LastActivityDate="2012-11-30T16:03:16.253" Title="Upright greek letters" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|math-display|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1478" CreationDate="2012-11-29T17:41:39.057" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To summarize:&lt;/strong&gt; the thread in question began life as a statement followed by three separate answers.  In response to comments here, it has been converted into a question plus one answer divided into three clear sections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The initial issue was that threads on SE need to maintain the standard question-answer format, even when they are used as a blog-like medium of exposition.  That issue is independent of the CW status.  It seems to me that the OP is correct in suggesting that his thread be given CW status, because he maintains that there are likely many useful answers, not limited to the three he has already provided, and that he hopes the thread can (over time) become a compendium of related solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2012-11-29T17:41:39.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1489" CreationDate="2012-11-30T14:12:17.830" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you have to use &lt;code&gt;unicode&lt;/code&gt; within the $\LaTeX$ code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ {\bf \unicode[Times]{x3B1}} $&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ {\bf \unicode[Times]{x3B2}} $&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ {\bf \unicode[Times]{x3B3}} $&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;will result in &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;$ {\bf \unicode[Times]{x3B1}} $&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;$ {\bf \unicode[Times]{x3B2}} $&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;$ {\bf \unicode[Times]{x3B3}} $&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_alphabet#Greek_in_Unicode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; for the Greek Alphabet for the unicode for each letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you can use regular $\LaTeX$ commands for upright uppercase Greek letters with &lt;code&gt;\rm&lt;/code&gt;. For example, using:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ {\rm A, B, \Gamma} $&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;results in &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;$ {\rm A, B, \Gamma} $&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9249" LastEditorUserId="9249" LastEditDate="2012-11-30T16:03:16.253" LastActivityDate="2012-11-30T16:03:16.253" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1492" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-30T21:18:50.577" Score="25" ViewCount="806" Body="&lt;p&gt;Greetings from Stack Exchange HQ! We have been assigned to evaluate Cross Validated and recommend some methods for making it even better. Please note that this is a more hands-on evaluation, and is not related to the Community Quality Evaluations already done on sites. This is a distinct evaluation project designed to quantify the community and health of the site and recommend ways for you, the core users, to improve it! Yay quantifying and evaluating!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s get right to it--your site is doing really well in a lot of key metrics! Your sites gets good traffic and has a good base of users. It also appears that Cross Validated has a lot of solid content. You have engaged users who care about the site and the quality of content on it. That is awesome. These are qualities and behaviors common to good sites, and we’re pleased to see your site doing well at them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, according to our metrics, these areas of the site need improvement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answer ratio: Cross Validated is hovering at a 78% answer rate, which is the lowest of the sites we evaluated. We understand that ‘statistics’ is an incredibly broad topic covering many fields of study, but we also believe that in order for this site to flourish on our model we need to find a way to increase the answer ratio.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Voting Ratio: this is tied to the previous item, but it is still an issue and one we have addressed &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1365/cross-validated-voting-improvement-and-community-development&quot;&gt;before.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chat: Activity in your chat rooms is almost non-existent. Chat is a feature we believe strengthens and reinforces community and fosters positive and helpful communication between users. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lots of viewers: Unusually, perhaps, Cross Validated isn’t suffering from lack of views, but we believe it is suffering from lack of &quot;quality of viewers&quot;. There is probably a better way to phrase that, but the upshot is that we need to get some more experienced eyes on the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are resources and ideas for improving the site and community:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reach out to your real life networks. Share the site with your co-workers, students, TAs, professors, etc. Share the site and invite your smartest, most knowledgeable stats-crazed friends. Referral Badges are awesome (just saying!).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chat Events! Whether they are weekly topical events or daily check-in times, increased chat usage is an easy way to increase the appeal of your site to new and experienced users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Social Media Networking: Cross Validated doesn’t really suffer from lack of views, but it seems like most of those views are primarily from the ‘homework’ crowd and aren’t going to do much to improve that answer rate or improve the breadth of knowledge in our sites. Use your personal social networks (twitter, tumblr, FB, stats messageboards, etc.) to promote the heck out of this site to the people you know would enjoy CV and be helpful resources to the community. &lt;strong&gt;We are not advocating spamming everyone you know&lt;/strong&gt;. However, you, the current passionate community of Cross Validated probably have some contact in some network with the next generations of users, if you know anyone else in the field. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I want to make it clear that none of these suggestions are required&lt;/strong&gt;. They are merely suggestions for actions that we believe help to grow and sustain your community--things we think will work and help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are relying on you, the core user community to implement and spearhead these efforts. Our position and expertise allows us to evaluate our sites, but YOU are the users. You know the site and we want to enable you to improve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you, or other core users of Cross Validated, have any other ideas of what can be tried to improve on these metrics, or any other element of the site you see as problematic, please leave an answer to this meta post. Our team will be working with a selection of sites for the next several weeks and you can feel free to reach out to us directly via email for support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This improvement push has grown out of a larger effort to create a model for judging the health and potential of each of our sites taking into account all the relevant data we have about your site. Please let us know if there is a metric you think we are missing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Finally, we know you are excited about the potential for our sites but please keep this meta post focused on things you, as the collective community, can do as opposed to feature requests or larger branding campaigns. We want your ideas, so please make them separate meta posts so we can keep all these discussions focused!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6125" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2015-10-16T12:49:02.977" Title="Improvement Drive - Cross Validated" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1493" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-01T21:04:44.183" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1000/using-cv-as-part-of-a-statistics-course&quot;&gt;Using CV as part of a statistics course&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Along the lines of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1492/improvement-drive-cross-validated?cb=1&quot;&gt;promoting and improving CrossValidated&lt;/a&gt;, how can it be used in the college classroom? I know that some stats departments teach their students to think as statistical consultants. Maybe an assignment for such students could be to answer some questions on CV?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8207" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2012-12-01T21:04:44.183" Title="CrossValidated in classrooms?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2012-12-05T17:30:14.820" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1492" CreationDate="2012-12-01T22:42:16.270" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding the &quot;answer ratio&quot; - I think that is partially a function of the nature of statistics and the questions we get. Not so much that statistics is incredibly broad - because the people who answer the questions here have a remarkably broad range of expertise - but some questions either have &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; answer or are so poorly worded that they &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; be answered (although, if they were better worded, they could be answered). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &quot;chat&quot; - well, what is it for? I've been very active here over the past year, but I'm not sure what chat is for, except for the case where a conversation in one of the threads gets a bit astray. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2012-12-01T22:42:16.270" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1495" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-02T08:56:31.147" Score="0" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;As required by the community, I've 10 rep points which are needed to post an image. I need to post a function as an image and my research is stuck with every passing day of inactivity, I honestly think that by getting leads from the really wonderful people here I'll be able to do some good. So please help me...!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17376" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2012-12-05T19:08:47.220" LastActivityDate="2012-12-05T19:09:19.460" Title="I have the min reqd. 10 reputation points so why am I not able to post image?" Tags="|support|status-completed|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1495" CreationDate="2012-12-05T19:09:19.460" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just for completeness: you should now have the power to add images, and your specific issue here has been resolved. Welcome to Cross Validated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5373" LastActivityDate="2012-12-05T19:09:19.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1497" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1498" CreationDate="2012-12-07T01:02:39.377" Score="9" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is moderately different to my title -- short story is that I'd like to be able to upvote questions/answers on StackOverflow, but am likely to only ever participate interactively on CrossValidated. I hope this is an OK topic for meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a biostatistician -- so I use StackOverflow quite a lot for advice on various bits and pieces of programming, and would like to upvote the useful help I find. But I only have reputation in CrossValidated, since this is where I can usefully help people out with answers (I hope) -- I wouldn't be much use on StackOverflow. Also, pretty much every question I might want to ask on StackOverflow has already been answered (which is good for me, and why I'd like to be able to upvote things!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I'm wondering if people have ideas about how best to approach getting reputation on StackExchange, given that I'm very much a browser/end-user there (and don't want to jam things up with questions that have already been answered) -- I do often get useful help from answers that seem to be orphaned, with no upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16974" LastActivityDate="2012-12-07T13:45:35.710" Title="Cross-crediting of CrossValidated reputation to StackOverflow?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1497" CreationDate="2012-12-07T13:45:35.710" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the FAQ to up-vote questions you have to have 15 reputation points. Easiest ways IMO are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;asking a good question (+5 per up-vote and +2 when you accept an answer)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;editing questions (+2 until you reach some reputation threshold)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;answering a question (always the chance that you come across some low-hanging fruit - or you could always look at old unanswered questions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long story short - ask one (or two) well structured question(s) about &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; or some other statistical package on SO and you will meet that small of threshold. I only marginally participate on SO as well, but I follow RSS feeds for the statistical package tags and will answer if I have a chance (and no one else already has). It is a good way to see stat programming in practice IMO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2012-12-07T13:45:35.710" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1000" CreationDate="2012-12-08T03:16:51.680" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aside from the (very valid) concerns from @whuber, it's still a great idea if one could this right. For example, an assignment could be to ask &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; good question and to give &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; good answer on CV. This would do away with the incentive to spam the site. The instructor / TAs would have to evaluate the questions and answers on their own to do away with the incentive for students to upvote each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8207" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T03:16:51.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1500" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-10T13:21:19.160" Score="3" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;As it is December 2012, we are now going to reset our Community Promotion Ads for the new year. Apparently no one caught (or at least, no one pointed out) that I accidentally put DIY's ad proposal here for the past year. Whoops. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's twitter account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources for statisticians&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interesting in-site activities and events&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be &lt;strong&gt;220 x 250 pixels&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/1500&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5645" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2012-12-10T13:22:31.127" Title="Community Promotion Ads - 2013" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2013-12-06T11:25:35.180" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-10T13:21:19.160" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1500" CreationDate="2012-12-10T13:22:31.127" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/StackStats&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TovHW.png&quot; alt=&quot;StackStats Twitter&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5645" LastActivityDate="2012-12-10T13:22:31.127" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-12-10T13:22:31.127" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1000" CreationDate="2012-12-14T20:52:59.983" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;John, you can additionally consider requiring your grad students to contribute to Wikipedia. If you see that their edits have withstood the criticism and additional edits of the community at large, that's a good sign that your students have mastered the material. (I do list the Wikipedia articles that I contributed to on my &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.missouri.edu/~kolenikovs/Stas-Kolenikov-CV-stat-June2011.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CV&lt;/a&gt;, although I don't know of anybody else who does that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastActivityDate="2012-12-14T20:52:59.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1505" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1506" CreationDate="2012-12-17T03:09:58.433" Score="18" ViewCount="530" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is about placing a footnote acknowledgement in an academic paper that some idea (or the seed of the idea) was based on some stackexchange question that I asked. I ended up doing this for my thesis on a particular topic because I got some decent advice. Preferably, in future projects I would like to avoid doing this, because readers of the journal might wonder why I couldn't figure something like this out myself and it might look bad in 10+ years that I would need help on such a simple thing. Thus, I want to know the acceptable amount of help that I can get/questions I can ask without being required ethically to acknowledge StackExchange (users).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/15900/which-robust-correlation-methods-are-actually-used&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. If the author of this question then went to use &lt;em&gt;transformations&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;adjustment/deletion of outliers&lt;/em&gt; in his study, and that's what was mentioned in the best answer to that question, should he acknowledge StackExchange/SE-users in his/her paper?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, consider the problem of implementing estimator $X$. It is an empirical paper, and I need to build $X$ into &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt;. However, I do not understand one of the equations that constitute the implementation of $X$ so I ask CV what the equation means and how I'm supposed to implement it and I get the answer. Do I acknowledge this in the paper?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16811" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2012-12-28T18:48:21.977" Title="At what point do I have to reference/acknowledge stackexchange (users)?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1505" CreationDate="2012-12-17T16:00:44.810" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that &lt;em&gt;to acknowledge or not to acknowledge&lt;/em&gt; depends on how much help you get in the answers. See for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/31679/10525&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you just clarified some ideas or concepts with the question, then I think it is fine not to acknowledge SE-users. Answering this sort of questions is one of the goals of SE sites and we all know that what we post here becomes of the public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if the question triggered or improved an idea that became a paper through a substantial involvement of one or more of the responders, then acknowledging this person(s) may be more ethically correct. Some SE users go beyond the question and provide proofs of new results or code. If you are planning to use them or include them in a research paper, then acknowledging their contribution is more correct, I think. If this is the case, you can let the user know through a message in the corresponding answer and see his/her opinion. It might be the case that the responder do not want to be acknowledged.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, typically you just have to acknowledge for &quot;helpful discussions&quot; without providing further details unless there is a special reason for doing so (such as including a result proved by the other person, a code, helpful/crucial references, or an original idea).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/45842/10525&quot;&gt;your question&lt;/a&gt; asks for clarification of a well-known result. I do not think it is necessary to acknowledge the responders unless you want to use the counterexample provided by @whuber. The rest of the contributions seem to be general pointers to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found some related discussions in &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;Academia-SE&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/1580/3836&quot;&gt;Attributing contributions to academic work that occur in Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/4891/3836&quot;&gt;Academic discretion: Should one participate in online forums or Stack Exchange sites anonymously?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10525" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user10525" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:49:58.060" LastActivityDate="2012-12-18T14:52:21.883" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1505" CreationDate="2012-12-28T18:48:21.977" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just my $0.02:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it may be a good idea to &lt;strong&gt;ask for references&lt;/strong&gt;. Because even if &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; used StackOverflow as your primary source, the ideas may have originated elsewhere. I consider it more appropriate to &lt;strong&gt;cite the original sources&lt;/strong&gt; then (although of course the SO posters should receive a thank you, IMHO, and maybe mention them in the acknowledgements for the pointer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side effect, this may yield a source that is much easier to cite (such as an academic paper), while citing web pages is still frowned upon. Many professors will e.g. not accept Wikipedia as an appropriate resource (and in fact, anything on Wikipedia &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; have a previous work) and may treat web sites such as SE/CV the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if there is no previous work the reply was based on, things get more tricky/interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7828" LastActivityDate="2012-12-28T18:48:21.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1492" CreationDate="2013-01-02T15:42:19.873" Score="15" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are some topics with a lot of overlap with stackoverflow (e.g. data mining questions) and I guess also math.stackexchange and mathoverflow (yes, there are even two sites for math!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not always clear which site is the more appropriate place, and when to suggest people to use the other site. This of course also leads to cross-posts; these tend to get answered more quickly on the larger site (i.e. main SO).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO it would be more helpful if this were more clearly defined, and if the &quot;migrate&quot; function was easier to use. The &quot;close&quot; vote does not include migrate to stats. IMHO, it should offer at least all sites the user is also active on, not just some random 5 subset.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;My impression is that the easy questions are more likely to end up on main SO, while all the really tough statistics questions do end up here. To me this explains the lower answer and upvote ratio.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes me wonder: &lt;strong&gt;should we actually care about these metrics&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I tried chat on main SO, and found it pretty much worthless. Why would I use it here, then? You don't need &quot;live&quot; math, you need some time to think and write down your ideas in a well-formulated way.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7828" LastEditorUserId="7828" LastEditDate="2013-01-09T15:07:54.333" LastActivityDate="2013-01-09T15:07:54.333" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1509" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1510" CreationDate="2013-01-07T14:37:01.943" Score="4" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;Among the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;10k privileges&lt;/a&gt; is the privilege to cast delete votes. I did a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=how+do+you+cast+delete+votes&quot;&gt;search of meta.SO&lt;/a&gt; and found lots of discussion of delete votes but nowhere is it made clear how to cast them. I thought it would just be a little button to click, similarly to close votes, but I see no button. Are delete votes made by notifying a moderator? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/47118/how-to-calculate-bias-of-a-simulation&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; as an illustrative example, I would appreciate it if anyone can point me in the right direction. I suspect that the functionality only appears for 10k+ users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; I've noticed that, for example, on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1504/i-think-there-should-be-more-of-an-effort-to-recruit-statisticians-for-this-webs&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, that there is a delete button. Both of the questions I linked to are closed, so why does one have a delete button while the other doesn't? Does the question need to be closed for a particular period of time before the delete option appears? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4856" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2013-01-07T14:46:56.030" Title="How do you cast delete votes?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1509" CreationDate="2013-01-07T14:46:56.030" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your first link (to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;10K privileges&lt;/a&gt;) explains that &quot;You must wait for a question to be closed for 2 days before you can vote for deletion.&quot;  It goes on to say that this waiting period is eliminated for &quot;trusted users,&quot; which currently are those with 20K reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2013-01-07T14:46:56.030" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1335" CreationDate="2013-01-20T15:46:34.767" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Consider the following example long data.frame with two dependent&#xA;  measures, &quot;Score&quot; and &quot;NewVariable&quot;, 1 between subjects variable&#xA;  &quot;Prep&quot; (3 levels), 2 within subjects variables &quot;Day&quot; (3 levels) and&#xA;  &quot;Experiment&quot; (2 levels), and a subject identifier &quot;SID&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;example &amp;lt;- (proper example here)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My best attempt so far would involve&#xA;  creating the two corresponding wide datasets, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;library(reshape2)&#xA;  dcast(example,SID+Prep~Day+Experiment,value.var=&quot;Score&quot;)&#xA;  dcast(example,SID+Prep~Day+Experiment,value.var=&quot;NewVariable&quot;) ...&#xA;  then manually gluing them back together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a better way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Issues&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;This meta post was recently cited for closing &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/47736/&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; I posed despite a &lt;em&gt;long&lt;/em&gt; and consistent history on meta of allowing and even encouraging such questions on CV.  Moreover, (as far as I can find) the quoted section of the FAQ &quot;if it needs statistical expertise to understand or answer, ask it here; if it's about an algorithm, routine data processing, or details of the language, then please refer to the collection of links to resources we maintain&quot; has never been a community moderated phrase in the FAQ.  At worst, this may indicate that by fiat someone (or group of people) have been by fiat changing what is acceptable in the community without appropriate discussion.  Regardless of the validity of the statement in the FAQ, the FAQ should (at the very least) be considered in light of the determinations made on meta.  See the citations below.  As such, the question listed above is appropriate for CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1/&quot;&gt;Discussion 1&lt;/a&gt;: Note the criteria here is NO statistical content, not the need for statistical expertise.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/35&quot;&gt;Discussion 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/252&quot;&gt;Discussion 3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/276&quot;&gt;Discussion 4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Outcome&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Under Debate&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; be closed.  Discussion continues about whether the question is suitable for CV or if migration is a suitable response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2013-01-21T06:39:42.763" CommentCount="15" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-01-20T15:46:34.767" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1512" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1517" CreationDate="2013-01-20T19:20:05.797" Score="5" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the story with the new &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;about page&lt;/a&gt;?  It's fancy now.  I like it, and I suspect it'll be more useful for new CV users this way.  &lt;em&gt;(Side question:  Should we link to it from the FAQ?)&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will say that I wish the old info were still accessible somewhere, as I thought that information was useful enough that I discussed it &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/24827/where-is-the-shared-variance-between-all-ivs-in-a-linear-multiple-regression-equ/24833#24833&quot;&gt;on&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1122/how-to-stem-the-tide-of-duplicate-qs/1137#1137&quot;&gt;several&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1390/how-should-questions-be-answered-on-cross-validated/1391#1391&quot;&gt;occasions&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="What's the deal with the new about page?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1513" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-21T10:40:09.150" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using my friends computer and I was trying to make a new account for stackexchange, but I must have done something wrong because now my email/ID is linked to my friend's account, and it didn't make a new account for me. Can anyone assist/advice ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18375" LastEditorDisplayName="user88" LastEditDate="2013-01-21T19:45:32.320" LastActivityDate="2013-01-21T19:45:32.320" Title="OpenID associated with a wrong account" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1514" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-21T16:07:29.613" Score="4" ViewCount="429" Body="&lt;p&gt;The FAQ currently states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the language is statistically oriented (such as R, SAS, Stata,&#xA;  SPSS, etc.), then decide based on the nature of your question: if it&#xA;  needs statistical expertise to understand or answer, ask it here; if&#xA;  it's about an algorithm, routine data processing, or details of the&#xA;  language, then please refer to the collection of links to resources we&#xA;  maintain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What criteria should be used to determine whether a question requires sufficient statistical expertise to be posted to CV?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your answers please provide a clear criterion and at least three examples that meet the criterion and three which do not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastEditorUserId="196" LastEditDate="2013-01-27T00:44:40.633" LastActivityDate="2013-01-28T19:49:01.693" Title="What standard should be applied in deciding whether a question requires sufficient 'statistical expertise' to be posted to CV?" Tags="|discussion|policy|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1514" CreationDate="2013-01-21T17:43:59.207" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No universal criteria are applicable.  Community moderation in the form of upvotes, downvotes, and actual answers will appropriately control and govern the scope of CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relevant discussions and standards (in chronological order): &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1/&quot;&gt;Example 1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/35&quot;&gt;Example 2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/252&quot;&gt;Example 3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/276&quot;&gt;Example 4&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/474/printhello-world-n/475#475&quot;&gt;Example 5&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/559/policy-on-r-questions-stackoverflow-vs-stats-analysis/598#598&quot;&gt;Example 6&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/584&quot;&gt;Example 7&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example statements arguing in favor of this loose standard:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;We agreed to welcome such questions, mainly because it is just hard to judge what is good and what is bad in this direction and we don't want to assume everybody here have also SO account&quot; @mbq&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Answer the question unless it clearly has no statistical content.&quot;  and &quot;... answer these questions and if no answer is forthcoming, then point them to SO. Not voting the question up for these types of questions will help too. I think it's easier to allow a wider range of questions rather than endless debating whether questions are on or off topic. Also if we close questions too quickly, it can put off people returning to the site - first impressions last and all that&quot;. @csgillespie&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I would like to suggest not migrating existing questions on any basis. Let this site grow as it will&quot; @whuber&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;To me, any SAS, R, S+, SPSS, Stata, etc. question is perfectly valid here&quot; @Baltimark&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The downside is that R questions will tend to be split between the stats.SE and SO sites. But that is happening already and our distinction of statistical questions here and programming questions on SO is rather fuzzy and almost impossible to moderate. Also, as somebody pointed out on another thread on meta, forcing people onto SO is not very friendly to newbies.&quot; @Rob Hyndman&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2013-01-27T04:14:20.800" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1513" CreationDate="2013-01-21T19:43:55.627" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, dealing with 2 accounts on one computer is pretty tricky and requires constant use of log-out. The good idea here is to use browser's &quot;porn mode&quot; (Incognito/Private/InPrivate depending on browser) --- this way you can remain logged in normal mode while your friend can simultaneously operate in the incognito one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going back to your problem, this is something you can fix on your own; just use &quot;my logins&quot; tab in the profile page to remove your OpenID from the friend's account so you can use it to create a new account for you. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/edit-logins&quot;&gt;Here is an official support page about this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2013-01-21T19:43:55.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1512" CreationDate="2013-01-21T20:36:28.600" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/163254/were-rolling-out-a-new-quick-start-guide-to-help-new-users-learn-the-basics&quot;&gt;meta post&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've been working hard on ways to help improve the experience of new users, and one of the best ways to do that is to help teach them the basics about how our sites work before they run afoul of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will improve their odds of having a good first experience, speed up how quickly they can become contributing members of community, and head off the frustrations they sometimes have as a result of crashing into one of the many things that make us... different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's more commentary and information in the link, but that's the gist of it -- we changed it because the old version wasn't helping new users. I firmly believe the new version &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5373" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2013-01-21T20:36:28.600" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1518" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-24T21:28:07.230" Score="6" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should we guys try to arrange a meeting on the JSM 2013? It's the business meeting requests time now through March, I believe. (Sorry for the North American bias here, but this is the biggest statistical conference in the world, so I am sure plenty of CV folks will be there.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I am concerned, if all the mixers and business meetings go as they have for the last five years, I personally will have a full evening program every day from Monday to Wednesday, and I am not yet factoring in the dinners that will certainly get themselves arranged with all the professional friends that I only meet there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: JSM 2013 is basically around the corner. If nobody requested the time for a formal mixer, so be it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="5739" LastEditDate="2013-07-17T23:27:01.337" LastActivityDate="2013-08-02T15:34:54.873" Title="JSM 2013 mixer?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1514" CreationDate="2013-01-25T00:21:42.850" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that there is no universal &lt;em&gt;criterion&lt;/em&gt;, which is why I am glad this question refers to the plural, &lt;em&gt;criteria.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Negative Criteria&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If any of the following hold, the question likely does not need statistical expertise to understand or answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The only tag is for a &lt;em&gt;single&lt;/em&gt; particular software platform&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;r&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;r&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/excel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;excel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;excel&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sas&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sas&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sas&lt;/a&gt;).  Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/47199/multivariate-distance-function-in-excel&quot;&gt;Multivariate distance function in Excel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/46817/how-to-find-sum-of-rows-that-contain-a-particular-substring-combination&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/46817/how-to-find-sum-of-rows-that-contain-a-particular-substring-combination&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/48353/calculating-the-gini-coefficient-from-lis-data-in-stata&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/48353/calculating-the-gini-coefficient-from-lis-data-in-stata&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/46848/how-can-i-determine-a-stata-files-ds-format-from-the-command-line&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/46848/how-can-i-determine-a-stata-files-ds-format-from-the-command-line&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/46823/first-var-and-last-var-substitute-in-proc-sql&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/46823/first-var-and-last-var-substitute-in-proc-sql&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/42963/implement-naive-bayes-and-oner-classifier-using-sas-enterprise-miner&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/42963/implement-naive-bayes-and-oner-classifier-using-sas-enterprise-miner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something to notice about most of these examples is that their titles contain technical statistical terms.  The presence of such words does not imply the question itself is on topic!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The question cannot (readily) be stated solely in English and mathematical notation:&lt;/strong&gt; that is, it is specifically about code in a particular computing language and (typically) it cannot be understood except by somebody conversant with that language.  Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/47736/how-can-one-convert-multiple-dvs-from-long-to-wide&quot;&gt;How can one convert multiple DVs from long to wide?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is also a good example of the &amp;quot;routine data processing&amp;quot; mentioned in the FAQ.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although there are many other examples, they are hard to find through any search mechanism.  Many of them are along the lines of &amp;quot;my code doesn't work; please help me fix it....&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The question is purely mathematical.&lt;/strong&gt;  Although it might possibly refer to a statistical application, it is unnecessary to know the application either to understand the question or to derive and describe an answer.  Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/48460/simplifying-help-with-poisson-process-question&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/48460/simplifying-help-with-poisson-process-question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/47670/confusion-related-to-the-convexity-of-norms&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/47670/confusion-related-to-the-convexity-of-norms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/47359/confusion-related-to-calculation-of-hessian&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/47359/confusion-related-to-calculation-of-hessian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; asserting that questions meeting any of these criteria automatically should be closed!  These are &lt;em&gt;flags&lt;/em&gt; that should cause us to read the question carefully and consider whether the questioner and the community would be better served by migrating it, closing it, or--possibly--leaving it open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Positive Criteria&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are too many to name.  Generally, questions that ask for interpretations, applications, and examples of things that are explicitly statistical or applied to data analysis tend not to be controversial, whether or not they are couched in a particular programming language or tied to a particular platform.  Our site currently has almost 15,000 such questions (out of 17,000 posted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;On the Edge&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, because it might help clarify the preceding, let me describe some characteristics of &amp;quot;edge cases&amp;quot;--those questions that might legitimately cause controversy and be difficult to place.  These might include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions that otherwise would definitely be migrated but involve relationships among or interactions between specific statistical or data analysis software packages. It's possible the only people who could answer such questions are here and not on SO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions about improving the utilization of computing resources for calculations with statistical and data-analytic applications.  Although these can be highly software-specific, they can have characteristics unique to statistical analysis and machine learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions that &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt; like they belong elsewhere but for which there is some evidence the proposers have some underlying statistical concern.  These are questions like &amp;quot;I wrote this code to perform ANOVA but it's failing with negative numbers because the logarithm is not defined for them&amp;quot; (I paraphrase a recent question.)  The &lt;em&gt;programming&lt;/em&gt; solution would be to trap the bad input, but--recognizing that no correct ANOVA algorithm is going to involve logarithms--the &lt;em&gt;statistical&lt;/em&gt; solution might be to ask about the underlying ANOVA question.  The first solution would belong on SO (and the answers there would likely help the O.P. implement a working but horribly incorrect solution to their problem), but the statistical approach of eliciting a better question and then answering that would probably be much more helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions that obviously overlap multiple sites, such as applying SDEs (finance might be a better place to get answers); about the roles of data analysts in academia (there's a site specifically devoted to such academic topics); or (hypothetically) about statistical terminology in non-English languages (there are sites specializing in French, German, etc. usage).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I invite readers to suggest additions or improvements to these criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2013-01-25T00:21:42.850" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1520" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1523" CreationDate="2013-01-25T08:30:32.930" Score="2" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/47855/formula-for-one-sided-hodrick-prescott-filter&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;I had set a bounty on it and I have found the answer in the meanwhile.&#xA;Can I answer it myself? There are no answers by others neither comments so far...&#xA;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12147" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Is it ok to answer a question with bounty myself?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1521" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-25T17:40:45.177" Score="4" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;This meta post is the placeholder for discussion of how CV will be represented on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amstat.org/meetings/jsm/2013/index.cfm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;JSM 2013&lt;/a&gt;. Let me start by addressing the information requests in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/132282/how-can-i-get-stack-exchange-to-send-me-to-a-conference/132283#132283&quot;&gt;the SE Meta post&lt;/a&gt; that suggested the ways to have StackExchange involved:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who&lt;/strong&gt; is going -- I guess we shall sign up in the comments or answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What&lt;/strong&gt; it is -- JSM stands for the Joint Statistical Meetings, an annual meeting of several major North American statistical societies: American Statistical Society, Statistical Society of Canada, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and International Biometric Society (Western North America Region, Eastern North America Region). With ~6,000 attendees, mostly from US and Canada, of course, but also from around the world, this is the largest statistical event in the world. This year, we may see additional boost as 2013 is announced to be the International Year of Statistics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When&lt;/strong&gt; the conference is running -- August 3-8, 2013. We need to take certain actions much earlier: the abstract submission closes February 4; the event requests need to be submitted by March 28 to be placed on the program. (SE would want to sponsor a mixer, I imagine, so if there is any money to spend, it should go towards free food, IMO.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where&lt;/strong&gt; the conference is located: JSM travels around North America. In 2013, the meetings will be held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. (This is arguably a more expensive location than the median; there are only about 20 cities in North America that have the capacity to support a conference of 6,000 people, though, and few of them can be called inexpensive.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why&lt;/strong&gt; should SE support sending people to this conference -- as I said, this is the largest statistical event of the year, and is a must to attend, at least from time to time. I will go as far as to say that if you've never been to JSM, you are not quite a statistician. Of the many SE sites, CV has been found to have lower than usual voting activity, probably due to not-so-active involvement of the discipline professionals. Showing up at JSM will increase SE visibility in statistical community, awareness of this resource, and hopefully bring new people to CV.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the space below, please answer 1 The Who, 4 How you are going to get there, 5 The Why if you have additional ideas on top of what I mentioned above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: last chance to respond before the meetings!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2013-07-18T00:29:02.190" Title="$JSM2013 - Sponsorship Proposal" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1521" CreationDate="2013-01-25T17:45:11.073" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;1.&amp;nbsp;I will be there; 4. my employer is paying for it, as I bring a good deal of visibility for the company with my presentations and business meetings; 5. I am running for a Program Chair post in one of the largest sections, Survey Research Methods Section, so I will be looking at how things are working from an internal perspective. I am also organizing a mixer of Russian statisticians, and deliver a couple of presentations. If there aren't any other volunteers, I can submit a meeting request on behalf of CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="5739" LastEditDate="2013-01-30T04:07:26.540" LastActivityDate="2013-01-30T04:07:26.540" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1520" CreationDate="2013-01-26T18:06:16.087" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not see any problem with that, personally. If you happened to find a solution to your problem, this is nice to share it with other users of this site. If a bounty was started, then you can get it or wait for new replies before bounty end (if you want to award the bounty to another great answer, letting a comment beneath your question might be a good idea). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more discussion, see some related threads on Meta SO :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/16065/150510&quot;&gt;How does the bounty system work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/120242/150510&quot;&gt;What happens to a bounty if you accept your own answer?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2013-01-26T18:06:16.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1514" CreationDate="2013-01-27T22:26:26.387" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposed criterion:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The question is about a specific aspect of one programming language or&#xA;  statistical software, that does not require statistical expertise to&#xA;  be understood and answered. It could be formulated in an agnostic&#xA;  manner so that anyone used to that programming language or software&#xA;  might provide a definitive answer without resorting to their&#xA;  statistical knowledge. &lt;em&gt;It is off-topic on this site.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples classified as off-topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/48560/930&quot;&gt;Vectorizing Operations on Vectors of Different Length&lt;/a&gt; [SO, but in fact there's no statistical context]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/48083/930&quot;&gt;Boxplots using ggplot2&lt;/a&gt; [RTFM, after 2.5 years I'm still looking for a question on how to effectively use the Grammar of Graphics]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/47413/930&quot;&gt;Is it possible to extract fixed effects in the fixed effects model in STATA?&lt;/a&gt; [RTFM or read Stata digest]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/5007/how-can-i-change-the-title-of-a-legend-in-ggplot2&quot;&gt;How can I change the title of a legend in ggplot2&lt;/a&gt; [RTFM; does not directly serve the purpose of data visualization to answer a specific statistical question]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/47736/how-can-one-convert-multiple-dvs-from-long-to-wide#comment92753_47736&quot;&gt;How can one convert multiple DVs from long to wide&lt;/a&gt; [RTFM; ???]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples classified as on-topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/27400/930&quot;&gt;Logistic regression: grouped and ungrouped variables (using R)&lt;/a&gt; [it requires some understanding of grouped vs ungrouped data wrt. ML estimates or residuals analysis if the OP wants more details]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/38616/930&quot;&gt;Visualizing mixed model results&lt;/a&gt; [you need to be conversant with mixed-effects models to suggest and justify a solution]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/35220/930&quot;&gt;Removing extraneous points near the centre of a QQ-plot&lt;/a&gt; [it is typically part of the questions about statistical computing that we all like]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There will always be borderline cases. Seconding @whuber's remark, the community has the means to express themselves to each new question, and many users do that already. I am very grateful to them. If a consensual decision could emerge from this thread, this would certainly facilitate the task of all reviewers on this site. In any case, we need to find a way to move forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm now making a little digression.&#xA;It is difficult to delineate a clear frontier between applied statistics and the particular use of a statistical software, much like it is difficult to draw a consensual line between SO and CV when it comes to questions that use R or another software to answer a specific question in a somewhat vague statistical context. Because applied statisticians ought to rely on dedicated software, this site was from the beginning expecting questions related to the use of a statistical software to solve specific tasks. Does this mean that we have to collect questions about performing a left join operation using some lisp flavour with a postgresql backend? I don't think so. &#xA;There are many R-only questions on this site, there are also many statistical questions on SO. An important distinction has to be made, though. This site has evolved since its inception, and so did its general policy on what is on- or off-topic. I believe that it has always been the reflect of what the community is expecting from this site, but &lt;em&gt;I would be very happy to hear from the community&lt;/em&gt; in this particular case, and I invite everyone to discussion, here or in a dedicated chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should note that relying on old threads on our Meta does not do justice to the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For this site to grow and be accepted in the Stack Echange network, we answered a lot of questions during the beta and just after: I have noticed that, starting in 2011, a bunch of the newly posted questions were about mathematical statistics and applied data analysis, and it certainly helped to attract a new audience;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There has been a noticeable but joint evolution/split of CV and SO regarding R programming: it is clear that many users have turned to SO when it comes to answering R questions, but they are still visiting CV to share their expert knowledge in statistics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stack Exchange has evolved itself, with a new reviewing system and the fact that old threads can no longer be migrated to other sites: it is now easier to spot off-topic questions but we can't clean up all threads.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2013-01-28T19:49:01.693" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1525" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1566" CreationDate="2013-01-29T13:28:14.967" Score="14" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some instances the question doesn't itself fit a particular tag, but the accepted answer/popular answers do.  If tags are a useful guide for others then it could make sense to re-tag based on the answers as well as the questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, often the question might not specify the language, but then R based code examples are given in the answer - should these be tagged R?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or the answer to the question might involve proposing the use of a particular statistical method, that would not be known to the question asker.  So if the answer involves, try using X, should the question get tagged with X?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19879" LastEditorUserId="19879" LastEditDate="2013-03-11T09:06:09.633" LastActivityDate="2013-03-11T09:06:09.633" Title="Should tags refer to the answer as well as the question?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1521" CreationDate="2013-01-29T22:52:34.150" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1.&lt;/strong&gt; I will normally attend this conference. &lt;strong&gt;4.&lt;/strong&gt; My employer is partly paying for it, fees and travel (August almost amounts to public holidays for me and I will most likely be traveling with my family because Montreal is great :-). &lt;strong&gt;5.&lt;/strong&gt; Not sure I will submit any abstract, but I'm open to any suggestion to increase CV visibility; this already has been discussed in the past: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1309/930&quot;&gt;Does CV slow down during big meetings like the JSM in the US?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/817/930&quot;&gt;Possible Conference Speaking Sponsorships — 2011&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1319/930&quot;&gt;Can we recruit more statisticians to participate in CV?&lt;/a&gt;. (That's for reference actually because I am sure you already browsed these threads.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2013-01-29T22:52:34.150" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1527" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-01T23:06:39.233" Score="13" ViewCount="308" Body="&lt;p&gt;The R tag covers an enormous number of questions, many of which aren't really about R in general, but how to use a specific package.  There appear to have already been some grumblings about this in meta already:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/693/syntax-highlighting-with-r-tag/695#695&quot;&gt;Syntax highlighting with r tag&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1525/should-tags-refer-to-the-answer-as-well-as-the-question&quot;&gt;Should tags refer to the answer as well as the question?&lt;/a&gt;(see comment)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I see it there are broadly three types of R question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Type A&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions that validly fit into a general R tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/20523/difference-between-logit-and-probit-models&quot;&gt;Difference between logit and probit models&lt;/a&gt; (questioner request an R answer)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/138/resources-for-learning-r&quot;&gt;Free resources for learning R&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Type B&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But other questions could be cut down to a more specific tag (as has been suggested at times, see meta examples above), for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/5135/interpretation-of-rs-lm-output&quot;&gt;Interpretation of R&amp;#39;s lm() output&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(could be tagged lm)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/48811/cost-function-for-validating-poisson-regression-models/48963#48963&quot;&gt;Cost function for validating Poisson regression models&lt;/a&gt;(Is also tagged cv.glm)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Type C&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While others use R heavily in the question example, but don't actually need R&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/26176/removal-of-statistically-significant-intercept-term-boosts-r2-in-linear-model&quot;&gt;Removal of statistically significant intercept term increases $R^2$ in linear model&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/20452/how-to-interpret-type-i-sequential-anova-and-manova&quot;&gt;How to interpret type I, type II, and type III ANOVA and MANOVA?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which questions should be tagged as R?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19879" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2013-02-12T22:54:50.010" Title="Should most R tags be replaced with package tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1527" CreationDate="2013-02-01T23:06:39.233" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think type C questions should be tagged R.  Surely R tags should be for questions that require knowledge of R to answer - R is not a hard syntax, so for the examples above many non R users would understand and be able to answer the question.  I don't think syntax highlighting is important enough, and anyway most people put the output in as well, which always highlights wrong (e.g. the &quot;Interpretation of R's lm() output&quot; link above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Type B questions I'm more unsure of.  On the one hand, they create an enormous number of R tags, but on the other hand they do need some R expertise.  If there are any answerers who follow the R feed because they have lots of R experience, then it is important these are tagged as R.  On balance I would say they should be tagged R.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19879" LastActivityDate="2013-02-01T23:06:39.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1529" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-02T15:15:25.417" Score="0" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14648526/diagnosing-why-r-is-crashing&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt; be moved to CrossValidated please? I have flagged the question on SO and asked it to be moved here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reason: the package author is active on CV but not SO. He has kindly given some advice about this issue in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/49068/why-does-mice-fail-for-one-dataset-and-not-the-other&quot;&gt;comments another question by me on CV&lt;/a&gt; but I fear if I post a new question on CV it might be closed as a duplicate/cross post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7486" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2013-02-02T15:30:17.730" Title="Can my question be moved to CrossValidated please?" Tags="|support|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1529" CreationDate="2013-02-02T15:30:17.730" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No offence, but the only valid reason for migration is when one question is off-topic on source SE and on-topic on the target SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to reach package author directly, it is a better idea to send an e-mail than to chase him across SE network with off-topic posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2013-02-02T15:30:17.730" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1531" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1532" CreationDate="2013-02-02T18:15:12.123" Score="3" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/49110/11849&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; belongs on CV since it is not a question on how to write code, but the error probably results from the specified model. Why was it migrated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11849" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2013-02-03T00:11:12.700" Title="Why was this migrated to StackOverflow?" Tags="|support|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1531" CreationDate="2013-02-03T00:11:12.700" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My error; I'll reopen it here, SO copy should be closed soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2013-02-03T00:11:12.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-03T06:47:52.870" Score="4" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I understand why extra reputation is required to be able to comment on questions and answers.  (At my level of reputation--16 in CrossValidated, though higher in some other areas of StackExchange--I can't do this, although I can ask and answer questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that I want to add to a question, or ask for clarification of it, or ask for clarification of an answer, when I don't have an answer myself.  I can't answer the question, and it would be counterproductive to start another question thread.  It seems as if commenting ought to require no more reputation than answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19960" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2013-02-03T16:59:07.990" LastActivityDate="2013-02-03T16:59:07.990" Title="Shouldn't commenting require less reputation than answering?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|comment|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2013-02-03T16:59:16.837" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1534" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1535" CreationDate="2013-02-05T00:11:45.573" Score="7" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just discovered this site, and I had a question that has been bugging me for a while. My question isn't so much about a concept as it is about terminology, so I thought I'd check whether this kind of question is acceptable on the site before I ask it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, here is the question I intended to ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My statistics professor claims that the word &quot;correlation&quot; applies&#xA;  strictly to linear relationships between variates, whereas the word&#xA;  &quot;association&quot; applies broadly to any type of relationship. In other&#xA;  words, he claims the term &quot;non-linear correlation&quot; is an oxymoron. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From what I can make of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_and_dependence#Correlation_and_linearity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this section&lt;/a&gt; in the&#xA;  Wikipedia article on &quot;&lt;em&gt;Correlation and dependence&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, the Pearson correlation&#xA;  coefficient describes the degree of &quot;linearity&quot; in the relationship&#xA;  between two variates. This suggests that the term &quot;correlation&quot; does in&#xA;  fact apply exclusively to linear relationships.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On the other hand, a quick Google search for &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=non%20linear%20correlation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;non-linear correlation&lt;/a&gt;&quot; turns up a&#xA;  number of published papers that use the term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is my professor correct, or is &quot;correlation&quot; simply a synonym of &quot;association&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20463" LastActivityDate="2013-02-11T22:33:14.580" Title="Are questions about terminology off topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1534" CreationDate="2013-02-05T03:38:16.387" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see any problem with your asking that question.  Note that we have a tag for terminology (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terminology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terminology&lt;/a&gt;) with 81 so categorized questions to date (2/4/13).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do think that terminology can be somewhat fuzzy and frustrating, with different people using the same term to mean different things, or different terms to mean the same thing.  It is possible that a terminological question thus has no real 'right' answer.  If this troubles people, they may ask to have your question made &lt;em&gt;community wiki&lt;/em&gt;, which is a status where you don't get any reputation for upvotes.  I could imagine that you might find this annoying, but it certainly wouldn't impact your ability to ask the question and get an answer.  (For the record, I don't think your question should have to be made CW, I'm just grasping for any possible complication.)  Other than that, I can't imagine any issues at all.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2013-02-05T03:38:16.387" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1536" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-06T14:14:57.690" Score="5" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to ask a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/48894/normal-distributed-random-numbers-in-time-expected-behaviour-askew-distribut&quot; title=&quot;Question&quot;&gt;Question&lt;/a&gt;, about 6 days ago.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Since I am new to the field, apparently my question apparently is too broad or vague. I have read a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1479/how-to-ask-a-good-question-on-crossvalidated&quot;&gt;good guide, how to ask good questions&lt;/a&gt;, but sadly this does not help me enough. My question is that vague because of my lack of experience.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For future questions I will read &lt;a href=&quot;http://stp.clarku.edu/notes/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a book on thermal and statistical physics.&lt;/a&gt; But what about this question? &lt;strong&gt;How long should I hold on to my question before deleting it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I could simply leave it, hoping someone will understand and answer it one day, but apparently it is not a good question. Therefore I do not want it to mess up this beautiful site.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;When is it a good time to give up on a bad question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20267" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2013-07-17T18:45:55.297" Title="When is it a good time to give up on a bad question?" Tags="|support|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1537" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1539" CreationDate="2013-02-07T07:45:39.933" Score="8" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a series of questions related to something I have been working on. As they share the same background information, I originally wanted to post a big question with many multiple parts. On further thought, it might be more beneficial for subsequent users if I were to break it down into multiple questions as they all relate to different though related statistical problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, which would be preferred?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A big question containing many sub-parts OR&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Multiple question, each containing a sub-part.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7448" LastEditorUserId="7448" LastEditDate="2013-02-07T07:59:23.683" LastActivityDate="2013-02-07T16:46:03.323" Title="Multiple questions or one big question?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1538" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-07T13:46:34.000" Score="55" ViewCount="2216" Body="&lt;p&gt;Has anyone else noticed that we are 5th from bottom with an answer rate of only 76%?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand there are some questions that appear &quot;answered&quot; in the comments, like this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/20583/is-the-percent-of-total-deviance-explained-a-useful-model-summary&quot;&gt;Is the percent of total deviance explained a useful model summary?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These should probably try be tidies up and &quot;answered&quot;, if only to shift them off the unanswered board.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the otherhand if we do have a large number of genuine unanswered questions, what do people think the reasons are, and what can be done about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are they bad questions - in which case should more be closed.  Or are they just too hard?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concern might be that it doesn't look great if you only have a 3 in 4 chance of getting an answer...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently (8 Feb 2013):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;$17420$ questions,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;$4175$ have no upvoted answer (24%)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;$484$ have answers, but no upvotes (2.8%)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not that I am suggesting we go round randomly upvoting old answers - but are all 484 answers rubbish?  I think I mights start flicking through some of these old questions, see if any good answers have gone unnoticed.  Any chance anyone else might do the same?  Of course at the same time there might also be old questions that could be answered...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Now would be a good time to answer old questions, if people can be persuaded to start looking at voting on old questions)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19879" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2016-09-12T13:25:06.837" Title="Why is our answer rate so low?" Tags="|discussion|unanswered-questions|participation|site-statistics|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1537" CreationDate="2013-02-07T16:46:03.323" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a personal recommendation (not as a moderator) based on my experience with the site (and is not a statement of SE policy): consider starting with one thread in which you do the following, in this order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;State the first question as succinctly as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Provide the background in a separate section.  If it's long, use heading markup and section separators judiciously to keep it visually organized.  Be sure to provide definitions of technical terms and links to relevant background material.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Craft a title that clearly reflects the unique nature of the problem, includes interesting keywords, and is brief--less than one line.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In subsequent questions, refer readers to this original &quot;master&quot; question for background (by means of hyperlinks).  Do not post all your questions at once: they will exhaust your readers, limiting the chances of getting good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may find that answers to your first question--or even comments asking for clarification--change your approach and cause you to modify what you are planning to ask.  Be open to this possibility, because therein often lies the greatest potential for constructive advancement of your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2013-02-07T16:46:03.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1538" CreationDate="2013-02-09T23:25:01.223" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;My guess is that novices ask questions that bore experts. So, experts don't bother to answer, seek clarification that never arrives, seldom upvote the question, and seldom upvote an answer (if one occurs).  Novices who just had a one off question don't return to the site or know how to use it to upvote the questions or mark it as accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastActivityDate="2013-02-09T23:25:01.223" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1538" CreationDate="2013-02-11T01:48:41.470" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;CV has been going for a while now. Since the subject matter doesn't change much with time, a substantial fraction of the set of all possible good CV questions may have already been asked. If that is true, what is left are duplicate questions, confusing poorly worded or thought out questions and questions that are too hard (acceptable answers may border on publishable new research). These questions are likely be left substantially unanswered. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10354" LastActivityDate="2013-02-11T01:48:41.470" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1542" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1543" CreationDate="2013-02-11T07:18:45.800" Score="9" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know if I comment after someone, or after their answer or their question, then they will be notified.  But is there are more general way to attract people's attention?  For example (hope he doesn't mind, but he's a mod :-) ) if I do @whuber will that now attract his attention?  Would this work in chat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, sometimes one sees a question that you'd like to flag up for another user (perhaps because you've seen them giving good similar answers before).  I'm digging through some old questions...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19879" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2013-06-30T23:45:14.183" LastActivityDate="2013-06-30T23:45:14.183" Title="Is there a way to attract a user's attention?" Tags="|discussion|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1542" CreationDate="2013-02-11T16:43:10.663" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;To get somebody's attention:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you need a moderator--just some moderator--flag a question, comment, or answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you need a specific moderator, flag something relevant and in the &quot;other&quot; box of the flag dialog explain whom you are trying to reach (and why).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Add a comment to their question or answer.  (Please don't do this for just any question or answer: use a question or answer that is relevant to the reason for getting their attention.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If they have participated in a comment thread, &quot;ping&quot; them using the &quot;@&quot; construct as illustrated in the question.  (NB: pinging does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; work in questions, answers, nor in comments if the user has not already participated in that comment thread.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the user has participated in chat, you may ping them from that chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you have sufficient reputation, you may create a new chat room and invite users to join it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Moderators may &quot;super-ping&quot; individuals from chat rooms: it works like a ping but does not require the individual ever to have been part of the chat before.  The mechanism to do this is a little intricate so it's not often done.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Moderators may contact users privately by e-mail.  Copies are automatically sent to the SE team and all other mods for the site: this is the mechanism used to address serious problems in usage or behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2013-02-11T16:43:10.663" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1527" CreationDate="2013-02-11T22:03:28.943" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;A risk of adding package tags would be 1) overlapping nomenclature 2) frequent disagreement on tags and 3) difficulty consulting relevant questions from other tagged questions with answers. For instance, a user working with the &lt;code&gt;survey&lt;/code&gt; package would probably often mistakenly use the &lt;code&gt;survey&lt;/code&gt; tag instead of the &lt;code&gt;survey-package&lt;/code&gt; tag. If a user tags their question with &lt;code&gt;ggplot2&lt;/code&gt; but the source of their problem was a data formatting issue, then should the &lt;code&gt;ggplot2&lt;/code&gt; tag be removed, even if the subtlety in data formatting was unique to that package? It could also greatly inflate the number of tags, leading to an overly granular approach to browsing questions (such as packages with overlapping functionality like &lt;code&gt;lme4&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;nlme&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;gee&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;geese&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;sandwich&lt;/code&gt; for computing robust standard errors).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think R packages come and go and there are way too many of them. I also think many expert statisticians can quickly look up documentation on a few package specific questions and quickly address the users questions without even downloading that package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think questions of type C which are methodological in nature but rely upon R to convey the idea and are tagged as such are in serious need of quality improvement. It seems that currently, expert users migrate these posts to stackoverflow where they often languish and die. I think experts should be more assertive in editing such posts to remove code/unformatted output that can be explained in concepts or algebra.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastActivityDate="2013-02-11T22:03:28.943" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1534" CreationDate="2013-02-11T22:33:14.580" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I am obviously very much non-senior, I don't see why there can't be some questions about terminology.  Statistical terminology is very important within the community of practice for statistics (try publishing a paper using the wrong terms for your audience, you'll likely get some nasty comments).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worse, different related communities of practice use the same terms for different things.  Statisticians, computer scientists, physicists, and social scientists all use a solid amount of stats.  They do not always use the same terms for the same concepts, which is complicated significantly by the fact that AI and CS is heavily Bayesian while social science is heavily frequentist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anything, I'd think there might need to be some guidelines for answering such questions.  I don't think any answer about terminology is remotely useful unless it cites a source and states the domain of science where such terminology is used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20396" LastActivityDate="2013-02-11T22:33:14.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1527" CreationDate="2013-02-12T22:54:50.010" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If this is a strictly R programming/implementation question, it should go to SO. If this is a true statistics question, then an R package is just an implementation of the method, and one can often find alternative implementations in Stata, SAS, Matlab, or even (God forbid) Excel. So instead of &lt;code&gt;cv.glm&lt;/code&gt; tag in the second type B question, it should have been the methods &lt;code&gt;cross-validation&lt;/code&gt; tag. Any of the &lt;code&gt;*lme*&lt;/code&gt; questions are actually &lt;code&gt;mixed-model&lt;/code&gt; questions, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a number of occasions, I wrote in the tag excerpt something like &quot;this tag is too generic, please use &lt;code&gt;this&lt;/code&gt; for this, and &lt;code&gt;that&lt;/code&gt; for that&quot; (see, e.g., &lt;code&gt;multilevel&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;gmm&lt;/code&gt; tags... I think the latter was actually killed, which isn't right, and should still be sitting around as a redirect). May be it is time to do something like this with &lt;code&gt;r&lt;/code&gt;: officially declare R to be the default statistical package to ask questions about and give examples in, discourage the use of the &lt;code&gt;r&lt;/code&gt; tag, and tell the users to use a tag like &lt;code&gt;learning-r&lt;/code&gt; for the second question in A and the first question in B. Some other tags may need to be devised for &quot;valid&quot; R questions that CV rather than SO should handle, e.g., &lt;code&gt;compare-stat-packages&lt;/code&gt; for tag combos like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r+sas&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r+sas&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r+stata&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r+stata&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2013-02-12T22:54:50.010" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1538" CreationDate="2013-02-14T09:46:41.760" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;A quick and unsystematic look through my own responses suggest that lately (though not previously) maybe a third of the answers I give are to a question where no answer is ever accepted.  These seem to be questions where the OP is beginner with low reputation asking a practical, more research design-oriented question. Unlike the @drnexus's experts, I actually like to answer these questions because I get the feeling that a good answer can really change the OP's understanding of something for the better.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, while there is sometimes discussion under the question, or even thanks, there is often complete silence.  This suggests that some proportion of posters don't understand how the site works and/or have an approach so instrumental as to lose interest immediately after answers have been provided.  I suppose this is the downside of folk asking very 'practical' questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1739" LastActivityDate="2013-02-14T09:46:41.760" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1518" CreationDate="2013-02-15T17:06:30.767" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just wanted to give this a bump to see what people's plans are. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not attending JSM this year, but I am currently working in Montreal.  I imagine people are busy with the usual conference stuff (the actual sessions as well as the networking/catching up/frantically revising presentations the night before/etc), but if anyone wants to meet up for coffee or a beer or what-have-you, it'd be nice to meet people face-to-face. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7250" LastEditorUserId="7250" LastEditDate="2013-08-02T15:34:54.873" LastActivityDate="2013-08-02T15:34:54.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1538" CreationDate="2013-02-17T15:56:19.973" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think a lot of those questions that don't get any answers (or where the answers don't get any up-vote)  should simply be deleted and/or closed after a certain time. On many of these questions, the OP has not visited the site in several months and often has not answered calls for basic clarification expressed in the comments. I agree with the opinion expressed by many others that this makes the website look untidy. To make matters worst, some of them apparently tend to get undue search engine attention. I think we should give a mandate to the moderators to progressively remove them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there is the separate issue of questions with up-voted answers that are not accepted by the OP after a long time. Here, in those cases where the OP has not visited the site for a long time i think we should delegate the authority to the moderators to 'accept' the most up-voted question as the final answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="603" LastEditorUserId="603" LastEditDate="2013-02-17T21:33:26.480" LastActivityDate="2013-02-17T21:33:26.480" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1538" CreationDate="2013-02-17T23:42:35.083" Score="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there are numerous factors, but statistics is one of those areas where a &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; large number of people are using a fairly demanding set of ideas with very little background in it -- in a way that (for example) people generating programming questions, largely &lt;em&gt;aren't&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This results in a tendency to ask very vague - but often surprisingly specialized - and frequently utterly unanswerable questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, sometimes the questions are so trivial that there's really nothing more to say than 'yes, that's correct', which hardly seems worth an actual answer, an issue I address in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2685/a-difficulty-with-self-study-like-questions-of-the-form-is-this-correct&quot;&gt;another question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With no answer selected, for a surprising number of the questions I see, clearly the original poster is satisfied by an answer &lt;em&gt;but doesn't choose any answer&lt;/em&gt;. With repeat offenders you can - if you notice - try to encourage them to do their bit, but with one-offs (accounts that ask exactly one question), by the time you realize they won't choose an answer out of good answers available, they're &lt;em&gt;long gone&lt;/em&gt;. Their problem is solved and our community norms don't matter. More often someone with a programming problem (for example) tends to anticipate a future need to solve such problems again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you add in a tendency for the jargon - and even the types of analysis - to be fractured across various disciplines that use statistics, it's especially apt to generate questions that won't attract answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I answer questions on stackoverflow (I answer R questions there for example), the answers often take seconds. When I answer them on stats.stackexchange, I may invest hours in constructing some answers ... and then often not garner a single upvote for my effort. It does tend to lead to only answering questions that will be 'worth my time'. Even so - and in spite of decades working and publishing and teaching in the area - I frequently have to do significant reading (as well as a bunch of requests for clarification) to understand what the person is even asking, let alone how to answer it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Little wonder then, that many questions I don't answer aren't answered by anyone else either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.427" LastActivityDate="2016-09-07T01:27:09.197" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1551" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-19T21:34:57.837" Score="6" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand notifications for favorites. I presume the number in blue that I see when I go to my profile is telling me that that many of my favorites have had something happen to them. But which ones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, just now I had a blue 5 next to favorites, but when I click on it, two favorites have a yellow background (which I'm guessing means &quot;something happened&quot;) and I couldn't see anything to indicate what else had happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What am I missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19879" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-03-01T14:01:48.253" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T14:01:48.253" Title="What does the blue number next to &quot;favorites&quot; refer to?" Tags="|support|user-interface|notifications|bookmarks|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1538" CreationDate="2013-02-21T16:39:09.080" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can not speak for everyone obviously but &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; problem with the answers on CV is the fact that I can't seem to communicate with statisticians. I don't understand and appreciate the lingo and the attitude. You might call it that I lack the basis, but I have never experienced mis-communication of such magnitude with experts or enthusiasts in any other field. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what does that have to do with anything? Well, if I can't get any help on a question I ask, then I don't see the point on accepting an answer, or up-voting for that matter. After all that's what the voting mechanism is for. You are all fully entitled to disagree with me, but paying attention to what you say and how you express it might help with the &quot;newbies with low rep&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and deleting questions with no up-votes or accepted answers is just brushing the dust under the carpet to feel good about yourself, IMHO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3014" LastActivityDate="2013-02-21T16:39:09.080" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1553" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-22T14:49:13.257" Score="3" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently, the main questions page has a filter for unanswered questions - obviously, for the benefit of those with the expertise to answer such questions (or some of them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm at the other end of the expertise spectrum: I'd like to filter for ANSWERED questions, because I'm looking to absorb the goodness from the answers!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could TPTB consider tweaking the HTML, please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20639" LastActivityDate="2013-02-22T14:49:13.257" Title="'Answered questions' filter for questions page" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1554" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1555" CreationDate="2013-02-22T18:47:35.257" Score="24" ViewCount="474" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1553/answered-questions-filter-for-questions-page&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, I thought it might be worthwhile to post a guide for those who just want to read and learn.)&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are the best ways for someone new to Cross Validated to sift through the volume of posts here and learn about statistics?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.427" LastActivityDate="2013-02-22T23:47:29.930" Title="How should a new user navigate Cross Validated to learn more about statistics?" Tags="|discussion|new-users|search|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1554" CreationDate="2013-02-22T18:50:04.130" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;One way to use this site is just to learn more about statistics in general, and you might want to peruse &lt;strong&gt;the best of Cross Validated&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An easy way to dip your toe into the water is each day to simply scan the list of recent badges that runs along the right side of the main page about half-way down.  You can click on badges for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/badges/23/nice-answer&quot;&gt;Nice Answer&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/badges/20/nice-question&quot;&gt;Nice Question&lt;/a&gt;, and navigate to that specific thread and read it.  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/badges/24/good-answer&quot;&gt;Good Answer&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/badges/19/enlightened&quot;&gt;Enlightened&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/badges/18/guru&quot;&gt;Guru&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/badges/21/good-question&quot;&gt;Good Question&lt;/a&gt;, etc., are less common, but work similarly.  The popularity driven tags, based on page views (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/badges/26/popular-question&quot;&gt;Popular Question&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/badges/27/notable-question&quot;&gt;Notable Question&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/badges/28/famous-question&quot;&gt;Famous Question&lt;/a&gt;) or favorite votes (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/badges/33/favorite-question&quot;&gt;Favorite Question&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/badges/36/stellar-question&quot;&gt;Stellar Question&lt;/a&gt;), are more of a mixed bag, but are also worth exploring.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can also use the links above and just work your way through the lists systematically from the beginning.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might notice that &lt;strong&gt;certain individual CV contributors reliably provide useful and informative posts&lt;/strong&gt;, and you might want to specifically go through their contributions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first thing to try is to click on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;users&lt;/a&gt;, and find that individual's userpage.  Once there, you can click on &quot;Answers&quot; (to get a list of all the answers they've posted here), or &quot;Questions&quot; (for all their questions), and start reading.  You may want to sort them by &quot;Votes&quot;, in case they aren't already, so that you can work your way down from their 'greatest hits'.  Unfortunately, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1055/should-there-be-a-way-to-indicate-answers-youre-especially-proud-of-on-your-use&quot;&gt;it's hard to discern&lt;/a&gt; which posts that person might themselves think of as their best, but vote totals can be a reasonable proxy.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Note that you can also officially &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/937/is-it-possible-to-subscribe-to-a-specific-users-answers&quot;&gt;follow&lt;/a&gt; a user:  At the bottom right corner of each user's userpage, there is a link for an &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RSS feed&lt;/a&gt; for that user's posts.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another approach is to try to learn more about &lt;strong&gt;a particular topic&lt;/strong&gt; (for example &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cluster analyses&lt;/a&gt;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The most basic strategy is to click on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;tags&lt;/a&gt;, and find the tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/clustering&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;clustering&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;clustering&lt;/a&gt;.  If you click on that you will get a list of all questions that have ever been asked on CV with that tag appended.  Note that you can sort this list by clicking on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/clustering?sort=votes&amp;amp;pagesize=30&quot;&gt;votes&lt;/a&gt; (for the most highly voted questions), or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/clustering?sort=newest&amp;amp;pagesize=30&quot;&gt;newest&lt;/a&gt; (for most recent), etc.  (The vote totals for questions will be loosely correlated with the quality of information that exists in that thread, or at least I have advocated such an approach to upvoting questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1426/if-a-question-is-good-enough-for-you-to-answer-should-you-up-vote-it/1427#1427&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.)  You could also sort these using CV's search options (click the link that says &quot;advanced search tips&quot; beside the search button) to get, for instance, only those questions that have answers.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can blend the above two strategies as well, by navigating to the page for the tag and clicking on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/clustering/info&quot;&gt;info&lt;/a&gt;.  There you'll find a brief introduction to the topic in the form of a tag wiki excerpt, and the full tag wiki.  Running down the right side of the page, you'll see a list of the CV users who have contributed the most under that category.  By clicking &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/clustering/topusers&quot;&gt;more&lt;/a&gt;, you'll get a great deal of information, and you can click on the number beside a user's username and get a list of all the answers that user has posted on that topic.  A slightly different variant is to go to the userpage of someone whose posts you've found helpful, clicking on &quot;Tags&quot;, finding the tag in question (e.g., clustering) and clicking on it.  This will give you a list of every post that user has written that was categorized with that tag.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Cross Validated&lt;/a&gt;, and happy hunting!  &lt;em&gt;(Be warned, it's easy to wind up spending a lot of time here... )&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2013-02-22T23:47:29.930" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1556" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-23T15:16:32.057" Score="7" ViewCount="413" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently the use of the homework tag was &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/147100/the-homework-tag-is-now-officially-deprecated&quot;&gt;deprecated on SO&lt;/a&gt;.  This is actually mentioned in the same meta that our FAQ points to in describing &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10811/how-to-ask-and-answer-homework-questions/10812#10812&quot;&gt;how to ask/answer homework questions&lt;/a&gt;.  However, elsewhere in the FAQ (and in the comments it seems) we tell them to tag their question as homework.  I propose that we should either deprecate the homework tag on CV (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/123758/can-we-now-discourage-the-use-of-and-burninate-the-homework-tag&quot;&gt;for the reasons discussed on SO&lt;/a&gt;) or update the FAQ such that we point to a uniquely CV discussion of how to ask homework questions (we already have a good one on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/12/919&quot;&gt;answer side&lt;/a&gt;).  What shall it be, or is there an option behind door #3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T16:13:59.583" Title="Should the homework tag be deprecated?" Tags="|discussion|tags|homework|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1556" CreationDate="2013-02-24T04:25:48.050" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to dispute some of the &quot;facts&quot; as presented in the SO version of this argument, which I think either don't apply here, or are just a little bit wrong. Generally speaking, I favor retaining the homework tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;homework is a meta-tag&quot;. I don't necessarily think meta-tags are bad. It helps put the question in context - this is homework, or an assignment, and so the relevant issue (at least should be) the OP understanding their answer, and being able to take it and apply it. While someone just asking &quot;What does this output mean?&quot; might be well served by an up and down explanation of the output, homework questions prompt me at least to try and convey some sense of how to avoid needing to come back to CV in the future with a similar, but slightly different, problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;homework might be factually incorrect&quot;. This is an argument against people tagging something they feel like is homework for being &quot;lesser&quot; as homework, not an argument against the tag itself. This is true for any tag - if someone errantly labels a thread with a tag, that tag might be factually incorrect.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Copied assignments (verbatim) with no attempt at solving the problem are not real questions and should be closed anyway.&quot; These are only a subset of questions that could be, and should be, tagged as homework.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Someone, somewhere, will feel the need to say &quot;is this homework? is it? is it homework? Really?&quot; then somebody else will &quot;USE THE HOMEWORK TAG11!!11&quot; This is at best mildly irksome.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;In spite of this tag, people do not treat the question differently (in my experience).&quot; I do.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;homework on occasion attracts some poor quality stuff.&quot; These questions will not go away because the homework tag is missing. That's like saying the &quot;Python&quot; tag in SO sometimes attracts some poor quality stuff.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5836" LastActivityDate="2013-02-24T04:25:48.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1556" CreationDate="2013-02-25T02:29:46.670" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm against the homework tag simply because it seems to raise more problems than it solves, since answers should in theory act differently for 'homework' questions than other questions, but in practice do so inconsistently which causes conflict between users. I don't think we'll ever hit the utopia of all users being on the same page on this issue. Someone is going to jump in and just answer the easy question it to gain the rep, so hey it may as well be me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also have issues with the need to selectively judge exactly what 'homework' is, unless the OP tags it as such themselves. Some things are obvious but often not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do we actually gain even if we do treat homework questions 'properly'? Answers on CV almost always provide more than is asked for. For a silly example, if the homework question is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Find the mean of [1,2,3,4]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;answers would typically explain what the mean is, how to compute it and maybe some links to more detailed explanations. No one answers with simply 2.5. The OP has learned something which is the point of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Homework questions are often poor, but if that is the case the deficiencies need to be treated the same way as any other question (typically asking multiple questions in one and not stating what it is about the question they do not understand). A well formulated question that someone is asking in order to complete some kind of homework probably wouldn't even be detected as a homework questions, which ends up making 'homework' a proxy tag for 'bad question' which may help prolong the life of bad questions that should simply be closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see too few upsides to negate the many downsides of the homework tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10354" LastActivityDate="2013-02-25T02:29:46.670" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1561" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-01T19:39:04.407" Score="10" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anecdotally I've noticed that there seems to be periods of time (during the day) when we get lots of questions asked, and then periods where lots of answering is done.  Before making up lots of ideas why this might be the case (Students/Professionals?), it would be interesting to find out if it actually is true.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that there is a SQL database type way of looking at activity on a stack exchange site - so if someone in the know could explain how to answer this that would be great. Anybody got the SQL skills to figure out if questions, comments and answers have different intraday profiles? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19879" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-07-09T14:00:17.070" LastActivityDate="2019-07-09T14:00:17.070" Title="Do questions and answers have different activity profiles during the day?" Tags="|discussion|participation|data-explorer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="974" CreationDate="2013-03-01T19:59:36.677" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I share many of the reasons for answering questions with the others given here - especially that of keeping sharp.  But I'll add an extra one that actually got me started on this site in the first place.  I'm not the world's greatest programmer, and found Stack Overflow to be a wonderful resource for answering my questions.  I felt it was right to &quot;give something back&quot; but obviously couldn't contribute over there.  Answering on CV &quot;balances out&quot; all the help I get on SO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find CV is really helpful, perhaps consider given back on the SE site in your area of expertise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19879" LastActivityDate="2013-03-01T19:59:36.677" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1556" CreationDate="2013-03-05T05:22:13.773" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm strongly in favor of retaining the homework tag, in pretty much the way we have it now (though I can see some point to making all the links to things stay within CV so they stay relevant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: on the charge that SO deprecates it, I'd point out that math.SE does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;; math.SE is a much closer model for the kind of activity we undertake than SO itself, so I don't think any claim of consistency carries weight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there can be some inconsistency, but that's more a reason to more clearly promote the kind of behavior that's expected - to point out what the tag means for both askers and answerers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Removing the tag is not doing the students a service!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2013-03-11T07:49:38.037" LastActivityDate="2013-03-11T07:49:38.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1564" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1565" CreationDate="2013-03-05T15:26:21.387" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to suggest adding the gmm tag for growth mixture modeling. This would help when asking questions specific to this area. There are a number of questions on this topic, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/48700/how-are-the-classes-determined-in-a-growth-mixture-model&quot;&gt;How are the classes determined in a growth mixture model?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2777/modelling-longitudinal-data-where-the-effect-of-time-varies-in-functional-form-b/2811#2811&quot;&gt;Modelling longitudinal data where the effect of time varies in functional form between individuals&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/27210/mixture-model-fixed-effects/27397#27397&quot;&gt;Mixture model fixed effects&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/48187/which-r-package-to-use-to-conduct-a-latent-class-growth-analysis-lcga-growth&quot;&gt;Which R package to use to conduct a latent class growth analysis (LCGA) / growth mixture model (GMM)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10598" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2013-03-07T15:47:44.180" Title="Should the gmm tag be added?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1564" CreationDate="2013-03-05T16:30:00.870" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think that would be a good idea - &quot;GMM&quot; is a little ambiguous and could mean Gaussian Mixture Model, which is currently tagged &lt;code&gt;gaussian-mixture&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing wrong with adding &lt;code&gt;growth-mixture-model&lt;/code&gt; as a tag though.  It looks like there already exists &lt;code&gt;growth-model&lt;/code&gt; which has been used on growth mixture models in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've created &lt;code&gt;growth-mixture-model&lt;/code&gt; as a new tag.  I don't know if it should be as synonym of &lt;code&gt;growth-model&lt;/code&gt; or if it is a special case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19879" LastActivityDate="2013-03-05T16:30:00.870" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1525" CreationDate="2013-03-05T16:48:21.340" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding this comment as an answer to try and encourage finding consensus on this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Scortchi says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think it's a sensible idea in general. After all if you're searching for topic X, answers about X could be just as useful to you as questions about X. But R in particular should be an exception or everything would end up getting tagged with 'R'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggests &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; good answers about X should result in tagging the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote this answer if you agree...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19879" LastEditorUserId="19879" LastEditDate="2013-03-05T16:54:04.153" LastActivityDate="2013-03-05T16:54:04.153" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-03-05T16:48:21.340" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1525" CreationDate="2013-03-05T16:49:59.777" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;An issue I found here (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1564/19879&quot;&gt;Should the gmm tag be added?&lt;/a&gt;) though is that what if the reference is in some or one of the answers, but not the accepted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote for this answer if you think that retagging based on the answer should only consider the accepted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19879" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2013-03-05T16:49:59.777" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-03-05T16:49:59.777" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1525" CreationDate="2013-03-05T16:52:16.247" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For completeness:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tagging should only refer to the contents of the question.  The primary purpose of tagging is to help people filter topics they feel they can answer and contribute to.  When searching to learn you can just as easily use simple text search rather than tag searching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote for this is you agree...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19879" LastActivityDate="2013-03-05T16:52:16.247" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-03-05T16:52:16.247" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1556" CreationDate="2013-03-06T22:10:11.983" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My sense (purely anecdotal) is that the very existence of a &quot;homework&quot; tag tends to promote less-than-congenial responses to perfunctory questions.  Instead of providing a welcome and some hints--which should be our first reaction--some community members seem to prefer writing comments like &quot;if this is homework, it should be tagged as homework!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could be friendlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have therefore changed how I personally respond to questions that smell like homework: I still treat them as such in my comments and answers, but I don't demand that they be tagged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In the interests of full disclosure, I do become decidedly less friendly towards questions that appear to abuse the site or the goodwill of the community: but that's not a matter of whether the questions are related to homework or not.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2013-03-06T22:10:11.983" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1564" CreationDate="2013-03-07T15:47:44.180" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Argh&lt;/strong&gt;. A few weeks ago, I disambiguated &lt;code&gt;gmm&lt;/code&gt; into &lt;code&gt;generalized-moments&lt;/code&gt; (the generalized method of moments was too long for a tag) in econometrics; &lt;code&gt;growth-model&lt;/code&gt; from social scientists; and &lt;code&gt;gaussian-mixture&lt;/code&gt; from computer scientists and machine learners. Unfortunately, &lt;code&gt;gmm&lt;/code&gt; as a tag disappeared, along with the explanation of why this is a poor tag (Corone explained it all). If &lt;code&gt;gmm&lt;/code&gt; appears again, I will go and weed it out, for the obvious reasons, but a better way would be to avoid it from the outset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastActivityDate="2013-03-07T15:47:44.180" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1571" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1573" CreationDate="2013-03-08T17:33:36.387" Score="20" ViewCount="391" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reviewing a paper for publication at the moment and I find the statistical methods in it quite questionable. But I've only got limited experience and don't want to call them out on something that isn't actually wrong either. So I'm wondering about the best way to ask for help on the main site. That is,(a) is it even ok to ask the equivalent of &quot;Am I right that you can't analyse X using Y?&quot;, (b) how do I best go about keeping confidentiality, and (c) are there any other tips for how to best deal with this sort of problem on CV?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12446" LastActivityDate="2013-03-09T18:29:17.957" Title="How to get help on stats when reviewing a paper for publication" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1571" CreationDate="2013-03-09T16:40:00.133" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;With some regrets, I think this should be strongly discouraged on this, or any other, site.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First the regrets&lt;/strong&gt;: An obviously conscientious reviewer taking the time to get feedback on a paper up for publication is probably much more likely to post a well-expressed, interesting statistical question. From a selfish perspective, I'd much rather read and think about such questions and they'd almost certainly increase overall site quality. I'm pleased that you would consider this venue and equally pleased that you took the time to ask about it here on meta first. There should be more reviewers like you in this world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now for the discouragement&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you know, reviewers are given a big responsibility and, as a form of compensation, get continuous first contact with new research advances. Confidentiality is one of their biggest and most important responsibilities. I think doing anything to potentially breach that, even unintentionally, is treading on very thin ice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are my suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Know your journal's policies&lt;/strong&gt;. Many (maybe most) journals have &lt;em&gt;strict&lt;/em&gt; policies on sharing manuscripts under consideration, even in private. While often these are &quot;softly&quot; ignored (some reviewers may pass off certain MS under review to graduate students), you should know the policies and be comfortable that whatever action you take meets them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't overburden yourself&lt;/strong&gt;. Double check with the associate editor handling the paper to see if there is a separate statistical reviewer. In many fields, particularly those allied to medicine, this is common practice and lightens some of this burden placed on other reviewers. That said, if you have concerns about the statistical methodology and can clearly enunciate them, they will still be taken into account when the AE makes their decision.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Think globally, act locally&lt;/strong&gt;. If there is no statistical reviewer, or you simply want to do so, seek out some assistance at the local level. If in (or near) academia and you have access to a statistics department or a statistical consulting service, visit them or send an email to people working in relevant areas. This lets you carefully control access to the manuscript and you can even have them sign something more formal to protect confidentiality, if needed. If in industry, presumably you have contact with statistical practitioners that might be able to help in a similar manner.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Use the network, but not the (inter)net&lt;/strong&gt;. If there is a contributor here that you believe you can trust, you might contact them privately to see if they would be able to help. You should work out, in advance, what if any attribution should occur.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As a very last resort, play the anonymous interested reader, with extreme(!) care and caution&lt;/strong&gt;. If &lt;em&gt;and only if&lt;/em&gt; an identical copy of the manuscript under consideration is posted to a public permanent archive (like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.arxiv.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the arXiv&lt;/a&gt;) or similar, then formulate your question as one of an interested reader unsure about some portion of the paper. This is still fraught with complications. You will have to wrestle with how to incorporate the feedback you get in a way that (a) meets your ethical thresholds, (b) meets the standards of required attribution as detailed by this site's copyright and content-sharing license and (c) will not subject you to the possibility that the author will see your report and then later happen to find the associated question on CV and be able to identify you. If you have any doubts, you should run it by the AE first. My opinion is that this is a minefield that is best avoided.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NB&lt;/strong&gt;: I have consciously written this post employing a rather strong tone, but it merely reflects my opinion and shouldn't be taken as authoritative. Hopefully some of the thoughts will be helpful as you think this through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2970" LastActivityDate="2013-03-09T16:40:00.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1571" CreationDate="2013-03-09T18:29:17.957" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although @cardinal raises some good points, I think some questions could be germane to CrossValidated, as long as things are handled appropriately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;em&gt;please&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;please&lt;/strong&gt; do not post an entire manuscript, or even big excepts from a manuscript, and ask for critiques. I think this is Cardinal's major concern and it is a very valid one. Among other things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is ethically dubious and violates your agreement with the authors/journal.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It might 'out' you as the reviewer (if you work in a field with anonymous reviews)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is unlikely to work anyway: I doubt many people here would be willing to spend hours plowing through a manuscript in order to write your review for you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, I think it would probably be fine to post specific and general-interest questions, particularly if done in a way that doesn't reveal too much about the original manuscript. For example, I think a question like this would be okay:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am reading a paper where the authors use a False Discovery Rate procedure to compensate for a large number of multiple comparisons. I was under the impression that the Benjamini–Hochberg procedure only worked for independent tests, but there are some arbitrary (i.e., positive and negative) dependencies between their tests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this procedure be used on dependent tests? If not, are there any similar alternatives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is answerable (in fact, it has already been answered here!), it is not too localized, and it probably would not violate any confidentiality agreement you have with the journal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, I think this a somewhat thorny issue and I hope others weigh in. Thank you for trying to be as conscientious a reviewer as possible! I'll buy you a drink if we're ever at the same meeting!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7250" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2013-03-09T18:29:17.957" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="118" CreationDate="2013-03-11T12:08:02.180" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To echo some of the sentiments above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think if you separate the more implementation based questions from the more abstract statistical questions you will find &lt;em&gt;cross-validated&lt;/em&gt; more useful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I come from a related signal processing background to speech but find the &lt;em&gt;dsp.stackexchange&lt;/em&gt; site far to focused on implementation and so for more methodological questions around the HMM theory, signal processing approach etc &lt;em&gt;cross-validated&lt;/em&gt; is far more useful. For questions (such 6. above) on particularly software packages or other issues with implementation such as bugs, &lt;em&gt;dsp.stackexchange&lt;/em&gt; or even &lt;em&gt;stackoverflow&lt;/em&gt; might be more useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11030" LastActivityDate="2013-03-11T12:08:02.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1575" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1576" CreationDate="2013-03-13T10:30:27.100" Score="8" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I am not a regular participant in Cross Validated, but a moderator on Maths. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We received a flag stating that &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/329268/obtaining-distribution-of-numbers#question&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; should be migrated here. It is of the form: &quot;given a data set, I want to find a distribution that does blah&quot;. For future reference: are these types of questions on-topic here? Or should I just decline the migration request?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6226" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:38.337" LastActivityDate="2013-03-13T12:15:30.037" Title="Are &quot;find the distribution&quot; questions on topic?" Tags="|discussion|migration|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1575" CreationDate="2013-03-13T12:15:30.037" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say they are &lt;strong&gt;on-topic&lt;/strong&gt;, but perhaps still likely to get closed here (either as &lt;em&gt;not a real question&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;duplicate&lt;/em&gt;, depending on the circumstances), unless there is some additional context provided by the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/distributions&quot;&gt;distributions&lt;/a&gt; tag will bring up some examples. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=[distributions]+%2Bfit+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;This search&lt;/a&gt; narrows things down a little more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2970" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2013-03-13T12:15:30.037" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1577" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-14T19:37:22.743" Score="18" ViewCount="633" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been many threads on CV-meta about whether questions are on-topic, off-topic, are too-localized, etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1575/are-find-the-distribution-questions-on-topic&quot;&gt;Are &amp;quot;find the distribution&amp;quot; questions on topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/710/is-a-question-about-configuring-r-to-use-a-proxy-server-off-topic&quot;&gt;Is a question about configuring R to use a proxy server off-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/492/are-the-machine-learning-questions-on-topic&quot;&gt;Are the &amp;quot;Machine Learning&amp;quot; questions on topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1534/are-questions-about-terminology-off-topic&quot;&gt;Are questions about terminology off topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1514/what-standard-should-be-applied-in-deciding-whether-a-question-requires-sufficie&quot;&gt;What standard should be applied in deciding whether a question requires sufficient &amp;#39;statistical expertise&amp;#39; to be posted to CV?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1432/is-this-question-off-topic&quot;&gt;Is this question off-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1460/are-notation-questions-off-topic&quot;&gt;Are notation questions off-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1023/how-do-i-find-out-why-a-question-here-fails-to-meet-quality-standards/1024#1024&quot;&gt;How do I find out why &amp;quot;a question here fails to meet quality standards&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/543/is-this-question-too-local/545#545&quot;&gt;Is this question too local?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1692/survey-vs-survey-methodology-tags&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;survey&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;survey-methodology&lt;/code&gt; tags&lt;/a&gt; (deleted, only visible to high-rep users)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5028/1352&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Where to publish&amp;quot; questions: on-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5069/1352&quot;&gt;Course or what to study recommendation questions on-topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I offer this question as a clearing house where we can keep a running and persistent tally regarding the criteria that we use to establish whether something is on-topic, off-topic, too-localized, needs to be migrated, and/or low quality.  These criteria should only be applied to contemporary posts at the time they are made.  Criteria for deleting/closing/migrating questions made prior to the date of this post should be discussed elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please provide only one criterion per answer.  Please title your criterion so that it may be referred to in other criteria.  Please provide examples when possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please liberally up-vote and down-vote proposed criteria.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each criterion that crosses a certain threshold of up-votes (I propose 5) should be considered to be in-force.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Additional Rules&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If two criteria conflict, then the criterion with more upvotes applies, unless another criterion with more than 5 upvotes specifically addresses the case of conflict (in which case please cite the titles of the specific criteria implicated in your conflict resolution criterion). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If two conflicting criteria have an equal number of votes, but no de-conflicting criterion has crossed the threshold of acceptance, then  the criterion with the later original post date applies.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When possible discussions should occur in chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Active Chats&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;None&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastEditorUserId="1352" LastEditDate="2017-11-22T09:25:25.517" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T09:27:43.163" Title="What is on topic on Cross Validated?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|migration|on-topic|" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1577" CreationDate="2013-03-14T19:50:17.547" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On-topic: &quot;find the distribution”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt;  This criterion is currently accepted per &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1575/are-find-the-distribution-questions-on-topic&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; unless it falls below 0 votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Find the distribution&quot; topics are on-topic if:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They do not meet any other exclusion criteria&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Specifically the following criteria are relevant to consult:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Too Localized&lt;/strong&gt; (not yet specified, cf. the FAQ and use your common judgement):  If your 'find the distribution' question is specific to your data-set then it is too localized to be a good question on CV &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question asker demonstrates considerable research effort and describe clearly the steps they have taken to solve the problem (distributions considered etc)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question asker clearly describes the source(s) of the data.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question asker's problem is not &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; about using software to answer their question in which case the question should be migrated to the appropriate stackexchange site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not a real question&lt;/strong&gt; (not yet specified, cf. the FAQ and use your common judgement)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Duplicate&lt;/strong&gt; (not yet specified, cf. the FAQ and use your common judgement; list specific duplicates here, and cite them when closing the question)&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bdistributions%5D%20%2bfit%20is:question&quot;&gt;This search should provide a starting point to search for duplicates&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless otherwise noted, questions meeting this criterion should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2013-07-05T23:16:38.433" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-03-14T19:50:17.547" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1579" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-18T00:32:22.307" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is possible (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1553/answered-questions-filter-for-questions-page&quot;&gt;I discovered!&lt;/a&gt;) to filter out unanswered questions from a search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't seem to be possible to do the same when you pull up questions by clicking on a tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question search URL uses a query string to which the 'answered' condition can be added with a '&amp;amp;'. The tag URL is static. (That exhausts the HTML expertise I can bring to bear on the problem!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my analysis is correct, is there a way of adding an answered filter to tag 'searches'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2013-03-18T03:22:41.907" Title="Answered questions filter for tags page" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1579" CreationDate="2013-03-18T02:05:53.123" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To search under a tag, you can either click on the tag, or type &lt;code&gt;[&amp;lt;tag-name&amp;gt;]&lt;/code&gt; in the search field.  Once you get to the search returns page, the &lt;em&gt;advanced search options&lt;/em&gt; link appears with the guidelines for more sophisticated searches.  However, you don't need that link to appear on the page in order to use those options; from any old page you can type &lt;code&gt;[&amp;lt;tag-name&amp;gt;]+answers:1&lt;/code&gt; in the search field to get all the threads tagged with that topic that have at least one answer.  For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bclustering%5D%2banswers:1&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; are the questions tagged under clustering that have one or more answers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2013-03-18T03:22:41.907" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1577" CreationDate="2013-03-18T16:10:36.543" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On-topic:  Machine learning questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; This criterion is currently accepted per &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16/is-machine-learning-a-part-of-statistical-analysis&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1061/incoming-machine-learning-questions&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; unless it falls below 0 votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No special criteria regarding this topic have been specified.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No criteria have been excluded for this topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2013-07-05T23:15:55.650" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-03-18T16:10:36.543" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1582" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1584" CreationDate="2013-03-24T01:44:52.167" Score="24" ViewCount="325" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a situation I find quite frustrating, which seems to be happening to me a lot lately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will answer a question. After pondering it, I may think of some additional points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later I will go back and fix some typos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the OP will post some or all of his or her data. I will add some displays or other analysis, or maybe just post some comments based on some analysis of their data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the OP may make a number of comments on my answer, with followup questions. Other people add more questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Responding to those sometimes requires many changes to my answer (even if I'd like to respond in comments, often my answers are quite extensive and involve research - finding papers, doing simulations and so on). The responses are often much too long for a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, to produce a good responsive answer tends to take a large number of edits over a couple of days, sometimes several edits in quick succession (respond to OP, respond to other people, notice one or more responses to my responses requiring further edits).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least three times recently I've seen good answers I've invested many hours in polishing turn community wiki, &lt;em&gt;when they really aren't community wiki&lt;/em&gt; - I've just been making a better, more responsive answer in multiple stages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a major turn off to fixing mistakes, to putting in illustrative graphics when the data becomes available, to finding more relevant research and to responding to followup questions. That is, it puts me off giving better answers, when that time could be invested elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I also don't want to be bothering moderators to say 'please unwiki this' several times a week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to turn down - even just a little - how sensitive CV is to edits to answers from one person? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this something worth pursuing? Is it something that's not likely to be easily done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I just be producing less ambitious, less responsive answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: Comment/update added 1 May 2014 (local time)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the recent changes to the way automatic CWing works pretty much deals with my concerns on this issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2014-04-30T23:28:12.407" LastActivityDate="2014-04-30T23:28:12.407" Title="Do answers become community wiki too easily?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1583" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-25T09:42:56.500" Score="1" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't sign in with a different account (with stackexchange). Somebody before me used my computer to sign in to their account (with stackexchange)...and now whenver I try to log out and then log in with my own account, it doesn't work. I click log out and then try to sign in with my own account but it automatically opens up the other person's account. So how is it possible to change this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user22485" LastActivityDate="2013-03-25T13:19:10.123" Title="How can I sign in with a different account?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1582" CreationDate="2013-04-02T21:20:41.370" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;To close the loop:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But I also don't want to be bothering moderators to say 'please unwiki this' several times a week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per one of the moderators (&lt;strong&gt;whuber&lt;/strong&gt;, above, in comments):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's little trouble to respond to flags to &quot;please unwiki this&quot;--it doesn't take any thought and shouldn't be considered bothering the moderators. I think I can speak for all moderators everywhere when I say we appreciate efforts like yours to enhance and improve answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So please: continue to flag for un-wiki-ing! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it possible to turn down - even just a little - how sensitive CV is to edits to answers from one person?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that yours is something of an....unusual case. Most people don't edit their answers 20+ times. There's nothing wrong with this! And it appears your behavior is 100% in line with things we &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; to see. As aforementioned: please simply flag your wiki'ed answers to have that removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should I just be producing less ambitious, less responsive answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NEVER!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5373" LastActivityDate="2013-04-02T21:20:41.370" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1585" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1586" CreationDate="2013-04-04T18:50:30.307" Score="4" ViewCount="6187" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to know if commenters receive notifications when the original post they commented on, has been edited. I've received some editing suggestions through comments for one of my previously asked questions and I don't know if the person who suggested the edits has been notified of the change or should I reply to his comment to notify him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22236" LastEditorUserId="22236" LastEditDate="2013-04-04T18:57:54.977" LastActivityDate="2013-04-04T18:57:54.977" Title="Are commenters notified when the original post is edited?" Tags="|support|comment|editing|notifications|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1585" CreationDate="2013-04-04T18:53:38.677" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nope! The people who comment to a post are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; made aware by default that a post has been edited. The post owner, however, is given a little blue notification in their global inbox. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you'd like to let commentors know that a post has been edited, you would need to @-alert them in comments manually. Sorry!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5373" LastActivityDate="2013-04-04T18:53:38.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1577" CreationDate="2013-04-12T22:56:41.237" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On-topic: Notation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notation questions should be on-topic. Notation is critical; it is also often hard to search for. I would be generous with notation that is used in multiple fields such as math and statistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="1352" LastEditDate="2017-11-08T10:03:10.223" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T10:03:10.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1577" CreationDate="2013-04-12T22:58:36.543" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On-topic: Terminology&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as it's statistical terminology, I say it's on topic. Lots of statistical ideas have multiple names. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="1352" LastEditDate="2017-11-08T10:03:00.097" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T10:03:00.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1589" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-15T14:24:05.953" Score="4" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would recommend to make &quot;cart&quot; and &quot;classification-tree&quot; tags junior synonyms of &quot;decision-tree&quot;. Because, often CART acronym is regarded to be just a particular &lt;em&gt;method&lt;/em&gt; or algorithm of the tree building, along with other methods such as CHAID or QUEST. Decision Tree seems currently to be the most omnibus term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3277" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="CART as junior synonym to Decision Tree" Tags="|feature-request|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1589" CreationDate="2013-04-15T15:20:14.950" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_tree&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;decision tree&lt;/a&gt; is a generic method that goes well beyond CART or classification, I would be reluctant to make it a synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2013-04-15T15:20:14.950" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1589" CreationDate="2013-04-16T00:32:13.987" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some relevant facts:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We seem to have four tags related to this discussion: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cart&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cart&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cart&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/decision-trees&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;decision-trees&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;decision-trees&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tree&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tree&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tree&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/classification-tree&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;classification-tree&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;classification-tree&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At present, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/cart/info&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;decision-trees&lt;/em&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;em&gt;tree&lt;/em&gt; are synonyms that automatically map to &lt;em&gt;cart&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.  On the other hand, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/classification-tree&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;classification-tree&lt;/em&gt; is distinct, but indexes only two threads&lt;/a&gt;, one of which is also categorized under &lt;em&gt;cart&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's also worth recognizing that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135466/how-can-you-find-questions-with-ses-search-features-that-have-now-defunct-tags&quot;&gt;making a tag a synonym makes it much more difficult to find questions categorized under the old tag, and this problem has not been resolved&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The points you raise are good ones, but I agree with @whuber that it might not be best to change the current pattern of synonyms.  My suggestion would be to edit cart's tag wiki excerpt to indicate more accurately how it ought to be viewed / used by the community.  There is a linguistic &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;phenomenon&lt;/a&gt; in English (and probably all languages) whereby the name of a particularly salient member of a category comes to stand for the category as a whole.  (For example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleenex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kleenex&lt;/a&gt; is a proprietary / brand name, but is used to indicate any facial tissue.)  I can imagine &quot;cart&quot; coming to be used (perhaps incorrectly) the same way.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2013-04-16T00:32:13.987" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="974" CreationDate="2013-04-17T06:22:50.790" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quite simply, I come here to get help, and feel that I should pay it forward to the best of my (often meager) ability.  It also seems like some of the really stellar statisticians here either aren't familiar with or don't want to answer really basic econometrics questions (i.e.: causal inference from observational data), so maybe I can contribute to somewhat in that arena.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17359" LastActivityDate="2013-04-17T06:22:50.790" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1593" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1595" CreationDate="2013-04-17T20:15:03.697" Score="17" ViewCount="483" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I came across with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/56385/good-resources-online-or-book-on-the-mathematical-foundations-of-statistics&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; that was asking for book recommendation in an expertise area related to statistic. Then, I was checking for duplicates and I realized among all book recommendation questions some of them were community wiki (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1815/recommended-books-on-experiment-design&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/27553/the-reference-book-for-statistics-with-r-does-it-exist-and-what-should-it-cont&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/125/what-is-the-best-introductory-bayesian-statistics-textbook&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;) and some were not (e.g.,&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/23849/good-starting-book-on-psychometrics&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/51309/book-for-non-parametric-statistics&quot;&gt;6&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/49166/suggested-books-on-spatial-statistics&quot;&gt;7&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Logically, among the examples given above, the group of question classified as &lt;em&gt;community wiki&lt;/em&gt; were the ones more upvoted, edited, etc, according to Cross Validated SE rules stated &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/privileges/community-wiki&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although there are specific rules to be followed regarding community wiki classification, there are also flexibility which I understand these question fits. For flexibility I mean the quotation bellow:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Moderators can also choose to convert posts into community wiki mode if they feel it is appropriate for the question or answer. Once a post is made community wiki through any of the above ways, that mode cannot be removed (except through moderator intervention in extreme circumstances).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, once these type of questions have very similar objectives, do you think it is a good idea to standardize all of them to have community wiki status?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I know book recommendation questions are considered off topic in many SE sites (e.g.: Arqade, Ask Ubuntu, Engineering, Programmers, Server Fault, StackOverflow, SuperUser, Travel, among others). We have a different theme here in CV, but maybe their arguments are valid for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T09:38:32.213" Title="Should all &quot;book recommendation&quot; questions be classified as community wiki?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|references|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1593" CreationDate="2013-04-17T22:44:45.760" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't agree that &lt;em&gt;book recommendations&lt;/em&gt; are a good use for &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; site &amp;mdash; but let's set that aside for a moment to avoid using Community Wiki as a way to make these somehow &lt;em&gt;okay.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Wiki was &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; designed to solicit crowd-sourced lists of stuff. The problem with Community Wiki is it's often used to to allow questions that otherwise would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be allowed on the site. That's why we largely deprecated the feature &amp;mdash; &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/the-future-of-community-wiki/&quot;&gt;Future of Community Wiki&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with most of these &lt;em&gt;&quot;let's create a list&quot;&lt;/em&gt; questions is that it becomes really hard to begrudge anyone their addition, and every suggestion of a random favorite book/tool/application/website/blog/etc is no better than any other, until all semblance of &lt;em&gt;expertise&lt;/em&gt; is lost. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this question (for example): &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/125/246&quot;&gt;What is the best introductory Bayesian statistics textbook&lt;/a&gt;, 26 answers citing the &quot;best textbook&quot; (really?), and the voting has a strong correlation to the &lt;em&gt;age&lt;/em&gt; of the answer. More views = more votes. That's not exactly what we're supposed to do here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There will always be users who prefer to just ask the easy &lt;em&gt;&quot;getting started primers&quot;&lt;/em&gt; &amp;mdash; It's just easier to cast a broad net and pick through the rubble of random answers to see what suits them later. But let's start with the premise that, with overly-broad, generalized questions, &lt;strong&gt;users will only be &lt;em&gt;guessing&lt;/em&gt; how to help them, specifically.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site will work better if you help these users flesh out a question about what specific problem they are encountering and what they are having trouble understanding in their day to day work. Specific, long-tailed questions will work much better than &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;you guys talk and I'll pick out the good stuff later.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not like these polls of the community should never be asked anywhere (discussion forums are great for this stuff), but what makes a Stack Exchange site &quot;work&quot; is its laser-sharp focus on specific, long-tailed questions at can be answered canonically. We stick to the practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that we face in our day-to-day work. That's a pretty big ask, I know. But specifically forgoing these types of overly-generalized questions is how we set ourselves apart from every other forum on the topic. It's a tough sell, but it's that practical, low-noise approach to Q&amp;amp;A that drives experts to these sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And let's not (mis)use the Community Wiki feature to &lt;em&gt;fix&lt;/em&gt; these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2013-04-17T23:20:43.100" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1593" CreationDate="2013-04-22T09:57:01.247" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To answer the title question: Yes, all such questions should be community wiki.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose the creation of an exception rule for questions about book recommendations, similar to the one created for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/423/what-is-your-favorite-data-analysis-cartoon/&quot;&gt;What is your favorite “data analysis” cartoon?&lt;/a&gt; and  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/726/famous-statistician-quotes&quot;&gt;Famous statistician quotes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To ensure a certain quality, the exception rule can only be applied if the following conditions are met (needs discussion)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An answer has to provide a at least one paragraph long founded justification why the book is recommended. Answers simply naming the title or stating unfounded reasons (&quot;I liked it&quot;) have to be deleted. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Beware of duplicates. Identify them, then merge or delete them without mercy. If possible, merge related questions into a bigger one by broadening the scope of the question to avoid one question for every pair &lt;code&gt;X,Y,Z&lt;/code&gt;  where the question pattern is &lt;code&gt;I have expertise in y for x years, which book do you recommend for z&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All this type of questions needs to be community wiki to prevent the reputation-only-motivation to answer this type of questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reasoning&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Recommendations from experts matter&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No doubt, book recommendations from experts in the particular area are far more valuable than the ones provided by John Smith (no offense to all John Smiths) or the number of the times the book has been bought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get such recommendations, one needs ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a site, where experts do contribute&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a way to somehow measure the degree of expertise to assign a subjective degree of belief to the recommendations of the recommendation provider&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accidentically, stats.SE has both. On the other hand, the review system of a big name book seller, although it might be useful in general, loses more and more of its value if the area of interest gets more and more narrow. Less reviews, less ratings of reviews, etc..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Misuse of community wiki&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We all know: The quality of this site heavily depends on the users learning, accepting and living the rules which have lead to the quality. If the number of users who do not care about the quality in general (!) gets too large, the site is doomed, especially when users with a good amount of reputation do violate the rules in order to farm reputation on their own, hence being a bad example for new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO, the current sense of quality in the users with a good amount of reputation on stats.SE is great. On the other hand, stackoverflow (again, only my opinion) is already a big pile of mess with gems hidden in it. I am still able to find the gems, but only due to the search- and &quot;sort by vote&quot;-function. I cannot count the duplicates or the number of times I have stumbeld upon high-level users violating the rules discussed in meta, so I guess that one can get the deputy badge within a day without ease. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I suspect, that stackoverflow, as the flagship of the SE-sites with the most traffic, requires stricter rules to be sustainable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Summary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: While I agree with most of Robert's arguments, I do not think that such a harsh treatment of book-recommendations questions on stats.SE is necessary .... yet.&#xA;If the quality of the site starts to decrease due to heavy misuse we might go back and enforce all these rules. Until then, we should not delete or prevent content which provides actual value. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="264" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-04-18T19:58:36.007" LastActivityDate="2017-04-18T19:58:36.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1596" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1598" CreationDate="2013-04-24T01:09:11.417" Score="8" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;For my own use, I wrote an R function to plot the observed probability (with error bars) of some binary outcome by quantiles of some continuous predictor variable. Among other things, I plan to use it to check the linearity assumption for logistic regression. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would there be an appropriate way to share this function with others on CV? I think others might find it useful since I don't believe there's an off-the-rack implementation, and I certainly would be very grateful if others pointed out any bugs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11511" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T07:07:54.127" Title="Is it appropriate to share a homemade R function?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1538" CreationDate="2013-04-24T11:33:40.487" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We could have a page (a bit like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;about page&lt;/a&gt;) that clearly explains why it's better to accept answers. That page should be mandatory viewing for new posters &#xA;(or maybe just linked to prominently). After all, it seems to me that a large number of questions with unaccepted answers are coming from new users.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="603" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2013-04-24T11:33:40.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1596" CreationDate="2013-04-24T11:55:53.003" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it answers a particular question it is ok (you can even make your own question and answer it yourself if you would like). Just note here isn't the place for code review: any question needs to have some relation to stats outside of programming, as explained in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ps - You may want to check the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/45099/1036&quot;&gt;references on this answer&lt;/a&gt;. Their visual diagnostics are very similar in nature to what you are proposing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2019-04-23T05:35:25.117" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T05:35:25.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1599" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-25T19:00:19.797" Score="7" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/57157/calculate-mean-of-one-variable-while-controlling-for-another-using-regression&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;, which includes an R expression (for the gam function in the mgcv package). The R expression includes two elements (functions?) which do not appear on the help page for that function ('te' and 'bs').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;R, of course, almost glories in its perverse unsearchability - a Google search on &amp;quot;te&amp;quot; brings up 4.6bn results!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious resort would be to comment on the answer, asking for clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as I understand it, those with fewer than 50 points in the bank are barred from doing this, and needs must remain in ignorance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a bug or a feature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20639" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2013-04-25T19:11:05.420" Title="Points of information for lowly members" Tags="|feature-request|comment|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1599" CreationDate="2013-04-25T19:10:22.573" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a feature, present throughout SE, to defend against the hordes of off-topic misguided comments that would appear without such a restriction.  (The community closes tens of answers-cum-comments each day as it is.)  As a moderator I would just love to be able to grant people like you higher privileges instantly, on the evidence of goodwill and intelligence you have already provided, but I have no such power.  About all I can do is cheer you on and encourage you to ask good questions and provide good answers in oder to attain the needed 50 points.  It only takes one average answer, actually: five upvotes will do it.  (I have been able to use my voting privileges, as a community member, to grant you five of those points. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2013-04-25T19:10:22.573" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1601" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-30T21:00:24.053" Score="3" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I respond to a comment with a comment or question directed to the commenter, does the commenter necessarily see it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, is there any way I can draw their attention to it? I assumed the site would have a personal message feature, but if it does, I have not been able to find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12923" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2013-04-30T22:02:13.243" LastActivityDate="2013-04-30T22:02:13.243" Title="Comments on comments and communicating with a commenter" Tags="|support|comment|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1601" CreationDate="2013-04-30T21:57:32.103" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends -- if you use the &lt;code&gt;@-reply&lt;/code&gt; feature and the other person is already in the thread, then yes they will receive a notification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/98EYw.png&quot; alt=&quot;comments example&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this picture, I've underlined the &lt;code&gt;@-replies&lt;/code&gt; and circled various people who received replies in the course of the conversation. The user named &lt;code&gt;Yannis&lt;/code&gt; is highlighted in gray because he was the owner of the post that these comments are attached to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through the course of the conversation, &lt;code&gt;Yannis&lt;/code&gt; received the replies to &lt;code&gt;@YannisRizos&lt;/code&gt;, both because he was &quot;pinged&quot; as well as because he owned the post. The user &lt;code&gt;John Dibling&lt;/code&gt; received notice about any posts that included &lt;code&gt;@JohnDibling&lt;/code&gt; in the body at all, just as &lt;code&gt;Shog9&lt;/code&gt; received messages directed towards &lt;code&gt;@Shog9&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later on in the conversation, someone else (not Yannis) responds to &lt;code&gt;McCannot&lt;/code&gt; as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noteworthy: you &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; ping more than one person in a comment. Thus, if you wish to respond to BOTH another commentor as well as the post owner, you must &lt;code&gt;@-reply&lt;/code&gt; the other commentor and you can mention the post owner; the latter will be notified regardless of &lt;code&gt;@&lt;/code&gt; usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this helps!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5373" LastActivityDate="2013-04-30T21:57:32.103" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1603" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-04T10:54:54.237" Score="5" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember great comments on questions here to which I'd like to point. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy enough to get the URL of a given comment. The problem is to find great comments back. Are comments searchable (if yes, how) and if not, can be made?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="603" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2013-05-06T18:03:49.440" LastActivityDate="2013-05-06T18:03:49.440" Title="Are comments searchable?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1604" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1605" CreationDate="2013-05-05T13:24:57.937" Score="20" ViewCount="1496" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions formatted in LaTeX are easier to read, but not everyone who has permission to review a question/answer knows how to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there any instructions on CV about how to use LaTex&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2023-04-02T17:29:20.667" LastActivityDate="2023-04-02T17:29:20.667" Title="Instructions on how to use LaTeX on CrossValidated" Tags="|support|faq|math-display|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1604" CreationDate="2013-05-05T15:51:06.317" Score="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are some options that I know of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a CV &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/editing-help&quot;&gt;help page&lt;/a&gt; for the markdown options that the site supports.  That covers things like italics, and some (but very little) actual &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\LaTeX$&lt;/span&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a comprehensive 'tutorial' thread on &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;meta.Mathematics&lt;/a&gt; here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5020&quot;&gt;MathJax basic tutorial and quick reference&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One way to learn is to find something that uses &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\LaTeX$&lt;/span&gt; that you would like to also be able to do and right-click on it.  Then select &lt;code&gt;Show Math As -&amp;gt; TeX Commands&lt;/code&gt;, and it will display the code that was used to create it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you need to identify the &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\LaTeX$&lt;/span&gt; name / code for a symbol and you can draw it, &lt;a href=&quot;http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;detexify&lt;/a&gt; might help.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stack Exchange does have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Q&amp;amp;A site dedicated to TeX&lt;/a&gt;; that might be helpful as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After that, it's the broader internet; I've found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.onemathematicalcat.org/MathJaxDocumentation/TeXSyntax.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this MathJax documentation site&lt;/a&gt; to be very comprehensive and informative, but it's &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; slow to load.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20140110233329/http://web.ift.uib.no/Teori/KURS/WRK/TeX/symALL.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This webpage discovered by @Andre&lt;/a&gt; is less extensive, but loads &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; faster.  There's a handy 'reference card' &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20160304012339/http://elevatorlady.ca/doc/refcard/expressions.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lastly, I suppose you could ask a question about how to do something specific here (e.g.: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1419/&quot;&gt;latex-macros-for-expectation-variance-and-covariance&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-03-25T04:27:24.357" LastActivityDate="2023-03-25T04:27:24.357" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1603" CreationDate="2013-05-06T18:03:37.283" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer your direct question: nope, comments are not searchable (currently) by the in-house search feature. I believe Google looks at &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; text on the page, including comments, but there isn't a way to limit searching to comments only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if your SQL is pretty good, you can use &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Data.SE&lt;/a&gt; and search comment text for any graduated site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5373" LastActivityDate="2013-05-06T18:03:37.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1607" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-09T17:51:56.940" Score="8" ViewCount="364" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone posted a helpful answer to one of my questions. Now I want to contact that person. How can I do this? Can I send a direct email?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21998" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2016-06-17T19:13:25.240" LastActivityDate="2016-06-17T19:13:25.240" Title="How to contact another user?" Tags="|support|user-accounts|users|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1607" CreationDate="2013-05-09T18:56:08.517" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No (unless you happen to find him in chat). Only moderators can contact people via e-mail. For fuller explanation, see this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/57537/how-do-i-contact-other-users&quot;&gt;How do I contact other users?&lt;/a&gt; (meta-SO) and this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1250/how-to-contact-a-user&quot;&gt;How to contact a user?&lt;/a&gt; (meta-Cross Validated).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I find the auto-suggest option while asking a question incredibly useful; think it is worth it to pay attention to the list of &quot;Questions that may already have your answer&quot; during typing - although it may take a few seconds for the script to catch up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15964" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2013-05-09T19:07:34.767" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1610" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-10T06:40:03.837" Score="2" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a shout out regarding a &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/54795/data-assimilation&quot;&gt;Data Assimilation&lt;/a&gt; site proposed on Area51. Some data assimilation questions would be on topic here, but for the most part it is a related but different discipline. Neither this site or Computational Science (or any other) has much in the way of good data assimilation questions. If you are interested, please support this proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10354" LastActivityDate="2013-05-10T06:40:03.837" Title="Data assimilation proposal" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1611" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5106" CreationDate="2013-05-21T20:34:02.190" Score="10" ViewCount="247" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/59657/which-variables-have-too-much-variation&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;, where one answer from @EngrStudent brings a link to a nice picture of a bubble chart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although link usage usually makes questions / answers smaller, I thought in that case it would be very nice to have the picture appearing directly in the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have the impression that pictures and formulas encourage users'  participation: upvotes, comments, and even downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I know it also depends on the question and the picture to be posted, but:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there guidelines/patterns to follow when choosing between posting a picture or providing its link?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What would be the best option: embedded picture on a link, or the picture / chart themselves?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I forgot to look on SO's meta, and they DO have this &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/48636/should-pictures-be-linked-to-or-embedded&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; too. The most upvoted answer guides to post the picture directly, even though CV content is more theoretical than SO's. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is another &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9397/official-position-on-the-use-of-images-in-questions-and-answers&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; on SO, with accepted answers towards pictures being posted directly in threads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2018-01-02T15:12:47.913" LastActivityDate="2018-01-02T15:12:47.913" Title="How to choose between posting a picture and providing its link?" Tags="|discussion|images|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1612" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1613" CreationDate="2013-05-21T21:14:37.060" Score="2" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking through the badges. Some have never been awarded! Some seem pretty much impossible to get, and one or two seem to be almost &quot;anti-badges&quot; - e.g. &quot;unsung hero&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these badges the same on all SE sites? Maybe it is easier to get some of them at other sites (I am almost exclusively on this one; a little bit on CV, and even less on Mathmatics and History and TeX/LaTeX&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Who decided what badges there are and how you get them?" Tags="|support|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1612" CreationDate="2013-05-21T22:11:31.703" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, they are the same. Check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/17853/how-do-badges-work&quot;&gt;the meta-SO FAQ&lt;/a&gt; for more information.  Yes, some are much easier to get on huge sites like SO than they are on smaller sites.  The best way to get badges is to vote as much as you possibly can and constantly encourage others to vote.  That's practically the only place reputation comes from (apart from the tiny bit added for accepting answers) and most badges depend on accruing rep in some way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2013-05-21T22:11:31.703" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1616" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-30T19:43:25.250" Score="10" ViewCount="314" Body="&lt;p&gt;As adequately addressed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/909/r-specific-stackexchange-site-or-greater-integration-of-r-community-within-cv&quot;&gt;R-specific StackExchange site or greater integration of R community within CV?&lt;/a&gt;, there has been a discussion on whether or not to start an R-specific StackExchange site (an idea I support, since my not-strictly-stats-R-questions aren't R-programming questions per se either, and don't really belong in SO).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The discussion in the linked question took place a year and a half ago, but I cannot see any conclusion. So I am curious whether the community decided on &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; pursuing the idea of starting an R Stack Exchange site, or if the initiative simply withered away with time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5501" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2015-04-28T17:13:01.227" Title="What happened to the idea to start an R-specific StackExchange site?" Tags="|discussion|r|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1618" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-31T14:47:38.970" Score="-5" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, I asked a question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/62116/mapping-data-to-graphical-three-ways-of-representing-objects&quot;&gt;GIS&lt;/a&gt; about visualization and needed some examples to understand a paragraph of a book better. People commented that it has nothing to do with GIS and you better ask it on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/60512/mapping-data-to-graphical-three-ways-of-representing-objects&quot;&gt;cross validated&lt;/a&gt; and a moderator closed as a duplicate of a completely irrelevant question. Since I've got no answer to my question, I asked it on cross validated as well, since people suggested so. Again, the above mentioned moderator came and closed my question as not constructive and deleted  it (they commented  it is cross-posted even though I mentioned it in the body of the question). I have no idea why people behaved naively and why I have nowhere to get satisfying answers to my questions. This is very disappointing and it's the first time I've encountered such behaviors especially from the ones who are elected to moderate the community. Stack exchange has been my most reliable to source to solve my problems and answer my questions in about a year.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16949" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2013-05-31T15:03:20.940" Title="A closed question on GIS is again closed and deleted here" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2013-05-31T17:55:44.533" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1618" CreationDate="2013-05-31T15:03:20.940" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the above-mentioned moderator, I have fully explained the reasons for closing the question both times. The first time was &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; that it was off topic: as the link plainly shows, it was closed as a duplicate. You subsequently commented that you did not see how the duplicate was a duplicate--without further explanation--and I replied pointing out how it was. I am sorry that you are disappointed with the outcome, but shopping a question from one SE site to the other without addressing the issues raised is not likely to be successful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, one option (still) open to you is to flag the original question for migration. A better one is to consider seriously the reasons for closing it and address them first by editing the question to make it conform to SE guidelines.  (Comments on both the GIS site and this one all point to significant deficiencies that would prevent it staying open for many reasons.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One option that will not work on SE is to make public &lt;em&gt;ad hominem&lt;/em&gt; allegations or insinuations (as in your use of &quot;naively&quot;): that only incites the community to react negatively to &lt;em&gt;you,&lt;/em&gt; as the violator of the site norms of discourse, and may limit its ability to consider your &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; seriously.  Although it's not easy to alienate moderators--we're used to much worse--it's a better idea to engage our support instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, you haven't actually asked a question here, so if you do not edit it soon to actually ask one, the community will soon close &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; thread, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2013-05-31T15:03:20.940" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1616" CreationDate="2013-05-31T18:32:00.443" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The short answer&lt;/strong&gt;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reality has a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_quo_bias&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;status quo bias&lt;/a&gt;; the initiative seems to have simply withered away with time.  I doubt anyone (or the community as a whole) explicitly decided not to do it.  Either way, nothing along those lines came of that discussion, and there isn't an R.SE site listed in &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Area 51&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Peripheral discussion&lt;/strong&gt;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think you're right that there can be R questions that aren't a great fit for either SO or here.  One such question might be, 'is there an R package for &lt;code&gt;_____&lt;/code&gt;?'  (Note this question comes up regularly and seems to be tolerated.) In addition there are questions that are off-topic on all SE sites by design (e.g., open ended discussion questions).  However, there are other sites on the internet--the r help listserv and forums, etc.  I don't believe that SE should try to expand to the point where it encompasses any question that could be formed in English.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I agree with @whuber that having an R specific site &lt;em&gt;in addition to&lt;/em&gt; CV and SO would likely lead to more confusion, not less.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I personally have never felt any confusion about where a given question belonged unless the question itself was confusing (confusingly worded, for instance).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, my criterion is simple: &lt;em&gt;what does the OP need explained to them?&lt;/em&gt;  If someone were to ask 'how do you calculate the average in R?', that doesn't seem like my prototypical conception of programming, but they still need to know how to &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; R to get something done; an answer that explained what an average &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; would not help them.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's another way to think about it:  R (in part because it's freeware, in part because it's common) is often used to &lt;em&gt;illustrate&lt;/em&gt; a point in an answer on CV, but this is simply instrumental to the real answer.  If another language could have been used equally well, the question definitely belongs here; if not, it probably belongs on SO.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under any rubric there will be some threads that end up on one site that might better fit on the other; so be it.  For example there are questions on SO where someone asked why something worked like it did in R, but the problem isn't that they didn't understand R's syntax but that they don't understand the underlying statistical concepts.  There are some questions here (especially older questions that are too old to migrate) that really belong on SO.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The argument is sometimes made that R programming questions with any statistical implications should stay here because a user would need to be statistically savvy to provide an answer that is sensitive to those (perhaps unstated) issues.  I don't buy this.  If you look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/tags/r/topusers&quot;&gt;list of SO users&lt;/a&gt; who frequently answer R-taged questions, you will see that these people are quite statistically sophisticated.  Moreover, R is hardly used for anything other than data analyses of various sorts; almost anyone who is knowledgeable enough of R to answer SO questions will be familiar with statistics.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information about whether a question should be migrated, you might want to read: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1514/&quot;&gt;What standard should be applied in deciding whether a question requires sufficient 'statistical expertise' to be posted to CV?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2013-05-31T18:32:00.443" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1622" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1625" CreationDate="2013-06-07T05:16:43.563" Score="15" ViewCount="310" Body="&lt;p&gt;Occasionally I have done a search like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;smirnov -[kolmogorov-smirnov]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to locate posts that mention a word that's likely connected to the tag, but doesn't have the tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/55689/kolmogorov-smirnov-and-bootstrap&quot;&gt;second post&lt;/a&gt; that it turned up, for example, appears to be a possible candidate for having the tag added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do this for a variety of reasons, but one is simply to add tags to posts where I think they need it so people can find them more readily, for example. (More selfishly it helps me locate posts I feel like answering at the time that I won't have found in previous forays with the tag.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was just doing this kind of search with the &lt;code&gt;histogram&lt;/code&gt; tag now, and added a few (not every post that mentions the word needs the tag however and I am sometimes left to ponder when it's reasonable to add and when it isn't. This post is not about that quandary).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It occurred to me that maybe there's some issue with specifically &lt;em&gt;searching&lt;/em&gt; for missing tags and (sometimes) adding them in this manner. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not something I do all the time, just now and then as the mood takes me (usually after noticing what seems to me to be an important but missing tag on a post).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is there anything out of order with that kind of behavior? Is it a good idea? A mix?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;---&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A big thanks to AndyW and gung for their insightful, helpful, high quality analysis, and useful links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By way of summary so far - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;there's a problem with doing it for a single tag on a large number of posts without consultation &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;even with a smaller number of posts, there's a problem with doing it on more than a couple at a time in quick succession because of the impact on the front page - so it should be well 'spread out' in time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2016-09-12T13:41:15.407" Title="Is it reasonable to go tag-hunting?" Tags="|discussion|tags|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1623" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1624" CreationDate="2013-06-07T05:59:24.950" Score="3" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed the link to the faq was gone (though I can see where much or perhaps even all of it is located now) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I didn't notice the change before (am I unobservant - did I miss something I should have seen?). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I point to the faq a lot (well, no longer, I suppose!) I have one minor concern and then just a question out of interest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;links to the faq itself clearly still &quot;work&quot; by going to the 'help' (I looked until I found one and clicked it), but does the faq going away (or rather, basically changing in form) break any old links to the interior of the faq? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I presume not, it looks like it would have been cleanly handled but figured I'd ask).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Was the change just in CV or everywhere?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="I just noticed the faq was gone - are any links broken? was this a SE-wide thing or a CV thing?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1623" CreationDate="2013-06-07T07:27:28.737" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Indeed, it looks like &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/161595/150510&quot;&gt;the new Help Center replaces FAQ pages on all sites&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. Please note that old FAQ links should now point to the HC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information, see this SO thread: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/182812/introducing-a-brand-new-consolidated-help-center&quot;&gt;Introducing a brand new, consolidated, Help Center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2013-06-07T22:02:39.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1622" CreationDate="2013-06-07T12:27:32.327" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is IMO totally reasonable. In fact, I've seen other sites organize &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/103168/150339&quot;&gt;tag clean-ups&lt;/a&gt; to try to get the community involved in similar behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the only thing to be concerned with is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/837/1036&quot;&gt;mass retagging without community approval&lt;/a&gt;. Users are just expected to use their best judgement about the boundaries between mass retagging and cleaning up a few questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2013-06-07T12:27:32.327" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1577" CreationDate="2013-06-14T03:26:43.123" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On topic: Program specific questions (e.g. R, SAS, SPSS, Matlab, C++, python, etc) with any statistical content&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; This criterion is currently accepted per &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1/how-to-answer-r-questions&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/252/should-we-allow-more-computing-questions&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; unless it falls below 0 votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answer the question unless it clearly has no statistical content.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No other special criteria regarding this topic have been accepted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No criteria have been excluded for this topic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Related criterion under review:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On topic: Questions that require statistical reasoning to be answered correctly&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2013-07-01T03:28:06.757" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1628" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1630" CreationDate="2013-06-15T17:39:39.797" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to add a tag for &quot;sensitivity&quot; and was not able to do so; I did add one for specificity. It's very surprising these aren't already tags, and I am not sure what's up&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2013-06-16T14:02:00.470" Title="No tag for sensitivity?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1577" CreationDate="2013-06-15T20:13:03.620" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On topic:  Literature/reference requests relating to topics that are on-topic on CV&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No other special criteria regarding this topic have been accepted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No other special criteria regarding this topic have been excluded&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6029" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2013-07-05T23:17:03.123" LastActivityDate="2013-07-05T23:17:03.123" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1628" CreationDate="2013-06-16T14:02:00.470" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You had a typing problem.  Because there exists &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sensitivity-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sensitivity-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sensitivity-analysis&lt;/a&gt;, after you typed &quot;sensitivity&quot;, the system would assume you meant that tag.  &lt;em&gt;As soon as you type another character,&lt;/em&gt; it knows you mean something else.  Type a space at that point and you'll be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2013-06-16T14:02:00.470" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1631" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1632" CreationDate="2013-06-19T04:45:01.047" Score="8" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering if there's a bug or I missed something obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently - a few days back - got the (bronze) &lt;code&gt;self-study&lt;/code&gt; tag badge (I've had a few others before).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then noticed in my tag-list that I had more points in the histogram tag, but I have no badge for it. Currently &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges?tab=tags&amp;amp;filter=bronze&quot;&gt;no users have that badge&lt;/a&gt;* (two of my answers under this tag have over 70 points between them which is why it's so high for me).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=user%3a805%20[histogram]&quot;&gt;my answers&lt;/a&gt; in order of votes if anyone wants to see them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By my understanding, bronze tag badges are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/67397/list-of-all-badges-with-full-descriptions/68395#68395&quot;&gt;awarded when&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The user has 100 points (upvotes minus downvotes) on answers under this tag (check)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On at least 20 questions (check)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Only non-community-wiki, non-deleted answers are considered&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I passed the second of the first two requirements maybe a week ago (probably the points boundary was passed second, I wasn't really watching, I know it was close a few weeks back).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Community-wiki&quot; I hear you thinking. I know I did. But I checked my answers on the tag - I can't find &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; CW questions or answers among the ones I have answers on, but in any case, even if I missed some, I have been through one by one and I counted over 100 points and over 20 answers without CW or deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(At least &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/51718/assessing-approximate-distribution-of-data-based-on-histogram/51753#51753&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt; of my answers became CW at one point - I've edited and updated enough times to trigger CW - but that CW was removed on request long ago. I wouldn't think that this would affect the badge though.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* I note when checking that first link in my question that this page and other badge-related pages have recently changed... but I doubt that could affect anything either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I note that only 18 of my &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=user%3a805%20[histogram]&quot;&gt;answers there&lt;/a&gt; have positive points... but again, I don't think it could be that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not all that worried about the badge, but I'm at a loss to explain what the cause of it is (and if it happens to me for whatever reason, presumably it will occur again, so in that broad sense it's certainly a concern).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried searching meta on SO as well as here but I can't figure out what the issue is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did I miss something? Or is there perhaps a bug of some kind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2013-06-19T12:50:42.893" Title="Is there a problem with a (previously unawarded) tag badge?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1631" CreationDate="2013-06-19T12:50:42.893" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;That one puzzled me several times, too, on another site.  It turns out there is an additional requirement over which you have little control: a tag has to appear in at least 100 threads in order to qualify for badges.  Presently, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/histogram&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;histogram&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;histogram&lt;/a&gt; has been used only 93 times.  Have patience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2013-06-19T12:50:42.893" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1577" CreationDate="2013-06-21T00:39:14.847" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On topic: Questions that require statistical reasoning to be answered correctly&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, someone asking for help debugging code that is obviously the wrong solution to their actual problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt;  This criterion is atypical because it is a property based on the answer rather than the question itself.  If approved this criterion may be difficult to interpret consistently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastActivityDate="2013-06-21T00:39:14.847" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1577" CreationDate="2013-06-21T00:47:47.530" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Low quality: Opinions sought in regards to literature materials without descriptions of the relevant material or key discussion questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No other special criteria regarding this topic have been accepted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No other special criteria regarding this topic have been excluded&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastActivityDate="2013-06-21T00:47:47.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1635" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1645" CreationDate="2013-06-26T18:47:29.193" Score="3" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I flagged a post for &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just a few minutes after, I got the same question on the first post review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before the change on the flag options, the &quot;I am done&quot; button automatically was used to come activated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This time, it was not. I tried to flag again (just for testing), but the options were not available. Then, I just pressed &quot;No action needed&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably the second, but is this a new feature or a bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2013-06-29T19:36:15.700" LastActivityDate="2013-06-29T19:36:15.700" Title="First post review queue -bug or new feature?" Tags="|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="974" CreationDate="2013-06-28T07:51:52.883" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there's a mix of things but I'll mention a few motivations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) being known in the places I work/have worked as someone who knows a fair bit of statistics means I spend/spent a lot of time answering statistics questions &lt;em&gt;anyway&lt;/em&gt;. At least for the common questions, I can instead point people here - and in the place of answering those questions, carry my share by providing answers here too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) I particularly like the idea of a searchable, permanent repository of questions and answers, especially one where the questions get edited and clarified and the answers often improve over time - it means when I come up with a good answer, &lt;em&gt;it doesn't just 'die' when I finish solving one person's problem&lt;/em&gt;, like it tends to when someone asks me a question in person. The combination of convenience and permanence makes it worthwhile to come back and clarify a paragraph in response to a followup comment, or add some clarifying picture, or generalize an answer slightly so it also answers another question, or covers the question in a way the asker mightn't have even understood enough to ask. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I find that my better answers, ones I have crafted and reworked, tend to influence the way I write my explanations elsewhere. My written explanations of concepts slowly improve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) I learn from just reading other answers, and from answering questions myself (checking details in a paper or running a quick analysis or simulation I don't normally do changes a lot of stuff I &lt;em&gt;sort of&lt;/em&gt; know into stuff I actually know). I may have been a statistician for a long time, but there's still plenty I don't know, or don't know as well as I should. Among other things, it's a neat way to learn about things &lt;em&gt;I didn't know&lt;/em&gt; I didn't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) I like that there's an opportunity for &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; to ask questions, should I need it - and the bigger the community gets, the more value it's likely to have for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5) When I get bored, spending 10 or even 20 minutes writing an answer is notionally more rewarding than getting another coffee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;6) If you like statistics, it's just interesting, you know? A reasonable fraction of the questions are simply fun to think about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2015-09-24T13:26:32.420" LastActivityDate="2015-09-24T13:26:32.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1638" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1639" CreationDate="2013-06-28T14:45:53.057" Score="7" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;I notice that the Edit header says that small, single-character edits should be avoided unless absolutely necessary.  Does this mean that spelling should be left incorrect?  I don't have much impulse to correct spelling in the body of a post, but I do find myself editing titles to correct spelling fairly frequently.  Should I not do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Also, not sure whether this should be in CV meta or SE meta, please advise.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24671" LastActivityDate="2013-07-01T20:42:37.267" Title="Spelling Edits: Do 'em or not?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1638" CreationDate="2013-06-28T21:34:39.247" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll second @AbbyT.Miller's sentiment that titles are often more important than other aspects of a post.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In deciding whether to edit, remember that this bumps the post to the top of the main page.  Some things to consider are how active the main page is at the moment (it's less of a big deal when traffic is slower) and where the post is currently (it's less of a big deal if it's currently in the top half of the main page).  Even for older posts during busier times it could still be worth editing, though: an example would be if a post would be missed in a search due to the misspelling.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple other points:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think part of the disapproval of &quot;small, single-character edits&quot; is when there are multiple issues with a post (e.g., spelling errors in the body of a post) that are ignored, and only a small correction is made.  When evaluating a suggested edit, I find that less worthy.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think there can be some cultural / stylistic differences between the sites with respect to issues like this (for example, between high-traffic sites like SO, and smaller sites like CV).  So, I think this is an appropriate place to discuss this issue.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2013-06-28T21:34:39.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1640" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-28T23:38:53.763" Score="2" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have already flagged this question on StackOverflow, but I am not sure if a flag on that site gets anyone's attention on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't get the question's original (CrossValidated) link now, but this is the question's new (StackOverflow) link:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17373838/how-can-rcmdr-r-commander-be-used-for-within-subject-aka-repeated-measures-e&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17373838/how-can-rcmdr-r-commander-be-used-for-within-subject-aka-repeated-measures-e&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is about use of an R GUI, not about programming at all (even in R).  It is clearly unfit for StackOverflow, and I think it should be moved back to CrossValidated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is in the same vein as these CrossValidated questions:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/24304/r-versus-r-studio-output-differences&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/24304/r-versus-r-studio-output-differences&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/5292/good-gui-for-r-suitable-for-a-beginner-wanting-to-learn-programming-in-r/5301#5301&quot;&gt;Good GUI for R suitable for a beginner wanting to learn  programming in R?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/725/suggested-r-packages-for-frontier-estimation-or-segmentation-of-hyperspectral-im/3341#3341&quot;&gt;Suggested R packages for frontier estimation or segmentation of hyperspectral images&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;...which deal with the use of statistical analysis software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27142" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2013-06-30T09:42:09.187" Title="Why was this question migrated to StackOverflow? It does not mention programming at all" Tags="|support|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1641" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1642" CreationDate="2013-06-29T06:07:33.813" Score="4" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what the right approach is in this case (and there are a few similar cases in other tags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pivot&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;pivot&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; seems to be being used for both 'pivotal quantities' and 'pivot tables' (as in Excel). The first use of it seems to have been related to pivotal quantities, but it's been used about equally for both. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, I think the 'find similar questions' use of tags is somewhat compromised, since half the 'pivot' hits you will get will be the other meaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Might it make more sense to set up 'pivotal-quantity' and 'pivot-table' tags and edit so that the two are separated (perhaps making pivot a synonym of one of them)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would, of course, involve editing the tags on the existing questions with the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it's not a heavily used tag (11 times I think), so perhaps its okay to just leave it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what the reasonable thing to do is, so I figured I'd ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;---&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Taking into account @gung's concern about large scale changes to tags being disruptive, here's my plan:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Right now -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) give the ~half-dozen questions that have the &lt;code&gt;pivot&lt;/code&gt; tag but aren't about pivotal quantities have the &lt;code&gt;pivot-table&lt;/code&gt; tag (thus changing only about five or six tags at once)  [&lt;em&gt;done&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) make a tag wiki for &lt;code&gt;pivot&lt;/code&gt; to say it's for &lt;em&gt;pivotal quantities&lt;/em&gt; and mentioning the existence of the &lt;code&gt;pivot-table&lt;/code&gt; tag [&lt;em&gt;done&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) make a tag wiki for &lt;code&gt;pivot-table&lt;/code&gt; [&lt;em&gt;done&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(at this point, the tag situation is 'stable' in the sense that it's clear to users what to do, if somewhat imperfect)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In the future&lt;/strong&gt; (if needed)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) At some time later on -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) make a &lt;code&gt;pivotal-quantity&lt;/code&gt; tag&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) make a tag-wiki for it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) edit tags on the remaining ~5-6 posts to make it &lt;code&gt;pivotal-quantity&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d) edit the &lt;code&gt;pivot&lt;/code&gt; tag wiki to mention the use of the other two tags&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e) reserve the &lt;code&gt;pivot&lt;/code&gt; tag for &lt;em&gt;pivoting&lt;/em&gt; in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_element&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;matrix calculation&lt;/a&gt; (Gaussian elimination etc) sense, and perhaps the &lt;em&gt;pivot&lt;/em&gt;-element in quicksort sense, both of which have some relevance to statistics (but retaining the note about the other two tags)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OR&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Alternative to (2) if &lt;code&gt;pivot&lt;/code&gt; becomes widely used and the matrix sense is needed -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) make a &lt;code&gt;pivot-element&lt;/code&gt; tag&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) make a tag-wiki for it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) edit tags on any &lt;code&gt;pivot&lt;/code&gt; posts that should have this tag instead&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d) edit the &lt;code&gt;pivot&lt;/code&gt; tag wiki to also mention the use of the new tag&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* Edit2: In carrying out stage 1, I struck the following quandary - &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/12901/tracking-problem-with-a-formula&quot;&gt;This post&lt;/a&gt; is tagged as &lt;code&gt;pivot&lt;/code&gt; ... and at first glance I had thought it was connected to &lt;code&gt;pivot-tables&lt;/code&gt;, but now I am not at all sure it is. In fact I can't work out how the term &lt;code&gt;pivot&lt;/code&gt; comes into it at all. Should it be retagged as some other kind of thing? [&lt;em&gt;Fixed by @gung&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2013-06-30T11:27:43.910" Title="The `pivot` tag is being used for two completely unrelated things - should I try to separate them?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-06-30T03:18:03.103" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1641" CreationDate="2013-06-29T11:48:10.000" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Go ahead, please!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thing your arguments (1 to 5, listed bellow) are very valid. Added arguments 6 and 7.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;..pivot seems to be being used for both 'pivotal quantities' and 'pivot tables'&quot;- Check;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;.. I think the 'find similar questions' use of tags is somewhat compromised..&quot; - Check;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;....make more sense to set up 'pivotal-quantity' and 'pivot-table' tags...&quot; - Check;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;...perhaps making pivot a synonym of one of them...&quot; - Check;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;... it's not a heavily used tag (11 times I think)...&quot; - Check;  (this is not a counter argument IMO, but supports the idea it is easier to fix it now).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Glen_b is a experienced user of CV -  Check;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is weekend and CV's traffic is very slow; - ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just one comment is that &quot;pivot table&quot; does not seem to be a statistic subject, so it could fit under other tags, for example, &lt;code&gt;excel&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/61563/add-values-from-multiple-columns-in-pivot-table&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; is one example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i) create &lt;code&gt;pivotal-quantity&lt;/code&gt;, and make &lt;code&gt;pivot&lt;/code&gt; a synonym;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ii) add at the &lt;code&gt;pivot&lt;/code&gt;'s tag excerpt (..&quot;do not use this tag for pivot-table&quot;);&lt;br&gt;&#xA;iii) remove the &lt;code&gt;pivot&lt;/code&gt; tag from pivot-table questions, and certifies this questions will have the tag &lt;code&gt;excel&lt;/code&gt;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: &lt;strong&gt;Implemented&lt;/strong&gt; by @Glen_b, with community approval. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Right now -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) give the ~half-dozen questions that have the pivot tag but aren't about pivotal quantities have the pivot-table tag (thus changing only about five or six tags at once) [done]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) make a tag wiki for pivot to say it's for pivotal quantities and mentioning the existence of the pivot-table tag [done]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) make a tag wiki for pivot-table [done]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(at this point, the tag situation is 'stable' in the sense that it's clear to users what to do, if somewhat imperfect)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2013-06-30T11:27:43.910" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1643" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-29T18:37:24.270" Score="4" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/independence&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;independence&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;independence&lt;/a&gt; tag should be split in two (or something): One for independent &lt;em&gt;data&lt;/em&gt; the other for independent &lt;em&gt;variables&lt;/em&gt;. These are often confusing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2013-06-29T18:59:26.693" LastActivityDate="2013-07-08T13:37:53.180" Title="Independence tag" Tags="|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1643" CreationDate="2013-06-29T19:02:48.520" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a reasonable point.  I just edited the tag's wiki &amp;amp; wiki excerpt to indicate that it is not for independent variables.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2013-06-29T19:02:48.520" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1635" CreationDate="2013-06-29T19:36:09.557" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is fixed now. Flagging the post outside the context of review should pre-enable the &quot;I'm Done&quot; button again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2013-06-29T19:36:09.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1640" CreationDate="2013-06-30T09:42:09.187" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Despite the close vote reason ('programming issue', which is the default message actually, see below), there's nothing in your question that would look like a statistical issue. As such it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;off-topic&lt;/a&gt; and it might be better served on another site (certainly not Super User where there seems to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://superuser.com/questions/tagged/r&quot;&gt;limited interest for R&lt;/a&gt; compared to, say, Stack Overflow where there's a vibrant community of R users). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bdNbF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also worth noting that our site policy has evolved since its inception, and we now try to focus on questions that require statistical expertise rather than questions asking about tools, or polls involving shopping-list or extended discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2013-06-30T09:42:09.187" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1638" CreationDate="2013-07-01T00:16:13.737" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll talk about what I try to do, and let others voice their opinion on its suitability or unsuitability:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) I &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; try to fix spelling errors in titles, even if its the only thing wrong. I think clean, clear titles matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Since this is a permanent repository, I'd prefer to have good spelling and formatting in posts, but I think it's pointless to fix one spelling error, &lt;em&gt;unless it's a key word someone might search for and it's only used that once&lt;/em&gt;. If I do edit, I &lt;em&gt;try to fix absolutely everything I can at once&lt;/em&gt; - every bit of spelling, grammar, formatting, unclear expression, ambiguous abbreviations - the lot. (I don't always succeed - e.g. I sometimes spot something important immediately &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; I finish editing, to my annoyance; in that case, I figure if I re-edit immediately, at least it only bumps it while it's still at the top of the active queue. If there's only a trivial problem remaining, I do try to leave it alone.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) If I am prompting the original poster to add something, I will sometimes mention other things they should fix in their own edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the principles that I think are important:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;clarity/comprehensibility and being able to find posts matters&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;one or two minor spelling or grammar errors alone that don't impact the first thing aren't a big deal &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if you're editing anyway, get everything you can, including stuff that doesn't matter (not least, because then nobody else will be tempted to edit it three hours later)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;try not to keep bumping old posts during busier times. If you're editing three six month old posts each four times in four hours, you should maybe slow down and give the new posts a chance. (Occasionally, I have caught myself re-editing an answer or question on an old post more than once in a short period ... and then I hear the @gung-angel on my right shoulder whispering to me to avoid temptation and spare the front page)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;---&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To respond to your question more directly, I think you &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; fix titles, and you sound like you're doing just fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2013-07-01T00:45:58.220" LastActivityDate="2013-07-01T00:45:58.220" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1638" CreationDate="2013-07-01T20:36:43.317" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I try to control myself as I understand that it is not the way things are done around here but I often have the impulse to fix even small things, Wikipedia-style. That way, we can develop a tidy and clean knowledge base over time. I feel that fixing typos and grammar mistakes, helping non-native speakers like myself, even gradually improving each other's answers is very valuable and we should not be too shy about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only issue seems to be this “bumping” on the home page but this does not seem like a huge issue, at least as long as nobody edits dozens of questions &lt;em&gt;en masse&lt;/em&gt;. At least questions that have just been bumped for some other reason (new answer, other edit, random “community” poking) can be edited aggressively. Also giving some new exposure to interesting unanswered questions could be seen as an upside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought this possibility should just be mentioned, even though I am not a moderator or anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6029" LastEditorUserId="6029" LastEditDate="2013-07-01T20:42:37.267" LastActivityDate="2013-07-01T20:42:37.267" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1649" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1651" CreationDate="2013-07-01T22:49:08.600" Score="8" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;On a few occasions I have come across questions where the question title asks one thing but the question body asks something related but different. Sometimes, the difference between the question title and the body of the question is quite significant, yet the questions still remain very closely related - close enough that it would be unfair to say the OP has asked an unclear question or anything like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if anyone else can relate to what I'm saying, and, if so, what is the best way to go about answering such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does one answer the question asked in the title? Does one answer the question(s) asked in the body of the question? Perhaps one ought to address both the questions posed in the title and the body? Which of the two questions is more important and deserves to be answered; title or body?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24617" LastEditorUserId="24617" LastEditDate="2013-07-01T23:03:13.567" LastActivityDate="2013-07-02T00:55:35.430" Title="Should I answer the question title or the question body?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1649" CreationDate="2013-07-01T22:50:43.363" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you perceive a conflict between title and body (or even an inconsistency anywhere in the question), &lt;em&gt;write a comment asking for clarification.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2013-07-01T22:50:43.363" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1649" CreationDate="2013-07-02T00:49:57.580" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it's clear the OP wants answers to both, I usually try to answer both, but point out that there's a discrepancy that they should edit to fix on the basis that the question and answer should aim to be more than simply solving one user's immediate problem, but should serve as an aid for someone trying to search for an answer such as this. (I tend to be a bit of a stickler for something along the lines of &quot;actually ask a clearly identifiable question or questions&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Occasionally - especially if I suspect they won't come back and edit, such as having been unresponsive to edit requests before - or where the required edit is obvious, I will edit myself to make title and question-body correspond and ask them to check it still matches what they wanted to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, especially if it's less clear what they actually want, I simply comment asking them to address the discrepancy in some way (by either editing the title, or more likely the body of the question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think sometimes people's understanding of what they want to ask evolves as they ask it (which may indicate a lack of research/effort up front, but it's also human nature), but that's partly why the ability to edit your own questions is there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2013-07-02T00:55:35.430" LastActivityDate="2013-07-02T00:55:35.430" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1653" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1655" CreationDate="2013-07-04T22:16:09.957" Score="8" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently, the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/error&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;error&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;error&lt;/a&gt; has been used mainly for two purposes on CV:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Statistical measure of deviation;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Notification messages shown when statistics-related software fails.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/residuals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;residuals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;residuals&lt;/a&gt; tag. According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Errors_and_residuals_in_statistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;em&gt;error&lt;/em&gt; (observed - true function value) and &lt;em&gt;residual&lt;/em&gt; (observed - estimated function value) are related but not same.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/deviation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;deviation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;deviation&lt;/a&gt;, but it is a synonym to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/standard-deviation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;standard-deviation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;standard-deviation&lt;/a&gt;.  We also have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bias&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bias&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bias&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it worth it to fix this? If yes, how? &#xA;Please, present a proposal considering two actions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;looking forward (i.e. to stop &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/error&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;error&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;error&lt;/a&gt; tag being used for different purposes from now and on);  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to fix this looking backwards (i.e., retag in a proper manner existing &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/error&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;error&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;error&lt;/a&gt; questions).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking forward the action which will result from this question, it was mapped (05th, July, 2013) among the 125 &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/error&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;error&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;error&lt;/a&gt; questions, 8 relating to software error messages.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;They are (from newest to oldest):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/58190/error-message-of-ugarchfit&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/54686/dudi-pca-error-in-vrow-w-non-numeric-argument-to-binary-operator&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/53385/jags-error-when-fitting-logistic-additive-mixed-model&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/41786/compilation-error-in-jags&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/33056/how-do-i-get-the-sse-for-predictions-using-sas&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/26045/array-index-is-less-than-one-winbugs-error&quot;&gt;6&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/24270/roc-curve-error&quot;&gt;7&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2085/checking-assumptions-for-random-effects-in-nested-mixed-effects-models-in-r-s&quot;&gt;8&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Status-completed (Edit 2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As far as I could go, I asked to CV's moderators to create the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/error-message&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;error-message&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;error-message&lt;/a&gt; tag as suggested by @A.M. (and with no objection by @gung). @chl gently, helped me in this step;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As suggested by @gung in #1 item, the tag wiki excerpts were edited (with peer review) for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/error&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;error&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;error&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/error-message&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;error-message&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;error-message&lt;/a&gt; to avoid confusion in future questions;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From the eight questions above, five of them had the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/error&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;error&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;error&lt;/a&gt; replaced by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/error-message&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;error-message&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;error-message&lt;/a&gt; as suggested in both answers (but not at once, as suggested on @gung's answer, item #3). Two of them (2 and 7) crashed in the meantime, and one I overlooked about the tag usage (5). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Error tag is ambiguous" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1653" CreationDate="2013-07-04T22:43:12.490" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My opinion is &lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt;.  Tags are one of the most important SE features for keeping the site organized.  I believe it is crucial to have tags organized properly to keep the site running smoothly, and will always require some level of effort at upkeep / maintenance.  There are several options that exist for doing so:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit tag wiki's, and especially (IMO) tag wiki excerpts to indicate how the tag should be used.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make a tag a synonym of another tag.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Extensive (typically) editing of tags on existing questions.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option #1 is the easiest and most practical, although it mainly only has an influence going forward (i.e., your second #2).  Option #2 is very difficult to do in practice; you cannot nominate or vote on tag synonyms until you have 5 votes on the tag, and no one ever looks at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms&quot;&gt;tag synonym vote page&lt;/a&gt;, so suggested synonyms just sit there collecting dust.  (Note also that once a tag is made a synonym, it is harder to find the indexed questions--a problem that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135466/how-can-you-find-questions-with-ses-search-features-that-have-now-defunct-tags&quot;&gt;has never been fixed&lt;/a&gt; to my knowledge.)  In my opinion, option #3 can be disruptive when it's done with more than a couple of threads, so you are either disrupting the main page, or it's a major pain to do it over time.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, my primary suggestion is to edit the tag wiki excerpt (option #1).  The question is &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; we should have for the various tags, &lt;strong&gt;and that should be discussed here before moving forward.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Below, I note some of my suggestions regarding these issues.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2013-07-05T04:23:03.947" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1653" CreationDate="2013-07-05T03:30:13.343" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To fix this for new posts, you &lt;strong&gt;really&lt;/strong&gt; want to stop using the ambiguous tag completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[error terms]&lt;/code&gt; for error terms&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[error messages]&lt;/code&gt; for program error messages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both will show up just fine when people start typing 'error'.  No re-training will be necessary when the old tag is made to stop popping up as an option (i.e. immediately)...except for the few people who have the power to create tags and don't know about the change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To fix this for old posts, there is going to be a lot of effort to re-tag things regardless, but there is an advantage to ceasing all use of &lt;code&gt;[error]&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It will be absolutely clear what posts remain to be tagged at any given time.  It will always be the case that all posts tagged with &lt;code&gt;[error]&lt;/code&gt; remain to be processed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, no matter what tag scheme is chosen, separately processing batches of questions tagged with program names should help a bit, since the rate of need for the two new tags will differ for those tagged with programs versus those that are not.  'Separately' could mean assigning a given person to only process program-tagged or non-program-tagged questions, or just sticking to one type on any given re-tagging spree.  You &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; even want to automatically tag program-tagged questions with the new program error message tag and non-program-tagged questions with the new error term tag.  It will be wrong, but it will be less wrong than what we have now.  ...and again, if you use my suggestion, you will still always know which questions' tags still need human vetting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27142" LastActivityDate="2013-07-05T03:30:13.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1643" CreationDate="2013-07-05T04:22:56.833" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a bit of a repeat of the answer I posted here:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1653/error-tag-is-ambiguous&quot;&gt;Error tag is ambiguous&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...but we should really consider ending the use of the ambiguous tag and moving to new ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The new tag terms should not fight users, though.  Many, many people use the term &quot;independent variable&quot;, so you will have a constant battle on your hands if you try to enforce the exclusive use of predictor.  &quot;independent variable&quot; and &quot;predictor (variable)&quot; are synonyms, so the tags should match that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[independent variable]&lt;/code&gt; (or &lt;code&gt;[independent variables]&lt;/code&gt;), and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[independent data]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doing it this way will make the re-tagging job easier, leaving &lt;code&gt;[independence]&lt;/code&gt; as the tag to mean &quot;I need a new tag&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most importantly, whenever users start &lt;em&gt;typing in &quot;independen...&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, they will find a tag that matches what they want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27142" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2013-07-05T04:22:56.833" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1657" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1658" CreationDate="2013-07-05T09:04:33.840" Score="5" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently dataframe and data.frame both exist as tags, yet are obviously synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that dataframe has more questions under it, I'd be inclined to make that master, but on the other hand data.frame might be more clearly the thing in R.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it reasonable to suggest both? (I'd be disinclined unless that was the expected behaviour in such cases)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any suggestions or comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2013-07-16T20:57:39.083" Title="dataframe vs data.frame tags which should be master?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1657" CreationDate="2013-07-05T09:22:43.297" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have converted all occurrences of &lt;code&gt;data.frame&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dataframe&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dataframe&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dataframe&lt;/a&gt;. These two tags are now synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2013-07-05T09:22:43.297" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1659" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1660" CreationDate="2013-07-07T12:34:16.490" Score="3" ViewCount="8323" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/validity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;validity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;validity&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/validation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;validation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;validation&lt;/a&gt; be synonyms, or there is a difference in meaning between them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far (07th, July, 2013):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/validity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;validity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;validity&lt;/a&gt; was used 16 times on CV and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/validation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;validation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;validation&lt;/a&gt; 69 times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a first suggestion for tag wiki excerpt given the answers of @gung and @Glen_b.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Validity&lt;/strong&gt; is the extent to which a concept, conclusion or measurement is well-founded and corresponds accurately to the real world. The validity of a measurement tool is considered to be the degree to which the tool measures what it claims to measure.&lt;/s&gt; DO NOT use this tag for &quot;validation&quot; model purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Validation&lt;/strong&gt; is the process of deciding whether the numerical results quantifying hypothesized relationships between variables, obtained from regression analysis, are in fact acceptable as descriptions of the data. &lt;s&gt; DO NOT use this tag for asking if it is valid (&quot;validity&quot;) to use a certain test, measurement or analysis. &lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Validity_(statistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia 1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_model_validation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt; Please, manifest the suggestion with upvotes, downvotes, additional comments, additional answers (we have right now 17-July-2013: question -1, @gung +9, Glen_b +6). &lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit 2 (status-completed):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag wiki excerpts were edited and approved according to modifications suggested by @gung and @Glen_b. See them &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/validity&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/validation&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Further improvements can be suggested directly on the tag wiki excerpts pages or with the opening of a new thread.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2013-07-19T13:13:35.437" Title="What is the difference between tags &quot;validity&quot; and &quot;validation&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1659" CreationDate="2013-07-07T14:45:38.127" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think these should be synonyms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Validity&lt;/strong&gt; is a &lt;em&gt;property&lt;/em&gt; of something.  For example, it can be a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Validity_%28statistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;property of a measurement&lt;/a&gt;--that it measures what it purports to measure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what the tag wiki excerpt currently indicates, and that seems to be how it's being used (&lt;em&gt;note: I edited one question where&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;validity&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;was being used in a different sense&lt;/em&gt;).  Nonetheless, there are other possibilities, such as a property of an &lt;em&gt;experiment&lt;/em&gt; (e.g., internal &amp;amp; external validity) or a property of a &lt;em&gt;model&lt;/em&gt;; if need be, we could create additional tags to denote these and ensure the excerpts do a good job of guiding people in their use.  At present, this doesn't seem to be necessary, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Validation&lt;/strong&gt; is a &lt;em&gt;process&lt;/em&gt;.  Examples might be &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/cross-validation/info&quot;&gt;cross-validation&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/sensitivity-analysis/info&quot;&gt;sensitivity analyses&lt;/a&gt;.  (I'm sure there are more.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I do think we need to add a tag wiki excerpt for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/validation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;validation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;validation&lt;/a&gt; to guide people in its appropriate use.  We simply need to figure out here what that should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2013-07-07T21:33:54.267" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1643" CreationDate="2013-07-08T13:37:53.180" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In regression, variables are rarely &lt;strong&gt;independent&lt;/strong&gt;. If you have a balanced experiment design, they can be made independent and uncorrelated (assuming you have no missing data). In pretty much every other situation, including every observational study (and that's what people usually come to this site with), the regressors are &lt;strong&gt;correlated&lt;/strong&gt;, and hence cannot be said to be independent. While I am totally fine referring to the response variable as the &quot;&lt;em&gt;dependent variable&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, I deliberately avoid the parallel, and always refer to the regressors as &quot;&lt;em&gt;explanatory variables&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we can help the utterly confused readers of the site, we should do this. I am in no position to enforce my idiosyncratic terminology use on everybody, but I would suggest rethinking what the &lt;code&gt;independent variables&lt;/code&gt; may refer to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh yes, the factors that come out of principal component analysis are uncorrelated (and hence independent if they are normal). And there's the method of independent component analysis, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ica&quot;&gt;properly tagged&lt;/a&gt; &lt;code&gt;ica&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2013-07-08T13:37:53.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1659" CreationDate="2013-07-09T03:02:55.987" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usage of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Validity_%28statistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;'validity'&lt;/a&gt; tends mostly to refer to the sense in used in psychometrics, education and other social sciences and often refers to specific tests or instruments to measure some particular thing (&quot;IQ-test validity&quot;). 'Validation' is usually used in a different (though not entirely unrelated) sense relating to the properties of particular statistical models - model-validation, predictive-validation, cross-validation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While occasionally they're used to talk about the same thing (like when a education researcher talks about &lt;em&gt;validation&lt;/em&gt; of an instrument or someone who has just done some model validation talks about model-validity), usually the two are used quite differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such I &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; think these should be synonyms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2013-07-09T03:02:55.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1663" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-10T22:52:54.907" Score="2" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was going through &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/63646/how-to-find-patterns-and-identify-changes-in-them-in-time-series-with-r&quot;&gt;CV&lt;/a&gt; and it seems to me that @Tom Reilly is promoting his own business along with the answer to OP's question. Is this considered OK in CV?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user227710" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2013-07-11T01:31:54.597" Title="Does this answer in CV imply advertisement?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1663" CreationDate="2013-07-11T01:31:54.597" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anders UP gave a good answer in a comment to the question.  The concern behind the question is that answers involving a product someone is closely connected with &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be less than objective.  That's a legitimate concern, so moderators and engaged users do our best to identify such connections and reveal them to the community.  When the answerer discloses their connection to any product or service used or recommended in their answer, all readers have the information they need to make their own judgments about possible conflicts of interest. That should lay the concern to rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we were to prevent everyone who has ever released software or patented a method or written a book from writing about it or using it, we wouldn't have any experts left to share their knowledge and insights.  I wish we had more Tom Reillys making such contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2013-07-11T01:31:54.597" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1665" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-11T06:31:04.953" Score="23" ViewCount="825" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's one user here (and I don't plan to name names) who asks a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of questions as they read various aspects of statistical literature (though they often don't say what exact document they're reading; it sometimes seems to be well outside the mainstream), but whose questions often betray a failure to actually read the document they're quoting, a failure to read the responses that they get and so on down the line. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get the impression that if an idea isn't instantly obvious - even right in the middle of a sentence, the response is &quot;post a question!&quot;. In some threads, every response seems to just generate another question, or even two, or three, &lt;em&gt;even when those questions have already been answered&lt;/em&gt; (I think in the last day or so I have been asked at least four questions I had already answered in previous responses to the same user in the last day or so). New questions then spin off the responses, with little regard for how easily the answers may be found with google or wikipedia or CV itself (or indeed that someone posting such questions would already have the resources to find out even without any of those).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, I sometimes take to downvoting for fairly obvious lack of research. At other times I try to ignore that poster. And sometimes I try to answer (... and am then back reliving when my son was a three year old who would just say &quot;why?&quot; to absolutely everything, without actually listening to any of the answers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far it's probably only been about one post in 30 that I have resorted to downvoting (I don't know the fraction for sure, I don't keep track, and I've probably voted at least as many up), but I find myself considering it more often recently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is not a concern about elementary questions; I answer much less sophisticated questions from less knowledgeable users quite happily.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly the 'ignore' route would be okay -- we're free to choose who we want to answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to what extent is (possibly frequent, given the frequency of posts) downvoting for lack of research okay? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm particularly interested in suggestions of criteria to apply or strategies to use, both when deciding how to vote on such posts and when replying (if at all) to the user.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: by way of information - this user has generated over &lt;em&gt;2000&lt;/em&gt; questions on the SE network in under 4 years, a large majority of them in the last two years. I strongly suspect that they actually face virtually none of these questions as actual problems, and sometimes seem to ask questions as little more than a form of entertainment. (If I saw this on one of the stats groups on reddit, I'd consider some of their behavior as effectively trolling.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit2: To clarify - I am in no way suggesting I would vote down a post because someone with a number of substandard posts has posted something which itself is not substandard -- I think each post should stand on its merits (indeed I wish there were more good posts from this user I could upvote - I'd much prefer to upvote good posts and try to encourage suitable behaviour that way); I mention other posts to point out that if I voted down every post of theirs that I thought merited downvoting on its own (through lack of research), then some days I would be downvoting a significant number of posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2013-07-12T00:52:04.377" LastActivityDate="2013-09-02T14:12:06.790" Title="Is it reasonable to downvote a fair fraction of one user's posts for lack of research?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1665" CreationDate="2013-07-11T13:02:12.763" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edit 2: After reading, all the other three answers (+3) and which were better than mine, I have partly changed my mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In such extreme situation (after you have tried a couple of times to advise or make a point) ignore the pattern / behaviour (in case one does not want to consider each post as an individual situation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With time, community will give guidelines about how to act in such situations.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO, the great majority of questions are legitimate (some / many of them are very good ones). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What bothers me, and maybe other users are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;misleading feedback;  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;editing the question and modifying its meaning after someone provides a good answer,  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However&lt;/strong&gt;, from an objective point of view, what rules does this kind of conduct disobey in CV? I am not sure, but I think none.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I read on a SO's meta thread once, someone advising if a question is edited after an answer is posted, the answerer can leave a note / edition, saying the question was edited and the answer does not fully address the question anymore).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer to the question:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, but focusing on the thread and applying same criteria for other users.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, I would like to reinforce @whuber's comment, as questions very related or duplicates are not, let's say, a good thing for the site, and community can help a lot to identify them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2013-09-02T12:38:54.023" LastActivityDate="2013-09-02T12:38:54.023" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1665" CreationDate="2013-07-11T14:07:56.050" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you think a question/answer should be downvoted - whatever that means to you - you should downvote it. I personally would try to stay away from voting down a question/answer purely due to &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; is posting it and would try to restrict my reasons to something inherently related to post (which I think is what you're describing) but I wouldn't deride you for doing so if you thought there was a good reason. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO, it's a waste of energy to try to understand how others vote, what is the &quot;right way&quot; to vote, and why vote counts may disagree with your own opinion about the quality of post. Disagreements about these things are inherently part of an anonymous voting system like this and I've yet to see a productive discussion about it on the SE network. So, do whatever you think is appropriate. Just be aware that if you downvote a person many times in a short period, those votes may be automatically reversed by the system. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4856" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2013-07-15T19:13:18.317" LastActivityDate="2013-07-15T19:13:18.317" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1665" CreationDate="2013-07-11T16:20:16.023" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My two cents:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm generally reluctant to downvote, but you've laid out a reasonable argument, and I couldn't much fault you for downvoting. (I think you should include an explanatory comment in each case, though.)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you go on a downvoting spree, it will undoubtedly get the OP's attention (whether it will help is another issue... ), but it will be automatically reversed, as @Macro notes.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ultimately, you are free to do whatever you want, as @Macro also notes.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Here's another suggestion:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the OP asks a question that you have answered in your answer to the OP's previous question, vote to close as a duplicate (again, with an explanatory comment).  This does not match the duplicate close vote definition &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt;, but it's certainly close enough, in my opinion.  Likewise, several of your other descriptions of poor use of the site are close enough to one or another of the official close vote reasons for my satisfaction.  Moreover, I suspect having question after question put &lt;em&gt;on hold pending improvements&lt;/em&gt; (as opposed to &lt;em&gt;downvoted&lt;/em&gt;) is more likely to lead to improved behavior.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2013-07-11T16:20:16.023" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1669" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1670" CreationDate="2013-07-13T23:48:42.190" Score="5" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was curious to see a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/47771/what-is-intuition-behind-beta-distribution/47782#comment123874_47782&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/27997/user27997&quot;&gt;user&lt;/a&gt; who had only 1 reputation on one of my answers (the commenter was &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the original OP).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment was a fine question and I of course had no objection to it, but I was still surprised that it was possible. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;privileges page&lt;/a&gt; says that the &quot;comment everywhere&quot; privilege is granted only at 50 rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was this possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8373" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2013-07-14T07:17:28.487" Title="How did a user with 1 rep comment on an answer?" Tags="|support|comment|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1669" CreationDate="2013-07-14T07:16:31.000" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This user posted his/her comment as an answer (this happens oftentimes, because of reputation issue or a misunderstanding of how the site works), and it was flagged by some vigilant users. A moderator converted it as a proper comment beneath your reply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2013-07-14T07:16:31.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1671" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-14T15:28:12.287" Score="1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is currently a proposal for a mathematical modeling stackexchange on Area51:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/57490/mathematical-modeling?referrer=B5TWQ70QNWlDGxDR-o9vQA2&quot;&gt;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/57490/mathematical-modeling?referrer=B5TWQ70QNWlDGxDR-o9vQA2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is intended to have no overlap with statsSE; questions that are on-topic on one site should be off topic on the other. With that said, the site is still in the definition phase, so it needs people to post suggested mathematical modeling questions that they would like to see answered in the future. These questions can then be voted on by others (a 5 vote limit) to decide what the site should be about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And again, this site should only be about mathematical modeling that is not statistical modeling. If you have any concerns, please post a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18177" LastActivityDate="2013-07-14T15:28:12.287" Title="Mathematical modeling stackexchange" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1672" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1694" CreationDate="2013-07-15T01:27:00.470" Score="7" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sample-size&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sample-size&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sample-size&lt;/a&gt; is one of our most popular tags (54th), categorizing 232 threads as of July 14, 2013.  However, the topic &lt;em&gt;sample size&lt;/em&gt; is very broad and not very distinctive, in my opinion.  There are a number of other tags that are related to this topic or overlap some aspects of the topic, including:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/small-sample&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;small-sample&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;small-sample&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/small-sample/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt;)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/big-data&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;big-data&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;big-data&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/big-data/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt;)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/large-data&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;large-data&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;large-data&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/large-data/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt;)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/power-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;power-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;power-analysis&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/power-analysis/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt;)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/power&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;power&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;power&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/power/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt;)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/underdetermined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;underdetermined&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;underdetermined&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/underdetermined/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt;)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At present the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/sample-size/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki excerpt&lt;/a&gt; for sample-size reads:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions where it is desired to know an appropriate&#xA;  sample size to perform a test or analysis or when the sample size is&#xA;  relevant to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure this provides the ideal guidance on the use of the tag.  It seems to me that if someone is trying to figure out what sample size they need for their study, the most appropriate tag might be &lt;code&gt;power-analysis&lt;/code&gt;, although I can also see how someone might say that tag should only be used for questions &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; power analyses (say, the difference between a-priori and post-hoc power analyses) instead.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, skimming down the list of questions tagged with &lt;code&gt;sample-size&lt;/code&gt;, perhaps about half are tagged with one of the above as well, and it's not clear what having the tag &lt;code&gt;sample-size&lt;/code&gt; in addition adds.  There are, of course, cases where the other tags do not occur and &lt;code&gt;sample-size&lt;/code&gt; seems appropriate, but quite often the manner in which each of those questions is related to &lt;em&gt;sample size&lt;/em&gt; seems fairly idiosyncratic.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'm wondering how threads should best be organized with respect to these categories.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, my suggestions would be:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copy the excerpt and tag wiki from &lt;code&gt;big-data&lt;/code&gt; (which is somewhat more informative) to &lt;code&gt;large-data&lt;/code&gt; (which seems to be the preferred tag), and make &lt;code&gt;big-data&lt;/code&gt; a synonym.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My preferred tag wiki excerpt for &lt;code&gt;sample-size&lt;/code&gt; might read:  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag is very ambiguous. Please use only if one of the following is&#xA;  not more appropriate: [small-sample], [large-data], [power-analysis],&#xA;  [power], or [underdetermined].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this may not be the best approach, and I'd prefer to open this up to community discussion here than make changes on my own with the only oversight being conducted by two suggested edit reviewers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2013-07-29T18:41:22.967" Title="How should the `sample-size` tag be used?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1665" CreationDate="2013-07-15T11:04:44.920" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This is my ramble:&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;My guiding rule is whether the question will help make an internet artefact that will be useful to others. Helping the person asking the question is a small good. Helping the thousands of people that eventually access many of the questions on this site is a big good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't particularly care whether the person asking the question is grateful. I  don't particularly care whether the person asking the question reads my answer. I care that the resource will be useful for the thousands of people who land on the page in the future via Google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The person asking the question is just a useful means of creating such a seed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I think someone is asking a lot of questions that will all be of general appeal, then that's fine by me. Other times questions can be edited into something of more ongoing utility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main issue is where someone is asking a lot of poor questions that won't be of general value. Then I find downvoting and voting to close are good options; however, I'd focus it on the specific question that has problems rather than the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2013-07-15T19:12:29.377" LastActivityDate="2013-07-15T19:12:29.377" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1657" CreationDate="2013-07-16T20:57:39.083" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems to have already been settled, but I wanted to voice an additional justification for the &lt;code&gt;data.frame&lt;/code&gt; -&gt; &lt;code&gt;dataframe&lt;/code&gt; canonicalization: R is not the only language with a &quot;dataframe&quot; data structure. In python, there is &lt;code&gt;pandas.DataFrame&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8451" LastActivityDate="2013-07-16T20:57:39.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="995" CreationDate="2013-07-16T21:52:22.043" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought that the answers to the question &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/5543/1381&quot;&gt;For which distributions are the parameterizations in BUGS and R different?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; would be of general interest to the R community so I wrote it up (in collaboration with the answer's author). The article &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.bu.edu/dietze/manuscripts/lebauer-dietze-bolker.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Translating Probability Density Functions: From R to BUGS and Back Again.&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is methodological, though the research part was limited to compiling references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The acknowledgements read &quot;This collaboration began on the Cross Validated statistical forum (http.//stats.stackexchange.com/q/5543/1381).&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1381" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2013-07-16T21:52:22.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="995" CreationDate="2013-07-16T22:00:27.003" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Almost two years after having asked this question, I actually wrote a paper inspired by CV (still unpublished):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.4920&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.4920&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used the question's url in the body of the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6961" LastActivityDate="2013-07-16T22:00:27.003" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1536" CreationDate="2013-07-17T18:45:55.297" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although this is an old thread, I think this subject fits well in the context of the new rules of putting questions on hold, so they can be edited, before closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the answer is: NEVER!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You showed that it is possible to revert a situation (your question has now 6 upvotes and a good answer).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other users helped you with that, but just because you came on Meta and shared your difficulties. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides Meta, you used other strategies such as: awarding a bounty and being available in chat to clarify possible doubts about the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This thread is an example to current/future users that improving the quality of a question is always possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastActivityDate="2013-07-17T18:45:55.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1678" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-19T17:02:58.413" Score="0" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to transfer reputation from, say, stats stackexchange to math stackexchange? Is this planned? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many here are experts in one field (and can earn a lot reputation there), while they learn in another (and could use reputation to offer bounties there etc.). Maybe that's the economist in me talking, but since reputation is already treated like a currency, we might as well reduce inter-platform restrictions and let reputation go where it is needed most.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way I know of to transfer reputation (sort of) is when you have enough reputation on one platform, then you get +100 anywhere else. But I think that's as far as it goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22543" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2013-07-19T18:06:51.900" LastActivityDate="2013-07-19T18:06:51.900" Title="Transferring reputation from one platform to another?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1678" CreationDate="2013-07-19T17:10:12.753" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;(The +100 is not a transfer of reputation: it is an &lt;em&gt;award&lt;/em&gt; of reputation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simple answer is no. And that can't be changed by any action of this community. I'm sure there are no plans to implement this idea, but further discussion of SE-wide issues belongs on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;the SE meta site&lt;/a&gt; rather than here, where you may bring this idea up if you wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are compelling arguments not to transfer reputation. I sure wouldn't want somebody with a high reputation on the cooking or German language or gaming sites, say, being confused with an expert statistician here, for instance.  In economist-speak, the reputations on different sites are not fungible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T09:16:14.490" LastActivityDate="2013-07-19T17:10:12.753" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1680" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-19T18:51:07.700" Score="17" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have the following question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What software(s) would I need and how would I have to use them to create a box plot for data &#xA;  for which I only know the 95% confidence interval and mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that I would love to ask but I am afraid of being downvoted for it so I would like to see if it is off-topic here before asking it on the main site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28231" LastActivityDate="2013-07-19T19:31:28.333" Title="Are Software Recommendation Questions Off-Topic for this website?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1680" CreationDate="2013-07-19T18:55:59.637" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion not only is this fine, I wish others would phrase their questions like it.  All too often people instead ask perfectly general and interesting questions in the restricted form of &quot;how can I do this in R/SAS/Stata/Whatever,&quot; which is limiting and repetitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2013-07-19T18:55:59.637" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1680" CreationDate="2013-07-19T19:31:28.333" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take a look at the current &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/software&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;software&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;software&lt;/a&gt; tag excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Make sure your question is related to STATISTICS, MACHINE LEARNING, or DATA ANALYSIS and is not solely about programming, support, or bugs. Include additional tags referring to the statistical issues involved.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, your question would include statistics issues (statistics and/or data analysis) like to construct a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/boxplot&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;boxplot&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;boxplot&lt;/a&gt;, but with limited statistical information: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mean&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mean&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mean&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/confidence-interval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;confidence-interval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;confidence-interval&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could also being related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;visualizing data&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/data-visualization&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;data-visualization&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;data-visualization&lt;/a&gt;), which is on topic at CV main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2013-07-19T19:31:28.333" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1683" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1684" CreationDate="2013-07-21T02:02:30.233" Score="6" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/p-value&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;p-value&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;p-value&lt;/a&gt; has 218 threads under it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/p&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;p&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;p&lt;/a&gt; has only 3 posts subordinated to it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;All the three &lt;code&gt;p&lt;/code&gt; questions refer to &quot;p-value&quot; concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to make them synonyms with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/p-value&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;p-value&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;p-value&lt;/a&gt; as the master?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastActivityDate="2013-07-21T05:22:17.617" Title="Suggestion to make tag &quot;p&quot; a synonym of tag &quot;p-value&quot;" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1683" CreationDate="2013-07-21T05:22:17.617" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good catch! I've merged the two, and the master tag is now &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/p-value&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;p-value&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;p-value&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2013-07-21T05:22:17.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1393" CreationDate="2013-07-21T08:55:49.027" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To provide a slightly different perspective: As a matter of fact, I have seen users with automatically generated names provide valuable content, answering questions and (as far as I can tell, not being a statistician myself) demonstrating real expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that's a direct answer to your question: Even if you are concerned about reciprocity and effort (and not merely about creating quality content) and unconvinced by appeals to general notions of the role of identity in scholarly discourse (yes, that's a fancy description of the PhD comic in @steffen answer!) the fact remains that anonymous users are productive members of this community. As a group, userXXX are perhaps a little more likely to ask an ill-conceived question and run (they are not the only ones to do that…) and nobody with such a name has reached stardom but they are not only “leechers” or randomly typing monkeys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6029" LastActivityDate="2013-07-21T08:55:49.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1393" CreationDate="2013-07-21T10:36:09.697" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a matter of cultural norms, and as identifiers other than real names are definitely allowed here all that people can do is express personal views and preferences that are not binding on anyone else. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it happens, the original poster @StasK (Stas Kolenikov) and I share a history of contributing to Statalist over several years where the culture is that posters are expected to use full real names and other identifiers are deprecated. That's no doubt an unusual culture by other standards but it's worked pretty well over 19 years or so. Of course, nothing stops people using names that look real, but are not, from some free account not associated with people's workplaces. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it is often true that first names alone are not revealing and full names can often not be traced back to unique individuals. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some forums anonymity is used to hide senders of offensive or insulting posts, but that is not tolerated here, so not an issue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good defence for anonymity is that posters, especially learners in statistics,  are allowed to ask elementary questions or to ask help given confusion or misunderstanding without loss of face. Equally I suspect that the fraction of lazy questions or fishing expeditions would go down slightly if people had to use real names, but that's idle speculation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastActivityDate="2013-07-21T10:36:09.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1687" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-23T00:49:23.963" Score="4" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you search for &quot;one tail&quot; or &quot;one sided&quot;, there are tons of hits. Glancing quickly, most of them really are about interpreting or choosing one-sided (one-tailed) tests. I think a tag would be helpful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about &quot;Two sided&quot; and &quot;two tails&quot;. Another tag? Or make the tag more general: &quot;One vs. two sided tests&quot;??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this is the right way to propose a new tag, but others have done so in meta, and I can't see an alternative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25" LastActivityDate="2013-07-23T13:19:06.683" Title="Suggest new tag for one-sided (or one-tailed) P value" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1687" CreationDate="2013-07-23T13:19:06.683" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once you have 300 reputation, you can create tags; so you're free to do so.  You simply edit an appropriate question and type the name you want for your new tag in the &lt;strong&gt;tags&lt;/strong&gt; field (supposing there aren't 5 tags already--that's the limit).  If the tag doesn't end up on at least one more question within six months, it will be automatically deleted.  For more information, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/create-tags&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the merits of this proposal, I personally don't have strong opinions.  You've done the research, if there are recurring on-topic questions about this issue, then we should have a tag for them.  Here are a couple of suggestions I have about tag creation:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think it would be better to have one tag than two.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can't have spaces between words, you have to put a dash &quot;-&quot;.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My guess is that 'tailed' is more common terminology than 'sided'.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's best for tags to have names that are as short as possible.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there are several names that might work almost as well, you could preempt them by asking the moderators to create them and make them synonyms of your new tag.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a possible name might be: &lt;code&gt;[1-vs-2-tailed]&lt;/code&gt;, but I'm sure someone else might be able to come up with a better name.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2013-07-23T13:19:06.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1689" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4299" CreationDate="2013-07-23T17:22:11.403" Score="7" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding filling the tag excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can be done when the tag name represents both a function of a statistical software, but its name also suggests a broader concept of usage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lme&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lme&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lme&lt;/a&gt; tag, which is a function in R, but it is also an acronym (in a broader sense) for linear mixed effect model.  CV has other tags for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;mixed effect models&lt;/a&gt;, but none for linear mixed effect models (besides &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lme&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lme&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lme&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had read once on an SO meta post that it was not a good idea to create a tag to refer only to software functions. Unfortunately, I did not find this post. I found this &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135200/are-tags-of-language-specific-functions-appropriate-for-so&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt;, which does not have a +10 upvoted and accepted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, after research, I count 42 posts out of 64 (63.7%) tagged if &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lme&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lme&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lme&lt;/a&gt; were also labeled with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;r&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;r&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I thought of suggesting an excerpt which could convey the broad sense, but also emphasizing the R aspect of its usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From FOX, J. (2002) &lt;a href=&quot;http://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/Fox-Companion/appendix-mixed-models.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linear Mixed Models&lt;/a&gt;. Retrieved from here (page 1, last paragraph),  I came up with this suggestion for the tag excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Linear mixed models may be expressed in different but equivalent forms. In the social and behavioral sciences, it is common to express such models in hierarchical form. &quot;lme&quot; also stands as an R function in the formulation described in Laird and Ware (1982) but allowing for nested random effects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suggestion was rejected but with different opinions from the reviewers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the objective here is to ask if we have a consensus of what to do when there is a tag that is strongly related to a specific software, but it can also be used for broader concepts, or even in different software.  &lt;strong&gt;How to fill in the tag excerpt in such situations?  And beyond that, are software function tags recommended or not?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T20:17:39.670" Title="Tags that have broad concept but also address a specific software function" Tags="|discussion|tags|software|tag-excerpt|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1690" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1691" CreationDate="2013-07-23T23:30:22.967" Score="9" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kolmogorov-smirnov&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kolmogorov-smirnov&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kolmogorov-smirnov&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kolmogorov-smirnov-test&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kolmogorov-smirnov-test&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kolmogorov-smirnov-test&lt;/a&gt; look like they addressing the same topic.  The latter seems to be a more specific name and the description accompanying it seems a little better.  While we are at it on meta there is &lt;code&gt;[tag]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[tags]&lt;/code&gt;.  Those probably could be merged too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2013-07-24T01:15:09.193" LastActivityDate="2013-07-24T01:18:53.913" Title="Suggestion to make tag “kolmogorov-smirnov” a synonym of tag “kolmogorov-smirnov-test”" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1690" CreationDate="2013-07-24T01:18:53.913" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;+1, I agree.  Note however, that there are 79 threads categorized under &lt;code&gt;[kolmogorov-smirnov]&lt;/code&gt;, but only 9 under &lt;code&gt;[kolmogorov-smirnov-test]&lt;/code&gt;.  In addition, there is a slight preference for tags with shorter names.  These facts suggest that &lt;code&gt;[kolmogorov-smirnov-test]&lt;/code&gt; should be the synonym and &lt;code&gt;[kolmogorov-smirnov]&lt;/code&gt; should be the master.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2013-07-24T01:18:53.913" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1577" CreationDate="2013-07-27T22:10:21.340" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On Topic: Questions related to survey methodology as it relates to statistical analysis&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This includes  &quot;soft&quot; concepts such as questionnaire design, non-response biases, interviewer effects, mode effects, timing of the phone calls, and other operational aspects so long as the question either directly addresses a statistical issue or the question asker indicates that their concern is in regards to later statistical analysis rather &lt;em&gt;solely&lt;/em&gt; the practical operational aspects of conducting the survey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastActivityDate="2013-07-27T22:10:21.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1672" CreationDate="2013-07-29T18:41:22.967" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(This answer is in response to @Andre Silva's suggestion--so that the question doesn't show up as unanswered.)&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I changed the tag excerpt for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sample-size&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sample-size&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sample-size&lt;/a&gt; to:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag is very ambiguous. Use it when the question is about sample&#xA;  size &amp;amp; the following are NOT more appropriate: [small-sample],&#xA;  [large-data], [power-analysis], [power], or [underdetermined].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I further copied the excerpt and wiki from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/big-data&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;big-data&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;big-data&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/large-data&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;large-data&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;large-data&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2013-07-29T18:41:22.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1695" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-31T15:25:49.470" Score="0" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of the questions deal with math, but since statistics is also about data I was wondering whether I can ask about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where can I find data about correlation between this and that?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;where can I find data about x in country y grouped by region?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26629" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2013-07-31T18:35:30.200" LastActivityDate="2013-07-31T18:35:30.200" Title="Is it suitable to ask for a particular dataset?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2013-07-31T15:43:46.293" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1696" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-01T20:40:28.153" Score="1" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;the bounty guidelines&lt;/a&gt; state that bounties are not cancellable for any reason. This makes a lot of sense to me and it's a good default setting. But I'm thinking specifically about a situation I am facing on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/65264/three-questions-about-support-vector-regression-feature-pre-processing-time-se&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. The lone answer was posted before I started the bounty, and it does not address enough items for it to be worthy of collecting the bounty. However, no other responses have appeared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In cases where the bounty fails to generate adequate answers due to total lack of responses, would it make sense to just cancel the bounty? I don't get to benefit unfairly by both having an adequate answer and also having my reputation refunded. Whereas if I can't cancel the bounty, I'm just facing a reputation loss as a consequence for trying to motivate interest in a question that community found uninteresting (for any reason).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be easy to implement a cancellation option under the specific scenario that, after the bounty is created, no new answers to the question appear at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, what is the specific rationale in this case? Does the community want to penalize  for not writing a question that, according to the preferences of other community members, is sufficiently interesting to merit effort on a response? Why wouldn't we just close those questions as not constructive and no reputation changes would take place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8927" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2013-08-02T01:23:48.813" Title="Would it be appropriate to allow cancelling a bounty for lack of responses?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1696" CreationDate="2013-08-02T01:23:48.813" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might do better to ask this question on meta.SE (or perhaps have it migrated); the bounty policy is system-wide.  There is nothing we (including CV's moderators) can do about it here.  On meta.SE you might get some attention from the developers, who could address this, if they so desired.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, I sympathize with your situation.  This does seem like a reasonable request.  However, it's also true that the bounty policy is clear, and it's clear that you lose the bounty &lt;em&gt;even if no one answers&lt;/em&gt;, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A bounty does not guarantee a response, however, and reputation refunds are not available if no answers are received as a result of the bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is about as clear and on-topic as I can imagine.  Sorry.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2013-08-02T01:23:48.813" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1698" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-03T18:15:24.157" Score="4" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am surprised to see that a &lt;code&gt;covariate&lt;/code&gt; tag does not yet exist, as it would be more applicable than any of the other tags I had to settle for when posting this question:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/66448/should-covariates-that-are-not-statistically-significant-be-kept-in-when-creat&quot;&gt;Should covariates that are not statistically significant be &amp;#39;kept in&amp;#39; when creating a model?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note:  &lt;code&gt;covariance&lt;/code&gt; exists, but does not seem to be a match at all, as it does not distinguish between IVs that are in or not in a model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Side note:  I am tagging this as a feature request, since I am asking for a change, but it's a tiny feature request...which could be implemented by any one of many, many site users! ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27142" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2014-05-29T20:04:23.187" Title="Please create tag `covariate`" Tags="|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="707" CreationDate="2013-08-03T19:19:13.963" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;R is great, but the name is terrible and invites many problems on scale much larger than the one you highlight here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It lacks searchability in general and possibly memorability for would-be users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the smaller problem you highlight could be fixed by moving to a different name (I nominate &quot;R-Statistics&quot; or &quot;R-Stats&quot;), but of course that would be a much larger effort than a tag change here!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know that it is up to StackExchange to try to deal with what is a bad name to begin with.  Of course, excepting &lt;code&gt;r&lt;/code&gt; from the no-capitals rule on the basis of it being a single letter seems reasonable if it is easy to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27142" LastActivityDate="2013-08-03T19:19:13.963" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1700" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1701" CreationDate="2013-08-04T17:03:41.380" Score="4" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;Under the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;recommendations&lt;/a&gt; there are 14 threads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;10 threads deals with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/recommender-system&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;recommender-system&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;recommender-system&lt;/a&gt; (49 uses). They are:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/60571/finding-similar-items-based-on-user-likes-and-dislikes&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/56740/calculating-user-preferences-based-on-purchases-how-to-incorporate-different-va&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/55797/svd-in-movie-recommendation&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/43942/collaborative-filtering-through-matrix-factorization-with-logistic-loss-function&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/41089/dataset-for-article-recommendation-with-demographic-data&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/37407/are-there-any-tagging-dataset-for-evaluating-a-recommender-system-e-g-user-ta&quot;&gt;6&lt;/a&gt; [closed], &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/36221/inaccurate-r-prediction&quot;&gt;7&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/18581/evaluation-methods-for-personalized-recommendation&quot;&gt;8&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/9505/item-set-similarity-for-real-time-calculation-purposes&quot;&gt;9&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2875/nearest-neighbor-information-for-recommendation-engines&quot;&gt;10&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;4 threads asks for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/references&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;references&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;references&lt;/a&gt; (237 uses). See bellow:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/56461/book-recommendation-for-mathematical-statistics&quot;&gt;11&lt;/a&gt; [duplicate], &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/37624/the-biggest-difference-between-medical-statistics-and-biological-statistics&quot;&gt;12&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/23696/how-to-learn-data-analysis&quot;&gt;13&lt;/a&gt; [closed], &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2282/counting-how-many-times-a-package-has-been-loaded-in-r&quot;&gt;14&lt;/a&gt; [closed].&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Solution chosen:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another option of putting &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;recommendations&lt;/a&gt; on the blacklist tag (like, not allowing it to be used).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Actions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All threads were handled properly during multiple campaigns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-04-16T20:25:15.630" LastActivityDate="2017-04-16T20:25:15.630" Title="Delete ambiguous [recommendations] tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-deletion|references|blacklist-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1700" CreationDate="2013-08-05T16:40:54.120" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;[Based on my comment.]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;We also have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/best-practices&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;best-practices&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;best-practices&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rule-of-thumb&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rule-of-thumb&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rule-of-thumb&lt;/a&gt; (and even &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/expertise&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;expertise&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;expertise&lt;/a&gt;, which was used only once!). Since the purpose of this site is to provide guidance, expert opinion and thoughful recommendations, I don't see any interest in keeping the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;recommendations&lt;/a&gt; tag alive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @Nick pointed out, there is no connexion between 'recommendations' and 'recommender system'. I would suggest killing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;recommendations&lt;/a&gt; tag, and cleaning up the aforementioned threads. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit (6 Sep.)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I've removed the tag from the remaining threads. &lt;strong&gt;It can safely be blacklisted now.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="930" LastEditDate="2013-09-06T09:44:41.247" LastActivityDate="2013-09-06T09:44:41.247" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1072" CreationDate="2013-08-05T20:48:59.883" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe, there is a workaround for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am using Stylish on Chrome to visualize accepted-answers on CV exactly equal to Stack Overflow. I think the green color used on the main site is too light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bellow code is a summary of what I got from &lt;a href=&quot;https://gis.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3252/make-the-accepted-answer-box-greener&quot;&gt;blah238's answer&lt;/a&gt; on GIS SE, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18048479/triangle-background-color-on-accepted-answers-on-se&quot;&gt;Brock Adams's answer&lt;/a&gt; on Stack Overflow SE. And there is also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/185401/who-stole-the-darkness-from-the-accepted-answer-tick/185457#185457&quot;&gt;Old CheckMark's answer&lt;/a&gt; on Meta Stack Overflow SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here it goes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1- Install the Stylish on Google-Chrome (it can be used with Mozilla Firefox too, but not sure about other web navigators).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2- Type on Stylish the following code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;div.status.answered-accepted, div.status.answered-accepted strong {  &#xA;background: rgb(117, 132, 92) !important;  &#xA;color: #e1e818 !important;  &#xA;}  &#xA;&#xA;.answered-accepted {  &#xA;    background-color: rgb(117, 132, 92) !important;  &#xA;    color: #e1e818  &#xA;}  &#xA;&#xA;.vote .vote-accepted-on {  &#xA;background-image:   url(data:image/png;base64,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);&#xA;background-position: 0% 0%;  &#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last part of the code refers to altering the checkmark. The checkmark image provided in the code is cutted a little bit but Brock Adams's answer provide an alternative way to one upload an own picture that can be used with &lt;code&gt;background-image&lt;/code&gt; argument (the image needs to be uploaded on the server already with the desired color/aspect). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3- Still on Stylish set the &quot;Applies to&quot; field to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;URL starting with --&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To set the webpage domain using Stylish on Firefox see blah238's answer and follow the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples/screenshots for the above code: &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WgLwo.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6R8ad.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y0BaC.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this can help you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2013-08-08T21:06:17.500" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1703" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1704" CreationDate="2013-08-05T23:27:14.163" Score="2" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;transfromation&quot; synonym should be &quot;transformation&quot;. That's just a typo, although it may have been lurking for a while. (I can't see a way to suggest an edit, except this one.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2013-08-06T02:24:02.063" LastActivityDate="2013-08-06T02:24:02.063" Title="Fix &quot;transfromation&quot; typo in tag synonym" Tags="|feature-request|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1703" CreationDate="2013-08-06T00:49:29.283" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this won't matter since &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/transfromation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;transfromation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;transfromation&lt;/a&gt; is already a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/data-transformation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;data-transformation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;data-transformation&lt;/a&gt;.  It might be that we need to create a new tag &lt;code&gt;[transformation]&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; be a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/data-transformation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;data-transformation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;data-transformation&lt;/a&gt;, but only to preempt the possibility that someone will create that tag without people noticing it.  However, that doesn't seem to have been an issue thus far; we can probably put that off until it actually occurs.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2013-08-06T00:49:29.283" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1705" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-06T08:40:42.210" Score="12" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to save a draft version of a question, and if so how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only options I'm aware of on SE are to either post the question (and perform consecutive edits) or discard (and lose the draft version). I think it would be useful to be able to save a draft (possibly for several different questions). This might be helpful for OPs to spend time to ask good questions, and would hopefully increase the quality of the questions that are actually posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27403" LastActivityDate="2014-08-02T13:54:09.837" Title="How to save a draft version of a question?" Tags="|support|feature-request|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1705" CreationDate="2013-08-06T09:29:34.200" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interesting question! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone has a third option of saving a draft to their own files, for a text editor or word processor. I don't know of a third option within Stack Exchange. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't understand exactly what's being suggested here and how this would help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who would be able to see a draft? Clearly the OP, but anybody else? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there's a way of saving a draft that remains personal to the poster (and possibly a few key others, say moderators) until finally posted, then that seems a fair idea. Most of us are often in the position of the little girl who supposedly said &quot;How do I know what I think until I see what I say?&quot;. It may take several revisions before we have expressed ourselves as clearly as we can. It's just a question of whether such a facility can be added (but I would guess wildly that something like that has already been considered and rejected). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a CV question is not like a research paper or report. If a question is long, my impression is that few people would read it. (In contrast, a long detailed answer is often especially interesting and useful.) I am tempted to say, contradicting myself, that if a CV question really requires multiple drafts, it's likely to be too complicated to have a good chance of a good answer. However, there are many complicating factors, such as people not writing in their own first language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At present posting a question in effect should amount to a poster saying &quot;I think I have here a fair question in good condition&quot;. Experienced users often disagree, as daily experience shows. A large fraction of questions are too general, too vague, too tied to specific data, too trivial, too badly presented,  to attract much attention, let alone to be of much long-term use to anyone beyond the OP. So, what else is new? Helping the OP improve the question and deciding what is of value (including ignoring hopeless questions) is a large part of what the site is about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I wouldn't personally be tempted to spend much time on something labelled a draft. If the poster is saying &quot;I know that this is in poor condition and needs to be improved&quot;, my attitude would be &quot;Give us your best shot and then we will have a look&quot;. The tail of &quot;I don't understand but the smart people on CV should be able to help&quot; could be lengthened to include &quot;I know this is not well written, but the smart people on CV should be able to rewrite it and then be able to help&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastActivityDate="2013-08-06T09:29:34.200" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1707" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-06T23:15:10.423" Score="14" ViewCount="283" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be more specific, I regularly encounter acronyms which are either ambiguous (e.g. is LDA 'Linear Discriminant Analysis' or 'Latent Dirichlet Analysis'?) or rather obscure (either because of a specialized area or just an idiosyncratic use of terminology - and googling is often little help in either case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either ambiguity or obscurity can lead to answering a different question than intended, or significant delays in clarifying an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I try to encourage people to spell things out on first use in a question (subsequent use of abbreviations is okay), but it often feels like I'm trying to close the stable door to the sound of hoofbeats fading over the hill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand I don't want to stop people using really standard abbreviations, but I find it very hard to draw a line, which makes me lean toward almost always spelling it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do people think? Is it sensible to have that in the help? Is this perhaps too minor an issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2013-08-07T12:37:47.213" Title="Is it reasonable to put &quot;try to avoid acronyms&quot; in the help on asking questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="575" CreationDate="2013-08-07T10:56:11.963" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is best to be very sparing with details not needed to understand your question. Your question should stand on its own as a technical question. Lengthy personal details or personal pleas don't usually help and may even make your question less likely to be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular be sparing with &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Salutations. Initial greetings are not needed. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Personal details or history. A little detail can make your question vivid and you appear human, and that's fine, but your precise personal situation and/or knowledge of and/or ignorance of statistics need not be spelled out at length. It's fine to say that you are a learner or very new to some field, for example, and that can be said in one sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Closing comments on how much you would appreciate our help. We appreciate that you want to be polite and courteous, but your gratitude is taken as read. Wording such as &quot;Thanks in advance&quot; or &quot;I would be very grateful for any help&quot; is not needed and won't make us more likely to answer your question. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Put all your effort into improving your post as a clear, concise but also suitably detailed technical question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastActivityDate="2013-08-07T10:56:11.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1707" CreationDate="2013-08-07T12:37:47.213" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Almost any TLA (three-letter-acronym) will have a large number of meanings.  It seems to me that in many cases if there is one statistical meaning there will also be another--if not now, then perhaps in the future.  Therefore it is foolhardy to assume that &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; TLA, no matter how conventional, will be correctly understood even from the context, no matter how obvious it may be to the original proposer or would-be respondents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should insist that all acronyms be written out (the first time) in all cases.  If a question is worth asking, it's worth spending another ten seconds to ask it clearly and unambiguously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2013-08-07T12:37:47.213" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1710" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1711" CreationDate="2013-08-10T23:48:33.930" Score="4" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've only just really noticed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/students-t&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;students-t&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;students-t&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has no tag wiki and appears to be being used for both the t-test and the t-distribution (with, at a quick glance, more using it to refer to the test). It is used in fewer posts to refer to the test than &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/t-test&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;t-test&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;t-test&lt;/a&gt; and in fewer posts that refer to the distribution than &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/t-distribution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;t-distribution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;t-distribution&lt;/a&gt;. I don't see a clear purpose to it outside those meanings. About 2/3 of its uses have been this year (7 and a bit months); for some reason it seems suddenly popular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion: I think (i) any references to Student's t-distribution under &lt;code&gt;[students-t]&lt;/code&gt; should be changed to &lt;code&gt;[t-distribution]&lt;/code&gt;; and then (ii) &lt;code&gt;[students-t]&lt;/code&gt; should become a synonym of &lt;code&gt;[t-test]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that it involves more than a handful of changes and its total number of uses is about the same as for &lt;code&gt;[t-test]&lt;/code&gt;, I thought I should ask for views on this before doing anything hasty. What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I haven't yet checked if I have enough answers in the right tags to do all these steps myself)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2015-11-30T11:12:15.957" LastActivityDate="2015-11-30T11:12:15.957" Title="Issue with [students-t] tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-deletion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-11-30T11:44:28.337" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1710" CreationDate="2013-08-11T17:14:31.263" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;(+1, &lt;em&gt;I thought I had asked about this on meta a while ago, but evidently I didn't.&lt;/em&gt;)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree, I see no reason for the existence of the &lt;code&gt;[students-t]&lt;/code&gt; tag.  (I just edited its excerpt to note this.)  I think starting to re-tag those instances where it is used to refer to the distribution is a good idea / first step.  Since there are several such cases, my recommendation would be to do 2-3 at a time, several hours apart so as not to flood the main page.  I did the same thing a few weeks ago w/ the ambiguous &lt;code&gt;[fisher]&lt;/code&gt; tag.  (You may even want to re-tag those instances where it refers to the test, but you could do that second--or not at all.)  These re-taggings should really be done &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; the tag is made a synonym for &lt;code&gt;[t-test]&lt;/code&gt;, or those threads will become mis-tagged and the situation will be much more difficult to rectify.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2013-08-11T17:14:31.263" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1712" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-11T21:15:57.867" Score="1" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried and failed to write my data set in this question. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/67090/statistical-significance-of-conditional-probabiltiy&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/67090/statistical-significance-of-conditional-probabiltiy&lt;/a&gt; it looks ugly. &#xA;how are we supposed to write columns and data?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11279" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2013-08-12T14:37:56.340" Title="data visualization" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1712" CreationDate="2013-08-12T14:37:56.340" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Organization and utility have more value than prettiness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Use inline code formatting&lt;/strong&gt;, as in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Header 1    Header 2     Header 3&#xA;123.45      -6.7         abc&#xA;8           9.0          xyz&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is simple (usually a copy-and-paste operation followed by a click of the &lt;code&gt;Preformatted text&lt;/code&gt; control) and useful (because readers can copy the data in a format suitable for input with most software).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;$\TeX$ markup is an option&lt;/strong&gt; where formatting of the data is essential (which is almost never).  $\TeX$ includes a myriad ways to tabulate things, as in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$\begin{align}&#xA;\text{Header 1}\qquad &amp;amp;\text{Header 2}\qquad &amp;amp;\text{Header 3} \\&#xA;123.45\qquad &amp;amp; -6.7\qquad &amp;amp; \text{abc} \\&#xA;8\qquad &amp;amp;9.0\qquad &amp;amp;\text{xyz}&#xA;\end{align}$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Avoid posting data as images&lt;/strong&gt; (unless the images, as bitmapped rasters, &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; the data): there is no straightforward way to use such code without manually transcribing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q8vAT.png&quot; alt=&quot;Figure&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please do not post large amounts (multiple pages) of data&lt;/strong&gt;: either strip down the data to a smaller example (which is &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; preferred) or post the full dataset elsewhere and provide a link (which is discouraged because the link may eventually rot).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2013-08-12T14:37:56.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1714" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-12T14:50:58.303" Score="12" ViewCount="321" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/67159/paired-t-test-or-independent-t-test&quot;&gt;Paired t-test or Independent t-test&lt;/a&gt; @Damien asks about paired vs. independent t-tests. Two commenters have asked him to say more, but I don't see how he can, given his level of evident confusion. I think it would be OK to answer this with some hints, but I don't want to violate site policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2013-09-30T14:50:17.107" Title="Question about answering a self-study question" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1715" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-13T20:55:46.007" Score="26" ViewCount="680" Body="&lt;p&gt;One great use of this website I discovered is digging through the highest voted answers authored by users with high reputation. I've discovered some really interesting discusions this way, and I recently developed a data explorer query to weed out the &quot;most interesting&quot; users on the site. I thought others might be interested and wanted to share my new tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/129374/cv-users-with-most-interesting-answers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Query&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;cv_user&lt;/code&gt; field is a direct link to the &quot;answers&quot; tab of the appropriate userpage, sorted by vote score. Also, I filtered out results from the &quot;best statistical jokes&quot; and &quot;best statistical quotes&quot; questions because I'm only interested in technical discussions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My intention here is not to stir up a competitive environment or anything like that, simply to highlight users whose answer histories are rich with interesting discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Enjoy!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: Per whuber's suggestion, here're some slightly modified versions of the above query&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answers that received more than a threshhold of votes (default = eight) within a limited time period (default two weeks) of being written -- &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/129735?DaysThreshhold=14&amp;amp;ScoreThreshhold=9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Query&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users who have submitted questions meeting the above criteria -- &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/129587/cv-most-interesting-users-only-counting-immediate-votes?DaysThreshhold=14&amp;amp;ScoreThreshhold=8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Query&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The unique questions associated with answers meeting the above conditions, sorted by the number of upvotes the &quot;best&quot; answer was able to achieve within two weeks &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/129799/questions-with-answers-that-received-lots-of-votes-quickly?DaysThreshhold=14&amp;amp;ScoreThreshhold=14&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Query&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone else has other suggestions, I'm taking requests ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8451" LastEditorUserId="8451" LastEditDate="2013-08-14T14:21:57.560" LastActivityDate="2013-08-14T14:21:57.560" Title="The most interesting users on CV" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1716" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1717" CreationDate="2013-08-18T22:41:56.533" Score="7" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;While performing an action derived from another &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1700/doubt-on-tag-recommendations&quot;&gt;CV meta question&lt;/a&gt; and re-looking this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/23696/how-to-learn-data-analysis&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;, I realized &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sources&lt;/a&gt; (5 threads) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resources&lt;/a&gt; (13 threads) have been used to mean &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/references&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;references&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;references&lt;/a&gt; (245 threads). I saw &quot;resources&quot; was already &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1007/tags-for-references&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt; to be a synonym in 2011 (no answers, though), but &quot;sources&quot; was not mentioned there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-04-16T20:25:36.560" LastActivityDate="2017-04-16T20:25:36.560" Title="Suggestion to make &quot;sources&quot; and &quot;resources&quot; synonyms of &quot;references&quot;" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|references|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1716" CreationDate="2013-08-19T14:15:04.623" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sources&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resources&lt;/a&gt; have been make synonyms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/references&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;references&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;references&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2013-08-19T14:15:04.623" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1718" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-20T16:03:58.997" Score="8" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;I review a lot of suggested edits, some of which are attempts to provide wikis and wiki excerpts for tags that don't have them.  I tend to think it is very important to have at least a wiki excerpt for each tag to guide people in its use.  For this reason, I lean towards approving such a suggested edit, especially when there had been nothing beforehand.  However, I sometimes see a suggested edit (mostly for wikis, but occasionally even for excerpts) that are nothing but information that has been copied and pasted from Wikipedia or similar sources (always with quotation marks and proper attribution, of course).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do we, as a community, think about this?&lt;/strong&gt;  Are quotes from Wikipedia, Wolfram Math World, etc., adequate for tag wikis excerpts?  Or for full wikis?  Does it make a difference if there was nothing beforehand?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2014-01-07T03:11:44.093" Title="Are quotes from Wikipedia adequate for tag wikis &amp; excerpts?" Tags="|discussion|editing|tag-wiki|tag-excerpt|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1719" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1720" CreationDate="2013-08-21T15:43:21.317" Score="5" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is related to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1122/how-to-stem-the-tide-of-duplicate-qs/1123#1123&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; about duplicate questions and I hope it does not seem trivial: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When can I be sure that a question is in fact a duplicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering about this when I flagged a question about p-values (in an application to an output table) for which the same content was dealt with in a more general previous question about p-values. To me it seemed that the &quot;new&quot; question was only new because of this table, so now I am a bit puzzled as to when a question can actually be seen as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps a function for moderators to comment on why a flag was declined would be useful, too. In this way they could help users to improve their flags which ultimately also helps their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26338" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T07:25:23.583" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T07:25:23.583" Title="What makes a question a duplicate and when should it be flagged?" Tags="|feature-request|exact-duplicates|moderation|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1719" CreationDate="2013-08-21T19:59:55.837" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe you are referring to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/67956/930&quot;&gt;Significance: p-value or t-value?&lt;/a&gt; and I would have vote to leave it opened (unfortunately, my buggy phone browser led me to just skip it). The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/31/930&quot;&gt;suggested near duplicate&lt;/a&gt; asks for more general definitions of t- and p-values in the context of null hypothesis statistical testing, which the present post doesn't: In my view, it asks how to gauge 'statistical significance' from a (nice) table where only regression coefficients and t-values are given. The latter accounts for sampling variation and provide all information since sample size are given (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/67956/significance-p-value-or-t-value#comment131240_67956&quot;&gt;as noted&lt;/a&gt; by Glen).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must admit that oftentimes it's hard to find a good duplicate (either because there are many, or because the two questions are just slightly different). In this particular case, I think the OP is concerned with the interpretation of results from two-stage regression summarized in a tabular way. This might be of interest for future readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No moderator declined your flag. Don't forget that users community can express their views freely. When moderators do reject an edit or flag, they generally explain why if it's not already available in our FAQ. But, please, please keep assuring the quality of this site by flagging and editing as you see fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2013-08-22T16:10:14.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1714" CreationDate="2013-08-23T09:03:34.503" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at that thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/67159/paired-t-test-or-independent-t-test&quot;&gt;Paired t-test or Independent t-test&lt;/a&gt; you will see that the two people who commented were @Glen_b and myself. I am confident that neither of us saw anything remotely personal or critical in this question, which is just using that example to raise a general issue. As it happened, we were also the only people to reply at the time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following encouragement from @Andre Silva, I try here to summarize all the comments, with some extra nuances. I incorporate freely comments made by @Glen_b.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if there is an explicit forum policy on some matter (e.g. self-study questions, questions that are really about programming, avoiding bad language) there can still be a judgement call about whether a particular posting has crossed the line into unacceptable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That members can disagree in public on where to draw a line in interpreting even site policy is at most very slightly embarrassing; it should never stop a member using their own judgment. In the limit the only alternative is that a moderator decides everything and that comments of the kind made by @Glen_b and myself are disallowed. Neither fits the principles or practice of CV. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, policy is maintained, or possibly even evolves, from seeing little discussions over grey areas in public. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arguably it's only by seeing views on marginal cases that we learn where to draw the line, or least to get some sense of whether each of us is hawk or dove. &quot;Hawk&quot; and &quot;dove&quot; here means more or less inclined compared with others with sufficient reputation to vote for closure on a particular question. Extreme hawks or doves should try to moderate their behaviour or to keep quiet! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the particular case of self-study questions, it is arguable that after a short delay (a few days at least), much more fully answering such questions is not only okay but perhaps to be encouraged. The pedagogical value of the OP doing some of it for themselves either has likely been achieved or won't be with further delay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2013-08-23T09:03:34.503" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1723" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-25T12:12:36.457" Score="10" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a question asked on CV is answered on another SE site, is that a duplicate question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2017-05-06T18:21:06.097" Title="Do duplicates count across SE sites?" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1723" CreationDate="2013-08-26T11:45:46.973" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a &quot;duplicate&quot; question of yours and my answer here, as one example, will try to follow Eliah Kagan's answer hint:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/172307/duplicate-questions-on-other-se-sites&quot;&gt;Duplicate questions on other SE sites?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He says (among other paragraphs):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the question is not really the same, but just somewhat related--as is often the case, especially across sites--then it can&#xA;  simply be answered. An answer may use and cite some information from&#xA;  one or more answer to the related question on the other SE site.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the question is really the same and on-topic, it can simply be answered with a link and quoted, properly cited excerpt to the other&#xA;  answer. It sounds like that's what should happen here, and it has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is no problem with this situation&lt;/strong&gt;. You may get different&#xA;  answers due to having asked a different community. We ask that people&#xA;  not ask the same question on multiple SE sites. We don't ask that&#xA;  people not ask a question one one SE site that someone else once asked&#xA;  on another SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not an official answer on Meta Stack Exchange (i.e. posted by a community manager or moderator) but it is well upvoted and by looking the comments here I think we also agree with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just remembering we are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; talking about cross-posting (the same question by the same O.P.) as also mentioned by @gung and @chl.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-05-04T13:53:38.917" LastActivityDate="2017-05-04T13:53:38.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1725" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1726" CreationDate="2013-08-27T12:34:14.253" Score="2" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;About the tag &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-declined&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt; 3 threads under it out of 13 did not have answers/comments explaining why the feature was declined (however simple the explanation may be).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the tag excerpt a developer generally would leave a comment explaining why the status was declined &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; the developer tags the question according to a community consensus (like, involving high score answers/opinion-based comments).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the tag excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Indicates that a request (usually a feature request) has been considered, but will not be implemented. Generally speaking, a developer will leave a comment as to why, or the community will come to consensus that the request is unnecessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could not visualize the excerpt history to see if it was created/filled after the questions were tagged (got the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/posts//revisions&quot;&gt;page not found, 404 chart&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following 3 questions are unanswered and seems to me they were not matched with the &lt;code&gt;status-declined&lt;/code&gt; excerpt criteria:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/114/a-sketching-tool-would-be-very-useful&quot;&gt;A sketching tool would be very useful&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/809/bordermatrix-in-mathjax&quot;&gt;bordermatrix in MathJaX&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/708/clustering-picture-gallery&quot;&gt;Clustering picture gallery&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The below threads are counter examples (the first has an answer left by a developer and the second has an answer posted by one of our mods). All the other 8 threads not cited here follow this pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1035/uploading-data-to-site&quot;&gt;Uploading data to site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1055/should-there-be-a-way-to-indicate-answers-youre-especially-proud-of-on-your-use&quot;&gt;Should there be a way to indicate answers you&amp;#39;re especially proud of on your user profile page?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it ok to decline a feature-request without giving a feedback?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, other users can like a certain proposal and be confused why the questions' ideas were not accepted. Also, duplicates questions might arise without being possible to mark them as duplicates (since there are no answers in the original ones).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for support to better understand how the mechanics of tagging a question &lt;code&gt;status-declined&lt;/code&gt; works and if our specific situation here on CV Meta is ok or if it needs to be updated (regarding the first 3 cited posts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2013-08-27T18:24:54.517" Title="Isn't feedback for declining a feature-request necessary?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1725" CreationDate="2013-08-27T18:24:54.517" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I imagine that &quot;desirable&quot; rather than &quot;necessary&quot; is the key word here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nick Cox &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1725/isnt-feedback-for-declining-a-feature-request-necessary#comment4456_1725&quot;&gt;has eloquently described&lt;/a&gt; both:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The reason many [feature-requests] get declined without comment; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whether or not a comment or explanation is required on a declined [feature-request].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lots of good feature requests get tagged [status-declined] because while they are good ideas that many people on the site would probably use, they aren't strictly necessary. While our development team &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/about/hiring&quot;&gt;is growing&lt;/a&gt;, we still have enough of a staffing shortage that we've got to perform a significant amount of triage on [feature-requests]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that's why those three were probably declined. I'll try and look into them further and see if there's any documentation anywhere about when they were discussed and what (if anything further) was decided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, leaving an explanation is not required, but extremely desirable. Moderators and employees have the ability to use the [status-*] tags without commenting or leaving answers, but it's annoying and confusing for the other users, so we should try to avoid it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6123" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2013-08-27T18:24:54.517" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1727" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-28T09:40:53.653" Score="13" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have today been flagging some very old questions that are very low quality. The reason I'm doing this is because they still show up in the &quot;unanswered&quot; section of the site, but they are very unlikely to ever get any meaningful discussion on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a waste of time? Should I just leave them be? I don't have sufficient rep to close them myself obviously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7883" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T09:40:53.653" Title="Flagging very old questions" Tags="|discussion|flagging|on-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1728" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1729" CreationDate="2013-08-28T13:46:02.893" Score="7" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking through questions tagged with &quot;beta&quot; on the main site recently. I found a large split in its usage; the majority of questions referred to the beta distribution. On the other hand, a sizable minority of questions referred to variable named beta in different contexts (for example, in a linear regression context). The existing tag excerpt referred to the beta distribution, so I removed the tag from non-beta distribution related questions. Examples of questions previously tagged as beta included:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/27417/what-does-beta-tell-us-in-linear-regression-analysis&quot;&gt;What does $\beta$ tell us in linear regression analysis?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/52385/is-a-larger-beta-weight-a-better-predictor-than-a-high-t-statistic&quot;&gt;Is a larger beta weight a better predictor than a high t-statistic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/47092/estimate-of-parameter-beta&quot;&gt;Estimate of parameter $\beta$&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that users may tag questions non-beta distribution related questions with &quot;beta&quot; again due to its ambiguous name. Based on the fact that the current tag deals with questions related to the beta distribution, I would like to suggest that the tag name be changed to beta-distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag would fit in nicely with other distribution specific tags such as &quot;normal-distribution&quot; and &quot;gamma-distribution&quot;. With its present name, there is a chance of a redundant tag due to mixing of question matter. What do other users think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T22:11:21.007" Title="Changing the beta tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1728" CreationDate="2013-08-28T14:40:02.580" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;+1, I think this is a good idea that will help to enforce proper usage of the tag.  However, I'm not sure that tag names can be edited.  What may need to occur is to create a new tag &lt;code&gt;[beta-distribution]&lt;/code&gt; and then make &lt;code&gt;[beta]&lt;/code&gt; a synonym of it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a somewhat related note, it's worth pointing out that we do have two relevant tags for &lt;em&gt;beta-as-coefficient&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/regression-coefficients&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;regression-coefficients&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;regression-coefficients&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/predictor&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;predictor&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;predictor&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T14:40:02.580" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1730" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-29T08:56:08.213" Score="5" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1538/why-is-our-answer-rate-so-low&quot;&gt;Why is our answer rate so low?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1492/improvement-drive-cross-validated&quot;&gt;Improvement Drive - Cross Validated&lt;/a&gt; on meta, there are many one-time users who post a question just because they need an answer for a particular problem and then they vanish again. It seems to happen quite frequently that such questions receive an answer some time later but probably the OP has already given up on waiting for one. Except from discouraging answers to one-time/low-reputation users, I could also imagine that new viewers looking up such a question may incorrectly conclude that the provided answer is not useful just because it was not accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To raise acceptance rates and to promote good answers also to older questions or to questions from one-time/low-reputation users I would like to discuss a voting system for senior users (2k reputation, for example) to accept answers instead of the potentially inactive OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26338" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2013-08-29T08:56:08.213" Title="Voting System to Accept Answer when OP does not respond" Tags="|feature-request|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1731" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1734" CreationDate="2013-08-29T09:34:09.100" Score="4" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my first &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/68601/suggestions-for-learning-probability-and-statistics?noredirect=1#comment132666_68601&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; here. In a very short way I was asking for prob/stat books that are very rigorous (again, this means axioms, theorems ,proof). User  whuber  closed my question as a duplicate of this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/421/what-book-would-you-recommend-for-non-statistician-scientists&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;. Now the other question is just asking for statistics books for non-statistician scientists. It does not require mathematical rigor as a condition. My question does. Thus, they are not duplicates. Because all answers that I see in the question that whuber thought was a duplicate of mine are either useless or answers that I am not able to judge if they would be answers to my own question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will copy few sentences from  some answers in the question that whuber marked as a duplicate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;with concise and accurate language, but without too much mathematics&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;A lot of Social Science / Psychology students with minimal mathematical background like Andy Field's book: Discovering Statistics Using SPSS. &quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I request that my question is opened again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29653" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2013-09-02T19:49:42.000" Title="My question was closed incorrectly as a duplicate" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1492" CreationDate="2013-08-29T10:06:02.943" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer focuses entirely on the repeated encouragement to use chat. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have glanced at chat and (more often) been encouraged by automatic prompts to move a conversation to chat, but I've always resisted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I naturally have no objection to anyone using chat if they find it useful (or even entertaining) but chat to my mind has various disadvantages, at least for users like myself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What can be most valuable about threads is the diversity of suggestions, including frank disagreements about how to see or to tackle the problem. The comments system is already excellent and well suited to making smaller points, including those expressed a little more informally. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that although chat is very visible if you seek it out, many people lose inhibitions they have in the forum, become digressive, personal, trivial and even offensive. (A recent poster made obnoxious remarks in chat about people who had tried to help him, but gave up frustrated.)  They also often become more inarticulate and write more poorly. The value of chat is thus very limited except for the people concerned at the time, so I really don't see that anyone should be encouraged to chat if they don't feel so inclined. (If you want to read this in reverse, and say &quot;But that is what chat is for!&quot; I agree, but it is not to my taste.) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Invitations to chat often come from inexperienced users, intent on one or two things only, getting an individual answer to a specific question (and often getting blessing for something they have already decided they want to do, usually in the form &quot;Is this OK?&quot;). Chat just distracts and detracts from the bigger goal of CV, building up an archive of good answers of use to a large number of people. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Using comments heavily does carry an obligation to clean up once a conversation is done, removing stuff made redundant by later edits, and so forth.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastActivityDate="2013-08-29T10:06:02.943" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1731" CreationDate="2013-08-29T13:39:56.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have no problem with your question being reopened. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meta answer:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel in the need to give you some explanation as I have participated in this subject, and this is just my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got your question on the first post review queue and I flagged it as a duplicate because even that you have used the word &quot;rigorous&quot;, in my first opinion there were two arguments in favor of duplicate (the subject, and the background in statistics) and one against (to be an elementary and rigorous book).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I thought not only there were more arguments in favor to mark the question as duplicate, but I also interpreted the word &quot;rigorous&quot; as being subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I decided to remove the duplicate automatic comment which appears beneath the question, because a experienced user (Nick Cox) argued in favor about the rigorous argument. Then, one of our moderators (other experienced user) ended up marking it as duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, book recommendation questions are subjective and they carry a side of being opinion-based (far away of being 100% opinion-based, though), and because of that some think they are on-topic (and so far they are!!), some think they should always be set as community wiki posts, and some think they should be off-topic (for the latter two opinions see this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1593/should-all-book-recommendation-questions-be-classified-as-community-wiki&quot;&gt;thread&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe you can edit your question to specify more about what you are looking for (explaining even better what you mean with rigorous) and giving emphasis about how much different it is from the &quot;duplicate&quot; question. Then, it will go to the &quot;reopen queue&quot; and users will vote if it reopens or stays the way it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Remark&lt;/strong&gt; (not Meta)&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: removed this answer part, as the thread was reopened on main site and it received satisfactory answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2013-09-02T19:49:42.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1731" CreationDate="2013-08-29T14:06:47.597" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;My concern about the thread in question is that by allowing apparently minor variations  (such as &amp;quot;rigorous&amp;quot; versus &amp;quot;for scientists,&amp;quot; which arguably already implies some form of rigor) of marginal questions (such as requests for lists of books) we will accumulate a series of confusingly similar threads that, because of their proliferation, serve nobody well.  I simply ask anyone who is considering posting a request for a list of books/resources/references that they first research similar questions on this site and carefully consider whether their needs are so different that a genuinely new list is needed.  &lt;strong&gt;I also ask the community in its voting to favor fewer, rather than more, such threads on this site.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Background&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally requests to reopen questions should appear in comments to the question, where they will be addressed (in good time) by moderators and high-reputation community members.  Because of the unusual appearance of a request here in meta, I feel obliged to provide some background information about the circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In comments to the original question, user @whuber requested an explanation of how the &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; to the apparent duplicate question were insufficient.  OP's reaction was a series of increasingly loud comments culminating in challenging @whuber's understanding, followed by posting the present question here on meta.  This is known as an &lt;em&gt;ad hominem&lt;/em&gt; attack: it is inappropriate anywhere on StackExchange (and anywhere else civil discourse is valued) because it improperly shifts attention from the &lt;em&gt;discourse&lt;/em&gt; to the &lt;em&gt;discussants.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the present instance this is not a problem, because @whuber is a moderator and part of that job is putting up with the bad as well as the good.  I would like to take this opportunity, though, to direct the OP's attention to the &amp;quot;Be Nice&amp;quot; section of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/behavior&quot;&gt;site policy on behavior&lt;/a&gt;.  My request is that all users, even avowedly new ones, review this material and strive to comply with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2013-08-29T14:06:47.597" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1735" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-29T22:20:59.983" Score="11" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that in posts &amp;amp; suggested edits the name of a piece of software is sometimes formatted as code, e.g. &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;Stata&lt;/code&gt;. Why?, &amp;amp; should this new (to me) convention be encouraged or discouraged? (I'm not of course suggesting editing current posts either way just for this reason.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T07:09:18.867" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T18:48:44.413" Title="Should the name of a piece of software be formatted as code?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1735" CreationDate="2013-08-30T01:37:37.533" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The peculiar use of a single letter to name software, as in &lt;code&gt;C&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;J&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;S&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt;, cries out for special formatting to help the reader.  Therefore I consistently write &quot;&lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt;&quot; instead of &quot;R&quot; and I appreciate posts that do this, too.  Some other packages do have conventional formatting: for instance, &quot;&lt;em&gt;Mathematica&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is always italicized on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Mathematica site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as edits go (picking up on a comment by @Glen_b), tastes differ, so during reviews I don't apply any particular convention.  I look for consistency in formatting.  I check that proposed edits to reformat text and code do not introduce any errors.  I follow guidelines laid down elsewhere suggesting we should eschew making minor edits, like formatting improvements, in posts that aren't &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; recent.  During reviews I therefore check that substantive edits are proposed and am grateful for any incidental formatting improvements made &lt;em&gt;en passant&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:10.070" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T01:37:37.533" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1665" CreationDate="2013-09-02T11:17:19.763" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The user in question seems to have an oddly Scholastic approach to the study of Statistics: putting me in mind of a medi&amp;aelig;val monk sitting in the library poring over ancient texts to try to clarify &amp;amp; reconcile their meanings, but lacking the conceptual apparatus that would allow him to begin to form his own judgements on the subjects they address. Furthermore, he keeps having to be prodded to give the context &amp;amp; definitions needed to make his questions comprehensible on their own without reference to his sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As he's been on Cross Validated long enough to know better (&amp;amp; has been told often enough), I don't think we should feel any compunction in down-voting his bad questions. Of course, like everyone else, I think we should up-vote his good questions. But I think it's fair to hold a seasoned, high-reputation user to a higher standard than one posting his first question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2013-09-02T14:12:06.790" LastActivityDate="2013-09-02T14:12:06.790" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1381" CreationDate="2013-09-02T15:49:57.333" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Information on how questions might best be answered on CV has been compiled here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1390/&quot;&gt;how-should-questions-be-answered-on-cross-validated&lt;/a&gt;, and this thread is linked in the help center here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2013-09-02T15:49:57.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="809" CreationDate="2013-09-02T16:49:40.067" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is this recent (June/13) news from mathjax.org: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mathjax.org/news/page/2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange continues as MathJax Partner&lt;/a&gt; posted by Peter Krautzberger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They appreciate Cross Validated SE feedback and the following news excerpts reinforce the advices given by @cardinal and @Abby to ask for support (feature-request) directly to MathJax team:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange continues its support as a MathJax Partner, demonstrating its commitment to being a partner to the math and science community on the web.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MathJax continues to benefit from Stack Exchange’s help with pre-release testing and we’re grateful to get the feedback from their technical team as well as the community which keeps MathJax flexible, open and robust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We look forward to continuing the collaboration with Stack Exchange, and welcome their ongoing support for the MathJax project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2013-09-02T16:49:40.067" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1740" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1915" CreationDate="2013-09-03T12:45:52.763" Score="3" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cross Validated Meta has four related tags and I am trying to understand them. I believe they are different (at least some of them) but not sure how. Tag excerpts do not exist for these yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/questions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;questions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; (x6 threads)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/asking-questions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;asking-questions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;asking-questions&lt;/a&gt; (x2)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/specific-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specific-question&lt;/a&gt; (x2)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/essential-questions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;essential-questions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;essential-questions&lt;/a&gt; (x6)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This thread is to ask for support about how to use the above tags correctly.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2014-01-15T21:14:03.597" LastActivityDate="2014-01-15T21:15:02.523" Title="Tags on meta.CV about &quot;questions&quot;" Tags="|discussion|support|tags|tag-excerpt|meta|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1741" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1746" CreationDate="2013-09-04T20:55:55.890" Score="20" ViewCount="442" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a newer user, I am uncertain if the community norms here in CV are different than on Math.SE. There, it appears to be acceptable to ask a user to accept/upvote an answer in cases such as your having posted the only answer and the OP commented that it was helpful (&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6984/is-it-wrong-to-ask-a-user-to-accept-an-answer&quot;&gt;see here&lt;/a&gt;). Does that apply here on CV too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29617" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:22.773" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T12:27:20.777" Title="Is it wrong to ask a user to accept an answer?" Tags="|discussion|answers|etiquette|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1741" CreationDate="2013-09-04T21:45:02.173" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes; I also think it's reasonable to ask even if they don't comment&amp;mdash;ask them to accept an answer or explain why it doesn't help them. But we do get a lot of users who appear once to ask a question &amp;amp; don't come back again once they get an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[@whuber's answer includes caveats I hadn't considered (in fact I haven't noticed such bad behaviour on CV), but of course fully agree with.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2013-09-06T09:33:42.803" LastActivityDate="2013-09-06T09:33:42.803" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1741" CreationDate="2013-09-04T21:56:58.683" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;We sometimes encourage negligent posters to review how the site works and, in particular, to accept good answers if they can.  This is a task that high-reputation community members often take on.  When you &lt;em&gt;politely&lt;/em&gt; address this &lt;em&gt;general&lt;/em&gt; behavior it does the site some good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A large number of the requests to accept an answer that I have seen come from people whose answers aren't that great in the first place: they are effectively rushing or even bullying the OP into a premature acceptance. People notice when you do this and if you do it too often you may acquire an &quot;invisible&quot; negative reputation.  This amounts to a sense among the frequent voters in the community that you are in this only to drive up your reputation. It would only be natural for them to tend to cut you less slack and refrain from upvoting some of your marginal posts. (Some folks might enjoy doing a tongue-in-cheek Bayesian analysis of this phenomenon :-).)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, after a suitable period of time (several days at least) you have posted an answer that, based on community votes, is clearly superior to the others, then you might post a comment that &lt;em&gt;subtly&lt;/em&gt; reminds the OP of the value of marking one of the answers as accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2013-09-04T21:56:58.683" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1744" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-05T15:21:12.633" Score="18" ViewCount="973" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've looked at a number of previous discussions on the CV/SO divide for R questions - I'm not sure that any of those I've seen quite get to the following point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are now, I believe, getting on for 5,000 R packages - the astonishing growth representing the growth in interest and expertise in R evident here, as elsewhere, a diversity driven, in particular, by folks who are both experienced statistical pros and fluent coders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is often (not always, but often) an R function out there which will scratch the exact statistical itch that's bothering you right now, compared with the dozens of others that get only get close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is both that (a) the package-specific help is patchy and (b) there is no comprehensive source of information which matches R functions to itches - so tracking the right one down often depends on luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many cases, what differentiates these functions is stuff that is 'under the hood' - that only those with a high level of expertise in both stats and R would easily grasp. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are one or two sources of function comparison like &lt;a href=&quot;http://glmm.wikidot.com/faq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this page for mixed models&lt;/a&gt;. But otherwise users are left guessing - and looking for help at SO or CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been monitoring answered questions with the R tag over at SO for a while: and they predominantly relate to function writing and data manipulation (plyr, reshape2, etc). They almost never talk about what's 'under the hood' of analysis functions like those in nlme and lme4 - I believe that such questions are deemed to be 'statistical' and therefore come under the remit of CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question: is it generally agreed by those at CV that such questions are on topic? Clearly, CV is 'multi-platform' - although my impression is that, especially where examples (toy data, etc) are provided in questions or answers, R is the predominant language used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, what's 'under the hood' has (naturally enough!) a direct effect on the analysis CV-ers are doing. And those using SAS, Stata, etc. will surely have similar questions - so it wouldn't be a special privilege for R users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20639" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2013-09-05T15:50:01.917" LastActivityDate="2013-09-10T16:23:49.703" Title="R questions 'on topic' for CV" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1744" CreationDate="2013-09-05T15:54:16.323" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;CV has a policy, which is explicit at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If your question is about Programming, ask on Stack Overflow. If the language is statistically oriented (such as R, SAS, Stata, SPSS, etc.), then decide based on the nature of your question: if it needs statistical expertise to understand or answer, ask it here; if it's about an algorithm, routine data processing, or details of the language, then please refer to the collection of links to resources we maintain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's fairly described as rather negative about anything where the code rather than the statistics is the focus of concern. It's germane that many postings on CV are bounced towards SO for that reason. (Some come the other way, too.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question, however, combines several related issues that are perhaps better kept distinct. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are making some broad statements about how far and how well R packages are documented. Many active members on CV would have views on that, but it is at best context, and not suitable for a debate on CV Meta. I just note in passing other views such as this from @joran (50K reputation on SO) in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/58966/why-and-when-create-a-r-package&quot;&gt;Why and when create a R package?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;R documentation is absolutely not the place to learn stat methods. Even vignettes assume a certain level of sophistication. Too many complaints about minimal documentation in R really amount to complaining that the docs aren't spoon feeding them statistical knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The policy of SO on different kinds of R questions is a matter for SO. The stated aim of SO is to support professional and enthusiastic programmers, and many questions on SO that are about someone else's code get little or no support (and indeed sometimes rather hostile or negative reactions). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That leaves CV policy and the questions you raise but do not really address are Is our policy wrong? Why should we change? What should be our new rules if those questions are convincingly argued? In fact, our policy is to be positive about questions in which statistical analysis is the focus of concern, and we often encourage posters to bring that to the fore (or be migrated to SO otherwise). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with you that many of the issues arising with R also affect use of other software too (SAS, Stata, etc.). In practice users of such software also have access to support from the vendors and there are healthy software-specific lists and forums that are broad-minded about software-specific questions. Then again R-help remains a very active list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2013-09-05T15:54:16.323" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1741" CreationDate="2013-09-06T03:04:01.887" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Users failing to respond to good answers by accepting one is annoying, there's no doubt of that. I've seen some wonderful answers go unrecognized by the poster of the question and the lack of response (either accepting or explaining why there are outstanding issues that would stand in the way of it) often strikes me as selfishness in the face of an answerer's generosity. Some regular contributors seem to suffer from this non-response to their efforts shamefully often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In my own case, even when I felt that an answer &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt; really answer my question after several attempts to convey the issue clearly to them, I have accepted an answer as clear recognition of the answerer's sterling efforts in responding to it.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think in the case where the OP explicitly acknowledges an answer as helpful it's more than reasonable to point out to them that accepting the answer is an option - even in respect of your own post - many new users miss that this feature exists (or forget it) and are often grateful for the chance to put their thanks to that poster in more concrete form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where there are several good answers that attract many upvotes, one might reasonably encourage the OP to consider choosing &lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt; answer. (I don't think it's reasonable to place the onus for encouraging others to understand the way stackexchange works only on the moderators. The responsibility falls to all of us.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you aren't &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; generating reminders on your own responses, but more generally encouraging people to 'follow the site culture', I think it's a very positive behavior. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2013-09-06T03:10:23.803" LastActivityDate="2013-09-06T03:10:23.803" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1744" CreationDate="2013-09-06T03:27:46.357" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;This issue seems to come up regularly in various forms, so it's clearly an issue where there isn't a perfect SE solution.  With respect to what's on-topic on CV, my own decision process (for what it's worth--nobody is obligated to agree with me) is rather simple:  &lt;em&gt;what does the OP need explained to them&lt;/em&gt;?  If the answer is a statistical concept, the question belongs on CV; if the answer is something about how &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; works / how to work with &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt;, then it doesn't (for more, see my answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1616/what-happened-to-the-idea-to-start-an-r-specific-stackexchange-site/1620#1620&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).  For the most part, the latter option tends to mean that the question is essentially a &lt;em&gt;coding&lt;/em&gt;-based issue and SO is the logical destination.  However, it is certainly possible that a given question is off-topic for &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; CV &amp;amp; SO.  The next most logical destination for &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; questions is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;r-help listserve&lt;/a&gt;.  I recognize the frustration that goes with having a question and having difficulty getting the information you need, but the SE ecosystem has a certain specific design, purpose and limits; it cannot serve all types of questions that can be asked.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2013-09-06T03:27:46.357" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1007" CreationDate="2013-09-06T09:50:06.677" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1700/930&quot;&gt;recent discussion&lt;/a&gt; initiated by Andre Silva, it has been proposed to backlist the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/recommendations&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;recommendations&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;recommendations&lt;/a&gt; tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/references&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;references&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;references&lt;/a&gt; has the following synonyms: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resources&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/book&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;book&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;book&lt;/a&gt; (s), &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tutorial&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tutorial&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tutorial&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/video&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;video&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;video&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/textbook&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;textbook&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;textbook&lt;/a&gt; (s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2013-09-06T09:50:06.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1749" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1750" CreationDate="2013-09-07T02:57:25.923" Score="10" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/196104/is-it-possible-to-speed-up-migration?noredirect=1#comment618909_196104&quot;&gt;Evidently&lt;/a&gt;, when we vote to close a question as off-topic and appropriate for Stack Overflow, the thread will not actually be migrated unless we select:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;close&#xA; -&amp;gt; off-topic because…&#xA;     -&amp;gt; This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network&#xA;         -&amp;gt; belongs on stackoverflow.com&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Put differently, if we select:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;close&#xA; -&amp;gt; Questions about programming are off-topic here unless they involve statistical &#xA;    analysis in some fashion, but they can be asked on Stack Overflow. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the question will simply go [on hold] for a period of time, and eventually be closed automatically.  I did not realize this, and I gather &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6018/confusing-closing-off-topic-dialog&quot;&gt;it was an issue on programmers.SE as well&lt;/a&gt;.  Thus, I wonder if others were also using the latter option because it is more salient, rather than because they wanted to close the question &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; it being migrated.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if we can edit the options that appear when you vote to close to make this clearer.  I don't have a specific suggestion on how to do that; I'm open to ideas that people have and I'm not even sure what options are possible.  I don't want to prevent people from being able to close without migrating if that's their intention, but I don't want posters to end up in limbo due to confusing design.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Side question&lt;/em&gt;:  Can &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/69065/frequency-table-comparison-using-r&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt; be migrated?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2013-09-07T14:48:32.633" Title="Can we clarify the off-topic closing options?" Tags="|feature-request|closing-questions|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1749" CreationDate="2013-09-07T14:48:32.633" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yeah, this was really confusing -- I have removed &quot;Questions about programming...&quot; close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2013-09-07T14:48:32.633" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1741" CreationDate="2013-09-08T07:26:13.100" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quite apart from community norms and the optics of begging for reputation, accepting an answer also visually marks the question as “answered” (which means “no need to spend more time on it/check it” if you are looking for something to do and also “likely to provide a solution” if you are searching past questions to solve a problem you are having).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of the discussion seems to focus on quality and reputation but in my mind the answer doesn't even have to be great or especially deserving to be accepted. If it provides a solution or somehow addresses the question (which might itself not be particularly deep or interesting), then the question ought to be marked as “answered” or the OP should explain what's missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike upvotes, it's not so much about the reputation than it is about site management and good record keeping. I often ask people to consider accepting an answer (my own or someone else's) or to “upgrade” short comments to a full answer for this reason (it's not uncommon for a brief comment that seems unremarkable to its author to fully and completely address a question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6029" LastEditorUserId="6029" LastEditDate="2013-09-08T09:38:39.967" LastActivityDate="2013-09-08T09:38:39.967" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1744" CreationDate="2013-09-09T07:50:04.883" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure I agree with the previous answers. Something like “How can I run a factor analysis in R?” would seem like something both would see outside the scope of this site but I am not convinced it should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the question does not require much statistical expertise (the relevant decisions have apparently already been made), I don't see where else it could be answered in the StackExchange network (of course, you could also try with a mailing list, ask a friend or hire a consultant but that's true for virtually &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; question on this site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turning to the letter of the policy, the question is not about “an algorithm, routine data processing, or details of the language” so it's not clear that it should be migrated to StackOverflow. In computer science terms, it could be understood as a question about R's “API” but such questions seem uncommon on SO, at least when it comes to R. In any case, statisticians, not programmers, are most likely to know the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both the policy and practical experience therefore suggest that questions about running some analysis in R don't fit on StackOverflow. Consequently, the only choice left is to refuse to help people seeking this type of information and simply close the question but what do we gain by doing that? They seem perfectly answerable (they are not unclear or subjective), probably require less effort than the more challenging statistical questions and are not so numerous that they would create insurmountable practical problems, even accounting for the fact that answering them could in turn result in more and more similar questions being asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we decide to be a little more accommodating when it comes to software-related question, they could become part of a useful knowledge base for anybody seeking to perform data analysis, along with more theoretical questions, suggestions on how to tackle new or unusual difficulties, questions about good practice in common situations, practical advice to beginning data analysts, literature recommendations and all the other type of questions asked on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6029" LastEditorUserId="6029" LastEditDate="2013-09-09T09:56:14.143" LastActivityDate="2013-09-09T09:56:14.143" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1753" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-10T02:56:33.207" Score="6" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;Presently (and for the foreseeable future) I have a particular interest in finding especially good fairly recent answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides the reasonably obvious ones of &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(i) following the active queue (seeing very recent answers) and identifying the good ones as they are posted or updated; or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(ii) using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tools&quot;&gt;moderation tools&lt;/a&gt; to locate&#xA;the &lt;strong&gt;Highest voted&lt;/strong&gt; among the &lt;strong&gt;Answers with extreme votes&lt;/strong&gt; (by day, week, fortnight, etc), and identifying the good ones by upvotes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;are there some neat ways of finding good answers, whether common to SE or considering the specifics of CV* that I might have missed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*&lt;strike&gt;(e.g. is there some user whose upvotes are especially good indicators of generally good answers, for example, or some other CV-specific indicator?)&lt;/strike&gt; (not possible as whuber points out)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Are there other ways to find good recent answers on CrossValidated?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1744" CreationDate="2013-09-10T16:23:49.703" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a moderator I have to cope with this issue many times a day, so let me briefly share the principal considerations that are involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it is at least &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; to answer a question on stats, data analysis, or machine learning in a way that does not require knowledge of a particular computing platform or language, then it is potentially on topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Any &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; to such a question that is comprehensible to a non-user of the target platform or language is therefore appropriate, even when it may include working code.  If it &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; includes working code, without further explanation, we may appreciate the respondent's effort but we should also be inclined to migrate the entire thread to SO.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that are understandable by or of interest &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; to users of a particular computing package or platform are &lt;em&gt;prima facie&lt;/em&gt; about that platform and belong on SO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have the flexibility to point out that certain questions originating from software problems have universal interest.  We tend to employ that flexibility by encouraging posters to phrase their questions in general terms.  &quot;How do I do a factor analysis in &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt;&quot; is off topic, but &quot;What is it about &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; I am doing this factor analysis that causes this particular problem&quot; is potentially on topic, regardless of whether the computing is being done in &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt;, Stata, or by hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note the important implications for would-be &lt;em&gt;answerers&lt;/em&gt;: in order to communicate with everyone we speak the language of statistics here, not the narrower dialects known as SAS, &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt;, Stata, SPSS, or whatever.  Therefore answers should not be presented solely in one of these languages, either.  We might look to the best publications in our field as a model: they all permit only a small number of natural languages and they employ a universal mathematical notation.  Papers submitted in Welsh or even Chinese are not accepted in most of them--even though Chinese may be one of the most spoken languages on the planet now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2013-09-10T16:23:49.703" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1753" CreationDate="2013-09-10T20:22:45.797" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Non-traditional methods for mining good and/or recent answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1- Search for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;is:answer score:5&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and filter by &lt;code&gt;newest&lt;/code&gt;. It will appear all the newest replies with score equal or more than 5 (the threshold 5 was just one example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To better understand how the search-by-score syntax works see this &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/188781/give-us-better-search-by-score-syntax&quot;&gt;thread&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2- Look for the lowest score responses from users with high &lt;code&gt;reputation per number of answers&lt;/code&gt; ratio. The answers are very likely to be good ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3- Investigate replies from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users?tab=NewUsers&amp;amp;sort=reputation&quot;&gt;new users&lt;/a&gt; sorted by reputation and I think good answers will pop up. Some of them already have statistics background and their contribution take some time to reach a good visibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2013-09-10T20:40:01.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1756" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1757" CreationDate="2013-09-10T21:17:27.703" Score="0" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/69674/gaussian-kernel-density-estimation-with-fixed-covariance-with-python?noredirect=1&quot;&gt;&quot;Gaussian kernel density estimation with fixed covariance (with python)&quot;&lt;/a&gt; was incorrectly migrated to StackOverflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we have it restored to Cross-Validated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1514/what-standard-should-be-applied-in-deciding-whether-a-question-requires-sufficie&quot;&gt;this meta question&lt;/a&gt; it does not appear as though the original post exhibited the negative criteria listed in the highest-voted answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question includes tags for things besides a programming language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question could be easily re-stated in English (with no computer code) since the idea that there is just a simple programming option to enable a full covariance-like bandwidth parameter to KDE is not a coherent criticism (there is no such simple programming option and it would involve novel research to create one.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question is not &lt;em&gt;purely&lt;/em&gt; mathematical, since it is about data-driven or otherwise covariance based choices in modeling data with KDE process and presumably applies to actual data given the programming references.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Along these lines, from the meta-question I linked above we have: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Something to notice about most of these examples is that their titles contain technical statistical terms. The presence of such words does not imply the question itself is on topic!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am curious if there is community support for the analagous claim: &quot;The presence of programming-language-specific words, tags, or phrases in the title of a question does not imply the question itself is off topic!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question does involve a programming language, but as I interpret it, the question asks about a method to employ a more &quot;covariance-like&quot; notion of bandwidth within the Kernel Density Estimation framework. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8927" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2013-09-10T22:44:18.710" Title="Question incorrectly migrated" Tags="|discussion|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1756" CreationDate="2013-09-10T21:44:04.830" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to migrate this question after some thought and reviewing the comments; this was not a clear or automatic case.  I ultimately relied on the original text to make the decision for me: it explicitly asks for a Python solution and the OP takes pains to intimate that he could program the algorithm himself, but wishes to avoid it.  That was a sufficiently clear indication that this is a pure programming question and leaves me comfortable with the decision. At this point it's out of our hands: you would need to appeal to the SO mods either to reject the migration or migrate the question back here. You ought to wait for clarification from the OP first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2013-09-10T21:44:04.830" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1756" CreationDate="2013-09-10T22:44:18.710" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I also voted to migrate that question.  My criterion is simple:  What does the OP need explained?  If it's a statistical concept, then the thread belongs here; if it's something about how to use software, then it belongs elsewhere.  The OP asked how to fix the covariance of a Gaussian kernel to some pre-specified value in Python.  A perfectly satisfactory answer could have been:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes, that's easy to do.  You set &lt;code&gt;argument=value&lt;/code&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2013-09-10T22:44:18.710" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1759" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1768" CreationDate="2013-09-11T18:21:56.707" Score="9" ViewCount="702" Body="&lt;p&gt;There exists Area51 proposal called &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/55086/sports-betting&quot;&gt;Sports Betting&lt;/a&gt;. (Admittedly, it is not very active so far and it might get deleted for inactivity. One of the reasons for writing here is making the users of this site aware of it; since there might be an overlap between people interested in this site and people interested in that proposal.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When discussing &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11541/should-sports-betting-be-merged-into-sports&quot;&gt;whether this proposal should be merged with sports.SE site&lt;/a&gt;; one of the followers suggested that questions about betting (or at least some of them) &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11541/should-sports-betting-be-merged-into-sports/11713#11713&quot;&gt;could be appropriate for this site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen that several questions about betting have been asked here before, for some examples see &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11541/should-sports-betting-be-merged-into-sports/11720#11720&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would some of the following questions about sports betting be on-topic for this site?  Would most?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Judging by the questions I have found so far, I would guess that some could be, but not most, but I guess there is no harm in asking.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll list here example questions from the proposal (to get an idea about the kind of the questions which might be asked there - but keep in mind that Sports Betting proposal is still in definition phase):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the pros and cons of level stakes betting?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Under what assumptions is Kelly staking 'optimal'?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are some good bookmaker comparison sites?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why do odds offered by the bookmakers tend to change rapidly during the last few minutes before the start of the game?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do odds comparison sites get the data with the odds for the events at various bookmakers?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why some bookmakers do not offer multiple bets (accumulator bets)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How is potential profit from an arbitrage bet (a.k.a. surebet) calculated?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt; &#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have posted several comments on betting-related questions asked on this site about this proposal. I hope it is ok. (It was mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/134805/what-are-acceptable-ways-of-promoting-your-area-51-proposal&quot;&gt;this meta.SO questions&lt;/a&gt; as one of the possibilities how to make potentially interested users aware of a site proposal.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30155" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T08:41:05.607" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T07:27:54.067" Title="Questions about sports betting" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1761" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-16T20:07:45.763" Score="15" ViewCount="401" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the Cross Validated community grows, so does the load on our moderator team. The existing staff is doing an excellent job, and in order to keep up the good work, they've requested a few more sets of hands. Therefore, the 2013 Community Moderator Election is now underway!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community moderator elections have three phases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nomination phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Primary phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Election phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please visit the official election page at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for more detail, and to participate!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/election&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;election&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;election&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2013-09-20T16:49:29.830" Title="2013 Community Moderator Election" Tags="|discussion|moderation|election|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-09-16T20:07:45.763" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1616" CreationDate="2013-09-16T23:02:37.370" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the original Asker of the META Q you link to, I think &quot;we&quot; (the people on SO who were getting annoyed with questions being closed that seemingly, or at that time, fell between the SO and CV cracks) decided that within the StackExchange ecosystem, what we hoped to achieve with an R-related SE site didn't really fit in with the SE ethos or could be covered within the SO or CV banners (plus some others).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest, I'm now more frustrated with CV and its relationship with R and questions about R than I am with the SO side of things. If you are using R to do stats and have a statistical question about what the code in R is doing (i.e., a function you are using, not something you wrote), then I don't see why that would be OT for CV. Others' opinions do vary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1390" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2013-09-17T00:20:26.383" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T00:20:26.383" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1763" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-17T00:55:56.653" Score="4" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I know that on cross validated we can nominate ourselves for the moderator position, but are we able to nominate others for the position?  I do not see an option for this but there a few people I can think of that I would like to nominate if they themselves do not do it.  even if they do not want the position (and could be the reason they do not nominate themselves) I think its a very nice way of saying we appreciate everything they do for the cross validated community at large.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user25658" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T07:17:25.270" Title="Can we nominate candidates for the 2013 moderator elections?" Tags="|support|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1763" CreationDate="2013-09-17T03:16:42.567" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are better ways to show appreciation than nominating someone Moderator (offer a bounty for example for answering above and beyond the call of duty, for example.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional effort has to be gone into if more than a set number of nominations are received; ten or more nominations results in the Primary system kicking in, effectively a round of voting to choose the best (or most voted for) candidates prior to the election proper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no problem with this if ten or more people want to nominate themselves, but there is no point having extra voting if people &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; want the job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Better would be to contact a particular user and see if they would mind being nominated. That way you can express your thanks &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; solicit their opinion on whether they would mind being nominated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1390" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T03:16:42.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1765" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-17T05:05:42.787" Score="21" ViewCount="653" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has been a lot of discussion about software-related questions on CV (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1577/1390,&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1514/1390&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for examples...). And yet there is &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; no clear idea and guidance on what CV is, what it strives to be and who it is for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been a user of and contributor to CV for a long time (intially during the beta phase) and I find it unclear what is and isn't allowed here. But more so I find the creep towards a more statistical &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; remit for the site, to wit, @Chl &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1646/1390&quot;&gt;recently said&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It also worth noting that our site policy has evolved since its inception, and we now try to focus on questions that require statistical expertise rather than questions asking about tools, or polls involving shopping-list or extended discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which alarms me immensely (well, not bit about the polls, discussion of shopping lists). That is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; what I signed up to with CV originally, and not what I have been contributing to. I also feel that such a move would be to the detriment of CV as a whole. I don't mean to single out @Chl here, but this is as best an admission I could find of what I have grown to believe has been happening here over the past year or so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I'll admit to not following &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the meta discussions (here or on Stack Overflow where I am somewhat more active) so I may not have been privy to some of the discussions regarding this shift, but at the very least there seems to be disquiet or a lack of clarity about what CV is and is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1745/1390&quot;&gt;recent thread&lt;/a&gt; on a similar topic @NickCox quoted the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; page in support of his argument that many R-related questions are off topic here. I quote the relevant section again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are certain subjects that will probably get better responses on our sister sites. If your question is about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Programming&lt;/strong&gt;, ask on Stack Overflow. If the language is statistically oriented (such as R, SAS, Stata, SPSS, etc.), then decide based on the nature of your question: if it needs statistical expertise to understand or answer, ask it here; if it's about an algorithm, routine data processing, or details of the language, then please refer to the collection of links to resources we maintain.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with this &quot;evidence&quot; is that it refers explicitly to &quot;Programming&quot;. Just because R is a programming language, it doesn't mean that using R is an act of programming. I would wager that the majority of R Users are not involved in any programming (as most people would recognise the term) but are using it as they would Minitab, Excel, SAS, SPSS etc to run statistical analyses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the above is now representative of a broader CV policy, the advice above needs to be updated to removal the &lt;em&gt;Programming&lt;/em&gt; qualifier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question or perhaps point really, is that the current policy regarding what is on or off topic here needs clarification. But I would like to stimulate a wider debate about what CV aims to be. As I expressed elsewhere, a site devoid of software-related questions is not something I want to see for CV but many users seem to think that anything with &quot;...do this in R?&quot; is OT here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I reject the argument that if a question is ostensibly related to or about R that it is OT for Cross Validated. If that question is motivated from primarily a statistical point of view then I don't care if it has an R or SAS or SPSS focus. Such questions &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be on-topic here and I would like to encourage that CV embrace such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/70188/1390&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;, though it is not the best example it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; pertinent as the comment by @BabakP about it being OT precipitated my particular question, would (or should) be a useful and relevant contribution here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Throughout I have referred to R but you could replace &quot;R&quot; in the above question with Your Favourite Stats Software and my point would remain the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1390" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2014-04-28T20:45:48.637" Title="What does Cross Validated aim to be, who is it for?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|software|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1735" CreationDate="2013-09-17T05:11:58.813" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it is not code, and contrary to @Glenn_b I would argue that it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; wrong to do so. Think about the semantics of the markup used; marking something as code that clearly isn't breaks the semantic meaning of the markup. That is bad!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is wrong with just emphasising with &lt;strong&gt;bold&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;em&gt;italics&lt;/em&gt; the name of a piece of software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1390" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T05:11:58.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1763" CreationDate="2013-09-17T07:17:25.270" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The moderator elections are fairly well announced and documented on the site - I'd suggest that anyone paying sufficiently little attention to the site to not notice the elections going on is probably poorly suited to being a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which means, in all likelihood, if someone hasn't put their name in, it's because they don't want to be moderator. And if someone doesn't want to be a moderator, they really shouldn't be, from either the standpoint of the community, or from &quot;Don't foist unpaid obligations on strangers&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest, if you &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; think someone would make a good moderator, that you contact them (many people have Twitter usernames and the like in their profiles) or leave a comment to that effect, perhaps in response to a well-written post in CV's meta site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5836" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T07:17:25.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1759" CreationDate="2013-09-17T07:27:54.067" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say that &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; sports betting questions could find a home on CV, but not enough to not justify their own site. To use an example that's actually an official SE site: &lt;a href=&quot;http://rpg.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;http://rpg.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; has some potential questions that are probabilistic - what's the distribution of values from a particularly opaque dice-rolling system, or particular optimizations (a sword with a higher mean value versus one with a lower mean but a narrower variance in terms of damage).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But its faster, and likely more productive, to ask someone who is already up on the longsword vs. greatsword debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is true for sports betting as well - you could ask many of those questions here, but a huge amount of time would be spent on &quot;defining your terms&quot; in a way that wouldn't be required with field specific expertise. There are occasionally sports-related questions that are on here, but I don't think there will ever be a sufficient concentration of them to satisfy the sports-betting enthusiast. And if the questioner &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; properly define their terms and lay out the problem in a generalizable form, they're well and truly out of luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5836" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T07:27:54.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1769" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-17T13:35:55.383" Score="14" ViewCount="341" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1800/2013-moderator-election-qa-questionnaire&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In connection with the moderator elections, we will be holding a Q&amp;amp;A with the candidates.  This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation.  Participation is completely voluntary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an alternative form of the Town Hall Chat system we've done &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/169754/february-2013-stack-overflow-moderator-election-town-hall-chat&quot;&gt;in previous elections&lt;/a&gt;, we're trying some new things to test out how a different approach works. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how it'll work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;During the nomination phase, (so, until September 23rd at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 4:00 pm EDT on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post &lt;em&gt;one question per answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The first two will be guaranteed to be included, the latter ones are if the community doesn't supply enough questions. This will be done in a single post, unlike the prior instruction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into at current.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At the end of the phase, the Community Team will select &lt;strong&gt;up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community&lt;/strong&gt; provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions. We reserve some editorial control in the selection of the questions and may opt not to select a question that is tangential or irrelevant to moderation or the election. That said, if I have concerns about any questions in this fashion, I will be sure to point this out in comments before the decision making time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Once questions have been selected, a new question will be opened to host the actual questionnaire for the candidates, containing 10 questions in total.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&amp;amp;A.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any questions or feedback about this new process, feel free to post as a comment here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5645" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2013-09-23T20:09:39.870" Title="2013 Moderator Election Q&amp;A - Question Collection" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1769" CreationDate="2013-09-17T13:35:55.383" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a set of general questions, gathered as very common questions asked every election. As mentioned in the instructions, the first two questions are guaranteed to show up in the Q&amp;amp;A, while the others are if there aren't enough questions (or, if you like one enough, you may split it off as a separate answer for review within the community's 8). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In your opinion, what do moderators do? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5645" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T13:35:55.383" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1765" CreationDate="2013-09-17T15:37:23.760" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see any real disagreements here.  The key is in the last line: if your interest in any question were to change radically upon replacing &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; by &lt;code&gt;BMDP&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;Systat&lt;/code&gt; or whatever, then that is likely because the question is not asking anything about data analysis or statistics: it is asking about how to say the magic words to make the software behave.  That's what SO is for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Of course&lt;/em&gt; that does not rule out fielding software-related questions here on CV.  As Peter Flom points out in a comment, software is a necessary medium for doing data analysis.  (I have argued elsewhere that it's not a good medium for conveying ideas about data analysis, though, because there is no software platform that a majority of people doing data analysis are familiar with.)  We have always recognized here that many ostensibly software-related questions are, when closely examined, really questions about analyzing data, even though they manifest themselves as software-related problems.  We want to answer &lt;em&gt;the deeper question&lt;/em&gt; about how to analyze the data rather than the immediate, shallow question about what to change in the code.  This, to me, is one of the keys to writing great questions and providing great answers: a great question provides enough information to identify the root cause of an issue and an awesome answer provides a revelation about that cause, increasing our understanding &lt;em&gt;regardless of what software platform we may choose to use ourselves.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think anyone anywhere here has claimed that &quot;using &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; is an act of programming.&quot; That's why programming is specifically mentioned in our FAQ.  When you are in fact using &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; for programming, you are employing it in its capacity to do a job that C++ or Python or VBA or whatever could do, and you should prefer to address your question to a community of programming experts.  That ain't us: that's SO.  When you are using &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; to carry out statistical analysis or data visualization, your questions about that are squarely on topic here and always have been.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently we have been migrating an average of 2 questions per day (out of 50 per day total) to SO.  They are not all &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt;-related: in the list I see a JMP question, a Stata question, and a Java question in the first ten.  What are the &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt;-related questions about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/70105&quot;&gt;How to compute a transition matrix from time series data.&lt;/a&gt;  I disagree with this migration: this question invites answers that explain how to estimate Markov transition matrices and then &lt;em&gt;illustrate&lt;/em&gt; the procedure with &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/70051&quot;&gt;How to reproduce a paper's results&lt;/a&gt;.  Although it &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be handled in a way that is informative, there seems little prospect that such an approach would appeal to the OP: he just wants the &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; equivalents of Stata commands.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/70063&quot;&gt;This question concerns a package installation problem&lt;/a&gt;.  That should be of no interest on this site: send it to those who love to diagnose such software problems.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/70041&quot;&gt;Clustering time series by correlation&lt;/a&gt;. This vague question really needed guidance from our community and IMHO is squarely on topic here.  I disagree with its migration.  However, the OP did get a useful answer on SO and her comments there suggest that maybe our community was right in its decision: the discussion is now focusing on details of &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; syntax and not the deeper issue of why this form of analysis is being attempted or how best to do it.  But maybe that's a self-fulfilling result: when a question stays here we discuss the data analysis implications and when it resides on SO, that community naturally addresses syntax, performance, and other computing issues.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could go on analyzing the migrations, but already some generalities seem to be emerging:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If we adopt &lt;strong&gt;the approach of addressing every software-specific question as being&lt;/strong&gt; (potentially) &lt;strong&gt;a question about data analysis&lt;/strong&gt;, in almost all cases we will be right and the question need not be migrated (although it might need considerable improvement to deflect its original focus from &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; to the &lt;em&gt;application&lt;/em&gt; of &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If we &lt;strong&gt;pause to write a comment&lt;/strong&gt; asking the OP about the nature of their question, we can be confident that we are directing them towards the community best suited to help them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We need to be a little slower to close questions.&lt;/strong&gt;  When I review the statistics, I find that many of our community members who are voting to close are spending remarkably little time to make their decisions and some of them are voting far too often for closure.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In brief, when you are in doubt about a question, &lt;strong&gt;don't migrate it, &lt;em&gt;improve&lt;/em&gt; it!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T15:37:23.760" CommentCount="43" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1769" CreationDate="2013-09-17T16:28:02.780" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are elected moderator, what (&lt;em&gt;specific, concrete!&lt;/em&gt;) changes would you like to see made to the way the site is currently administered and moderated? How do you view your role in effecting the proposed changes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2970" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T16:28:02.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1769" CreationDate="2013-09-17T17:10:22.393" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are your opinions about casting the deciding &quot;moderator&quot; vote on closing/opening questions? For example, if five non-moderator users have closed a question that you think should be left open, would you consider unilaterally re-opening it? Similarly, if a majority of reviewers have recommended that a question be left open (say 1 close vote and 3 &quot;stay open&quot; votes) under what circumstances would you decide to use your deciding close vote to override the majority? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4856" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T17:10:22.393" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1769" CreationDate="2013-09-17T17:19:44.403" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is your take on the &quot;software questions on CV&quot; that come up very frequently and where do you draw the line and decide it should be migrated to SO or simply closed? Based on the review queue, it seems there is a lot of heterogeneity among the high-rep users in terms of what constitutes &quot;off-topic&quot; in this context and, with moderators having the ability to unilaterally close/migrate questions, this seems a natural question to ask. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4856" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T17:19:44.403" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1741" CreationDate="2013-09-17T18:02:08.253" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Encouraging (pressuring - yes, it can be viewed as such) users to accept an Answer has been outlawed on StackOverflow for good reason. It is up to individual users whether they want to accept an answer or not. If they don't want to, that is up to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the accept rate is now not displayed for a user in the Q&amp;amp;A to stop people berating users that have a low accept rate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A timely reminder of how the SE sites work via a link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; is OK for new users, but doing so for every unaccepted question would just clutter the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that, vote on good Answers, downvote or comment on bad Answers, users visiting those Questions will be informed by the voting even if an accept is not forthcoming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I don't buy into the idea that once an Answer is accepted the Q&amp;amp;A is complete. A better Answer may be forthcoming, or an alternative approach or solution provided. I often check back against interesting Q&amp;amp;As through the Favourite mechanism to see if there have been updates. CV, like the other SE sites, is an evolving beast, and that doesn't end with a click on the tick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1390" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T18:02:08.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1769" CreationDate="2013-09-17T18:43:22.817" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;What kind of moderatorial experience, if any, have you had before (online or offline)? Can you give an example of a moderatorial issue that came up, how you had handled it, and how the community that you moderated viewed your handling of the situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T18:43:22.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1735" CreationDate="2013-09-17T18:48:44.413" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My guess is that it justified in the sense of looking like the formatting that you will see in the tags under the question (which for better or worse looks exactly like the code formatting), thus ensuring some sort of uniformity within a page. I tend to like it, but, as Glen_b and whuber, definitely won't see this as a major reason for a proposed edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T18:48:44.413" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1769" CreationDate="2013-09-18T00:02:29.710" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is your interpretation of the purpose of Cross Validated and how does this influence the way you choose to use the site as an ordinary user? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4856" LastEditorUserId="4856" LastEditDate="2013-09-18T01:39:06.267" LastActivityDate="2013-09-18T01:39:06.267" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-09-18T01:39:06.267" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1780" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-18T04:44:46.620" Score="11" ViewCount="524" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the various issues regarding handling of software-related questions (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1765/1390&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for one jumping-off point), can we curate a set of &lt;em&gt;house rules&lt;/em&gt; that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;encapsulates what Question the community would like to see remain on CrossValidated (CV)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;provides explicit guidance for users and moderators alike when considering flagging for migration or migrating Questions to StackOverflow (SO)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have made an initial attempt, see my Answer below, but as that is classed Community Wiki please feel free to make edits to it as well as adding additional Answers that might act as signposts for discussion or jumping-off points to discuss particular aspects of suggested wording.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the base text was lifted from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I decided to reproduce the entire document from the above link as it contains a lot of useful material that we should maintain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1390" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Defining clearer house rules on software-related questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1780" CreationDate="2013-09-18T04:44:46.620" Score="10" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Proposed replacement for  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New text begins below the line, other horizontal lines enclose regions where changes have been made&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CrossValidated is for statisticians, data miners, and anyone else doing data analysis or interested in it as a discipline. If you have a question about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;statistical analysis&lt;/strong&gt; - applied or theoretical&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;designing experiments&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;collecting data&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;data mining&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;machine learning&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;visualizing data&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;probability theory&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;mathematical statistics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;statistical and data-driven &lt;strong&gt;computing&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then you're in the right place. Anybody can ask a question, regardless of skills and experience, but some questions are still better than others. If you came here with a question to ask and are new to the site, please consult our thread on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1479/how-to-ask-a-good-question-on-crossvalidated&quot;&gt;how to ask a good question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our community aims to create a lasting record of great solutions to questions. For more about this and guidance about how to provide your own great answers, please read &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1390/how-should-questions-be-answered-on-cross-validated&quot;&gt;How should questions be answered on Cross Validated?&lt;/a&gt; Providing references to peer-reviewed literature or links to on-line resources is warmly welcomed. You can also incorporate the work of others under fair use doctrine, which particularly means that you must attribute any text, images, or other material that is not originally yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Converted the Homework &lt;em&gt;link&lt;/em&gt; to SE markup for the Homework &lt;em&gt;tag&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Homework questions are welcome. Please mark them with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag. They get &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10811/how-to-ask-and-answer-homework-questions/10812#10812&quot;&gt;somewhat special treatment&lt;/a&gt;, because ultimately you benefit most by finding the solution yourself. The community will try to provide &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/12/919&quot;&gt;guidance, hints, and useful links&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more help, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;What types of questions should I avoid asking?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Heavily modified!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Reordered bullets, collected all software-related entries into a single section&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Added a line to the Bugs bullet about appropriate reporting&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Under the &lt;em&gt;programming&lt;/em&gt; sub-bullet I added a &lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt; to clarify what we mean by programming. The other text in this bullet is a verbatim copy from the original&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Added several bullets under the general topic (which is also new) of &lt;em&gt;Software-related&lt;/em&gt; Questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are certain subjects that will probably get better responses on our sister sites. If your question is about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mathematics&lt;/strong&gt; ask on &lt;a href=&quot;http://math.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;math.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bugs&lt;/strong&gt; in software, ask the people who produced the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Added:&lt;/strong&gt; For add-on packages for languages such as &lt;strong&gt;R&lt;/strong&gt;, written by third parties, identify the author or package maintainer so as to make your bug report in the appropriate place.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Software-related questions&lt;/strong&gt; Computers and statistical software are integral to the modern practice of statistics or data analysis. As such, questions with a significant software aspect are &lt;em&gt;in general&lt;/em&gt; welcome on CV. However, the CV community has no desire to replace documentation or existing help email lists or discussion fora for statistical software. Consider whether a &lt;em&gt;software-related&lt;/em&gt; question is suitable for CV via the following criteria:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Software-related&lt;/em&gt; questions &lt;strike&gt;that&lt;/strike&gt; are &lt;em&gt;potentially&lt;/em&gt; related to the practice of statistics or data analysis, however well-disguised as a coding or software issue they may be. &lt;em&gt;Such questions should be assumed&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;on topic&lt;/strong&gt; for CV &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; another criterion would render them off topic. Such questions may need improvement to meet other quality criteria; assist the original poster to improve the question to draw out the statistical or data analytical issues by leaving comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;General questions&lt;/em&gt; about using &lt;strike&gt;statistical&lt;/strike&gt; functions, software or add-on packages for languages such as R, especially those concerning basic usage, are &lt;strong&gt;off topic&lt;/strong&gt; on CV &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; SO, particularly so when they concern topics covered in the introductory manuals, or function or package documentation. As such, these questions should &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;in general&lt;/em&gt; be migrated or flagged for migration to SO.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Programming&lt;/em&gt; If the language is statistically oriented (such as &lt;strong&gt;R&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;SAS&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Stata&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;SPSS&lt;/strong&gt;, etc.), then decide based on the nature of your question: if it needs &lt;em&gt;statistical expertise&lt;/em&gt; to understand or answer, ask it here; if it's about an &lt;em&gt;algorithm&lt;/em&gt;, routine &lt;em&gt;data processing&lt;/em&gt;, or details of the &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt;, ask on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; or refer to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/793/internet-support-for-statistics-software&quot;&gt;collection of links to resources&lt;/a&gt; we maintain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: With languages such as &lt;strong&gt;R&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;Python&lt;/strong&gt; it can be difficult to distinguish between &lt;em&gt;programming&lt;/em&gt; and simply &lt;em&gt;using&lt;/em&gt; the software's functionality for data analysis. Questions about &lt;em&gt;using&lt;/em&gt; higher-level statistical functions or add-on packages in such languages are not considered &lt;em&gt;programming&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Do not flag such questions for migration to SO&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;em&gt;statistical reasoning&lt;/em&gt; is required to answer the question, the question is &lt;strong&gt;on topic&lt;/strong&gt;. This criterion has broad applicability, for example a question requiring help with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1627/1390&quot;&gt;debugging code producing patently incorrect results&lt;/a&gt; is considered &lt;strong&gt;on topic&lt;/strong&gt; if statistical reasoning is needed to correct the code.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;additional criteria here&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about &lt;strong&gt;obtaining particular datasets&lt;/strong&gt; are off-topic (they are too specialized). The &lt;a href=&quot;https://gis.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;GIS SE&lt;/a&gt; site welcomes inquiries about obtaining geographically related datasets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note, however, that cross-posting is not encouraged on SE sites. Choose the best location to post your question. Later, if it proves better suited on another site, it can be migrated, along with any comments and answers. In particular, &lt;strong&gt;don't&lt;/strong&gt; post a duplicate question on another SE site if your question attracts close votes; let the community moderators migrate the question for you. To aid this process, feel free to flag your own question for moderator attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;look around&lt;/a&gt; to see if your question has been asked before. It’s also OK to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/helpcenter/self-answer&quot;&gt;ask and answer your own question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question is not specifically on-topic for CrossValidated, it may be on topic for another &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange site&lt;/a&gt;. If no site currently exists that will accept your question, you may &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;commit to&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/76974/how-can-i-propose-a-new-site&quot;&gt;propose&lt;/a&gt; a new site at &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Area51&lt;/a&gt;, the place where new Stack Exchange communities are democratically created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1390" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2013-09-19T18:01:52.597" CommentCount="15" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-09-18T04:44:46.620" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1765" CreationDate="2013-09-18T07:22:08.090" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't really know where to post this but there is an additional point that I feel should be made. When looking at questions like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/70310/how-to-fix-mean-and-variance-of-latent-variables-with-the-mirt-package&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/70310/how-to-fix-mean-and-variance-of-latent-variables-with-the-mirt-package&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to perform Chi square test for trend in SPSS v 19?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18788051/3-level-logistic-regression&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18788051/3-level-logistic-regression&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18774985/bootstrap-on-correlation-coefficients-in-r&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18774985/bootstrap-on-correlation-coefficients-in-r&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need quite a lot of statistics knowledge to even simply &lt;em&gt;understand&lt;/em&gt; the question. The answer might ultimately be as simple as “type XXX” but finding the right function, being able to understand the relevant documentation and to cut through inconsistent and confusing terminology, or to understand what parameters you need to use and check that the function is really doing what you want is far from trivial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wording of the questions might emphasize the “how-do-I-carry-out-test-X” aspect and ostensibly suggest that the relevant statistical decisions have already been made but they still have no place on StackOverflow. Those are simply not questions a programmer could answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, we might still want to close them for other reasons but we should at least agree that the only site where they could possibly be on-topic and stand a good chance of reaching knowledgeable contributors is CrossValidated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6029" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2013-09-19T12:33:48.937" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1765" CreationDate="2013-09-18T09:21:00.643" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the line between on-topic and off-topic has drifted a little bit lately, and it'd be nice if we could (collectively) re-establish it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to second @whuber's point that most software questions that might be off-topic have underlying data analysis questions with two examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I once asked about why the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/44957/does-spss-rescale-dendrograms&quot;&gt;distance values differed between SPSS's and R's dendrograms&lt;/a&gt;. It turned out to be something fairly mundane (an artefact from when SPSS drew ASCII diagrams), but at the time I was wondering whether the rescaling had some potentially-useful statistical interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I also recall a question about adjusting the priors on a Naive Bayes classifier in R. This could be answered in several different ways. The &quot;StackOverflow-y&quot; answer is probably either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Add these arguments to the function call, like so....&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;You can't in $X$; use package $Y$ instead.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, armed with (a very little bit of) statistical knowledge, one could suggest multiplying the posterior probabilities of each class $P(\textrm{Class}=C|\textrm{Data})$ by $\frac{P_{new}(C)}{P_{old}(C)}$ to manually update the priors instead.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I don't want to wade through tons of &quot;how do I import my Excel file into R?&quot; or &quot;why does my NumPy matrix look weird?&quot;, I'd personally like the line to be drawn such that these sorts of questions are firmly on the on-topic side. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even some of the &quot;How can I do this, but in another language&quot; questions may have merit, as some techniques have far too many names (there are probably about a dozen ways of saying &quot;PCA&quot;), and sometimes a term is overloaded to mean multiple things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe the rule of thumb should be something like &quot;How often would this happen in a non-statistical context?&quot; Everybody has programming problems with things like I/O and flow control, but I would venture to guess that there are very few off-topic situations where someone would care about potential differences between Matlab's &lt;code&gt;eig&lt;/code&gt; function and Octave's &lt;code&gt;qz&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7250" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2013-09-18T09:21:00.643" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1784" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1791" CreationDate="2013-09-18T12:50:36.550" Score="5" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been a user on cross validated website for quite some time. Around a month ago, I was suddenly unable to add tags to my questions or to add comments to any question. I have contacted the website and they replied me that they have not heard of or seen such a problem before. Is anybody having this problem too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: other websites, such as stackoverflow, are working fine&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hi @gung, I couldn't post a reply to this question so I am answering you here. The support have replied me asking to restart my computer (which I did, yet failed to add comments) and to tell them how to reproduce the problem. I replied that the problem can be reproduced very easily and, I am just unable to add a comment! I haven't heard from them back yet, but I wanted to see if anybody have had the same problem before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens exactly: in comments: I type my comment, then hit &quot;add comment&quot; and and everything I typed disappears.&#xA;With tags: I type in the tags I want but they do not show as suggestions, so I am not able to add them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28940" LastEditorUserId="4454" LastEditDate="2013-09-19T19:28:46.783" LastActivityDate="2013-09-19T19:28:46.783" Title="I cannot add comments on cross validated!" Tags="|support|tags|comment|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1780" CreationDate="2013-09-18T12:58:39.183" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has clearly caused a lot of confusion; it seems hard to be specific. However, I think perhaps this is a starting point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If answering the question requires knowledge of statistics, ask it&#xA;  here. If it does not, ask it on SO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the division should be in terms of who is going to answer. I hang out here (and on English Language Learner and sometimes History) but on SO I almost exclusively &lt;em&gt;ask&lt;/em&gt; questions rather than &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; them. I am not a programmer. Some questions that are currently getting migrated to SO are ones I could answer - they involve &lt;code&gt;SAS&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; but really require someone to know statistics, not programming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2013-09-18T12:58:39.183" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1780" CreationDate="2013-09-18T14:49:38.653" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;All of the discussion reminds me of bureaucrats aiming to impugn a strict set of rules to a diverse set of circumstances. I'm skeptical such a list of rules can be derived or agreed upon. To hijack your question (sorry) I'd prefer to focus on actionable steps the community can take to better resolve such disagreements. I'll propose two;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A sizable proportion of such disagreements are over ill-defined questions (oft by new users). We can &lt;em&gt;encourage&lt;/em&gt; reviewers to be less hasty in voting for migration when such questions occur and encourage other actions such as editing (which can be more easily reversed). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A forum for discussion on borderline questions (much like the one Gavin suggests the R community on stackoverflow has). Whuber states &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1771/1036&quot;&gt;we migrate on average 2 questions a day&lt;/a&gt;; this is few enough discussion can be taken on an individual question basis when disagreements arise. This can be accommodated via chat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course as best we can do is encourage such behavior (we can't force individual action). The biggest impediment at this stage IMO is getting adoption of the chat system. Fingers crossed, we may have enough community participation at this point (if we prod people enough) to establish regular participation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just don't think adding to the already long list of guidelines has any utility to the site. I'm skeptical the FAQ is an effective vehicle to encourage behavior for either newcomers (asking questions) or regular users (the ones voting to migrate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2013-09-18T14:49:38.653" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1769" CreationDate="2013-09-18T20:23:00.090" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;How would you moderate situations where you find yourself disagreeing with official SE policy about something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2013-09-18T20:23:00.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1789" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1790" CreationDate="2013-09-18T20:44:27.183" Score="3" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked this question in a chat forum the other day but I decided to post it here to get an official answer started.  I'd like to know if there is a way to change my profile picture to a newly random image (I believe it is called an identicon?).  To try and make this point more clear, currently my image is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ILmAt.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and I would like it to be one of the many random possible images like these &lt;a href=&quot;https://sslproxy.getsatisfaction.com/sslproxy/SWhAdDNLMG5zdGFuVGlWenmLbJDGd3CABhjZermgcystANA4T6nd0pzV0fSzBRRGOd17A4b8ZLwi6-HESbXI0oOtKof2VRZOxneNP4RtPq32gbUj6V4YLOZtcpsG0VfOLrcG3GAy6vRrrS3Ffsg-dg==.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;identicons&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user25658" LastEditorDisplayName="user25658" LastEditDate="2013-09-18T21:15:10.753" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Changing profile picture" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="20" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1789" CreationDate="2013-09-19T15:46:16.813" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there is no way to currently force one of our sites to generate a new identicon for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the bright site, you can &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/01/announcing-a-new-way-to-change-your-profile-picture/&quot;&gt;upload any other image&lt;/a&gt; to be your avatar. It can certainly be another identicon, but you'll probably have to take care of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/17443/how-is-the-default-user-avatar-generated&quot;&gt;generating one&lt;/a&gt; yourself. I'm willing to bet there are sites out there that can produce an identicon for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, I'm sorry to hear that you're set on leaving the site now over the discussion here in comments. Communicating via text can be confusing and it looks to me like there's been a bit of miscommunication here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your contributions to this site have clearly been appreciated by the community, and you would be missed. So, I would like to ask you to reconsider. Give it a day or so, think things over. If you're still set on leaving then, fill out the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/contact&quot;&gt;form here&lt;/a&gt; and we'll take care of the deletion for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8588" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2013-09-19T15:46:16.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1784" CreationDate="2013-09-19T19:28:41.317" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You appear to be using Internet Explorer in &quot;compatibility mode&quot;. This breaks the site in numerous ways - you will need to turn it off. Please follow the instructions &lt;a href=&quot;http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/internet-explorer/use-compatibility-view#ie=ie-10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3122/why-cant-i-post-a-comment-anymore&quot;&gt;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3122/why-cant-i-post-a-comment-anymore&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4454" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:38:20.813" LastActivityDate="2013-09-19T19:28:41.317" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1792" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-19T19:47:40.340" Score="5" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/70529/1390&quot;&gt;answer of mine on CV&lt;/a&gt; I have the following code chunk, indicated via indentation by 4 spaces at the start of the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;&gt; AIC(gam_example$lme)&#xA;[1] -2.136317&#xA;&amp;gt; AIC(gamm_example$lme)&#xA;[1] -1286.448&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that to illustrate this I have wrapped the above in HTML &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;pre&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tags - the layout above is how it was entered in the edit window in the Answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The displayed code block is rendered as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;&gt; AIC(gam_example$lme)&#xA;    [1] -2.136317&#xA;    &amp;gt; AIC(gamm_example$lme)&#xA;[1] -1286.448&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Again, here this is wrapped in &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;pre&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; in the editor, but only to show the problem.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly the alignment in the code block is wrong. I wonder if this is something to do with MathJax (note the &lt;code&gt;$&lt;/code&gt; in both chunks). Compare these two blocks, both entered without &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;pre&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tags in the editor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; AIC(gam_example$lme)&#xA;[1] -2.136317&#xA;&amp;gt; AIC(gamm_example$lme)&#xA;[1] -1286.44&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; AIC(gam_example$lme)&#xA;[1] -2.136317&#xA;&amp;gt; AIC(gamm_example)&#xA;[1] -1286.44&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first chunk of these two is a live example of the problem I report here. Note the lack of a second &lt;code&gt;$&lt;/code&gt; in the second code block allows this to render with the correct, intended alignment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything that can be done about this, or is it an unfortunate clash of R syntax and MathJax? Or something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1390" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2013-09-20T11:42:32.447" Title="Strange alignment of rendered text in a code chunk" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2013-09-20T16:09:53.423" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1792" CreationDate="2013-09-19T19:54:37.340" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it looks like a clash of markup procedures. The only workaround I have found is to add a comment containing an odd number of $\$$ after each offending line.  For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; AIC(gam_example$lme)&#xA;    [1] -2.136317&#xA;    &amp;gt; AIC(gamm_example$lme)&#xA;[1] -1286.44&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;becomes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; AIC(gam_example$lme) #$&#xA;[1] -2.136317&#xA;&amp;gt; AIC(gamm_example$lme) #$&#xA;[1] -1286.44&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2013-09-19T20:00:40.267" LastActivityDate="2013-09-19T20:00:40.267" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1794" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-20T15:03:53.853" Score="1" ViewCount="601" Body="&lt;p&gt;I &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1792/1390&quot;&gt;recently came across&lt;/a&gt; the niggle of odd formatting of code chunks when the code chunk includes R syntax with a number of &lt;code&gt;$&lt;/code&gt; characters. @whuber &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1793/1390&quot;&gt;has suggested a workaround&lt;/a&gt; that involves adding an extra &lt;code&gt;$&lt;/code&gt; in a comment, which resolves the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As my question showed, the problem doesn't arise if one explicitly marks the block up with &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;pre&amp;gt;...&amp;lt;/pre&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tags, presumably because the chunk is included verbatim and not rendered by the Markdown (MD) processor. However, there are subtle differences in styling of blocks marked up  with &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;pre&amp;gt;...&amp;lt;/pre&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tags and those marked as code chunks in MD. The latter are rendered as &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;pre&amp;gt;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;....&amp;lt;/code&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/pre&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to tweak the CSS here to render plain &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;pre&amp;gt;....&amp;lt;/pre&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; marked sections with the same styles as &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;pre&amp;gt;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;....&amp;lt;/code&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/pre&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;? That would make using this as a work around less noticeable but not require the user to remember to nest &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; within &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;pre&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; to get the required styling?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Example&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First a standard code block indicated using MD&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;foo &amp;lt;- lm(y ~ x1 + x2)&#xA;summary(foo)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next a chunk entered as verbatim HTML via &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;pre&amp;gt;...&amp;lt;/pre&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tags only&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;foo &amp;lt;- lm(y ~ x1 + x2)&#xA;summary(foo)&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, a chunk entered verbatim but wrapped in &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;pre&amp;gt;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;...&amp;lt;/code&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/pre&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;foo &amp;lt;- lm(y ~ x1 + x2)&#xA;summary(foo)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice the subtle styling differences in sizes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1390" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2013-09-20T15:31:07.743" Title="Render `pre` tags in same style as code blocks in CSS" Tags="|feature-request|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1794" CreationDate="2013-09-20T15:31:07.743" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hmm, scratch that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;pre&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tags just makes this worse as unless you encode html entities like &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;&lt;/code&gt; which is much more of a pain for R code than adding a comment and an extra &lt;code&gt;$&lt;/code&gt;. I'll leave this open for a wee while to see if anyone has anything else to suggest/contribute, but otherwise I should probably close or delete this as appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1390" LastActivityDate="2013-09-20T15:31:07.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1761" CreationDate="2013-09-20T16:49:29.830" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;After some searching, I found that &lt;strong&gt;Yi Jiang's SE moderator stats site is still up and running&lt;/strong&gt; (and improved since the last election). In one location it conveniently summarizes much information about candidates' activities here.  Check it out at &lt;a href=&quot;http://elections.stackexchange.com/#stats.stackexchange&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://elections.stackexchange.com/#stats.stackexchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2013-09-20T16:49:29.830" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-09-20T16:49:29.830" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1797" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1798" CreationDate="2013-09-20T17:18:41.357" Score="8" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;This came up in the Election chat room; what are the requirements that a user must meet in order to be eligible to &lt;em&gt;vote&lt;/em&gt; in the moderator elections? There is a 300 rep barrier for nominations, but what restrictions, if any, beyond having a user account on CV are in place as regards the right to vote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find details specific to CV (or anything more general, but I didn't spend a long time looking across SE) on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1390" LastActivityDate="2013-09-20T17:58:49.683" Title="What requirements are there to vote in a Moderator Election on CV?" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1797" CreationDate="2013-09-20T17:58:49.683" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I consulted with mods on other SE sites and they showed me where the information is.  You can get to it by selecting the &quot;Election&quot; tab buried near the bottom of the first screen of our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;election page&lt;/a&gt;.  After doing so, the contents of the box at the right will be updated to explain the voting requirements and procedure.  Here is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election/2?tab=election&quot;&gt;direct link&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2013-09-20T17:58:49.683" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1800" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-23T20:08:16.940" Score="17" ViewCount="726" Body="&lt;p&gt;In connection with the moderator elections, we are holding a Q&amp;amp;A thread for the candidates. Questions collected &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1769/2013-moderator-election-qa-question-collection&quot;&gt;from an earlier thread&lt;/a&gt; have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as the space for the candidates to provide their answers. Due to the lack of submission count, we have selected all provided questions as well as two of our back up questions for a total of 10 questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a candidate, your job is simple - post an answer to this question, citing each of the questions and then post your answer to each question given in that same answer. For your convenience, I will include all of the questions in quote format with a break in between each, suitable for you to insert your answers. Just &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/08c8b59c-0c4b-42d9-a9c9-52d460316e0a/view-source&quot;&gt;copy the whole thing after the first set of three dashes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once all the answers have been compiled, this will serve as a transcript for voters to view the thoughts of their candidates, and will be appropriately linked in the Election page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck to all of the candidates!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) What is your take on the &quot;software questions on CV&quot; that come up very frequently and where do you draw the line and decide it should be migrated to SO or simply closed? Based on the review queue, it seems there is a lot of heterogeneity among the high-rep users in terms of what constitutes &quot;off-topic&quot; in this context and, with moderators having the ability to unilaterally close/migrate questions, this seems a natural question to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2) If you are elected moderator, what (specific, concrete!) changes would you like to see made to the way the site is currently administered and moderated? How do you view your role in effecting the proposed changes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(3) How would you moderate situations where you find yourself disagreeing with official SE policy about something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(4) How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(5) How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(6) What are your opinions about casting the deciding &quot;moderator&quot; vote on closing/opening questions? For example, if five non-moderator users have closed a question that you think should be left open, would you consider unilaterally re-opening it? Similarly, if a majority of reviewers have recommended that a question be left open (say 1 close vote and 3 &quot;stay open&quot; votes) under what circumstances would you decide to use your deciding close vote to override the majority?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(7) What is your interpretation of the purpose of Cross Validated and how does this influence the way you choose to use the site as an ordinary user?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(8) What kind of moderatorial experience, if any, have you had before (online or offline)? Can you give an example of a moderatorial issue that came up, how you had handled it, and how the community that you moderated viewed your handling of the situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(9) A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(10) In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5645" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2013-09-25T10:58:32.113" Title="2013 Moderator Election Q&amp;A - Questionnaire" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1801" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-09-23T20:22:57.200" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions should be given this tag if the question relates to an aspect of moderation, i.e.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Actions taken by moderators&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flag decisions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Editing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Closing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Migrating&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moderator pages&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pages unique to moderators, used to maintain the site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Abilities&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What a moderator can and cannot do&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Decisions&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flag validity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions should not use this tag if their question is about moderators themselves, rather than the actions they take/can take. For questions about moderators, use: &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/moderators&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'moderators'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;moderators&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;Who are the Moderators?&lt;/a&gt; and&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30155" LastEditorUserId="30155" LastEditDate="2013-09-23T20:39:59.153" LastActivityDate="2013-09-23T20:39:59.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1802" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-09-23T20:22:57.200" Score="0" Body="Questions dealing with moderator actions, pages, abilities or decisions." OwnerUserId="30155" LastEditorUserId="30155" LastEditDate="2013-09-23T20:40:01.733" LastActivityDate="2013-09-23T20:40:01.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1803" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1804" CreationDate="2013-09-23T20:24:13.480" Score="10" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;Will we be able to see the results by vote after the elections are over?  Or will we just have an announcement of who the winners are?  I would be interested in knowing the exact numbers, as in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Candidate 1: x # of votes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Candidate 2: x # of votes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user25658" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2013-09-24T03:12:58.437" LastActivityDate="2013-09-24T17:50:18.383" Title="How can we obtain voting data after the election?" Tags="|support|election|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1803" CreationDate="2013-09-23T20:30:15.987" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.  You can even practice now on the results of our first election held in 2011: find them at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election/1&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election/1&lt;/a&gt;.  (For some inspiration, check out what &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/11120&quot;&gt;another site has done&lt;/a&gt; with their election results.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, here is &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; code to read and process an election file from a sister site's election (GIS in 2013).  (I chose this because my familiarity with the details enabled me to verify the code is processing the data correctly.)  It also tabulates the votes as shown in this barplot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jQH5K.png&quot; alt=&quot;Barplot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Candidates are ordered by a heuristic likely to correspond to the outcome of the election.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;source &amp;lt;- &quot;http://gis.stackexchange.com/election/download-result/2&quot;&#xA;#&#xA;# Read and process the election descriptor record&#xA;v &amp;lt;- unlist(read.table(source, nrows=1))&#xA;n.candidates &amp;lt;- v[1]&#xA;n.positions &amp;lt;- v[2]&#xA;#&#xA;# Read the rest of the file&#xA;x &amp;lt;- read.table(source, skip=1, fill=TRUE)&#xA;#&#xA;# Process the candidate descriptor record&#xA;candidates &amp;lt;- x[j &amp;lt;- is.na(x[,2]), 1]&#xA;na.candidate &amp;lt;- candidates[1]&#xA;candidates &amp;lt;- candidates[c(-1,-length(candidates))]&#xA;#&#xA;# Process the voting record&#xA;votes &amp;lt;- x[!j, 2:4]&#xA;d &amp;lt;- unlist(apply(votes, 1, function(z) &#xA;  sapply(z, function(i) ifelse(i==0, NA, candidates[i]))))&#xA;rownames(d) &amp;lt;- c(&quot;First&quot;, &quot;Second&quot;, &quot;Third&quot;)&#xA;#&#xA;# Tabulate the raw results found in array `d`&#xA;results &amp;lt;- apply(d, 1, table, useNA=&quot;always&quot;)&#xA;rownames(results) &amp;lt;- c(levels(candidates)[sort(candidates)], &quot;NA&quot;)&#xA;i &amp;lt;- order(results %*% c(5,3,1), decreasing=TRUE)&#xA;results[i, ] # Prints the two-way table of candidate by position&#xA;#&#xA;# Plot the tabulated results&#xA;barplot(t(results[i,]), legend.text=colnames(results), main=source)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:10.070" LastActivityDate="2013-09-24T17:50:18.383" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1800" CreationDate="2013-09-23T21:03:36.497" Score="11" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Q1 Handling software questions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've expressed my particular views recently on Meta and encapsulated them in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1780/1390&quot;&gt;some proposed changes&lt;/a&gt; to the Help Centre text on what in on topic for CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary (those threads are &lt;em&gt;long&lt;/em&gt;) if a question is obviously simply about the use of a particular application of piece of software then it is off topic. Questions that enquire about how to fit particular statistical models in software or how to interpret output are on topic. General programming in languages such as R or Python is off-topic unless there is a clear data-analysis or statistical issue the OP requires help in implementing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to what should be migrated to SO, there needs to be an obvious programming element, and the question should have exhibited some background research, explained what has been tried, and a self-contained example or example output provided. Without these extra accoutrements, migrated questions are likely to attract the ire of the SO community. It would be helpful if the OP is asked to improve the Q before it is migrated for this reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Q2 What changes would you make to CV?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main change I would like to see and work towards if elected moderator is to improve the consistency of close votes and flags for migration. As Q1 indicates, there is a degree of inconsistency in how various users view particular questions, especially those that are software-related. If we can agree on what these are, I'd like to see additional guidance to Askers and Answers to help guide decisions when closing, flagging, or commenting. I'd aim to increase the use of the SE Chat system for the curation of close votes etc where there are differences in opinion as to howto handle a question. This has worked well in the R tag on SO to which I contribute regularly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general I see CV as working well, a testament to the community of users and the existing mods. I don't see any need to shake things up; if it ain't broke, don't fix it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Q3 How would you handle a difference of opinion with SE policy?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a tricky one --- CV is a SE site and part of the whole SE ecosystem with clear aims and policies. To some extent the individual sites have some flexibility regarding certain aspects of what they allow; questions that solicit opinion is one area where policy is allowed to and can vary between SE sites. If I found myself disagreeing with SE policy, I'd discuss this with the other moderators and on CV Meta if appropriate. Depending on the outcome of that discussion I'd raise the issue to the main Meta site (meta.stackoverflow.com).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the main though, unless there was strong feeling here or on Meta.SO against current SE policy, that policy should guide our actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Q4 How would you handle a difficult personality on CV?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another tough one. The harmony of the whole CV community is paramount. Regardless of the quality of their answers, if a user's other contributions are upsetting or alienating other CV users, or engendering (hostile) argument and flags, then that user's behaviour on the site needs to be tempered for the good of CV. I'd start off with the &amp;quot;we're all adults&amp;quot; approach and raise the issue with the user, say via an invited chat room, or comment in a relevant thread. If that didn't work, in consultation with the other moderators, a tougher sanction may be necessary, such as locking the user in question out from CV for a period of time. Ultimately, if the user didn't chose to change their approach then a complete ban may be in order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Q5 How would you handle a difference of opinion with another moderator?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd discuss this with the moderator to understand their point of view, or discuss the issue on Meta. Unless the moderator had done something very much against the site or SE rules, you have to appreciate that not everyone will see eye to eye on every issue. If there is something that can be learned from a particular situation, great, but however difficult, one has to realise that your opinion may not be shared by others. That should be respected. Understanding why there was disagreement is probably more important than that there was disagreement. Understanding that will hopefully help with future similar situations. Also, as per an earlier comment above, I'd look to use Chat more to discuss issues that arise such as this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Q6 How would you treat handling the casting/overriding vote?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a judgement call. I wouldn't want to overrule the community, but if I felt strongly that the non-moderator users were applying the wrong rule or criteria in a particular situation I'd be willing to use the moderator vote to &amp;quot;overrule&amp;quot; those users. It would be better to discuss this in Meta or Chat before that situation arose, but if all else fails, that is why there are moderators on SE sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Q7 What do you see as the purpose of CV?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want CV to be a place that users can ask interesting question about statistics to help them answer their data analysis questions. Conversely, I see CV as the place where informed users want to hang out and share their expertise to help users solve their problems and learn more about statistical analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CV should also be a place that interested people can come to learn more about the process of data analysis and come to appreciate statistical thinking. I want CV to continue to be the place on the internet where people can find answers to statistical problems or questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As more of a user of statistics I have an interest in the application of the theory and tools to answer interesting (in my case ecological) questions. I've learned a lot from reading the answers supplied to questions on CV and as a moderator I'd work to ensure that others can continue to benefit from the great community of experts here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Q8 What moderation experience do you have?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whilst not formal moderation, I've had a lot of experience on SO &amp;quot;moderating&amp;quot; the R tag and the group of regular contributors there has developed a nice model for curating issues in Chat to help keep our corner of SO clean and tidy and a pleasant place to ask questions about R.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an academic I've been involved in mentoring and guiding students, which often involves being extremely patient as you help them learn for themselves to solve problems. I've also been involved in a number of large research projects with many partners; successfully navigating the various personalities and politics is essential to the smooth running of a successful project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Q9 Are you happy to have a diamond attached to everything you've ever done on CV?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's fine by me. I'm a scientist who does peer review and I'm open with my comments there, signing my reviews of other researchers papers. I'm happy to stand by my opinions there where arguably it could have impact upon future career opportunities, and I see my other contributions in the same light, here or elsewhere on-line. The key for me is to be honest in the way you approach anything, be critical where necessary though constructively so, respect the position you find yourself in, treat others courteously, just as you would in the real world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Q10 How would you be more effective as a moderator than simply using the tools available to high-rep users?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interesting question as many users many not realise that once you hit 20K you have almost all the same powers as a moderator on a given site. This reflects the ethos of SE of having users that have earned the trust of a community help moderate a site. I have experience of the privileges that such rep brings on SO, so I know what the additional tools and responsibilities they bring with them entail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, I don't think how I approach voting and flagging would be very different as a trusted user compared to a moderator. Where I would see a difference would be perhaps allowing the community users to decide/vote on certain issues and respond to their consensus rather than wield the moderator vote immediately. Unless, of course, some immediate action were required to remove SPAM or offensive comments/posts etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Access to the extra moderator tools would allow me to act upon issues that the community raises, rather than relying on the small group of mods to action flags etc. The main difference in effectiveness is in being able to shoulder a portion of the workload that inevitably falls on the shoulders' of moderators as a result of the CV community's flagging, voting, and commenting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1390" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2013-09-25T01:18:07.673" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1800" CreationDate="2013-09-24T01:10:19.350" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;As stated in my nomination remarks, my ultimate goal as a moderator would be to be as invisible as possible. I want to help provide the atmosphere that allows the community to set the course for our site; my objective would be to be available to step in to aid where necessary, but otherwise to get out of the way and let the site develop as the community desires.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q1&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Handling software questions&lt;/em&gt;). I think within the last year, the CV user base has reached enough of a critical mass where moderator intervention for closing and/or migrating should be (and, lately, seems to have been) pretty minimal. With this in mind, as a general practice, I would not plan on migrating/closing questions unless I was (a) in agreement with the decision to migrate/close and (b) was the fifth and final vote, thus reducing my participation to that of a &quot;regular&quot; user. This personal &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087332/quotes?item=qt0475956&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;guideline&lt;/a&gt; would extend to all questions, not just software ones, with exceptions being if posts are obviously spam or contained some other content that was strongly against site norms or Terms of Service and required immediate intervention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the direction of the site will continue to evolve and all community members are, and should feel like, stakeholders in what it becomes. That means consensus views on content are likely to change somewhat over time. On a personal note, I would like to see us be &lt;em&gt;slightly&lt;/em&gt; more permissive regarding software-related questions in that, even if a question is ostensibly about how to get something done programmatically, if it requires or would benefit from statistical expertise in answering it, we should be willing to do so here. I think we already get that about right, but may have ever-so-slightly drifted towards being a little too quick to migrate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q2&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Specific, concrete changes&lt;/em&gt;). Much of the motivation for me suggesting this question in the first place was that I was having a difficult time identifying concrete changes I would want to make and so I wanted to see what was driving other candidates to run for moderator. One thing I think CV would particularly benefit from is a somewhat larger user base of active, high-quality answerers. To this end, one of my personal goals will be to try to make new users feel as welcome as possible and get them engaged with the site providing quality answers, yet with minimal emphasis on reputation accumulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q3&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Disagreeing with official SE policy&lt;/em&gt;). My perception is that there are various &quot;degrees&quot; of &quot;official SE policy&quot;. As regards Terms of Service and fair use, matters are black and white: I believe moderators need to uphold their obligations at all times. At the same time, each site should be allowed a modicum of freedom to develop its own personality and there are certain aspects of SE policy that (a) aren't so iron-clad and (b) don't necessarily make complete sense for our particular community. Those are items that, if they arise, I would be willing to be flexible about if there was a consensus among the moderators that this was alright and there was a similar broad consensus from the community. I believe in maintaining proper discretion; if I have any disagreements with SE policy, I will communicate them in private to SE staff, not air them publicly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q4&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Valuable answers, but difficult personalities&lt;/em&gt;). This site has been fortunate to experience very few instances of problematic behavior. That is not just luck, but great management from all three moderators (and their predecessors). I am not against some degree of public social correction (e.g., via comments) if it would help orient the user and provide clarity and a good example for others. Anything of a personal or particularly problematic nature should be handled in private, after consultation with all other moderators, and&amp;mdash;if necessary&amp;ndash;SE staff. The major problems I've seen on this site have mostly dealt with overzealous desire to rapidly accumulate reputation with quality suffering in the process; this is something I would like to see mitigated insofar as possible. Quality questions and answers should be our focus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q5&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Reversing another moderator's actions&lt;/em&gt;). I doubt there will be many instances of this where I feel so strongly that something &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be done. Only in very rare instances have I ever disagreed with the judgment of CV moderators based on their public actions. My first step would be to engage the other moderator in private to obtain some details on the situation, especially if I didn't personally witness what transpired. I suspect that oftentimes this would already be enough, as a sensible explanation would then be evident. If the matter were still unresolved, I would request a group discussion among the moderators. If no agreement could be found, I would suggest posting a relevant question to meta. I would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; unilaterally undo another moderator's actions except in the extremely unlikely scenario that the moderator had, for whatever reason, obviously &quot;gone rogue&quot;. (In that circumstance, SE staff would immediately be notified.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q6&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Casting the deciding vote&lt;/em&gt;). This was addressed above in my response to Q1. My participation in close/migrate decisions would be as a &quot;regular&quot; user except in exceptional circumstances. I want the community to make these decisions and I think we have the user base to do so now. (That was not quite true even a year ago and certainly not when I joined.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q7&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Interpretation of the purpose of CV&lt;/em&gt;). I want CV to be &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; place where people bring their interesting, challenging, stimulating and deep questions (of all levels!) about data analysis, statistics, machine learning, data visualization and attendant topics. They will come because they know they'll get great answers and advice. I would rather see two or three very high-quality answers obtained through some community collaboration than, say, seven to ten mediocre answers from users &quot;battling it out&quot; for upvotes. My own site usage is somewhat unconventional and, as long as a user's mode of use is not disruptive, I think we should allow for such freedom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q8&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Prior moderator experience&lt;/em&gt;). I do not recall any previous online moderator experience in any formal capacity. I have fairly extensive experience in professional service organizations, international research and standards bodies and private industry where part of my activities have been in conflict resolution and facilitating communication between various parties involving difficult ethical issues like public release of study data. Participation on standards committees, in particular, involves navigating the many opinions of their members and requires a considerable degree of patience and empathy. I would hope to bring to bear some of what I've learned from those experiences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q9&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Diamonds!&lt;/em&gt;). I have no qualms with having a diamond attached to anything I've previously said or done. Before posting anything, I try to think carefully through whether I would be willing to say out loud to a colleague what I'm about to post online. That serves as a useful guide, for me, at least. If anything, I worry that the addition of a diamond next to a post that is years old may give it an undue air of authority to future readers and I would hope to avoid such potential misunderstandings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q10&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Additional effectiveness of being a moderator&lt;/em&gt;). I mostly seek to simply complement the existing moderator team in whatever way that I can. In the rare instances that obvious spam has been posted, I've flagged it, but if it happens to be during inactive times, it can go unresolved for a few hours. In these instances, it would be nice to be able to step in and take care of things. Based on usage patterns, some of the times that I'm often available are also times that current moderators happen to be inactive (though we have very active and pretty geographically distributed moderators as it is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If there's anything that I've missed or you feel I haven't adequately addressed, please post a comment and I will reply, or make edits, as necessary.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2970" LastEditorUserId="2970" LastEditDate="2013-09-25T00:16:58.580" LastActivityDate="2013-09-25T00:16:58.580" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1807" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1808" CreationDate="2013-09-24T07:55:46.980" Score="6" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw a question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/70877/how-to-break-the-table-elements-in-latex&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) that was clearly off-topic and could be (and probably has been) answered on tex.stackexchange.com. However, when I tried to flag it, was given the option of saying it was better suited for our meta site, the math Stack Exchange site, or SO. When none of these options are appropriate, there doesn't seem to be a way of either writing in another Stack Exchange site, or marking it as generally off-topic (see screenshot below). What do moderators prefer or expect users do in this situation? Downvote and/or comment without a flag? Or just leave it alone? Something else? Have I missed something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/B2amm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9249" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2013-09-30T14:50:54.910" Title="Flagging as off topic" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2013-09-30T14:51:47.993" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1807" CreationDate="2013-09-24T08:25:31.550" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Indeed, there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/505/930&quot;&gt;pre-defined migration paths&lt;/a&gt; (mostly because off-topic questions on this site are often of potential interest on SO or math.SE). I appreciate that users &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/884/930&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;flag such questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, so that moderators can handle the migration quickly. You can also leave a comment to the OP, but in this case don't forget to remind him or her not to cross-post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2013-09-24T10:33:12.033" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1800" CreationDate="2013-09-24T08:28:11.773" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good luck to all the potential candidates!  It is an honor to compete with all of you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Q1) What is your take on the &quot;software questions on CV&quot; that come up very frequently and where do you draw the line and decide it should be migrated to SO or simply closed? Based on the review queue, it seems there is a lot of heterogeneity among the high-rep users in terms of what constitutes &quot;off-topic&quot; in this context and, with moderators having the ability to unilaterally close/migrate questions, this seems a natural question to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(A1)&lt;/strong&gt; Early on when I started using Cross Validated (4 months ago) I would say that this was one of my biggest complaints when I used the site.  I come from a Bayesian statistics background and so the focus of my early questions tended to be on how could I achieve a computational result using &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt;, and much to my chagrin, most of all of my questions were migrated to SO.  having now gone through the pain of having a question migrated and/or closed I think I can fully understand why there is such a large debate on this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, I believe that any question related to software questions should be allowed to stay on the site as long as it has statistical merit towards contributing to the overall CV community.  Of course what warrants &quot;statistical merit&quot; is obviously open to debate but I do decisively know which software questions I would like to see migrated/closed. The questions that I do like to see closed (or have offense with) are ones that simply (although they are statistical in nature) ask how can I do this with software without giving a good/valid discussion of why they are trying to implement the software method or without at least writing out the mathematical formulas behind the software.  I equate &quot;how do I run this statistical model with software&quot; to &quot;how do I solve this homework problem,&quot; and so for me I want to see that the user knows why they are trying to use the software much like how I would like to see how a user has attempted to solve a homework problem they are working on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not to dwell on this question, but to me, there is a very big difference between &quot;How do I fit the least square equations in &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt;&quot; and &quot;How do I fit the least square equations&#xA;$$\hat\beta=(X^TX)^{-1}X^Ty$$ in &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; so that I can show a linear association between my covariate $x$ and my response $y$.&quot;  Questions like the former should be closed (or better improved upon so that they are not closed) where as question like the latter are right on topic for what a software question should be like. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Q2) If you are elected moderator, what (specific, concrete!) changes would you like to see made to the way the site is currently administered and moderated? How do you view your role in effecting the proposed changes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(A2)&lt;/strong&gt; Having only been around for four months this is probably the hardest question on the list for me to answer.  Honestly, everyday I am discovering new things about the CV website and community and so any proposed change I could think of probably already exist somewhere.  With that said though, there does seem to be a clear issue with closing/migrating of certain types of questions that I think need to be addressed, however, a more concrete change I would like to see is a more strict answer posting guidelines/rules for self-study tags.  I do not like seeing questions that are simply questions with no work or any indication that anything has been tried before an answer can be given.  In fact, it would be nice if there was some way (perhaps a time limit) when questions get tagged with self-study that no one can post an answer for at least 1 hour (of course this time limit could be less) so only clues/hints could be given in the comments section to help avoid users from simply giving answers to receive reputation points. Hopefully my constant presence is now noticed within the CV community so I do believe that I would be effective in &quot;policing&quot; questions to make sure they are on-topic for the self-study tag and making sure that users abide by the suggested guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Q3) How would you moderate situations where you find yourself disagreeing with official SE policy about something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(A3)&lt;/strong&gt;  In my opinion I do not think that the title of moderator should allow oneself to be above official Stack Exchange (SE) policy, and so, just like any other user on SE I would use the meta Cross Validated (CV) site to address these concerns and turn the issue into a public forum so that everyone could weigh and voice their opinions.  As a moderator I would want to work for the users of CV and put the best interest of the majority first rather than my own personal grievances.  Additionally, after this election there will be 5 moderators on CV and I think that communication amongst the moderators (as well as the staff of SE) will be vital in resolving problems as well. Open dialogue will always be the key to success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Q4) How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(A4)&lt;/strong&gt; Aren't I that user?  But seriously, there is no place for arguments, flags, and or rude/mean behavior on Cross Validated (CV) (or the greater Stack Exchange (SE) network) regardless of the the value/worth that a user presents in their answers.  I think it goes without saying that the Golden Rule should be in place just like anywhere else in life that we should treat others as we would like to treat ourselves. Having had my own personal experience with this on CV I do not think this will be an issue given that I have found this community to be one of the most supportive and friendliest people I have come to know in these short four months here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Q5) How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(A5)&lt;/strong&gt; Like I have expressed before, open dialogue is the key to solving most all problems.  If I was to disagree with another moderator's action on CV I would definitely express my concern (in private) with said moderator and try to understand their point of view before taking any further action.  Given the interactions I have had with the current moderators and the wonderful users of CV I think that expressing concerns over others actions will be an easy subject to broach with one another. Of course, if there are ever any problems with other moderators (and no other choices are left) then the topics/issues of concern could be raised on Meta CV and if still not resolved they would need be deferred to the greater gods of the SE -- the SE staff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Q6) What are your opinions about casting the deciding &quot;moderator&quot; vote on closing/opening questions? For example, if five non-moderator users have closed a question that you think should be left open, would you consider unilaterally re-opening it? Similarly, if a majority of reviewers have recommended that a question be left open (say 1 close vote and 3 &quot;stay open&quot; votes) under what circumstances would you decide to use your deciding close vote to override the majority?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(A6)&lt;/strong&gt; I'll let you know when I get to 3000 reputation points...2 more days? :) Well I do not have the privilege yet to review opened/close votes yet so I am not to savvy on this topic.  With that being said, I do feel strongly about moderators having unilateral power to reopen questions but perhaps erring on the side of group consensus when it comes to closing questions. I think this boils down to am I comfortable with making more type I errors or type II errors (oh stats humor, you've done it again) in that is worse to reopen a question when everyone agrees it should be closed, or is it worse to close a question when everyone agrees it should be reopened?  I think the former is of less concern and that is why I think moderators should be able to reopen questions (hey if it gets shot down again after reopening then perhaps that is further evidence it should not have been open in the first place) but closing a question when it should have stayed opened (hmmm, insert all of those &quot;software questions&quot; here) seem like a bigger issue.  At the end of the day we appoint moderators because we believe them to be ideal candidates to represent our beliefs and we should trust them with some unilateral power.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Q7) What is your interpretation of the purpose of Cross Validated and how does this influence the way you choose to use the site as an ordinary user?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(A7)&lt;/strong&gt; Like I said in my nomination statement, 2013 is the international year of statistics and I believe it is the duty of every statistician to help build a stronger more informed community for future statisticians.  Cross Validated is my answer to this statement. Cross Validated helps bring together a great mishmash of people with different statistical backgrounds all with the common goal of providing excellent answers for helping advance the field of statistics. With this common goal in mind myself, I frequent Cross validated several times a day (it is 12:34 a.m. as I write this) in hopes of helping others figure out solutions to own statistical problems. Building a stronger statistics community through Cross Validated has now officially become an obsession of mine :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Q8) What kind of moderatorial experience, if any, have you had before (online or offline)? Can you give an example of a moderatorial issue that came up, how you had handled it, and how the community that you moderated viewed your handling of the situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(A8)&lt;/strong&gt; I do not have any moderatorial experience as far as anything online other than the privileges that have been bestowed upon me by Cross Validated (CV) at each reputation milestone I have achieved.  Outside of the online world, I have worked as a moderator (or perhaps more of a liaison) between clinicians and laboratory scientists.  I worked as an applied statistician for 2 years at UCSF, and having been the only statistician in my department I was often times sole moderator on issues of statistical relevance for everybody in the department.  I was responsible for helping lab techs design statistical studies, advised clinicians on interpretation of statistical models and results, and was overall the main source of statistical computing (in &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt;). So as you can see I have a good amount of experience in the types of questions/topics that get presented on a day to day basis on CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Q9) A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(A9)&lt;/strong&gt; I am completely okay with having a diamond attached to everything I say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments.  I have the luxury of having only been around for 4 months so the diamond would not be attached to much past stuff, however, we elect our moderators knowing that they started from humble beginnings just like everyone else and so as long as a moderator makes progress day in and day out to contributing to the CV community I don't think a moderator's past will be something to dwell upon. For the record though, I do look much better in gold then diamonds...just saying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Q10) In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(A10)&lt;/strong&gt; I would assume that by the time anyone reaches 10k or (especially) 20k rep that they would essentially be contributing to Cross Validated at the same &quot;standard&quot; or &quot;rate&quot; as a moderator although without the official title.  However, I think the title of moderator will make me a more effective user because it will keep me engaged in the CV community for the long haul. I would imagine that without the moderator status it could become easier to lose interest and/or disappear for extended periods of time but the status of moderator &quot;guarantees&quot; that the user should be held accountable for being a  daily known presence in the CV community. Plus, a little recognition for all the hard work one puts in never hurt anybody :) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user25658" LastEditorDisplayName="user25658" LastEditDate="2013-09-24T15:41:01.407" LastActivityDate="2013-09-24T15:41:01.407" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1800" CreationDate="2013-09-24T19:02:25.327" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) What is your take on the &quot;software questions on CV&quot; that come up&#xA;  very frequently and where do you draw the line and decide it should be&#xA;  migrated to SO or simply closed? Based on the review queue, it seems&#xA;  there is a lot of heterogeneity among the high-rep users in terms of&#xA;  what constitutes &quot;off-topic&quot; in this context and, with moderators&#xA;  having the ability to unilaterally close/migrate questions, this seems&#xA;  a natural question to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think some of the heterogeneity comes from my answer - that determining the &quot;SO vs. CV&quot; line for software questions is a bit of a gut feeling, &quot;I know it when I see it&quot;, community standards-esq answer. For me, I draw the line at what I'd call &quot;programming skills&quot; vs &quot;statistical skills&quot;. If its just getting a function written correctly, which arguments go where, etc. question, it's a programming question and belongs in SO. If it's a question that involves what's &lt;em&gt;happening&lt;/em&gt; when the code is invoked, how it actually works or how to take the code and get meaningful results, it belongs in CV. And for the edge cases, I'd try to err on the side of &quot;Where is the user more likely to get useful answers?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2) If you are elected moderator, what (specific, concrete!) changes&#xA;  would you like to see made to the way the site is currently&#xA;  administered and moderated? How do you view your role in effecting the&#xA;  proposed changes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a tough one - I think CV is by and large a fairly functional community. As a moderator, the two things I would make a really active effort toward improving are encouraging users to accept answers when possible, and making CV welcoming to new users, especially people of intermediate skill but with a lot of subject matter expertise (like myself, a couple years ago) - I think they benefit from the site, and the site benefits from them, but it can sometimes seem like an odd fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(3) How would you moderate situations where you find yourself&#xA;  disagreeing with official SE policy about something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tempting as it is to growl &quot;I am the Law&quot; and move forward, CV exists within a large ecosystem, users move back and forth between sites, and I think we all benefit from playing nicely in the same sandbox. If it was a genuine, irreconcilable policy issue, I'd bring it to the other moderators or meta, as appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(4) How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of&#xA;  valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of&#xA;  arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to think of these users as a learning opportunity - they've clearly got the knowledge, but perhaps lack a little bit of an understanding of CV as a community, rather than as an intellectual exercise. I'd try to emulate some other communities I have been a part of in communicating that there are community rules and standards, and that CV is not the &quot;Wild West&quot; or &quot;Other Sites&quot; and a certain degree of hostility, etc. isn't productive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(5) How would you handle a situation where another mod&#xA;  closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Why we did what we did&quot; is a question that seems to lend itself well to meta, and clarifying what could be viewed by both users and mods as divergent understandings of what CV &quot;should&quot; be doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(6) What are your opinions about casting the deciding &quot;moderator&quot; vote&#xA;  on closing/opening questions? For example, if five non-moderator users&#xA;  have closed a question that you think should be left open, would you&#xA;  consider unilaterally re-opening it? Similarly, if a majority of&#xA;  reviewers have recommended that a question be left open (say 1 close&#xA;  vote and 3 &quot;stay open&quot; votes) under what circumstances would you&#xA;  decide to use your deciding close vote to override the majority?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I vote my conscience. If I think a question should stay open, I'm voting for it to stay open. If I think it should be closed, I'm voting for it to be closed. I view this as a fair way to handle questions - each is evaluated by me, and only me, and so gets as fair a shake as I can give it without considering the mix of whose on &quot;my side&quot;, who isn't, etc. When in doubt, I err on the side of whether or not I think the user will get a useful and productive answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(7) What is your interpretation of the purpose of Cross Validated and&#xA;  how does this influence the way you choose to use the site as an&#xA;  ordinary user?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Surely there is someone who has seen this before&quot;. Statistics, and data visualization, are wide open fields, full of people working with varying levels of expertise, perspectives, etc. But when it comes down to it, we're all in the same boat - how do I take my data, and understand what it means? That's also sometimes a lonely endeavor, and a burden best shared. I do my best to answer what I can as helpfully as possible, and ask the questions I have in a way where they're amendable to answering. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(8) What kind of moderatorial experience, if any, have you had before&#xA;  (online or offline)? Can you give an example of a moderatorial issue&#xA;  that came up, how you had handled it, and how the community that you&#xA;  moderated viewed your handling of the situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've served on a number of boards and the like, but most of these have been either peer-review focused or making sure things were working smoothly on the back end. I have however served as an officer in an online gaming guild for some time with a similar feel to CV in some ways - a single purpose, a important set of community standards, and no clear hierarchy between mods. For the most part, the problems that arose from that were from people who didn't really fit with the community. I've tried to help them figure out what about it isn't working, gently nudged them in what I thought was a more productive direction, and made it clear when things were just Not Working. I have no idea what people thought of my moderating, but I know the tone and community of the guild was valued by its members. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(9) A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in&#xA;  the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you&#xA;  will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about&#xA;  that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do my best never to post anything on here I'd be embarrassed to have attached to my name. That remains true, diamond or no diamond.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(10) In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more&#xA;  effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, the answer is &quot;I'd be useful sooner and more often&quot;. To me, having gained the whole Trusted User status on the Academia beta thanks to its lower threshold, I don't take the tools available any less seriously - but it's a much longer haul to that status here, and in my mind as a &quot;Trusted User&quot; I check in on the site &lt;em&gt;when I'm using it&lt;/em&gt;. As a moderator, I view the responsibility as something that demands tending to whether or not I'm on CV for other reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I've forgotten anything, or you have anything else you'd like me to answer, please do leave a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An answer to @Macro's question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hi EpiGrad, I wonder if you can clarify &quot;...I would make a really active effort toward improving are encouraging users to accept answers when possible&quot;, which relates to a recent meta thread. What would you do to try to enact this change in the culture? I think many of us have asked an OP to accept an answer under various circumstances but, in that meta thread, there's a bit of variability in what active members consider acceptable (and, as @Gavin mentioned there, it's been outlawed on SO).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly. I think there's not a particular use in the &quot;Please accept an answer&quot; comments - I can't think of one I've ever left that's actually manifested as progress. I do however think that for new users, its both a useful introduction to the community and the system, a helpful little bit of rep, and a chance to make sure &lt;em&gt;we've actually answered their question&lt;/em&gt;. I know I have a couple questions with no accepted answer because there wasn't one I thought was an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do however think its useful to pop in and ask a new user who has several upvoted answers if there exists an answer that satisfies their question, explain the bounty system if there isn't on (or offer to make one for very low rep users), or possibly work on editing and clarifying their question to solve whatever misdirection is causing several answers to go awry. Basically, I see it as a chance for new user engagement, and any new user engagement helps retain those users. If it boosts the number of accepted answers, great. If it doesn't, but one person learns how to use the bounty system, or actually gets there question answered? Also worth it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5836" LastEditorUserId="5836" LastEditDate="2013-09-24T23:28:43.787" LastActivityDate="2013-09-24T23:28:43.787" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1800" CreationDate="2013-09-25T10:53:09.953" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry I am a bit late here. I was at a conference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) What is your take on the &quot;software questions on CV&quot; that come up&#xA;  very frequently and where do you draw the line and decide it should be&#xA;  migrated to SO or simply closed? Based on the review queue, it seems&#xA;  there is a lot of heterogeneity among the high-rep users in terms of&#xA;  what constitutes &quot;off-topic&quot; in this context and, with moderators&#xA;  having the ability to unilaterally close/migrate questions, this seems&#xA;  a natural question to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My idea is that we should try to base migration on which set of users can better &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; the question, rather than whether the question mentions a statistical package. If the question demands statistical knowledge (even if it also involves knowledge of a package) then I think it belongs here. If it does not demand such knowledge I would vote to migrate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2) If you are elected moderator, what (specific, concrete!) changes&#xA;  would you like to see made to the way the site is currently&#xA;  administered and moderated? How do you view your role in effecting the&#xA;  proposed changes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the site in general is good. I would like to see a better way of welcoming newcomers. One thing would be that, when a person posts a question for the first time, they are directed to the FAQ automatically. They could get a message such as &quot;thank you for asking a question on our site. Here is a FAQ about the site&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(3) How would you moderate situations where you find yourself&#xA;  disagreeing with official SE policy about something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would discuss it with other moderators and perhaps other users in general in the meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(4) How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of&#xA;  valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of&#xA;  arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is very likely, but I would take each person and each question separately. Useful answers should stay. However, if a person is generating flags (as opposed to arguments) and those flags are justified, then measures would have to be taken - first warning the person. But arguments can be good, if they are conducted civilly. Not all statistical questions are answerable in only one way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(5) How would you handle a situation where another mod&#xA;  closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I felt it was serious I would discuss it with him/her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(6) What are your opinions about casting the deciding &quot;moderator&quot; vote&#xA;  on closing/opening questions? For example, if five non-moderator users&#xA;  have closed a question that you think should be left open, would you&#xA;  consider unilaterally re-opening it? Similarly, if a majority of&#xA;  reviewers have recommended that a question be left open (say 1 close&#xA;  vote and 3 &quot;stay open&quot; votes) under what circumstances would you&#xA;  decide to use your deciding close vote to override the majority?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be more willing to re-open a question than to close one against the majority of votes. I would only vote to close if the situation was pretty clear (e.g. a near exact duplicate). Having a &quot;bad&quot; question on the site (unless it is offensive or something like that) does less harm (in my view) than deleting a question that others will find useful. I would bear in mind that it can be hard to search for the right question in statistics, as the user may not know the right terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(7) What is your interpretation of the purpose of Cross Validated and&#xA;  how does this influence the way you choose to use the site as an&#xA;  ordinary user?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the primary purpose is to serve as a Q and A repository for all sorts of statistical and data analytic questions - from elementary to advanced, from purely data analytic to highly theoretical. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(8) What kind of moderatorial experience, if any, have you had before&#xA;  (online or offline)? Can you give an example of a moderatorial issue&#xA;  that came up, how you had handled it, and how the community that you&#xA;  moderated viewed your handling of the situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not had any such experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(9) A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in&#xA;  the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you&#xA;  will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about&#xA;  that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel fine with it. When something of mine needs deletion (e.g. if someone else points out an error) I delete it. That would remain the same whether or not I become a moderator. I am not sure how different the light will be. I, personally, don't view statements from moderators differently, except in that all the moderators are clearly experienced people who consistently give good answers. But so do many non-moderators. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(10) In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more&#xA;  effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure. I ran for moderator not to be more &lt;em&gt;effective&lt;/em&gt; exactly, but in order to give more back to this community and help more people ask good questions and get good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="686" LastEditDate="2013-09-25T10:58:32.113" LastActivityDate="2013-09-25T10:58:32.113" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1714" CreationDate="2013-09-25T21:12:04.447" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not of the mind that getting someone who is clearly stuck out of the weeds is a bad thing. While I think it's fine, and indeed a good idea to ask them to clarify or see if they can push their question a bit further, I don't think there's any use in requiring some arbitrary and undefined amount of work until the poster hits &quot;enough&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you the answerer think they're stuck, and further work is only going to end in confused flailing and frustration (or worse, in my mind, failing to get one's question answered, never to return), then I see no reason why you shouldn't at least try a gentle nudge in the right direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5836" LastActivityDate="2013-09-25T21:12:04.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1813" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-25T22:05:22.430" Score="10" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cross Validated gets a lot of new users; perhaps other SE sites do as well, but I am not very familiar with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These new users often do not do things the &quot;CV&quot; or &quot;SE&quot; way, through no fault of their own. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I therefore propose that when a new user asks a question (or gives an answer or makes a comment) he or she be automatically be sent a copy of the FAQ or, at least, be directed to the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2013-09-26T12:43:31.323" Title="A proposal to better serve new users" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1813" CreationDate="2013-09-26T12:43:31.323" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;On tex.SE, moderators and other users often leave a &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3503&quot;&gt;welcome message&lt;/a&gt; to all newcomers; it usually includes a link to their FAQ, as well as specific details regarding the question itself (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/121155/how-to-adjust-a-table-to-fit-on-page#comment270513_121155&quot;&gt;adding a minimal reproducible example&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like this idea, and maybe we could add some greeting message to our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/771/930&quot;&gt;Library of helpful responses&lt;/a&gt;? I'm not sure we need to create a dedicated thread on Meta for that purpose, since most of the information is expected to  be available in our FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:34:32.380" LastActivityDate="2013-09-26T12:43:31.323" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1714" CreationDate="2013-09-26T15:46:54.290" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is fine to use our own judgment. One of my concerns is that the hints may be too complicated or the questioners too confused, causing them to leave and the question unanswered. It is indeed a shame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that the learner should decide if he/she needs more explicit hint, there is a nifty markdown called &quot;spoiler&quot; &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;!&lt;/code&gt; you can use to mask the more tempting part of the answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. -- &lt;em&gt;Aaron Levenstein&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user will have to scroll over to see the contents. That way, we made our point as an educator, and we don't have to baby the learner and come back to check on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$\LaTeX$ codes work in this masked block as well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; $SE = \frac{SD}{\sqrt{n}}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Previous version of this response&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any function like blocking out a chunk of texts so that the questioner will know that a more explicit answer is contained, but get to decide if he/she can work on the hints (which is not blocked out) first?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an illustration from the forum GameFAQs.com, which is very cautious about players giving out game-related spoilers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PD1g0.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user would have to drag the cursor across the black box to reveal the more explicit part. Like the white text I revealed in this picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that the learner should decide if he/she needs more than a hint. This is a Q&amp;amp;A platform, and I hate to see most of these fundamental questions didn't get wrapped up because the questioner left or the members didn't follow up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13047" LastEditorUserId="13047" LastEditDate="2013-09-27T12:25:42.927" LastActivityDate="2013-09-27T12:25:42.927" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1816" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-28T09:17:11.393" Score="6" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;In our site Help Center, under 'Asking' heading there is currently three pinned user-guiding themes: &lt;strong&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;What types of questions should I avoid asking?&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;What does it mean if a question is &quot;closed&quot; or &quot;on hold&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;. I propose that the moderators formulate and pin yet another one: &lt;em&gt;Guidelines to ask a question&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, there exist only a link within &quot;What topics can I ask about here?&quot; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1479/how-to-ask-a-good-question-on-crossvalidated&quot;&gt;how to ask a good question&lt;/a&gt; thread. A newcomer is of course unlikely to read that thread before composing his urgent question. Instead, he should be prompted to read through several compact and perhaps even commanding suggestions. Such a bill would probably save many questions from being edited or commented with displeasure. Among other points in the guidelines I'd suggest to cover these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask your &lt;em&gt;statistical&lt;/em&gt; question in a way that it does not appear to be&#xA;tied to a specific software/language (such as &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt;). For example,&#xA;instead of just showing code do describe your analysis in words&#xA;besides showing the code. Remember that people on the site use&#xA;different statistical computer languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If your question is about difficulties/peculiarities you faced in analysing your data  then try to give a relevant snippet of the data (right in your question), so&#xA;that readers of your question are able to try to reproduce and check&#xA;your results. Without data, many questions are pointless. Generally, avoid giving a link to an external data file, but if you do it, please leave the file in Excel or text format.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use the formatting tools as you compose the question. The key phrase, the question itself, should be clearly discernible (e.g. &lt;strong&gt;Bold face&lt;/strong&gt;). Code and data, if any, should go as &lt;code&gt;Preformatted text&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Try to make your question specific whenever it is possible. For example, if you have difficulties in doing or understanding some kind of statistical analysis please make clear you specific concerns which raised about it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Avoid writing acronyms of statistical procedures without decrypting them (and especially in the title of the question). The best practice is to spell the name in full first and give the acronym in parenthesis. Then later in the question use just the acronym.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do not sign your question or write things like &quot;Thanks in advance&quot;, &quot;Thank you!&quot;, &quot;Any help is appreciated&quot; in the end or &quot;Hello&quot; in the beginning.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think these points were formulated right by me, nor that other should agree with them. My point is only this one: create the Guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3277" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2013-09-28T11:27:40.977" Title="Updating guidelines about asking a question on our Help page" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1817" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-29T14:12:18.717" Score="8" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do we really need both of these tags? They seem very close to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2013-09-30T14:49:48.073" LastActivityDate="2013-09-30T14:49:48.073" Title="Do we need both &quot;power&quot; and &quot;power analysis&quot; tags?" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1817" CreationDate="2013-09-29T22:57:22.290" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As some people have stated in the comments, I think 'power' is the more appropriate parent, as there are some questions that pertain to power, like the power of a particular test, or what a given power implies, whereas 'power analysis' is something you do to a particular study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5836" LastActivityDate="2013-09-29T22:57:22.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1819" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1820" CreationDate="2013-09-30T01:06:19.333" Score="13" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just got a reminder (while upvoting an answer) that I hadn't upvoted a question in a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it turned out, I had explicitly chosen to go to that particular question with the intent of upvoting the question (because I was already aware that I hadn't done so in a while and was looking for a question I felt worthy of an upvote). Nevertheless, that shows that the reminder was 'reminding' me appropriately - it had been long enough that I already knew it was true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest, I don't think I upvote a high enough proportion of questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My overall record is fine (about as many questions as answers have been upvoted; I think several answers upvoted for every question would be okay), but I seem to be finding it much harder to upvote questions lately. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I read an answer, it's easy to find reasons to upvote; some good, helpful points that address the question (or important aspects of it), no major errors, and I am happy to vote up... and when I really don't think I can upvote, I can make suggestions that would make the answer better and perhaps upvote later. Indeed, I sometimes find it hard to wait until I have finished reading a well put answer before I upvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When reading questions, however, I don't very often feel like I am reading a good question. I don't so often think a question satisfies &quot;shows research effort, is useful and clear&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally it seems like there's some problem that makes me hesitate - the question has pretty much been asked already, or the poster hasn't really thought about what they want to ask - indeed, likely hasn't even googled their question or checked Wikipedia. Maybe it's a question that wouldn't be widely useful, or (oh, so often) the poster hasn't even bothered with basics like layout or spelling. [Not everyone can spell, but computers are pretty good at it; as I type this question, I get a little wiggly red underline under misspelled words, which I assume is my (pretty standard) browser checking what I type -- it doesn't like &lt;em&gt;upvote&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;googled&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;wikipedia&lt;/em&gt; above; the last I have now capitalized.] It is sometimes worse, like when people can't even bother to spell a word wrong the same way twice in a row.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps my standards for questions are too high, or perhaps I am missing some other opportunity to upvote questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing that occurs to me is to be more diligent about coming back and upvoting questions that the OP is willing to improve. That doesn't seem like it would increase my upvote rate enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one - or quite often, 3 or 4 - of our diligent editors makes a poor question into something approaching a decent question, giving  reputation to the original poster for someone else's work (often needing a lot more effort than the original took) seems misplaced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are some good reasons to upvote a question? When might I think about upvoting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2013-09-30T14:49:35.603" LastActivityDate="2013-09-30T14:49:35.603" Title="What ways do you use to decide a question is 'good'?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1819" CreationDate="2013-09-30T14:47:39.590" Score="14" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Upvoting&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When  you answer a question,&lt;/strong&gt; or think you could answer it if you had the time, that's strong &lt;em&gt;prima facie&lt;/em&gt; evidence the question is good enough to be upvoted. Please do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When you do not feel comfortable answering a question&lt;/strong&gt; but feel that you at least could understand it and the O.P. has taken the care to make it as short, clear, and focused as possible while providing any necessary details, then it deserves your positive vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some questions are badly put but their intent is clear and they are &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; they may suggest some novel way of looking at a concept, for example. I upvote those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Factor in possible difficulties with English:&lt;/strong&gt; when a  question comes through sufficiently clearly but the English is stilted, look beyond that and consider upvoting it (and editing it for grammar and usage if you have a few minutes to spare).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Not voting&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When a question needs clarification&lt;/strong&gt; or other improvement, please leave a comment to guide the O.P. and do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; vote the question up: save your vote as a reward for the improvement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Because most of us look primarily at questions we think we can answer or about subjects we may be interested in, the fact that you have looked at it suggests you should either upvote it or write a comment suggesting an improvement.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, due to lack of knowledge of the situation or terminology, you feel you cannot tell whether the question has been clearly formulated, then don't vote.  You probably won't be spending much time with such questions anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Downvoting&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because &lt;strong&gt;downvotes&lt;/strong&gt; can discourage people, especially newcomers, save the (rare) question downvotes for just that: they go to people who have been shown what needs improvement and how to improve it but (after a suitable period of time) have not made the necessary changes. In fact, &lt;em&gt;those are the questions you should vote to close,&lt;/em&gt; so &lt;strong&gt;save your downvotes for people who violate site norms&lt;/strong&gt; (become belligerent, attack people, repeat their own questions, and so on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2013-09-30T14:47:39.590" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1821" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-01T20:12:06.700" Score="18" ViewCount="403" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cross Validated's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election/2&quot;&gt;second moderator election&lt;/a&gt; has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the new moderators are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/686&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/flair/686.png&quot; alt=&quot;Peter Flom&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/2970&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/flair/2970.png&quot; alt=&quot;cardinal&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They'll be joining &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;the existing crew&lt;/a&gt; shortly — please thank them for volunteering, and share your assistance and advice as they learn the ropes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For details on how the voting played out, you can download the election results &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election/2&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opavote.org/results/4873744203907072/0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;view a summary report online&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8588" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2013-10-01T20:25:57.880" Title="2013 Moderator Election Results" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1821" CreationDate="2013-10-01T20:25:57.880" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks to all who voted for me. I am honored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2013-10-01T20:25:57.880" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1823" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-04T11:35:21.050" Score="16" ViewCount="322" Body="&lt;p&gt;Took me a while to locate it, but unless there's some CV specific-benefit, perhaps this one should be &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/110030/should-spam-posts-be-edited&quot;&gt;closed&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've just flagged, voted for deletion and downvoted a blatant spam post. No doubt it will be taken care of in short order - a few hours at most (US moderators will probably be asleep right now).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't like the idea that it gets to sit there as is for even one hour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it would be possible to replace the text with 'This was spam, I have edited it out', for example, that would cause people to have to take an extra click to check and see that it really was spam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be okay to say &lt;strike&gt;Strike through all the text&lt;/strike&gt; and attempt to render any links inoperative (in the sense that you can't accidentally click on them, but would have to copy paste the address, say)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of even slightly mangling spam withing minutes of its appearance seems fair to me - but on the other hand I don't want to just do something like that unilaterally - there may be some consequence I am unaware of. I don't want to make anyone but the spammers less effective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I just leave it as is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit 11 April 2015:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been brought to my attention on a moderator forum (with information I am not at liberty to quote, as useful as that would be) that there's a problem with mangling spam -- even textifying the links -- in that it interferes with bots/scripts designed to help find spammers and consequently for StackExchange to deal with them. Just wanted to mention it before I forgot -- it's something perhaps we should be mindful of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T07:23:28.360" Title="Is it okay to 'interfere' with spam?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1823" CreationDate="2013-10-04T15:05:14.810" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;My practice as moderator has been both to delete all text from a spam post (just leaving it blank or putting in some anodyne text if a character limit is imposed) &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; delete the post.  Deleting the post makes it invisible to most users and the initial edit makes it invisible to &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; users (including moderators) unless they go to the effort of looking at the edit record.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The initial text deletion accomplishes two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Any offensive material is viewed only by readers who really, really want to see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Any links to bad sites will not inadvertently be clicked on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thing anyone should do upon encountering a noxious post is to flag it for moderator attention: mods can do more than delete posts; we can delete entire user accounts (as well as a few other things useful to investigate wider patterns of bad posting).  However, I think nobody would object if, upon encountering such material, a thoughtful community member were to do this text editing in order to spare subsequent readers the risk of being offended or accidentally clicking through to a bad site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Edit&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Glen_b recently points out in his answer in this thread, changing spam text can inhibit the performance of bots and other procedures in place to identify and prevent spam.  Although that is well worth bearing in mind, I still think the first priority should be to delete any obviously offensive material as soon as possible.  (A well-programmed bot should recognize that the OP did not do the editing and it will have full access to the editing history, so &lt;em&gt;in principle&lt;/em&gt; our efforts to take such material out of view should only &lt;em&gt;enhance&lt;/em&gt; the success of these bots.  But who knows what practical barriers there may be to implementing a good online spam-learning algorithm on SE ... .)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2015-04-27T21:19:58.273" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1825" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1826" CreationDate="2013-10-07T18:52:30.823" Score="3" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;In France, I am under the impression that the probability &amp;amp; statistics teaching in secondary school contains many disasters. For example, here are two typical exercises in books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A coin is flipped 100 times and the results are 40 heads and 60 tails. What is the probability of getting one head ?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In a company containing 1000 employees, there are 400 women and 600 men. Does this company discriminate in job hirings ?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you wonder why do I say that in Cross Validated meta ? Well, I was thinking about that and I was tempted to open a discussion in Cross Validated about this topic. Cross Validated members come from many countries, and then I thought that such a discussion could be interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I'm afraid such a question does not fit well with Cross Validated. Firstly, it is not clear what I'm asking here; from one hand, I am interested in the causes of such a bad teaching, and from the other hand I am interested in the status of this teaching in other countries. It is rather a &quot;discussion request&quot; than a question. Secondly, I'm afraid such a question could become &quot;popular&quot;, and brings me many reputation points whereas this is not what I expect. By the way I could be seen as cynical if I opened such a question (especially since I'm not a comfortable English speaker, it's difficult to assess the perception of my readers, and to improve my text in order to avoid misperception).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, for opening such a potentially &quot;popular question&quot;, or rather discussion, should we find another place than Cross Validated ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8402" LastActivityDate="2013-10-07T20:28:57.593" Title="Opening a possible &quot;popular&quot; question/discussion" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1825" CreationDate="2013-10-07T20:28:57.593" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because we are not a discussion site and you have no specific question in mind, your idea is definitely off topic.  If you had a specific question then, &lt;em&gt;depending on what it is,&lt;/em&gt; it might be on-topic here or perhaps on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Academia site&lt;/a&gt;.  Chat is an option, but few people participate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:49:58.060" LastActivityDate="2013-10-07T20:28:57.593" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1827" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1830" CreationDate="2013-10-09T12:24:54.503" Score="4" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;somehow the &quot;Dear all&quot; from my previous question disappeared and could not be edited back in? Does this happen all the time or was there just something weird going on in my browser?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30510" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2013-10-09T14:24:21.827" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Are salutations like &quot;dear all&quot; automatically removed from questions?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1828" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-13T10:51:00.463" Score="15" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am rather new to the .SE sites (started with math.SE and then expanded to CV) but during these last three months I had some time on my hands and I have answered a fair number of questions (93 in math.SE and 63 in CV), which can constitute an indicative, if not representative ...sample. This sample tells me that my answers tend to be long, and certainly &quot;against&quot; .SE guidelines that advise for rather short and to-the-point answers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some reflection I think this is possibly due to three reasons -two of them are personality traits, the other one may be defensible: &lt;strong&gt;a)&lt;/strong&gt; It is the teacher in me, &lt;strong&gt;b)&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;I like to hear the sound of my own voice&quot; (I read this as an offered explanation for long answers in some math.SE post) and &lt;strong&gt;c)&lt;/strong&gt; The question touches a more general issue that I believe is worth elaborating on in order to put the specific question in perspective, something that I know from off-line experience that makes its answer more useful to the person who asks the question (deeper and more comprehensive understanding).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A recent example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/72613/subscript-notation-in-expectations/72614#72614&quot;&gt;this answer of mine&lt;/a&gt;: the OP asked about the meaning of subscripts attached to the symbol of the Expectations operator. Since this phenomenon appears when more random variables are involved, I decided essentially to also answer &quot;another question&quot; -&quot;when more r.v.'s are involved and there is no subscript in the expectations operator, what do we do?&quot;. I believe that in this way my answer stands as a more complete treatment of this aspect of scientific notation, it permits the OP and any other reader to understand that the more general question is &quot;when more than one r.v. then what?&quot; -and to have an answer on this last question (which being more general is bound to pop up in more circumstances). But this approach &lt;em&gt;doubled&lt;/em&gt; the length of my answer, and strictly speaking, half of the answer was, if not off-topic, at least off-question, as the latter was actually asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be valuable to hear from more experienced members of the community about the matter. As I said, most probably there are &quot;rather questionable&quot; personality traits that are pushing me towards this answering approach, but I honestly believe that it also has something to offer to the readers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would really appreciate any thoughts on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28746" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2013-10-14T20:43:02.620" Title="Should I opt for a comprehensive answer at the price of making it a long one?" Tags="|discussion|answers|on-topic|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1828" CreationDate="2013-10-13T11:30:44.700" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use the Merkle-tree-like writing scheme, i.e., start with a shortest possible summary of your answer and then more-less repeat it adding details. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way your post will be a bit longer, but most readers will be able to skip substantial part of it; on the hand you will be able to contain all the information required by a beginner to get it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastActivityDate="2013-10-13T11:30:44.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1827" CreationDate="2013-10-13T12:52:56.003" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, some salutations and closings are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/93989/150510&quot;&gt;automatically removed&lt;/a&gt; from new posts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Peter mentioned, there's no need to add a full signature since your gravatar automatically shows up in each of your post; feel free to put any additional information about you in your profile page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the SE system draws its strength from its wiki capabilities (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/04/introducing-stackoverflow-com.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;and more&lt;/a&gt;): unlike usual mailing-lists, greetings and thanks can be omitted since they are not an essential piece for building a live repository of good questions and answers. This does not mean that we are not courteous, just that we are aware that CV is a different place to ask questions. And rewarding existing answers by votes and green check can also be seen as a form of thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2013-10-13T12:52:56.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1828" CreationDate="2013-10-13T13:10:29.537" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not necessarily abusing the SE system when you provide extended answers, as long as they can be justified other than by pure digressions. Answering a related subject in passing might also be a good idea, if you feel that this would be useful for the OP and future readers. (In this particular case, the number of upvotes you got suggests you were not too far off base :) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you're done with the take-away message, it is fairly easy to add further considerations in your post: You can highlight your main points in the first part, and then append side notes or related topics in the remaining part. Or as @mbq said, you can build your answer incrementally. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, some facts I have noticed with time: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Good answers often go beyond what look like seemingly simple questions (that's why it is also important to comment early on new question, i.e. to help clarify what the OP is &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; looking for).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Good answers often increase interest in the issues raised by the OP.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2013-10-13T13:10:29.537" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1832" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1834" CreationDate="2013-10-13T21:38:44.170" Score="4" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are questions about grammar induction on-topic here?  I believe GI belongs to the subject of machine learning, but not necessarily statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31264" LastEditorUserId="2970" LastEditDate="2013-10-13T23:01:41.550" LastActivityDate="2013-10-14T02:47:59.387" Title="Is grammar induction on-topic here?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1828" CreationDate="2013-10-14T01:53:56.877" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll note that the post you point to is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(i) not all that long&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(ii) already well upvoted (including by me; indeed given the active voters and the active meta participants have a big overlap, that's probably true of several people participating in the discussion)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so I think you can take the broader community response as positive already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for my two cents&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think long answers (longer than that one) are usually fine. Answers with a pedagogical slant are fine; people are often looking for expositions that will convey understanding, not just an 'answer'. My favourite answers here that I have seen from others are slightly longer ones that undertake to convey understanding. That's not to say that it's not possible to convey understanding succinctly - I've seen great short answers - but that people understand things differently. Sometimes a little more discussion, or a diagram, or an outline of how a result comes about, or some general explanation to help with intuition helps people that won't see it from the shortest answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions and answers are supposed to help future readers, not just the OP - so making your responses more general than a direct answer to the question is often a good thing. There are sometimes important points and fascinating ideas that are closely related to the question, but that the OP hasn't the knowledge to even know to ask. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Added in edit: your question asks 'should I?' ... but outside general guidance I don't think it's up to us to tell you how best to answer a question outside of what the rules cover (e.g. avoid 'one sentence' answers, avoid link-only answers, and so on) -- one good aspect of CV is the different approaches people bring. There are often several good contributions, some short, some long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2013-10-14T07:50:12.017" LastActivityDate="2013-10-14T07:50:12.017" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1832" CreationDate="2013-10-14T02:47:59.387" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I suspect a question may be off-topic for Cross Validated, I often leave a comment like this:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Welcome to the site, @user31264.  This question seems to be only about&#xA;  &lt;code&gt;topic ______&lt;/code&gt;. As such it would be off-topic for CV (see our help&#xA;  page).  If you have a substantive question about statistics, please&#xA;  edit to clarify; if not, this Q may have to be be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &quot;statistics&quot; in this context is shorthand for &lt;em&gt;statistics, machine learning, or data visualization&lt;/em&gt;, which is our mandate.  In other words, questions about machine learning are fully on-topic here.  Note that we have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt; tag, which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;our fourth most commonly-used tag&lt;/a&gt;, appended to 1469 threads (as of today).  For a full list of the topics that are appropriate for Cross Validated, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; in our help center.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2013-10-14T02:47:59.387" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1828" CreationDate="2013-10-14T20:43:02.620" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't think any of your answers are too long. Only thing I'd add to what others have said here is the caveat that CV isn't the place for lengthy expositions of broad topics that are already well covered elsewhere e.g. textbooks (not that your answers fall into this category).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2013-10-14T20:43:02.620" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1836" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-15T20:07:46.290" Score="1" ViewCount="851" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found two active users with identical user names, but distinct accounts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was over at math.SE and saw an &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/11258/how-should-i-ask-questions-that-i-just-need-hints-on?cb=1&quot;&gt;interesting meta-quesiton&lt;/a&gt;. I read it through and I thought I recognized the username of the OP. I have answered a question of an OP with the same name here in CV. Then in a comment the OP states &quot;I am homeschooled and doing math on my own&quot;. I say &quot;no, this can't be, the OP whose answer I answered is a biologist taking a stats class&quot;. I check the math.SE profile of the user -and &lt;em&gt;it does have a CV account&lt;/em&gt;. &quot;Ha!&quot; I think &quot;The guy is playing us&quot; -for some reason of his own (I assume it is a he). Then I check his profile on CV... and the question I have answered to is nowhere to be found. I go to my profile, find the question that I have answered, open it, hit on the OP username... and I end up in a &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; CV account, with the &lt;em&gt;same&lt;/em&gt; username.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Retrospectivly, it sounds fun - but only because I thought I do the above checks before going at the OP in a suspicious tone.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is rather puzzling (policy-wise) that the system permits the same user name for two different accounts. Obviously the system gets to differentiate the users by the account number, but permitting identical user names can create confusion and misunderstandings for users that see the same user name in answers and comments, which come from different people. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any info on that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28746" LastEditorUserId="28746" LastEditDate="2013-10-16T01:25:20.333" LastActivityDate="2013-10-16T01:25:20.333" Title="Identical username for two distinct active accounts allowed by the system?" Tags="|discussion|design|policy|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1836" CreationDate="2013-10-15T20:20:04.400" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are no restrictions at all on the uniqueness of user names, you're free to chose whatever name you wish. This is an intentional design decision. I personally find this rather nice, unlike many other sites an inactive user can't block your preferred user name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a potential for confusion if two active users use the same name, but that is rather rare. There is the avatar to help distinguish users, and users can change their names in cases of true confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The situation is not unlike the real world. Many people share the same name, but occasions where this gets problematic are still rather rare, and someone people tend to find an easy way to deal with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user12068" LastActivityDate="2013-10-15T20:20:04.400" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1838" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-19T14:59:27.557" Score="4" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just now @Gung and I were editing the same post in the same way (making equations into latex equations). The post was fairly lengthy and this sort of editing is a bit of a pain. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to avoid having two people edit the same post at the same time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is this a matter for a different forum? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2013-10-19T14:59:27.557" Title="Two people editing at once" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1839" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-22T01:48:51.507" Score="8" ViewCount="430" Body="&lt;p&gt;GMM is an abbreviation for&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Generalized Method of Moments&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gaussian Mixture Models&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Growth Mixture Models&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second usage seems to be far more common on CV, but now that Lars Hansen has finally won a Nobel, would it be possible to somehow separate out the GMM questions? At the very least, it makes it hard to search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7071" LastEditorUserId="7071" LastEditDate="2013-10-22T20:16:49.273" LastActivityDate="2013-10-22T20:16:49.273" Title="Distinguishing between types of GMM" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1839" CreationDate="2013-10-22T14:57:21.007" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ah, not again!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dimitriy, I did some work a few months ago of weeding out the generic &lt;code&gt;gmm&lt;/code&gt; tag, and separating it into &lt;code&gt;generalized-moments&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;generalized-method-of-moments&lt;/code&gt; was too long), &lt;code&gt;gaussian-mixture&lt;/code&gt; for the classification/machine learning folks, and &lt;code&gt;growth-mixture-model&lt;/code&gt; (which is what psychologists and education researchers think when they hear GMM). I think I kept the &lt;code&gt;gmm&lt;/code&gt; wiki entry saying that the use of this tag is confusing and discouraged, in favor of these three specific ones, but since no questions were tagged &lt;code&gt;gmm&lt;/code&gt; after my overhaul, it disappeared. Your... uhm... help in re-establishing &lt;code&gt;gmm&lt;/code&gt; is... uhm... appreciated, but it would be much better if you folded the &lt;code&gt;gmm&lt;/code&gt; description into &lt;code&gt;generalized-moments&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators: is there any way to protect a tag even if there are no entries for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastActivityDate="2013-10-22T14:57:21.007" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1841" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1843" CreationDate="2013-10-23T00:46:18.883" Score="6" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has been nagging at me a while. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guessed I'd figure out what was going on eventually, but I haven't - I am more puzzled than ever. If it is a bug I could post it to meta.SO*  -- but it's more likely to be something obvious I missed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*(I searched there but didn't turn anything relevant up)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the bounties offered page of people's user profile, there's a list of bounties offered (no  surprise there). Below is part of mine. On the right had side are user names beside each one (see the red oval below -- you may be able to open the image in its own browser tab or 'view it' in this tab to see a larger version; or see my &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/805/glen-b?tab=bounties&amp;amp;sort=offered&quot;&gt;bounties offered&lt;/a&gt; page, but it will eventually come to differ from the picture):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KktiG.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two sensible things that might go there, I think - the name of the person who got the bounty, or the name of the user asking the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I keep trying to figure out what it actually represents. Looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/69889/interpretation-of-kolmogorov-smirnov-critical-value-generated-distributions&quot;&gt;${\color{purple}{(1)}}$&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/71871/impact-of-data-based-bin-boundaries-on-a-chi-square-goodness-of-fit-test&quot;&gt;${\color{purple}{(3)}}$&lt;/a&gt; (those purple numbers in the text are also links to the corresponding posts, by the way) you'd think it was the person to whom the bounty was awarded. Makes perfect sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now, look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/72479/general-sum-of-gamma-distributions&quot;&gt;${\color{purple}{(2)}}$&lt;/a&gt; - I didn't award that to myself, I awarded it to @whuber. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it isn't that. What did I do on that page? I edited the question, and I commented under whuber's answer (and some time later deleted it); aside from awarding a bounty, that comment and later deletion would have been the last things I did there, likely around that indicated time. Why would anyone care to associate that bounty award with someone that just deleted a comment? Is it treating me as special because I also awarded the bounty? ... well, no:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/70490/taking-the-expectation-of-taylor-series-especially-the-remainder&quot;&gt;${\color{purple}{(4)}}$&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;em&gt;Nick&lt;/em&gt;? What the heck? Nick only has a deleted answer there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it - as it appears - merely indicating the last person to touch the page? (...and if so, why the heck would anyone care who did that?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is this apparent behavior intentional? What would be the purpose of such behavior? ... &lt;em&gt;OR&lt;/em&gt; ...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is this actually a bug, and the intended behavior was something less seemingly useless?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2013-10-24T23:41:53.397" Title="Does the bounties page of user profile have a bug? (or am I just especially dense?)" Tags="|discussion|bug|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1842" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-23T11:57:45.080" Score="3" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to understand how StackExchange recommends questions to the users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Untill now, my observation is &lt;em&gt;tags&lt;/em&gt; of  recommended questions are associated with &lt;em&gt;tags&lt;/em&gt; user is related to (tags of questions / answers he posted and likes). However, what might be the underlying &lt;strong&gt;algorithm&lt;/strong&gt; of question recommendation in StackExchange? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What might be an appropriate algorithm(collaborative filtering or content-based filtering) for a general question recommendation problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS:&#xA;The recommended question list refers to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XokHx.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7259" OwnerDisplayName="xiaohan2012" LastEditorUserId="7259" LastEditDate="2013-10-24T07:38:10.983" LastActivityDate="2013-10-24T07:38:10.983" Title="Question recommendation algorithm in StackExchange" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1841" CreationDate="2013-10-24T23:41:53.397" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;I suppose I'll turn my comment into an official answer, so that this doesn't get recorded as unanswered.&lt;/em&gt;)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the answer is #1.  The name listed is simply the last person to record a change (i.e., added a new answer or edited an existing post).  This is consistent with the way a lot of other pages work in the SE system.  I suspect that there is some code that makes various pages work this way and this behavior is simply inherited rather than having been coded up separately (and deliberately) to behave that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2013-10-24T23:41:53.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1844" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-25T19:26:22.817" Score="7" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just had a thought: we should encourage askers of [self-study] questions to write up (and accept) the answers the answers that they end up with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question here is: is that a good idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we accept it, we could &#xA;(a) as individuals do so, and &#xA;(b) modify the description of the self-study tag to indicate this policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16859" LastActivityDate="2013-10-25T19:26:22.817" Title="Encouraging questioners to answer their own self-study questions" Tags="|discussion|tags|policy|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1845" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-31T06:47:59.793" Score="3" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;Total newb to stats: I'm an embedded programmer with a BSEE, so I like to think I've got lots of knowledge with the least possible amount of applicability to real life. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I built a test bench to observe the output of a sensor and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19269638&quot;&gt;came up with an algorithm&lt;/a&gt; to quantify an anomaly I observed in the data. I wanted to know what to call it, so I asked on &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/530767&quot;&gt;Math.SE what is the average of an integral&lt;/a&gt;. While continuing to research related questions on Math.SE for a week, I just saw someone said their similar-ish question was answered on here...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could I please get help with which tags to use to post the &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/530767&quot;&gt;Math.SE question&lt;/a&gt; on here? Or if this is really trivial, I'd appreciate a pat on the back and &lt;em&gt;&quot;it is $__________$, duh!&quot;&lt;/em&gt; for an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19269638&quot;&gt;stackoverflow alagorithm link&lt;/a&gt; above, I mention that standard deviation, skewness, nor Kurtosis help. Also that I have known data, so my problem isn't helped with estimation tools like linear regression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, I came up with a way to quantify the &quot;dip&quot; in this figure and want to know what that process is called:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/W5oXL.png&quot; alt=&quot;I caught the dip, but what is the fishing rod called?&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2013-10-31T06:47:59.793" Title="How do I go about asking this question here on Stats.SE?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1846" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2776" CreationDate="2013-11-01T14:25:36.707" Score="8" ViewCount="410" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; This is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; about closing questions labeled as big-list.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What could we do about the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/big-list&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;big-list&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;big-list&lt;/a&gt; (x38)?&lt;/strong&gt; It excerpt says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Used to tag questions (often Community Wiki) where a collection of replies is requested, such as a list of references, of quotations, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag has been used mostly* in the sense of making a list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/references&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;references&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;references&lt;/a&gt; (x 303), such as books (and related), papers, algorithms, software (and packages), datasets and quotations. &lt;sub&gt;(*see examples in the end of this question)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference tag excerpts says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;References&quot; is our generic tag for questions seeking information about books, papers, presentations, videos of lectures, on-line tutorials, etc., regarding any subject matter that is on-topic for Cross Validated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as pointed by @gung the tag &lt;code&gt;big-list&lt;/code&gt; is not solely about &quot;references&quot;. It is also about: lists asking how to use and not to use statistics, questions to use in an job interview, and others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some problems I see with this tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are many other questions (asking for references) which are big lists (or potential to become a big list) and they are not tagged with it;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nowadays, big lists threads are not the focus of CV SE;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SE discourage the use of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/18878/how-do-i-correctly-tag-my-questions&quot;&gt;meta-tags&lt;/a&gt; on main sites. &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is the argument explaining why.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;It is different with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; tag, which is a on-topic subject of our site and there is specific policy designed to it&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Counter-arguments which I can visualize are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Retaggings (specially in old threads) are always a problem, mainly because this action bumps old questions to the active tab, and takes aways the attention of new answers on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=active&quot;&gt;active question tab&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some solutions could involve: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;let &lt;code&gt;big-list&lt;/code&gt; the way it is;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rewrite/improve tag excerpts and tag wikis to avoid confusion and to narrow down how to use it correctly;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;blacklist/burninate the tag;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make it a synonym of tag &lt;code&gt;references&lt;/code&gt;;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;other and combinations of above. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some statistics about the 38 threads labeled as &lt;code&gt;big-list&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nº of threads with Community-wiki status  = 25  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nº of threads tagged only with &lt;code&gt;big-list&lt;/code&gt; tag = 03  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Closed (or duplicated) = 02  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an attempt to facilitate the discussion (answers and proposals), the 38 threads where grouped into categories and sub-categories to depict into what context they&#xA;are inserted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inside each topic links are ranked as: newest (top) to oldest (bottom)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 - Big-list related to references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;1.1 - also tagged with references (or actual synonyms)&lt;/p&gt;  &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;algorithms:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/66330/lesser-known-but-powerful-probabilistic-inference-algorithms&quot;&gt;Lesser-known but powerful probabilistic inference algorithms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;books and related (textbook and handbook):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/72799/what-are-good-econometrics-handbooks&quot;&gt;Good econometrics handbooks?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/41726/are-there-any-good-popular-science-book-about-statistics-or-machine-learning&quot;&gt;Are there any good popular science book about statistics or machine learning?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/29066/books-on-non-parametric-theory-with-correlated-data&quot;&gt;Books on non-parametric theory with correlated data&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/26372/introductory-book-for-multivariate-statistics&quot;&gt;Introductory book for multivariate statistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/25608/non-linear-regression-references&quot;&gt;References on non-linear regression analysis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/21346/what-is-a-good-reference-book-for-the-matrix-algebra-linear-algebra-used-a-lot-i&quot;&gt;Reference book for linear algebra applied to statistics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/15692/probability-theory-books-for-self-study&quot;&gt;Probability theory books for self-study&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/13069/book-for-getting-a-broad-conceptual-overview-of-statistical-methods&quot;&gt;Book for broad and conceptual overview of statistical methods&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/9292/which-books-would-you-recommend-for-mixed-distributions-continuous-and-discrete&quot;&gt;Books for mixed distributions (continuous and discrete)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/4612/good-econometrics-textbooks&quot;&gt;Econometrics textbooks?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/4347/good-fuzzy-textbook&quot;&gt;Fuzzy textbooks&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/3294/resources-for-learning-markov-chain-and-hidden-markov-models&quot;&gt;Resources for learning Markov chain and hidden Markov models&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/3291/building-a-statistics-library-with-knapsack-constraint&quot;&gt;Statistics library with knapsack constraint&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/3281/statistics-based-on-fractal-mathematics&quot;&gt;Statistics based on fractal mathematics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1053/references-for-survival-analysis&quot;&gt;References for survival analysis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/290/resources-for-learning-stata&quot;&gt;Resources for learning Stata&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;other (can be a mixture of books, paper, software, etc):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/6176/readable-introduction-to-measure-theory&quot;&gt;Introduction to measure theory&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-software/packages:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/12670/data-apis-feeds-available-as-packages-in-r&quot;&gt;Data APIs/feeds available as packages in R&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;1.2 - not labeled with references or any of its synonyms&lt;/p&gt;  &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;algorithms:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/12288/what-is-a-message-passing-method&quot;&gt;What is a &amp;#39;message passing method&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;papers:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/10510/what-are-good-references-containing-arguments-against-null-hypothesis-significan&quot;&gt;References containing arguments against null hypothesis significance testing?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/9365/what-are-some-interesting-and-well-written-applied-statistics-papers&quot;&gt;What are some interesting and well-written applied statistics papers?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;quotations:    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/726/famous-statistician-quotes&quot;&gt;Famous statistical quotations&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;other (can be a mixture of books, paper, software, etc):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/9456/what-are-some-good-hard-exemplary-problem-sets-to-work-through-to-solidify-my-un&quot;&gt;Hard exemplary problem sets to work through to solidify my understanding of statistical concepts?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/9190/graphics-encyclopedia&quot;&gt;Graphics encyclopedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/5937/tiny-real-datasets-for-giving-examples-in-class&quot;&gt;Tiny (real) datasets for giving examples in class?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/3413/hurst-exponent-calculation-methodology&quot;&gt;Hurst exponent calculation methodology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1980/complete-substantive-examples-of-reproducible-research-using-r&quot;&gt;Complete substantive examples of reproducible research using R&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;software/packages:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/12681/software-for-making-semi-variograms-and-analyses&quot;&gt;Software for making semi variograms and analyses?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 - Big-list &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; related to references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;correct or incorrect use of statistics methods (pitfalls,sins,etc):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/27146/pitfalls-in-time-series-analysis&quot;&gt;Pitfalls in time series analysis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/10680/how-to-not-use-statistics&quot;&gt;How to NOT use statistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/4551/what-are-common-statistical-sins&quot;&gt;What are common statistical sins?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/3814/how-to-annoy-a-statistical-referee&quot;&gt;How to annoy a statistical referee?&lt;/a&gt;    &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;other:    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/5465/statistics-interview-questions&quot;&gt;Statistics interview questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2379/what-are-the-big-problems-in-statistics&quot;&gt;What are the &amp;#39;big problems&amp;#39; in statistics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1883/revolutions-in-statistics-for-the-last-50-years&quot;&gt;Revolutions in statistics for the last 50 years?&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3 - Big-list misused (meaning &quot;list of data&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;any size of data:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/60197/how-to-manage-correlation-coefficients-spearman-kendall-with-lists-of-differe&quot;&gt;How to manage correlation coefficients (Spearman, Kendall) with lists of different dimensions?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;large-data:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/24619/resampling-dataset-size&quot;&gt;Resampling large dataset&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2015-11-30T11:10:35.767" Title="What could be done with respect to tag &quot;big-list&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-deletion|blacklist-request|meta-tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1847" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1848" CreationDate="2013-11-01T20:29:36.067" Score="4" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;have you ever noticed that almost ALL questions here in &lt;em&gt;meta&lt;/em&gt; are tagged as &lt;strong&gt;&quot;discussion&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;? &#xA;When we consider the fact that every question is discussed...it is quite useless tag. So it would be rational to cancel this useless tag, don't you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.&#xA;I also add tag &lt;strong&gt;&quot;discussion&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; to this question...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;...I hope statisticians have a sense of humor:)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28218" LastActivityDate="2013-11-01T21:09:50.543" Title="Increasing efficiency - removing tag &quot;discussion&quot; from CV meta" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1847" CreationDate="2013-11-01T21:09:50.543" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it's pretty much a meta-tag for this site.  But since &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; question &quot;must include at least one of [bug feature-request discussion support],&quot; we are at the mercy of the site developers: when the question is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; about bugs, feature requests, or support, then (by the law of the excluded middle) it &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/discussion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;discussion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt;.  Unless you wanted to abuse the system, you had no choice when you picked that tag!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2013-11-01T21:09:50.543" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1849" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-03T00:20:51.860" Score="5" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a new tag: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dispersion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dispersion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dispersion&lt;/a&gt;, which I just edited. It can, I believe, refer to at least two different things: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Measures of spread of a distribution or set of values (e.g. the sd, the interquartile range). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The rate at which something (e.g. a new idea, an infection) spreads through a network or a population. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should be done here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2013-11-03T01:58:44.870" LastActivityDate="2017-05-25T21:35:10.760" Title="The 'dispersion' tag is ambiguous" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1850" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1851" CreationDate="2013-11-05T10:49:23.203" Score="9" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few minutes ago, I rejected a tag wiki edit (which didn't match the comment) as too minor (a one character change), and seconds after I did so realized that I had made a mistake, since it turns out that one character change will matter a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/764/how-to-unvote-on-comments&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; answer applies also to other votes, including this one, but thought it was worth asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It'll be in the suggested edit review queue; I suppose sooner or later it'll get enough approves and go through, but it would be nice to now if there's a way to undo my error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: It looks like it ended up rejected; I have fixed it by repeating the change (but at least the comment now clearly explains why it was changed)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T13:33:47.817" Title="Is there a way to 'undo' a mistaken review?" Tags="|discussion|support|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1850" CreationDate="2013-11-05T12:35:51.097" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/152641/is-it-possible-to-undo-a-review-action&quot;&gt;Is it possible to undo a review action&lt;/a&gt;? So far, it is not.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you said, there will be other reviewers which will end up approving the suggestion. If they do not, one can go over the tag wiki and edit it to fix the mistaken review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, if you are still uncomfortable with the user who suggested the edit, it is possible to ping him/her on chat (or leave a comment) and explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But don't worry, because everybody makes mistakes once in awhile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T13:33:47.817" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="793" CreationDate="2013-11-06T18:10:27.783" Score="11" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Minitab&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tutorials for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.minitab.com/en-us/support/videos/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Minitab&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://support.minitab.com/en-us/minitab-express/1/help-and-how-to/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Minitab Express&lt;/a&gt; with examples and illustrated instructions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.minitab.com/en-us/support/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free assistance/support&lt;/a&gt; directly from developers (e-mail and phone call).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Learn more about Minitab on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitab&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-11-11T09:07:15.593" LastActivityDate="2023-11-11T09:07:15.593" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-11-06T18:10:27.783" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1849" CreationDate="2013-11-07T17:44:58.497" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/72937/what-is-the-statistical-efficiency-of-l-moments&quot;&gt;thread&lt;/a&gt; that uses &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dispersion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dispersion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dispersion&lt;/a&gt; (x 1) is meaning the bullet number #1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Measures of spread of a distribution or set of values (e.g. the sd, the interquartile range).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, we already have a tag which covers bullet #2: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/epidemiology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;epidemiology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;epidemiology&lt;/a&gt; (x 109). I am considering the topic diseases/infection (can't think of a different concrete example for this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its excerpt says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Epidemiology is the study of the distribution and spread of disease or illness at the population level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also has a nice &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/epidemiology/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Change the current &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dispersion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dispersion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dispersion&lt;/a&gt; tag excerpt from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dispersion can refer to at least two things 1) It is a general term for how spread apart values are; 2) It is a term for how fast something spreads through a network&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to something in the below lines;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is a general term for how spread apart values are. For questions related to disease spread/dispersion content, use the tag epidemiology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case another example appears, than we could consider a new tag to it or to adapt the situation to an existing tag (if any). Then, the &lt;code&gt;dispersion&lt;/code&gt; excerpt would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is a general term for how spread apart values are. For questions related to disease spread/dispersion content, use the tag epidemiology. For other meanings of dispersion consider using a related tag or creating a new one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2013-11-08T12:38:45.677" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1854" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-12T11:11:54.477" Score="1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suggestion: Either consolidate tags or allow more than 5&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We currently have multiple tags with overlapping meanings. For example the tags: &quot;svd&quot;, &quot;matrix-factorization&quot; and &quot;linear algebra&quot;. I think that there is an eigenvalue related one as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With so many synonyms, it is logical to include all of them so users who are only looking for one of do not miss out on my question. This leaves less &quot;tag allowance&quot; to add tags that describe what I am applying linear algebra to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my suggestion is to either allow more than five tags to be used or to consolidate the tags. For example, all of the examples mentioned above could be catergorised as &quot;linear-algebra&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16596" LastEditorUserId="16596" LastEditDate="2013-11-12T23:58:16.963" LastActivityDate="2013-11-12T23:58:16.963" Title="Discussion: Either consolidate tags or allow more than 5" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1855" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1856" CreationDate="2013-11-12T23:48:03.597" Score="9" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/76359/integrate-with-ecdf-quickly-in-r?noredirect=1&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; was a question with a legitimate statistical issue in it (though poorly identified in the question)... and was unfortunately moved fairly* quickly (indeed it disappeared while I was trying to formulate - off line - an explanation of the relevance of the issue that was raised, much to my frustration). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* relatively speaking, at least - to be fair it was here for several hours&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, I feel the central issue was related to statistical algorithms (and has connections to topics like Rao-Blackwellization and importance sampling, for example). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it clearly falls under the last item in the list for what's on topic in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help&lt;/a&gt; (i.e., statistical and data-driven computing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, even in the absence of my (too slow) attempt to make it clear there was a statistical issue there, I think the answer that was given before it was moved made it clear enough that it was pretty solidly on topic. (The crucial point is that second line of algebra.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, I'm saddened to lose such a great, relevant answer from our site. One that I think is very likely to be useful to a subset of other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So two main questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Am I off-base? Is that really off topic? How would one tell?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Given that getting such a post back is relatively tricky, in the absence of at least a close vote* can these things be done ... a little more slowly, so there's a little more time to respond to them? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* that I saw, at least; if I had I'd have clicked the &quot;leave open&quot; button &lt;em&gt;really hard&lt;/em&gt;. I may have needed a new trackpad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I don't wish to criticize the great work that the moderators do, nor would I remotely suggest that there's anything here but the highest of motives. I am mostly concerned about the speed on what was - in my opinion - at worst toward the borderline of being off topic and worthy of a chance for more extensive consideration.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2013-11-13T11:21:26.423" Title="Was it right to move this post? (What are the criteria?) Did that happen too fast?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1855" CreationDate="2013-11-13T11:17:55.500" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The referenced question has now been reopened  on the main site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2970" LastActivityDate="2013-11-13T11:17:55.500" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1857" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-15T20:22:59.187" Score="5" ViewCount="246" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few months ago I published some &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/148108/bad-question-good-answer?minimumDifference=4&amp;amp;maximumScore=5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;data explorer queries&lt;/a&gt; I'd developed that people seemed to appreciate. I had a funny idea today and I thought I'd share my results: the following query lists answers that scored at least 4 points more than questions with a maximum score of 5 points (feel free to input different thresholds if you like).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/148108/bad-question-good-answer?minimumDifference=4&amp;amp;maximumScore=5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bad Question, Good Answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep up the good work everyone, and a special thanks to those of you who have shown the patience to provide serious answers to poorly asked questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I just realized this isn't an entirely original idea. See the page for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/57/reversal&quot;&gt;reversal badge&lt;/a&gt; (which hasn't yet been awarded on CV). Perhaps we should change the thresholds for the reversal badge to reflect the more conservative voting here compared to the voting on SO&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2013-12-01T12:40:10.717" Title="Bad questions that received excellent answers" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1858" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1859" CreationDate="2013-11-17T21:21:27.160" Score="5" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have two tags for intraclass correlation: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/intraclass-correlation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;intraclass-correlation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;intraclass-correlation&lt;/a&gt; (which indexed 40 threads), and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/icc&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;icc&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;icc&lt;/a&gt; (which indexed 6). I have retagged 5 of the latter (1 was migrated and couldn't be edited), and changed the wiki to indicate that it is a duplicate.  However, I cannot suggest that it is a synonym because I don't have 5 upvotes on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/intraclass-correlation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;intraclass-correlation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;intraclass-correlation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2013-11-17T22:38:27.383" Title="Can we make icc a synonym of intraclass-correlation?" Tags="|support|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1858" CreationDate="2013-11-17T22:38:27.383" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;These two tags have been merged, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/icc&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;icc&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;icc&lt;/a&gt; is now a synonym for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/intraclass-correlation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;intraclass-correlation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;intraclass-correlation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2013-11-17T22:38:27.383" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1861" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-21T00:59:25.340" Score="14" ViewCount="478" Body="&lt;p&gt;I notice that overnight (my time) we hit the first non-CW &quot;Great Answer&quot; badge (it had been awarded 3 times before, but all to community-wiki answers), on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/13314/is-r2-useful-or-dangerous/13317#13317&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;; congratulations whuber.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, since I had been wondering when that might happen for some time, two questions occur to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other outstanding milestones yet to be achieved on CV that would indicate we're moving to being a 'mature' group, in some sense (at least in the very narrow sense of having enough voting subscribers to make such badges achievable)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which milestones, achieved or not yet achieved, do you think are more important as indicators in some sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or if you'd prefer to take a contrary view, feel free to discuss how looking at any such milestone is meaningless. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: and less than three weeks later we hit another one. Congratulations, gung&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-08-13T17:37:31.193" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T17:37:31.193" Title="We hit the first non-CW &quot;Great Answer&quot; badge. What milestones are we yet to hit that indicate a 'mature' group?" Tags="|discussion|participation|site-statistics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1861" CreationDate="2013-11-21T17:07:21.713" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;About the suggested milestone #2 we reached it in july/2017 (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users?page=2&amp;amp;tab=reputation&amp;amp;filter=all&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). It is an indicative that people are voting and it is good to have more people around who able to answer questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the proportion of unanswered questions is growing faster than the ones which do get answers. We agree a significant part of the former group are the type of poor quality, off-topic, uncler, broad, opinion-based and duplicates (some references: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4477/my-questions-dont-get-an-answer-is-it-a-general-trend-or-am-i-doing-somethin/4478#4478&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4901/2017-moderator-election-qa-questionnaire&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I would answer this question today, I'd say a milestone would be somehow to reduce the number of unanswered questions by being more effective towards questions which should be put on hold/closed/deleted. This could be achieved in many ways, such as going from improvements in the SE system bot which automatically deletes poor posts; having more 3k reputation users who are able to cast close/reopen votes; giving more incentive to users to find duplicates (for &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/274353/reward-3k-reputation-users-for-finding-duplicates&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;); and also having current 3k users to be less tolerant with poor questions (including questions from new users) and quickly put those on hold, independent if a custom comment will be posted or not. It is time to rely more on our default close-reason messages (they can be improved if needed) plus the extended documentation built on CV Meta along past years; and put more weight on the OP's shoulders about the responsibility of learning how the site works and come back to improve their questions if they can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1- One milestone I think we could be proud of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the respectful environment we have been keeping on Cross Validated SE;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merits to all community, but specially for the high quality level we have on our moderation team;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2- Milestones yet to reach are difficult to say, but what about: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Reputation&amp;amp;filter=all&quot;&gt;two pages of users&lt;/a&gt; with 10K reputation;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mathematics SE has 190 10k reputation users (1068 questions by 10k user).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;We have 22 10k reputation users (1318 questions by each 10k user).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this milestone is important because it brings us more independence as a group.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It is also a consequence of having many users participating and voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-08-13T17:22:42.597" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T17:22:42.597" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1863" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-23T14:57:15.577" Score="5" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know we are not supposed to give full answers to HW questions. But what if the answer given by the book or teacher is demonstrably wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the case for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/77444/standard-deviation-hw-question&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2013-11-24T20:54:40.593" Title="Question regarding answers to HW questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1863" CreationDate="2013-11-24T20:54:40.593" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think exposing the silliness of a silly question has greater utility for all CV readers than forcing one OP to think a bit more. In any case the raison d'&amp;ecirc;tre of the rule is moot if he's been already given the &quot;right&quot; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2013-11-24T20:54:40.593" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1865" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-06T11:25:16.710" Score="6" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's the time of the year again, namely it is December 2013, and so we shall now refresh our Community Promotion Ads for the new year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's twitter account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources for statisticians&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interesting in-site activities and events&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be &lt;strong&gt;220 x 250 pixels&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/1865&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5645" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2014-11-03T11:19:43.847" Title="Community Promotion Ads - 2014" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-01-01T03:24:24.627" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-06T11:25:16.710" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1865" CreationDate="2013-12-06T11:25:16.710" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/StackStats&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TovHW.png&quot; alt=&quot;StackStats Twitter&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5645" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T11:25:16.710" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-06T11:25:16.710" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1867" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1868" CreationDate="2013-12-09T19:07:22.383" Score="14" ViewCount="345" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/21807/evaluation-measure-of-clustering-without-having-truth-labels/79080#79080&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt; that was copied &amp;amp; pasted &lt;em&gt;in toto&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/76093/how-to-determine-which-method-is-the-most-reasonable-clustering-results/76095#76095&quot;&gt;another thread&lt;/a&gt;.  I think the answer is high-quality--I had upvoted the previous iteration--but I am uncomfortable with this; I suspect this behavior (unabated) will clutter up the site.  I am also in a quandary about whether to upvote an answer twice or leave a worthy answer un-upvoted, which may imply to future readers that the community didn't think much of it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly there are any number of questions that are fundamentally similar that arise regularly.  This issue has been discussed before (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1122/how-to-stem-the-tide-of-duplicate-qs&quot;&gt;How to stem the tide of duplicate Qs&lt;/a&gt;) and I continue to hold the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1122/how-to-stem-the-tide-of-duplicate-qs/1137#1137&quot;&gt;opinions&lt;/a&gt; I stated in the previous discussion (&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr&lt;/strong&gt;: this is inevitable, &amp;amp; harnessed properly can lead to positive knock-on effects).  I don't think the best solution is to simply close and/or delete any question where the same answer could be given.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I left a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/21807/evaluation-measure-of-clustering-without-having-truth-labels/79080?noredirect=1#comment155111_79080&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; to the answer at issue to the effect that it would be better to leave a comment to the question with a link to the previous answer or a brief answer with such a link.  The OP &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/21807/evaluation-measure-of-clustering-without-having-truth-labels/79080?noredirect=1#comment155114_79080&quot;&gt;disagreed&lt;/a&gt; on the basis that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19756/how-do-comments-work&quot;&gt;comments&lt;/a&gt; and original &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/209694/when-a-user-has-one-of-his-question-or-answer-deleted-why-dont-you-notify-him&quot;&gt;answers&lt;/a&gt; elsewhere could be deleted without notice.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to debate this with a single individual in the comments to an answer.  I think it should be discussed here on meta.  &lt;strong&gt;What policy should we adopt relative to this type of situation?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/85470/reposting-an-identical-answer-on-a-different-question&quot;&gt;this meta.SO thread&lt;/a&gt;, but did not find it to be very helpful.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/106660/ive-copied-one-of-my-old-answers-into-a-more-appropriate-question-should-i-del&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is another related meta.SO thread.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2013-12-23T10:33:15.410" Title="What should be our policy on duplicate answers?" Tags="|discussion|answers|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1867" CreationDate="2013-12-10T02:47:19.793" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As a moderator I look upon duplicate answers with prejudice.&lt;/strong&gt;  Although there's nothing morally wrong with reproducing all or part of a previous answer that you authored (wherever it may have appeared) without specific attribution, there's nothing right about it either.  If something you posted elsewhere might be useful as an answer, &lt;em&gt;link to it&lt;/em&gt; instead and provide a synopsis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By default readers will understand that what is posted on our site is original unless advised otherwise. Violating that expectation can be perceived as deceitful.  Of course non-original materials may be reproduced under fair use guidelines and need to be properly attributed (that is, name the author and identify the publication in which the materials appeared).  There is a spectrum of quotation: at one extreme, we ask that links be explained so that answers can stand alone; and at the other extreme, we ask that an answer that otherwise would be a wholesale extract of other work--even your own--be condensed to a brief summary with a link to the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that deleting a duplicate post destroys no information whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, too, that there is extremely low risk in offering a link as a comment: nobody (at least nobody acting in good faith) is going to delete such a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2013-12-10T02:47:19.793" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1865" CreationDate="2013-12-10T15:36:58.357" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HQ5S2.png&quot; alt=&quot;Astronomy Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35976" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:06.920" LastActivityDate="2013-12-10T15:36:58.357" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-10T15:36:58.357" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1870" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-10T15:47:48.080" Score="3" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag wiki for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gam&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gam&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gam&lt;/a&gt; says &quot;general additive model&quot;, and has 44 questions. There is also &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/general-additive-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;general-additive-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;general-additive-model&lt;/a&gt;, which has 6 questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please can someone with the required privileges establish the synonym?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3794" LastActivityDate="2013-12-10T15:47:48.080" Title="synonym request - gam and general additive model" Tags="|feature-request|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2013-12-10T16:35:01.223" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="618" CreationDate="2013-12-11T16:45:18.463" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding the new &lt;strong&gt;top bar&lt;/strong&gt; which was launched recently:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The below thread on Meta Stack Overflow provides alternatives for its customization.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/210041/gallery-of-custom-styles-and-or-scripts-for-the-top-bar&quot;&gt;Gallery of custom styles and/or scripts for the top-bar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some suggestions merge features from new and old versions; others provide examples for color changing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2013-12-11T16:55:27.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1872" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1873" CreationDate="2013-12-13T15:46:00.683" Score="6" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just edited a previously empty tag Wiki and put a good deal of effort into writing a decent description, providing an example etc. in a reasonable length. I saved it, got the usual &quot;Thanks for the edit, we will review it&quot; message and then waited for a while but nothing happened. When I returned to the tag Wiki later my text had completely disappeared. Now I'm just wondering what happened there?&#xA;I'm sure what was written was not wrong and it certainly was an improvement (given that this tag had been empty before), so I asked myself if this is a bug of some sort?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26338" LastEditorUserId="884" LastEditDate="2013-12-14T01:05:11.423" LastActivityDate="2013-12-14T01:05:11.423" Title="Changes to tag Wiki gone missing" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1872" CreationDate="2013-12-13T16:00:29.537" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently reviewed several tag wikis and wiki excerpts that you proposed.  Some I accepted, others I accepted with edits, and a few others--including one long one--I declined.  In all cases I provided explicit reasons. &lt;strong&gt;Thus, if there is any bug here it would be that those reasons were not communicated back to you by the system.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To hunt down what's going on, I looked at your recent user activity (available on your profile page) and linked through the &amp;quot;suggested edit&amp;quot; links.  That brought me to pages like the one at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/24893&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/24893&lt;/a&gt;, where at the top my response is prominently highlighted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rejected 24 mins ago:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;whuber♦ reviewed this 24 mins ago: Reject&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This text goes well beyond what would be needed in a wiki: consider posing a question that it would answer and then post this as an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore &lt;strong&gt;it appears that all is working,&lt;/strong&gt; although it seems like the system for providing feedback for rejected edits could be streamlined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, the suggested edit is still visible at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/24893&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/24893&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2013-12-13T16:00:29.537" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1875" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-14T18:21:05.303" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;Right now the 'beta' tag refers to the distribution of that name. Does it need clarification or amendment to deal with &lt;code&gt;beta&lt;/code&gt; as used in finance (a measure of risk, I think). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2013-12-14T21:39:47.230" Title="Does the beta tag need clarification?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1875" CreationDate="2013-12-14T21:39:47.230" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would do no harm to add a clarification inside the tag wiki, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tag usage&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do not use this tag for &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_(finance)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beta&lt;/a&gt; as measurement of how much an asset return can be predicted by a benchmark (finance context). Consider using the tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/finance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;finance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;finance&lt;/a&gt;, and/or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/beta-risk&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;beta-risk&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;beta-risk&lt;/a&gt;, instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was just a rough suggestion (both wiki amendment and beta-risk tag).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems there are no current threads labelled &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/beta&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;beta&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;beta&lt;/a&gt; outside the beta-distribution concept.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This is why I am suggesting to add the clarification inside the wiki and not inside the excerpt (but no objection using the excerpt, if one prefers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doing a research by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bfinance%5D+beta+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;[finance] beta is:question&lt;/a&gt; it returned 4 questions. I believe the newest one is a candidate to place the new tag, if it is the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/67198/can-i-run-a-regression-where-dependents-are-coefficients-from-other-regression-a&quot;&gt;Can I run a regression where dependents are coefficients from other regression and independents are R squared from these regressions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2013-12-14T21:39:47.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1877" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-16T08:23:45.847" Score="4" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I hover over the upper edge of a question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/3794/energynumbers&quot;&gt;a profile page&lt;/a&gt;, then first one line appears under the hyperlink, and as I move the mouse down, towards the centre of the question, then as the mouse passed into the hyperlink box, the cursor changes, and a second line appears under the hyperlink:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hUUOC.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That second underline shouldn't be there, should it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3794" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2013-12-16T11:26:08.983" Title="Double-underlining on linked questions on profile page" Tags="|bug|design|style|hyperlinks|profile-page|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1865" CreationDate="2013-12-16T16:22:32.487" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/44G6J.png&quot; alt=&quot;Astronomy Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35976" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:06.920" LastActivityDate="2013-12-16T16:22:32.487" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-16T16:22:32.487" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1880" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-17T01:39:26.353" Score="13" ViewCount="351" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just been having a discussion in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/comments/156571?noredirect=1&quot;&gt;comments here&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;where I referred the poster to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;the help on cross-posting&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;I've been told that I'm wrong (which, given how often I am wrong, hardly comes as a shock to me), and the help is misinformed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm happy to be educated, but if the &lt;em&gt;help&lt;/em&gt; is wrong, or even incomplete (and consequently, the actions of the moderators and some of us ordinary users here thereby misplaced), something really ought to be done about it. At the least we ought to clarify the situation here in meta.&#xA;So what is the situation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nearest relevant meta post here on CV I can locate is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/896/is-it-acceptable-to-post-the-same-question-on-multiple-sites?rq=1&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, but I expect that Michael will tell us that, that, too, is based on the same misinformation.&#xA;I think Michael ought to have the chance to put his case that I – and anyone else making the same error – have been doing it wrong, because if we have, we should change that. &#xA;I have invited him over, so that we don't spam the comments in CV, and here in an answer there's plenty of room to make the point, rather than the tiny space in comments. But anyone's take or some pointers to better information is great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-08-18T22:03:58.983" LastActivityDate="2017-08-18T22:03:58.983" Title="Is the help wrong when it says that cross-posting is not allowed?" Tags="|discussion|policy|cross-posting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1880" CreationDate="2013-12-17T15:50:56.297" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had debated on posting &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/28047/effective-way-to-visualize-net-growth-profit-income#comment52381_28047&quot;&gt;a similar question awhile ago&lt;/a&gt; so I have collected a few links on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is actually a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cross-posting&quot;&gt;cross-posting tag&lt;/a&gt; on Meta Stackoverflow. And the highest voted question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/64068/150339&quot;&gt;Is cross-posting a question on multiple Stack Exchange sites permitted if the question is on-topic for each site?&lt;/a&gt; This is clearly in line with favoring migration as oppossed to cross-posting in all circumstances.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/620&quot;&gt;Jeff Atwood&lt;/a&gt; saying it is abuse to copy and paste questions on different sites.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/167476/150339&quot;&gt;Is it OK to cross-post an old, unanswered question?&lt;/a&gt; This suggests that an old, unanswered question is ok to repost it as long as you link back to the original and tailor it to the new site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is easier to speak in terms of potentially irksome behavior and try to limit that specifically as opposed to the obverse. For me, things I find irksome are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not linking to the other discussions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cross posting multiple questions immediately&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first should always be done and is not in debate as far as I can tell. The second seems to have less agreement, for both how long is reasonable to wait and whether you need to wait at all. Some of the motivation for cross-posting immediately is stated to ask the question to different audiences. I am not very bemused by this answer, as it is IMO a good indication your question is either subjective or lacks information that would make one receive similar answers on different sites. In combination without linking is taking advantage of the goodwill of the community to help, as one is likely in many circumstances to receive duplicated answers across sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what suggestions to give as to how long is reasonable to wait. I would personally say multiple days if not a week or longer - others seem to have different expectations though as to how fast questions are answered (a good question for the data explorer when I get a chance).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either case I don't think the linked question by Michael Hardy is irksome. He waited a day and cross-posted. Last I knew MathOverflow wasn't a stackexchange site, so migrating isn't even an option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2013-12-17T15:50:56.297" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1880" CreationDate="2013-12-18T21:02:07.443" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;math.stackexchange.com has long been here, and mathoverflow.net, which has functioned for, I suspect, about five years, only recently got absorbed into stackexchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vast majority of questions appropriate for math.stackexchange.com are &lt;b&gt;not&lt;/b&gt; appropriate for mathoverflow.net, but perhaps any question appropriate for mathoverflow.net would also be appropriate for math.stackexchange.com.  It has long been customary that a question posted math.stackexchange.com that gets no attention there may be cross-posted to mathoverflow.net &lt;b&gt;provided&lt;/b&gt; that they're the sort of questions appropriate for the latter forum, and also provided that one states that one is cross-posting, with links in both directions.  This became customary long before mathoverflow.net recently became a part of stackexchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus it is incorrect to say that &lt;b&gt;all&lt;/b&gt; stackexchange forums consider it &lt;b&gt;always&lt;/b&gt; wrong to cross-post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5176" LastActivityDate="2013-12-18T21:02:07.443" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1867" CreationDate="2013-12-20T20:26:34.120" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not believe that duplicate answers should be removed.  If the answer is concise and answers the question the first time, it should not be summarized, and instead should be posted in total the second time as well (with credit given to original post).  I think of the familiar situation in which you look up a term in the index of the back of a book, only to find &quot;see ...&quot;, which leads you to another search term.  This would create a needless waste of time considering we have no page limit on the internet.  The problem I have with only giving a link is that you must take the time to read the other Q&amp;amp;A to make sure the situation adequately replicates your own and that it isn't just &quot;something similar&quot; to get you started.  As a person interested in finding a quick, concise answer to a particular question, having a self-contained answer on the page in which the question was asked is most convenient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36381" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2013-12-23T10:33:15.410" LastActivityDate="2013-12-23T10:33:15.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1884" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-24T17:54:30.940" Score="9" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just went to post something to Ten-fold (the main chat room); specifically a bit of chat not suited to a post to the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ten-fold has been frozen for inactivity!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I put it down to the new &quot;style&quot;, which hides the chat link away (I was going to use it several times in the past couple of weeks but didn't, for several reasons, including simply the difficulty of finding it on two occasions, and the sudden absence of anyone there for more than a couple of days on a couple more). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last actual discussion there was between Andre Silva and myself (and gung earlier, on Dec 6) in the aftermath of the changes (where I complained about them); I suppose this is in the week after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that there was two consecutive posts by Theta30 (Dec 11, since removed), and then &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That chat would be used less because of the changes was obvious to me as soon as I saw the new changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That it would simply &lt;em&gt;die&lt;/em&gt; was not immediately obvious, but that's quite clearly what killed it. Aside from some discussion about disliking the changes in the days after they happened, &lt;em&gt;no discussion has taken place in chat at all&lt;/em&gt;. Not a single conversation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now it's gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, that's a pretty disastrous consequence of the change; we've gone from at least some discussion every few days to a frozen chat room that can't be posted in at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can we do, if anything? [Individually, of course, I can post to meta.SO complaining about this outcome, but I expect that to be utterly useless; I think this is something that the mods ought to be weighing in on, collectively if possible.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we care that now Ten-fold is suddenly so unused that it has automatically been frozen? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(should I add the support tag - since 'can we unfreeze?' could be a support question. I was tempted to add 'bug', but I don't know if you can call the awful consequences of a deliberate decision a bug)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I find it difficult to express quite how bothered I am by the changes, to be honest. I've given it quite a few weeks and I don't have a single positive feeling about the changes. I think the site is substantially less pleasant now (of which this event is one symptom), to the extent that I'm pondering whether to simply withdraw my labor.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2013-12-26T21:34:49.693" LastActivityDate="2013-12-26T21:34:49.693" Title="Ten-fold has been frozen for inactivity. I put it down to the new &quot;style&quot;. What can we do, if anything?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1885" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1887" CreationDate="2013-12-25T01:11:27.240" Score="6" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't tell if someone is trying to be nice to me or if its something the site is doing, but someone upvoted all my 9-vote answers to 10. I probably wouldn't have noticed but there were a lot of my answers sitting on 9 votes -- 6 or 7 of them I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's something that was supposed to happen, well, I'm fine with that, but if someone's just upvoting a bunch of my posts to take them to 10, I believe that's not how the site is supposed to work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I like getting upvotes and badges as much as the next guy, I wanted to make sure the moderators know that this has happened to make sure it's not contravening the rules. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is it legitimate? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2013-12-26T15:09:39.117" Title="I seem to have been given a 'Christmas present' on all my 9-vote answers ; is this legitimate?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1886" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-25T14:04:37.877" Score="6" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.blogoverflow.com/2012/02/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://stats.blogoverflow.com/2012/02/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something is wrong with your layout there:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eTmn9.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1205" LastActivityDate="2013-12-25T14:04:37.877" Title="Blog design is off for monthly view" Tags="|bug|design|blog|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1885" CreationDate="2013-12-26T15:09:39.117" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If all the votes came from the same person within a given time period, our fraud detector will have picked it up and reversed the votes. We can all just carry on with our days - the system is doing its job!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6123" LastActivityDate="2013-12-26T15:09:39.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1888" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1906" CreationDate="2013-12-29T09:12:25.133" Score="5" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I had flagged some posts for which the flag was initially declined but just little later the concerned questions were closed or migrated for exactly the reason I had flagged them for. Examples are,&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/80715/open-source-java-c-statistics-functions&quot;&gt;Open source Java/C statistics functions [on hold]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/80416/normality-and-heteroscedasticity-problems-in-panel-data&quot;&gt;Normality and heteroscedasticity problems in panel data [on hold]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20588321/pseudo-r-squared-for-cumulative-link-function&quot;&gt;Pseudo R squared for cumulative link function&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not sure if I just got unlucky, if I am flagging too much (though on the other hand the vast majority of my flags is usually accepted) or if this was a system related thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26338" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2014-01-11T15:44:17.640" Title="Mistakenly declined flags" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1889" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1890" CreationDate="2014-01-04T02:23:49.907" Score="11" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;The newly created tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/chi-square&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;chi-square&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;chi-square&lt;/a&gt; seems to be a synonym of tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/chi-squared&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;chi-squared&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;chi-squared&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21599" LastActivityDate="2014-01-04T09:28:06.520" Title="Suggestion to make tag &quot;chi-square&quot; a synonym of tag &quot;chi-squared&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1889" CreationDate="2014-01-04T09:28:06.520" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;These two tags have been merged. Master tag is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/chi-squared&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;chi-squared&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;chi-squared&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/chi-square&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;chi-square&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;chi-square&lt;/a&gt; is now a synonym. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2014-01-04T09:28:06.520" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1298" CreationDate="2014-01-04T23:10:32.093" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's now an SE site in beta called &lt;a href=&quot;https://opendata.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Open Data&lt;/a&gt; for such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1191" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:57:29.717" LastActivityDate="2014-01-04T23:10:32.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1892" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-04T23:42:26.820" Score="14" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Help/Tour&lt;/a&gt; page says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cross Validated is a question and answer site for statisticians,&#xA;  machine teachers, data analysts, data miners and data visualization&#xA;  experts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Aside: Should &quot;machine teachers&quot; be there? -- it's not in the other versions of the tag line.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about data visualization &lt;em&gt;novices&lt;/em&gt;? Do such users and their questions belong on CV or some existing SE site? If not, should CV invite them or should a new SE site be created for them? Looks like there is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/11508/infographics-and-data-visualization&quot;&gt;deleted Infographics and Data Visualization proposal&lt;/a&gt; in Area 51 in case anyone has enough rep to see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On one hand, I like data visualization living in CV because many data visualization issues are tightly coupled to data analysis. For instance, choosing the right summarization level and making valid comparisons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there are other aspects not tied to analysis, such as choosing a color scheme, understanding efficient layout, software tools, and visual perception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because I noticed this new site, &lt;a href=&quot;http://helpmeviz.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Help Me Viz&lt;/a&gt;, is trying to use the WordPress engine for something similar to SE in this area. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1191" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2014-01-07T19:07:43.280" Title="What about data visualization novices?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1718" CreationDate="2014-01-06T07:05:59.700" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I for one think something (accurate) is better than nothing, so it should make a difference whether something's there yet. However, a counterargument: people might feel less welcome to change something short that's already there, even if it's incomplete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The accuracy of the information should matter more than the source (all quotation and attribution being proper and equal, that is). I think I understand the desire to avoid copying existing info without improving it, but improvement isn't always possible, and degradation shouldn't be preferable to copying in such cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/372/32036&quot;&gt;What to include&lt;/a&gt; seems to me like the broader, more important question; if Wikipedia or Wolfram or 4chan can provide all the desired information in a succinct, thorough, accurate manner, why should anyone care where the info came from (so long as it's cited properly)? Conversely, where the info came from should not affect how the edit's quality is judged when it's lacking either. As others have implied, Wikipedia is only as reliable as us &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedians&lt;/a&gt;, and our reliability varies quite widely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2014-01-06T07:05:59.700" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1718" CreationDate="2014-01-07T03:11:44.093" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Q&amp;amp;A sites like Cross-Validated  are not aggregators of information available over the web. They exist because general sources like Wikipedia do not suffice, and they are supposed to offer expertise focused on their field. Obviously what we write in this forum is not parthenogenesis, but neither is just aggregation : it is a purposeful &lt;em&gt;synthesis&lt;/em&gt; of sources (our own brains included), guided by the question at hand. In this case the &quot;question&quot; is the name of the tag, and we should approach the content of the tag wikis and excerpts in the same spirit as when answering a question -and even more so, since tag content requires an even more distilled and concrete knowledge of the subject. In the answers we do mention and point to external references - but how often do we copy/paste passages from them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28746" LastActivityDate="2014-01-07T03:11:44.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1895" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-01-07T04:08:03.967" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Editing is a core, fundamental part of the Stack Exchange network. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag usage&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any user can edit a post, although users with less than 2k reputation will require peer review before their edit goes live. If the question is about suggested-edits, consider using the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/suggested-edits&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'suggested-edits'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;suggested-edits&lt;/a&gt; tag as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/edits/info&quot;&gt;wiki&lt;/a&gt; for the &lt;code&gt;[edits]&lt;/code&gt; tag on the Meta Stack Exchange site also has useful information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32036" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2014-12-15T15:28:47.753" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T15:28:47.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1896" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-01-07T04:08:03.967" Score="0" Body="For questions about the process of editing, how edits work, and other general inquiries about the edit system, used in editing questions, answers, tag wikis..." OwnerUserId="32036" LastEditorUserId="32036" LastEditDate="2014-01-07T13:32:23.367" LastActivityDate="2014-01-07T13:32:23.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1897" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-01-07T14:05:50.583" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Migration is the operation that occurs when a question is deemed more appropriate for one of the other sites in the Stack Exchange network and five users (or one moderator) vote to close the question as &quot;off-topic because ...&quot; and then select &quot;This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network.&quot; The question (and all of its answers and comments) are copied to the new site and the original question is closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32036" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2014-01-07T16:06:15.450" LastActivityDate="2014-01-07T16:06:15.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1898" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-01-07T14:05:50.583" Score="0" Body="&quot;Migration&quot; is the process of moving threads from one Stack Exchange site to another. " OwnerUserId="32036" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2014-01-07T16:06:42.453" LastActivityDate="2014-01-07T16:06:42.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1892" CreationDate="2014-01-07T17:03:51.320" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm running this by the Community Team just in case there are any objections I can't come up with, but overall, this seems reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize, this community is in favor of changing its description to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cross Validated is a question and answer site for people interested in statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining and data visualization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will be on /tour, the twitter account, and anywhere else the description is displayed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6123" LastActivityDate="2014-01-07T17:03:51.320" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1900" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-08T21:54:43.147" Score="23" ViewCount="628" Body="&lt;p&gt;Users have pointed out that it is very difficult for beginners to comment on questions, see this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1533/shouldnt-commenting-require-less-reputation-than-answering&quot;&gt;thread&lt;/a&gt;. These users particularly seem to emphasize that it appears Cross Validated has separate policies regarding comment permissions compared to other stackexchange sites, even though this is actually not the case. The problem actually appears to be that it is much more difficult to get reputation on Cross Validated than it is on other stack exchange sites, because people don't vote as much, as can be documented in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1365/cross-validated-voting-improvement-and-community-development&quot;&gt;thread&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is extremely frustrating for a generally trusted stackexchange user to not be able to comment on the answers to questions or even be able to ask for clarification on other people's questions. Could this be addressed by giving reputation a bit more generously or perhaps doing something else. Maybe saying something on the sidebar like, &quot;please up-vote all well researched on topic posts even if you don't feel qualified to do so (it is especially important that you up-vote reasonably worthy newcomers, as their participation is greatly inhibited without up-votes)&quot;. The point is, we are all able to tell whether a question is well researched, a duplicate, or reasonably on topic. Down-voting is a bit different you should be qualified in the subject at hand, but our users should feel comfortable up-voting anything they think is appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We really need to do something about the lack of up-voting in our community. This &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/317/36444&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to a previous thread really strikingly uses stats to show just how much of problem voting is.&#xA;Looking at the first 50 posts on the main-page right now, I see 14 net up-votes given with shockingly 1 up-vote being the max given for a single post!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other things we could post on the sidebar is (note there may be some disagreement on this suggestion) &quot;You should up-vote every question you answer&quot;. The reason for this is that you should not be answering bad questions anyways because (1) it prevents the user from deleting the question and hence decluttering the site (note that bad question clutter makes it difficult for users to tell if their question is a duplicate), (2) It can easily be stated in a comment, (3) It encourages users to ask more bad questions (the main reason question askers come here is to get answers not rep).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36444" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2014-01-09T13:22:04.707" Title="CrossValidated's rather extreme up-voting problem" Tags="|discussion|comment|reputation|policy|votes|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1900" CreationDate="2014-01-08T22:56:40.730" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think a decent compromise to the SE upvote famine is the following: edit confidently and often, downvote uneditable posts or remove them early and often. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On editing: The poster is responsible to ensure both that their post is of top quality and that the substantive question remains correct. Very few new posters put the requisite time into asking a high quality question. If quality editing compromises the latter, then the poster needs to correct the editor. I've often imputed large amounts of context, inventing variables and study settings, to make a question readable and contextually appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On downvoting/removing: we are at odds with making a community usable for beginners and keeping our quality up. Cluttered low quality posts are a huge issue here. As far as statistics are concerned, I'm curious whether we take overly dramatic (or not dramatic enough) action to remove irrelevant posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastActivityDate="2014-01-08T22:56:40.730" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1900" CreationDate="2014-01-09T03:42:44.720" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some personal thoughts/methods about this important issue: voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1- Voting on answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1492/improvement-drive-cross-validated/1494#1494&quot;&gt;thread&lt;/a&gt;, Peter Flom gives an answer about the low answer ratio that was found/audited in CV (at that time):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;...I think that is partially a function of the nature of statistics and the questions we get...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many users agreed with him and I believe this reasoning of thinking also applies (up to a certain level) to voting. Statistics is not that trivial to most of us mortals. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are times which I read an well formatted answer but can't vote for it because I lack background to understand its content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I partially understand an answer, but there are comments of trusted users saying it is a good reply I am also inclined to vote for it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as possible I try to contribute by voting for correct and &lt;strong&gt;trivial&lt;/strong&gt; answers under the following situations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is the first answer in a thread and it does have none or few upvotes;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It adds something different from other existing answers and it does have none or few upvotes;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Important to say is that generosity has a limit. Correct information always need to be preserved so we can keep the site's credibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2- Voting on questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now about questions I do a lot of voting. Like to think that if I am spending my time to read a question my &quot;null hypothesis&quot; is initially to vote for it, unless it does not follow the site's guidelines (poor formatting, duplicate, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite we already have here a mixture of friendly environment with good professionalism level, I agree we can improve on encouraging more users to actively participate here (voting, answering, asking, editing, chatting, flagging, etc). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope you keep helping us on this task from now on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2014-01-09T03:42:44.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1900" CreationDate="2014-01-09T13:22:04.707" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;CV's a democracy of a kind, so many standard political points arise. The first lessons in politics include learning that many other people are very confident in telling you should be voting this way or you shouldn't be voting that way. Excuse me: they're my votes, or not. Within the rules, I vote as I like. (I don't impute or infer attempts to offend, naturally.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some of my views: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I won't vote for anything I have not the time to read. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I won't vote for anything I don't think serves the long-term interests of the forum. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I won't even necessarily vote for anything I think is worth answering or commenting on. Sometimes, indeed often, the question is lousy, but it is worth trying to produce a good answer for the sake of the forum. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When people want to focus on how or whether reputation can be enhanced, their emphasis is in the wrong place.   &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CV is a success, mostly, but I think the central problem remains one that is more or less inevitable and has been pointed out many times. Many questions are really rather poor. They suffer from one or more of &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;. The poster's weak understanding of statistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;b&lt;/strong&gt;. Excessive focus on immediate details (e.g. a particular data set or a particular research question) which reduces the general or long-term value of the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;. The poster's lack of effort in learning or reading. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt;. The poster's failure to understand how CV works best. This can even apply to people who have been on the list for some years, yet ask the same vague, cryptic or over-general questions, or the same kinds of questions, again and again. &#xA;Some of these people are seemingly indifferent to the evidence that they are way out of line (as shown by voting, answers, comments). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of these, &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; is often the main reason the question is being asked and &lt;strong&gt;b&lt;/strong&gt; is the way it arises. So, these weaknesses are understandable but they don't often lead me to feel that an upvote is deserved. &lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt; is even more of a reason for not upvoting. Conversely, &lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt; is a reason for downvoting! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the whole, the tone of CV is frank yet civil and positive, and that's a good thing. But there is a certain timidity about very firmly discouraging outlier posters and/or removing very weak questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many strong technical questions too, naturally. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastActivityDate="2014-01-09T13:22:04.707" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1904" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-09T15:29:22.687" Score="10" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just (attempted to) reject an edit to include the &quot;self-study&quot; tag in a question, because the editor was &quot;pretty certain that this is a self-study/homework question&quot;. &quot;Self-study&quot; is I think the only tag that refers to how the question relates to the OP, and not to the content of the question, and I don't think it is appropriate to add it to a question through an edit - we should ask the OP instead.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am posting this because while I was writing the reason for rejecting the edit, somebody else accepted it. So I figured, there are diverging views on the matter, and hence room for discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question is: &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Should we add the &quot;self-study&quot; tag through an edit, or should we always ask the OP to do so?&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Response to Andy W comments and the &quot;duplicate&quot; issue&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As is usually the case, Whuber's answers are exemplary, but he too writes &quot;&lt;em&gt;In my experience, around half of the questions the community initially believes to be homework turn out, in fact, not to be so&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Since the way we approach a &quot;self-study&quot; question has differences with any other&lt;/strong&gt;, I believe that a 50% chance of being wrong is enough to validate a policy of &quot;always ask first&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28746" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-10-11T16:18:23.767" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T16:18:23.767" Title="Is it okay to add the [self-study] tag through an edit instead of asking OP to do it?" Tags="|discussion|tags|editing|homework|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1905" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-10T19:20:52.303" Score="2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;Last week I &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/81132/ratio-of-probabilities-vs-ratio-of-pdfs&quot;&gt;started a question&lt;/a&gt; which got not answers so I set up a bounty. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;Help center&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you do not award your bounty within 7 days (plus the grace period),&#xA;  the highest voted answer created after the bounty started with a&#xA;  minimum score of 2 will be awarded half the bounty amount. If there's&#xA;  no answer meeting those criteria, the bounty is not awarded to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &lt;code&gt;the bounty is not awarded to anyone&lt;/code&gt; mean? Do the points come back to me or are they lost?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok I just stumbled upon this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1124/unclaimed-bounty-points-where-did-they-go&quot;&gt;Unclaimed bounty points: where did they go?&lt;/a&gt; (which makes mine a duplicate) and apparently I loose the points. How is this fair?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10416" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2016-10-15T13:24:08.533" Title="What happens to the bounty if there's no answer?" Tags="|support|bounty|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2014-01-10T19:35:18.840" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1888" CreationDate="2014-01-11T15:44:17.640" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I am moving my &lt;strong&gt;guess&lt;/strong&gt; comment as an answer, as it seems other users shared the same opinion.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess it can happen (happened with me a few times). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the first two reviewers or one moderator did not agree with you and declined the raised flag.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But after that, let's suppose another user flagged the same question for the same reason as you did.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see two possible paths: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Other peer reviewers can have approved the flag (because they understood differently from previous reviewers).  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The reviewers who declined your flag in first place, could have changed their minds due to having more people thinking as you did.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addition&lt;/strong&gt; to above comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once in a while, discussions come up on grey areas about closing and migrating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One alternative to surpass this situation consists of leaving comments to the OP asking for clarification or providing guidance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This strategy requires some time to revisit the comments after some time and if no reply is given by the OP, then the question can be flagged more safely. Some cases it is better to flag the question right away (it depends on individual judgement).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hint&lt;/strong&gt; - to increase effectiveness of leaving comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably, many users already know about this, but I recently (motivated by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1904/self-study-tag-added-through-an-edit&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; thread) discovered the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/2116/autoreviewcomments-pro-forma-comments-for-se&quot;&gt;AutoReviewComments&lt;/a&gt;* script for customizing standard warnings on SE.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was designed specially to deal with newcomers who naturally know very little about the site's functioning rules.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*developed by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/users/876/benjol&quot;&gt;Benjol&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I am not using it yet, but looks promising.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:45.643" LastActivityDate="2014-01-11T15:44:17.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1908" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-14T03:47:10.910" Score="5" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I normally get to meta.stats.SE by either typing &quot;meta.&quot; in the address bar or by clicking a link to meta in the sidebar - which might link to say &lt;code&gt;http://meta.stats.stackexchange.com/?cb=1&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But today I picked the link in the 'help' drop down in the menu bar on CV, which goes to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;https://meta.stats.stackexchange.com/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and got this (in Firefox):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This Connection is Untrusted&#xA;&#xA;You have asked Firefox to connect securely to meta.stats.stackexchange.com, but we &#xA;can't confirm that your connection is secure.&#xA;Normally, when you try to connect securely, sites will present trusted identification &#xA;to prove that you are going to the right place. However, this site's identity can't be &#xA;verified.&#xA;&#xA;What Should I Do?&#xA;If you usually connect to this site without problems, this error could mean that &#xA;someone is trying to impersonate the site, and you shouldn't continue.&#xA;meta.stats.stackexchange.com uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is &#xA;only valid for the following names: &#xA;  *.stackexchange.com , stackexchange.com , meta.stackexchange.com , &#xA;  *.meta.stackexchange.com , *.stackoverflow.com , stackoverflow.com , serverfault.com , &#xA;  stackauth.com , sstatic.net , meta.serverfault.com , superuser.com , &#xA;  meta.superuser.com , stackapps.com , openid.stackauth.com &#xA;(Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a problem my end or did somehow the site omit including this meta in its certificate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I've just noticed different behaviour on CV itself - MathJax is still rendering fine when using &lt;code&gt;http:&lt;/code&gt; to access CV but isn't working when I click any links that use &lt;code&gt;https:&lt;/code&gt;; I wonder if that's related&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thought I've just had is this might perhaps be being impacted in some way by me running noscript in Firefox, but I've been running it for ages and never had this before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second Edit: This is weird. Now when I click the link in the 'help' menu in the bar at the top, it simply shows as &lt;code&gt;meta.stats.stackexchange.com&lt;/code&gt; again and so works fine. If I type 'https:' in (as the link was going to before), it still gives the warning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the main issue (clicking the link in the pull down 'help' menu generates the certificate warning) is no longer there, if it doesn't generate a response I may just delete this question soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I included the tag &lt;code&gt;bug&lt;/code&gt; since it seems to cover any unexpected site behavior, even though this may well be just my own issue.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="37296" LastEditDate="2014-01-14T08:16:50.443" LastActivityDate="2014-01-14T08:16:50.443" Title="Just got an invalid security certificate for meta.stats.SE ... what's up?" Tags="|discussion|bug|status-declined|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1909" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1911" CreationDate="2014-01-14T11:35:27.180" Score="8" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;I provided an answer to this deleted question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/80048/calculating-power-function-for-anova&quot;&gt;Calculating power function for ANOVA&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;I was looking for my answer and that's how I've discovered the question has been deleted. Is there a way to retrieve my answer ? It took me a non-short time to write it, and I'm sad cause I need it now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8402" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2014-01-14T14:49:23.370" Title="Retrieving the answer of a deleted question" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1909" CreationDate="2014-01-14T14:49:23.370" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure there is an easy way to do this for users with less than 10K reputation. (I'll try to look into this some more.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the meantime, I do not see why the question was deleted in the first place, so I have undeleted it. You should also now be able to access your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2970" LastActivityDate="2014-01-14T14:49:23.370" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1913" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-01-15T12:45:35.703" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suggested reading&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10582/what-is-a-closed-question-in-stackoverflow-how-do-they-work&quot;&gt;What is a &amp;quot;closed&amp;quot; or “on hold” question?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/32490/closing-migrating-question-instructions-guidance&quot;&gt;Closing/Migrating question instructions/guidance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2014-04-23T13:43:48.573" LastActivityDate="2014-01-15T13:37:02.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1914" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-01-15T12:45:35.703" Score="0" Body="This tag is for instructions and guidance on closing or migrating questions, and the reasons for those closures." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-01-15T13:37:06.000" LastActivityDate="2014-01-15T13:37:06.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1740" CreationDate="2014-01-15T20:34:02.107" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some time has passed and it was possible to observe how the above cited tags evolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a more carefully reading I came up with this proposal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The CV tag &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/questions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;questions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; (x8, +2) seems to label threads similarly to the main Stack Exchange site. Here it is their tag excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions regarding the nature of a &quot;question&quot; on StackExchange sites; e.g. how to ask, whether specific questions are appropriate, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could also import/adapt the current detailed &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/tags/questions/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt; from it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Both tags &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/asking-questions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;asking-questions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;asking-questions&lt;/a&gt; (x2, +0) and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/specific-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specific-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specific-question&lt;/a&gt; (x2, +0) did not evolve and at least 3 of them would be just ok tagged as &quot;questions&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/essential-questions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;essential-questions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;essential-questions&lt;/a&gt; (x6, +0) tag labels threads discussing about Cross Validated launching features such as: logo, promotion, moderators, faq, etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They have in common to be originated during the private-beta (pre-launching) phase. Here I propose a complement to give emphasis on that (either on tag name or tag excerpt).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal Summary&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;questions&quot; - import tag excerpt from the main SE Meta site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;asking-questions&quot; and &quot;specific-question&quot; - make synonyms of &quot;questions&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;essential-questions&quot; - create excerpt with something similar to: &#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;questions involving Cross Validated SE preparation for the public phase    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T09:34:21.123" LastActivityDate="2014-01-15T21:15:02.523" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1918" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-17T06:06:04.740" Score="5" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there an iPhone app for cross validated? This would be pretty awesome, but I think there's no such thing...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30192" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Is there an iPhone app for cross validated?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1918" CreationDate="2014-01-17T14:42:59.507" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aside from the excellent user-created apps cardinal linked to, the Stack Exchange team is currently developing mobile apps for the whole network on Android and iOS. The Android app &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/190200/help-us-test-the-alpha-version-of-our-android-app&quot;&gt;is in alpha&lt;/a&gt;, and beta is near on the horizon. The iOS app is a few steps behind, but it is nearing its alpha testing period. There will be an announcement on MSO when the iOS app is ready for people to sign up to alpha test. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6123" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2014-01-17T14:42:59.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1921" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-01-18T14:06:33.137" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2014-01-18T14:06:33.137" LastActivityDate="2014-01-18T14:06:33.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1922" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-01-18T14:06:33.137" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding the nature of a &quot;question&quot; on Cross Validated; e.g. how to ask, whether specific questions are appropriate, etc." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-01-19T03:22:05.870" LastActivityDate="2014-01-19T03:22:05.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1923" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-01-19T15:07:40.933" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2014-01-19T15:07:40.933" LastActivityDate="2014-01-19T15:07:40.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1924" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-01-19T15:07:40.933" Score="0" Body="Group of questions involving Cross Validated SE preparation for the public phase. This tag is now defunct; please do not use it." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-01-19T17:51:14.870" LastActivityDate="2014-01-19T17:51:14.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1925" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1928" CreationDate="2014-01-19T17:21:50.200" Score="8" ViewCount="330" Body="&lt;p&gt;Previously I posted a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1900/crossvalidateds-rather-extreme-up-voting-problem&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; in this meta stack exchange about lack of up votes of questions, especially questions that have answers. Based on the answers in that post, it seems like multiple people on the meta site have the general philosophy that if the question was clear enough to answer, and showed a minimal amount of research effort, it is clear enough to up-vote. The philosophy has come up in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1426/if-a-question-is-good-enough-for-you-to-answer-should-you-up-vote-it&quot;&gt;other posts&lt;/a&gt; as well. So my question is, would it be inappropriate to let others on this exchange (who don't use the meta) know about this unspoken norm to encourage up-voting. Basically would it be inappropriate to post below an answer in a comment &quot;Please consider up-voting all questions you answer. If the question is good enough to answer, it's likely good enough to up-vote. If you don't think an up-vote is appropriate you might want to consider asking a question in a comment, as opposed to providing an answer to an unclear, or obviously un-researched question.&quot; I suspect many users would find this comment offensive. Is this a really bad idea? I can definitely see downsides, like potentially it discourages answers. We already have a problem of posting answers in comments anyways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36444" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2014-01-22T19:48:18.820" Title="Is it inappropriate to post a comment under an answer, like &quot;Please consider up voting all questions you answer&quot;" Tags="|discussion|votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1925" CreationDate="2014-01-19T21:56:53.233" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is inappropriate to leave comments advising for voting (so +1 if I want to answer your title question). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Meta we discuss and exchange ideas about many subjects in an attempt to promote and create guidelines that can help the site to develop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People can have different interpretations, for example, about what a good question/answer is. Comments (repeatedly) pro-voting would probably annoy users and cause disagreements.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is better when people come here spontaneously to take a second opinion and make comparisons with what they already think.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I rarely see comments which asks/advises voting. What I sporadically see are comments asking for the OP to accept an answer when he/she clearly speaks through comments that a specific answer solved his/her problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See this thread for more info: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1741/is-it-wrong-to-ask-a-user-to-accept-an-answer&quot;&gt;Is it wrong to ask a user to accept an answer?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2014-01-19T21:56:53.233" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1927" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-20T08:16:33.607" Score="8" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21213726/betting-algorithm&quot;&gt;a question on StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt; that I thought might be more of a statistics question, so I thought I would head over to stats.SE to check out the FAQ to see what's on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no obvious link to a FAQ, but there is a link to a &quot;tour&quot;, and that has &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;a link to the FAQ&lt;/a&gt;. Unfortunately, the FAQ page just redirects you to the tour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I would hope that the FAQ (or criteria for &quot;on-topic&quot; questions) would be readily available from the help page of the site, at the very least the link for it on the tour should be fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37539" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2015-05-26T14:20:28.043" Title="Where is the FAQ?" Tags="|support|hyperlinks|help-center|tour|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1925" CreationDate="2014-01-22T06:36:24.893" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for explaining the background and motivation; I think that helps with a picture of why you are asking as you do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know myself it can sometimes be frustrating at first, especially for motivated contributors, who may often be - very reasonably - wanting to participate in ways the software doesn't allow them to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On your question, I'd think it reasonable only to a fairly limited extent: in particular, for users that answer many questions, and who show a pattern of not upvoting quite a few questions they answer (which, if you were able to look at my votes on my last ten answers, sure looks to be the case - I have not upvoted at least three of them), I think it may be okay to encourage them to consider it, once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difficulty, of course, is that you won't be able to see their votes, I think, only how many times they have voted, and how many net votes an answered question has received (with 1000 reputation you can see the split into up and down votes, though if you're clever you may be able to figure it out before then, with a bit of effort); so sometimes you'll be guessing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'd be the ideal candidate for such a reminder, by the look of it, though in fact last year I was one of the top handful of voters on the site (I don't know exactly where that would be because I wasn't really paying close attention, maybe in the top 5, but it was between 3000 and 3200 upvotes over 2012, and I believe more than 60 percent of those up votes were on questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, at one point last year, the site itself said something along the lines of &quot;You have been upvoting a lot of answers just lately, but it's a while since you upvoted many questions, consider upvoting more questions&quot;... which I have worked on since (and that's why my rate on questions is now over 60% of total upvotes). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for some users at least, the site itself may remind them to upvote questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be good if the site encouraged the relatively new users to simply vote more (in what ways they're able, as they're able); many don't seem to remember to do it at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2014-01-22T19:48:18.820" LastActivityDate="2014-01-22T19:48:18.820" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1929" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1930" CreationDate="2014-01-23T22:30:05.287" Score="9" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently there were some discussions on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/1231/potential-technical-obstacle-to-migrations-and-suggestion-for-a-solution&quot;&gt;MathOverflow&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12307/mo-mse-tag-incompatibility&quot;&gt;Mathematics&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/210532/drop-or-change-automatic-migration-rejection-based-on-non-existing-tags&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; related to an automatic check on tags that is performed when a question is migrated: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is  checked if at least one of the tags on the questions exist on the target site (possibly only as tag-synonym or intrinsic tag), if not the migration is automatically rejected. This can cause some unwarranted rejections, since one needs an exact match and already an extremely minor variation such as singular/plural can cause a rejection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially related to MO there is the issue that on MO the main tag for statistics is named st.statistics, and not just statistics; due to MO using the math categories of arXiv as top-level tags, which are marked by a prefix.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, on this site (unsurprisingly) no tag st.statistics exists and while (I strongly assume) statistics would be an intrinsic tag here and a question thus tagged accepted, this is not the case for st.statistics and questions got rejected due to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I raise this here, while not being active here but only on MO, is that if this should be resolved in a somewhat direct way it essentially can only be fixed here. I do realize that an initial reaction might be, why not just  rename st.statistics to statistics on MO, but this would change the entire tagging system there, and synonyms on the source site do not help, very unfortunately IMO, to change this was the content of my meta.SO post mentioned above. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two ideas I could offer to resolve this in a somewhat quick way (if this site even wants to receive questions from MO tagged only st.statistics):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ask for st.statistics to become an intrinsic tag.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make st.statistics a synonym of something fitting here, e.g., mathematical-statistics, on the grounds that if it comes from MO it should be mathematical-statistics (though in reality this might not always be true yet  it might be better to have some resolvable mistags than rejections through-out).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry for bursting into your meta with some suggestion/request, but I thought the issue might be of interest here. &#xA;One could also envision to work on more compatibility of the tagging systems, but the migration traffic is not that high so maybe it is not worth the effort to work on details. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course there could also be issues in the converse direction, this site to MO, where the problem then is easier to fix on MO (as then  synonyms there could suffice). If there should be such problems and you let me know, I could communicate and try to resolve them there. (I have no official role on that site, but can say to be pretty involved with tagging there.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37747" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2014-02-03T10:44:16.153" Title="Tag-related problems with migrations from MathOverflow" Tags="|discussion|support|tags|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1929" CreationDate="2014-01-24T16:06:57.970" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have made &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/st.statistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;st.statistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;st.statistics&lt;/a&gt; a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-statistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-statistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-statistics&lt;/a&gt; (which is not an intrinsic tag) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pr.probability&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pr.probability&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pr.probability&lt;/a&gt; a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/probability&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;probability&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;probability&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please keep an eye on attempted migrations from MO and let us know whether there are any more problems with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2014-01-24T16:06:57.970" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1931" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1932" CreationDate="2014-01-25T13:32:04.867" Score="10" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just saw a proposed tag for &quot;Facebook&quot; based on (I believe) one question; further, I voted to close that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we need a tag for &quot;Facebook&quot;? Does having extra tags in the system do any harm?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2014-01-27T13:25:10.623" Title="Do we need a tag for &quot;Facebook&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1931" CreationDate="2014-01-25T17:27:42.223" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it was created after I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/83136/37729&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, since I didn't see it when I posted my question and someone added it later. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/facebook/info&quot;&gt;&quot;facebook&quot;&lt;/a&gt; tag is probably overlapped with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/social-network/info&quot;&gt;&quot;social-network&quot;&lt;/a&gt; tag, at least for statistical purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37729" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2014-01-25T17:27:42.223" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1931" CreationDate="2014-01-26T17:47:26.023" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that for the time being there is no reason to add a &lt;code&gt;facebook&lt;/code&gt; specific tag given that the &lt;code&gt;social-network&lt;/code&gt; exist. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If questions about social network statistics start gaining momentum we can start differentiating then. As it stands, having a single question using a tag is pointless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11852" LastEditorUserId="11852" LastEditDate="2014-01-26T23:28:43.323" LastActivityDate="2014-01-26T23:28:43.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1934" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-27T13:11:24.137" Score="6" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are half of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tag-synonyms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tag-synonyms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tag-synonyms&lt;/a&gt; questions duplicative of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1200/32036&quot;&gt;Current tag synonym candidates&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Some debate on the utility of this thread occurred in its comments. Let this question serve as a home for a revival (and hopefully an actionable resolution) of that debate. To fuel it, consider the following...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, there is a known issue with synonyms themselves that's worth acknowledging: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135466/how-can-you-find-questions-with-ses-search-features-that-have-now-defunct-tags&quot;&gt;questions with old tags don't appear in searches for their preferred synonym&lt;/a&gt;, if I understand the issue correctly, and assuming it still hasn't been fixed. See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/762/32036&quot;&gt;Tagging bug?....&lt;/a&gt; [&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; @gung's answer indicates this has been fixed, though these questions haven't been updated to reflect that yet...please comment here or edit if this changes.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for meta-questions that propose synonyms, only one solo proposal has been closed as duplicative, and recently: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1870/32036&quot;&gt;synonym request - gam and general additive model&lt;/a&gt;. This prevents answers, but not comments/votes. The question appears in searches, but points to the &lt;em&gt;meta-thread&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1200/32036&quot;&gt;Current tag synonym candidates&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Should we continue flagging new single-idea meta-questions as duplicates of this meta-thread? What about old questions like this?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That meta-thread is itself somewhat duplicative of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1044/32036&quot;&gt;Cleaning up tags: merging&lt;/a&gt;. The original only attracted a counterpoint, but wasn't closed. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1200/32036&quot;&gt;Current tag synonym candidates&lt;/a&gt; has seen more use. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/120/32036&quot;&gt;Tag rename suggestions&lt;/a&gt; was the true de facto original, but didn't actually ask for synonyms. &lt;strong&gt;Could/should all these questions be merged? If so, should &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1200/32036&quot;&gt;Current tag synonym candidates&lt;/a&gt; be preferred?&lt;/strong&gt; Also, maybe @AndyW's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1045/32036&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; could be moved here, since it is critical of this idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the meta-thread, @gung suggested deleting answers that have been resolved; I have done so, but in retrospect, I think it's a debatable practice. Deleted answers can't receive votes or comments from people who might disagree later. If we want to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1200/32036&quot;&gt;Current tag synonym candidates&lt;/a&gt; as a meta-thread for synonym suggestions, &lt;strong&gt;do we want to delete these suggestions after they're implemented, or leave them open for future voting and commenting&lt;/strong&gt; in case late voters prefer to undo the synonym?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tag-synonyms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tag-synonyms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tag-synonyms&lt;/a&gt; has been used 22 times here. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1369/32036&quot;&gt;Three of&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1659/32036&quot;&gt;the examples&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/36/32036&quot;&gt;below didn't&lt;/a&gt; use it; the other 11 did. Uses not mentioned below are mostly for more complex questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Examples that I'd say discourage treatment of these questions as duplicates in general:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/50088/246931&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meta SO's resolution of their own equivalent issue&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/suggest-tag-synonyms&quot;&gt;this privilege&lt;/a&gt; obsolesces the meta-Q...?&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tag-synonyms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tag-synonyms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tag-synonyms&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tag-synonyms&quot;&gt;has been used 755 times over there&lt;/a&gt;. Clearly we're no MSO; should we follow?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Big discussion of many related tags here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1369/32036&quot;&gt;Redundant tags: mixed effects and related models&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nuanced answers + comments: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1659/32036&quot;&gt;What is the difference between tags &amp;quot;validity&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;validation&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Examples I'd argue could be considered duplicative:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Could've answered a meta-thread: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1198/32036&quot;&gt;Should the data-visualization and figure tags be merged?&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Same, just an answer and some votes and comments: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1476/32036&quot;&gt;Tag merge: average and averages&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Same as above, plus an argument against following MSO: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1344/32036&quot;&gt;Synonyms for the &amp;quot;Test&amp;quot; tags&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1690/32036&quot;&gt;Suggestion to make tag “kolmogorov-smirnov” a synonym of tag “kolmogorov-smirnov-test”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An early instance, but again, answers $\approx$ comments: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/36/32036&quot;&gt;Modeling vs. Modelling tag&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Resolved, but not implemented yet: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1817/32036&quot;&gt;Do we need both &amp;quot;power&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;power analysis&amp;quot; tags?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many comments; resolved? &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/890/32036&quot;&gt;Should mixed-model and multilevel-analysis be tag synonyms?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Two suggestions, 1st implemented, 2nd still needs feedback: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/724/32036&quot;&gt;Merging tags, should we do it? How to do it significance-test/statistical-significance Mathematical-statistics/mathematic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Open &amp;amp; shut case: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1716/32036&quot;&gt;Suggestion to make &amp;quot;sources&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;resources&amp;quot; synonyms of &amp;quot;references&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The list of such cases goes on...&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1683/32036&quot;&gt;Suggestion to make tag &amp;quot;p&amp;quot; a synonym of tag &amp;quot;p-value&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and on...&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1889/32036&quot;&gt;Suggestion to make tag &amp;quot;chi-square&amp;quot; a synonym of tag &amp;quot;chi-squared&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and on...&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1858/32036&quot;&gt;Can we make icc a synonym of intraclass-correlation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and ends with: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/994/32036&quot;&gt;Tag synonym suggestion: multiple-comparisons &amp;lt;-&amp;gt; multiple-hypothesis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Declined: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/881/32036&quot;&gt;Tag synonym: auc -&amp;gt; roc?&lt;/a&gt;. Were upvotes in favor or just expressing interest?&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Same + embedded note of a bigger problem: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1589/32036&quot;&gt;CART as junior synonym to Decision Tree&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This issue might be somewhat trivial, but I could imagine some consequences. Asking questions separately for each suggestion might encourage more individualized consideration and more discussion for each, whereas posting them all to one meta-thread might encourage more uniform handling of all suggestions and somewhat less debate on each. One meta-thread might bring more attention to all proposals, whereas some may be forgotten if posted separately, as seems to be true of three of the above cases that haven't been implemented. On the meta-thread, some of gung's answers have also adopted a useful convention that could be edited into the question itself: to vote on answers as favorable or unfavorable proposals, rather than the tooltip-denoted meaning of votes on a question, &quot;This question shows research effort; it is useful and clear.&quot; Some ambiguity exists in the last two examples I've listed above because the meaning of the upvotes they received may be interpreted in either of these ways. See a related question on MSO: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/270/246931&quot;&gt;Meaning of downvotes in Meta vs Main sites?&lt;/a&gt; for more on that issue...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T12:27:53.150" Title="Are half of &quot;tag-synonyms&quot; questions duplicative of &quot;Current tag synonym candidates&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1931" CreationDate="2014-01-27T13:18:33.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not much use in closing the question now; at present, it's 11th most popular, and poised to continue climbing. I shared that initial impulse though, FWIW. I find its popularity useful for redefining the utility of CV as a whole—not that it needed redefining necessarily, but I think I understand it better now, thanks to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/facebook&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;facebook&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;facebook&lt;/a&gt;, one question certainly doesn't make the tag needed. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=facebook&quot;&gt;Searching for &quot;facebook&quot;&lt;/a&gt; yields 66 hits at present though, so if &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/facebook&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;facebook&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;facebook&lt;/a&gt; is going to be useful, it should probably be applied to some of those other questions (of which there are less than 66, because that number includes answers). That being said, those questions may not be &lt;strong&gt;about&lt;/strong&gt; Facebook, so if too few of the questions actually are, the tag seems quite useless from an empirical perspective, for now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, since &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/social-network&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;social-network&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;social-network&lt;/a&gt; already exists, has been used 21 times, and has a good, non-redundant wiki and excerpt (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/facebook&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;facebook&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;facebook&lt;/a&gt;'s are redundant), the synonym suggestion,&lt;br&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/facebook&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;facebook&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;facebook&lt;/a&gt;$\rightarrow$&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/social-network&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;social-network&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;social-network&lt;/a&gt;&quot; would naturally find its way to a meta-question like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1200/32036&quot;&gt;Current tag synonym candidates&lt;/a&gt;, by my own hand if no one else's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the preceding answers argue for this synonymity as well, and have received their share of upvotes already, I've submitted an edit to the question in question that replaces &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/facebook&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;facebook&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;facebook&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/social-network&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;social-network&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;social-network&lt;/a&gt; (among some other pretty trivial changes). It got accepted, so I guess that's that? &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/facebook&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;facebook&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;facebook&lt;/a&gt; now appears on zero questions! I suggest it be removed entirely...though &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1162/32036&quot;&gt;this will happen automatically if it remains an orphan for six months&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/social-network&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;social-network&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;social-network&lt;/a&gt; might fit on some of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=facebook&quot;&gt;those questions that mention &quot;facebook&quot;&lt;/a&gt; though, so there may remain some work to do, depending on whether editing those questions is worth bumping them up in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=active&quot;&gt;the active questions list&lt;/a&gt;. This (and the OP itself) raise a number of related meta-questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/441/32036&quot;&gt;What should be rules for making and using tags?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Note the tentative rule, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/452/32036&quot;&gt;community consensus prerequired for sitewide retagging&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;@AndreSilva, note the proposed rule, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/449/32036&quot;&gt;&quot;adding new tags by retag should be exceptional&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Note comments on downvoted rule, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/456/32036&quot;&gt;automatically kill one-question tags, except w/ high rep&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1622/32036&quot;&gt;Is it reasonable to go tag-hunting?&lt;/a&gt; [for the sake of retagging where a good tag is missing]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1200/32036&quot;&gt;Current tag synonym candidates&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2014-01-27T13:25:10.623" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1934" CreationDate="2014-01-27T17:36:14.973" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You brought many insights on your question. I'll focus on the idea if we&#xA;should ask &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/tag-synonyms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tag-synonyms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tag-synonyms&lt;/a&gt; questions individually or just compile all of them into one unique thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I have no objections about users who prefer to ask these kind of questions in a compiled manner I prefer to generate threads individually for some reasons. One of them you cited on your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Asking questions separately for each suggestion might encourage more individualized consideration and more discussion for each&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is easier for me to pay attention and focus when just one subject is presented rather than a big list with many subjects under it. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2016-09-21T12:27:53.150" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T12:27:53.150" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1934" CreationDate="2014-01-28T02:09:22.110" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;+1 for the massive research effort if nothing else; note that upvotes &amp;amp; downvotes have a different meaning on meta than the main site: here they imply people agree or disagree with your proposal.  In this case, I partially agree, so it goes with the admiration for the quality of the question.&lt;/em&gt;)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me put down some random thoughts:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Regarding the question about old tags not showing up in searches, I believe that issue has been resolved.  (For example, if you look at the answer I linked to in the comments, the corresponding question is now tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/logistic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;logistic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;logistic&lt;/a&gt;, so it can be found.  I gather the moderators have changed the protocol when making duplicates somewhat so that this problem no longer occurs.)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I believe I'm agreeing with @AndreSilva (at least partially) in that there is room for two kinds of meta questions here.  The thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1200/32036&quot;&gt;Current tag synonym candidates&lt;/a&gt; is a good choice for simply proposing a candidate synonym.  Of course, you can do this through the mechanism SE originally set up, but you need 5 upvotes on the tag in question, and it will never get noticed or resolved.  This way makes it more salient and more democratic.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, some of the potential duplicates you list strike me as primarily &lt;em&gt;discussion items&lt;/em&gt;.  That is, the OP is not necessarily certain, but wants to find out what people think about the overlap / distinction between the two tags.  Prime examples of this type might be:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1659/32036&quot;&gt;What is the difference between tags &amp;quot;validity&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;validation&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1817/32036&quot;&gt;Do we need both &amp;quot;power&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;power analysis&amp;quot; tags?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that neither of these seem to be quite saying 'this is obviously a synonym, can we make this happen?'  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Regarding your points about deleting answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1200/32036&quot;&gt;Current tag synonym candidates&lt;/a&gt;, I still think they should be.  &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First, if we do end up using that thread as a bulletin board for this issue, it will become excessively cluttered very quickly with old, resolved proposals, too cluttered to maintain its usefulness.  (Remember that new answers will all be stuck at the very bottom, which will get further and further away.)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Second, once a tag has been made a synonym, it makes little sense for people to keep voting and discussing the issue; the old tag will simply have disappeared.  Should someone in the future want to revive the old tag, the best bet would be to initiate a new meta.CV thread to discuss the issue.  Moreover, I'm not clear how the process of unmaking a synonym works.  The moderators may be able to do it, but I don't think it's ever been done before, and if you read through the comments to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135466/how-can-you-find-questions-with-ses-search-features-that-have-now-defunct-tags&quot;&gt;How can you find questions with SE&amp;#39;s search features that have now-defunct tags?&lt;/a&gt;, @whuber's reservation was that the proposed solution makes the change irreversible.  Since that approach appears to have been adopted, it seems even more unlikely that synonyms will be converted back.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For what it's worth, I have deleted many of the answers that I had posted to that thread, where the change was made.  And you should have the ability to undelete your answers if you feel the need for some reason.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many of the threads you list probably are duplicates and could be closed.  However, I'm not sure if it is as important to do that with old meta threads.  Here on meta, the community user does not bump unanswered questions.  If no one else is bumping them, it may not be worth the hassle to close them all.  Naturally, &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; threads that are duplicates should be closed.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2014-01-28T02:09:22.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1938" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-28T15:16:23.883" Score="6" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am unable to ask questions or post when accessing &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;. When I attempted to access the meta site it was also not possible for me to log in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&#xA;Screenshot:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vq61x.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Also it appears to be auto-logging me in without needing to enter a password sometimes but not others. Finally, shouldn't the log-in page always be https://? Seems insecure to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, visiting &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; gives invalid cert:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;meta.stats.stackexchange.com uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is only valid for the following names: *.stackexchange.com , stackexchange.com , meta.stackexchange.com , *.meta.stackexchange.com , *.stackoverflow.com , stackoverflow.com , serverfault.com , stackauth.com , sstatic.net , meta.serverfault.com , superuser.com , meta.superuser.com , stackapps.com , openid.stackauth.com (Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the issue seems to be that getting logged into the https:// version does not mean you are logged into the normal version of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless the user is using add-on like https everywhere it appears their password is being sent in plain text by default every time they log in. If my understanding is correct, anyone who is not using &quot;https everywhere&quot; can have their pass stolen over wifi. I think it is not such a big deal for CV but this can be a major problem for those who reuse passwords. The cookies are also not being deleted upon log-out. It is not possible to log in to the meta site using https at all without making an exception for an invalid cert, which is why I don't wish to post there any longer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Copied from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/83612/what-are-good-ways-of-plotting-distributions-over-time-using-r?noredirect=1#comment164008_83612&quot;&gt;comment on our main site&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38102" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2014-02-11T14:32:31.533" Title="Problem with log-in and posting when using https://" Tags="|bug|status-completed|login|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1938" CreationDate="2014-01-29T14:57:16.243" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The issue with the captcha should be fixed already, as of a few hours after this question was posted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the rest of your question... check out our developer Nick Craver's &lt;a href=&quot;http://nickcraver.com/blog/2013/04/23/stackoverflow-com-the-road-to-ssl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;excellent blog post&lt;/a&gt; on Stack Exchange's road to SSL for full details. The long and the short of it is that child metas do not support SSL yet due to certification problems with our subdomains. (The URL formats &lt;code&gt;*.*.stackexchange.com&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;meta.*.stackexchange.com&lt;/code&gt; are what specifically is giving us trouble.) The eventual goal, if we go full SSL, will be to move child metas to &lt;code&gt;*.meta.stackexchange.com&lt;/code&gt; to get around this problem (as mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://gaming.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8099/11014&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). (Read Nick's blog post - it's interesting and more informative than this answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it is worth mentioning that the whole &quot;password is being sent in plain text&quot; is misleading. When you're logging in through the openid provider either no passwords are sent at all, or, if you're using Stack Exchange's openid, all traffic is via SSL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tl;dr: SSL is a work in progress, and you've hit a kink that hasn't been worked out yet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6123" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:33:54.933" LastActivityDate="2014-01-29T14:57:16.243" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1940" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1942" CreationDate="2014-01-29T17:47:28.080" Score="8" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Unanswered&quot; are considered the questions whose answers have received no upvotes. This creates the following situation: a question gets answered, and answer is accepted by the OP, but the OP has not enough reputation in order to also upvote it. At the same time, the question may be so specific and narrow, that no member with upvoting rights upvotes it, due to lack of interest in the subject matter. Then the list of &quot;unanswered questions&quot; contains also this kind of questions, which in my opinion are not really &quot;unanswered&quot; since they have been indicated as useful by the OP in the only way the OP could indicate that (by the way, can somebody count how many of the questions with no upvoted answers have an answer accepted by the OP?)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that some threshold for upvoting rights must exist (and it is set fairly low anyway, but still creates this kind of situation, especially for questions that come from new users), so shouldn't the &quot;unanswered criterion&quot; change so that questions with accepted but not upvoted answers stop appearing as &quot;unanswered&quot;?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this is, I think, a stack-exchange-wide feature, and so perhaps unlikely to change, should we go on a crusade to hunt for these questions and upvote them in order for them to leave the list of unanswered questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe there is a stronger case to consider these questions as &quot;answered&quot; compared with the questions that are essentially answered in the comments -in the case I am describing, somebody did post an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28746" LastEditorUserId="4454" LastEditDate="2014-01-30T20:39:38.337" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Criterion for &quot;Unanswered&quot; question - should it change?" Tags="|discussion|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1940" CreationDate="2014-01-29T20:19:49.967" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Robert Cartainos's answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3669/would-it-be-possible-to-have-a-community-accepted-feature&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; states the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &quot;accepted answer&quot; feature was never intended to mark which answer is best or even if the answer is correct. It is, simply stated, the answer that the original author found most useful in solving their problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voting is the most reliable and safe tool to address that a question indeed is answered (in context of content quality).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today we have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;757 zero score accepted answers (&lt;code&gt;isaccepted:1 score:0&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;5356 answers with zero score (&lt;code&gt;is:answer score:0&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;9535 &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=unanswered&quot;&gt;unanswered&lt;/a&gt; questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the key point for us if we want to get the big fish is to focus on more voting* regardless of whether the answer is accepted or not. If the content is good, vote for it!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe it is OK to look for zero-score answers on a subject you understand and help with voting (up and down).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I wouldn't go either on a crusade or just on zero-score accepted answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*some references &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1900/crossvalidateds-rather-extreme-up-voting-problem&quot;&gt;a&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1365/cross-validated-voting-improvement-and-community-development&quot;&gt;b&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/314/vote-early-vote-often/317#317&quot;&gt;c&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://gis.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/859/does-gis-have-a-low-voting-problem&quot;&gt;d&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2014-01-30T20:32:13.630" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1940" CreationDate="2014-01-30T17:39:06.827" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/09/ok-now-define-answered/&quot;&gt;For future reference&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of today, here’s how we do it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answered questions&lt;/strong&gt; have at least one answer with one upvote (or accepted)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Unanswered questions&lt;/strong&gt; have no answers with upvotes (or accepted)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read the full post - it explains the rationale behind these criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4454" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2014-01-30T17:39:06.827" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1943" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-31T23:35:28.380" Score="2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently tag &quot;text-mining&quot; has a definition that somehow mixes up data mining on text and text classification. Also, there is no other general tag like &quot;text-analysis&quot; that covers the broader field. In my mind that broader field includes e.g. clustering of text, feature extraction, preprocessing etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since we do have &lt;em&gt;general&lt;/em&gt; application tags like image-processing or clinical-trials that cover all different aspects of the corresponding applications shouldn't we have something similar for text? It would help better annotate questions that can be answered by experts of the field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose renaming the text-mining tag to text-analysis and provide a more general/loose definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37188" LastActivityDate="2014-01-31T23:35:28.380" Title="Should &quot;text-mining&quot; tag become &quot;text-analysis&quot; instead?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1944" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-02T02:36:19.270" Score="6" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1046/can-code-review-be-relevant-here&quot;&gt;an earlier question on code review at CV&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While 'code review' itself is understandably out of scope, I wonder about questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21074240/methodology-of-high-dimensional-data-structuring-in-r-vs-matlab&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; which I asked on SO, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7714677/r-scatterplot-with-too-many-points&quot;&gt;this question on plotting nicely&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine that there is a methodological gradient that goes from theory to programming mechanics, but I'm curious where CV stops. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1782/20307&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; seems particularly salient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples of possible edge cases I thought up and the site they border on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plotting results effectively (&quot;data-to-ink&quot; ratio) -- SO, TeX?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keeping data organized throughout scaling and transformations (for example, keeping track of categorical variables so they still match the transformed features) -- SO&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Extending existing statistical packages without creating kludge (both etiquette and methodology here) -- SO&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Implementation of a stochastic algorithm (is this the right way to code this, or is there a better algebraic expression for X?) -- MSE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reporting results in limited space; how to prioritize? (i.e., papers etc.) -- Academia&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Preparing chains of statistical analysis elements so that reports can be made mostly agnostic to input data -- SO&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What's the best way to store data you're going to start/continue analysis work on in &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;this language&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;? -- SO&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Basic checklist of &quot;things to try&quot; on data when exploring/classifying (CW) -- SO&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I want to do X, when should I format my data like A? If I'm trying to do Y, should I transform my data to B? What's the best way to go about that in &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;this language&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;? -- SO&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are all methodological questions, and I'd like to ask some of them, in fact. I'd like these questions to be allowable in the context of &lt;strong&gt;review&lt;/strong&gt; specifically, because that's really the best way to learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20307" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2014-02-02T02:36:19.270" Title="Are 'style/approach review' questions acceptable?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1945" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-02T21:53:47.320" Score="13" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;By now there are so many new questions on Cross Validated that &quot;active&quot; topics disappear from the front page in around 8 hours. This is fast. This means that if I check the website once per day, I will miss a lot of questions that were active during the past 24 horus. This is particularly true because only new answers and edits count as &quot;activity&quot; (as far as I understand), but comments and upvotes do not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As many (most of the?) questions are very specific and often of no general interest, I have a feeling that it is very easy to miss something really interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: how do you monitor interesting questions and answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that the idea is that worthy stuff should get upvoted, and one can look in the hot/week/month section. However, I noticed that sometimes high quality questions and answers go by without many upvotes -- I guess when the topic is too narrow; questions of very wide appeal often get a lot more upvotes (e.g. the recent question about Facebook).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course one can monitor only specific tags, but then one automatically misses a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed that quite often high quality answers to interesting questions have figures in them. I wrote &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/164585/last-answers-with-figures-hoster-on-imgur-com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a query to get last answers with images posted on imgur&lt;/a&gt;, but have yet to see whether it turns out to be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2014-02-02T21:53:47.320" Title="How not to miss interesting answers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1946" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1947" CreationDate="2014-02-03T11:10:34.093" Score="4" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know our policy is that answers should be fairly fully worked out - not something like &quot;Logistic regression should do it&quot;, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you hover over the &quot;add comment&quot; after a question, it says &quot;use comments to ask for more information or suggest improvements. Avoid answering questions in comments&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like &quot;logistic regression should do it&quot; &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; answer the question, at least partially. It is not a request for information or a suggested improvement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the hover text disagrees with our policy. One or the other should change. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2014-02-04T17:36:44.793" Title="Comments vs. answers - does the popup for &quot;comments&quot; need to be changed? or does our policy?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1946" CreationDate="2014-02-03T16:22:55.133" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;We could try: &quot;use comments to ask for more information, suggest improvements, or provide brief partial explanations. If you can provide a complete answer, please do so and avoid using the comments&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2014-02-03T16:22:55.133" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1948" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-03T20:32:34.130" Score="13" ViewCount="391" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE 31/7/2014:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;It continues unabated.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that the general issue of cross-posting questions has been discussed before; opinions were not unanimous, but one could discern that the general tendency was rather &quot;against&quot; than &quot;in favor&quot;. My question specifically regards synchronous cross-posting in &lt;strong&gt;CV&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;math.SE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, because this happens &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; – and for known reasons: there is a rather strong group of answerers in math.SE regarding mathematical statistics and probability theory. I participate also in math.SE, and sometimes I answer some of the left-overs, and this is how I know that many questions are cross-posted practically at the same minute in both forums. But I find myself rather reluctant to churn out &quot;please don't cross-post&quot;, mark as duplicate, etc. at the volume needed given the number of cross-posted questions... Sometimes, perhaps one should go with the flow.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There is also the methodological dilemma: which forum should be considered &quot;primary&quot; and which &quot;secondary&quot; in this specific case?  (I am posting this for discussion; I don't ask from anybody to &quot;tell me what to do&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Should I... cross-post this in &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;meta.math.SE&lt;/a&gt;? :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28746" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:38.337" LastActivityDate="2014-11-08T17:42:35.910" Title="Cross-posting in CV and math.SE tends to become an epidemic" Tags="|discussion|policy|cross-posting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1946" CreationDate="2014-02-04T17:36:44.793" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find that often the &quot;simple comment answers&quot; are actually a solicitation for more information, at least implicitly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Seems like logistic regression would do it&quot; is often more of the form &quot;Is there a reason logistic regression &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; what you're doing?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About half the time I get a comment answer, I reply with &quot;Would you convert that to a full answer so I can upvote it?&quot;. The other half of the time however, it actually ends up prompting me to provide more information, or a reason why Profoundly Obvious Solution isn't what is going to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5836" LastActivityDate="2014-02-04T17:36:44.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1950" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-06T17:17:03.043" Score="8" ViewCount="246" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any interest to meet up at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amstat.org/meetings/jsm/2014&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;JSM 2014 in Boston&lt;/a&gt;? I asked this before for 2013 &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1518/5739&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1521/5739&quot;&gt;there&lt;/a&gt;, but nothing came to fruition. I am bringing this up to your attention again, as the time period to submit requests for business meetings runs through February and March. If there's enough interested comments, I will develop this question to outline more about what may be doable there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I don't have any particularly good strategies to make CV more visible in the academic and professional community. There's obviously demand for experts (given that the questions are being asked on CV, and few if any of them have more than a couple of answers), but the academic and professional community is not interested in responding. If the ASA President were to give the address focused on CV this may change, but somehow I think there are bigger items on their agenda.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2014-02-07T09:44:08.830" Title="JSM 2014 mixer?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1319" CreationDate="2014-02-07T11:35:14.620" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the opposite to Michael in one respect: it's important that &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; assurance should be given that the accepted answers are sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the questions on CV concern real-life problems. A site for learners of Statistics to help each other learn is unequivocally a boon to the discipline; a site where professionally certified statisticians purport to provide solutions to non-statisticians on the basis of reading a couple of paragraphs about their problem would be a travesty of the consulting process. As it stands the onus is on askers of questions to make them clear &amp;amp; include all relevant information, &amp;amp; to critically evaluate the answers; anything that tended to give a contrary impression should be, &amp;amp; probably would be, of concern to professional bodies or learned societies considering lending their support to CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Statistical societies worldwide impose obligations on their members to keep on learning, help others learn, &amp;amp;  promote public understanding of the discipline: CV is already well suited to help them fulfil these obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2014-02-07T15:10:42.303" LastActivityDate="2014-02-07T15:10:42.303" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1953" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1954" CreationDate="2014-02-10T20:44:40.317" Score="20" ViewCount="608" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am fairly new to CrossValidated, but during the last month I could not help noticing curiously high popularity of at least two questions that I am missing a right term to describe -- maybe &quot;small talk&quot; questions? I mean the Facebook question and the Amazon question, and you can check &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/?tab=month&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/?tab=month&lt;/a&gt; to see that they are &lt;em&gt;by far&lt;/em&gt; the winners by upvotes, views, and even favourites. Neither of them raises what I would consider to be particularly deep statistical questions, and looking at what sort of questions top users here enjoy answering, I suspect I am not alone. Given plenty of truly excellent questions and enlightening answers appearing here almost daily, I am a bit puzzled. The Facebook question is actually the sixth &lt;em&gt;overall&lt;/em&gt;, which I personally find rather ridiculous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does it happen? Is it something like a slashdot effect, or is it internal CV phenomenon? Was it always like that? Do people here perceive it as amusing or annoying?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2014-02-11T16:30:58.567" Title="Why do some not-particularly-deep questions get SO popular, and is it a problem?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1953" CreationDate="2014-02-11T16:30:58.567" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll address the issues that I think are at the heart of your concern separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Provocative Titles and Visibility&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This section stems from @cardinal's comments above:&#xA;Part of the popularity of the questions you cite is due to the choice of title.  I think we all are quite susceptible to the power of first impressions, and thus can be swayed to &#xA;read or skip an article/post/answer/book/etc based on its title.  Any medium that allows for a piece of work to conspicuously display a title opens the door to the use of sexy, attention-grabbing titles to garner views.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On top of that, the particular questions acquired numerous views quickly, and thus was included in the Network side-bar of 'Hot Questions', increasing the questions visibility and thus, increasing the likelihood that people would &#xA;click the link to the question, giving it more views (and possibly more votes).  And to somewhat belabour the point, but what information is displayed in the 'Hot Questions' sidebar?  The title of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Accessibility to non-experts&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also mentioned by @cardinal is that the questions were quite accessible to people who wouldn't consider themselves as statistics- or data analysis-experts.  They include real-word concepts that people, regardless of background, are familiar with (Facebook, Amazon, interview questions), &#xA;and the questions were posed in lay-person terms.  Concerning the Amazon question, I'd say the way in which the question is worded is not a problem, but rather a very good thing.  The &quot;deep&quot; questions you may be searching for do not&#xA;necessarily need to be asked in an esoteric fashion.  There are numerous questions from the Math.SE which concern deep, philosophical concepts, but are framed in such a way that not only does it not repel non-mathletes, but also reels them in.  A really great, recent example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/661855/is-it-faster-to-count-to-the-infinite-going-one-by-one-or-two-by-two&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And when you combine accessibility to non-experts with a catchy title and place it in a prominent location, it'll be hard to stop the rise in view count.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Depth, or lack-thereof&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll mainly focus on the Amazon question for the next couple sections.  The Amazon question is deeper than it first appears.  To quote @whuber's comment from the original question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...the point of this question is not to obtain a mathematical answer&#xA;  but rather to see whether the interviewee thinks carefully about what&#xA;  assumptions need to be made in order to obtain a reasonable,&#xA;  defensible answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being cognizant of and understanding the assumptions that are explicitly and, more importantly, inherently made when approaching a problem is an important and deep issue.  Quoting @whuber again, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thus, we ought to consider any single, definite answer to this&#xA;  question to be incorrect--or at least not worthy of getting a job&#xA;  offer from Amazon. The answers that point out the ambiguities and&#xA;  discuss the assumptions are the ones that have merit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that if someone provided a clear, detailed answer addressing the issues @whuber brings up, worthy of many positive votes, then the question becomes one we can use as an example of a &lt;em&gt;fantastic&lt;/em&gt; question on this site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it a problem?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, are &quot;soft&quot; or &quot;shallow&quot; questions a problem?  I'd say not necessarily. There are numerous questions on the Math.SE which some can deem &quot;soft&quot; or &quot;shallow&quot; (and some have provocative titles), gained much popularity very quickly, but bred good discussions and sometimes really great, thoughtful answers (Exhibit &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/71874/can-i-use-my-powers-for-good&quot;&gt;A&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/54431/why-do-people-use-it-is-easy-to-prove&quot;&gt;B&lt;/a&gt;). If the result is interesting discussion, I worry less about its genesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's important to note here that SE has the Reversal badge, which is awarded to a user who provides an answer of +20 score to a question of -5 score.  We reward those who can provide an excellent answer to a terrible question, so why would we not also condone a great answer to a &quot;shallow&quot; question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And specifically, are the questions you cite examples of a problem present in this particular SE, or the SE Network in general?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say no.  Concerning the Amazon question, from the answers and the discussion above it's apparent that the question is deeper than it seems at first glance. &#xA;If I were to have a problem with it, it'd be that multiple answers arrive at the same conclusion using the same means, i.e. they're not adding anything that isn't already there.  So actually, your issue (and maybe my issue) with it may lie in the answers, not the question itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5594" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:38.337" LastActivityDate="2014-02-11T16:30:58.567" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1956" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1958" CreationDate="2014-02-17T15:31:03.013" Score="20" ViewCount="714" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across this question and answer today: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/38141/recall-and-auc-of-a-binary-classifier&quot;&gt;Recall and AUC of a binary classifier&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I think the accepted answer is wrong. So I wrote what I believe is a better answer, and downvoted the accepted answer explaining why I think it is wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;side note: if my reasoning went astray please correct me&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;side note 2: I actually think in terms of content it will be easy to fix the accepted answer and I also left a comment that I'll gladly upvote a revised version. I don't think it will be a matter where the author of the accepted answer and I cannot reach convergence - I think that he just didn't think of a particular situation which makes the &quot;can never happen&quot; answer incorrect.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It is not like trench wars about the correct prior or appropriateness of Bayesian vs. frequentist approaches&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The concept of stackoverflow&lt;/strong&gt; relies on the fact that other users can up- or downvote answers. Ultimately this &lt;strong&gt;should lead to good (including correct) answers floating on top&lt;/strong&gt;. This concept also assumes that in case some issue discovered, all sides can react: the author of the answer can edit and the OP can even change the accepted answer. This &lt;strong&gt;relies on people staying active on CV/SX, but what if they aren't active any more?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question and accepted answer are 1 1/2 years old. The OP's profile says that the OP never came back to the site after the day that question was asked and &quot;answered&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The author of the accepted answer was online here more recently (2 weeks ago) so he/she may edit the answer in reaction to my comment.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;I'll flag the question for moderator attention, but&lt;/s&gt; I think it would be good to write down here how to proceed &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in case the OP doesn't show up again and react on the new situation. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in future if similar issues arise (the OP could have deleted his/her account meanwhile)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be even more clear: I think it is a perfectly valid policy to say that we don't do anyting in these situations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just think that it would be good to have the policy discussed and spelled out here (whatever it is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4598" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2014-02-25T22:24:05.823" Title="What to do if an accepted answer is wrong but author of accepted answer and OP are not active on CV any more?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1956" CreationDate="2014-02-18T11:02:14.037" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ask what to do on Meta, linking to the question under discussion; it will attract attention &amp;amp; more up-votes for your correct answer, making it clear to future readers that the accepted answer is flawed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Sorry for being flippant. But considering the case where an incorrect answer has been accepted with an up-vote or two, &amp;amp; a correct answer has zero votes or a down-vote, would it be an appropriate use of Meta to ask for more eyes on the question?&amp;mdash;after of course following @Nick's advice.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2014-02-18T14:51:05.643" LastActivityDate="2014-02-18T14:51:05.643" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1956" CreationDate="2014-02-18T13:10:06.560" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no special policy either possible or needed here. Every action is fallible, but within limits correctable! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Original posters may accept poor or even incorrect answers (and then fade away). It is best not to read too much into question acceptance; always remember that this is just one person's judgment. Sometimes an OP chooses what they wished to hear, or what they understood, or what best fitted their specific needs. Often the pattern of voting indicates other answers that are deeper, fuller, or more interesting to many readers. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People may post poor or even incorrect answers (and then fade away). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But people who are competent and confident can and should &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Post good answers. If you have a better answer, post it! &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Explain firmly but politely the limitations or errors of other answers. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Vote up (and down) accordingly. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this specific case, you did what you could, and that's fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note on editing: The tacit policy seems to be that people with sufficient reputation and a reasonably good eye for language, mathematical and statistical formatting should edit &lt;strong&gt;mainly to improve presentation&lt;/strong&gt;. Supposed technical errors other than trivial typos should be brought to the attention of posters, with the aim that ideally they make  corrections themselves. Such diffidence is partly for posters' own education (assuming they accept corrections) and partly because editors may be those who are confused or incorrect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2014-02-18T13:18:41.203" LastActivityDate="2014-02-18T13:18:41.203" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1959" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1960" CreationDate="2014-02-19T14:55:28.173" Score="13" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on the answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/990/synonym-merging-suggestion-for-users-with-under-2-5k&quot;&gt;Synonym merging suggestion for users with under 2.5k?&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed the recent creation of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/visualisation&quot;&gt;visualisation&lt;/a&gt; tag and also a little used &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/data-visualisation&quot;&gt;data-visualisation&lt;/a&gt;, both spelled with an &quot;s&quot;. Can this be a synonym or merged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/data-visualization&quot;&gt;data-visualization&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1191" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2014-02-19T18:49:53.133" Title="Visualisation tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1959" CreationDate="2014-02-19T15:05:36.393" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks.  I merged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/visualisation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;visualisation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;visualisation&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/data-visualisation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;data-visualisation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;data-visualisation&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/data-visualization&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;data-visualization&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;data-visualization&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2014-02-19T18:49:53.133" LastActivityDate="2014-02-19T18:49:53.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1961" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1962" CreationDate="2014-02-21T16:51:05.650" Score="6" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have periodically reviewed posts on CV over the past few years. In recent months anytime I click on 'review' there are never any available tasks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has my account been blocked from reviewing and if so how come?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11030" LastEditorUserId="32036" LastEditDate="2014-02-21T21:47:15.177" LastActivityDate="2014-02-21T22:04:50.720" Title="Blocked from reviewing?" Tags="|discussion|new-users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1961" CreationDate="2014-02-21T22:04:50.720" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; perform a review task, it will be grayed out, as at your rep level should be the case with all except the &lt;code&gt;First Posts&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;Late Answers&lt;/code&gt; tasks. When I'm around, I'm one of those zealous users that's causing your problem ;) I check the review queue between practically every page navigation precisely because these tasks' queues empty so quickly – of course, in the process, I exacerbate the &quot;problem&quot; in which I share. My solution was to hit the next tier of privileges so I could start reviewing suggested edits too. I imagine higher-rep users will be alternately relieved and disappointed that my overzealous editing won't need reviewing anymore, nor fertilize their badge farms :) In summary, I'm afraid the only solution is to keep up with the crowd! Good luck to you (it's not easy in this crowd!), and may the fastest reviewer – &lt;em&gt;who doesn't sacrifice thoroughness and tact&lt;/em&gt; – &quot;win&quot;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32036" LastActivityDate="2014-02-21T22:04:50.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1963" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-22T22:30:12.297" Score="2" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inspired by this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1953/why-do-some-not-particularly-deep-questions-get-so-popular-and-is-it-a-problem&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt;, I had the idea that browsing questions would be more fun if there was a feature that allowed sorting/filtering/searching based on the number of up-votes a question has &lt;strong&gt;received from high karma/reputation users exclusively&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue is that a non-trivial number of deep questions are only accessible to an advanced audience, and therefore they don't receive the up-votes and &quot;favorites&quot; that experts might feel they deserve.  Don't get me wrong, I think we want to leave question-voting/scoring unchanged.  I'm glad newbies can vote.  But I think this is an important second-order problem.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could add this feature without making it super-prominent if we want to keep the UI clean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This feature would make CV and other SE sites more interesting to experts, and attracting experts has benefits that trickle down to all users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to Nick Stauner for suggesting I make this an official feature-request.  I encourage all of you to offer more specific suggestions for how it might be implemented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3748" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Can we add the ability to sort questions based on the number of up-votes from high reputation users?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1963" CreationDate="2014-02-23T00:30:32.103" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was thinking some such sorting method could even be invisible or implemented via user-localized, potentially customizable scripts. I'm out of my league on the programming side here, so I don't know how complex or dangerous (e.g., exploitable) an implementation of these ideas would be, but FWIW:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Links to data feeds could be provided on meta-site posts.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This would preclude necessitating a main site UI overhaul.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would facilitate limited testing – could even proceed by email invite in early stages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downloadable computer scripts could generate organized hyperlinks in a separate program dedicated to displaying the proposed list sorting structure.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This could connect to the aforementioned data feed, which could be raw to cut down on UI development work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm not sure how SE feels about web crawler bots, but this could produce some objections.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SE as a whole could set up thresholds or more continuous weighting systems for votes by rep.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;E.g., sort by votes received from users with above-average rep score, or weight by score.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users could customize their own thresholds / weighting schemes, ideally.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To preserve anonymity, SE could restrict modifications to rough, e.g., decile increments&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alternatives to weighting by rep could be considered, such as possession of badges like:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://kevinx.net/labs/php/badge.php?txt=Nice%20answer&amp;amp;c=c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://kevinx.net/labs/php/badge.php?txt=Nice%20answer&amp;amp;c=c&lt;/a&gt; for 10 upvotes on an answer; one awarded per $10\times$upvoted answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://kevinx.net/labs/php/badge.php?txt=Enlightened&amp;amp;c=s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://kevinx.net/labs/php/badge.php?txt=Enlightened&amp;amp;c=s&lt;/a&gt; for posting the first answer, then getting it accepted and upvoted $\times10$.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://kevinx.net/labs/php/badge.php?txt=Mortarboard&amp;amp;c=c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://kevinx.net/labs/php/badge.php?txt=Mortarboard&amp;amp;c=c&lt;/a&gt; for earning 200 rep in a single day.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://kevinx.net/labs/php/badge.php?txt=Necromancer&amp;amp;c=s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://kevinx.net/labs/php/badge.php?txt=Necromancer&amp;amp;c=s&lt;/a&gt; for earning five upvotes on an answer that's $\ge60$ days late.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These are just the badges that I've gotten so far and found karmically meaningful. I've only been around for four months though, so I'm not sure if we'd want to set the bar higher...but at least these I've found these attainable enough that plenty of people have likely earned them, so no one's anonymity would be in jeopardy if only one such badge could be used at a time.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Side effects on activity geared toward earning such badges might be affected if this question-sorting method was publicly visible and popular, but my idea #1 could suppress such effects by reducing visibility and making functionality easy to turn off if problematic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kudos to &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/users/31/kevin?tab=accounts&quot;&gt;Kevin&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;http://kevinx.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;kevinx.net&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/users/61460/martin-clayton&quot;&gt;Martin Clayton&lt;/a&gt; for mentioning &lt;a href=&quot;http://kevinx.net/labs/php/badge.php?txt=B%20Question&amp;amp;c=g&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;kevinx.net's badge generator&lt;/a&gt; in a comment on the Meta SO question, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/100306/246931&quot;&gt;Add badges to Markdown?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2014-02-26T03:14:10.093" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1963" CreationDate="2014-02-23T02:20:06.387" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @AndreSilva &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1963/can-we-add-the-ability-to-sort-questions-based-on-the-number-of-up-votes-from-hi#comment5419_1963&quot;&gt;notes&lt;/a&gt;, this cannot be done within the SE ecosystem.  It is important that voting be anonymous.  As a result, who has voted on what cannot be accessed by anyone except the developers.  You cannot get this information either directly or indirectly from the SE data dump, for instance.  (For example, it is not possible to query and find out your &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/84011/is-it-possible-to-know-how-many-competing-answers-i-upvoted&quot;&gt;progress&lt;/a&gt; towards the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/63/sportsmanship&quot;&gt;sportsmanship badge&lt;/a&gt;, because this would make it possible for someone else to figure out how you voted.)  If the system you suggest were to exist, it would be at least possible to narrow down who is voting on what.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what you mean by a &quot;high-karma user&quot; exactly, but anyone whose &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/set-bounties&quot;&gt;reputation is &gt;75&lt;/a&gt; can promote a particular thread by setting a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;bounty&lt;/a&gt;.  There are a variety of &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/09/bounty-reasons-and-post-notices/&quot;&gt;reasons&lt;/a&gt; related to your idea that can be cited, including to draw more attention to the question, to get a canonical answer, or to reward an outstanding answer.  Questions that have active bounties are listed on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/?tab=featured&quot;&gt;featured tab&lt;/a&gt; of the main page, and do get more attention.  You can also navigate to the user page of whomever's opinion you particularly respect and see what bounties they have offered in the past, by clicking on bounties -&gt; offered.  We probably should encourage people to offer more bounties for questions and answers that they feel are especially noteworthy.  I'll admit I feel remiss for not doing this more often.  At present, the reigning champions seem to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/805/glen-b?tab=bounties&quot;&gt;@Glen_b&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/930/chl?tab=bounties&quot;&gt;@chl&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2014-02-23T10:23:24.543" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1966" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1967" CreationDate="2014-02-23T23:06:02.620" Score="25" ViewCount="732" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am relatively new StackExchange user, and I had a few basic questions for the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Cross Validated a good place to post questions regarding Statistical Theory, or is it more targeted to applied topics (calculating ANOVA, using SAS, R,  etc..)? In the past I have directed my Statistical Theory questions to the Mathematics StackExchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any general guidelines available for deciding on which Exchange to post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to post questions to both Exchanges, or is this a taboo practice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anyway to search both Exchanges simultaneously? I am assuming that some questions have been answered in one Exchange but not the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, is there anyway to combine profiles and reputation points? (not a biggy, it would just be nice to have Mathematics reputation points on Cross Validated)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apologize if this question should be directed somewhere else, as of right now I do not have enough reputation points to ask this question in the meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your time!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35526" OwnerDisplayName="k6adams" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="StackExchange: Mathematics vs. Cross Validated" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1966" CreationDate="2014-02-24T00:35:53.620" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stat theory is definitely on topic here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there's some overlap with math.SE, just as there is with some computational statistics questions vs similar questions on SO; indeed that same issue exists at the boundaries all over the SE network. In the cases where something is on topic in more than one location it belongs at the one you choose to post it at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you are requested &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;in the help&lt;/a&gt; not to cross-post to multiple SE sites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please note, however, that cross-posting is not encouraged on SE sites. Choose one best location to post your question. Later, if it proves better suited on another site, it can be migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are there any general guidelines available for deciding on which Exchange to post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd start with the description of what's on topic in the help for both sites, and on the extent to which particular types of questions tend to be well-answered. (Some people are active on both sites.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there anyway to search both Exchanges simultaneously? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know of any way to do it, but copy-pasting the same search into two tabs isn't terribly onerous. I do it ... well, not frequently, but sometimes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit&lt;/em&gt;: Actually, of course there is: &lt;em&gt;Google&lt;/em&gt; certainly indexes both sites, and I've had answers on both pop up in Google searches. If you use the &lt;code&gt;site&lt;/code&gt; argument in a Google search in such a way as to include both, you should be able to search both that way. Google seems to update on the content of the two sites within an hour or so, so it's always pretty current. (Some equivalent on some other search engines will probably also work, but I haven't tried.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Finally, is there anyway to combine profiles and reputation points? (not a biggy, it would just be nice to have Mathematics reputation points on Cross Validated)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, you can't combine your reputation on both. But if you have enough reputation on one, you can get an association bonus on the other - which helps in that you don't have to build up the low-level reputation - so if you do that you can start commenting and such, right away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7237/how-does-reputation-work&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, where it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You gain reputation when:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;you associate accounts of two or more Stack Exchange network sites, and at least one of those accounts already has 200 or more reputation: +100 on each site (awarded a maximum of one time per site)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe you can use the one profile for both, though (but what you do at each site doesn't carry over). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[On the other hand, when you use chat, you will have your combined SE-network reputation show; when I am in chat presently, mine shows as 38K not 36K because I have a couple of thousand reputation between StackOverflow and math.SE]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2014-02-24T04:49:32.443" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1956" CreationDate="2014-02-25T22:24:05.823" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;I just realized I forgot to make my comment an answer, as requested&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of possible actions, including&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(i) commenting on the answer (to point out where it went wrong) and&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(ii) posting a better one&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(and - though it's seldom used* - (iii) to correct easily fixed errors via edit)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* and that's mostly a good thing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you post a good answer, there's some chance the people who know the area you're posting about will recognize the better answer and upvote your answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The correct thing for the moderators to do is to respond to any of those actions you can take as any other reasonably high-reputation user on the site might do in response - in their capacity as users - which is to comment, upvote, revert a mistaken edit, etc as appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you do generally check things you're not completely certain about, you should not fear to post or comment. Yes, you may be wrong - I don't think anyone here is immune from that** - but if you're right most of the time, and you are reasonably diligent, everything will work much as it should. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're going to edit other people's answers to correct errors, you need to be much more careful - but even then there's little to fear, because your edits will be reviewed (and which edits might be rejected if they're too extensive, even if they're right). Even if edits go through, they can be reverted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;** (certainly not me, though I could point to a couple of users who are &lt;em&gt;almost never&lt;/em&gt; wrong)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2014-02-25T22:24:05.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1970" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2789" CreationDate="2014-02-27T14:19:56.657" Score="28" ViewCount="372" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I have been reading quite a lot on CV about fixed / random / mixed effects models and related terminological controversies. Unfortunately, the CV tags for the mixed models are a mess, which does not help navigating the questions (which is a pity, given that the topic is confusing enough).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Namely, there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixed-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixed-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixed-model&lt;/a&gt; tag (&lt;strike&gt;689&lt;/strike&gt; 1214 questions, nice wiki),  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixed-effect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixed-effect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixed-effect&lt;/a&gt; tag (&lt;strike&gt;95&lt;/strike&gt; 305 questions, worse wiki), and also &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixed&lt;/a&gt; tag (&lt;strike&gt;28&lt;/strike&gt; 61 questions, no wiki). I do know that terms &lt;em&gt;fixed&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;random&lt;/em&gt; are used differently by different people, but as far as I understand, mixed is mixed. So I think these three tags should be merged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I think the master tag should be &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixed-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixed-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixed-model&lt;/a&gt;, and the other two can be merged into it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two related tags are called &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/random-effects-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;random-effects-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;random-effects-model&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fixed-effects-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fixed-effects-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fixed-effects-model&lt;/a&gt;, so originally I wrote here that the best name for the merged tag would be &lt;code&gt;[mixed-effects-model]&lt;/code&gt; (which currently does not exist at all); however, on reflection, &quot;mixed model&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_model&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;seems to be&lt;/a&gt; a more standard terminology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This issue was brought up multiple times on Meta, but stays unresolved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1200/current-tag-synonym-candidates/1969&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; I suggested the same thing yesterday and @gung commented that it seems reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In 2012 &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1369/redundant-tags-mixed-effects-and-related-models&quot;&gt;a bunch of related tags&lt;/a&gt; was discussed with the same suggestion about &quot;mixed&quot; tags, and I can see no counter-arguments in the discussion (even in the careful reply of @StasK).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In 2011 &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/890/should-mixed-model-and-multilevel-analysis-be-tag-synonyms&quot;&gt;a related question was asked&lt;/a&gt;, and @chl reported in the comments that he merged [mixed-model] and [mixed-effects-model] (the latter tag does not exist anymore).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In 2013 @Randel left a comment in the above thread suggesting the same thing as I do here, and @AndyW and @chl agreed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2015-10-25T13:58:29.740" Title="Let us merge [mixed], [mixed-effect] and [mixed-model] tags" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1971" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1974" CreationDate="2014-03-01T15:17:17.980" Score="12" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just suggested an edited to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/88375/dynamic-regression-and-panel-models&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;. For instance, the sentence &quot;I was told that I should use an aroma with regressors&quot; was clearly meant to say ARIMA rather than aroma (usually autocorrect on cell phones does stuff like that). So I suggested to correct this and to add the forecasting tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Community bot immediately voted to reject this suggested edit. Now this got me wondering: why should the bot vote if it can't tell whether an edit is sensical or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26338" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Why should the Community bot vote on suggested edits?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1971" CreationDate="2014-03-01T18:36:05.997" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;Community bot&lt;/a&gt; doesn't actually vote, it &quot;owns&quot; votes that cannot be otherwise attributed to a user.  I'm not sure what that would mean in this context.  However, I &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/28753&quot;&gt;don't see a record&lt;/a&gt; that your edit was rejected.  @user603 and I both approved your edit, and it &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/88375/dynamic-regression-and-panel-models&quot;&gt;seems to have been made&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2014-03-01T18:36:05.997" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1973" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-02T23:18:23.823" Score="1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted the question &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/87158/how-to-stop-genetic-algorithm-population-converging-to-a-single-value&quot;&gt;How to stop genetic algorithm population converging to a single value&lt;/a&gt;&quot; 11 days ago but it has received very little interest - only a single comment and my response to that comment.  How can I improve this question so that it actually gets some response from the community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28556" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2014-03-02T23:18:23.823" Title="Why is &quot;How to stop genetic algorithm population converging to a single value&quot; not being answered" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1971" CreationDate="2014-03-03T02:02:26.787" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been through Community user rejecting suggested edits either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems most of the rejection cases is because of editing conflicts. Maybe the OP had had the edit button activated the time you did the action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the following thread on Meta Stack Overflow for more information on this matter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/76251/how-do-suggested-edits-work/76284#76284&quot;&gt;How do suggested edits work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will quote a relevant part of it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;....&#xA;Sometimes the Community user approves or rejects my edit. What does that mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Community user will appear to approve or reject your edit when one of the following two cases apply:&#xA;...&#xA;You submit a suggested edit at the same time as the original poster or a 2000+ rep user (20000+ in the case of tag wikis) or any moderator (in other words, anyone who has full edit privileges over the specific post). In that case, your suggested edit will be rejected by Community in favor of the fully privileged edit. Since the Community user does not provide a message when such an edit is rejected, it may appear as though the system has rejected your edit immediately, without warning. Don't worry! This has nothing to do with bans, or your profile being banned from suggesting edits. Just try submitting your edit again and it could make it to the review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, suggested edits rejected by Community are not counted towards the suggested edit ban.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2014-03-03T02:02:26.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1975" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1976" CreationDate="2014-03-04T07:22:42.930" Score="7" ViewCount="271" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to the field of statistics. While reading a book, I came across some symbols or code-like text (shown below) which I was not able to interpret. I tried Google, but it couldn't help either. I remember seeing similar text in this site and so I'm posting this question here. What is this text and how to read this? Please give some pointers to understand this kind of text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\begin{eqnarray} &#xA;\mbox{output} &amp;amp; = &amp;amp; \left\{ &#xA;\begin{array}{ll} &#xA;0 &amp;amp; \mbox{if } \sum_j w_j x_j \leq \mbox{ threshold} \\ &#xA;1 &amp;amp; \mbox{if } \sum_j w_j x_j &amp;gt; \mbox{ threshold} &#xA;\end{array} \right. \tag{1}&#xA;\end{eqnarray}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please feel free to edit the question or move it the right place if this is not the right place to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35967" OwnerDisplayName="StrikeR" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2014-03-04T14:43:38.193" LastActivityDate="2014-03-04T14:43:38.193" Title="What do the symbols in Cross Validated mean?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1975" CreationDate="2014-03-04T10:13:24.687" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just copy the text on this website in the textfield &lt;strong&gt;without&lt;/strong&gt; formatting it as code and you will see that it renders as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;\begin{eqnarray} \mbox{output} &amp;amp; = &amp;amp; \left\{ \begin{array}{ll} 0 &amp;amp; \mbox{if } \sum_j w_j x_j \leq \mbox{ threshold} \\ 1 &amp;amp; \mbox{if } \sum_j w_j x_j &amp;gt; \mbox{ threshold} \end{array} \right. \tag{1}\end{eqnarray}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or as a graphic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BhNNq.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, you simply need to add it into a online or offline LaTeX converter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="442" OwnerDisplayName="Henrik" LastActivityDate="2014-03-04T10:13:24.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1977" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-04T16:30:33.180" Score="10" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just came across the ingeniously enforced &quot;small, single-character edits should be avoided&quot; policy. I was trying to change a &quot;$-$&quot; in a formula into a &quot;$+$&quot;. I succeeded after a prolonged fight with the &quot;at least 6 characters&quot; script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a math site, people. A single &quot;$-$&quot;, or a &quot;$2$&quot;, or a &quot;$1/\pi$&quot; is frequently crucial. How do we go about removing this silly restriction on truth?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2658" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-07-20T08:55:32.190" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T15:52:50.313" Title="Allow single-character edits in formulas" Tags="|feature-request|editing|math-display|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1977" CreationDate="2014-03-04T17:53:00.717" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edits which change the technical content of someone else's question should be avoided, even if a part of the subject is not correct. This is because the edit could be the question's answer (or part of it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing to do in this situation is to leave a comment to the OP pointing out what should be edited/clarified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the following Meta Stack Exchange post for more information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/78845/should-suggested-edits-change-the-technical-content-of-a-post&quot;&gt;Should Suggested Edits change the technical content of a post?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About edits with less than 6 characters, this is to avoid abuse in the Stack Exchange system, once even non-registered users can suggest an edit in whichever post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, sometimes this feature does not encourage editing, but generally it does more good than harm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-07-20T15:52:50.313" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T15:52:50.313" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1977" CreationDate="2014-03-05T01:56:22.763" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/editing&quot;&gt;help on editing&lt;/a&gt; lists some circumstances in which it's okay to edit posts (i.e. questions and answers). These include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To fix grammar and spelling mistakes  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To clarify the meaning of the post (without changing that meaning) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first suggests that typos should probably be fixed, and the second clarifies that we must be careful to preserve the &lt;em&gt;intent&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this specific case, the intent was pretty obvious, and I think it's an error of the same kind as a 1-letter typo that results in a completely different word which results in a grammatically possible but plainly unintended meaning - the error is minor (the intent being correct aside from a typo), but a naive reading would be grossly misleading. Generally it's better if the person posting the answer fixes it, but if that may not happen for a long time (or at all), it would seem to be better to edit in spite of the limitation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While one-letter corrections are to be avoided, where a naive reader would be likely to be misled, and the OP isn't likely to change it soon, I think an edit is okay, and indeed, in keeping with the sense I get from the guidelines in the help ... but I think it's incumbent on us to carefully label the reason for the change when making the edit, and generally, to highlight the change in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is broadly consistent with the help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2014-03-05T01:56:22.763" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1980" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1981" CreationDate="2014-03-05T07:50:00.730" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to know whether R would be suited to real time monitoring of a system. In my application, I need to read data from a serial connection and plot it in real time. Also, whether there is a specific library that would work well in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would such a question be on-topic for the main site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20929" LastActivityDate="2014-03-05T14:46:28.097" Title="Would a question about R for a specific application be on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1980" CreationDate="2014-03-05T08:12:15.770" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;For advice see &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If your question is about Programming, ask on Stack Overflow. If the language is statistically oriented (such as R, SAS, Stata, SPSS, etc.), then decide based on the nature of your question: if it needs statistical expertise to understand or answer, ask it here; if it's about an algorithm, routine data processing, or details of the language, then please refer to the collection of links to resources we maintain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see a statistical core to your question, so my advice is that your question would be off-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To help understanding, know that Stack Overflow both predates Cross Validated and carries a large number of questions on R. It is true that many questions here mention R, which is fine if there is a statistical question at the core. Nevertheless, this is not a forum for &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; questions about R, or indeed any other software, statistical or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having mentioned Stack Overflow, I don't see that your question is suitable for that forum either, and in turn I suggest you read their help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2014-03-05T14:46:28.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1982" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1983" CreationDate="2014-03-05T23:45:06.530" Score="10" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;If one purpose of the site is to promote good statistical practice, why are tutorials not part of our offerings? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems many users could benefit from well-written tutorials on subjects such as regression, expectation maximization, maximum likelihood, the delta  method, survival analysis, etc., just to name a few. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering why this functionality hasn't been proposed. Perhaps the idea has been discussed before and discarded - I searched a bit, but didn't find anything. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is worth considering as it could attract many more users if we provide excellent tutorials in areas that are commonly used by those needing certain types of technical analysis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not become the go-to site for best practices by posting tutorials? We could vote up and keep the best ones and then reap the benefits as users share with others where they learned the methodology.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24073" LastActivityDate="2014-03-12T16:14:06.107" Title="Why doesn't CV offer tutorials?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1982" CreationDate="2014-03-06T00:09:05.383" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many ways to promote good statistical practice. For example, one-on-one tutoring by experts would likely be invaluable to those receiving the tutoring, if a somewhat inefficient use of expert time. We may not be able to pursue every form of encouraging good practice within the goals of the SE network. CV's central purpose is a statistical question-and-answer site, so we need to keep that in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within that central purpose, I see two obvious ways to have some form of tutorial using the features of SE that are already available:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.blogoverflow.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt;. While the blog hasn't updated in a long time, several of the blog posts have elements of tutorial in them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tutorial posts aren't explicitly listed on the about page, I think it wouldn't take much to convince people to add it - currently the blog isn't being used at all, so why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An explanation about the blog and how you get to post to the blog is &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.blogoverflow.com/about/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. You might have to get the mods to revive the chat mentioned there.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions and answers. If you see a burning need for a tutorial, you can frame it in the form of a question and answer (it's completely legitimate to answer your own questions). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a situation came up for me a while ago, when in the course of answering a question I needed to use interpolation, and realized the OP wouldn't know how to do that. (I'd previously answered several other questions with the same problem -- but to explain interpolation in a post which was primarily about something else would be getting too far off track.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I decided to put up a tutorial on interpolation in tables in the form of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/64538/how-do-i-find-values-not-given-in-interpolate-in-statistical-tables&quot;&gt;a question and answer&lt;/a&gt; - one that I (or anyone else) could link to whenever needed, rather than giving an overly-brief half-baked explanation every time or pointers to less directly relevant material off site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few such questions-with-answers written by other people on the site (and I think we could stand to have more).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[If you're looking for tutorials with broader participation on a single good answer rather than a potential plethora of answers, you might even seek to set up some community wiki questions for the purpose.]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shorter tutorials would be well placed for Q&amp;amp;A, longer tutorials would perhaps be better as blog posts. (But the 'post of the week' option on the blog allows for highlighting of questions/answers on the blog as well.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do either of those things (organize blog post-tutorials or Q&amp;amp;A tutorials), or manage to get others to do some (I'd love to see a few tutorials from some of the experts), I would be cheering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, if there's a topic that there's an obvious need for a tutorial on, I could perhaps contribute one, or contribute to one, as long as it's something I know a little about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2014-03-07T01:11:10.907" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1984" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-06T21:01:47.307" Score="2" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I assume that many of you are aware, there are no &lt;code&gt;[soft-question]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[advice]&lt;/code&gt;, or &lt;code&gt;[career-development]&lt;/code&gt; tags in stats.SE. I was wondering why this was, and who decides it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the most successful / popular questions of math.SE have the &lt;code&gt;[soft-question]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[advice]&lt;/code&gt;, or &lt;code&gt;[career-development]&lt;/code&gt; tags which can be see from just looking at the first couple of pages of math.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see no reason why these types of questions should be important to people on math.SE but not on stats.SE. Moreover the argument is that these are &quot;not encouraged by the format of SE&quot; seems strange as they feature prominently on one of the most successful SE sites. (One could generalise this argument to math.overflow, although that is not part of the SE network.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41431" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2014-03-07T02:12:00.567" LastActivityDate="2014-03-10T17:01:16.833" Title="Why are there no soft question, advice, career development tags on Cross Validated?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1984" CreationDate="2014-03-06T23:21:51.443" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tags are created by people who ask questions.  To date--after three and a half years and some 35,000 questions--nobody has seen fit to apply such a tag.  None of the active high-rep community members have seen any need to create and apply such tags retroactively.  Although I would not necessarily object to their creation, I see little need for them within the network of tags that has arisen within this site.  I do have some concern that tags with &quot;soft&quot; in them could be viewed prejudicially, as if such questions somehow had less merit or interest than &quot;hard&quot; tags related to techniques and theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2014-03-06T23:21:51.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1984" CreationDate="2014-03-09T11:03:52.990" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, we do have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/careers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;careers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;careers&lt;/a&gt; (and also &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/education&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;education&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;education&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;learning&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/academia&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;academia&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;academia&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phd&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phd&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phd&lt;/a&gt;). It's not a particularly popular tag here, as you can see. It may not always be applied where it should (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/25713/32036&quot;&gt;Things to consider about masters programs in statistics&lt;/a&gt;), but we're not especially zealous about retagging old questions here (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1287/32036&quot;&gt;Retagging old questions&lt;/a&gt; for more nuanced discussion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with @gung that an &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/advice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;advice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;advice&lt;/a&gt; tag sounds overly ambiguous. I'm not sure what it would add to organize questions this way, and also wonder whether it's really doing math.SE any major favors. Feel free to pitch it to us if you think it has worked over there, but popularity isn't necessarily an indication of practical utility. It seems particularly fishy to me that &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/tags/advice/info&quot;&gt;its tag wiki&lt;/a&gt; suggests using another tag too, but hasn't been filled out much at all yet – not even to disambiguate it from the other, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;soft-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;soft-question&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for that tag, I agree it could be misunderstood or misapplied as pejorative derogation of a question's scientific merit, but tags are misapplied often enough (gung had to correct me on my own use!) that I prefer to accept this as par for the course and worry more about the intended meaning of the tag. There's still plenty to worry about there. First, you've got another &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/tags/soft-question/info&quot;&gt;excerpt-only tag wiki&lt;/a&gt; there, so its use doesn't seem very clear to begin with – not exactly a strong candidate to nominate over here...Second, &quot;questions that don't admit a definitive answer&quot; reminds me a lot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;the Help Center's don't-ask page&lt;/a&gt;, as well as the &lt;code&gt;too broad&lt;/code&gt; text – &quot;There are either too many possible answers...&quot; – and the &lt;code&gt;primarily opinion-based&lt;/code&gt; text for closing questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm concerned that a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;soft-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;soft-question&lt;/a&gt; tag would legitimize questions that test these boundaries. Maybe this wouldn't be a bad thing; the questions could help define the boundaries, and the tag could help mark boundary cases, but this begins to approach the dangerous, implicative, prejudicial territory again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, I echo @Glen_b's observation that it's quite a subjective call as to when one should expect a definitive answer. Since statistics often entails a considerable amount of error tolerance and choice of competing models, definitive answers may be somewhat rarer here than on Mathematics. I would prefer &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to see questions organized by this characteristic, but by its opposite (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/proof&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;proof&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;proof&lt;/a&gt;, I assume) wherever a definitive answer is clearly necessary. IMO, if the idea of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/soft-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;soft-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;soft-question&lt;/a&gt; tag is to encourage less-than-definitive answers, the place to do that is in the body of the question, not in the list of tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, I downvoted too for these reasons, but to echo gung once more, it's not because I found your question useless or unclear! As a matter of fact, I just retagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/89376/32036&quot;&gt;a new question&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/careers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;careers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;careers&lt;/a&gt; thanks to having that tag brought to my attention...so thanks for asking anyway!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2014-03-10T00:34:29.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1987" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1988" CreationDate="2014-03-09T20:47:47.787" Score="6" ViewCount="283" Body="&lt;p&gt;For some reason the rendering of the right hand column of the webpage is overlapping my comments and is preventing me from editing or deleting my post...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Screen Resolution: 1280 x 800&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Windows XP&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chrome, Latest Version&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/89230/confidence-interval-for-a-random-sample-selected-from-gamma-distribution&quot;&gt;Link to original question.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/g024U.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Rendering Error&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35526" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T19:47:58.427" Title="Rendering error: Comments with MathJax syntax errors overflow their boxes" Tags="|bug|comment|design|math-display|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1987" CreationDate="2014-03-09T22:05:51.067" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This rendering occurred because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In one of your MathJax statements, a &lt;code&gt;$&lt;/code&gt; was left out at the beginning, so there was an odd number of &lt;code&gt;$&lt;/code&gt; meaning that most of your comment was interpreted as MathJax and rendered as such.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your use of markdown for the link was also incorrect. The correct syntax is &lt;code&gt;[text description](http://yourlink.com)&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have edited the comment to correct these errors. Please check that it looks alright. I (or one of the other mods) can make additional edits, if necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was actually a little difficult to even make the edits: I had to go into my browser's DOM inspector and manually hide the &quot;Hot Questions&quot; bar at the right so that I could click on the comment's &lt;code&gt;edit&lt;/code&gt; link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please make sure to double-check the MathJax and other markdown before submitting comments. For complicated math in comments, one way to double-check is to use the page's &lt;strong&gt;Answer&lt;/strong&gt; box to make sure it renders properly there and then cut and paste everything into a comment once it looks alright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2970" LastActivityDate="2014-03-09T22:05:51.067" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1987" CreationDate="2014-03-09T23:20:48.020" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As cardinal notes in his answer, the problem is caused by an extremely long MathJax expression that exceeds the normal width of the comment area.  Normally, MathJax does allow excessively long expressions to be broken over multiple lines, but that requires the expressions to actually contain some &quot;natural&quot; breakpoints such as commas or math operators.  If it's all just run-on text, it won't get wrapped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the comments are formatted using HTML tables, the over-long math expression then causes the whole comments table to expand to accommodate it.  The obvious fix would be to set an explicit maximum width for the comment text, e.g. with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;.comment-body {&#xA;    max-width: 630px;&#xA;    overflow: auto;&#xA;    overflow-y: hidden;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These CSS rules cause any over-wide comments to acquire a horizontal scroll bar instead of spilling over into the sidebar, like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/k25Bg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ps. While waiting for the SE devs to fix this styling issue properly, I've added the CSS fix described above to version 1.22 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/4486/stack-overflow-unofficial-patch&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow Unofficial Patch&lt;/a&gt;.  (Earlier versions, since v1.10, included a slightly different fix using &lt;code&gt;table-layout: fixed&lt;/code&gt; instead.)  Please let me know if you encounter any unwanted side effects from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9808" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:45.643" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T19:47:58.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1984" CreationDate="2014-03-10T17:01:16.833" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just as other folks have said, statistics is not math, and there are sufficiently many differences in how the two areas project to academia, the real life, and the SE system. My impression (based on limited excursions to math.SE) is that most questions on math.SE come from people who are studying math for their own enjoyment. The distribution of the question sophistication is bimodal: 90% of questions are graduate-level questions, and the remaining 10% of the questions are high school calculus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stats.SE sees visitors from computer science, economics, psychology, among others, so plenty of questions on stats.SE come from people who were thrown into statistics and had to produce a specific analysis for their report, dissertation or paper, with no intention of making statistics their lifetime passion and a career choice. They could be hit-and-run &lt;code&gt;user#######&lt;/code&gt; folks who bring the discussion forum expectations into their formatting of the questions and answers, use of tags, etc. The level of sophistication of these questions is essentially &quot;What does it mean to compute $\int_0^\infty x^2 {\rm e}^{-x} \, {\rm d}x$ by parts?&quot;, and there's a fair amount of noise because the different disciplines that use statistics (or machine learning, or feature extraction, or data science, or quantitatve methodology, or whatever the equivalents of statistics are in the disciplines) use their own idiosyncratic names for the procedures that they need to produce. This is all to say that there is little room to &lt;code&gt;soft&lt;/code&gt;en this site any further, and that's why the &lt;code&gt;career&lt;/code&gt;-related tags see little demand. The distribution of sophistication is smoother on stats.SE, I think, but this may be an artifact of the fact that you need to have a college degree to begin with before anything statistical would come your way, so you would have a need to address stats.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the communities may have developed some conventions of what they mean by &lt;code&gt;advice&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;soft-question&lt;/code&gt;. We have some high popularity &lt;code&gt;advice&lt;/code&gt;-type questions about statistical tools (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/1595/5739&quot;&gt;Python?&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/33780/5739&quot;&gt;SAS vs. R?&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/7815/5739&quot;&gt;skillset of a statistician&lt;/a&gt;; etc.), which don't ask specific technical questions, but instead ask broader why or what-to-do types of questions. A smart reader thinking about building their career in statistics would gain a lot from reading these. I guess we just did not have in our conventions that such questions should be tagged &lt;code&gt;advice&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2014-03-10T17:01:16.833" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1982" CreationDate="2014-03-12T16:14:06.107" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Doubtless many users could benefit from following well-written tutorials, but I'm not sure it's often owing to the paucity of these that some (seemingly) haven't yet. Your examples are covered in numerous blogs, on-line lecture notes, textbooks, &amp;amp;c. On the other hand resources to answer specific questions are a lot scarcer, &amp;amp; we all must know how frustrating it can be to look something up in half a dozen different places &amp;amp; still not understand it. So perhaps people feel they're spending their time more usefully by answering ten unique-ish questions on Kaplan&amp;ndash;Meier, hazard ratios, &amp;amp;c., than by writing one more &quot;how to&quot; for survival analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2014-03-12T16:14:06.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1992" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-13T17:09:10.633" Score="12" ViewCount="476" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can see in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1483/25936&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; that questions shouldn't be asked with &quot;thank you&quot;s, &quot;cheers&quot;, etc. But should we remove these during editing? I'm asking because the &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/a/9653/77151&quot;&gt;policy on the Mathematics&lt;/a&gt; site is to leave &quot;thank you&quot;s in place, so I don't want to make any assumptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, sometimes I see posts that begin with &quot;This question is too simple for this site&quot;, or similar. It seems less obvious that that should be edited out, but should that text go too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25936" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:22.773" LastActivityDate="2016-02-21T19:07:04.433" Title="What's the site policy on removing text such as &quot;thank you&quot;, or &quot;This question is too easy&quot;" Tags="|discussion|policy|editing|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1992" CreationDate="2014-03-13T23:02:45.943" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally I leave &quot;thank you&quot; statements or the like. It is nothing that clutters up the question and at the end of the day it's nice if people are friendly. A different thing is when someone has a lengthy introduction which is about anything else but statistics. Fortunately this rarely happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've never seen anyone starting their answer with &quot;this is too simple for this site&quot; or likewise statements, though I'd apply the same rule of thumb as before: if it clutters up the text due to excess length then it has to go. Otherwise I would just leave it even though I think it's not very polite to begin an answer this way. What is a trivial problem for some users can be a huge challenge for others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26338" LastActivityDate="2014-03-13T23:02:45.943" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1992" CreationDate="2014-03-14T01:05:47.517" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like so much around here, this pivots on the slight tension between &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Individual posters with short-term goals of getting an answer, who almost always want to express appreciation of your attention, their need for an answer, their gratitude if you provide one, and so forth. That's all fine, and I have no inclination to dismiss or downplay politeness. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The long-term goals of the forum, of building up posts with concise, clear and correct questions and answers as an archive for all interested. These goals are what drive a desire to cut out material that doesn't help technical understanding. Even cutting 5% of a post that isn't needed is 5% cut for possibly many future readers in a busy world. Questions and answers are public statements that happen to be written by individuals, rather than personal statements that happen to be visible widely. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say: We really can assume goodwill from essentially all concerned, except in a very few cases, and those separately require different treatment. So, although naive or new posters sometimes pad their posts, the silent reply is Thanks for the thanks, but we don't need that. Sometimes I will comment on the point if it seems appropriate, but I can't claim to be consistent on that. Sometimes I am in a hurry too, and irritated by someone's sloppy and careless presentation (with latitude when it's evident that English is not the first language). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I edit quite frequently. I usually edit for concise style, improved grammar, spelling and punctuation, and improved presentation of mathematics and code; but I will also cut down emotive content, including not only extended thanks, over-lengthy personal statements, and pleas of desperation or urgency. I think it's germane that those edits are very rarely reversed, although it is clearly very possible that many people never noticed, or did notice and disapprove, but lack the time and inclination to do anything about it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastActivityDate="2014-03-14T01:05:47.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1992" CreationDate="2014-03-14T03:35:28.760" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's a formal policy, but I'll talk about what I've noticed myself doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone just says 'thanks', I tend to leave it, even when doing a lengthy edit, even though it strictly doesn't belong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if I'm removing a subsequent signature, I may take 'thanks' as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's a long rambling thanks (say a couple of sentences) I take it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I object to the distraction of put-downs of the question or apologies for asking a basic question by the asker and tend to have a strong impulse remove those or encourage the OP to. (Not least because it puts down &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; users of the site with the same problem. They may think they're only calling themselves dense or uneducated, but since the questions are permanent, and often posted questions are questions other people have, ... they aren't)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's potentially a similar put-down with the basic-concepts tag. I'd say easily 2/3 of the posts with the tag don't come remotely close to being basic (people tend to underestimate the non-basicness of their problems, sometimes drastically), and many of the ones that could rate such a tag ... well, I often wish they wouldn't, for the same reason I don't like &quot;sorry this is such a dumb question&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We were all ignorant once - what's so wrong with a basic question that we must apologize for it? I don't come here only to answer questions at the outer edge of my knowledge. Indeed, sometimes formulating a good answer to what looks like a relatively simple question can be a surprisingly subtle task, and the review of the basics from a variety of viewpoints can often be helpful even when it's reasonably familiar territory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the emotive statements that come up, the kind that tend to get me the most is begging. I find those particularly objectionable. (I don't &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt; much object to a simple factual statement about time pressure, but multiple lines of &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;PLZ&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; answer my question&quot; or even worse, a title with it... that stuff pushes my buttons for several reasons at once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2014-03-14T03:48:31.807" LastActivityDate="2014-03-14T03:48:31.807" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1992" CreationDate="2014-03-14T14:32:37.313" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some good answers here. My policy (and I think the default overall), is that if I edit, I remove all peripheral comments, be they 'thanks', '-Bob', 'I'm not a statistician, sorry about the dumb question...', etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A topic that hasn't been covered much yet is deciding &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; to edit, or to approve suggested edits.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the only thing that needs to be done is remove 'thanks', I won't edit so as not to bump the thread.  If someone else has suggested an edit that only removes 'thanks', I click &lt;code&gt;reject&lt;/code&gt; as 'too minor'.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am slightly more likely to edit (approve) to remove only '-Bob' or 'I'm not a statistician...', but the older the thread is, the more likely I am to leave it.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The more of such stuff there is, the more likely I am to edit.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I edit for whatever reason, I will always remove this sort of thing as well.  If I review a suggested edit in which these have been left in, I will click &lt;code&gt;improve&lt;/code&gt; and remove them before approving.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2014-03-14T16:20:59.737" LastActivityDate="2014-03-14T16:20:59.737" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1997" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1998" CreationDate="2014-03-19T11:14:13.033" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;On cogsci there was migrated a question from academia. I think it better fits here I could be wrong but the design looks like a multivariable feed forward neural network. &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/questions/6026/what-do-we-call-the-middle-variables-in-a-complex-research-model&quot;&gt;https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/questions/6026/what-do-we-call-the-middle-variables-in-a-complex-research-model&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11279" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:17.973" LastActivityDate="2014-03-19T13:00:12.343" Title="Does this question belong here?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1997" CreationDate="2014-03-19T13:00:12.343" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not the best fit, but it is about understanding the parts of a path model.  (It isn't an artificial neural network.)  Path models are part of statistics, so it can be migrated here.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2014-03-19T13:00:12.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="35" CreationDate="2014-03-21T00:54:40.870" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that the (almost universal) opinion in answers here was that the second kind of question should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be closed or migrated from CV ... but such questions are being routinely closed/migrated at the moment (many more than I am comfortable with). I'm voting against many of the closures, but usually to no avail. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed it seems just recently like almost any mention of a package or a function in a package is treated as grounds for closure. I think it's high time for us to revisit this question, now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2014-03-21T00:54:40.870" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2001" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2002" CreationDate="2014-03-23T13:32:29.087" Score="3" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see that older threads are marked as modified by the community moderator bot, although there are no actual edits. It brings up unanswered questions on my active list, some of which are quite interesting. However I haven't seen this happening on other sites. What's the algorithm or statistical process used for the community bot &quot;edits&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25936" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T08:54:23.287" Title="Edited by community moderator bot (1 diamond rep)" Tags="|support|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2001" CreationDate="2014-03-23T14:34:13.260" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Those aren't &lt;em&gt;edits&lt;/em&gt;.  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;community user&lt;/a&gt; simply 'bumps' questions without a single answer that is either upvoted or accepted to the top of the main page.  As far as I know, it picks such a question at random from all of the questions meeting the criteria that exist.  My impression has been that unanswered questions are 'bumped' once per month (although that isn't part of the official explanation).  The community user 'bumps' one question per hour.  I have no idea why you wouldn't see this on other SE sites.  I assume that you would, but I don't follow any other sites closely enough to comment.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some additional information at this meta.SO thread: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19738/who-is-the-community-user&quot;&gt;Who is the Community user?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2014-03-23T15:15:47.193" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2004" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-25T15:50:34.953" Score="12" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been an active participant in the site for a while now, and I never really figured out how to deal with issues that keep recurring (nor have I figured out &quot;Community&quot; topics).  I would appreciate some pointers.  Is there a place for statistics FAQs and their ever-growing answers?  Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2014-03-28T02:16:37.013" Title="Common Issues and FAQs" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2005" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-25T20:04:32.847" Score="-4" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see that it's been &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/210/can-we-have-a-belongs-on-any-se-site-option&quot;&gt;asked to allow questions to be migrated to any SE network&lt;/a&gt;, and I don't necessarily agree (complete red-herring topics should be closed-closed, not migrated, fewer network options will help expedite that process). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, philosophy addresses many aspects of probability, interpretation of probability, and especially the seemingly endless banter about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=bayesian+frequentist&quot;&gt;Bayesian versus frequentist&lt;/a&gt; probability. Operational questions about how to accurately calculate and report probabilities, estimates, and inference in each paradigm is warranted. But very often, things are spun around into the basic misconception of what probability is (in either context). As much as we, as statisticians, love that discussion, I don't think it actually contributes much to our site to have to explicate the finer points of this as often as it comes up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as there are grey areas with whether certain questions should be migrated to StackOverflow and Mathematics, I think the community can decide and help clean up the questions a little bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2014-03-25T20:14:07.180" Title="Add Philosophy as a possible SE network to migrate off-topic questions" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2005" CreationDate="2014-03-25T20:14:07.180" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;During the last six months we have migrated 400 posts and none of them have gone to the Philosophy site.  This is not due to lack of awareness or inability to do so: moderators review close votes and can perform migrations to any SE site.  On that basis alone there appears to be no need for this feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning and interpretation of the terms and concepts we use are of interest to this community and are on topic here.  Our presumption should be that when the original poster elects to ask their question here, then they want the reaction of a community of statisticians and data analysts rather than the advice of a philosophical community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the rare occasion anyone happens to find a thread that looks like it would be better suited for the Philosophy site, please just flag it for moderator attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2014-03-25T20:14:07.180" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2007" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-26T11:50:06.180" Score="10" ViewCount="642" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/22657962/1412059&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; is clearly off-topic on Stack Overflow (it asks for package recommendations). However, as the answer shows it should be (possibly with some minor revision) a good fit for CV. So why was it migrated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11849" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2014-03-27T02:09:12.587" Title="Why was this question migrated to SO?" Tags="|discussion|migration|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2007" CreationDate="2014-03-26T14:19:24.910" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Software-specific questions have always been a touchy subject here.  When questions are &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; about how to do something in &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt;, or what does this error message mean, or what is the code for, or what is the package for, are off-topic for CV.  However, it can be tricky.  For what it's worth, my rule is simple: what does the OP need explained?  If it is a statistical (machine learning, etc.) concept / principle, then it belongs here; if it is something about the language / software, it doesn't.  In the case of that thread, the answer was ultimately about the current state of statistical science on the topic, so I would agree that it belongs on CV.  But, that was presumably not known to the migrators of the thread.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, another point about migration of &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt;-related threads needs to be made clearer here on CV.  In the little that I follow SO, and in the discussions about migration of &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; questions, it has become apparent that any &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt;-related question needs to have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/5963269/1217536&quot;&gt;reproducible example&lt;/a&gt; to be on-topic on SO.  That is, it needs some minimal data and code that will allow potential answerers on SO to reproduce the issue.  That question did not have such, so I wouldn't have voted to migrate (I would have voted to close, though--mistakenly given the true nature of the answer).  I think that question was tricky in that it seems to be of such a nature that it doesn't need a reproducible example.  But my understanding of on- / off-topic criteria for &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; questions on SO is that they construe &lt;em&gt;programming&lt;/em&gt; questions quite narrowly.  That is, since it wouldn't need a reproducible example, it is off-topic.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another issue, I think, is that people seem to believe that all questions should have a home somewhere in the SE system.  This belief leads people to think, 'it's either on-topic here or on SO, and it's not on-topic here, thus by disjunction, it must be on-topic on SO'.  However, many &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;Stata&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;SAS&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;SPSS&lt;/code&gt;) related questions will not be on-topic on either site, but should be asked on the r-help-listserv (statalist, etc.).  That is where I would have encouraged the OP to ask.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, the requirement of having a reproducible example on SO is not so rigid for other languages (e.g., &lt;code&gt;Python&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;SAS&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Stata&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;MATLAB&lt;/code&gt;, etc.).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I would be fine, given the answer, if the question were migrated &lt;em&gt;back&lt;/em&gt; to CV.  (I might edit the question to say something like, 'why doesn't there seem to be a package for LASSO standard errors, are they difficult to compute?', though, to make it easier to find, and easier to see it's statistical nature.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2014-03-26T14:19:24.910" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2007" CreationDate="2014-03-26T17:05:55.840" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a particularly great question for Stack Overflow. I wouldn't necessarily have closed it if it had been &lt;em&gt;asked&lt;/em&gt; there, but given it was originally asked &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2007/why-was-this-question-migrated-to-so/2008#2008&quot;&gt;arguably isn't wholly inappropriate&lt;/a&gt; I'm not going to waste time trying to re-write it to fit somewhere else - y'all can edit / answer / close / continue discussing as you feel appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it did collect an additional answer on Stack Overflow (from a member of this site), I migrated it back and closed the original as a duplicate (and then deleted the original just to simplify things - all outstanding links will now redirect to the most recent version of this question). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember: migrations are fairly permanent unless you get moderators from multiple sites involved in cleaning them up. Generally you'll want to avoid migrating &lt;em&gt;borderline&lt;/em&gt; questions, since it just makes things difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4454" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2014-03-26T17:05:55.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2010" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-26T18:03:33.973" Score="7" ViewCount="2408" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/91181/1390&quot;&gt;recent Answer&lt;/a&gt; I posted on CV, I included markdown for a link, just like I have done thousands of times on CV and SO. This time the link text wasn't rendered as a hyperlink, either using the inline notation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[link text](URL)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or the reference link notation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[link text][1]&#xA;....&#xA;[1]: URL&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rendering links seems to be working just fine here on CV Meta. Have I lost the plot and gotten my syntax in a muddle or is there some other problem with CV's rendering?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I include the entire source for my Answer below to save you heading to CV to look at it. The &lt;strong&gt;Gelman et al 2008&lt;/strong&gt; part should be rendered as a hyperlink. The Answer uses the reference notation, but I've tried the inline notation as well with no luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Given the stated sample size (150,000), why do you think there will be bias due to &quot;small sample&quot; size? You have 1500 observations of the positive case, which I wouldn't normally think of as being *small*.&#xA;&#xA;An alternative in R is the **brglm** package, which also implements Firth's method.&#xA;&#xA;However, I was recently pointed to a paper [Gelman et al 2008][1] which showed Firth's method performing quite badly compared to other methods for bias reduction, in a Bayesian context. The authors of that paper wrote the `bayesglm()` function in R package **arm** to provide a range of priors on the model coefficients (Firth's method boils down to a particular choice of prior in the model; a Jeffreys prior). My main reason for mentioning it is that it may also work more efficiently than the options considered thus far.&#xA;&#xA;(For some reason the markdown isn't rendering the link to the paper: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/priors11.pdf‎)&#xA;&#xA;[1]: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/priors11.pdf‎&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1390" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2017-02-26T20:24:56.603" Title="Markdown link not being rendered as a hyperlink?" Tags="|support|hyperlinks|markdown|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2007" CreationDate="2014-03-26T23:32:52.310" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the decision to migrate my question reflects an over-zealous concern by the moderators for maintaining a strict separation from SO. Questions about software &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; appropriate on CV. The FAQ (I wrote the first version) includes &quot;statistical and data-driven computing&quot;. Asking what package implements a specific procedure falls directly into that category. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the question is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; appropriate on SO because I wasn't asking a programming question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with @gung that CV questions should only be asking about &quot;a statistical (machine learning, etc.) concept / principle&quot;. That is clearly too restrictive according to the FAQ (or whatever it is now called at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tour&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is inappropriate to ask a question about software on SO or CV, where should it be asked? I think it is reasonable to think that all (good) questions should have a home on the SE network, and so I do not agree that the question needs to be shunted off to one of the R lists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could have written the question differently as @gung has suggested, but then it would be a different question, and not the one I wanted answering. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my view, for what it is worth, is that the question &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a good fit for CV and does not need revising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2014-03-27T02:09:12.587" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2004" CreationDate="2014-03-28T01:43:56.273" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1122/1036&quot;&gt;very similar question&lt;/a&gt; came up around a year ago, although I'm unaware of any material change in the site in response to that. I will suggest cardinal's suggestions are still just as relevant and highlight other communities' behavior in response to similar problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the faq tag &lt;em&gt;on the main site&lt;/em&gt; is the simplest way forward. I imagine you have some answers of your own in mind about evaluating regression models: you could add a &lt;code&gt;faq&lt;/code&gt; tag to the question yourself and then in the future make sure to link back to it whenever a similar question returns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interesting project may be to examine the network of answers and see which ones are linked to most frequently. These might be good candidates for applying the &lt;code&gt;faq&lt;/code&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2014-03-28T02:16:37.013" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2013" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2014" CreationDate="2014-03-31T12:23:07.557" Score="11" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have quite a few questions in mind that would work much better if I could attach PDFs of academic papers to the post. I could then refer to the PDF in the question. I have access to the PDFs through my university, but otherwise, anyone wanting to access the PDF would need to take out a subscription to that journal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to attach PDFs of papers to questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If no, is it possible include screenshots of specific parts of a paper?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12492" LastEditorUserId="12492" LastEditDate="2014-03-31T12:32:09.753" LastActivityDate="2014-04-02T14:12:04.903" Title="Am I allowed to attach PDFs of papers to questions?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2013" CreationDate="2014-03-31T14:11:36.187" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most likely those papers are copyrighted, and if you posted a downloaded version you would be violating that copyright as would SE.  It is fine to reference papers and link to their hosting site.  You can also quote from them or post a screenshot of a part of them as fair use.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2014-03-31T14:11:36.187" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2013" CreationDate="2014-04-01T00:11:33.693" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This started out as a comment but once it got toward filling up three comments worth of text, I figured I better move it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In response to whuber's and gung's points about 'fair use':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Fair use' as a legal term applying to copyright seems to be part of US copyright law. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright conditions can vary from country to country; for example Australian copyright law* is a little different - there are a list of somewhat similar exceptions to what would be exempt in the US, but the broader notion appears to be significantly more restrictive (there's no explicit and broad 'fair use' doctrine as there is in US law; on the other hand, things seem to pass out of copyright somewhat earlier). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* I was very recently on the receiving end of some somewhat strongly-worded education from an Australian student of law on this exact topic ('fair use') in another forum on the internet. He was able to point me to the precise sections of the Australian law in that case (which IIRC don't actually contain the phrase 'fair use' at all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not everyone is in the US, so there's something of a potential legal minefield here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One person might take an action that would be legal for them in their home country (reproduce some section of a document under the 'fair use doctrine'), but which induces another person to inadvertently break the law in theirs (such as by opening a linked document or viewing an image of a section of text they have no reason to anticipate is potentially illegal for them to have even a temporary copy of on their machine, but which copy is generated by opening the link to the document or image - or even just viewing the question, in the case of say imgur links in a question). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People may well open such a link/view such an image, close it (perhaps even after noticing they shouldn't have) and not realize there's still a (potentially illegal) copy on their machine, but for which certain organizations may well seek to pursue them vigorously for were it later discovered. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the vigor, even extreme prejudice with which some particular organizations (such as the RIAA and MPAA) seem to have famously pursued (in a number of countries) even quite minor issues such as people having copies of songs on a machine when they were unaware the copies even existed, or where they already legally owned a copy of the material, it may be that we need to be extra cautious about advising people what they can do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the least, I think we should take care telling people they can safely rely on a doctrine like 'fair use' that might not even apply to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[edit: On the other hand, I don't think we should tie ourselves overly in knots trying to accomodate every legal framework. Ultimately people need to take some trouble to be aware at least of what circumstances apply in their own part of the world and make their own informed choices. I don't know the OP's locale, but it might be reasonable not to assume he's from the US until we know otherwise.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2014-04-01T08:58:50.877" LastActivityDate="2014-04-01T08:58:50.877" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2016" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-01T00:21:44.103" Score="12" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just seen an answer closed as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/92052/kolmogorov-smirnov-test-for-large-sample&quot;&gt;duplicate&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text in the blue box containing the information about the reason it was closed says &quot;This question has been asked before and already has an answer.&quot;... but the thing it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/92035/how-to-guess-a-curve-distribution-from-count-data&quot;&gt;marked as a duplicate of&lt;/a&gt; doesn't have an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that still legitimate? If it is, shouldn't that reason be changed so it doesn't say the duplicate has an answer that it doesn't have? If the text can't be changed, wouldn't it suggest the intent is that both should remain open until one of them actually gets an answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I'm not trying to suggest that there's something egregious here - and certainly I don't think there's anything but the right motives present - but if I find this quite confusing, it would not be surprising if the OP does. Some additional clarity on this issue would be good, I think.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2014-04-05T18:51:59.690" Title="Is a rough duplicate without an answer a valid reason for closure?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2016" CreationDate="2014-04-01T13:48:20.000" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a gray area, but I think it would be best if we changed the text to &quot;This question has been asked before&quot;.  Consider the case of someone who posts an identical question several times in a row (maybe once per day or so) or because their question didn't get an answer.  This seems to happen somewhat regularly.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I suspect the moderators don't have the ability to change that text.  In light of that fact, we could just be somewhat more cautious about closing threads as duplicates of unanswered questions (although I would still do it in many cases).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2014-04-01T13:48:20.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2018" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2019" CreationDate="2014-04-01T18:26:11.743" Score="2" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently magically increased my reputation to be 32k, but I still can't read those deleted replies and comments, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/91953/what-inferential-method-produces-the-empirical-cdf&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Can I? &#xA;p.s. Happy everyday! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1005" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2014-04-01T18:50:37.687" Title="Not able to read deleted replies with rep &gt;10k?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2018" CreationDate="2014-04-01T18:50:37.687" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is an SE April fools day gag.  They are offering &quot;magic unicoins&quot; that you can use to do things like (appear to) increase your reputation, etc.  I am not surprised that it does not have any real effects (for example, you don't get the extra privileges that would come with that reputation).  I predict that it will be gone at midnight GMT.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2014-04-01T18:50:37.687" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2013" CreationDate="2014-04-02T14:12:04.903" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Legal/ethical issues aside, if someone has to read all, or most, or several dispersed parts of a research paper in order to answer your question, it's less likely to attract interest, &amp;amp; therefore answers, as well as other readers who might be helped by it. Better in this case to extract &amp;amp; summarize relevant information, referencing the original paper for background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2014-04-02T14:12:04.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2016" CreationDate="2014-04-05T18:51:59.690" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the message &quot;This question has been asked before and already has an answer...&quot; was not carelessly written, then it just covers cases where the question is a duplicate &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the OP can find the answer elsewhere in the forum. Nevertheless what @gung refers to is also an existing matter that should be handled: serial posting of the same unanswered question, or just two identical questions, irrespective of whether the first has an answer.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pehaps this should be turned into a &quot;feature request&quot; -to close the question as duplicate while having the choice to select one of two messages -the current version of the message or its truncated version that gung proposes.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, perhaps it would be cleverer to close &lt;em&gt;the older&lt;/em&gt; one, since it appears that newer questions have more chances of being answered... which would require another message:&quot;This unanswered question has just become a duplicate -of a newer one&quot;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28746" LastActivityDate="2014-04-05T18:51:59.690" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2022" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-05T22:18:41.763" Score="12" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stackexchange recently opened up a new site, &lt;a href=&quot;http://matheducators.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;matheducators.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;, for public beta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a site for math teachers to discuss how to be better teachers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have already been a few statistics education questions. Because mathematics and statistics are often taught by the same instructors and with similar methods, I'm sure a lot more questions will arise about teaching statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing I'm not sure about is how many stats teachers are currently on the site. If there is anyone on CV interested in statistics education, we would welcome you with open arms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18177" LastEditorUserId="159" LastEditDate="2014-04-06T00:52:03.200" LastActivityDate="2014-04-06T00:52:03.200" Title="Mathematics Educators Stackexchange and its relationship to statistics" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2023" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-08T10:33:07.070" Score="1" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question turned out to be a duplicate. Yet, it gathered some good answers. However, one of the answers to the other, first, question suits me best. Can I accept it as best answer to my question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42717" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2014-04-08T11:29:05.403" LastActivityDate="2014-04-11T18:07:31.110" Title="Accepting an answer of another/duplicate question" Tags="|support|answers|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2023" CreationDate="2014-04-11T18:07:31.110" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer your specific question, as the comments already stated, &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt; you can not accept an answer to a different question. So in light of that, reasonable actions to take are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flag your question to be merged with the duplicate. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answer &lt;em&gt;your own&lt;/em&gt; question, given the information in the other. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Nick Cox says in the comments make sure to link to the other question, both for sake of proper attribution as well as creating a strong indicator between the two questions. (The linked and related questions bars on the right hand side are wonderful for navigating similar questions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the disruption that occurs when merging questions together - especially if your question already has an answer(s) to it - I would prefer option 2 unless the questions are flagrantly duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2014-04-11T18:07:31.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2026" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2028" CreationDate="2014-04-13T03:32:42.533" Score="39" ViewCount="1704" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed the ad on the main site today for the data science proposal, which evidently is 77% committed.  Some of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/55053?phase=commitment&quot;&gt;people committed&lt;/a&gt; to the proposal are users on CV.  Most of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/55053?phase=definition&quot;&gt;questions listed&lt;/a&gt; look like they would be on-topic on CV, or even might be duplicates of existing questions.  A minority of the questions are more programming oriented, but I would guess they could fit on one or another of the various SE programming sites.  Of course, people can form a new site if they want, but I'm wondering what the value-add is?  Is there something we're lacking, or should we be more welcoming of something?  Moreover, what do people think of the proposal?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-08-06T23:36:40.650" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T20:17:24.543" Title="Data Science SE" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|datascience-stackexchange|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2026" CreationDate="2014-04-13T10:10:30.900" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure what about &quot;data science&quot; would not be covered either here or at StackOverflow, but one thing I can think of is programming questions about &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;SAS&lt;/code&gt; and the like. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2014-04-13T10:10:30.900" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2026" CreationDate="2014-04-13T17:48:56.190" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone raised this issue in Area 51, &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13476/overlap-with-existing-sites&quot;&gt;Overlap with existing sites&lt;/a&gt;, with only a little discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would think Cross Validated would be suitable for most Data Science topics, but apparently there is a perception that CV is for theoretical stats questions. The CV description is &quot;a question and answer site for people interested in statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, and data visualization&quot; which seems aligned with Data Science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as the question of what can be done to avoid the overlap goes, we can&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;participate in the Area 51 discussion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;start some more organized effort of &quot;try CV first&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;add &quot;data science&quot; to the CV description&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;be accepting of less statistical data science questions (data cleaning, storage, ...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a point of comparison, there are two math sites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Mathematics&lt;/a&gt; &quot;for people studying math at any level and professionals in related fields&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/&quot;&gt;MathOverflow&lt;/a&gt; &quot;for professional mathematicians&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1191" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T08:41:05.607" LastActivityDate="2014-04-13T17:48:56.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2026" CreationDate="2014-04-15T14:34:13.810" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Spoiler: a highly opinionated answer follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am here with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2027/5739&quot;&gt;Peter Flom&lt;/a&gt;. I think questions on how to handle stuff in statistical packages deserve a site that is separate from CV and separate from SO. I would be the first to admit that I am behind on any of the Data Science issues involving Hadoop or Mahout -- I don't get to see the limits of my existing tools in the work that I have, and however much I would love to learn Python and such, I don't have the need for the applications that I am an expert in, and thus have no pressure to learn them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how it settles in my head (which is the sample of size 1, and there are 4000 heads on CV meta, most of which are undoubtedly better than mine). To me, programming is figuring out how compilers work, and what they allow you to do, almost regardless of the input data (and a good program will protect itself from poor data, anyway). Most statistical packages (excluding probably R) lack the syntax features to express these levels of abstraction from the data. On the contrary, in data analysis tasks, we usually have to take data for granted, and dance around it, may be with some reshaping or contracting of the data or construction of some new variables to better explicate the existing data structures (and the vast majority of the real life data sets represent a single rectangle -- medical patients and their vitals, say; sometimes two or three rectangles -- patients plus hospitals plus insurance companies). (Going back to my ignorance comment in the first paragraph -- this is the kind of data that I deal with, not the jagged, multiple sites twitter threads that many people fancy to mine.) So R or SAS or Stata questions on SO have looked out of place to me all the way along.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has been a very recent discussion about this on Statalist, the support forum for Stata software. Due to some planned hardware and personnel retirement, this whole list is being transplanted from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a text-only email version&lt;/a&gt; to a &lt;a href=&quot;http://statalist.org/forums&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;forum version&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2014-04/msg00112.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;My wishful thinking&lt;/a&gt; was, though, that the mass of Stata users (several hundred, I am guessing) could move to StackExchange, for the mutual benefit. The Statalist users will get a functional platform that works well in improving answers and collecting knowledge. CV will get a group of users with high technical expertise (although some of the most active ones are already here; you can easily identify them in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/stata/topusers&quot;&gt;appropriate tag&lt;/a&gt; activity).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as duplication of the content goes, there has been discussion of how to split mathematical statistics questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1929/5739&quot;&gt;between CV and math&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2022/5739&quot;&gt;what to do with education questions&lt;/a&gt;. Duplication is probably unavoidable; however in case of the overlap with math, at least math people are aware that theoretical statistics is present on CV. Whether the data science people are aware that A/B tests &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student%27s_t-distribution#History_and_etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;have been invented some hundred years ago&lt;/a&gt; is an open question to me; some are, but many probably aren't. What to do with the data science movement is &lt;a href=&quot;http://magazine.amstat.org/blog/2013/07/01/datascience/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an open question for professional statistical societies&lt;/a&gt;, but that's a wave that statisticians cannot steer even the slightest. Extrapolating this experience here, I would expect that the CV users won't be able to stop the Data Science Area 51 from whatever trajectory it is on (although comparisons with Big Data proposal that never took off the ground are very obvious), especially given a much greater mass of programmers-proper in the StackExchange system as a whole compared to the mass of statisticians-proper on CV, and a much lower reputation of whuber compared to Jon Skeet. If anybody will have the patience to sift through the Data Science questions and point to the appropriate duplicates on CV, I guess we should give them a platinum badge of a saint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2014-11-25T03:22:47.523" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2031" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2032" CreationDate="2014-04-16T09:11:42.740" Score="4" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;No one likes duplicate questions, but I'm considering posting a question about information theory. It would be well-suited to both Cross Validated AND &lt;a href=&quot;https://crypto.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Cryptography&lt;/a&gt;. I'd be interested in the opinions of both communities. Can a single question be shared across two (or more) Stack Exchange sites? If so, how? If not, why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36804" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:48:27.653" LastActivityDate="2016-08-06T23:38:43.570" Title="Can questions be asked on more than one Stack Exchange site?" Tags="|discussion|questions|policy|cross-posting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2031" CreationDate="2014-04-16T13:48:45.197" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term you are looking for is &quot;cross-posting&quot;.  It is a little bit ambiguous, but the general consensus is that it is inappropriate.  This topic has been discussed before on meta.CV; see these threads:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1880/7290&quot;&gt;Is the help 'misinformed' on the question of cross-posting?&lt;/a&gt;,  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1948/7290&quot;&gt;Cross-posting in CV and math.SE tends to become an epidemic&lt;/a&gt;, and  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/941/7290&quot;&gt;Posting the same question on other statistics forums in addition to CV&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your situation may be different, though.  The typical problem is that someone asks an identical statistics question here and on math.SE (which has a &lt;code&gt;[statistics]&lt;/code&gt; tag and small set of dedicated followers), or an R / statistics question here and on SO. Your description is too vague for me to know for sure, but I wonder if the statistical and cryptographical aspects are different aspects of the question.  If you want a statistical perspective on something, and a cryptographical perspective on it as well, that strikes me as acceptable.  You aren't just fishing for a faster answer, or trying to find someone who'll do your homework for you, and the answers wouldn't provide duplicate information across the SE system.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2014-04-17T02:09:33.500" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2033" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-19T07:51:56.843" Score="10" ViewCount="314" Body="&lt;p&gt;I frequently post mock ups of my data to help get better answers to my questions. But it occurred to me that I would probably be better off posting my real data. Is there anything wrong with asking questions in which I upload my real data? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12492" LastActivityDate="2014-04-20T10:23:33.770" Title="Can I post my real data?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2033" CreationDate="2014-04-19T08:09:40.030" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your real data are often exactly what are needed to help us understand your question. Indeed, it is often very frustrating for people who offer comments or answer questions to be told that someone's data are really quite different from that first stated or implied, so that a thread has to be reoriented with time-consuming secondary questions, revised answers, and the like. (Alternatively, people may decide not to give (more) time to a poorly asked question.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posting of data need not imply that the dataset is included within your question. If it is small, say a few hundred values, that can be fine. But often a link to a publicly accessible datafile is sufficient. It's best not to assume that everyone uses the same software as you, so avoid proprietary or idiosyncratic data formats. Comma- or tab-separated text files may be considered universally accessible. (Nor are software-specific questions always on-topic here, so the defence of being an X user is not much of a defence on Cross Validated for posting datasets only X can read. Your question should always have a statistical core, and therefore is presumed to interest people who use quite different software.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some areas in which caution is recommended. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the data you are working with are not strictly yours, but unpublished data from other scientists or scholars, you should seek their permission before publication. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Publication of data should not breach the anonymity, confidentiality or privacy that subjects, institutions or clients may require, deserve or expect. In general, this is between you and those persons or institutions and it is your responsibility to check on any restraints or constraints on publication. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is possible that the real data are just too large or too complicated in ways that do not bear on your question. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(Nod to @Glen_b) Remember that the web location should remain stable and accessible. The point of postings here is not just to provide immediate gratification to the original poster, but to build up an archive of questions interesting and useful to others. A web link that is no longer valid weakens your question as something helpful to as many as possible for as long as possible. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A rule of thumb I suggest is that helps to see real data of the number and kind that drives your question. Even if you cannot post the full real data, telling us about measurement and sampling protocols, actual sample sizes, number and kinds of variables, and the like  often helps greatly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE On how you do it: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copy and paste of data as text is fine. If you copy data as you would copy code, alignment of rows and columns is easier to preserve. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The overarching principle is blindingly obvious, but I will spell it out, as it is sometimes ignored: The key point is not just that others can see your data, but that they can read them easily into their own favourite software to carry out their own analyses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes people save a screenshot of a data listing as an image, but a dataset presented in that form is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; easy to copy as data. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2014-04-20T10:23:33.770" LastActivityDate="2014-04-20T10:23:33.770" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2035" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-23T18:45:30.937" Score="2" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently signed up here and had expected that a previous question I posted without signing up (although giving my e-mail adress) would be merged such that it would be attributed to my account. This did not happen though, can I do this somehow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44344" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2014-04-23T18:52:11.103" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T18:52:11.103" Title="Merge users with same e-mail?" Tags="|support|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2035" CreationDate="2014-04-23T18:51:29.843" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help system&lt;/a&gt; directs you to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/merging-accounts&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/merging-accounts&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T18:51:29.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2037" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-24T16:37:25.210" Score="3" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed an increase in my reputation today further to an upvote to one of my answers. Surprisingly, the increase is 6 units, not 10.&#xA;I'm aware of the ways one can gain/lose &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;reputation&lt;/a&gt; (also saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/746/27403&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; closely related question), and based on my recent actions I guess I got 2 down votes to some of my questions/answers.&#xA;I don't mind the &quot;loss&quot; of these 4 units, but I would like to see where/how I lost them to potentially address issues in my questions/answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I can't find a trace of the 4-unit loss when checking the &lt;code&gt;\reputation&lt;/code&gt; tab on my profile page. The only item I see for today is the upvote. I also noticed similar inexplicable small reputations losses 2-3 times last summer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How could I find out where I lost reputation? Is there a bug? Would it make sense to add a &quot;type&quot; display filter for reputation (alongside the existing &quot;post&quot;, &quot;time&quot;, &quot;graph&quot; displays) that would allow to see reputation changes grouped by categories, possibly corresponding to the cases listed &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27403" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2014-04-25T04:55:20.377" Title="Finding where/how reputation went down" Tags="|support|feature-request|votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2037" CreationDate="2014-04-24T17:32:14.583" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;When (certain low-rep) users are removed from the site, all their votes are reversed.  (This is a matter of ongoing debate, so please do not discuss it here: visit the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;main meta site&lt;/a&gt;.)  The SE team also occasionally reverses votes it deems were applied in bad faith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/27403/quantibex?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;reputation summary&lt;/a&gt;, available by linking through your user profile, shows that you lost two +2 votes from the removal of a user.  (I am not sure whether these specific entries are visible to just the mods, to you and the mods, or to all viewers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is almost never anything to be learned about your site interaction when reputation changes in this manner.  The (rare) exception is when votes were reversed due to some gaming of the system, such as when rings of voters are detected.  (It is possible to be the unwitting target of such votes, so there are no negative implications for you.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many details of the voting system are usually not revealed, to protect the innocent and the guilty as well as to make it harder for people to misuse their votes.  Even the information available to moderators is limited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2014-04-24T17:32:14.583" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2037" CreationDate="2014-04-24T23:34:33.800" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;For future reference, we can rule out downvotes, because those show up in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/27403/quantibex?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;your reputation score history&lt;/a&gt; ordinarily. The &lt;code&gt;-4&lt;/code&gt; you noticed does not appear when I look at your rep score history, but I can usually see a &lt;code&gt;-2&lt;/code&gt; on my own history when a user or post was removed. This is a loss of &lt;code&gt;+2&lt;/code&gt; rep that you originally gained by suggesting an accepted edit. It hurts much more when a user gets removed who had upvoted several of your posts, or when serial upvoting is automatically reversed: then you lose &lt;code&gt;+5&lt;/code&gt; per question upvote and &lt;code&gt;+10&lt;/code&gt; per answer upvote! See the relevant meta-controversy:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/125740/246931&quot;&gt;Don't throw away all votes when a user is deleted&lt;/a&gt;.&quot; &lt;sub&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/users/616736/lorem-ipsum?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;The SO user formerly known as Yoda&lt;/a&gt; once lost 1685 rep!)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess as to why you're unable to see the two entries on your own rep score history is that you haven't checked the box on the bottom left that shows these (see inside &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/19775/246931&quot;&gt;obligatory freehand circle&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4VVmD.png&quot; alt=&quot;Stack Exchange loves some freehand circles...&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, losses also occur when a post gets migrated, but you gain your vote reputation back at the destination site. Sadly, the same is not true of suggested edit reputation gains (else I'd be rich on SO). Then again, one meta-post (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/125787/246931&quot;&gt;Points for answer migrated with question, points for edit not migrated&lt;/a&gt;) suggests something I can't explain: he kept his suggested edit gains on Server Fault post-migration. This has not been the case for my suggested edits to questions asked here on CV that got migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2014-04-25T04:55:20.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2040" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2041" CreationDate="2014-04-25T08:51:12.867" Score="5" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two days ago the Community bot pushed a great amount of old threads. I've somewhat lost track of the more recent ones that I found interesting and when I went online the other day I was a little confused as to what happened. Was this a one-time event or will the bot continue to more actively push up old questions? Interestingly it seemed to have pushed questions with accepted answers as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26338" LastActivityDate="2014-04-25T13:35:40.643" Title="Why did the Community Bot reshuffle the CV meta?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2040" CreationDate="2014-04-25T13:30:17.967" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There were many posts over the years that contained links to Meta Stack Overflow, which served as both the meta for SO and as the meta for the Stack Exchange system.  But recently (see the official announcement &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/04/announcing-the-launch-of-meta-stack-exchange/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), meta.SO has been changed / split into &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; (the meta for the whole SE system) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;meta.SO&lt;/a&gt; proper (which is now the meta only for SO).  Most of the old meta.SO threads are now meta.SE threads.  As a result, the links in our old meta.CV posts needed to be updated.  The community bot edited all those posts to update the links.  The reshuffling was just a side effect.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2014-04-25T13:35:40.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2044" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2045" CreationDate="2014-05-02T23:36:49.193" Score="5" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently I'm far away from the reputation required to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Or is there a reason not to do this?  Granted one can simply search the site for &quot;Rayleigh,&quot; but I assume the tags are there so anyone concentrating on it can subscribe/follow.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34792" LastEditorUserId="13145" LastEditDate="2014-05-07T21:06:43.797" LastActivityDate="2014-05-07T21:06:43.797" Title="Could someone create tag Rayleigh-distribution?" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2044" CreationDate="2014-05-03T01:58:42.097" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot create your own tags, even on your own questions, until your reputation is &gt;300 (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/create-tags&quot;&gt;privileges: create tags&lt;/a&gt;).  Since it is your own question, and seems relevant, I edited your post to create the tag for you.  Be aware that, as noted on the help center page:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;new tags will be automatically culled and removed from the system if they are not used by at least 1 other question in a 6 month period&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2014-05-03T01:58:42.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2046" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2050" CreationDate="2014-05-03T03:01:17.397" Score="3" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I notice that now there seems to be a rust colored flag between my usercard and &quot;review&quot; in the top bar.  As I type this, it reads &lt;code&gt;4&lt;/code&gt;.  Clicking on it takes me to the review queue where there are... &lt;strong&gt;0&lt;/strong&gt; items to be reviewed.  Does anyone know what is the deal is?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2014-05-03T22:24:20.243" Title="Review flag does not indicate items to review" Tags="|support|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2047" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-03T13:51:53.340" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should any tag for a distribution include that &lt;em&gt;-distribution&lt;/em&gt;, or only when necessary for disambiguation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the following distribution tags do not include that suffix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;chi-squared: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/chi-squared&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;chi-squared&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;chi-squared&lt;/a&gt; (even though this &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; ambiguous)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gaussian (potentially ambiguous; n.b., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gaussian&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gaussian&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gaussian&lt;/a&gt; redirects to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/normal-distribution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;normal-distribution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;normal-distribution&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Weibull: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weibull&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weibull&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weibull&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the following do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dirichlet-distribution: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dirichlet-distribution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dirichlet-distribution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dirichlet-distribution&lt;/a&gt; (even though this not ambiguous)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pareto-distribution: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pareto-distribution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pareto-distribution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pareto-distribution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tweedie-distribution: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tweedie-distribution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tweedie-distribution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tweedie-distribution&lt;/a&gt; (not ambiguous)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34792" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2014-05-03T15:35:50.867" LastActivityDate="2014-05-03T16:00:12.820" Title="Should distribution tags always include &quot;-distribution&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2047" CreationDate="2014-05-03T14:15:51.250" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that we also have a tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/distributions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;distributions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;distributions&lt;/a&gt;, users can always amend a generic tag like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/chi-squared&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;chi-squared&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;chi-squared&lt;/a&gt; in order to avoid ambiguities. For instance, a question concerning the chi-squared test can equally be used together with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/inference&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;inference&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;inference&lt;/a&gt; to show that the question is not about the distribution. For this kind of tag I think it's beneficial to not have an additional one for the distribution itself. Otherwise we might unnecessarily inflate the number of tags even though existing tags can be used in combination for the same purpose. After all this flexibility is implied by allowing the use of multiple tags per question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26338" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2014-05-03T15:37:05.350" LastActivityDate="2014-05-03T15:37:05.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2047" CreationDate="2014-05-03T16:00:12.820" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a preference for shorter tag names when possible.  That is why I created a tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rayleigh&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rayleigh&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rayleigh&lt;/a&gt;, and not &lt;code&gt;[rayleigh-distribution]&lt;/code&gt; (but I didn't really think about it).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When there are enough questions categorized under a tag, if there is a demonstrated need, we can create additional tags that will further differentiate a category.  As an example, I split up &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fisher&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fisher&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fisher&lt;/a&gt; when it seemed to become problematically heterogeneous (in my mind) and created new tags for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fishersexact&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fishersexact&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fishersexact&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fisher-information&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fisher-information&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fisher-information&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fisher-transform&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fisher-transform&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fisher-transform&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ronald-fisher&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ronald-fisher&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ronald-fisher&lt;/a&gt;.  I do believe that having the right tags, and having threads tagged appropriately, is very important to the organization and usability of the site.  However, I think think that this will always be a work in progress, requiring some continued maintenance as the site evolves; I don't think it is very possible or useful to try to predict what tags / differentiations will be needed in advance.  For instance, you make a good point about the ambiguity of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/chi-squared&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;chi-squared&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;chi-squared&lt;/a&gt;, but I haven't noticed an actual problem.  If someone else has, or if one emerges, we could split the tag up.  Until then, I'm inclined to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKTyd0qy10o&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;let it be&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2014-05-03T16:00:12.820" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2046" CreationDate="2014-05-03T22:24:20.243" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've submitted &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/230833/246931&quot;&gt;my own feature request regarding this notification&lt;/a&gt;. Its functionality was changed recently to display the number of flags available for review to the community as a whole for users who have unlocked the moderation tools privilege (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/230726/246931&quot;&gt;Anna Lear's answer&lt;/a&gt; to &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/191638/246931&quot;&gt;Notify users of possible reviews on toolbar&lt;/a&gt;&quot;). This does not exclude flags you've already reviewed, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/191638/notify-users-of-possible-reviews-on-toolbar?lq=1#comment758002_230726&quot;&gt;Shog9 says&lt;/a&gt; that degree of personalization would be too expensive for the developers. For those of us without moderation tools unlocked, the old suggested edits notification works like it used to. I've requested that this old notification continue to take priority over the new notification, or that the new notification respond somehow to our clicks or to changes in the number of active flags. I would appreciate any support or feedback that the CV community can offer me on this. That feature request once again is: &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/230833/246931&quot;&gt;Modulate the review notification's color to reflect changes, or make it dismissible&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that snailplane's feature request &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/230874/246931&quot;&gt;Bring back the suggested edits notifications to the top bar . . . again&lt;/a&gt;&quot; has been marked &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt;, so further fulfillment of the true intent of that request is not likely forthcoming (unless, hopefully, the old notification can take priority over the new notification without deactivating it, as I've requested). As I implied in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/230874/bring-back-the-suggested-edits-notifications-to-the-top-bar-again#comment758460_230874&quot;&gt;my comment&lt;/a&gt;, that was probably a foregone conclusion of that feature request. The new notification functionality &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/191638/notify-users-of-possible-reviews-on-toolbar?lq=1#comment757998_230726&quot;&gt;is favored because it seems to help clear review queues for the community as a whole&lt;/a&gt;. As I've &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/191638/notify-users-of-possible-reviews-on-toolbar?lq=1#comment758002_230726&quot;&gt;quoted Shog9&lt;/a&gt; in my feature request, it is supposed to compel us to encourage each other to review after we've done as much as we can personally. IMO, it's presently too confusing to lead naturally to that, and it should have its design modified somehow to disambiguate it from the suggested edits notifications that old users are accustomed to, and that new users will see until they unlock the moderation tools privilege, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;does not yet mention the change in notification functionality that comes with the privilege&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2014-05-03T22:24:20.243" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2051" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2053" CreationDate="2014-05-04T15:47:07.963" Score="18" ViewCount="816" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there is some useful response to a question,&#xA;can I cite it to an academic journal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15997" LastActivityDate="2014-05-05T14:55:05.460" Title="Can I cite a question/response to an academic paper?" Tags="|discussion|papers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2051" CreationDate="2014-05-05T14:53:47.693" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;citing a question or an answer for a hypothesis being proposed should not be a problem. I have found some real good answers - original ones too. Citing these answers as a cross validation could be helpful and desirable. But, there must be appropriate guidelines and screening by the experts in the relevant field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10619" LastActivityDate="2014-05-05T14:53:47.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2051" CreationDate="2014-05-05T14:55:05.460" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Continuing @Nick Cox's thoughts in the comment thread, my inclination both as a writer and reviewer would be that if you have encountered useful material on CV that you believe to be original, then include an account of it in your paper (as a brief appendix if you must) and acknowledge its original source. That makes you responsible for it, which removes the problem of relying on potentially unreviewed anonymous posts on the Internet, while complying with the scholarly tenet of recognizing your sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need a posted image, treat it in the usual way: contact the owner for permission to re-use it. I periodically get requests from publishers in this regard and routinely grant them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2014-05-05T14:55:05.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2054" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2057" CreationDate="2014-05-05T15:00:27.223" Score="4" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that it might be useful to have the questions you are participating in or following / favorited readily available from your home page. In order to go back to my questions I have to access my profile and follow from there. Since this might be a very common option, one might make it more direct: one could add a new tab &quot;followed / favorited&quot; or &quot;participating&quot; inside the &quot;questions&quot; one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44760" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2014-05-05T17:12:39.913" LastActivityDate="2014-05-06T17:07:02.820" Title="Following questions and tags" Tags="|feature-request|design|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2055" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2056" CreationDate="2014-05-05T22:48:47.487" Score="14" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;↑ That ↑ is the question...(Sorry, couldn't resist.)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've flagged a couple comments as obsolete here, and had both flags declined. These comments were suggestions to correct errors in OPs, which were then fixed in editing. Specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first comment &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/87099/is-there-any-way-the-adjusted-r2-might-decrease-by-adding-predictors#comment169921_87099&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. &quot;&lt;em&gt;R²&lt;/em&gt;&quot; was changed to &quot;adjusted &lt;em&gt;R²&lt;/em&gt;&quot; in response to a corrective comment:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;i think you might be confusing {R-sq} and {adjusted R-sq} here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The last comment &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/88158/anova-terminology-repeated-measures-vs-within-between-subjects#comment172431_88158&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The clarification was copied into the body of the question, as suggested:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please edit your question to elaborate it (not in a comment)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I inferred from this that CV doesn't want to delete such corrective comments even after corrections have been made, but I can't find actual discussion of any such unwritten rule, so here's a place for it. If I've inferred too much from two declined flags, I'll be happy to resume trying my luck on new cases as they arise...but I see these sorts of comments hanging around on quite a lot of old questions too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; For the record, I just flagged a third comment as obsolete (a request to edit in data, which was done), and had it marked helpful. This weakens my statistical evidence against the null hypothesis of no difference in policies between CV and SE in general. (Of course, it was extremely weak in the first place.)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm fine with leaving corrective comments regarding resolved errors if that's how we want to do it here, but that would appear to be idiosyncratic policy, and should have an on-record decision here on the meta-site if we want to go against the network-wide grain. In personal experience, I have flagged comments as obsolete on &lt;a href=&quot;https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Cognitive Sciences&lt;/a&gt; and had them removed. On &lt;a href=&quot;https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Math Educators&lt;/a&gt;, I found a useful meta-question (that actually inspired this one): &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://matheducators.meta.stackexchange.com/q/288/394&quot;&gt;Do we want to delete “obsolete” comments on this site?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; Its accepted answer (&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Yes.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;) also links to some useful questions on Meta Stack Exchange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/77373/246931&quot;&gt;Should moderators delete obsolete and resolved comment threads?&lt;/a&gt; (Some actual debate here.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/156127/246931&quot;&gt;Is it OK to casually flag comments as obsolete?&lt;/a&gt; (Pretty one-sided here: &quot;Flag away!&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should CV have its own policy? If so, what should local policy be on comments like those I've linked?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If they're not obsolete enough to delete, what clearly would be? And where should we draw the line?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:17.973" LastActivityDate="2014-05-06T19:02:13.597" Title="Obsolete comments: To flag, or not to flag?" Tags="|discussion|comment|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2055" CreationDate="2014-05-05T22:48:47.487" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I favor deleting obsolete comments, and I think this should include the comments I flagged. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I see some value in preserving comments like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/87099/is-there-any-way-the-adjusted-r2-might-decrease-by-adding-predictors#comment169921_87099&quot;&gt;the first one I linked&lt;/a&gt; for educational or cautionary purposes, but I think it's telling that the Math Educators community doesn't find enough of this value in keeping corrective comments around once the errors in question have been edited out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are much better places to look for substantive education on subtle differences for general purposes: e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/25214/32036&quot;&gt;How to choose between the different Adjusted $R^2$ formulas?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comments on matters of policy or general advice like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/88158/anova-terminology-repeated-measures-vs-within-between-subjects#comment172431_88158&quot;&gt;the second one I linked&lt;/a&gt; shouldn't be left as pointers for other users unless they link to relevant meta-questions. We should probably have a new user advisory meta-post about making clarifications via edits instead of comments (if we don't already), as this is a common faux pas, but it seems naive to imagine isolated comments having any effect on the incidence of this behavior. Maybe the same would be true of a meta-Q. Still, I don't think users should inadvertently volunteer their posts as hosts for policy announcements by making initial mistakes that they then correct...At most these posts should host comments as signposts pointing to independent policy statements. Actual meta-questions can at least be edited, downvoted, responded to separately, and protected better from deletion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I agree that these comments are somewhat distracting. I also suspect they may make a question or answer look worse than it is at first glance after its original blemishes have been removed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An author who never makes errors initially &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be more credible than an author more like myself, and that info might be contained in obsolete comments to some very limited, unreliable extent, but not enough to justify tempting any readers to judge credibility by this criterion instead of more valid ones.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These points being made, I don't yet see a need for a CV-specific policy on obsolete comments, but I would welcome any suggestions, counterpoints, or competing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2014-05-05T22:48:47.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2054" CreationDate="2014-05-06T17:07:02.820" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This doesn't exist right now, but there's some stuff in the works that may speak to some of these requests. Until then, there is a workaround, though! Here's how it works. When you mark a tag as a favorite tag, all of its questions on the homepage show up highlighted in blue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/F9ebz.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next part of the trick: if you click &quot;edit&quot; next to Favorite Tags, you'll be given the choice to add ignored tags. This grays out questions on the homepage from tags you aren't interested in: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fuhbM.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the third and final part of the trick: go to your profile page and click the &quot;preferences&quot; tab. There, you'll find a radio button that will let you hide questions in tags you've chosen to ignore: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sJeYd.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will leave you with a homepage that only has questions from your favorite tags and tags you have neither favorited nor ignored. The questions in favorite tags will still be highlighted blue. It's not exactly what you're asking for, but it helps to filter your homepage view a little bit so you're more likely to see questions you're interested in right off the bat. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6123" LastActivityDate="2014-05-06T17:07:02.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2061" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-12T03:55:26.900" Score="1" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would a bounty generate an answer for this question? Is there someone who is willing to work on it for points or is it generally unanswerable or what? Nick already told me it was very localized and that I do agree. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/97247/new-systematic-quantile-normalization&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/97247/new-systematic-quantile-normalization&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11279" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2014-06-02T02:32:56.280" Title="Would a bounty generate an answer for my quantile question?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2061" CreationDate="2014-05-13T08:26:08.117" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bounties do help, but they're absolutely no guarantee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before contemplating a bounty you should endeavor to make your question as clear as possible. That will usually involve a reduction in jargon, and explaining as if readers are broadly knowledgeable of basic statistical ideas, but not necessarily familiar at all with your particular application. Your question should not just speak to experts on your problem, nor just to statistical experts, but later readers who may be relative statistical novices who are also unfamiliar with your problem (but may nevertheless find parallels to you problem if they can come to understand it, and so may benefit from the answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without that, I don't think there's likely to be much to gain from a bounty. Getting a post to this point may require a fair bit of effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in spite of having done my PhD thesis on a time series topic, I didn't even follow the entirety of your paragraph labelled &quot;1.&quot; -- and I didn't feel any impulse to try to put in the effort required to decipher it any further. Without a bit more explanation/clarity, no bonus would be likely to induce me to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tell you what ... if you make the question nice and clear*, preferably with pictures --  I'll gladly put a bonus on it myself. You may have to nudge me with a comment, though, so I know you want me to look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the question is sufficiently clear yet, but I'll improve my offer - if &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; two moderate-reputation readers (&gt;500 rep, say) here think the question is either reasonably clear &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; think it nevertheless stands a good chance of an answer with a bonus in its present form (and let me know they think so), I will put up a bonus of at least 100 points. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is later modified, and two such users then decide it counts as above (and let me know), then as long as it hasn't already had a bonus I will put up a 100 point bonus (at least) at that time, as long as I am still an active user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[So there's a really good reason to try to improve the question - you just have to get it to a point where two people think it's worth trying a bonus on, and I'll supply the bonus.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*(think &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ELI5&lt;/a&gt;, and you probably won't go too far wrong)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2014-06-02T02:32:56.280" LastActivityDate="2014-06-02T02:32:56.280" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2064" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-20T19:22:34.263" Score="-21" ViewCount="385" Body="&lt;p&gt;My &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/99376/how-do-i-add-this-p-value-to-normal-probability-plot-in-minitab&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; was about Minitab but the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/919/whuber&quot;&gt;moderator&lt;/a&gt; made a hold on the question because he didn't understand it. He has a lack on the topic of &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.duke.edu/~rnau/testing.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;assumptions for regression analysis&lt;/a&gt; (iv: &quot;normality of the error distribution&quot;). This is why he is asking&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please tell us how the five statistics given in the table ought to be represented by graphical elements in this plot. (How to do that for a p-value is particularly mysterious, so please pay special attention to that .)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in the comment section. I find it really funny that he is moderating the site in this way, he can moderate but if he doesn't understand some basic topics about Statistics he should not block questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at his &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.quantdec.com/quals/cv.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CV&lt;/a&gt; you will see that he has no education in Statistics, and he is making fun of me (I'm a 4th year Statistics student).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2014-05-21T07:35:53.940" Title="Moderators should not hold the question if they do not understand science of Statistics" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2064" CreationDate="2014-05-21T07:35:53.940" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Your question is off-topic.&lt;/strong&gt; Any moderator would have put your question on hold, waiting further clarifications from your part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is clearly not about visualizing data; you are just asking how to customize a regression diagnostic plot generated by a particular statistical package, i.e. putting a box with some numbers near a probability plot, as the comment thread and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/99376/revisions&quot;&gt;revision history&lt;/a&gt; of your post suggest. In comparison, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/97774/graphing-and-analyzing-probit-regression&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; you referred to in one of your comment is about plotting and interpreting the results of a Probit model, that is how to convey meaningful information from a regression model and what conclusion can be drawn from model's output (this is completely independent of the software used for that particular analysis), which is perfectly on-topic here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beside what is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic&lt;/a&gt; on Cross Validated, there's a section that reads &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/behavior&quot;&gt;Be nice&lt;/a&gt;. In that respect, &lt;strong&gt;public &lt;em&gt;ad hominem&lt;/em&gt; allegations are inappropriate on Stack Exchange&lt;/strong&gt;: They are useless, counter-productive, and they will only serve to discredit your arguments. In my experience--and this does not limit to Stack Exchange or public communities--constructive and respectful discussions are more likely to lead to positive feedback and consensual decision. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case, you already got helpful comments: the very first comment was posted to help see if there was possibly a statistical inquiry requiring statistical or data visualization expertise behind your original post. As it appeared that it was purely off-topic, you were kindly suggested to refer to Minitab help or our own software-related resources. Then you raised the issue on our Meta seeking input from other users about your problem, while targeting a particular person in very negative and rude terms. It is simply not a constructive behavior: Moderators and community members are here to help as benevolent contributors, and I do not think anyone really likes to be challenged in such a way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2014-05-21T07:35:53.940" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1698" CreationDate="2014-05-29T20:04:23.187" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently, we have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/covariate&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;covariate&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;covariate&lt;/a&gt; (x 23) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/covariance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;covariance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;covariance&lt;/a&gt; (x 298), both with excerpt and wiki filled in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was discussed in comments that these tags have different meanings. If anyone sees the opportunity to improve them, please go ahead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastActivityDate="2014-05-29T20:04:23.187" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1846" CreationDate="2014-06-04T21:26:22.917" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is my proposal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Objective&lt;/strong&gt;: eliminate the meta tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/big-list&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;big-list&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;big-list&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;s&gt;&lt;sub&gt;The tag would be removed by the method of blacklisting (see slhck's &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/120640/what-does-it-mean-to-burninate-a-tag&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;). That means the tag is removed and it can't be recreated (also, it does not trigger bumping of posts).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Premise&lt;/strong&gt;: minimize bumping of threads while performing necessary actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Constraints&lt;/strong&gt;: 3 threads would require edition, but they would be accomplished separately (one per day).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Actions&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Replace tags in threads which the only current tag is &quot;big list&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 3 threads are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/5465/statistics-interview-questions&quot;&gt;Statistics interview questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;replace big-list by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/careers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;careers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;careers&lt;/a&gt; (x23).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2379/what-are-the-big-problems-in-statistics&quot;&gt;What are the &amp;#39;big problems&amp;#39; in statistics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;replace big-list by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history&lt;/a&gt; (x34).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/10680/how-to-not-use-statistics&quot;&gt;How to NOT use statistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;replace big-list by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/teaching&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;teaching&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;teaching&lt;/a&gt; (x73) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/validity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;validity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;validity&lt;/a&gt; (x30).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. Blacklisting of the meta tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/big-list&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;big-list&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;big-list&lt;/a&gt; by Stack Exchange developer.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Implemented as per amoeba's answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2015-11-22T13:35:56.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2026" CreationDate="2014-06-12T10:03:44.913" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site has now launched.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I lurked around there and want to share my preliminary, biased impression:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Judging from the first few questions there is a lot of overlap and redundancy with SO and CV. Case in point: the five most recent questions were &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/326/python-vs-r-machine-learning&quot;&gt;R vs Python&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/324/how-can-i-extract-news-about-a-particular-company-from-various-websites-using-ro&quot;&gt;sentiment analysis&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/323/how-can-we-calculate-auc-for-a-simple-decision-tree&quot;&gt;calculating AUC&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/321/how-to-extracting-consecutive-columns-from-a-matrix-in-r&quot;&gt;extract rows in R&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/319/number-of-layers-vs-cost-in-a-neural-network&quot;&gt;number of layers in neural networks&lt;/a&gt;. All these questions have been answered on SO or on CV. Voting behavior tends to be a bit better and currently the fraction of unanswered questions is extremely low. I am not yet comfortable with giving a qualified judgement of the quality of the answers and questions, but they are missing the &quot;knights in shiny armor&quot; that CV undoubtedly has. Preliminarily it appears to me to not be too high, a lot of opinion and hand-waving, less SE like and more discussion forum-ish. But perhaps the &quot;CV-way&quot; is too engrained for me to be fair. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Authentic &quot;data science&quot; questions (i.e. not suitable for CV or SO) seem to be rare and the site seems to tie in mostly with what data science has come to mean nowadays: Data analysis for engineers who have a very narrow (and imo misinformed*) definition of &quot;statistics&quot;. In that it is telling that the highest voted question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/1/what-characterises-the-difference-between-data-science-and-statistics&quot;&gt;The difference between DS and Stats&lt;/a&gt; and the top answer pretty much sums that (imo misguided view) up (we older people would call it &quot;computational statistics&quot; and what is listed as specific DS tasks are what we did in grad school since the early 90ies in our statistics curriculum).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*This is certainly also statistics' own fault, especially with respect to how it is traditionally taught. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8413" LastEditorUserId="8413" LastEditDate="2017-08-14T20:17:24.543" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T20:17:24.543" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2070" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2071" CreationDate="2014-06-17T12:52:31.653" Score="4" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been informed by @whuber that a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/793/internet-support-for-statistics-software?noredirect=1#comment5738_793&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; I made on over a year ago about a topic that is still important and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1765/what-does-cross-validated-aim-to-be-who-is-it-for?rq=1&quot;&gt;contentious to the Cross Validated community&lt;/a&gt; will be deleted.  Moreover, he notified me that my other comments on the topic under discussion may be subject to deletion.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I appreciate that notice was given, I question the appropriateness of the decision.  Specifically, I hold that regardless of whether you agree with my comment or its accuracy, as a matter of principle comments should not be deleted by moderators so long as they comport with what we consider to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/behavior&quot;&gt;acceptable user behavior&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I agree that my comment is pointed, it is not so uncivil as to run afoul of requirement to 'be nice'.  Moreover, in my opinion it is honest.  I fully allow that others may have a differing opinion... that is their right.  However, it seems that if my comments are viewed as 'misinformation' that then the guidelines would suggest that the appropriate response is to &quot;vote it down. Add comments indicating what, specifically, is wrong. Provide better answers of your own&quot; - not to delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three questions arise in this post.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it appropriate for a mod to delete a comment that they believe to be potentially confusing to others?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it appropriate for a mod to delete a comment that they believe pulls up old discussions on settled matters? [As a matter of evidence supporting the view that it is not appropriate I would note that the very topic under discussion in those comments represent an old discussion on settled matters being dredged back up and a different conclusion being reached.]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In specific regard to this item, is it acceptable to delete it?  That is, is it sufficiently confusing, is it bringing up an old discussion on a settled matter, or uncivil as to warrant deletion?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2014-06-17T18:49:54.270" Title="Is it appropriate for mods to redact community discussions to reflect their views?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2070" CreationDate="2014-06-17T13:29:01.380" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;To those who might just be jumping in here, please note that the thread in question is our list of alternative internet resources that we maintain to help those with software-specific questions.  It is not an ordinary meta discussion.  In this light, I think the answers to the three questions are simple and obvious:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it can be appropriate for mods to delete irrelevant, tangential, or distracting comments (see #2 below): since only mods have the privilege to delete comments, the burden of cleaning up comments falls on them alone.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This depends on context.  In the current context, the comment was clearly out of place and detracted from a thread intended to serve as a resource for many visitors and not as a meta discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;See (2).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that comments cannot be voted down, so the proposed correction for misleading or &quot;misinformative&quot; comments is inapplicable.  In the present case, adding more comments would only further detract from the mission of the thread.  That is why the comment section will shortly be cleaned up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also suggest--and I think this is evident to all--that &quot;being nice&quot; is not the sole guiding principle of our site, although it is a fundamental one.  Others that are equally important include maintaining useful and clear information. (In the present situation there is no conflict among these principles: as far as I know, there is nothing posted in the thread in question that violates the norms of courtesy.)  One reason that extensive privileges to curate the site are granted to high-rep users and moderators is that some judgment is needed in balancing these principles.  In the present case, though, given the very special nature and status of the thread in question (it is explicitly linked from our help system, for instance) I think there ought to be no controversy about deleting any off-topic comment in that thread.  Those who have a taste for discussion can always start new meta threads like this one or create a chat room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the comment in question has since been deleted by its owner, and Nick Cox has rightly pointed out that this discussion would be difficult to follow without it, I will quote it in full for the record:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I see this is where by fiat it was decided that the purpose of the site should be changed. Despite the claim that it didn't really reach a conclusion, the final moderation there was 6 in favor of keeping such questions on the site and 3 against.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I respect and appreciate the motivation for raising issues about the purpose of the site and how that purpose is decided, I felt that bringing them up in a place dedicated to redirecting newcomers was inappropriate, so I responded:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the interests of avoiding any confusion here--where your comment does not really belong--I feel obliged to point out that it misrepresents the conclusions of the discussion I linked to. The present thread achieved nothing &quot;by fiat&quot; and it certainly did not unilaterally change any policies on our site, as you seem to intimate. This thread is offered as a service to our community, not to dredge up old discussions. After a brief interval I will, therefore, delete both your comment and this one (and any others on this subject that might appear).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2014-06-17T18:49:54.270" LastActivityDate="2014-06-17T18:49:54.270" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2076" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2077" CreationDate="2014-06-19T03:06:07.347" Score="2" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CSS for the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/18/ten-fold&quot;&gt;main CV chat room&lt;/a&gt; is broken/not resolving rendering the room difficult to use. This has been the case for the past few hours and I did try this in clean browser sessions / multiple browsers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently the chat room looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cWY1t.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1390" LastEditorUserId="6123" LastEditDate="2014-06-19T03:33:41.347" LastActivityDate="2014-06-19T15:22:14.163" Title="Missing or broken CSS in main CV chat room" Tags="|bug|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2076" CreationDate="2014-06-19T15:22:14.163" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This appears to have been a temporary issue with the content delivery network CSS file affecting at least one user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1390" LastActivityDate="2014-06-19T15:22:14.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2078" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-19T17:40:58.037" Score="10" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that it is difficult to get questions migrated from SO to CV. I've already read that this doesn't occur often 'in the wild' but as 'Big Data' and 'Analytics' become trendy in the software industry I would not be surprised to see an increasing trend of migration worthy question appearing on SO. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anecdotally I have found that there is an increasing number of people in Silicon Valley/ Bay Area that did a quick MOOC, or read one of many machine learning/ data mining survey books (k-means/OLS/LogReg/DT/SVM/RF), that only describe the most common machine learning techniques as plug-and-play software tools in R and doesn't leave them with a sense of how much more they ought to learn. For instance I listened to to a talk by a chief data scientist at a social gaming company that explained his investigation of a problem as 'trying a bunch of things' and settling on a linear regression fit because the $R^2$ 'was good'. I have other anecdotes as well, for example the emerging trend of 'advanced analytics' vs 'analytics' to mean statistical/machine learning techniques because so much of what people call analytics in the software community is just average/max/min (without acknowledging population vs sample) and various elementary mathematical calculations called 'key performance indicators'(KPI).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure how I would show that there is an inflation of claims to understand statistical/ machine learning topics given the data we have but I strongly suspect that it is occurring and if this is true, evidence should be mounting somewhere within SO. The challenge is that well-meaning SO moderators may not know how to identify these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example I have flagged 4 SO questions as migration candidates to CV with the most recent flag occurring more than a week ago. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of them, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24084242/considering-more-number-of-features-reduces-the-efficiency&quot;&gt;feature selection&lt;/a&gt;, question was rejected because 'declined - a moderator reviewed your flag, but found no evidence to support it' and at the same time one of the close-voters, AGS, has commented on it 'This question appears to be off-topic because it is about machine learning theory / stats, and not programming related'. That looks like it is some evidence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One flag that has been open for 11 days now is about computing &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24066732/computing-predicition-intervals-with-cross-validation&quot;&gt;prediction intervals&lt;/a&gt; after using cross-validation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another 11 day open flag is about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24046396/hyper-parameters-of-gaussian-processes-for-regression&quot;&gt;hyperparameters in a Gaussian Process&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first flag of this kind that I have raised was about selecting an &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/102681/using-machine-learning-to-tell-apart-users-from-crawlers&quot;&gt;anomaly detection model&lt;/a&gt;. It wasn't until I demonstrated that it was CV worthy by answering it as one that it was migrated.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To recap, from my extremely limited sample size of 4 flags, the only successful migration was the one that was subsequently demonstrated to be a CV question by providing a CV answer first. I attribute this to the limited experience of SO moderators in CV topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a solution I would propose the idea of a bridge moderator. Where I went to school for my undergraduate there was the concept of a bridge faculty. For instance there is a bridge faculty member for Math/CS and one for Stat/CS and both are able to liaison between their bridge disciplines. At my job which has many full time statisticians and full time software engineers, I act in a similar liaison capacity between Stat/Engineering, though this is a relatively new idea here. Since moderator level reputation may be rare enough in one discipline, let alone two, I would propose that a moderator level reputation on the migrate-to side and some lower threshold reputation on the migration-from side might be sufficient to strike a balance. Perhaps there are better ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that we can certainly continue to demonstrate the migration-worthiness of questions by first answering them but I also believe that it is an inefficient way to crowdsource this problem when cross topic contention will only increase with the increasing portfolio of SE topics. I would ask the community to consider more efficient options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13950" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2014-06-19T17:40:58.037" Title="Bridge Moderators and an Increasing Trend of SO to CV Migration-worthy Questions" Tags="|feature-request|migration|moderation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2014-07-30T16:28:31.883" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2079" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2080" CreationDate="2014-06-20T15:20:06.033" Score="4" ViewCount="380" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just logged into stack exchange for the first time to answer a very basic question about logistic models in R.  I found out that I cannot answer the question because I don't have enough &lt;em&gt;reputation&lt;/em&gt; points.  So, I am curious what are the fastest ways to gain the 50 reputation points needed to answer this basic question about how to get a pseudo $r^2$ for a logistic regression?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/8511/how-to-calculate-pseudo-r2-from-rs-logistic-regression&quot;&gt;How to calculate pseudo-$R^2$ from R&amp;#39;s logistic regression?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The answer is just to use the pscl package with the pR2 command but I am really confused about how to get more points.  Any useful tips for increasing reputation are appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48729" OwnerDisplayName="user48729" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2014-07-02T08:26:11.097" Title="How to increase reputation with very low reputation points?" Tags="|discussion|r|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2079" CreationDate="2014-06-20T16:37:44.847" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you are confused between answering a question in a comment (50 rep) and answering as the site intends for everyone to be able to do (1 rep). This response was done in the text box below that you see as 'Your Answer' with several formatting options readily on display. This is where you should be able to provide answers even with only 1 rep. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that what you are attempting to do is answer in a comment which is where I had previously answered you. This requires 50 reputation and is generally not supposed to be where an answer that is intended to be final or complete should go. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Providing answers in comments is for partial answers, asking for clarification, interrogatively arriving at answers, providing guesses and other interactions that are not explicitly intended to be fully authoritative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try providing your answer in the huge text box instead of a comment and it should work. Lastly, if the answer I have provided you here was helpful please check the check mark next to the answer.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to Cross Validated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13950" LastEditorUserId="13950" LastEditDate="2014-06-20T16:46:50.680" LastActivityDate="2014-06-20T16:46:50.680" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2079" CreationDate="2014-06-21T05:21:13.447" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;To clarify (though all the parts of this information is here in various places):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the main site, you can normally answer a question with 1 reputation. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here on meta you need 5 reputation to answer&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You need 50 reputation to comment in either location.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$\,$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To gain reputation quickly&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;answer questions on the main site. Good answers will generally get upvoted; this is the fast route to reputation. An average answer should typically get you about 30 points or so (but even an experienced answerer with a higher average will get 0 points sometimes). [However, it might take a while to figure out the kinds of answers that tend to be worth more - my average was below the site average for a long while. Other people may be faster on the uptake than I was.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many unanswered questions, so there's plenty of opportunity for points. An even slightly determined person can get 50 points in a session.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ask good questions on the main site. This is often a little slower, but a very good question gets a lot of attention, and one that attracts good answers gets a lot more. You don't need to be able to answer questions to garner a lot of reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if you have good reputation on other SE sites and the site knows they belong to the same person (i.e. you register the accounts from the same email), you should get a bonus (this one doesn't look like it applies to you but may apply to other people who read this question).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a list of sources of reputation in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;help&lt;/a&gt; (I know you already found this though - again, I am putting it here in an answer for later readers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2014-06-28T00:10:33.090" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="793" CreationDate="2014-06-21T17:36:50.357" Score="10" Body="&lt;h1&gt;JMP&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jmp.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;JMP&lt;/a&gt; is a desktop statistical exploration tool from SAS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary source of online support for JMP is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://community.jmp.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;JMP User Community&lt;/a&gt; site which hosts discussion forums and a file exchange for add-ins and data sets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other online resources include &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jmp.com/support/help/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;JMP documentation&lt;/a&gt;, a semi-technical &lt;a href=&quot;https://community.jmp.com/t5/Blogs/ct-p/Blogs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;JMP blog&lt;/a&gt; and weekly live &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jmp.com/about/events/webcasts/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;webcasts&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1191" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-11-11T09:13:43.823" LastActivityDate="2023-11-11T09:13:43.823" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-06-21T17:36:50.357" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2083" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-22T13:59:35.803" Score="32" ViewCount="1019" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any ideas / proposed explanations about why CV stands out regarding the percentage of questions that have &lt;strong&gt;zero&lt;/strong&gt; answers? (I have excluded questions that have answers, but none of them are upvoted/accepted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;\begin{array}{| r | r | r |}&#xA;  \hline                       &#xA;  \rm June\; 22, 2014 &amp;amp; \rm Total\ Qs &amp;amp; \text{Qs with no As} &amp;amp; \text{%}\\ &#xA;  \hline                       &#xA;\rm Physics &amp;amp; 35,372 &amp;amp; 4,331 &amp;amp; 12.2 \\&#xA;\rm Cross \;Validated &amp;amp; 38,582 &amp;amp; 11,468 &amp;amp; \mathbf {29.7} \\&#xA;\rm Math \; Overflow &amp;amp; 51,364 &amp;amp; 9,859 &amp;amp; 19.2 \\&#xA;\rm Math.SE &amp;amp; 296,538 &amp;amp; 39,727 &amp;amp; 13.4 \\&#xA;\rm Stack \;Overflow &amp;amp; 7,509,663 &amp;amp; 801,136 &amp;amp; 10.7 \\&#xA;  \hline  &#xA;\end{array}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the comparison, I purposefully chose other SE sites which deal in fields that require a mathematical background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have the feeling this large difference cannot be solely attributed to the fact that sometimes questions are answered through comments (that in any case needs to be combined with the additional argument that on CV, we tend to do that more than on the other sites).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ADDENDUM&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;CV-meta link&#xA;14 months back... &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1538/why-is-our-answer-rate-so-low?rq=1&quot;&gt;Why is our answer rate so low?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28746" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2014-07-02T01:09:09.407" Title="Unanswered questions as percentage of total – why does CV stand out?" Tags="|discussion|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2083" CreationDate="2014-06-22T14:47:57.567" Score="30" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Some facts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rate at which questions are answered here has been dropping for years.  When we left beta in early 2011 the answer:question ratio was around 1.6:1.  It has steadily declined: in November 2012 it dropped below 1:1 and at present it is around 0.75:1.  I believe this is due to a greater rate of increase in the rate at which questions are asked compared to the increase in community members who are active and qualified to answer questions.  During this time the answering rate has tripled but the asking rate has gone up sixfold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Nuances in the comparisons&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although comparing the rate of unanswered questions to the rates at other SE sites looks disturbing, it has benign explanations.  SO fields programming questions that tend to be routine and solvable.  Math fields a very large number of (easily answered) homework questions.  Here, we get a great number of questions that not only are related to research, but cannot immediately be answered by anybody: they would require considerable work to answer.  In that regard we are perhaps most comparable to MO (19.2% unanswered) or TCS (21.6% unanswered), which focus on research-level questions.  Another informative comparison to make is with GIS, which is a kind of hybrid of SO (most questions nowadays are about programming) and CV (because a huge variety of specialized platforms are covered on GIS and very few qualified people are around to answer many of them).  On GIS there are 23.3% unanswered questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What we can do&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding such comparisons, it would be good to leave fewer questions unanswered here.  The only significant way that can be addressed is to grow the number of people who are (a) qualified to give good answers and (b) excited enough about our site to be regularly active.  Thus, what I would suggest is that once we feel we understand &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; our rate of unanswered questions is so high, we should turn to discussing &lt;em&gt;what to do about it&lt;/em&gt;--and I think that conversation ought to look for ideas on how to attract active, qualified people into our community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2014-06-22T14:47:57.567" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2083" CreationDate="2014-06-23T00:53:02.397" Score="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;My comments expanded enough to be some kind of answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there are a number of reasons why the rate might be different - some have been &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1538/why-is-our-answer-rate-so-low?rq=1&quot;&gt;discussed before&lt;/a&gt;. On SO or math.SE (which I participate a little on, mostly on R and stats questions respectively), questions tend to be much more specific and focused, with direct, short answers. ('How do I do this?' ... may often answered with 'call this function' or with a couple of lines of algebra.) - those are not the norm here; often the asker doesn't even know what they want, let alone how to express it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, I think a lot of questions on SO or math.SE could be answered by a competent undergraduate or enthusiastic amateur - and there seem to be plenty of both around those places. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from homework-like questions, there aren't so many of either here. Many questions are subtle and the breadth of knowledge required to tackle more than a tiny subset of them takes a long time to accumulate. I think I have answers in more tags than anyone else now (about 450 I think), yet I can really only competently answer a very small fraction of the questions we get. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the course of answering questions over a few days, I often find myself doing algebra I've never quite attempted before, running simulations I've never run before (and writing and debugging code to do them!), suggesting novel or tweaked test statistics and exploring their properties, comparing the properties of several approaches to a problem, coming up with slightly novel way to visualize some data, reading papers to follow the history of some little technique, reading more papers to even figure out what a person is asking about ... and so on. That is, a lot of questions here take actual research effort. Sometimes hours of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a pretty dedicated but small group of people who answer a lot of questions and an even smaller dedicated group who put effort into clarifying questions and getting posters to improve/focus their questions enough to be answerable (anyone who is reading this is likely to be contributing in both ways). Those need to expand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do quite well on some things - all our review queues are empty, almost all the time. SO would love to have that statistic. Nothing stays in a review queue for long. The survival time in the suggested edit queue often seems to be a couple of minutes at best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure how to get more people answering questions here. I sometimes do a bit of pointing to good answers here while I am in other forums, and that sometimes brings a few people in. I do talk to people about the site, but I seem to be singularly unsuccessful in convincing other people to actually come and participate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2014-06-23T04:52:18.683" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2083" CreationDate="2014-06-23T16:38:47.003" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;This ends up being a non-answer, but I figured I would share some analysis I did. For a while I've been concerned that the site's continual progress rests on the shoulders of a relatively few individuals. It is expected that a relatively few contribute a lot, but I felt the balance here was even more perilous than in some of the other sites I marginally participate on. Or put another way, if 5 of the top users depart the site in one fell swoop I worried we would not have a functioning site anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My perceptions seem to be inaccurate though when examining the data - or at least several of the other sites mentioned face the same issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comparing the long tails of several of the sites mentioned here in terms of the proportion of users that answer questions vs. the proportion of all answers we appear to be pretty similar to Physics, GIS, and MathOverflow in terms of the empirical CDF. The Math and Mathematica site have an even greater amount of inequality than we do here, with 20% of the people answering near 95% of the questions. TCS (theoretical computer science) is the most equitable of the sites listed here, and fits Pareto's 80-20 mark. We are closer to 85-20 - although the interesting part of the bend is closer to around 10% of the users answering questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8ek3H.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a slightly &lt;a href=&quot;https://dl.dropbox.com/s/t2r2ph0abd4dvnd/ECDFChart.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;larger version of the figure with tool tips&lt;/a&gt; (although they don't help very much given the overlap of the lines).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So although I definitely agree attracting more users should be a long-term goal of the site, from this it doesn't appear to me that we have a problematic imbalance &lt;em&gt;of expert users answering questions&lt;/em&gt;, at least relative to some of the other sites listed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Data for this analysis can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dropbox.com/sh/w3a7yg3ryi0bmsd/AACwAD6_t5bpyN6D-aAHYhr3a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. I used &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/203684/the-long-tail-of-answers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt; at the Data Explorer to gather the csv files for the different sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2014-06-23T17:13:18.277" LastActivityDate="2014-06-23T17:13:18.277" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2083" CreationDate="2014-06-25T03:02:09.593" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's my take as a relatively new question-answerer, and as someone with far, far less knowledge than our superstar members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you guys are spot-on so far. For instance, my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/103849/computing-inverse-probability-weights-conditional-multivariate-density-esti&quot;&gt;Computing inverse probability weights -- conditional (multivariate) density estimation?&lt;/a&gt; has an open bounty and, frankly, shouldn't be that complicated. And yet there are currently 17 (?) questions with open bounties, some three times as big, and mine is at the bottom of the list. I'm master's student -- I may be overzealous but I doubt I'm on the fringes of multivariate nonparametric statistics methodology. Someone out there knows the answer, and that someone would do me an enormous service in helping move my research along. Either there are many fewer competent statisticians out there than I think there are, or there's a talent mismatch. I'm guessing the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there's another issue. The superstar question answer-ers are &lt;em&gt;too good&lt;/em&gt; at answering questions. It's not that they answer too &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; questions. It's that their answers are just &lt;em&gt;too good&lt;/em&gt;. Every time I think about something I could contribute, I think &quot;I'm just gonna sound like a dope if I try to post something, and I sure as hell don't want to steer anyone wrong.&quot; I've tried to pick out a niche of questions I can competently answer, and I'm grateful that the more experienced members are around to clean up my posts. But writing your first answer is intimidating, even moreso if it's an area at the limits of your own expertise, and when there are others out there who know way, way more than you do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also have to say: I've learned an enormous amount already from answering questions here, in large part because of the high standards set by others before me. That was the goal all along, but it's working out way better than I could have hoped. I agree that probably the best way to help get more, better answers is to recruit. I'm going to start recommending CV to classmates, but most of them really aren't the type to spend hours helping strangers on the Internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also I suspect that a number of questions get answered, but don't get marked as answered, either because the answers don't actually answer the question, or the asker is a first-time poster and doesn't know how it works. If I wasn't already procrastinating as badly as I am by posting here, I'd try and figure out how to pull down that info and run some numbers on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: there are also lots of questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/98986/naive-bayes-non-dictionary-term-in-test-document&quot;&gt;Naive Bayes non-Dictionary Term in Test Document&lt;/a&gt; that get answered, get discussed in the comments, and then are never resolved enough to be &lt;em&gt;marked&lt;/em&gt; as answered even though the asker almost surely got something like an answer out of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36229" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2014-06-25T03:19:58.560" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2083" CreationDate="2014-07-02T01:09:09.407" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unsophisticated students ask many questions here.  Our comments provide valuable assistance, helping to guide their thinking and studying.  The students' questions themselves are often unanswerable (e.g., not clearly stated) or are so basic that they are well addressed by a comment such as &quot;Have you considered &lt;em&gt;_&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8137" LastActivityDate="2014-07-02T01:09:09.407" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2079" CreationDate="2014-07-02T08:26:11.097" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can also earn reputation by editing the questions and answers. Your edit will be placed in a queue, but on stats.SE the queues disappear quickly. You can read more about how editing works here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/76251/how-do-suggested-edits-work&quot;&gt;How do suggested edits work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2116" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2014-07-02T08:26:11.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2090" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-03T15:58:17.817" Score="4" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On CrossValidated some questions never get answered.  Some questions get amazing answers.  Some questions get 20 unique answers, and some only get one.  Is it the fault of the question?  I don't know how to answer that, but I wish that I knew where to start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that there is a human answer to &quot;what makes a great question&quot; but how does that bear out in the scoring?  Does the score reflect a good technical question, or a well written but less technical question?  Does it reflect time of day, audience in the world?  How well does the value applied to the questions and answers reflect their worth? In the same theme of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jmp.com/support/help/The_Variability_Gauge_Chart.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kevin Slavin&lt;/a&gt;, I would like to see the physics of the culture here in CrossValidated in enough clarity to evaluate how well the numerics line up with the human goals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen &quot;rock-star&quot; answers to average questions that boost the points and participation substantially.  This was about the answerer, not just the question.  Does &quot;who answers the question&quot; mean more, in terms of score, than the nature of the question or the other good answers - in defining the current point-related social phenomenology?  Sometimes it can be good and sometimes bad, but the frequency of these events and their outcomes are not quantified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some folks will repeatedly post the same valid question.  They may do it for more answers, or an answer of sufficient quality.  They do it because it returns value.  It returns value in this synthetic economy.  Why is the two-year-old's repeated question working plausibly well for adults with technical questions in a technical forum?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The theme of the question behind these ideas feels like the Timbuk3 line &quot;&lt;em&gt;how well do we use our freedom to choose the illusions we create&lt;/em&gt;&quot; but I would prefer to ask how we can inform improvement - increased return of value to the users.  Malcolm Gladwell might tell you that the best Spaghetti sauces were not invented, they were measured into being. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jmp.com/support/help/The_Variability_Gauge_Chart.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were to look at the data, what would the &quot;moneyball&quot; of CrossValidated look like? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An acceptable answer will umbrella other questions like the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would the empirical answer inform improved participation/engagement/learning and merit driven point scoring? (show how the data speaks to current human metrics)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is is possible to measure a better CV into being like extra chunky spaghetti sauce or a pleasant pepsi?  (does the data show &quot;hidden metrics&quot; being served, and if so what, and should they be considered?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What would the process of determining the &quot;moneyball&quot; look like? (show the approach)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with this is that it is far too broad to be accessible.  (Thank you @gung .)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lets start simply, and if reasonable we can expand.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lets assume:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that the score given to a question is the perfect measure of merit of a question (output) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lets use as data (inputs):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the number of comments, weighted by their authors reputation (or a transform thereof), with +1's&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the number of questions, weighted by their authors reputation (or a transform thereof)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the number of +1's given to the answers, and correct scores&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;oh and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we should have an askers name as part of the input, as well as date/time of asking&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strategic Question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how well does the input correctly predict the output?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tactic 1: Can I use a random forest to predict the output given the input?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I use appropriate approaches to maximize the quality of the RF, so that the error is on the part of the model and not the modeler, what is the difference in variance between the data and the mean (whatever that means) versus the variance between the data and the model?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I look at importance of the variables, does the &quot;rock star&quot; effect show in the names?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tactic 2: If I were to make several &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jmp.com/support/help/The_Variability_Gauge_Chart.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;variability charts&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jmp.com/support/help/Bivariate_Analysis.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bivariate fits&lt;/a&gt;, or logistic fits using appropriate columns columns what answers could I find to the following&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how does day of week, and time of day of asking impact number of answers? ... mean or max rating of answerers?  mean or max rating of commenters?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how does score of asker relate to quality of question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how does score of answerer relate to score of answer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how does the score of an answerer relate to the rating on the comment?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, do these together indicate or refute that CV has:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rock star effect in question, answer, or comment&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;time of day or day of week effect in response to answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for helping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22452" OwnerDisplayName="EngrStudent" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-07-08T16:14:46.690" LastActivityDate="2014-07-08T16:14:46.690" Title="Relationship between question quality, answer count, and ordered answer scores" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2091" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2092" CreationDate="2014-07-08T17:36:30.483" Score="10" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since we have this rule very clear in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; that questions asking for datasets are off-topic, could we include this reason in the off-topic dialog?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0tDym.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The initial suggestion would be to include the current text in the help center and a link to it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;obtaining particular datasets&lt;/a&gt; are off-topic, because they are too specialized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible advantages:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Currently, I flag such questions for 'moderator attention', but with a customized reason in the off-topic dialog the community would be able to help in a more automatic way. Please, advise me if I should be using another type of flag for this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A second advantage would be to spare comments explaining to the OP why the question is off-topic.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2014-07-09T01:03:52.890" Title="Include 'asking for datasets' reason in the off-topic dialog" Tags="|feature-request|closing-questions|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2091" CreationDate="2014-07-08T18:43:35.647" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's a good idea, so I have formally proposed it.  Adoption requires approval of at least one other moderator.  (I imagine the other mods might hold back approval until this discussion has progressed a little and the pros and cons of the idea become fully apparent.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wording of my proposal is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;obtaining specific datasets&lt;/a&gt; are off-topic because they are too specialized and narrow in scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2014-07-08T18:43:35.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2091" CreationDate="2014-07-09T00:58:37.107" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have no in-principle objection, but I also think that there's a present route that works well enough: close &gt; Off-topic &gt; Other&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mwDUG.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... and I think that possibly the close dialog may be a better place than the flag dialog if we want to add a specific option. The advantage of &lt;code&gt;close&lt;/code&gt; rather than &lt;code&gt;flag&lt;/code&gt; is that high reputation users can close without necessarily bothering a moderator (though it's rare that one of the mods doesn't jump in anyway, it's nice to have the ability to deal immediately with such minor issues even if the mods all happen to be busy)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does feel like we have had a recent increase in the numbers of posts seeking data sets so it might at least be worth considering doing something to streamline it, but it hasn't struck me as onerous yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One consideration: is there a hard limit to the number of options we have in either one place or the other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2014-07-09T01:03:52.890" LastActivityDate="2014-07-09T01:03:52.890" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2094" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-11T05:17:33.063" Score="11" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was interested in knowing which stack exchange site is appropriate for artificial Intelligence questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, I wanted to understand the following statement better:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;statistical learning is not the path to AI (Artificial Intelligence)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I love machine and statistical learning and would be very interested in knowing why people feel that way or whether that's even the goal of statistical learning! Maybe statistical learning is not even interested on being AI and something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyhow, I was interested in either, references about that or maybe posting this question on one of the stack exchange sites, but was unsure if it was appropriate or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also know there is a CS stack exchange site, programmers and data science, or even maths. Which one is the best to ask a variant of this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28986" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2014-07-11T13:14:40.023" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T09:22:40.367" Title="Where should I ask a question about artificial intelligence?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2094" CreationDate="2014-07-11T10:11:40.540" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd be inclined to say that a question on AI including a comparison with &lt;em&gt;statistical learning&lt;/em&gt; would be pretty clearly &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on topic&lt;/a&gt; here (and I might have considered it at least potentially on topic even without that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears to be perhaps most directly &lt;a href=&quot;https://cs.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on topic&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;http://cs.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Computer Science&lt;/a&gt; -- both AI and machine learning are on topic there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question leans toward the theoretical, you might also consider &lt;a href=&quot;http://cstheory.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Theoretical Computer Science&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, wherever you post it, you would nevertheless need to avoid heading much toward either a chatty/opinion-based or an overly broad question, because either would still be in danger of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;closure&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:48:37.853" LastActivityDate="2014-07-11T10:18:55.443" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2096" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2097" CreationDate="2014-07-13T23:08:00.377" Score="9" ViewCount="296" Body="&lt;p&gt;By and large, I agree with the practice of closing questions which refer to specific datasets (&lt;strong&gt;Matt Parker&lt;/strong&gt; very nicely summarizes the issue in his answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/486/suitable-venue-to-help-find-specific-statistical-data&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, it's undeniable that some datasets hold a unique place in the realm of Data Analysis, transcending their particular (specialized) domain (e.g. Fisher's &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_flower_data_set&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Irises&lt;/a&gt;, Old Faithful data). Shouldn't these be treated differently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that it's hard to draw a line between these exceptional cases--perhaps an easy rule-of-thumb would be: &quot;If it's built into &lt;strong&gt;R&lt;/strong&gt; then it's ok.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, this is just something I was thinking about earlier and wanted to hear what you guys thought about it--as I think about it more I'll update this post accordingly.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Note: I also think that &lt;strong&gt;Cross Validated&lt;/strong&gt; could benefit overall if it even outright &lt;em&gt;encouraged&lt;/em&gt; the use of these types of built-in datasets in the questions themselves. But that may be a whole different meta-post entirely...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41810" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2014-07-14T16:12:41.823" Title="&quot;Questions about Datasets&quot;: Possible Exceptions?" Tags="|discussion|data|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2096" CreationDate="2014-07-14T11:23:09.127" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is someone really going to struggle to find the &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/1ko278V&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Iris data-set&lt;/a&gt; or whatever if they already know the name of it? The current wording of the off-topic reason is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about obtaining specific datasets are off-topic because they are too specialized and narrow in scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which I read as allowing requests for non-specific data-sets that can be used to make some statistical point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So IMO&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Request for US macroeconomic indicators by year&amp;mdash;off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Request for dataset to test regression procedures with nearly collinear predictors&amp;mdash;on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Request for Longley data&amp;mdash;lack of research.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2014-07-14T11:40:32.023" LastActivityDate="2014-07-14T11:40:32.023" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2098" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2100" CreationDate="2014-07-18T08:11:53.133" Score="-3" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ab-test&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ab-test&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ab-test&lt;/a&gt; test be removed from the list or made into a synonym? It is jargon for the BI community and we should encourage use of proper technical terms to preserve the consistency of the field of statistics. Should we redirect to &quot;hypothesis-testing&quot; or some other existing tag? Is there a term in the community of statisticians for a multi-grouped randomized experiment where the hypothesis is that one is the best in a well defined metric?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45876" LastEditorUserId="45876" LastEditDate="2014-07-18T13:46:14.053" LastActivityDate="2014-07-18T17:18:30.580" Title="ab-test is not a technical term" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2098" CreationDate="2014-07-18T13:19:54.887" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't really agree here. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/B_testing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A/B testing&lt;/a&gt; is a specific kind of experimental design that is important and common in a specific setting (most typically website development, I gather).  It could be a duplicate for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/experimental-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;experimental-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;experimental-design&lt;/a&gt;, but I don't think it's a duplicate of &lt;code&gt;[hypothesis-testing]&lt;/code&gt;.  Moreover, I think it is specific enough, and used often enough, to merit its own tag; we do have tags for other specific designs (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/split-plot&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;split-plot&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;split-plot&lt;/a&gt;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2014-07-18T13:19:54.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2098" CreationDate="2014-07-18T13:26:47.380" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Organizing tags is a delicate balancing act between being too comprehensive and too specific.  It is no surprise, then, that discussions about tags occur frequently.  I am grateful that our community is constantly thinking about them and proposing improvements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags are primarily intended to help people find information.  Secondarily, they organize threads into related groups that are used to recognize people who are active in various specialties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proposal to synonymize &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hypothesis-testing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hypothesis-testing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hypothesis-testing&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ab-test&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ab-test&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ab-test&lt;/a&gt; runs counter to both these objectives.  It loses the semantic differentiation implied by &quot;A/B testing.&quot;  It would seem prudent not to make one a synonym of the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Supporting this conclusion are 49 threads currently endowed with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ab-test&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ab-test&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ab-test&lt;/a&gt; tag.  This number, which has developed organically by original posters and community members applying the tag as they see fit, is evidence that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ab-test&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ab-test&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ab-test&lt;/a&gt; is perceived to be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2014-07-18T16:41:35.663" LastActivityDate="2014-07-18T16:41:35.663" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2098" CreationDate="2014-07-18T17:18:30.580" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;People working in particular areas tend to embrace slightly different terminology from people working in other areas, and both may use the terminology differently to mainstream statisticians. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for example you might see 'force of decrement' used by an actuary (moreso in the past than now) where a statistician might say 'hazard', for example, and such differences persist in every corner of statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These differences come in from psychology, biology, physics, astronomy, econometrics, marketing, and so on (and on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's really up to us to dictate what's 'proper' terminology -- if enough people are using it to talk to each other, even if it's in some small niche application area, it should as far as possible be embraced. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main caveat would be in the case where there's a very strong chance that a terminology will be very directly misleading, in which case at the very least we need to be very careful to clarify what's going on and in some cases (as few as possible) perhaps call for going with the more conventional terminology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2014-07-18T17:18:30.580" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2102" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-19T08:18:49.217" Score="7" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;The homogeneity tag seems to map to &quot;heteroskedasticity&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is problematic because &lt;em&gt;homogeneity of variance&lt;/em&gt; is not the only form of homogeneity people are interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/108503/homogeneity-test&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;, which I have been trying to improve (still a work in progress, I'm afraid, I started with trying to give it some context). He seems to be trying to follow the advice in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.homogenisation.org/files/private/WG1/Bibliography/Applications/Applications%20%28P-S%29/sahin_etal_2010.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt;, or perhaps to follow the analysis in Wijngaard et al (2003)*.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP was asking about homogeneity, so wanted to use the 'homogeneity' tag (n.b., the tag doesn't specify '... of variance' so that's perfectly reasonable). But it just replaces that reasonable use with the misleading tag 'heteroskedasticity'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider also the &lt;em&gt;chi-square test of homogeneity of proportions&lt;/em&gt;. Someone might (again, legitimately in my opinion) want to use the homogeneity tag... with a rather unfortunate result (especially if they don't notice that it silently changes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the tag was 'homogeneity-of-variance' I think the argument for such a merge would be strong. But without the 'of-variance' I don't think they're necessary the same thing at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should be done about it? I'm somewhat disinclined to simply say 'you can't use the homogeneity tag to talk about homogeneity'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$\,$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* J.B. Wijngaard, A. M. G. Kleink Tank, G. P. Konnen, (2003),&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Homogeneity of 20th Century European Daily Temperature and Precipitation Series,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Int. J. Climatol&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;23&lt;/strong&gt;, 679-692.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2014-07-19T14:34:47.050" Title="Homogeneity tag incorrectly merged?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2102" CreationDate="2014-07-19T14:32:10.837" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without moderator action (I'm not clear on all the required steps), nothing is going to happen to the &lt;code&gt;[homogeneity]&lt;/code&gt; tag.  You do make a compelling argument for changing the existing tag to &lt;code&gt;[homogeneity-of-variance]&lt;/code&gt;, and then making &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; a synonym of &lt;code&gt;[heteroscedasticity]&lt;/code&gt;, but that also seems like it might be more trouble than it's worth.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, if you have another, specific kind of homogeneity that you think merits a tag (e.g., &lt;code&gt;[time-series-homogeneity]&lt;/code&gt;--possibly with a better name ;-), then why not create such a tag directly?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2014-07-19T14:32:10.837" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2104" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2105" CreationDate="2014-07-23T09:44:34.737" Score="10" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;I once asked for some reasoning. I got a single answer but I hoped for more answers, possibly objecting the view of the single answer as this was what I had suspected to be right anyway. However, I also suspected that there might be special cases where a different answer would have been reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing happened so I accepted this answer after some days. Even much more later no other answer appeared. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did I discourage other answers by accepting too early? Generally, does accepting an answer discourage later answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28705" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-07-23T22:56:36.883" LastActivityDate="2014-07-26T07:38:41.227" Title="Does accepting answers discourage further answerings?" Tags="|discussion|answers|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2104" CreationDate="2014-07-23T13:37:42.487" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think you discouraged other answers by accepting the existing answer too early, nor did anything else wrong.  Most answers will be provided within the first day or two.  After that, the question has usually dropped off the main page and will get much less attention.  If you want to keep it in the limelight a while longer, you can add a bounty, but otherwise you're OK.  Additional answers do trickle in from time to time, even if there is already an existing answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for myself, I usually wait a couple of days to accept, even if there are good answers already, just to see if any more will come in (I do upvote immediately), but after a couple of days it's good to accept an answer.  That sounds like what you did, so I would have done the same.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2014-07-23T13:37:42.487" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2107" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2109" CreationDate="2014-07-23T14:07:56.513" Score="29" ViewCount="1008" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question has been asked on other SE forums, but has anyone on Cross Validated added their profile information (either putting their handle, rep, or both) on their resume or curriculum vitae? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are, of course, numerous other factors that influence applicability for a job; &amp;amp; acquiring rep/presence on a SE site is particular to just this community, making it rather arbitrary to an outsider. However, the question below &amp;amp; its subsequent answers got me thinking that the nature of the CV forum in particular as it relates to working in the field of statistics:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2083/unanswered-questions-as-percentage-of-total-why-does-cv-stand-out/2084#2084&quot;&gt;Unanswered questions as percentage of total – why does CV stand out?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the organizations I have worked or interviewed – largely requiring an applied statistics background – researching, understanding to the best extent possible, &amp;amp; then communicating technical concepts from statistics is critical. Oftentimes the client/asker doesn't know specifically what they want to see beyond a broad conceptual outcome. And of course there may be multiple approaches to any problem given the background of the expert/client, as well as organizational constraints (available time, technology, etc.). The nature of the questions &amp;amp; answers on CV, which frequently require deeper research &amp;amp; are more specific or nuanced than other SE sites, seems reflective of what I &amp;amp; others have encountered in the workforce. As Glen_b summarizes this well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the course of answering questions over a few days, I often find&#xA;  myself doing algebra I've never quite attempted before, running&#xA;  simulations I've never run before (and writing and debugging code to&#xA;  do them!), suggesting novel or tweaked test statistics and exploring&#xA;  their properties, comparing the properties of several approaches to a&#xA;  problem, coming up with slightly novel way to visualize some data,&#xA;  reading papers to follow the history of some little technique, reading&#xA;  more papers to even figure out what a person is asking about ... and&#xA;  so on. That is, a lot of questions here take actual research effort.&#xA;  Sometimes hours of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Glen_b's summary seems to be exactly the kind of mindset required for many stats positions. So having a quality presence on CV in particular may serve as a plausible representation of one's aptitude in solving statistical problems in general. This is different from SO for example, where questions are expected to be very specific w/ reproducible code, solutions don't necessarily need to be as nuanced, potential number of solutions are more limited, &amp;amp; the community/pool of knowledge is generally larger. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar SE questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/58947/at-what-point-do-you-put-your-so-reputation-in-your-resume&quot;&gt;At what point do you put your SO reputation in your resume?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/30836/i-was-recently-asked-for-my-stack-overflow-reputation-score-in-a-job-interview?lq=1&quot;&gt;I was recently asked for my Stack Overflow reputation score in a job interview. Is that appropriate?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;NOTE: I'm asking this as a general question. I definitely would not classify my current presence on CV as &quot;quality&quot;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40501" OwnerDisplayName="Niubius" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2019-06-23T00:23:14.567" Title="Putting Cross Validated stats on resume" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2107" CreationDate="2014-07-23T14:40:24.140" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not on my resume but I have it on my website. That way, it can be a link. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" OwnerDisplayName="Peter Flom" LastActivityDate="2014-07-23T14:40:24.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2107" CreationDate="2014-07-23T15:43:31.627" Score="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an independent consultant I am open to opportunities of any sort, including working full time for a (worthy) organization.  I therefore maintain different resumes according to the type of position: consulting, academic, and industrial.  The academic and industrial ones mention SE, but it is just one short entry out of many under &quot;professional activities.&quot;  It is there as a strategic element, intended to provide an opening for further discussion in an interview.  Given such a chance, I would make a case similar to Glen B's, but I would not emphasize this in any application materials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others, elsewhere, have pointed to a significant problem with CV (and SE in general): a high reputation is not necessarily associated with knowledge, quality of exposition, or even a tendency to be correct.  Moreover, a very high rate of participation could be a negative in some employers' views (&quot;why would she spend so much time at that and would that activity distract from her job?&quot;), so you should be prepared to provide a good explanation if you are in that category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That has begged the question of what I might say during that hypothetical interview.  Some points I think would be worth making about CV in particular are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Active participation--even if it is primarily reading, editing, and commenting--exposes us to far more statistical consulting problems than anyone ever has seen in their lifetime before.  It can thereby serve as excellent preparation for consulting and to demonstrate one's fitness to serve as a statistician in almost any environment or organization.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Actively answering, especially with the care described by Glen B, will teach anyone who is sufficiently thoughtful and humble to improve their communications skills as well as their statistical expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The site is useful as a &quot;sandbox&quot; in which to test ideas that might be turned into more formal resources such as a blog, a textbook, or (in a few cases) published papers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Involvement in as many topics as possible exposes one to a wider range of solutions and thereby, over time, can considerably augment one's skills and tools.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2014-07-23T15:43:31.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2107" CreationDate="2014-07-23T17:11:37.030" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess, it depends on the match between the requirements of the job you are applying for and your activity profile (I emphasize profile, not only rating) on CV. Persons applying for a teaching statistics position could, in my opinion, profit by placing their CV profile in their applications if they have provided many good answers on CV and less so if they have asked many good questions. If you are a researcher or an independent consultant you apply with the projects/studies you have carried out, and less with the exchange of ideas in the course of carrying out your projects. And if you have the CV profile of whuber or Peter Flom you can only profit from it, no matter what position you are applying for and whether you put it on your website or on your curriculum vitae - there just aren't that many of these profiles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16444" LastEditorUserId="16444" LastEditDate="2014-07-23T19:36:08.620" LastActivityDate="2014-07-23T19:36:08.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2107" CreationDate="2014-07-23T19:12:02.110" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;My effort here is not on my resume, nor do I envision any very likely situation in which I would include it. It's possible that I might in the right circumstance, but it would require a situation (or a potential employer) that doesn't presently apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic issue is that I don't anticipate that an organization I would be likely to work for would be likely to care very much about it ... but perhaps one might come up at some point. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think some of my activities here have added (at least a bit) to particular aspects of my communication skills, such as they are, and I've certainly learned some things I wouldn't have learned otherwise - those things are positives an employer would care about. But those would be skills which if I really had them, I could demonstrate in other ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If in an interview, we came to a discussion of my hobbies, I might mention my activities here among them; I don't list my hobbies on my resume, though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If (as in one of your links) that mention somehow led to a question about what my reputation was, that would make me concerned about their priorities (what would that indicate, on its own? It's easy to accumulate &lt;strike&gt;fake internet points&lt;/strike&gt; reputation without being particularly insightful - there are many better statisticians here with lower reputation than I have). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if they asked about say reputation per answer, that would say more (though it's at least somewhat confounded with/distorted by several other things). If they asked me to show them three of my answers I thought were good, that might provide something to go on -- but even then I think it would only be particularly relevant to certain kinds of jobs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine (so I don't have to talk about myself) I were someone with whuber's reputation. Would I show that reputation score to an employer? Probably not. But if I were someone with some of his &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt;? Yes, it's certainly possible I'd show some of those in the right situation - many of them are wonderful. The quality of those sort of activities might say a lot. [But I doubt whuber needs to, since he has so many other achievements he could point to in their stead. Similar comments would apply to many of the other high reputation users - they have some wonderful answers that might be worth a mention in the right situation, but probably don't need to.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You quote me talking about doing research in my activities here - one problem I'd note is that a lot of the research I do to answer questions doesn't end up anywhere but in my head. I spent a couple of hours researching an answer in the last day ... but by the time I was confident I could provide a good answer backed up with a suitable reference, someone had already written one. There was (as is often the case) nothing to do but upvote it and move on. Where's the &lt;em&gt;evidence&lt;/em&gt; I did that research and learned something worthwhile? Nowhere. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I might read an article, do some algebra and perform a simulation study. Where does all that go if there's already a decent answer in the meantime with all the essentials? Nowhere. Even when I do give an answer, a lot of that effort may end up as a parenthetical comment in a single sentence, or if I am lucky, appear as a single image. On the other hand, some of that learning definitely shows up - if less directly - in the course of my work. I know a few more things, and am more practiced at explaining them concisely. I am aware of references I otherwise wouldn't be. Stuff like that.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd agree with whuber that active participation exposes one to many varied problems, and that serves as excellent preparation for consulting - but I spent years doing consulting already, both in an academic capacity (consulting to research students in a variety of areas) and in several different application areas (in 'industry' as they say). I don't even include all my actual paid consulting on my resume. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also agree with him that involvement in as many topics as possible &quot;exposes one to a wider range of solutions and thereby, over time, can considerably augment one's skills and tools&quot;. Indeed, that's one of the major attractions of the site to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2014-07-23T20:38:15.093" LastActivityDate="2014-07-23T20:38:15.093" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2104" CreationDate="2014-07-24T02:03:47.680" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You say you waited a few days, so I doubt it's an issue that you accepted. On the other hand, if it's not really what you're after, you should think carefully about whether you really want to accept it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People that answer after longish delays might reasonably expect an answer to have been accepted, and can still post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen people accept answers as soon as they are able to, which I think does discourage better answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also suggest that if you're thinking of promoting your post via a bounty, you should not accept an answer before the bounty starts - and probably not until the bounty period is up or nearly up (unless a near-perfect answer arrives earlier in which case you might accept it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My practice so far has tended to be (over only a few questions that I've asked) to try to upvote any reasonable contribution immediately (I might hold off for a day if I'm waiting for clarifications), but to wait at least a few days to accept an answer, unless something great comes along much sooner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2014-07-26T07:38:41.227" LastActivityDate="2014-07-26T07:38:41.227" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2113" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2115" CreationDate="2014-07-24T05:12:07.727" Score="2" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Apologies if this is the wrong forum/format, I am open to guidance.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I posted a question yesterday (&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/109076/what-is-your-favorite-statistical-graph&quot;&gt;What is your favorite statistical graph?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;), modeled along the lines of another well received question on CV. My question and the initial answers have been well received. As of a few hours ago, and of this writing, the question received 8 up votes (7 yesterday, 1 today) and scads of views. However, I received reputation for only 4 of these up votes, despite being well below the 200 reputation daily limit (&lt;em&gt;curse you &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/41/mortarboard&quot;&gt;Mortarboard badge&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/em&gt;), and not receiving any down votes or (as far as I can tell) any flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is this a case of missing reputation, or a case of my not understanding how reputation works? Enlightenment welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Was there some sort of flag, or something I am missing that would indicate that I &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; overstepped a CV/SE boundary somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44269" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2018-06-15T05:49:38.313" LastActivityDate="2018-06-15T05:49:38.313" Title="Why am I not gaining reputation for upvotes?" Tags="|support|reputation|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2107" CreationDate="2014-07-24T07:26:11.180" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have. I'm a psychologist in the early stages of my career though. I have a lot more space on my curriculum vitae and LinkedIn profile than some of these other guys, fewer other ways to demonstrate my statistical skills, &lt;em&gt;such as they are&lt;/em&gt; &lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(@Glen_b is overly modest when he refers to his readily evident communication skills with this phrase, but my stats skills are still largely untested outside this forum)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;, and fewer things to mention in cover letters and interviews, especially since I also fall into @whuber's category of very high rate-of-participation users. I've been overdoing it on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Editors&amp;amp;filter=year&quot;&gt;edits&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Voters&amp;amp;filter=year&quot;&gt;votes&lt;/a&gt; all year! I've been mostly  unemployed post-PhD too &lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(vacation attributable to &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_post-reinforcement_pause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;post-reinforcement pause&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/92248/32036&quot;&gt;heavy remedial study of stats for analysis overhaul prior to dissertation publication&lt;/a&gt;, moving out, brutal job market for teachers, etc.)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;, so my activity here has probably been my most valuable and demonstrable professional activity since grad school. Since abandoning teaching applications, I've even been making a tentative (and temporary) career shift toward statistical consulting. I've had two private clients since graduating – one referred by a friend, and another who found me here! This inspired me to just list myself as a freelance statistical consultant on my CV, LinkedIn, etc., which resulted in a hiring company contacting me (I didn't have the software knowledge necessary though). Clearly it's a better entry than nothing to account for my time since graduating...but I'm fairly atypical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, I've just been hired for a psychology postdoc with heavy stats demands. I got this far in part by studying longitudinal SEM, and I owe much of my confidence with these methods to my experience here, since I've had limited chances to apply them otherwise. In applying, I described my activity since graduating as statistical consulting – mostly volunteer – and mentioned my experience here on CV briefly in both my cover letter and during the interview. Both were received well. I don't think the mention of CV in my cover letter mattered much, but I noticed a little bit of surprised enthusiasm when I described over the phone how I've been sticking my nose in people's statistical problems from all over the world and all sorts of careers for the past 8 months. I don't want to overplay the effect – I have a lot of other strengths and lucky compatibilities going for me in this case – but mentioning my work here (briefly, as others have advised; it wouldn't have been enough in isolation) sure didn't hurt my chances. See also this related question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1187/32036&quot;&gt;Does being on StackExchange help get consulting jobs?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope my self-indulgent autobio doesn't seem too tangential. I prefer to tell the story than advocate my choices, as my only support for them is in their results so far. My relevant curriculum vitae entries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Professional Experience&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Statistical consultant, various clients and projects, 2013–2014&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[One other unrelated entry here – president of a departmental grad student association]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Professional Memberships&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/32036/nick-stauner&quot;&gt;Cross Validated&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/users/4086/nick-stauner&quot;&gt;Cognitive Sciences&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nick_Stauner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ResearchGate&lt;/a&gt;, 2013–2014 [hyperlinks included!]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[Four other unrelated entries here – psychology associations with conferences I presented at]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are just one line apiece in fields I wanted to include anyway – nothing too obtrusive or emphatic. FWIW, on LinkedIn, Cross Validated is somewhat more prominent on my profile. I list three websites, one of which is my profile here. I list myself as a &quot;personality &amp;amp; social psychologist &lt;strong&gt;and statistical consultant&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. I describe my experience as, &quot;Statistical analysis, review, reporting, editing, and consultation,&quot; which largely refers to my activity here. Last, there is a field for volunteer work – Cross Validated is my only entry there, and though it may not amount to a hill of beans on the job market, I'm very proud of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and my alibi for my (hyper)activity here, should it be called into question: I've been striving to build connections and contribute to the staying power of one of the best professional resources I know of, and now that I've got this job, I'll probably be transitioning away from editing/reviewing/answering and toward asking! Bounties forthcoming as necessary – I can certainly afford a few now. Thanks CV!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:17.973" LastActivityDate="2014-07-31T17:54:19.923" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2113" CreationDate="2014-07-24T08:47:33.210" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You (or possibly a moderator) seem to have checked the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit-community-wiki&quot;&gt;community wiki&lt;/a&gt;&quot; box when editing the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result being, that the post has become a community wiki post, which means there are no reputation gains for the OP. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can edit to remove the checkbox, but any upvotes that occurred during the period it was community wiki will not count towards your reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24254" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2014-07-24T08:47:33.210" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2116" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2120" CreationDate="2014-07-25T22:59:16.397" Score="3" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I enjoy serendipitously learning new stuff based on answered questions on CV. But given the volume of questions a day, I end up only sampling from the newest questions, which are more likely than not unanswered. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to sample from questions that HAD a bounty on them. That would increase the probability that the question was interesting (at least to someone) and was answered in detail!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On that note, just filtering for questions that had ACCEPTED answers would also be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Thank you all. Great answers. And the use of badges is a great idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8226" LastEditorUserId="32036" LastEditDate="2014-07-31T17:59:33.867" LastActivityDate="2014-07-31T17:59:33.867" Title="How to filter for questions that had a bounty on them?" Tags="|support|feature-request|accepted-answer|search|bounty|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2116" CreationDate="2014-07-25T23:54:46.453" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you familiar with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;Advanced Search&lt;/a&gt; options? They help a lot filtering questions (and answers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if you want to search for questions with accepted answer type in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=&quot;&gt;search field box&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;hasaccepted:1&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=hasaccepted%3A1&quot;&gt;click me&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To search for questions with accepted answers and which were not closed or put on hold type:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;hasaccepted:1 closed:0&lt;/code&gt; and so on with other options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, there is not a current advanced search option customized for threads with awarded bounties. As I think you already know one can search for current open bounties in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=featured&quot;&gt;featured&lt;/a&gt; tab.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One option for searching bounties on old threads is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/170307/top-200-bounties-by-bounty-amount&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;The link is a query which should retrieve the top 200 bounties (regarding amount of reputation). It is not very organized though. Some threads (specially the oldest, for example, from 2010) do not contain bounties. Maybe in such situations, it was opened a bounty but they were not awarded. If you go to the top bounties (500 rep, 200 rep) you will see they were actually awarded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this helps you to get started. Good luck. Good learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2014-07-25T23:54:46.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2116" CreationDate="2014-07-26T01:36:48.007" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's possible to extract the &lt;em&gt;number&lt;/em&gt; of bounties awarded (regardless of reputation transferred) with &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/210451/questions-with-accepted-and-bountied-answers?topX=10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt;. The top 10 questions by number of bounties + 1 for an accepted answer are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/80380&quot;&gt;Examples where method of moments can beat maximum likelihood in small samples?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/12140&quot;&gt;Conditional inference trees vs traditional decision trees&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/65276&quot;&gt;Negative binomial regression question - is it a poor model?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/72685&quot;&gt;Why is Mantel&amp;#39;s test preferred over Moran&amp;#39;s I?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/93099&quot;&gt;Root finding for stochastic function&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/35414&quot;&gt;Mixed model vs. Pooling Standard Errors for Multi-site Studies - Why is a Mixed Model So Much More Efficient?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/71221&quot;&gt;Selecting PCA components which separate groups&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/82078&quot;&gt;Why the F-test in Gaussian linear models is most powerful?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/3064&quot;&gt;Longitudinal comparison of two distributions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/7607&quot;&gt;Boundary effect in a wavelet multi resolution analysis&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases the bounty expired without being awarded because there were no answers given before the bounty expired. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Enjoy!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27774" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2014-07-26T01:36:48.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2119" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-26T09:37:37.190" Score="4" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;A user sent me several notifications in the comments of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/109432/proving-some-properties-of-expected-first-order-statistics-with-respect-to-sampl&quot;&gt;this discussion&lt;/a&gt; today, but I have not received any notification. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8402" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T19:14:18.177" Title="I don't receive notifications" Tags="|bug|comment|notifications|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2116" CreationDate="2014-07-26T16:59:20.270" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are good answers here with respect to your explicit question.  However, implied by your overt question is a latent question 'how can I find more of the best CV questions and answers than just surfing the main page?'  Should you be interested, one strategy is to skim through the list of recent badges on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges&quot;&gt;badges page&lt;/a&gt; for nice (etc.) questions and answers.  There are more ideas along these lines here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1554/7290&quot;&gt;How should new users navigate Cross Validated to learn more about statistics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2014-07-26T16:59:20.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2107" CreationDate="2014-07-28T07:35:45.327" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;My background: 5 years job experience in non-academia, working in software development and ML &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dynamicyield.com/2014/07/startup-data-science/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;research&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My overall (sad ?) impression based on this and based on reading career advices for programmers is, that what you have done and how it contributed to the business is way more important (and explainable) in job interviews then how strong your theoretic background is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Made up example: Suppose you have created a sophisticated spam-filter and email-sorting system, which had to deal with only a small amount of labeled data (semi-supervised learning), could be improved efficiently by each user (active learning) and worked only well by doing more than the bag-of-words-approach (natural language processing). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the interviewer understands all this, one can explain this in detail. Otherwise, it is more advised to focus on how much this improved the overall workflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same goes for stats.SE. While I would put the activity here on the CV as hobby, I'd rather use the limited space to focus on my biggest practical accomplishments which are easy to understand even for HR drones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I have improved a lot by participating on stats.SE (and got a lot of ideas), but this only mattered and become visible at the very moment I have solved a business problem using that knowledge. Then none cared &lt;em&gt;WHY&lt;/em&gt; I was able to do it, just that I &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last point: &#xA;While I agree with whuber that active participation on stats.SE should matter for an employer, it is hard to explain that &lt;em&gt;shortly&lt;/em&gt; in a CV (may be even in a job interview if this point has not been raised by the interviewer). As another example, I have a hobby which is social, requires self-organization and keeps my creativity alive, but is not known (and understood) that widely that I'd put in in the CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="264" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T07:35:45.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2122" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-29T01:49:53.150" Score="9" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I know the answer to this, but as a naive newbie I posted a plea for &quot;some interesting datasets&quot; for a particular purpose. I see the rule about asking for &quot;a particular dataset&quot;, and I suppose that applies to my posting as well. But before I delete my question, I want to hear some opinions. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/109710/good-data-example-needed-with-covariate-affected-by-treatments&quot;&gt;The question is here&lt;/a&gt; and I will delete the question if there is a consensus that I should. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Update&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the discussion here, as well as on the question itself, which has not given a clear &quot;delete&quot; signal so far at least, I intend to leave my question there. I think there is (and has been) a clear methodological context for the question, and it is my hope and belief that its presence will not open the floodgates for the types of data requests we don't desire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52554" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2014-07-31T17:29:52.960" Title="Not-a-particular dataset request – still not kosher?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|data|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2123" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2125" CreationDate="2014-07-29T08:09:52.223" Score="1" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have some questions that I would like to see answered. May I use the chat to attract (indiscriminately) some users' attention towards my questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40252" LastEditorUserId="32036" LastEditDate="2014-07-30T04:43:55.653" LastActivityDate="2014-08-18T04:50:43.423" Title="Chat to attract answers?" Tags="|discussion|questions|chat|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2122" CreationDate="2014-07-29T12:39:54.067" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;My take on the rule is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2096/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;: I think we only want to ward off (the many potential) questions about getting data (&quot;statistics&quot;) &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; particular subjects&amp;mdash;economics, baseball, or medicine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2014-07-29T12:39:54.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2123" CreationDate="2014-07-29T13:35:37.977" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suppose you &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt;, but it isn't the preferred way to attract attention to your question.  Be aware that most questions aren't answered immediately; it can be a few hours at least before a question is answered.  Once your question drops off the main page, though, the amount of attention it garners will decrease substantially.  At that point, you could edit your question to add more information and that would 'bump' it to the top of the main page again, so that it would get more attention.  After two days, if it still isn't getting much attention, you could add a bounty.  But chat isn't the ideal strategy.  In addition, it isn't very likely to work; there is very little traffic in chat.CV.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2014-07-29T14:53:51.113" LastActivityDate="2014-07-29T14:53:51.113" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2126" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-29T14:13:04.430" Score="13" ViewCount="351" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/108765/12615&quot;&gt;In inverse theory, how do I transform the averaging kernel matrix to a new grid?&lt;/a&gt;) earned me the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/40/tumbleweed?userid=12615&quot;&gt;tumbleweed badge&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;em&gt;Asked a question with no votes, no answers, no comments, and low views for a week&lt;/em&gt;.  What is the &quot;take home&quot; message for that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No downvotes – it is apparently not considered a bad question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No close votes – it is apparently not considered off-topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No comments, no upvotes, no answers (before I figured out my own answer a week later, and posted it).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can I learn from the tumbleweed badge?  What is the &quot;take home&quot; message when I get it?  Is such a question too specialised, too localised, or simply not very interesting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; It seems this post has generated some attention to the linked question, eliminating its former tumbleweed status.  But the question remains.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12615" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2014-08-01T17:18:29.807" Title="What is the &quot;take home&quot; message if I get the tumbleweed badge?" Tags="|discussion|unanswered-questions|badges|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2126" CreationDate="2014-07-29T16:44:11.000" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an age-old question. Seriously: there's &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/1576/165581&quot;&gt;an MSE thread&lt;/a&gt; about this that's five years old. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My two personal favorite explanations: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I see it more as a consolation prize. No one looked at your question or answered it, so here's something to hold you over until you get an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/1579/165581&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/1579/165581&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...it's the the engines way of saying &quot;Sorry, I couldn't get you an answer. Please forgive me :(&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/1653/165581&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/1653/165581&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6123" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2014-07-29T16:44:11.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2126" CreationDate="2014-07-29T19:25:34.973" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't take it hard.  Most of the views of a question come from people seeing the title on the main page and finding it interesting, either as something that they think they can contribute a helpful answer for or as something they want to understand better themselves.  There is a certain amount of 'churn' on the main page (which is a good thing), and so when the thread gets pushed off the main page its ability to draw attention goes down considerably.  Without a question being edited or answered (and so 'bumped' back to the top) it will drop off of the main page within a day.  Thus, the &quot;for a week&quot; part of the definition of tumbleweed isn't as bad as it seems.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My take here is that your question is good (in the sense of being useful and clear and showing research effort, etc.) and is definitely on-topic for CV.  However, it is also quite specialized, even esoteric.  My sense is that most questions on CV are about fairly basic aspects of linear models and hypothesis testing, and that the bulk of the CV users are most comfortable with topics like those (for example, I am).  As a result, few people might be drawn to your question before it drops off the main page.  This is unfortunate, particularly in your case.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used to read through the new badges everyday, including going through the tumbleweeds to see if they needed work or just to be bumped, but I do that much less often now that the new badges are no longer on the main page.  You will probably get some more attention arising from this meta thread, but we can also add a bounty if you want.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2014-07-29T19:25:34.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2122" CreationDate="2014-07-29T20:26:08.543" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I generally believe that questions about datasets should be on-topic on CV (see my answer here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1300/7290&quot;&gt;What is a good place for &quot;how/where do I get data on X&quot; questions&lt;/a&gt;).  Your question fits the category of asking for datasets that I think is acceptable, so I wouldn't mind leaving it open. However, the community seems to clearly disagree with me on this.  So I suspect your question is off-topic for CV under the agreed-upon rules.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2014-07-29T20:26:08.543" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2126" CreationDate="2014-07-29T23:53:52.443" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, for one reason or another, a question gathers little attention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be a really useful or interesting question, but for some reason didn't particularly get noticed (sometimes the day or time of posting might have been unfortunate, for example - if you just happen to post when many people's attention is elsewhere ...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or maybe its more of a niche interest than you feel it should be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On (rare) occasion you can have a question that gets little notice, but picks up later on, for one reason or another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sometimes&lt;/em&gt; it may suggest you should edit it to be a bit punchier, and consider how to promote it - via a bounty, say. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But other times it's just one of those things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have only asked a handful of questions, but I have managed to gather a tumbleweed myself. (I suspect in my case it was more 'asking a question most people just didn't care to read'. I think I have to work on my 'how to ask a question' skills -- or at least my 'how to write a title' skills.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's nice to at least have the consolation prize of a badge when it happens. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if nearly all your questions are tumbleweed ... that may be something to worry about (it might suggest considering whether another forum might be better, for example). And even if the question gets some attention later (it seems to have some now, at least), you get to keep the badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2014-07-29T23:59:18.103" LastActivityDate="2014-07-29T23:59:18.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2131" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2132" CreationDate="2014-07-30T15:30:10.083" Score="9" ViewCount="339" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I've been using &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;, I've noticed that questions related to statistics or probabilities take more time to get answered, if they get answered, than at CV. This is just my impression without any evidence to support it. (I may be wrong about this.)&#xA;So, I've cross-posted sometimes. Yes, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently I was warned not to do it. Hence my two-part question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why should we not cross-post? (Any link or help with this information is very welcome.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the possible consequences of persisting in this behaviour?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help would be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40252" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:38.337" LastActivityDate="2014-08-06T12:35:37.617" Title="Cross-Posting on Math and CV" Tags="|discussion|policy|cross-posting|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2131" CreationDate="2014-07-30T22:55:57.613" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Comments&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your &lt;em&gt;culpa&lt;/em&gt; doesn't seem &lt;em&gt;maxima&lt;/em&gt; enough!  Knowingly cross-posting...&lt;a href=&quot;http://youtu.be/syOatIDhAHY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shame!!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing you're responding to &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/882644/neyman-pearson-lemma-doubt-on-the-text-of-the-lemma#comment1821565_882644&quot;&gt;this comment on your recent Mathematics question&lt;/a&gt;. Do clarify if your &lt;code&gt;ME&lt;/code&gt; $\ne$ Mathematics. We may wish to discuss the issue on a per-sister-site basis, and having it arise WRT a different site than usual could make this question unique. As is, it might be a dupe of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1948/32036&quot;&gt;Cross-posting in CV and math.SE tends to become an epidemic&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, but it can't be closed as such for lack of an upvoted answer over there. I also like that you've emphasized the &lt;em&gt;why-nots&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;what-ifs&lt;/em&gt; over the &lt;em&gt;what-should-we-do-abouts&lt;/em&gt;; I have much more to say about these. BTW, your question also reincarnates &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1948/cross-posting-in-cv-and-math-se-tends-to-become-an-epidemic?lq=1#comment5354_1948&quot;&gt;an upvoted comment on that question&lt;/a&gt;, so let's have at it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Background&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more I look into this cross-posting issue is the more it seems controversial to me, rather than clear-cut like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;the help page&lt;/a&gt; suggests:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please note, however, that &lt;em&gt;cross-posting is not encouraged&lt;/em&gt; on SE sites. Choose one best location to post your question. Later, if it proves better suited on another site, it can be &lt;em&gt;migrated&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On that side of the fence, there's also a big fat $\mathbf{NO}$ sitting atop the accepted answer to the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/64068/246931&quot;&gt;Is cross-posting a question on multiple Stack Exchange sites permitted if the question is on-topic for each site?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; Further down, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/64073/246931&quot;&gt;the second-most upvoted answer&lt;/a&gt; is a slippery slope argument against cross-posts by SE's own &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/1/jeff-atwood&quot;&gt;Jeff Atwood&lt;/a&gt; &lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(self-appointed &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001169.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow Valued Associate #00001&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;.&#xA;Here on CV, our very own &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/users/88/mbq&quot;&gt;mbq♦&lt;/a&gt; even posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/897/32036&quot;&gt;the biggest &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;NO&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; you'll find on the network!&lt;/a&gt; Looks clear-cut, &lt;em&gt;no?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well...&lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; – look a little further. On the above questions, highly upvoted comments challenge both &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64068/is-cross-posting-a-question-on-multiple-stack-exchange-sites-permitted-if-the-qu/75012#comment302240_64069&quot;&gt;the objectivity of the accepted answer&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64068/is-cross-posting-a-question-on-multiple-stack-exchange-sites-permitted-if-the-qu/75012#comment429638_64073&quot;&gt;the slipperiness of the slope&lt;/a&gt;. Below, two newer answers argue that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/75012/246931&quot;&gt;there are exceptions and good practices for them&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/234946/246931&quot;&gt;there are systemic incentives&lt;/a&gt;. The former has &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64068/is-cross-posting-a-question-on-multiple-stack-exchange-sites-permitted-if-the-qu/234946#comment181805_75012&quot;&gt;a supportive comment from Jeff&lt;/a&gt; that draws a clearer line between bad and good (or at least &lt;em&gt;acceptable&lt;/em&gt;) cross-posting; it has plenty of upvotes too. The latter answer was brief and rather unconvincing (which is an ill-fated approach to arguing against dominant opinion), but it has my upvote – there certainly are wide disparities in site traffic, and I've now edited in a graph to demonstrate just how wide and provided supporting arguments. These include mention of a worthy &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/199989/246931&quot;&gt;on MSE&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/199989/build-and-strengthen-the-stack-exchange-community-with-crossover-questions-bet#comment636099_199989&quot;&gt;comments linking many others&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/64996/246931&quot;&gt;a similar suggestion for good cross-posting practices&lt;/a&gt; made by &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/811/shog9&quot;&gt;Shog9&lt;/a&gt; (a &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/03/welcome-valued-associate-josh-heyer/&quot;&gt;SE Community Manager&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/leagues/4/alltime/meta&quot;&gt;kind of a big deal on MSE&lt;/a&gt;, second only to Jeff there). Internally, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/98786/robert-cartaino&quot;&gt;Robert Cartaino&lt;/a&gt; &lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Director of Community Development and &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/04/welcome-stack-overflow-valued-associate-00005/&quot;&gt;Valued Associate #00005&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt; has also been around longer, and he has also &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/4713/246931&quot;&gt;supported cross-posting in &quot;edge cases&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, which I think are losing their &quot;edge&quot; as the network grows and more sites overlap more naturally. On &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/131950/246931&quot;&gt;yet another popular feature request&lt;/a&gt;, another MSE &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=OG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OG&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/102937/robert-harvey&quot;&gt;Robert Harvey&lt;/a&gt; echoes &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/212725/246931&quot;&gt;the conditional and informal nature of cross-posting policy&lt;/a&gt;. CV also expresses dissent on the topic: &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1880/32036&quot;&gt;Is the help &amp;#39;misinformed&amp;#39; on the question of cross-posting?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence I wonder if the illusion of clear-cut policy isn't a relic of Jeff's original design that is obsolescing as the network grows in ways that were unforeseeable when these matters were &quot;decided&quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;My answer&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1) Why should we not cross-post?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because you're probably going to &lt;a href=&quot;http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/youre-doing-it-wrong&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;do it wrong&lt;/a&gt; if you haven't thought it through (see background links). That being said, there is &lt;strong&gt;a way to cross-post conscientiously&lt;/strong&gt; for questions that deserve it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Read your target sites' on-topic help pages&lt;/strong&gt; to check if your question is on-topic at each.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Search the sites' meta-questions&lt;/strong&gt; for issues with your question's specific topic (think at the level of specificity that decides what tags to use) and issues of overlap with the other site's main domain. You'll not often be the first to want to cross-post on your particular pair of target sites.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do not copy-paste; reframe your question.&lt;/strong&gt;  Differentiate your two posts to emphasize what aspect(s) of your question you want each community to weigh in on separately. Don't just cross-post to enlarge your audience; do it because each audience may have a different perspective on your problem, and do your part to encourage a different angle of approach on each site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Link to your other version of the question on the other site.&lt;/strong&gt; This facilitates the good side of cross-posting: open juxtaposition of different sets of answers and a bridge between related communities. It also indicates that you're not just thinking of yourself and trying to circumvent the dominant policy thoughtlessly or surreptitiously. Don't underestimate the power of ruffled feathers; tread lightly and respond diplomatically to any critiques from the local leaders. Don't overreact.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2) What are the possible consequences of persisting in this behaviour?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't seem to come up much, which is probably a good thing! I suspect people tend to settle on one site or another depending on which gives the better (or worse) reception, and maybe individuals really don't have that many &quot;edge cases&quot; to offer. I think the collective behavior of the communities persists more, in that new users keep arriving without site preferences, nuanced understanding of sites' topic boundaries, or awareness of the dominant anti-cross-posting policy. This probably fuels that policy's power, because new users tend to ask worse questions anyway*. Hence they probably also take the brunt of that policy's force, for better or worse. They receive more negative feedback at first (call it hazing if you will, but it's purposeful, and ideally, constructive), have more questions closed, and probably suffer a higher incidence of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/86997/246931&quot;&gt;question bans&lt;/a&gt;. I think it must be very rare for people to achieve that level of rejection for cross-posting alone though; truly bad cross-posting is probably comorbid with many other troublesome behaviors that compound to produce that end result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose if you've &quot;gotten away with it&quot; before, someone might recognize that you're at it again and respond more bluntly or develop an attitude toward you, but it's far wiser to worry about the community's opinion than an individual's. Bringing the issue to the per-site metas (or having it brought there, maybe even in a way that's stilted against you, though we're supposed to keep it impersonal) is the upside of persistence. This is a touchy issue regarding which the whole network needs to work out its ambivalence and resolve its differences. There may be no complete, network-wide solution until a particularly ingenious feature request gets implemented (which could still be a long time from now – it's not gonna be easy), but in the meantime, individual communities can develop local policies and partnerships with their relatives. This is also where we decide what sites to list as migration paths within the flag / close-vote popup dialog. Popular cross-post pairings help inform that decision, because migration is another, softer solution for handling cross-posts that a site doesn't want to keep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus if you feel compelled to persist, bring it up in meta! As you demonstrate, this is one good effect. Of course, if you follow step 2 above, you may also find that others have beaten you to it. Don't forget to vote while you're there! That's ultimately how we steer this thing (to &lt;a href=&quot;https://politics.stackexchange.com/a/321/2470&quot;&gt;the extent that we do&lt;/a&gt; ;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Footnote&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;* New users asking worse questions, IMO (as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/110/steward?userid=32036&quot;&gt;newly badge-holding &quot;steward&quot;&lt;/a&gt;!), is due to natural ignorance of &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; SE policies, the effect of negative feedback from the community that shoos away bad attitudes and incoherent writers early on, and the positive effects of practice for those who persist. We don't just learn the site culture; we learn to communicate! IMO, the effects of this network's feedback are what make it special, and its culture worth accommodating.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:44.430" LastActivityDate="2014-07-30T23:48:44.090" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2133" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-07-31T16:37:17.823" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cross-posting refers to posting the same question on multiple websites. Cross-posting is frowned upon as it leads to fragmented answers splattered all over the network. If you spot a user cross-posting, please make use of &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/24560/flagging-a-question-for-moderator-review&quot;&gt;moderator flags&lt;/a&gt; to inform the moderators. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Refer to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64068/is-cross-posting-a-question-on-multiple-stack-exchange-sites-permitted-if-the-que&quot;&gt;cross-posting FAQ&lt;/a&gt; for more details and discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32036" LastEditorUserId="32036" LastEditDate="2014-07-31T23:48:34.603" LastActivityDate="2014-07-31T23:48:34.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2134" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-07-31T16:37:17.823" Score="0" Body="Cross-posting refers to posting the same question on multiple websites." OwnerUserId="32036" LastEditorUserId="32036" LastEditDate="2014-07-31T23:48:39.753" LastActivityDate="2014-07-31T23:48:39.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2126" CreationDate="2014-08-01T17:18:29.807" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have also earned this badge for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/108945/statistical-significance-or-unambiguous-direction-of-influence&quot;&gt;a question of mine&lt;/a&gt;. I would interpret this &quot;zero-response&quot; as the result of some, or all, of the following (assuming that the question covers the usual requirements for being on-topic, being clear, etc)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) Too specialized a question  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) Too &quot;textbook&quot; as an issue (so everybody leaves the rather boring answer for everybody else)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) Not textbook, but still dull &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d) These are random processes and a zero-response has strictly positive probability of happening, just because of random variability. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28746" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2014-08-01T17:18:29.807" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2131" CreationDate="2014-08-01T23:57:54.190" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Trying to be a dutiful member of the community, I have previously alerted of accelerating cross-posting &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1948/cross-posting-in-cv-and-math-se-tends-to-become-an-epidemic&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, where I even posted a single-phrase update yesterday.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this does not mean I disagree with the practice (or that I agree). Although Nick Stauner's answer is a tour-de-force, I have a few(...) things I would like to say on the matter: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let a question that is on-topic on all sites that is cross-posted. Why should the practice be considered unethical or wasteful? These are the only two issues that one could raise against a cross-on-topic cross-posted question: either it wastes resources (time, attention, queue space etc) or it gives the asker an &quot;unfair advantage&quot;. Or better, &lt;em&gt;exactly because&lt;/em&gt; it creates an advantage by wasting resources, it should be considered unethical (me being an economist).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, does it? Apparently yes. It appears on two different url's, it is read by different users... moreover, it may be answered in essentially the same way by two different persons, so even more waste...  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why is this a waste? Another important issue in Q&amp;amp;A sites is &quot;why and who do we answer for?&quot; In most cases, here and in other sites, the attitude is &quot;we answer for the asker, but also for posting knowledge on the web for all future askers in need&quot; (an attitude with which I agree). In that case, one could even argue that &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; cross-posting a cross-on-topic question is the attitude that should be considered unethical, since it deprives the &lt;em&gt;other crowd&lt;/em&gt; of an interesting question that may receive a useful answer. And why is it a waste, if two different answerers provided the same answer? Answerers are doing it exclusively for their own psychological reward, so, each one separately was not hurt -on the contrary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, it is a waste for the community seen as a whole, because, the second answerer could have answered another question that now may have gone un-answered, making it an unfair situation for the asker that didn't get his answer... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But wait, what &quot;community as a whole&quot;? If the SE world was one community, why do we have many sites? The answer to that is rather obvious (practical, technical, socio-psychological reasons). But what if the SE word of websites was one integrated interface, where the existing Q&amp;amp;A sites where &quot;thematic tags&quot;? Would we then say &quot;please don't tag each question with more than one thematic tag&quot;? In other words, is there any essential difference between cross-posting a cross-on-topic question, and multi-taging a question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These back-and-forth arguments can go on indefinitely. In other words, this is a classic case of a situation where &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; stance will to some degree violate some accepted principles and values, sometimes the &lt;em&gt;same&lt;/em&gt; principle by a different route, a usual situation in human affairs. Cross-posting may be considered wasteful and unethical, but it can also be considered non-wasteful and ethical. Not-cross-posting may also be considered unethical...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In which case, we have to turn to &quot;unintended consequences&quot;: what if cross-posting was accepted, even encouraged? Is there not a real probability that pretty soon, a visible number of users would start cross-posting even off-topic questions? Increasing many times the burden of each community to clean up the newly created mess, and then &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; causing a waste of resources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To consider this probability as tangible, one should side with the opinion that humans may be controlled by ethical values, but they are &lt;em&gt;driven&lt;/em&gt; by self-interest -and the Internet is notorious for lowering the power of the former (this is one of the things that I really like about CV by the way -it is so un-Internet from that perspective). I do side with this opinion, and so I consider this probability an important hurdle in embracing cross-posting. In a sense this is what &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64068/is-cross-posting-a-question-on-multiple-stack-exchange-sites-permitted-if-the-qu/64073#64073&quot;&gt;Jeff Attwood advanced as a &quot;slippery slope&quot; argument&lt;/a&gt; in a more direct manner. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cross-posting may have principled arguments in favor of it, especially as SE Q&amp;amp;A sites multiply and the degree of overlap increases. But my hunch is that the extend to which the practice will be mis-used, once it is openly allowed/encouraged, will outweigh the benefits from it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under this light, suggestions like Nick's &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Don't copy-paste; Re-frame your question&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; are an excellent way to make productive and positive the &quot;illegal&quot; practice of cross-posting: &quot;Give us a good reason to tolerate what you do, although we won't officially embrace it&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28746" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2014-08-02T00:50:39.070" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2026" CreationDate="2014-08-02T01:28:30.073" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update September 18, 2014&lt;/strong&gt;  (data are for public Beta)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;\begin{array}{| r | r | r |}&#xA;  \hline                       &#xA;   &amp;amp; \text {CV} &amp;amp; \text{Data Science} &amp;amp; \text{Data Science}\\&#xA;  \hline &#xA;\hline                       &#xA;  \text {Metric} &amp;amp; \text {end of Beta} &amp;amp; \text{80 days in Beta} &amp;amp; \text{128 days in Beta}\\&#xA;  \hline                      &#xA;\text {Q per day} &amp;amp; 7.6 &amp;amp; 2.6 &amp;amp; 2\\&#xA;\text{% answered} &amp;amp; \text {96%} &amp;amp; \text {90%} &amp;amp; \text {82%}\\&#xA;\text{avid users} &amp;amp; 138 &amp;amp; 47 &amp;amp; 55\\&#xA;\text {total users} &amp;amp; 1,763 &amp;amp; 1,773 &amp;amp; 2,311\\&#xA;\text {answer ratio} &amp;amp; 3 &amp;amp; 2.5 &amp;amp; 2.4\\&#xA;\text {Visits/day} &amp;amp; 1,159 &amp;amp; 230 &amp;amp; 179\\&#xA;  \hline  &#xA;\end{array}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looks like a decline. The interesting fact is that the only metric doing really good is &quot;total users&quot; (at $+550$ in $48$ days, this is $11$-$12$ new accounts per day). This means that there is an interest for the site &quot;out there&quot;, but those interested are passively waiting to get knowledge by &quot;other peoples' questions and answers&quot;... But sometimes &lt;em&gt;everybody&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;other people&quot;, as indicated by the decline of the &quot;Q per day&quot; metric, which in turns makes the site poor and leads to lower visits by the (increasing number of) total users. Also, one could conjecture that the interested users do not feel knowledgeable or confident enough to &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; questions, as indicated by the falling &quot;% answered&quot; and &quot;answer ratio&quot; metrics (which sounds a reasonable conjecture given that the field is essentially nascent).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feels a bit sad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update August 2, 2014&lt;/strong&gt;  (data are for public Beta)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;\begin{array}{| r | r | r |}&#xA;  \hline                       &#xA;   &amp;amp; \text {CV} &amp;amp; \text{Data Science} \\&#xA;  \hline &#xA;\hline                       &#xA;  \text {Metric} &amp;amp; \text {end of Beta} &amp;amp; \text{80 days in Beta} \\&#xA;  \hline                      &#xA;\text {Q per day} &amp;amp; 7.6 &amp;amp; 2.6 \\&#xA;\text{% answered} &amp;amp; \text {96%} &amp;amp; \text {90%} \\&#xA;\text{avid users} &amp;amp; 138 &amp;amp; 47 \\&#xA;\text {total users} &amp;amp; 1,763 &amp;amp; 1,773 \\&#xA;\text {answer ratio} &amp;amp; 3 &amp;amp; 2.5 \\&#xA;\text {Visits/day} &amp;amp; 1,159 &amp;amp; 230 \\&#xA;  \hline  &#xA;\end{array}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28746" LastEditorUserId="28746" LastEditDate="2014-09-19T00:33:21.357" LastActivityDate="2014-09-19T00:33:21.357" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1705" CreationDate="2014-08-02T13:54:09.837" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not possible yet to save drafts on multiple questions or answers, but it is possible to do that with one question and with one answer, since &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/59445/recent-feature-changes-to-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;2010-10-01&lt;/a&gt;. More details on this &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1177/allow-questions-to-be-saved-as-drafts-prior-to-posting&quot;&gt;Meta SE thread&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, each user gets one draft for questions and one for answers, and the answer draft is cleared if the user posts a new answer (the same for questions). Drafts expire in one week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also possible to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/68957/manually-clear-saved-question-drafts/126299#126299&quot;&gt;discard drafts&lt;/a&gt; if someone wishes to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2014-08-02T13:54:09.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2131" CreationDate="2014-08-06T12:35:37.617" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A proposal: whenever we see questions over at math SE which clearly are more appropriate here, we should propose to move it here! (use the &quot;flag&quot; option and write that proposal, it is usually accepted). Especially when questions there did not already get good answers!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I try to do this agressively, that is also a way to make our site better known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastActivityDate="2014-08-06T12:35:37.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2142" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2143" CreationDate="2014-08-08T02:24:23.343" Score="13" ViewCount="331" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have at least one question that I'm the only person to provide an answer to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't accepted my own answer. (I couldn't see the point, to be honest, obviously I think it answers the question, and - in the absence of any other answers - it's the best of the answers that answer the question, there's no need to signal that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it occurs to me that maybe that is a problem from the point of view of making the &quot;questions with no accepted answers&quot; rate worse (and my own acceptance rate, come to think of it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I suppose I have a three-part question, though answers to any portion will be of interest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As a general principle, should you accept your own answers in order not to make the accepted answer rate lower?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there any other reason to accept your own answer?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there any reason you should avoid accepting your own answer?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I note that there's an additional delay on accepting your own answer to give other answers a chance to be accepted. In this case any such interval is long past. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2014-08-12T04:08:12.390" LastActivityDate="2014-08-23T18:09:57.333" Title="Is there any point to accepting your own (lone) answer?" Tags="|discussion|answers|accepted-answer|self-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2142" CreationDate="2014-08-08T13:52:23.670" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When the answer is good or at least it is not bad (has not downvotes), then, yes. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/64538/how-do-i-find-values-not-given-in-interpolate-in-statistical-tables/64539#64539&quot;&gt;Yours&lt;/a&gt; seems pretty good. If the OP is sure the answer solves the question, then, yes again. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes. The Stack Exchange sites &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/self-answer&quot;&gt;encourage this behavior&lt;/a&gt;. There are &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/01/accept-your-own-answers/&quot;&gt;rules&lt;/a&gt; which avoid gaming the system.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes. When there is a better answer than the OP's. If another better answer appears after a self-answer is accepted, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/93969/is-changing-the-accepted-answer-frowned-upon&quot;&gt;one can always undo the accept&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one accepts an answer when he/she shouldn't I guess votes will guide properly future readers towards good answers. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/20836/algorithms-for-automatic-model-selection/22633#22633&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is one example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Meta, I'd say if it is a discussion post and there is only the the self-answer there, then, it should have at least a minimum score, let's say, 3.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2014-08-08T13:52:23.670" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2144" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-08-08T14:04:19.170" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can spot a self-answer in the stream of answers by the fact that the user card shares the same background style (shaded in a different colour) as the OP. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Unstuck by design&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Self-answers, if accepted, &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6365/vote-ordering-of-accepted-answers-has-changed-accepted-below-top-voted&quot; title=&quot;just like any other&quot;&gt;will not rise or be pinned to the top of the answer pile&lt;/a&gt; like normally accepted answers. They will stay in the flow according to the sort view, be it by votes or date of activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;More at the Stack Exchange blog&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/05/encyclopedia-stack-exchange/&quot;&gt;Encyclopedia Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; - Making it easier and quicker to post the answer to that burning question you've just broken the sweaty back of.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/01/accept-your-own-answers/&quot;&gt;Accept your own answers&lt;/a&gt; - Introduction of the feature where the OP can complete the loop themselves after further investigation or enlightenment.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Copied from: &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/self-answer/info&quot;&gt;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/self-answer/info&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-08-09T05:26:12.620" LastActivityDate="2014-08-09T05:26:12.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2145" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-08-08T14:04:19.170" Score="0" Body="Questions also answered by the user asking, easily marked by the shaded user card attached to the answer." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-08-09T05:24:35.050" LastActivityDate="2014-08-09T05:24:35.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10" CreationDate="2014-08-13T04:40:53.250" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A bit late to the party, but MetaOptimize now seems to suffer from rather sticky problems.  The spam filtering is pretty much nonexistent, and right now, the site has been down for at least a couple of days -- in spite of being on CloudFlare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking to me like the survival of the fittest ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23810" LastActivityDate="2014-08-13T04:40:53.250" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2147" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-13T12:44:35.910" Score="2" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently acquired 2k reputation, and can now review suggested edits. Over the last several days I looked at an occasional pending edit, and &lt;em&gt;not a single time&lt;/em&gt; could decide whether I should accept or decline it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In several cases the suggested edits were very minor. In one case somebody edited another person's answer in quite a substantial way. All of them were probably borderline cases, but without any explicit guidelines how am I supposed to decide whether the edit should be accepted or rejected?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought I could learn by example and see what suggested edits get accepted and rejected by the more experienced users. For this I need to browse through the history of edits, but weird enough I cannot find it! In particular, this page &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/history&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/history&lt;/a&gt; is empty. Am I just missing an obvious link somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2014-08-13T12:44:35.910" Title="What are the guidelines for accepting/rejecting suggested edits?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2014-08-13T14:16:41.840" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2149" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2154" CreationDate="2014-08-14T17:03:10.043" Score="9" ViewCount="338" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a provocative question: should we send &lt;strong&gt;&quot;How do I do this in R/SAS/Python/Stata/SPSS&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; questions to the DataScience, now that it's open? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Data cleaning is never a programming question, as it rarely is generalizable. SAS or Stata aren't really programming languages in the strict sense of that word, the way Python or C++ are. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So may be in addition to the existing &lt;strong&gt;&quot;close -&gt; off-topic -&gt; another site -&gt; StackExchange&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;, we should also have &lt;strong&gt;&quot;close -&gt; off-topic -&gt; another site -&gt; DataScience&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. (May be at least some folks there would become aware of CV, as well. Most of what I do on DataScience is flag statistical questions to be migrated to CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T11:56:09.050" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T11:56:09.050" Title="Migrating software syntax to StackOverflow or DataScience?" Tags="|discussion|migration|on-topic|software|stackoverflow|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2149" CreationDate="2014-08-14T21:11:17.933" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I view data cleaning as on-topic here: it is a fundamental, if somewhat unglamorous (and underappreciated) aspect of data analysis.  But, in keeping with this site's approach and philosophy, we would want to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;welcome answers that focus on principles and generalities which would apply regardless of one's computing platform, and &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;migrate any threads that focus &lt;em&gt;exclusively&lt;/em&gt; on which commands to issue or buttons to push in one particular platform.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Migration to DS is always possible: when voting to close as off-topic you could include a comment with this suggestion; moderators (who can designate any SE site as the target) can then act on that comment.  I have migrated exactly one question to DS since it opened, so I don't think it's an act that will happen so frequently that it needs its own option in the list of closing reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, given that DS looks almost certain to fail, any question that might have any value here, no matter how peripheral, probably should stay here.  I would advocate migrating only questions that are very clearly not on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2014-08-14T21:11:17.933" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2151" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2153" CreationDate="2014-08-18T04:42:51.857" Score="3" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just noticed that I no longer seem to have the ability to recommend some posts for closure (which I noticed because I wanted to do something with a link only post – I eventually took the available options of commenting and flagging).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The system has been a bit wonky the last couple of days, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's that – but I wonder perhaps: did I fail some review and not notice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not sure if bug or just bug in user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: added the &quot;bug&quot; tag as suggested, as the behavior seems to persist. It's still not clear whether this is a real issue or just faulty memory/understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example (from a few hours ago) where I'd normally think I'd see a close option:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lmTc3.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/112613/paired-t-test-with-subsamples-in-r&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; has a close option for me, but the answer doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went with flagging it (which helps me I guess, because it gets me closer to a Marshal badge, but most of these sort of things I'd try to deal with another way if I can).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I notice some of my rep totals are still inconsistent across different displays (connected with the issues from the last few days), so it may all be connected to that, perhaps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: apparently just a bug in the user. I've removed the &lt;code&gt;bug&lt;/code&gt; tag and cropped the image to remove the comment field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2014-08-21T18:21:31.640" Title="Did the interface change, did I lose a privilege, or is everything just slightly wonky?" Tags="|support|closing-questions|answers|votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2123" CreationDate="2014-08-18T04:50:43.423" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;[How did I miss this question before? I have no idea. I've checked meta almost daily in the last three or four weeks, and I think this is the first time I've spotted it.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The usual ways to get attention:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) improve your question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) offer a bounty&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) pique someone else's interest so they offer a bounty&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In normal circumstances, I wouldn't suggest you do it in chat (a few people have done so now and then). It's usually only going to catch the attention of active users (who probably saw your question already), and it's more likely to annoy than interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, given how empty chat is, just lately, it might be worthwhile just having anything vaguely relevant post there. I just today posted some nonsense there because it had been silent for 8 days - I wouldn't want it to freeze just when I need it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What question(s) needed attention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2014-08-18T04:50:43.423" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2151" CreationDate="2014-08-21T02:09:35.667" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot &lt;em&gt;close&lt;/em&gt; answers.  Answers can only be flagged.  (Actually, if an answer has a score &amp;lt;-1 and your reputation is &gt;20k, you can vote to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/trusted-user&quot;&gt;delete&lt;/a&gt;, but that's a different story.)  Only questions can be closed (this assumes your &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;reputation is &gt;3k&lt;/a&gt;, if it's less you flag).  It might be confusing that you can flag both questions and answers, but only close questions, but flagging questions gives different options.  When your reputation is &gt;3k, mostly flagging questions is just about leaving a note for the moderators.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2014-08-21T02:09:35.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2149" CreationDate="2014-08-21T18:13:50.853" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;My comment is true: beta sites can't be listed in the flag/close dialog as migration options; one has to suggest that destination in an &lt;code&gt;other (needs ♦ moderator attention)&lt;/code&gt; flag. Here's &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5780/119139&quot;&gt;a quote from Tim Post on Meta Programmers&lt;/a&gt; (this was as also quoted partially &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/178463/246931&quot;&gt;here on Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm Tim Post, a community manager for Stack Exchange. I'd like to take a few moments to answer this, and explain a bit about migration paths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Migration paths between sites are something that we're very cautious to establish, we put them in place only when we're certain that the conduit will:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Help ease confusion for users that ask a question on a site that overlaps with another, ensuring a great question is sent where it will receive the best answers without much additional effort on the part of the question author,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Be largely beneficial to the target site,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Not become a party to unresolved topic disputes on the originating site, or between the originating and target site...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We don't establish migration paths to a site that is still in its beta period.&lt;/strong&gt; We don't want to send content from one site to another unless we're certain that the target site is a permanent fixture. There are exceptions to this; moderators &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; migrate relatively new questions to sites not in the current migration path, but this ability should be used sparingly. A question should be of much better than average quality, and all hope of it being on topic for the current site should be exhausted prior to going around the established routes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When [a site] comes out of beta, this is something that we can revisit. However, for now, &lt;strong&gt;it's simply not possible to add a migration path&lt;/strong&gt; [to a beta site]. &lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;[Bolding added for emphasis.]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2014-08-21T18:13:50.853" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2155" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2159" CreationDate="2014-08-22T18:04:03.463" Score="5" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it on purpose that our name on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt; is 'Statistical Analysis' rather than 'Cross Validated'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NgMjb.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not only on the main page, but also when one is inside a query and want to select Cross Validated by clicking in the 'switch sites' check box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jtshl.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T21:26:58.303" Title="Our name on SE Data Explorer is Statistical Analysis. Is this by design?" Tags="|support|data-explorer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2156" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-22T20:42:29.530" Score="4" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm mainly thinking about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/112951/36229&quot;&gt;this question (&quot;Is my learnings in Machine Learning fine?&quot;)&lt;/a&gt; which was put on hold for being off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm wondering is: would this question still be off-topic if the asker had targeted the question to something like, &quot;Are these qualifications suitable for a job in statistics?&quot; or, &quot;What kinds of statistics jobs am I qualified for?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36229" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2014-08-27T18:30:36.017" Title="Is discussion of statistics jobs &amp; qualifications off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2142" CreationDate="2014-08-23T18:09:57.333" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;One specific reason to accept your own answer that was not mentioned before is making the question appear differently in the question list/search results. Clearly marking questions that either already provide a solution to non-experts or need further attention from an expert might make search results (and the site in general) marginally more useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6029" LastActivityDate="2014-08-23T18:09:57.333" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2158" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-23T19:41:59.977" Score="19" ViewCount="356" Body="&lt;p&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE 28-8-2014&lt;/strong&gt; : Following suggestions, this post now appears also in the CV blog, &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.blogoverflow.com/2014/08/answering-narrowly-or-more-broadly-some-evidence-from-green-checks-and-upvotes/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://stats.blogoverflow.com/2014/08/answering-narrowly-or-more-broadly-some-evidence-from-green-checks-and-upvotes/&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although not that controversial, there is always the issue: &quot;Should we &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; answer the question, or opt for a more comprehensive treatment of the issue to which the question is associated?&quot; There has been some discussion about this here and on other SE meta-sites also, and various opinions have been registered – although, as I said, it is not an issue that creates hot debates (and this is perhaps why most of the opinions were aired in comments or in the context of an answer to a meta-post with a different focus).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My intention here is to provide a tiny bit of statistical evidence that, &lt;strong&gt;&quot;If we opt for a more comprehensive treatment of the issue to which the question is associated, we are also being more helpful to the OP and to the OP's specific question – &lt;em&gt;according to the OP&lt;/em&gt;.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally I expect that the true statisticians in this site will be able to tear my argument apart (always in good spirit and with good intentions of course) – but this is one of my secret motives for this post: to see applied statistics at work, from the point of view of judging the degree to which postulated conclusions are indeed supported by the statistical evidence, even tentatively.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I will do is to examine the relation between upvotes per answer and accepted/non-accepted answers, or &quot;green/ungreen&quot; answers. At least in theory, the number of upvotes, at least conditional on the popularity of the issue answered, is a rough indication of the general quality of the answer, while the green mark indicates strictly the opinion of the OP, who, having a specific question in mind looks for an answer to his specific question, and may find a more general treatment to be an obstacle rather than helpful.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So one &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; argue that there may be a conflict here: the more focused an answer is, the more helpful will be to the OP (and so the more the chances that it will get the green check), but the less interesting will be for the broader community (and so it will have less chances of being highly upvoted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here is what I've done: I examined myself as an answerer here on CV. I have $379$ answers currently.  My answers usually get few upvotes: only $14$% of them have got $5$ or more, and there are only $7$ answers that got $10$ upvotes or more. Partly, one could attribute this to the fact that it appears that I do tend to answer questions that do not interest the majority of users here – but most probably it is also an indication that my answers are just &quot;OK&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, according to &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/1433/users-with-highest-accept-rate-of-their-answers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt;, I have the top accepted-answers-ratio ($48$%) among users that have $\pm 25$% answers than me $[285 , 475]$. This could be considered as evidence that I am good at getting the green mark. Following the previous conjecture, this could also contribute to the low-upvotes finding: I am answering narrowly, so I may be getting the green mark from the OP, but my answers do not excite the wider community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given these preliminary findings, let's look at the counts, as well as the joint-marginal and conditional empirical relative frequencies here (rounded). I have separated the &quot;upvote&quot; space in three bins. The &quot;one or less&quot; bin seems a natural choice. I have used &quot;5 or more&quot;, just getting the idea from our network profiles, where shown are only answers with five or more upvotes. But it proved an interesting binning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;COUNTS&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;\begin{array}{| r | r | r | r|}&#xA;  \hline                       &#xA;\text{Upvotes} / \;\;\text{Accepted} \rightarrow  &amp;amp; \text {Green} &amp;amp; \text{Ungreen} &amp;amp;\Sigma \\&#xA;  \hline &#xA;  \hline                       &#xA;  \leq 1 &amp;amp; 43 &amp;amp; 66 &amp;amp; 109 \\&#xA;  \hline                     &#xA;2,3,4 &amp;amp; 106 &amp;amp; 110 &amp;amp; 216 \\&#xA;  \hline &#xA; \geq 5 &amp;amp; 33 &amp;amp; 21 &amp;amp; 54 \\&#xA;\hline&#xA;\Sigma &amp;amp; 182 &amp;amp; 197 &amp;amp; 379 \\&#xA;  \hline  &#xA;\end{array}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Joint &amp;amp; Marginals&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;\begin{array}{| r | r | r | r|}&#xA;  \hline                       &#xA;\text{Upvotes} / \;\;\text{Accepted} \rightarrow  &amp;amp; \text {Green} &amp;amp; \text{Ungreen} &amp;amp;\text{Marg} \\&#xA;  \hline &#xA;  \hline                       &#xA;  \leq 1 &amp;amp; .114 &amp;amp; .174 &amp;amp; .29 \\&#xA;  \hline                     &#xA;2,3,4 &amp;amp; .28 &amp;amp; .29 &amp;amp; .57 \\&#xA;  \hline &#xA; \geq 5 &amp;amp; .087 &amp;amp; .055 &amp;amp; .14 \\&#xA;\hline&#xA;\text{Marg} &amp;amp; .48 &amp;amp; .52 &amp;amp; 1.00 \\&#xA;  \hline  &#xA;\end{array}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conditional: Upvotes given Color&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;\begin{array}{| r | r | r |}&#xA;  \hline                       &#xA;\text{Upvotes} / \;\;\text{Accepted} \rightarrow  &amp;amp; \text {Green} &amp;amp; \text{Ungreen}  \\&#xA;  \hline &#xA;  \hline                       &#xA;  \leq 1 &amp;amp; .24 &amp;amp; .33  \\&#xA;  \hline                     &#xA;2,3,4 &amp;amp; .58 &amp;amp; .56  \\&#xA;  \hline &#xA; \geq 5 &amp;amp; .18 &amp;amp; .11  \\&#xA;\hline&#xA;\Sigma &amp;amp; 1.00 &amp;amp; 1.00  \\&#xA;  \hline  &#xA;\end{array}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conditional: Color given upvotes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;\begin{array}{| r | r | r | r|}&#xA;  \hline                       &#xA;\text{Upvotes} / \;\;\text{Accepted} \rightarrow  &amp;amp; \text {Green} &amp;amp; \text{Ungreen} &amp;amp;\Sigma \\&#xA;  \hline &#xA;  \hline                       &#xA;  \leq 1 &amp;amp; .39 &amp;amp; .61 &amp;amp;1.00 \\&#xA;  \hline                     &#xA;2,3,4 &amp;amp; .49 &amp;amp; .51 &amp;amp; 1.00 \\&#xA;  \hline &#xA; \geq 5 &amp;amp; .61 &amp;amp; .39 &amp;amp; 1.00 \\&#xA;\hline &#xA;\end{array}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above seem to indicate that color and upvotes are uninformative for each other regarding the middle of the distributions involved, but &lt;em&gt;they are informative for the two tails&lt;/em&gt;. Especially the 2nd conditional table, where an apparently clear positive association emerges: knowing that an answer has got $\geq 5$ upvotes visibly increases the chances that it is also a green one, compared to the marginal &quot;probability&quot; of being green.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, this is evidence that answering in a more broad fashion is more beneficial both for the users of CV in general, but also for the OP.  And I believe this is strengthened by the fact that I tend &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to answer narrowly, but broadly, which means that we do not have to condition also on my &quot;answering approach&quot;. So &quot;when my broad answers are liked by the community, they are more helpful to the OP also&quot; (this last statement is just an example of the attempt to turn science into rhetoric).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is just &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; user, and not &quot;representative&quot; of the community, by his own words. One can understand that performing such kind of analysis on data related to other users has the danger of being considered indiscreet, and rightfully so. I am leaving it at that, and hope for some &lt;em&gt;statistical&lt;/em&gt; discussion on the issue. Thanks for reading thus far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28746" LastEditorUserId="28746" LastEditDate="2014-08-28T16:26:01.867" LastActivityDate="2014-08-28T16:26:01.867" Title="Answering narrowly or more broadly: some evidence from green checks and upvotes" Tags="|discussion|answers|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2155" CreationDate="2014-08-24T11:07:53.003" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The official policy of SE is to give all sites the descriptive name and *.stackexchange.com domain because it is good for SEO and SE business overall; there are basically 3 reasons for an exception:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;being a pre-Area 51 and pre-SE site (StackOverflow, ServerFault and SuperUser),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;political reasons (MathOverflow, AskUbuntu, +-AskDifferent),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;issues with a descriptive name or a strong community demand (Seasoned Advice, Mi Yodeya, Arquade and CrossValidated).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In our case, the reason to be in the group 3 is that Statistical Analysis does not cover the whole scope of the site (mainly machine learning, but also visualization and data mining; and it is a real problem what numerous failures of machineLearning.SE have shown), and is on its own a historical artifact because this site was proposed on Area51 as only for statistics and expanded during the private beta period. There was even an idea to change the descriptive name to &quot;Data Stack Exchange&quot; but the data.stackexchange.com have been already taken by the Data Explorer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, because of the already mentioned SEO stuff and maybe some internal mechanics sites from the group 3 still have &lt;em&gt;descriptive name&lt;/em&gt;.stackexchange.com domains and use their descriptive name in data dumps and darker places as the data explorer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user88" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2014-08-24T12:58:34.957" LastActivityDate="2014-08-24T12:58:34.957" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2160" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2164" CreationDate="2014-08-28T10:35:35.270" Score="1" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am sorry to post here but Cross Validated did a merge on my account and I lost all reputation points on my stats forum and I cannot post to meta without any reputation points. I don't know what this merge means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I solve this problem or where to address this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20980" OwnerDisplayName="Cagdas Ozgenc" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-08-30T18:00:16.280" LastActivityDate="2014-09-12T09:11:56.183" Title="All reputation is gone" Tags="|support|reputation|user-accounts|merge-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2161" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-08-30T18:07:23.530" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This tag is used for posts that are related to merging multiple Cross Validated accounts of the same user. A user may have multiple accounts due to the one of the following possible scenarios:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One account was created using OpenID whereas the other one is a cookie based account &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One is an unregistered account and the other is registered account &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anonymously asked questions, which are now required to be linked with an OpenID account? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To claim an unregistered user&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Visit this &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/help/merging-accounts&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; for more information about how to get multiple Cross Validated SE accounts merged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Excerpt and wiki were imported and adapted from &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/merge-accounts/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-09-01T12:50:16.360" LastActivityDate="2014-09-01T12:50:16.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2162" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-08-30T18:07:23.530" Score="0" Body="For questions and requests to merge multiple Cross Validated accounts of the same user." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-09-01T12:50:07.713" LastActivityDate="2014-09-01T12:50:07.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2160" CreationDate="2014-09-12T09:11:56.183" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The analysis of the situation revealed that I accidentally set up two accounts one for CrossValidated and one for Quant forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the Quant login propagated to CrossValidated automatically as a convenience provided by the system. As a result I thought all my reputation was lost. In reality it was still on the other account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to admins they merged my accounts by following the steps in the comments above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All is good now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20980" LastActivityDate="2014-09-12T09:11:56.183" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2165" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-14T14:52:51.407" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just posted a question inspired by an earlier question/answer pair in cross-validated (CV).  I think this is part of the intent of the site and a delightful phenomenon. There were folks involved in that other question who had good input in answers and comments.  While they are notified and have links to that question and its ... communication-ecosystem, they are not connected to my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wish there was a way that I could link to the question as a follow-on.  I would like to tag users, but I don't want to deal with trolls or spam, or that high level of complexity.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that there are domino cheers, Markov chains, in questions that exist, create, and comprise an ongoing living organism.  This is what journals, and chat forums do.  They provide a universe where these creatures can live and grow.  While these creatures exist in the primal soup of these early social computing constructs, those constructs were blindly built.  They are imperfect at providing ideal habitat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not looking for the NationalInstruments discussion fora - they have the &quot;chains&quot; but not nearly the purity and caliber and focus of thought that currently, delightfully, exist in CV.  I guess that there is an ideal thought organism, and a world appropriate for it.  I don't know what either means, but like giraffe-necks, we are always building toward it - we can't not make a choice.  If we can't hit the brakes, then we can at least steer the car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am suggesting that by being able to connect new questions to old we can engineer a non-accidental Markov  chain that allows any reader or potential participant who enters to a random point on the chain to traverse the current branch toward its tip or tips, or to go back toward the root and see (and contribute to) adjacent branches they might never have known about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now linking to a single or multiple previous posts might cause graph-theoretic issues like loops or mazes.  Such connection could inform utility of pages and contribution of users, like a pagerank.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way that I can link to a previous post in such a way that the participants who choose, who I do not know, have the choice to participate in my question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way for me to see the children of a particular post?  I know there are some truly excellent and brilliant folks here and they engender substantial learning and growth.  Evidence of that is going to be in downstream questions.  If I wanted to learn from them in the more sequential way, exposing myself to their light for not just an instant, but multiple sequential times making a continuum and showing the evolution of their thought over time, how would I do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22452" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2014-09-15T21:11:41.610" LastActivityDate="2014-09-15T21:11:41.610" Title="Notify a user in a new question" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|policy|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2165" CreationDate="2014-09-15T14:10:46.020" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seems to be a lot packed into your question.  As far as the parts that consider changing the SE system, I suspect that is unlikely to occur.  Here are a few concrete suggestions regarding some of your points:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First, I would simply link to the prior thread at the beginning of your new question, with a short statement that your question is inspired by what happened there.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;With respect to having answerers and commenters there notified of your new question, the easiest way would be to leave a comment below such answers and ping the commenters by leaving another comment below theirs with @user____.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As to learning more from a particular user, and finding all of their subsequent answers, etc., most of that can be done via their user page.  In particular, at the bottom there is a link for an RSS feed, so you can sign up to be notified of what they do on CV.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2014-09-15T14:10:46.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2167" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2168" CreationDate="2014-09-16T13:39:32.520" Score="7" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-trick&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-trick&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-trick&lt;/a&gt; are two different tags on CV, with the first one reserved for kernel smoothing and density estimating, and the second one for kernel trick in maching learning (kernel SVM, kernel PCA, etc.). I noticed that &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; of people confuse these tags, mostly by using &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel&lt;/a&gt; instead of more specific &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-trick&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-trick&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-trick&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is bad, because e.g. questions about kernel PCA are currently divided (approximately evenly) between these two tags. I see two possible solutions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-trick&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-trick&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-trick&lt;/a&gt; is removed as a separate tag and becomes a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The questions confusingly tagged should be re-tagged.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think that the tags are separated quite well and would therefore prefer the second option. Moreover, I was going to go ahead and re-tag all questions about kernel PCA to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-trick&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-trick&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-trick&lt;/a&gt; (and possibly some other questions about SVMs, if I come across any). This would, however, bump all these questions to the front page, and if I re-tag them in one sitting, then there will be lots of questions on the same topic edited by me appearing on the front page practically one after another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this be okay?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Of course, I can also make some other improving edits and maybe even answer some of these questions along the way, to make this less of a book-keeping activity. But still.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are currently &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel+svm&quot;&gt;68 questions&lt;/a&gt; tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/svm&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;svm&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;svm&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel+pca&quot;&gt;7 questions&lt;/a&gt; tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pca&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pca&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pca&lt;/a&gt;. Whereas I was originally referring only to questions on kernel PCA, the problem seems to be much more severe in the SVM topic. For comparison, there are only &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-trick+svm&quot;&gt;16 questions&lt;/a&gt; tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-trick&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-trick&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-trick&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/svm&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;svm&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;svm&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turns out, this issue was discussed two years ago: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1115/what-does-the-kernel-tag-refer-to&quot;&gt;What does the kernel tag refer to?&lt;/a&gt; where @mbq and @whuber argued that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-trick&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-trick&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-trick&lt;/a&gt; is unnecessary. I think I am happy to accept this point of view, but that would mean that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-trick&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-trick&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-trick&lt;/a&gt; should be merged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 3&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just realized that there exists &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-density-estimate&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-density-estimate&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-density-estimate&lt;/a&gt; tag (used 45 times), which could most likely cover almost all uses of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel&lt;/a&gt; tag that are not referring to kernel trick...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2015-10-16T21:49:51.247" Title="Should lots of old questions be retagged [kernel] $\to$ [kernel-trick]?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-10-16T21:47:31.540" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2167" CreationDate="2014-09-16T18:50:34.733" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would be in favor of &lt;strong&gt;option 2&lt;/strong&gt;.  The existence of 46 (as of 9/16/2014) tagged threads suggests that the tag has some organic utility for organizing the topics within CV.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would make two suggestions:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't re-tag all the candidate threads at once, so as not to spam the main page.  It is best, IMO, to do a handful at a time.  As a further extension of that idea, it is best to do the re-tagging during slower traffic periods.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I suspect part of the problem is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-trick&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-trick&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-trick&lt;/a&gt; has no tag wiki excerpt, and the excerpt for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel&lt;/a&gt; is too sparse.  The excerpt for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel&lt;/a&gt; could be clarified a little, and something like 'DO NOT USE this tag for [kernel-trick]' could be appended to the end.  Likewise, a suitable excerpt for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-trick&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-trick&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-trick&lt;/a&gt; should be created.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2014-09-16T18:50:34.733" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2171" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-19T18:37:04.100" Score="10" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;It doesn't immediately grab me why such low quality homework help problems should be closed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/116089/i-need-help-with-this-estimation&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/116089/i-need-help-with-this-estimation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we probably agree this post should be nixxed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot; gives the user the chance to make revisions and articulate exactly where their confusion lies... if it is anything other than a ploy to get solved homework problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, this post is only widely downvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is vote to close because &quot;unclear what is being asked&quot; the proper COA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2014-09-19T18:55:00.097" Title="OK to close homework-help scans as &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|votes|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2171" CreationDate="2014-09-19T18:47:51.017" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a boilerplate close reason for such questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Self-study questions (including textbook exercises, old exam papers, and homework) that seek to understand the concepts are welcome, but those that demand a solution need to indicate clearly at what step help or advice are needed. For help writing a good self-study question, please visit the meta pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This kind of question is starting to appear frequently enough (a few per day) that I no longer give any further thought to it: any blatantly obvious homework exercise (such as a definite quotation from a textbook or exam question) that is posted without additional comment or analysis automatically gets my close vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as why these are off-topic, few people in this community (if any) participate for the joy of doing homework on behalf of those who just won't be bothered to make any effort themselves.  We would like to keep our site clear for questions that are new, interesting, or at least something the OP cares about.  I believe this is covered by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;admonition that&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copy-pasted homework problems arguably are not of this sort, if we take the sense of &quot;problem&quot; to mean not just any question, but specifically a question in which one is interested and willing to invest some intellectual effort to obtain the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2014-09-19T18:55:00.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2173" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2174" CreationDate="2014-09-21T10:57:15.123" Score="4" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/81469/if-any-two-variables-follow-a-normal-bivariate-distribution-does-it-also-have-a&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was marked as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/30159/is-it-possible-to-have-a-pair-of-gaussian-random-variables-for-which-the-joint-d&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, they are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; asking the same question, and I think that unless the answers at the supposed duplicate are altered to respond to this question, they don't actually answer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is asking about a trivariate where all of the bivariate margins are bivariate normal. The question it's marked as a duplicate of is asking about a &lt;em&gt;bivariate&lt;/em&gt; where the &lt;em&gt;univariate&lt;/em&gt; margins are normal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An answer to the question &quot;&lt;em&gt;Is it possible to have a pair of Gaussian random variables for which the joint distribution is not Gaussian?&lt;/em&gt;&quot; does not of itself necessarily imply the same answer to the question about bivariate margins of a trivariate distribution. It's a rather subtler question, and the counterexample somewhat more complex than the counterexamples for the supposed duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the answers could be extended to answer this question, as far as I can see they currently don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it first came up for closure (a couple of weeks ago), I responded (via a comment) pointing out the difference. I've only just noticed that it was voted for closure in spite of the comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've just nominated to reopen, but apparently my original comment was insufficient, so I raise it here, in the hope that we can resolve this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2014-09-22T12:06:59.343" Title="Question wrongly marked as duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2173" CreationDate="2014-09-22T12:06:59.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You convinced me - it is now back open. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More in general I have been irked by others taking actions in reviews/edits that I disagreed with and left a comment (the comments of others are not always easily visible in the review queue - there are quite a few different mechanisms to leave comments). But this appears to be a best case scenario - the site provided the facilities to reverse a decision and your petition was successful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2014-09-22T12:06:59.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2175" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2176" CreationDate="2014-09-23T08:23:10.117" Score="7" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say someone has an idea related to statistics, or for that matter another field, in which that person is not an expert. The idea works better than competing approaches found in literature, but perhaps is not expressed using the right key words or terminology. Another problem is that it is quite easy to program a moderately complicated algorithm which might be very difficult to express in &quot;math&quot; notation (at least for the author of the algorithm).    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would you recommend such a person to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think about putting such an idea up the website here for some kind of pre-review?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My motivation for this question is that in such a case I gave a presentation at a conference, but didn't get so much feedback on it. And I don't know if people were just too polite to show that the idea was silly or already existent, or if the idea was fine and I should do more with it. At forums people are more open and direct, but then there might also the risk that somebody would take the idea, cast it in better shape (which is OK) but would also take the credit for the original idea (which I think is not OK). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the question is a bit naive, but it may also be relevant for some other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35811" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2014-09-23T09:42:52.440" LastActivityDate="2014-10-03T21:41:45.767" Title="Using Cross Validated for a &quot;pre-review&quot; of an Idea that might be suited for a publication" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2175" CreationDate="2014-09-23T10:03:47.690" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you already have flagged some of the difficulties with the idea you are discussing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you publish what may be original material on the internet, there is always a risk that someone will take it and publish it elsewhere without giving proper or indeed any credit. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If people comment on such material, there is always a risk that their comments (including improvements and even critical comments) will be published without their receiving proper or indeed any credit. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the criminals could well be third parties, and not even registered, let alone active, members of this or any other forum. The risk is compounded by the common use of anonymous or cryptic identifiers in many forums. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there are no guarantees. If you wish to safeguard your work, there is nothing better than keeping it private if not secret before publication. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I don't think either point is really a major difficulty. Despite all too many cases of marginal or even total plagiarism, it can be quite hard to get good ideas published. It is fairly obvious but I think important that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pre-publication reviews can't really simulate the specific experience of review by a particular journal.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You would be expecting CV or any equivalent forum to fulfil an extra purpose for which it is not intended. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet I think there is a positive side to this too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nothing stops you posing a question, answering that question with a suggested method, and thereby inviting comments and other answers in the usual way. Otherwise put, existing practices allow you to try to provoke the discussion that you want.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an extra warning, however. Elsewhere I am a journal editor, and like every other editor I want to be clear that we are being offered original material. If you first make public your idea, then do so in a way that allows you to claim and date whatever originality it has. In your case, there is a prior conference publication that you could cite, but let's make the point crystal clear. Suppose a new idea is posted by user987654321, and then offered for publication to a journal by Phineas Fogg. Fogg may be challenged on whether he stole the idea from 987 and be obliged to prove that he is one and the same. That could be embarrassing at best. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastActivityDate="2014-09-23T10:03:47.690" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2177" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2178" CreationDate="2014-09-24T23:08:14.123" Score="15" ViewCount="533" Body="&lt;p&gt;Often - sometimes several times a day - I see questions that open (or occasionally close) by apologizing for the poster's ignorance or for asking a 'basic' question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, there's no need to apologize for ignorance here - the site exists to help us overcome our various forms of statistical ignorance; it's precisely what we're here for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, there's no need to apologize even for a truly basic question; basic questions are actually likely to help many more people than the more esoteric ones, and some of our very best answers are thoughtful responses to what might be seen as basic questions. As long as you've put some basic effort into resolving your problem (at least check Wikipedia for definitions and search here to check if your question has already been answered), basic questions are welcome. In any case, seemingly basic questions are often surprisingly subtle - if you don't know enough to know the answer to a basic question, you probably don't know enough to know whether it's more complicated than it seems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a good place (perhaps the on-topic help?) where we can explain to users not to apologize for either of these things? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Edit: indeed, it might be worth saying &quot;don't apologize in your question&quot; more broadly. If you're apologizing for something you can avoid, just fix it instead. If there's really nothing you can do about it, don't apologize for it.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2014-09-25T00:52:11.700" LastActivityDate="2014-10-27T14:20:36.160" Title="Should we make it clearer that there's no need to apologize?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2177" CreationDate="2014-09-25T03:54:21.357" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I apologize that I don't have a better answer, but I doubt adding this information to the on-topic help will make a difference.  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic section&lt;/a&gt; of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; is editable by the moderators (unlike the rest of the help center or the site's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt; page), but I doubt enough people look at that before posting for it to make any difference.  I do understand what you're talking about, I notice this behavior all the time myself and it pains me too.  But I doubt anything can be done about it.  Sorry.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T03:54:21.357" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2177" CreationDate="2014-09-25T09:12:00.907" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree in broad terms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In essence, don't apologise for asking questions on a forum: that's what it's for! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as @Gung also emphasises, it is very difficult to stop these apologies being added in the first place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apologies are given for understandable reasons: an attempt at politeness, embarrassment, confusion, unwillingness to look ignorant or stupid, and so forth. And if you turn it round, is it more or less irritating to see questions posted without apologies that should not have been posted because they are lazy attempts to get other people to do the work, show no research effort or attempt to explain a problem clearly, or are inappropriate any way? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't see that we can get more people to read advice in the Help Center before posting. For every person cautious enough to read all the advice first, it seems that there are several who just post any way. We don't have a futuristic technology that would prevent people from posting until they understood the precise goals and style of the forum, and if we did, the world would be a more awful place, as many science fiction stories underline. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My solution, in a word, is just &lt;strong&gt;editing&lt;/strong&gt;. I often edit out, or at least edit down, these apologies as irrelevant to the technical question being asked and of no real use or interest to other readers. They join in oblivion pleas of urgency or desperation and other irrelevant stuff. If I edited your post and you are reading this, know that I was just trying to improve your question and make it easier for others to read, to grasp your question and to give you a good answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T09:12:00.907" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2180" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2183" CreationDate="2014-09-28T19:19:25.683" Score="11" ViewCount="260" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I respect, laud and enjoy Cross Validated questions' and answers' palimpsest-like qualities of being a dynamic and living documents, I have a need to print (or save to PDF) a static snapshot of some questions and answers. My browser and/or operating system's default printing behavior do not seem to be playing well with Mathjax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a utility for printing a CV question or answer or saving it as a PDF?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44269" LastActivityDate="2014-09-29T23:55:55.747" Title="How to print a Cross Validated question or answer?" Tags="|feature-request|printing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2181" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2182" CreationDate="2014-09-29T00:52:38.363" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is about the use of statistics language on this website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've developed a set of features. Do I now &quot;assess the effectiveness of these features in classifying data&quot; or &quot;assess the effectiveness of models using these features in classifying data&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry if this is not the correct place to post, but it seems like the best option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41680" LastActivityDate="2014-09-29T02:13:30.220" Title="Question about the use of statistics language on CV" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2181" CreationDate="2014-09-29T02:13:30.220" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I think you could ask this question on the main site, but it's probably fine to ask it here too.  I think terminology is not well standardized or used consistently across disciplines, which is a minor pet peeve of mine.  As a result, you could probably ask it either way, you just need to be careful when talking to others (either as speaker or listener) that everyone is on the same page.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that having been said, I would say that the two versions imply slightly different meanings.  The first (&quot;of these features&quot;), implies you have a model, say logistic regression, and you are trying to figure out which features belong in the model or don't.  The second (&quot;of models using these features&quot;), implies you will use these features in whichever model you end up choosing, but you are trying to figure out what &lt;em&gt;type&lt;/em&gt; of model (e.g., logistic regression, vs. k-nearest neighbor, vs. SVM, vs. CART, etc.) you want to use as your classifier.  Note that these two interpretations parallel two different modeling activities and for which we have two distinct tags: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feature-selection&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-selection&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-selection&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/model-selection&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;model-selection&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;model-selection&lt;/a&gt; (which, as far as I can tell, are used interchangeably).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2014-09-29T02:13:30.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2180" CreationDate="2014-09-29T23:55:55.747" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stackprinter.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;StackPrinter&lt;/a&gt;. It formats a given question, with answers and comments, into printer-friendly form, which can be saved as PDF or printed directly. The StackPrinter Bookmarklet allows this to be done directly from the question page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user56674" LastActivityDate="2014-09-29T23:55:55.747" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2184" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2185" CreationDate="2014-09-30T02:49:05.437" Score="22" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many of the questions closed with the reason &lt;em&gt;&quot;obtaining specific datasets&quot;&lt;/em&gt; would actually be good questions for Cross Validated's new little brother:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://OpenData.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;http://OpenData.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When closing such a question, how about suggesting Open Data?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about obtaining specific datasets are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;off-topic&lt;/a&gt; on Cross Validated. You are welcome to post this question to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opendata.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Open Data&lt;/a&gt; QA site instead, thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Please note that Open Data is mostly for datasets under an open license, even though commercial datasets are usually tolerated.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1437" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2014-09-30T23:30:51.060" Title="For &quot;obtaining specific datasets&quot; questions, let's recommend OpenData.stackexchange.com" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2184" CreationDate="2014-09-30T13:05:09.947" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that's a good idea.  Perhaps we can go one better and migrate their questions to OpenData.SE.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2014-09-30T13:05:09.947" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2177" CreationDate="2014-09-30T15:04:33.723" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to add a thought to other answers: I see people apologizing because on some SE sites, people are quick to flag basic questions as inappropriate, hence the psychological need to apologise hoping not to bring the wrath of experienced but not so tactful users. I totally agree with the OP that basic questions with a minimum effort of understanding from the asker are totally correct on SE. It's only that when you don't know a lot on a topic, it's often hard to show that you have done the basic researches because, well, you don't understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry if this is not right on topic ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52073" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2014-09-30T21:21:52.143" LastActivityDate="2014-09-30T21:21:52.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2177" CreationDate="2014-10-03T02:37:32.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since I don't have to apologize for my answer, I will feel free to unabashedly express my straightforward opinion on the problem: I think a lot of people are afraid that some responders will mock and deride them and in all honesty, I have apologized in some of my questions because I have seen the evidence of people being mean, mocking, and cynical to the newbies. Regardless of the fact that CV is generally a great exclusion from this phenomenon, I have nevertheless seen this sort of behavior even here and this is why I believe some people apologize -- so all those arrogant &quot;I know it all&quot; insecure individuals will hone their incessant urge to put other people down and show the newbies their proper place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not believe that either flagging, editing, or putting some sort of an obvious statement on top is going to solve the issue. Why not be honest and look at the fundamental problem lingering on here? The fewer instances of such embarrassing and immature (&quot;Oh, that's such a primitive question&quot;) behaviors there are on here, the fewer newbies feel embarrassed and inferior and downright afraid to post their supposedly &quot;stupid&quot; or &quot;incompetent&quot; questions. It's easy to just sugarcoat the cake with some nice little candles, but it's not really going to help change its core and original flavor. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And please let's not pretend that arrogance and pretentiousness has never been an issue; some people just tend to use online resources to unleash their inner insecurities and ego problems. It's unfortunate they mistake this amazing source for a professional psychotherapist. That's the core problem that needs to be addressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, this might be harsh, but hey, for once I don't feel the need to apologize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54516" LastEditorUserId="54516" LastEditDate="2014-10-03T02:42:59.997" LastActivityDate="2014-10-03T02:42:59.997" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2189" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-03T09:01:07.643" Score="9" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;Often I visit CV via my mobile phone because during the day I am out for work, etc. With the smaller screen and the imperfections of a touch device I have experienced a few instances where I approved an edit or post without having the intention of doing so (rejections aren't the problem because there I have a follow-up screen before the review is final). As it has just happened again I have become sufficiently fed up with my phone in order to write this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible to have a short period after a review in which it is still possible to change it? I'm talking about something like 10 seconds or so, such that this kind of mistake can be fixed immediately if one realizes that this has happened. After all we do allow for retraction of up/down votes on the site for a certain period as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26338" LastEditorUserId="26338" LastEditDate="2014-10-13T20:16:05.710" LastActivityDate="2014-10-13T20:16:05.710" Title="Is it possible to change accidental reviews for a short time after the review?" Tags="|feature-request|review|undo|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2190" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-10-03T15:18:49.590" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many different tasks to be completed in the review panel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Close Votes&lt;/strong&gt; - Vote whether or not to close questions with close votes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;If your question is specific to this task, supplement your question with the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/vote-to-close&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vote-to-close&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vote-to-close&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reopen Votes&lt;/strong&gt; - Vote whether or not to reopen closed questions with reopen votes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;If your question is specific to this task, supplement your question with the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/vote-to-reopen&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;vote-to-reopen&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vote-to-reopen&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First Posts&lt;/strong&gt; - Review first posts from new users.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;If your question is specific to this task, supplement your question with the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/new-users&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;new-users&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;new-users&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suggested Edits&lt;/strong&gt; - Approve, reject, or improve edits suggested by users.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;If your question is specific to this task, supplement your question with the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/suggested-edits&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;suggested-edits&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;suggested-edits&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Low Quality Posts&lt;/strong&gt; - Identify, then improve or delete low-quality posts.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;If your question is specific to this task, supplement your question with the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/low-quality-posts&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;low-quality-posts&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;low-quality-posts&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Late Answers&lt;/strong&gt; - Review late answers from new users.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;If your question is specific to this task, supplement your question with the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/late-answers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;late-answers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;late-answers&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported an adapted from &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/review/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-10-03T17:46:09.457" LastActivityDate="2014-10-03T17:46:09.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2191" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-10-03T15:18:49.590" Score="0" Body="For questions about the /review path where users can view and act on posts by other users that the system thinks may need attention." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-10-03T17:46:13.663" LastActivityDate="2014-10-03T17:46:13.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2192" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-10-03T21:20:25.167" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tag usage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For questions on features of the Stack Exchange sites that have the undo action enabled.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For feature-requests asking for new undo actions to be implemented.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-10-04T15:38:16.640" LastActivityDate="2014-10-04T15:38:16.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2193" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-10-03T21:20:25.167" Score="0" Body="For questions on features that have the undo action enabled, or requests for undo actions to be implemented" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-10-04T15:38:21.223" LastActivityDate="2014-10-04T15:38:21.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2175" CreationDate="2014-10-03T21:41:45.767" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your ultimate goal is to publish this idea and as you indicated in your post that a) it is a good idea and b) you are not an expert in the field. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my personal opinion the simplest course of action is to engage someone who &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; an expert in the field (or at least published) and bounce the idea around with them.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At that point, you'll know how good the idea is - then if you choose, publish the paper &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; them.  It will likely make your paper stronger &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; increase the likelihood it will be accepted by a top-flight journal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44618" LastActivityDate="2014-10-03T21:41:45.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="793" CreationDate="2014-10-04T04:23:10.837" Score="9" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Wizard&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wizardmac.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wizard&lt;/a&gt; is desktop statistics and data visualization package for Mac OS X. The primary support channel is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/wizard-users&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wizard User Group&lt;/a&gt; hosted on Google Groups.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclosure: I am the developer of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56911" LastEditorUserId="56911" LastEditDate="2014-10-05T13:17:22.247" LastActivityDate="2014-10-05T13:17:22.247" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-10-04T04:23:10.837" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2177" CreationDate="2014-10-09T02:42:07.337" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a newbie I think it might be informative that I share my experience. Cross-validated is intimidating, period. There are a few reasons for that, some of which are preventable, some of which are not (perhaps this idea deserves its own meta discussion). Anyways, apologizing is a natural response to asking others for help, particularly because you may feel like a burden. I understand it is important to let people know that they are not a burden: just be careful not to tell people that they &quot;don't&quot; need to or &quot;shouldn't&quot; feel bad; instead just let them know you're glad to help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35526" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2014-10-09T09:28:58.293" LastActivityDate="2014-10-09T09:28:58.293" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1948" CreationDate="2014-10-09T03:20:35.083" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing an answer because I do not have enough reputation points to leave a comment. This may not technically be possible, but what if you had the tags themselves guide the direction of the question? For example: someone tags their question as &quot;probability&quot; and &quot;Normal Distribution&quot; on Mathematics (or SO for that matter), and because of the tag, the question jumps over to CV. I understand this is a simplified example and would require a lot of collaboration with Mathematics on who should handle what tags, but it might be worth considering. Also, while I recognize the desire to remain mostly autonomous from Mathematics, it would &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; be nice to be able to search both CV and Mathematics simultaneously. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35526" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2014-10-09T09:31:14.207" LastActivityDate="2014-10-09T09:31:14.207" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2198" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2201" CreationDate="2014-10-10T09:52:14.020" Score="14" ViewCount="467" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been downvoted on 5 answers this morning, the downvotes occurring in a batch with no comments left. The obvious conclusion is that some user decided for whatever reason to pick on me. Can you suggest some simple checks, heuristics or algorithms that can be put in place to help eliminate this sort of negative StackOverflow behaviour.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rQ6IW.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As pointed out by @whuber, there are algorithms in place to detect serial downvoting. This instance of serial downvoting was recognised and reversed. Hurray for algorithms&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9233" OwnerDisplayName="martino" LastEditorUserId="9233" LastEditDate="2014-10-13T11:59:04.040" LastActivityDate="2014-10-22T16:22:37.677" Title="Is there a way to protect against unreasonable downvoting" Tags="|discussion|votes|etiquette|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2198" CreationDate="2014-10-10T10:11:27.483" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you'd be well advised to look through discussions on SE Meta. I have bumped into numerous discussions which raise the issues you raise and others linked; I have never searched for more. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the bottom lines appear to be three-fold: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some changes in reputation are automated, driven by automated attempts to spot unacceptable behaviour. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If someone is downvoting in a nasty way, then among those there are mechanisms to spot that and if need be discipline or remove that person, in which case your reputation should be corrected in due course &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A great deal of thought has gone into how to handle this and it is only &quot;reputation&quot;, not reputation (win some, lose some). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So multiple downvoting, as it appears to you, is &lt;strong&gt;not necessarily evidence of individual nastiness or spite&lt;/strong&gt;. So the obvious conclusion isn't quite so obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDITS (1) in reaction to helpful comments may make some comments below seem mysterious. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDITS (2) in reaction to @whuber's reply, which is naturally definitive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" OwnerDisplayName="Nick Cox" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2014-10-10T15:19:00.060" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T15:19:00.060" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2198" CreationDate="2014-10-10T11:39:23.913" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The same thing happened with two of my answers &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/100173/explanatory-variables-may-bias-predictions/100265#100265&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/104085/is-there-ever-a-reason-not-to-use-orthogonal-polynomials-when-fitting-regression/104105#104105&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;; it's to be hoped five is enough for the algorithm to pick up on &amp;amp; reverse. More vexing than the tiny &quot;reputation&quot; loss is the thought that a false impression may be given of genuine disagreement about something quite uncontentious. &lt;strike&gt;Whether the downvotes are due to someone's childishness or to some system glitch, the best I can suggest is to ask the reason for the downvote in a comment below the answer&amp;mdash;perhaps you'll get a response, or at least influence readers to disregard it.&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, inculcating skepticism is probably a good thing. [And @wuber's point that reacting at all might encourage repetition of the behaviour is a good one.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2014-10-14T19:44:17.023" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2198" CreationDate="2014-10-10T14:49:42.960" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;For reasons I hope are obvious, (1) these &quot;simple checks, heuristics or algorithms&quot; are in place and (2) their details--even their nature--are not publicized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you think you have been a victim of &quot;revenge&quot; or &quot;serial&quot; downvoting, please do not post the usual &quot;why the downvote?&quot; comments.  Instead, flag one of the downvoted posts and use the &quot;Custom&quot; reason to explain your concern.  A moderator will look into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that moderators do not have any powers to change votes.  We do have the ability to contact users privately about such voting (there is a standard e-mail template for this behavior--it's not uncommon, alas). We can also contact the SE team directly with a request to look into such things.  The team always responds, but it can take a few days. Any high-rep user also has the ability to compensate for untoward downvotes by (1) adding their own upvote (if they hadn't done so already) and (2) offering a bonus to make up for the lost reputation and to provide explicit public support for a particular answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case (rather than waiting for the automatic mechanisms to kick in) I have confirmed these downvotes and learned who made them; that they are the first and only downvotes made by one user; and I have contacted the SE team to investigate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T14:49:42.960" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2203" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2213" CreationDate="2014-10-22T00:54:10.893" Score="10" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;I incorrectly flagged a post (simply caused by me being especially unobservant) before realizing I should have just voted-to-close (which I then did). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way for me to unflag, so I don't unnecessarily bother moderators?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-11-14T19:39:48.680" LastActivityDate="2014-11-14T19:39:48.680" Title="Is there a way to unflag?" Tags="|discussion|support|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2198" CreationDate="2014-10-22T16:22:37.677" Score="-1" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Making explanation of downvotes compulsory&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Put a minimum limit on the explanation (at least 100 characters)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might mitigate serial downvoting to some extent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10823" LastActivityDate="2014-10-22T16:22:37.677" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2177" CreationDate="2014-10-24T13:53:45.997" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Re meanness: I don't see evidence for it in comments or answers, or in voting to migrate or put on hold unsuitable questions for CV. Down-voting basic questions, however, especially without explanation, might be viewed as meanness; at any rate it may not be encouraging to new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recent examples of questions that IMO are all right, but received down-votes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/121182&quot;&gt;Probability that x samples from normal distribution sum to X&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/121257&quot;&gt;Log probability vs product of probabilities&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/120833&quot;&gt;How to analyze relationship between data pairs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course these questions, &amp;amp; others, may well not have been downvoted &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; they're basic (&amp;amp; I don't mean to criticize anyone just for voting in a way I might not have done), but if there's anything to the idea that people are being discouraged from asking basic questions by the manner in which other basic questions are responded to, as @Jen has suggested, it's that &lt;em&gt;impression&lt;/em&gt; we want to avoid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for basic questions I'd certainly suggest&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Taking more pains than usual to explain the reason for the down-vote where you feel one's justified.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;amp; more tentatively&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Considering, in cases where the question hasn't any up-votes, &amp;amp; isn't blatantly awful (incomprehensible, scan of entire homework sheet, &amp;amp;c.)&amp;mdash;&amp;amp; especially when it's from a new user, or gathering close votes anyway&amp;mdash;whether a down-vote's helpful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2014-10-27T14:20:36.160" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2206" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-26T02:21:24.640" Score="6" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a novice in statistics and would like some guidance in data analysis for my research project.  I just want to make sure that it is ok to post my research question, method, and ask the community for guidance to obtain results?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38410" LastActivityDate="2014-10-27T15:48:01.777" Title="Is it ok to ask for guidance on my research project?" Tags="|support|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2206" CreationDate="2014-10-27T15:42:56.817" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's what the forum is for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But look at the Help Center to get guidance on what to post, and what not to, and look at some past questions, especially for questions that look like yours and got upvoted answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Helpful general pages include &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;What types of questions should I avoid asking?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also much good advice within this thread here: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1479/how-to-ask-a-good-question-on-crossvalidated&quot;&gt;How to ask a “good” question on CrossValidated?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What helps is being specific, explaining your question precisely and concisely, and having a new question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions of the form &quot;I am working on X and wondering how to analyse my data&quot; have less chance of a good reply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2014-10-27T15:48:01.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2208" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2209" CreationDate="2014-10-29T03:15:12.807" Score="5" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just received notification that I have earned the Talkative Badge for posting 10 messages in Cross Validated chat rooms with one or more of them starred. I can recall only one message that I have ever posted in the Ten Fold chat room (I did it just a few days ago), and it certainly does not seem to be starred in any way (or being, to my mind, really deserving of a star).  Searching the chat rooms for any other messages that I might have posted did not reveal any older messages that I had forgotten about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is this Talkative badge, and why have I been awarded it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6633" LastEditorUserId="4456" LastEditDate="2014-10-29T09:54:28.843" LastActivityDate="2014-10-29T09:56:06.850" Title="The Talkative Badge?" Tags="|support|bug|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2208" CreationDate="2014-10-29T09:56:06.850" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/18?m=18314881#18314881&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; be the message?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4456" LastActivityDate="2014-10-29T09:56:06.850" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1865" CreationDate="2014-11-03T11:19:43.847" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/75912/scientific-imagination?referrer=IPIEcsN2huMFuP7v0aO_3g2&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/coftu.png&quot; alt=&quot;For the geeks interested in fun science questions and answers.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59394" LastActivityDate="2014-11-03T11:19:43.847" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-11-03T11:19:43.847" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1948" CreationDate="2014-11-08T17:42:35.910" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The optimal solution is just to post a comment to the OP (and informing anyone who subsequently views the tread that it is a duplicate and) that cross-posting is frowned upon.  The OP should decide which site is more appropriate and delete the other.  If necessary, you can flag the moderators as well.  (Note that you cannot close a question on CV as a duplicate, if the potential duplicate is on another site.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2014-11-08T17:42:35.910" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2203" CreationDate="2014-11-14T19:38:18.363" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently, it is not possible to unflag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following Stack Exchange post and some duplicated questions under the &lt;code&gt;Linked&lt;/code&gt; topic in the sidebar have some pro answers/arguments toward unflagging:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/87500/cancel-misclicked-flags&quot;&gt;Cancel misclicked flags&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is the option of putting a bounty requesting for more attention on that topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point of view on this is that having a misclicked flag once in a while is ok (not a big issue).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2014-11-14T19:38:18.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2215" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2217" CreationDate="2014-11-16T23:08:56.497" Score="10" ViewCount="247" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is something I've experienced several times, but it was brought home to me most clearly by my most recent question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/123814/how-can-i-best-deal-with-the-effects-of-markers-with-differing-levels-of-generos&quot;&gt;How can I best deal with the effects of markers with differing levels of generosity in grading student papers?&lt;/a&gt;. At present there are two answers that are quite different from one another, and another answer in the comments that is different from either of those two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first step is to apply my knowledge as best I can to the answers and try to decide based on that. If that fails I'll often go with the heuristics such as the number of upvotes an answer has received, or whether the answerer is a user I know to be highly reliable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the absence of those cues, and with a bounty ticking away, I'm unsure how to proceed. Does anyone have any advice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relatedly, is there any way for me to see which users have upvoted a particular answer? If so, that could provide another useful cue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9162" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2014-11-17T13:20:30.533" Title="How can a non-expert user decide which of multiple, highly different, answers to select?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2215" CreationDate="2014-11-17T00:01:38.450" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your acceptance is yours. No one is telling you how to apply it. You can use it to flag the post you find most useful or helpful, or to flag using any other criterion. If you want to be guided by the community and follow the voting, that is your choice too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's another thing that's important. Sometimes an answer looks better at first than it does after comments pointing out its limitations or even errors. Or sometimes a really good answer arrives late. It's fine for you to change your mind. There won't be flak. It's your privilege. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember also that upvotes and positive comments remain other ways of acknowledging good answers even if you don't accept them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reputation is a funny thing any way. Even people with moderate or high reputation are often puzzled by patterns of voting: what they think are good answers sometimes are not accepted, or much upvoted, and the opposite happens. So, accepting a question is your way of saying thanks, and thanks for the thanks, but on the whole people here don't take reputation more seriously than it deserves. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2014-11-17T00:17:30.573" LastActivityDate="2014-11-17T00:17:30.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2215" CreationDate="2014-11-17T00:29:33.953" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you cannot decide among answers because it is unclear whether one (or any of them) is correct, &lt;em&gt;then those answers are not good enough for you.&lt;/em&gt;  You don't have to award them bounties, acceptances, or even your (up)vote.  What you should do instead is write comments asking for clarification.  Then you can decide on a best answer (if indeed any answer at all is valid) based on objective, rational criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2014-11-17T00:29:33.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2215" CreationDate="2014-11-17T00:32:56.167" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a tricky problem - how does a non-expert choose what's a good answer (if you knew enough to tell reliably, you probably wouldn't need to ask, right?) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that seeing what more knowledgeable people think would help in figuring out which might be better, but there are very good reasons why we shouldn't see who votes for what. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes two very different answers &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; both be reasonable approaches to a problem. If it's not clear whether or not they're both reasonable, you might ask for some clarification. Or you could try them, and then ask about what issues you run into when you do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's several days in which people can point out problems --  if an answer on a bounty question has a glaring error, it's unlikely to be there for long without someone saying something, so at the end of the full week, you're likely to be choosing between reasonable answers. Let the time run, you may find the choice becomes clearer over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, choosing what seems to you like a good answer to your problem (taking into account the various things you already seem to be considering) isn't a bad approach. &#xA;An answer that speaks to you more clearly is at least exhibiting some characteristics of what makes a good answer, even if it isn't the one that someone with more expertise might choose. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2014-11-17T00:32:56.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2215" CreationDate="2014-11-17T13:20:30.533" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the OP, you have no obligation to decide what is the &quot;best answer&quot;. After all &quot;best&quot; needs a definition. What should matter to you is select an answer that is useful &lt;em&gt;to you&lt;/em&gt;: You may receive a highly sophisticated answer, totally correct, insightful, brilliant etc etc etc. It may be an answer to admire -but it also may be partly or wholly incomprehensible to you, which in all will make it  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a)&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;useful in general&lt;/strong&gt; as an on-line repository of knowledge&lt;br&gt;&#xA;but&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;b)&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;useless &lt;em&gt;to you, for your immediate concern.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In such a case, I would suggest to let the upvoting of the community reflect the answer's &quot;quality and value&quot;, but keep your green mark and your bounty for an answer that you can actually &lt;em&gt;understand and use&lt;/em&gt;, and not just admire. In this virtual market, the OP is the customer and the answerer are the suppliers: if what you need is bread and I provide a sophisticated French plate, my offering is high-quality, and of higher value than a bread-answer (I love bread, by the way), but it is not certain that it will go well with your stomach. After all, an &lt;em&gt;efficient&lt;/em&gt; supplier is a supplier who understands what the customer can digest, otherwise he risks turning himself into a participant in a beauty contest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Glen_b's suggestion that the green mark and the bounty need not necessarily go to the same answer, is also a good policy advice, IMO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28746" LastActivityDate="2014-11-17T13:20:30.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2220" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-18T12:30:31.263" Score="3" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have come across a vibrant question - how does one visualize results of post hoc Nemenyi tests - on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/82278/plot-result-of-nemenyis-test&quot;&gt;Crossvalidated&lt;/a&gt;. This question is often raised in my institute and by students or peers at conferences. Most times people waste hours to code self-made solutions or draw it by hand in a graphical program. I was angry enough that I hacked a &lt;a href=&quot;http://niedakh.github.io/algorithms-critical-distance-visualization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;solution&lt;/a&gt; to it. But the has been marked as off-topic on Cross Validated, and I miss reputation to do anything with it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I do with it? The question is valid, perhaps it should go to Stack Overflow, but then - why wasn't it moved instead being tagged off-topic? How do I report it to be moved if it is closed as off-topic and I don't see any flag options? I can only edit the question but I don't think that is needed at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35022" OwnerDisplayName="niedakh" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2014-11-19T18:34:52.283" Title="Reopening and migrating a valid coding question from Crossvalidated to Stackoverflow" Tags="|support|on-topic|migration|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2220" CreationDate="2014-11-18T12:35:35.210" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is from January - much older than the 60 days in which a question can be migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was most likely not migrated because not enough closers reached the migration consensus (3 of the 5 people closing need to have selected Stack Overflow as a migration target for that to have happened).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it stands - this is not a suitable question for Stack Overflow, so a migration, if it had occurred would have most likely been rejected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24254" LastActivityDate="2014-11-18T12:35:35.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2220" CreationDate="2014-11-18T14:46:21.367" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I sympathize with your predicament. After all, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpiIWMWWVco&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it's not easy being green&lt;/a&gt;.  As @Oded states, the question could not be migrated, even if it were re-opened, because it is too old.  I do think a similar question could be on-topic on Stack Overflow.  Why not ask an analogous question on SO yourself, and then provide your own answer?  Asking and answering your own question is unusual, but &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/self-answer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange has always explicitly encouraged users to answer their own questions&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2014-11-18T14:46:21.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2223" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2224" CreationDate="2014-11-18T19:35:22.407" Score="28" ViewCount="472" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1486&quot;&gt;For the third year running&lt;/a&gt;, the Stack Exchange team is organizing a &quot;Winter Bash&quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;  Users earn &quot;hats&quot; for their gravatars by completing novel tasks (analogous to badges). Certain specific actions will trigger access to a (graphical) hat, which their gravatar can then &quot;wear&quot; at the user's option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This event will run from 15 December 2014 to 4 January 2015. Individuals who don’t want to participate, don’t want to see hats, or are generally anti-hat will have an &quot;I hate hats&quot; option available (which will cause you not to see hats at all). The only visual change to the site itself will be the presence of the hats and the &quot;I hate hats&quot; button in the footer. Participation on one site does not affect accounts on other SE sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two answers aim to collect votes for a community poll: &lt;strong&gt;Please, indicate whether you think Cross Validated should participate in this event or not&lt;/strong&gt; (1 vote per user). Responses from the community are due by November 30.  Moderators will inform the SE team of our collective decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2016-12-19T11:42:48.890" Title="Should Cross Validated participate in the 2014 “Winter Bash”?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|winterbash|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2223" CreationDate="2014-11-18T19:35:22.407" Score="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;, Cross Validated should participate in Winter Bash 2014.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2014-11-18T19:35:22.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2223" CreationDate="2014-11-18T19:40:10.090" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;, Cross Validated should not participate in Winter Bash 2014.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2014-11-18T19:40:10.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2220" CreationDate="2014-11-19T18:29:25.537" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I sympathize with your request, because I both edited and upvoted the question on January.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could suggest an edit to let it be on topic. Here is one suggestion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, it is written like the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could you please tell me which R function/library (not necessarily R) to use to plot Nemenyi's test result with the critical differences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let it be on topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the correct way to interpret a Nemenyi's test plot? Also, is there any R function/library (not necessarily R) to use to plot Nemenyi's test result with (and without) the critical differences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would require two reviewers to approve the edit suggestion. The edit would not conflict with the author's intent, because it would only have information added. After the edit being approved*, moderators and 3k rep users could reopen the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, you could enlighten the community with an answer split in: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The theoretical explanation about what is and how to interpret the Nemenyi's test plot.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A programming solution to produce such graph.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;*it is not guaranteed it will be approved.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastActivityDate="2014-11-19T18:29:25.537" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2227" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-20T19:38:46.923" Score="1" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing my first paper on Machine Learning. I worked on a problem, took the results, and wrote the paper. I discussed the results with my teachers and seniors; they said it looked fine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I want to write a paper, and I wrote it following other papers. But I wanted to get it checked independently by an expert. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought to discuss the issue here. May I post this here, or in any open room forum? Or do you have any other suggestions? I do not want to post to the board of editors in journal as they do not review very sharp makes very gross comment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2329" OwnerDisplayName="SUBHABRATA" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2014-11-24T11:08:04.297" LastActivityDate="2014-11-24T11:08:04.297" Title="How to get an independent review of my article?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|papers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2227" CreationDate="2014-11-21T12:27:32.677" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I thought to discuss the issue here. May I post this here, or in any open room forum?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think so, because Stack Exchange is designed for Q/A format. Therefore, discussing a whole study/paper would be off-topic. If there is a particular issue you want to discuss, it would be necessary to adapt it to a answerable question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or do you have any other suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. Submit the article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems you were already suitably cautious for someone who is writing the first paper:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You discussed method/results with your advisors who said they were OK.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You already set the structure of your article's text according to other published materials (as long as the papers used as examples are good examples, this is positive).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The peer review will address some issues you may have overlooked and there will be a chance for you to improve it. Moreover, it is very unlikely that a first paper will be approved without needing at least one review. I wish you good luck on this task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2014-11-23T16:56:55.780" LastActivityDate="2014-11-23T16:56:55.780" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2229" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2232" CreationDate="2014-11-21T19:06:10.010" Score="8" ViewCount="284" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I have read &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1000/using-cv-as-part-of-a-statistics-course&quot;&gt;Using CV as part of a statistics course&lt;/a&gt; and believe I am asking a separate question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I teach graduate Introduction to Biostatistics (for non-biostatisticians). I try to give my students lots of tools to help them integrate the subject matter, and, naturally think CV is tops. I am &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; interested in evaluating students' participation in or use of CV, but I wonder:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What I might do to encourage the use of this resource, beyond plugging CV and its the link?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do you have ideas or experiences for creative ideas or experiences in integrating CV into curriculum?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44269" LastEditorUserId="44269" LastEditDate="2018-02-16T07:53:21.517" LastActivityDate="2018-02-16T07:53:21.517" Title="Ways to integrate CV into Intro to Biostatistics curriculum" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2229" CreationDate="2014-11-22T22:07:59.310" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sincerely, I believe you should not point your students here, specially because they are starters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are good content on CV, but they are too loose in context. It is frequent self-learners here trying to jump right away in the answer/solution without showing sufficient effort (there are exceptions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO, if you want to teach statistics, better stick to the classes, lots of exercises and a good book. If you are too busy, a graduate student to help others solving exercises during extra class time always help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe only after the course is finished you could introduce CV SE and challenge your students to master secondary (but not less important) skills. Some were suggested by @whuber:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how to ask relevant, clear and focused questions to clarify problems.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how to understand someone else's problem and write clear explanations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastActivityDate="2014-11-22T22:07:59.310" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2229" CreationDate="2014-11-23T02:50:14.043" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have pointed students here, as a way of finding answers to their more frequent questions -- especially when they needed information quickly (I'm just not around much at 3am on Sunday). In each case they were students with a couple of stats courses already, but I'd consider it with introductory level students if they clearly understood how to use it as a resource (i.e. mostly via search).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be a valuable source of basic explanations, intuition, examples and motivation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has many useful counterexamples to common errors of understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These might be incorporated into learning in a variety of ways; it's hard to say more without knowing how your subject is organized and what topics you cover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some excellent answers - mostly, but not all non-community-wiki - that provide insight on a number of topics. Both internal and external searches can turn up some very useful posts (I suggest using both, as they often tend to turn up different answers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of those might be used as additional reference material, or supply you with different explanations that would be useful in cases where the more common discussion of an issue isn't working as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some might suggest exercise-type questions for students to consider, or more extensive investigations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Excellent questions and answers cover a variety of levels from basic (at least the questions seem so -- the answers usually reveal subtleties not obvious to the beginner):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/118/why-square-the-difference-instead-of-taking-the-absolute-value-in-standard-devia&quot;&gt;Why square the difference instead of taking the absolute value in standard deviation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/23117/which-mean-to-use-and-when&quot;&gt;Which &amp;quot;mean&amp;quot; to use and when?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;through introductory-level but highly important:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/26450/why-does-a-95-ci-not-imply-a-95-chance-of-containing-the-mean&quot;&gt;confidence intervals&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/31/what-is-the-meaning-of-p-values-and-t-values-in-statistical-tests&quot;&gt;The meaning of a t-value and a p-value&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/3734/what-intuitive-explanation-is-there-for-the-central-limit-theorem&quot;&gt;CLT intuition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/18058/how-would-you-explain-covariance-to-someone-who-understands-only-the-mean/18200#18200&quot;&gt;insight on covariance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/29781/when-should-you-center-your-data-when-should-you-standardize/29783#29783&quot;&gt;centering and scaling&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/12262/what-if-residuals-are-normally-distributed-but-y-is-not&quot;&gt;normal residuals vs normal y in regression&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to numerous intermediate topics and beyond ... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also search up a tag or tags and find highly rated questions or answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if you're discussing histograms, you can find the &lt;code&gt;histogram&lt;/code&gt; tag, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/histogram&quot;&gt;click it&lt;/a&gt; to get a list of upvoted questions with the tag (though keep in mind that tagging is incomplete).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can suggest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) rather than just plug it, suggest ways to make use of it (perhaps a one-page resource on using it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;explain how to search it both internally and via external search engines (such as Google).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;explain how to use tags to search&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;point to information on how to ask questions if they aren't answered here&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) reference parts of it in materials where it's relevant&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) depending on how your subject is organized you may be able to base questions of some of the content&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2014-11-25T23:50:41.500" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="793" CreationDate="2014-11-24T15:11:58.750" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Weka&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Weka is a collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks. The algorithms can either be applied directly to a dataset or called from your own Java code. Weka contains tools for data pre-processing, classification, regression, clustering, association rules, and visualization. It is also well-suited for developing new machine learning schemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A mailing list, forum, &amp;amp; IRC channel are listed at the Weka site under &lt;a href=&quot;https://waikato.github.io/weka-wiki/getting_help/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Getting Help&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-11-11T09:12:18.460" LastActivityDate="2023-11-11T09:12:18.460" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-11-24T15:11:58.750" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2235" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-28T19:30:47.560" Score="3" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Asking about my On-hold question,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/125784/what-online-tools-to-diy-anonymize-user-names-no-pii-concern&quot;&gt;What online tools to DIY-anonymize user names (no PII concern)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I freely admit my question is naive in comparison to the included linked post. However, when I wrote the post I believed it was relevant to Stats.SE by the example set in the in-post link (upvote 13). I also searched for relevant tags for pre-analysis data conditioning or data-cleaning for which there are 28 posts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also the Cross Validated &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic&lt;/a&gt; page includes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;collecting data&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And from what I was taught, cleaning data, preparing it for processing, is inextricable from the actual processing. Where decisions are made to manipulate the pre-analysis data one way or the other, this impacts analysis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please, if you will, instruct me. I just don't understand why this question would be off-topic. As I continue to work in some areas of overlap in statistics, I expect to have more question in the future. I would very much appreciate any guidance or explanation which makes the policies of CrossValidate/Stats.SE clearer for me so that I may contribute more constructively to the community in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6517" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2014-11-29T23:26:05.120" Title="My on hold question needs improvement" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2236" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-29T11:36:04.460" Score="7" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;There were two very similar posts on CV - &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/125909/forecast-using-arima-models&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27201188/which-code-to-be-used-for-forecasting-arima-model/27201634#27201634&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt; it (almost) duplicates (at least, &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; you count the Q in comments, it's a duplicate). I marked the linked one as a duplicate and was in the process of answering the other, but some computer problems delayed my answer, which was then migrated (and my in-progress answer was lost in the migration, but I have since made a rough version of it in the migrated one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closed one clearly is on topic here, since it's a question about properties of forecasting time series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either one of two situations exist:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The one I linked above really is a duplicate, in which case the thing it duplicates must also be on topic and so should never have been migrated&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It isn't a duplicate, in which case it should be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the first applies (that the question in comments in the original post made it on topic, and at the same time made the second one a duplicate); however, picking either (1) or (2) is reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In respect of the post I linked above, as it stands currently the post it was closed as a duplicate of isn't a post on CV, so on what grounds is it a duplicate? It can only be a duplicate of the other one if the other one is brought back here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible it's a duplicate of another post, of course, but as it stands, something is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2014-11-29T20:01:43.310" Title="Inconsistency with closure and migration" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|migration|exact-duplicates|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2236" CreationDate="2014-11-29T14:39:57.110" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This result is certainly inconsistent.  But no system works perfectly.  The migrated question definitely looks like an SO coding question to me.  Even with the comments it is a little ambiguous that the real problem is the OP doesn't properly understand the concepts rather than the code.  I can understand how it was migrated.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, the closed-as-duplicate question sounds like more of an on-topic, conceptual question than the migrated one.  In light of that, and since we have no control over getting the other one back, why not edit the duplicate and we can re-open it?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2014-11-29T14:39:57.110" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2238" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-11-29T20:08:24.193" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/closing-questions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'closing-questions'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;closing-questions&lt;/a&gt; should discuss the general idea of closed questions, what that means for a question, and other topics &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; the feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you are looking to discuss the &lt;strong&gt;process&lt;/strong&gt; of closing a question, use &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/vote-to-close&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'vote-to-close'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vote-to-close&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you are looking to discuss the reasons one might vote to close something, use &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/close-reasons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'close-reasons'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;close-reasons&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If are are looking for reasoning why a question was closed or for it to be reopened, use &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/reopen-closed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'reopen-closed'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reopen-closed&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported excerpt and adapted wiki from &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/closed-questions&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-11-30T20:04:21.753" LastActivityDate="2014-11-30T20:04:21.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2239" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-11-29T20:08:24.193" Score="0" Body="This tag is for general questions about questions that have been closed because they are off-topic or otherwise do not meet the criteria defined in the FAQ." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-11-30T20:04:29.123" LastActivityDate="2014-11-30T20:04:29.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2240" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-11-29T20:17:36.637" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This tag should be used to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Request a closed question to be reopened by the community, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Receive a further explanation of why the question was closed in the first place.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported excerpt and adapted wiki from &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reopen-closed&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-11-30T20:04:26.633" LastActivityDate="2014-11-30T20:04:26.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2241" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-11-29T20:17:36.637" Score="0" Body="A request to reopen a closed question, or receive further explanation of why it was closed." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-11-30T20:04:24.117" LastActivityDate="2014-11-30T20:04:24.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2242" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-01T06:04:39.367" Score="41" ViewCount="1566" Body="&lt;p&gt;From time to time I look at CV site-related stats of various kinds in various places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was alarmed to look at this &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/15260/statistics-based-on-total-questions-and-answers-per-month-for-the-last-12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;query&lt;/a&gt; on Stack Exchange Data Explorer (SEDE), Which shows a dramatic drop in the answers per question and what seems to be an equally dramatic rise in unanswered questions (this query is in reverse time order - the third and fourth columns are what I'm commenting on). Edit: the last couple of months is what concerns me. In the most recent month (November), the zero-answer questions will go down a little in the next few days of course, but I fear not a great deal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nIGGA.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at other queries shows that total answers per month are nearly flat*, but questions per month are going up fast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*(there's a few days lag in the data so the small recent drop in total answers might not signify anything at all)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prior to October, in a month we'd never averaged more than about 58 questions per day; in November we averaged 70 questions per day. That's not a small change. It's also about 65% higher than last November, while the number of answers grew about 17.5% in the same period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the number of answers a question gets does rise over time, but generally speaking if a question isn't answered within about a week or so of posting, it's likely to remain unanswered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the site is to remain relevant we'll need to find a way to reduce the rise in proportion of unanswered questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To that end, I have some thoughts about what things &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; help:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;short term:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Avoiding &quot;answering in comments&quot;, or at least going back later and making the comment into an answer if one isn't forthcoming. When all that's needed is a short answer, and the OP responds with &quot;thanks! I see now!&quot; ... it's unlikely to ever get any more action. We should try to reduce these (I've already been trying to do it less myself, but it can become a habit).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Closing more questions that are unlikely to generate answers because they're poor, and the OP isn't going to fix them&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;long term: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ultimately, I think we need more people answering questions - many times more. While more experts would be great, I think we actually need more ... journeyman statisticians, and even in some cases relative novices -- and ways to encourage them to answer a few of the questions within their capabilities. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is in two parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We have lots of users - how do we encourage greater participation from a lot more of them to answer questions?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are there other important things we can do to lift the proportion of questions that get answers?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I managed to find some time to do some analysis of the questions and answers per month (I looked at September 2010 to November 2014, obtaining updated figures to be sure all of November was included), to try some analysis more or less along the lines suggested by whuber (I don't expect I fitted quite what he had in mind, though).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fitted a simple model (quasi Poisson glm) with exponential trend (i.e. constant annual growth rate) and (multiplicative) monthly seasonal factors to each series. I totally ignored any serial correlation (but I wasn't looking at any significance tests so this shouldn't be a major issue - my aim was to capture the main effects).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then plotted the question/answer ratio and the ratio of fitted values from the two models (since that would hopefully pick up the regular seasonal variation in the ratio). The fit is reasonably good, and I can only conclude that whuber's take on it is right - almost all of what we see in the Answer-per-Question relationship (marked in blue in the plot above) is just due to the combination of the relative difference in growth rates and seasonal effects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QxVRt.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The recent few points are a tiny bit worse than the overall trend but there's no suggestion whatever that this is anything more than typical variation about the model (not that I &lt;em&gt;believe&lt;/em&gt; the model - but if we have that such a simple model does adequately account for what initially seems to be surprising, it is enough for me to discount the impression that anything new is happening without much better evidence).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not to say there's nothing to worry about -- the Answer per Question clearly is getting worse, and at a fairly rapid rate (it has dropped by half in a little less than 3 years). It's just that there's nothing that makes the more recent values substantively different from the existing trend. The answer to the question in the title seems to be &quot;there's no particular reason to think so&quot;, but the questions in the body (what to do about the decline) remain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A small update: looking at posted questions/answers over the last year, it seems that some growth in the ratio has continued, but fortunately at nothing close to the rate I initially feared we may have been undergoing. Currently looking back over the last year that rate seems to mostly in the region of 1.5-ish, but varies between about 1.3 and 1.65. (It's a number I wish was below 1, however.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2016-06-21T02:30:43.933" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T19:42:57.063" Title="Are we seeing a dramatic drop in answers per question?" Tags="|discussion|site-statistics|participation|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2242" CreationDate="2014-12-01T16:53:24.267" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a very &quot;journeyman&quot; statistician myself, I feel somewhat qualified to post an answer expressing skepticism about the power of the less academically high-powered to make a serious dent in the &quot;unanswered questions&quot; issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I scored 99.5% in my undergraduate stats exams, but despite a fair amount of self-study since then, I've never taken a Masters, had further professional training, or sought membership/certification with a professional body. My own ability to contribute at CV is probably at the high end of what could be expected for a good undergraduate or recent graduate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find that there are enough things for me to do here that I can perform some useful services. I am confident that most of my answers represent &quot;low-hanging fruit&quot; that would have received a perfectly good answer without my intervention. In that respect I am simply saving someone else some work - though even this isn't entirely clear-cut, as I have seldom been the only person to answer a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where I fall down compared to a full-time industrial or academic statistician, is the range of questions I feel capable to answer. I can't really comment about the Machine Learning as I have little experience of that field, and can't judge how many of those questions are essentially at entry-level (this may be large, if anecdotes about how many people started doing it right after taking an introductory MOOC are correct, but the plural of anecdote isn't data). Of the traditionally statistical questions, fairly few seem (a) clear, (b) accessible to someone with an undergraduate background, (c) sitting around for a long time without an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a fair number of basic questions that don't stray beyond undergraduate level but are nevertheless hard to answer, because the OP is themselves confused about either what they want to achieve, or the statistical methods which they want to use. On close examination, many of the questions seem to be posted here because the OP has fundamental misunderstanding (sometimes conceptual, sometimes simply of notation or terminology) and once that is cleared up, most likely after discussion in the comments, there is &quot;no question to answer&quot;. (I'm skeptical whether some of these questions should be allowed to fester after the OP's issue is resolved - in the best cases, the Q&amp;amp;A provides a good resource that tackles a common misunderstanding. Other times I suspect folk who arrive here via search engine because they were confused about a topic in the first place, are only going to leave more confused. This is a parenthetical issue, but still an important one, because it hints that the costs of the &quot;delete really poor questions&quot; strategy that @Glen_b mentions above may not be too high.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do some freelance statistical consultancy, and the sort of problems I encounter there rarely match even the &quot;easy end&quot; of CV questions. The most common outcome is that people end up paying me to explain what a t-test, or equivalent, is and what the results mean for their data (or simply what a &quot;test&quot; is, at all). Only on very rare occasions, either where they are doing something very important or unusually complex, have I felt it appropriate to suggest a potential client instead consults a chartered statistician (who would roughly charge what I do but with a zero on the end). In my experience most novices only want very basic answers to basic questions, and as a &quot;journeyman&quot; statistician I am more than qualified to help them. But because their knowledge is so limited, they're very rarely able to formulate the question in the first place. It can take considerable discussion to work out what they are trying to achieve, and only at this point am I able to suggest some possible approaches that could meet their needs. This initial two-way communication stage can be pretty hard work, and even with &quot;comments&quot;, is not well-suited to an internet Q&amp;amp;A site. This is probably a good thing - CV would otherwise be deluged with &quot;novice data analysis&quot; questions. But it does mean that those which do end up here, are often unclear, poorly suited for the format, and hence hard to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On harder questions, I'm aware that even experts here rarely answer beyond a couple of fairly specialised fields. I wonder if unanswered questions represent a gap between tastes or skill-sets of answerers and the requirements of posters? If so, more journeymen seem unlikely to make much impact. It may also be due in part, as CV becomes better known, to an increase in poorly phrased &quot;novice questions&quot; where the gap is of the &lt;em&gt;patience&lt;/em&gt; of answerers to unpick what has been misunderstood, or what information the questioner is really trying to ascertain. These options aren't mutually exclusive. They are also testable hypotheses - take a sample of answerers and ask them to classify questions based on such things as whether they are in their field/out of field (perhaps with some finer distinctions such as &quot;slightly out of my field but could probably answer if I did a bit of research&quot;), clarity of the question, expected effort it would take to answer, and whether they would be likely to submit an answer (or at least a tentative or clarifying comment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="22228" LastEditDate="2014-12-02T00:15:23.467" LastActivityDate="2014-12-02T00:15:23.467" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2242" CreationDate="2014-12-01T18:18:58.397" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Besides the subjects already mentioned in the question, I can think of some suggestions to improve the site's statistics (and perhaps indirectly increase the number of participants too):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;short term: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;support &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/125740/dont-throw-away-all-votes-when-a-user-is-deleted&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; proposal, which asks for votes not being deleted when a user leaves the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;once in a while, pay attention in the active tab, to questions bumped up by the community user. They are questions with 0 score answers and maybe the answer(s) did not receive enough attention. This &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/252822/unanswered-questions-with-answers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;query&lt;/a&gt; written by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/users/3717023/raff&quot;&gt;Raff&lt;/a&gt; also clip such questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;go forward to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/59/announcer&quot;&gt;announcer&lt;/a&gt;, booster and publicist badges. They help to improve the site's visibility and maybe it will attract more active participants.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2014-12-01T18:18:58.397" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2242" CreationDate="2014-12-01T19:25:02.200" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are a couple quick thoughts:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I used to read down the 'recent badges' along the right side of the main page every day.  I would click through to all the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/40/tumbleweed&quot;&gt;tumbleweeds&lt;/a&gt; and see if they could be answered, edited (&amp;amp; bumped), clarified through comments, or submitted for closure.  I haven't done this much since the recent badges were moved to a new tab in place of 'hot questions' from other SE sites and empty space.  (As you can tell, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/209906/eeeek-hot-network-questions-killed-recent-tags-and-recent-badges#comment673101_209906&quot;&gt;I don't care for this change&lt;/a&gt;.)  Nonetheless, people can go to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges&quot;&gt;badges tab&lt;/a&gt; and look through the recent tumbleweeds as a service to the site, and a way to help address this issue.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is also easy to search the site for recent unanswered questions by clicking on the &lt;code&gt;UNANSWERED&lt;/code&gt; tab and sorting by the &lt;code&gt;newest&lt;/code&gt; subtab.  Also &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=answers%3A0+created%3A2014-11..&quot;&gt;searching the site&lt;/a&gt; with the syntax, say, &lt;code&gt;answers:0 created:2014-11..&lt;/code&gt; will yield the unanswered questions that were asked on or after November 1st, 2014.  (I am surprised to see the number is 1,216 between then and today--December 1st, 2014.)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the issue of answers in comments, I think people should feel free (after a suitable time) to answer the question, even if it is essentially the same as what already exists in the comments.  There are a couple of possibilities:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can add a comment to the comment-answerer to convert their comment to an answer; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can add your own answer with similar material if you feel comfortable (e.g., you knew that was the answer on reading the question and before seeing the comment); &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or, if you don't feel comfortable doing that, you can copy the comment into the answer, with a brief note explaining what you are doing, and make the answer CW.  An example where I personally have done the latter is here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/109917/7290&quot;&gt;How to interpret regression coefficients in a log-log model?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2014-12-02T04:47:30.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2246" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-12-01T21:15:52.677" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use this tag to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Discuss participation of users within the Cross Validated Stack Exchange site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Propose new ideas to enhance/improve participation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-02T08:37:47.537" LastActivityDate="2014-12-02T08:37:47.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2247" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-12-01T21:15:52.677" Score="0" Body="The users' engagement within the Cross Validated Stack Exchange site" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-02T08:38:43.867" LastActivityDate="2014-12-02T08:38:43.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2248" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4711" CreationDate="2014-12-02T08:57:00.023" Score="5" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent suggested edit to the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/statistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;statistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;statistics&lt;/a&gt; tag wiki (and excerpt) came up.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The change was to make it explicitly for discussion of statistics relating to activity on the main site (things like my recent question relating to answers per question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think having a tag for such a purpose is an excellent idea.  As such I (though with some uncertainty) approved the suggested edit. I am still unsure about it, hence this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to my questions: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there a need for a &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/statistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;statistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;statistics&lt;/a&gt; tag in the more usual sense?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If that is the case, might a &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/site-statistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;site-statistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;site-statistics&lt;/a&gt; tag be better for the purpose of discussion relating to statistics about the main site?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[This is now finalized - the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/statistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;statistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;statistics&lt;/a&gt; tag was renamed &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/site-statistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;site-statistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;site-statistics&lt;/a&gt; via a tag-merge.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-04-04T11:04:10.577" LastActivityDate="2017-04-04T11:04:10.577" Title="Meta CV tag - [statistics] vs [site-statistics]" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-excerpt|tag-wiki|meta|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2248" CreationDate="2014-12-02T15:19:14.597" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's a great idea, and we could make &lt;code&gt;[statistics]&lt;/code&gt; a synonym.  If there's some confusion about which site is referenced, you could use &lt;code&gt;[main-sites-statistics]&lt;/code&gt; instead.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2014-12-02T15:19:14.597" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2242" CreationDate="2014-12-02T19:05:34.730" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I should be talking about @Glen_b's data (this is a statistics forum, isn't it?), but I have little experience with forum reports and find that I want to see a much longer run to comment. So instead I will expatiate in a miscellaneous way on what I take to be the main underlying question here, how to make Cross Validated work better? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Optimists might look at the large volume of excellent threads here (and I note that the lively discussions can be as helpful as the many definitive answers) and want to claim &lt;strong&gt;success&lt;/strong&gt;. Pessimists might look at the large number of questions here that never really got off the ground, including some distressingly broad or vague or confused questions that seemed doomed to get no response that would satisfy the poster, or anyone else, and want to claim &lt;strong&gt;failure&lt;/strong&gt;. &#xA;Both are right. In fact any dialogue is not so much between persons as between moods. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first suggestion is that ways of dealing with the internet seem to be evolving very quickly and this may be behind some patterns of change that we are seeing. Users here vary from those who seem to have joined at about the start and remained committed ever since, through those like myself who have joined much more recently, to users who joined a few minutes ago to ask their question (and who in many cases will not return). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's already getting hard for me to re-create my initial puzzlement at how CV worked. For some time between learning about this site and actually joining it I was shy because it looked so very complicated (why all those badges, for example? that just looked childish). Looking again at the home page and trying to see the site from a beginner's eyes, it seems more obvious to me that &lt;strong&gt;you can ask a question&lt;/strong&gt; than &lt;strong&gt;how you can search for an answer&lt;/strong&gt;. As often remarked, there is a tension between the short-term and individual focus &quot;Here is my question: What's the answer?&quot; and the long-term and collective goal of building up a repository or resource that can be consulted. We don't usually hear from those who found something interesting or useful on our pages and just benefited from that. We do usually hear and see those who are struggling even to ask a question that triggers the right response. Either way, &lt;strong&gt;making it more evident that there is a site to be searched and how to search it seems a priority&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both here and elsewhere I feel that there is a steady drift upwards in the fraction of questions based on the assumption that we are an oracle capable of answering even cryptic questions. This is tied up with deep-seated educational and cultural attitudes towards statistics, even among people with backgrounds that otherwise are reasonably quantitative and/or mathematical. Some symptomology that is recurrent includes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I know little or nothing about statistics, so you need to explain in terms I can understand.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I need to know the right way to analyse this dataset, already in my hands.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I tried Googling this, but got nowhere.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I need to know what to say in my Master's research proposal.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, I should stress that rudeness or discourtesy remain exceptional here; it's a credit to our moderators and more active users that it wouldn't be tolerated.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In blunt terms, it seems that we are often expected to compensate for those who never received much of a statistical education, or whose statistical education to date has failed to inculcate much understanding. And this is increasing. The syndrome is that &lt;strong&gt;the internet will give me an answer&lt;/strong&gt; and therefore that it's the job of CV to provide that answer. Naturally, in broad terms that is what we do offer, but the small print doesn't include promises that we always can satisfy those who have not tried much to help themselves. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do other fields experience the same expectations? Forgetting statistics for a moment, let me imagine that I want to learn some physics or economics or whatever, some subject where my knowledge is very slim. I would certainly put most emphasis on reading some books; it's not practical for me to take courses but if I were a student it should be; I would use what I could find on the internet. I would feel that I had to work long and hard before bothering strangers in a forum. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, @Silverfish's answer had an interesting autobiographical flavour. I won't quite follow suit, but so that this is not interpreted as another patronising put-down by a statistician of those struggling with statistics, I stress that I am not a statistician by training or by (any!) qualifications. I am a primitive life-form, a geographer who uses statistical methods, but a lot. Low-hanging fruit? That's the best. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2014-12-02T21:37:27.227" LastActivityDate="2014-12-02T21:37:27.227" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2251" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-03T00:49:31.437" Score="3" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;second attempt&lt;/strong&gt; to launch an &lt;strong&gt;Economics.SE&lt;/strong&gt; site has &lt;a href=&quot;https://economics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;gone into public Beta.&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;On-topic there are of course &lt;strong&gt;Econometrics&lt;/strong&gt; also, so if you hit on an econometric question on Cross Validated that rests unanswered, you may consider flagging it for migration, or alert the OP about the existence of Economics.SE.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I will check older CV unanswered questions with the tag &quot;econometrics&quot;, with the same intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the site stays on, perhaps it will become a new source of cross-posting, but we will have to wait and see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28746" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:51:38.237" LastActivityDate="2014-12-03T01:23:20.793" Title="Economics.SE has entered Public beta" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2251" CreationDate="2014-12-03T01:23:20.793" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It does seem like economics merits its own SE site, so I wish it well.  However, deciding whether to migrate new questions will be tricky.  We have (but rarely) gotten questions that are rather purely about economics with little statistical content--those can clearly be migrated.  Econometric questions that have meaningful statistical content &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be migrated, but I'm not sure I'd want to by default and there is some case to be made that we should defer to the OP's implied wishes in posting here for those questions that can be on-topic on two sites.  As with software and math questions, I suggest we focus on what the OP needs explained:  If the question is about econometrics, but the underlying confusion is really about the economics, we should migrate; If the question starts and stops with the econometrics, I would keep it here.  As for &lt;em&gt;old and unanswered&lt;/em&gt; econometrics questions, be aware that after a short period of time (I don't know how long, it may be 30 days) threads are no longer migratable.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2014-12-03T01:23:20.793" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2253" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-03T10:23:49.023" Score="77" ViewCount="1825" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to reopen the discussion regarding CV and the Data Science beta. This question is related to this previous one: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2026/data-science-se&quot;&gt;Data Science SE&lt;/a&gt; but now with a better view of where Data Science seems to be going. I was inspired to make this post because of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/126403/crossvalidated-vs-datascience-what-is-different&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/126403/crossvalidated-vs-datascience-what-is-different&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference between CV and data science appears to be that CV focuses on data analysis theory (statistics, machine learning and math to a lesser extent) while data science focuses on (big) data analysis in practice (software frameworks, databases, languages). At least on paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CV's mission statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cross Validated is a question and answer site for people interested in statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, and data visualization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Data Science's mission statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Data Science Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for Data science professionals, Machine Learning specialists, and those interested in learning more about the field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These mission statements are pretty vague but already there one can immediately see tremendous overlap. I think historically the need for Data Science arose because CV rejected 'implementation-related' questions. That may have been a mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not convinced that these should be separate, especially considering the evolution of data science. Maybe CV is focusing on independence of statistics too much. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Data Science is getting &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; of theoretical questions which should probably have ended up here (most are in fact already answered here), some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/2582/consequence-of-feature-scaling&quot;&gt;Consequence of feature scaling&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/2513/please-enlighten-me-with-platts-smo-algorithm-for-svm&quot;&gt;Please enlighten me with Platt's SMO algorithm for SVM&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/2258/where-to-start-on-neural-networks&quot;&gt;Where to start on neural networks&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/736/skewed-multi-class-data&quot;&gt;Skewed multi-class data&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/410/choosing-a-learning-rate&quot;&gt;Choosing a learning rate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/22/k-means-clustering-for-mixed-numeric-and-categorical-data&quot;&gt;K-means clustering for mixed numeric and categorical data&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/806/advantages-of-auc-vs-standard-accuracy&quot;&gt;Advantages of AUC vs standard accuracy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The list goes on. If we consider the list given at &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.meta.stackexchange.com/a/15/119&quot;&gt;Data Science meta&lt;/a&gt; to be used, such questions would fit on both venues. The idea that (a non-trivial amount of) questions may well end up on either site is in direct contradiction to the overall mission of StackExchange sites (e.g. to provide a single place to answer certain questions that cannot be found in other places).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On CV we are (fairly) consistently closing questions that belong on data science while they appear to not be doing the same. Essentially this boils down to '&lt;em&gt;when in doubt, ask at Data Science&lt;/em&gt;'. This is just an observation, don't consider this to be a complaint or accusation. It seems to me that CV needs better PR at least. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question: &lt;strong&gt;is having two small, heavily intertwined sites better than one large one related to 'data analysis' in all its forms?&lt;/strong&gt; StackOverflow has shown that a single go-to point for programming stuff has worked tremendously well, so maybe the equivalent for data analysis has its merits? From a new user's perspective, it would make a lot more sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:50:40.830" LastActivityDate="2019-07-26T10:18:26.050" Title="CV and Data Science: semi-identical twins?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|datascience-stackexchange|" AnswerCount="11" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2254" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-03T07:51:56.313" Score="20" ViewCount="705" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably it will be off-topic, but anyway I really want to know the difference between this forum and &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/?tab=hot&quot;&gt;Data Science&lt;/a&gt; forum? The both communities are the subparts of StackExchange and at the moment I don't see the reason to split the Data science questions in the two parts (consequently to provide two different communities)... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49268" OwnerDisplayName="Guforu" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:50:40.830" LastActivityDate="2014-12-03T11:33:06.447" Title="CrossValidated vs DataScience: what is different?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2014-12-18T16:57:45.530" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2254" CreationDate="2014-12-03T08:16:28.367" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion cross-validated concerns the theory and methodology of analysing data, e.g. statistics and machine learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Data Science, on the other hand is more hands-on and deals with implementation related topics such as data handling, software infrastructures, databases and toolchains. This is particularly true at the start of Data Science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there is an increasing gray zone between the two. Data Science is receiving more and more questions that, in my opinion, should end up here instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25433" OwnerDisplayName="Marc Claesen" LastActivityDate="2014-12-03T08:16:28.367" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2242" CreationDate="2014-12-03T11:46:36.713" Score="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure how responsible the following is for the recent drop in answers per questions ratio (possibly not at all), but here is one thing I noticed and would like to bring it up in the context of this discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am following the [pca] tag and am trying to make sure that all of the questions related to PCA are either answered or closed. As there are not &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt; many questions asked about PCA (maybe 1-2 per day), sometimes I feel like I have some time to go over the old unanswered PCA questions. I even have this silly dream of one day bringing the number of unanswered PCA questions to zero (from currently ~250).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of these questions are not very interesting. Many older questions are also quite specialized (e.g. asking about kernel PCA) &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; not interesting. What happens then, is that I write an answer which I think does quite a decent job in addressing the question and in the ideal world should be several times upvoted and accepted. But I often find that it remains with 0 upvotes (or 1 if I am lucky; probably also with ~0 views) and un-accepted (e.g. because the OP is not active anymore). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is extremely frustrating. Why should I spend time answering these questions if &lt;em&gt;nobody&lt;/em&gt; cares? Apart from me trying to empty the unanswered PCA queue, which sounds rather like a symptomatic internet addiction problem than a noble enterprise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially frustrating is when the answer does not get a single upvote, so the question even &lt;em&gt;remains officially &quot;unanswered&quot;&lt;/em&gt; even though I did answer it with the single purpose of making it answered!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think by now I have some understanding of which threads are more likely to attract some attention, and the temptation is to answer only those. &lt;strong&gt;Update to clarify:&lt;/strong&gt; My hypothesis is that something like that is happening at the population level: recent increase in the number of questions is due to an increased number of not-so-interesting questions, and potential answerers feel that such threads are simply not worth the effort. &lt;strong&gt;End of update.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. On a related note, what about old uninteresting and possibly unclear questions from non-active users with zero upvotes (that probably constitute the bulk of old unanswered questions). Is it a good practice to go through them and flag to close? Is it a good practice to downvote them silently, hoping that if they remain with -1 votes, they will eventually be automatically deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update.&lt;/strong&gt; After writing this, I stumbled upon &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1248/28666&quot;&gt;this older answer&lt;/a&gt; by @whuber where he explicitly encourages to spend time writing few &quot;high-quality, well-crafted&quot; answers as opposed to many short ones. First, this directly goes against answering lots of questions just to have them answered and suggested carefully selecting only interesting questions. Second, if the number of not-so-interesting questions steadily increases, then this advice will inevitably lead to more and more unanswered questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T13:44:17.890" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2257" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-04T04:16:57.610" Score="13" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new here. Yesterday (my time) I answered &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/126363/r2-of-linear-regression-with-no-variation-in-the-response-variable/126373#126373&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. In the subsequent micro-discussion that took place in the comments, discovered that I had, in fact, misread the intent of the question, and provided an irrelevant answer. This is not the first time that I've managed something similar, despite the best of intentions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The discussion which allowed me to understand why my answer is irrelevant was instructive, both to me and (judging by the comment-votes) others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should I delete this answer?  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there a general policy which allows one to make &quot;common sense&quot; choices about such cases, where the answer may not be helpful per se but stimulates discussion which may be, may prevent others from making similar mistakes, or provide interesting context for other answers on the page?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, (rephrased) is the ultimate editorial aim for elegant answers, or warts-and-all discussions of intermediate working? Or are there cases for both?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61519" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T22:58:02.927" Title="When should answers be self-deleted?" Tags="|discussion|support|self-delete|deleted-answers|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2242" CreationDate="2014-12-04T11:17:31.010" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using this &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/59302/questions-and-answers-per-month&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;simpler query&lt;/a&gt; I obtained the number of new questions and answers per calendar month for the whole time of CV existence. Here it goes (vertical dashed lines separate years):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1Vim4.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last two months do look alarming, but I would say that at the moment it is a bit hard to say if the number of questions is going to stabilize again or to continue to grow rapidly. I am afraid that @Glen_b is rightly worried, and it will grow fast. Note that as recently as in 2013 the Q/A ratio was still around 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T11:17:31.010" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2259" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2264" CreationDate="2014-12-04T14:05:44.753" Score="12" ViewCount="403" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is inspired by @Glen_b's worry yesterday that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2242/are-we-seeing-a-dramatic-drop-in-answers-per-question&quot;&gt;we [are] seeing a dramatic drop in answers per question&lt;/a&gt; and is also related to my own question from almost a year ago about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1945/how-not-to-miss-interesting-answers&quot;&gt;How not to miss interesting answers?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have the feeling that many (most?) active users on Cross Validated are more or less monitoring the whole forum. They look at the front page several times per day, which makes them see pretty much &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the appearing and updated questions. They definitely can monitor all the bounty questions that rarely exceed 10 at any given time. Questions and answers mostly get views and upvotes while on the front page (and some further views/upvotes if they get into the weekly/monthly top, but enough initial views/upvotes is necessary for that). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So overall I get the feeling of a reasonably small and attentive community, like a big permanent seminar in a busy room where anybody could come in and ask a question (sort of a coffee lounge in a stat department, like it &lt;em&gt;should be&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question (linked above) from a year ago was motivated by the fact that it seemed to me that this model &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; breaks down now, because the number of questions gradually becomes too high. As @Glen_b now points out, this trend is likely to increase in the near future. Which makes me wonder: how does our bigger (much bigger!) brother Stack Overflow manages to function &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt;, given that they are much, much beyond our activity level?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For comparison. We have ~50k questions, they have ~8000k. We have ~10 bounty questions at any given time, they have ~500. Our front page covers the last ~5 hours, their front page barely covers 1h.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe some people here frequent both forums and can comment on how this HUGE activity influences how the forum functions and in particular how active contributors deal with it? How can each individual question or answer possibly get enough attention, views and upvotes? Are people only following specific tags, and so the forum is basically split in some barely overlapping ones? But there isn't even a way to see all the questions with one's &quot;favourite&quot; tags on one page! Do people rely on email notifications? Etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T22:28:54.163" Title="How does Stack Overflow actually manage to work given ~100x higher traffic than here, and what can we learn from it?" Tags="|discussion|participation|stackoverflow|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2259" CreationDate="2014-12-04T14:49:38.253" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my case, very simple. I follow the tag &quot;Stata&quot; exclusively. Occasionally that leads me elsewhere, but I don't systematically follow anything else.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, that's one reason I am quite aggressive on migrations to Stack Overflow. If it's a Stata question, I will certainly look at it on SO. (If it's an R question, there are many spectacularly competent people on SO; and so on for most of the leading statistical platforms. I find I don't care much about supporting statistics in environments that don't allow programming; or else life is short, and some things have to be somebody else's problem.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stata users count as a tiny niche community within SO. That's why it's manageable to monitor. Posts are of the order of 1 per day. But no moderators on SO know anything about it, so far as I can tell. Occasionally, this causes bizarre problems, as when perfectly good answers are deleted by moderators under pressure from high-reputation users because they don't recognise key words, and the answer looks like spam or irrelevance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T14:49:38.253" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2259" CreationDate="2014-12-04T16:28:50.293" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many colleagues in my workplace who uses Stack Overflow in the read-only mode. I try to encourage them to participate, but they always say that most things they look for are already there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As time goes on, it is more difficult to ask different good questions (despite new subjects are always coming up). As a consequence, there are many closed and downvoted questions on that site, and the community handles them until a certain point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A recent change in the SE system allowed users who carry a tag gold badge to cast binding votes on duplicate threads from that tag. I felt that questions labeled with Excel were more organized and easier to search, as simple questions were right away marked as duplicates to a canonical answer (e.g., &lt;code&gt;vlookup&lt;/code&gt; questions). That somehow will make top answers more accessible to people coming from Google and other search engines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a feature we could give more attention: linking recurrent questions as duplicates of canonical answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: SO is rolling out a promising feature to increase the quality level of its questions. First part of it, is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/278380/help-us-test-question-triage&quot;&gt;Triage&lt;/a&gt; process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T09:16:14.490" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T20:36:30.463" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2262" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-12-04T16:37:49.150" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag usage&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For questions which refer to (connect, compare, associate) Cross Validated and Stack Overflow.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-04T21:50:44.217" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T21:50:44.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2263" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-12-04T16:37:49.150" Score="0" Body="Stack Overflow is a website part of the Stack Exchange network featuring questions and answers on a wide range of topics in computer programming." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-04T21:50:53.800" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T21:50:53.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2259" CreationDate="2014-12-04T17:37:29.980" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the biggest factor that allows SO to function is that there are &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; more people contributing answers and working to maintain the site.  That is, the number of people asking is larger, but the site as a whole maintains some sort of balance between the number of askers and the number of active answerers.  It seems that we are slipping out of balance, which I take to be @Glen_b's concern (although it may be just a seasonal effect, as @whuber &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2242/are-we-seeing-a-dramatic-drop-in-answers-per-question#comment6239_2242&quot;&gt;noted&lt;/a&gt;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that, my impression is that SO has evolved to become a loose federation of tag-based fiefdoms.  I occasionally look at the &lt;code&gt;[r]&lt;/code&gt; tag page on SO, @NickCox and @StasK only follow the &lt;code&gt;[stata]&lt;/code&gt; tag page, etc.  I'm sure there is some overlap for some of the tags (e.g., &lt;code&gt;[html]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[css]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[php]&lt;/code&gt;, and [&lt;code&gt;javascript]&lt;/code&gt; logically go together), but you still have semi-isolated islands in an archipelago.  I certainly never follow the main page on SO and I suspect (almost?) no one does.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, on the other hand, I do follow the main page, and I'm glad I do.  This has exposed me to a lot of statistical (ML, etc.) topics that I'm still not expert in but would otherwise be totally unfamiliar with.  This has been quite valuable to me and I'm glad it remains manageable; I rue the day when it ceases to be.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T18:35:50.183" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2257" CreationDate="2014-12-04T17:54:03.140" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there should be a general policy with regard to this issue.  I believe this decision should be solely the prerogative of the individual answerer.  That is, you should get to choose which of the options you prefer, and should be entitled to chose differently from one thread to another or even deleting / undeleting and editing the same answer over time.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case, I think you are right that the answer is incorrect, but that the discussion in comments is illuminating and contributes to the thread.  In that sense, there is perhaps a net benefit to the site for it to remain.  However, I think that should be your choice and I personally would respect your choice even if you chose to delete it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T17:54:03.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2266" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-12-04T18:25:54.683" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Also, consider using one of the following tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/deleted-questions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'deleted-questions'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;deleted-questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/deleted-answers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'deleted-answers'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;deleted-answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-05T11:45:28.307" LastActivityDate="2014-12-05T11:45:28.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2267" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-12-04T18:25:54.683" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding deleting your own question or answer." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-04T23:53:50.693" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T23:53:50.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2268" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-12-04T18:30:08.937" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answers can be deleted by the following mechanisms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the original poster (OP).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a community moderator.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;enough votes from trusted users (20k).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;spam and offensive flags.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information on deleted-answers, refer to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-answers&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; Reference: adapted from &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/deleted-answers/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-09T16:35:15.667" LastActivityDate="2014-12-09T16:35:15.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2269" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-12-04T18:30:08.937" Score="0" Body="Questions related to deleted answers specifically." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-04T21:51:20.743" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T21:51:20.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2270" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-04T20:05:06.447" Score="9" ViewCount="299" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to Stack Exchange and want to answer questions, but without 50 rep I can't post a comment asking the OP for clarification.  Is there a clear guideline for what to do in this situation?  (If so, can we make the guideline easy to find?  Users with &amp;lt;50 rep are the ones least likely to know how to find that information on CV / meta.CV / meta.SE.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, I want to help Chrissy figure out &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/126575/how-to-explain-when-main-effect-and-interaction-are-not-significant&quot;&gt;How to explain when Main Effect and Interaction are not significant?&lt;/a&gt; but she doesn't provide details necessary to answer her question properly.  Unable to request clarification in a comment, I requested clarification in an answer and did the best I could to answer the question given the sparse information provided.  (As I was typing, another user requested clarification in a comment.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I did was explicitly against the guidelines in the window that pops up when answering a question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thanks for contributing an answer to Cross Validated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please be sure to answer the question. Provide details and share your research!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But avoid …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Asking for help, &lt;em&gt;clarification&lt;/em&gt;, or responding to other answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the SE meta I found the answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/214173/why-do-i-need-50-reputation-to-comment-what-can-i-do-instead&quot;&gt;Why do I need 50 reputation to comment? What can I do instead?&lt;/a&gt; which states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But I want to contribute now. What should I do instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I put my comment in an answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But suggests:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you are sure you can provide a real answer, then you are of course&#xA;  welcome to go ahead, but make sure it's a &lt;strong&gt;full, valid answer to the&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;question&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's what I was aiming for, but given the details provided I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a &lt;strong&gt;full, valid answer to the question&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/21549/comments-incorrectly-submitted-as-an-answer-instead-what-should-we-do&quot;&gt;Comments incorrectly submitted as an answer instead: what should we do?&lt;/a&gt; addresses this topic from the point of view of a senior user cleaning up after a newbie.  The 'best' answer is to let users with low rep treat the answer field like a comment field:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For people whose reputation (at the time the comment was made!) was&#xA;  low enough, the 'answer instead of comment' is all they can do. There&#xA;  is no cause to chide them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, other responses span the gamut from permissive to &quot;we need to somehow reinforce that commenting is a privilege,&quot; and even &quot;If they look like superfluous noise, then tell the author to STFU.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is there a right answer?  A best practice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61971" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T05:36:33.470" Title="Best practice: How to request clarification from the author without 50 rep to comment?" Tags="|discussion|support|comment|answers|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2270" CreationDate="2014-12-04T21:12:47.273" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;We're fairly easy-going around here, but I can only speak for my own moderation habits on this one because nominally it's breaking the rules: when I run across an answer that has been flagged as really being a comment in disguise, and it begins something like &quot;I'm new here and don't have enough rep to comment but I really would like to help somebody by making the following point ...,&quot; then I'm happy to run through a few mouse clicks to turn the post into a &lt;em&gt;bona fide&lt;/em&gt; comment.  (I also try to remember the poster's name, because such behavior indicates they're likely to be a really helpful person to have around.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For other newbies reading this, please bear in mind that the system presents answers in varying orders depending on user preferences (and the phase of the moon), so if you feel moved to comment on a particular &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; then please make clear which answer it is.  Even if you currently see only one answer, by the time anybody actually reads your post other answers might have appeared.  Remember, too, that comments cannot exceed 500 characters: anything after that in your post will vanish after it's converted into a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the site matures and traffic grows, it may become harder to bend the rules like this, so please be judicious.  It's already becoming a lot of work to close a dozen questions a day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T21:12:47.273" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2270" CreationDate="2014-12-04T22:05:16.347" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The limit is a problem when people like yourself who have something to contribute find a roadblock. The system is a pretty crude instrument, but does cut down on the low-content comments that you see on so many sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the mods have been very helpful in frequently turning comments-in-answers into comments, it's probably not something they can continue to do so often in the longer term. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People who take the trouble to post about it here in the past have often been reasonably close to having enough reputation to take them over, and it often turns out that someone manages to find an upvote-worthy post and the problem is solved. I suppose that technically we're not really supposed to use our votes in that way, but in practice it seems to work quite well.  However, again, that's not going to be as feasible as the site grows. (As soon as I saw your post, I was inclined to see if your problem could be solved in that way, but it already had been. Still, I found something to upvote.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing it's at least possible to do if you're able to give a partial answer is to post the answer as far as you're able and then seek clarification in the answer (but where possible you should seek to edit the request for clarification from the answer once the issue is addressed). This also gives the possibility that if the partial answer is good it may attract an upvote or two and that may well tip you into territory where you can post the comment as a comment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you pretty much did what you could do within that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possibility (and perhaps even what the intended solution is) is to find &lt;em&gt;another&lt;/em&gt; question or two to answer - whether new, or an older unanswered question (either of which we have in abundance), or even an already answered question you have a particularly good take on that isn't there already. It can seem hard at first to get much recognition for your good contributions (especially for those people more like me, for whom it took some time to understand what kind of contribution would be appreciated), but a little perseverance in trying to provide good answers will win the day. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2015-04-23T05:36:33.470" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T05:36:33.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2270" CreationDate="2014-12-04T22:09:23.873" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;@whuber's stamina is admirable, but I have to endorse @NickCox's suggestion: You just have to hang in there, contribute answers to questions that don't need clarification (etc.) until you get to 50.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other option is to build the lack of clarity into your answer.  Recognize that many askers here don't know enough to use the right terms or include the necessary (and only the necessary) information in their question.  Thus, they may not understand or be able to provide the information requested in your comment.  So an answer could be: 'I think you're asking about ____, but this other aspect could be A or B.  In your case, if it were A, it would work this way...' This has more potential to help the OP and may lead to a stronger answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T22:09:23.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2259" CreationDate="2014-12-04T22:28:54.163" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;To a greater extent than here, SO seems to divide up into mostly independent topic areas, though individual questions might cross several such topics that usually don't sit on the same question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my case, I read the &lt;code&gt;r&lt;/code&gt; tag there, and rarely look at anything else, so stackoverflow looks to someone like me like a largish but quite manageable site with questions on R. Sometimes I read Python questions (but can't answer any - it's a way of trying to learn more). On rare occasions I venture into looking at other tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine most people would look at a wider range of tags than I do, but would still keep themselves to only a few.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here on CV, I don't limit myself by tags. There are certainly some tags that I'm not qualified to say much about, and topics I'm not actively trying to answer, but I try to make sure they all show up when I look at the site. That's partly because stats questions are much less compartmentalized than typical SO questions (and partly because both my interests and background are substantially broader). It's the same when I go on math.SE (though the topics I'm qualified to answer on there are more restricted). Since math.SE has quite a bit more traffic than here and it's not quite to the overwhelming stage there, I expect I'd be able to see a substantial growth in traffic here without changing that habit very often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if the volume were multiplied by ten, I imagine I'd pretty much have to cut that &quot;read everything&quot; down a lot of the time, either by searching on favorite tags or by using the ability to ignore some. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T22:28:54.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2257" CreationDate="2014-12-04T22:45:55.553" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's really up to you what you do with your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sometimes misread questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once I realize, most of the time I improve my answer in light of the new understanding. Sometimes I see that the actual question is well answered already and if mine doesn't have anything to add, and still wouldn't add much after an edit, I might delete mine. Sometimes I write a note at the top of my answer explaining what's wrong with it and &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; delete it (higher rep users see all deleted answers, so that's not as pointless as it sounds). Sometimes I do other things. Occasionally, where I think it might be more informative to do so (e.g. where there's a particularly enlightening comment in response to it), I choose to leave it stay as is. [And occasionally, though I intended to do something, I just forget to do anything with it.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can see value in the discussion under your question (I think there is value there, but it's really up to you), you might leave it. Or you might change your answer to improve it, or you might delete it. Any of those are potentially reasonable choices. I think a good criterion would be &quot;what leaves this question being the most useful to later readers, who have a range of abilities?&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is easy to misread it might in some cases be quite beneficial to later readers to leave the answer but make clear that it is based on that misreading (since if they also misread the question they might end up there looking for just that kind of answer). [On the other hand, it might then be reasonably argued that the question should be edited.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the whole I think that if the question really has only one interpretation, broadly speaking the answers that stay around should respond to it, but I would not want an overly-prescriptive rule on that because sometimes there's a good deal of value in the responses to/discussion of a mistake. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2014-12-04T22:51:18.473" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T22:51:18.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2257" CreationDate="2014-12-04T22:51:24.770" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As another contributor to that that discussion - I would, of course, happily delete my comments if they were no longer relevant to the provided answer, but I can see that there's a benefit in the discussion as currently recorded. In cases like this, I think it should be the decision of the original answerer whether to edit or remove their post, or not. Because the discussion in the comments seems potentially educational, and future readers are unlikely to be left confused by it, there doesn't seem to be an urgent need for the answer to be removed nor for the answerer feel obliged to &quot;fix&quot; it in an edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I regret the lack of a &quot;whoops!&quot; button for those moments when you realise that you've posted something that contains a stupid mistake (I am speaking here in general, rather than in the case of the OP), but where if that mistake were pointed out, the answer retains value for future readers. If there was a user who posted under their real name, for instance, leaving their &quot;not thought through&quot; answer associated with their account might be particularly embarrassing - professional reputation etc. But if there were a virtual version of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Smithee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Alan Smithee&lt;/a&gt; on whom the disowned post could be hung, it would be possible to leave the answer hanging there without shame. Perhaps this is a somewhat playful suggestion, but in somewhat related circumstances I can remember an answer that @whuber abandoned and opened up to community wiki when he realised his method contained a flaw that he couldn't see how to fix, but felt the answer still contained enough value to persist and hoped other contributors might be able to fix the gap. I thought that was an interesting alternative to just deleting the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="22228" LastEditDate="2014-12-04T22:58:02.927" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T22:58:02.927" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2277" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-12-05T12:58:01.323" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments can be added to questions or answers by any user with at least 50 points of reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the commenting &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;privilege&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: adapted info from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/comments/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-06T10:25:19.690" LastActivityDate="2014-12-06T10:25:19.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2278" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-12-05T12:58:01.323" Score="0" Body="Comments are small addendum to each question or answer, intentionally limited in size and formatting." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-06T10:25:22.937" LastActivityDate="2014-12-06T10:25:22.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2279" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-12-05T13:03:29.023" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answers are what Stack Exchange sites are all about (apart from questions). Without good answers, the sites don't work as no one will come and post their questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: adapted content from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/answers/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-06T10:25:16.807" LastActivityDate="2014-12-06T10:25:16.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2280" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-12-05T13:03:29.023" Score="0" Body="Questions about answers: how to answer, whether specific answers are appropriate, and so forth." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-06T10:25:25.093" LastActivityDate="2014-12-06T10:25:25.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2253" CreationDate="2014-12-06T10:05:15.867" Score="77" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My question: is having two small, heavily intertwined sites better than one large one related to 'data analysis' in all its forms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, my answer is 'no'. If anything, I think Data Science should be merged into Cross Validated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can respect that some people would want to keep the engineering and theory separate (I'll let them make that case); however:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is possible to have a single site which deals with different aspects of the same area. Tags have a role to play. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's kind of annoying having to check two sites, have two sets of rep etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There will be wasteful duplication and dilution of conversations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Computational tractability is often driving the choice of theories to pursue. IMO there is a complementarity between theoretical questions and engineering issues.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's going to get dull seeing 'is this one for data science?' in comments fields.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One could argue that it is inconsistent that on CV we will sometimes provide R/matlab code, but seem to shy away from larger systems engineering questions or less familiar software. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16663" LastActivityDate="2014-12-06T10:05:15.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2282" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-12-08T13:26:10.983" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag usage&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For questions which refer to (connect, compare, associate) Cross Validated and Data Science Stack Exchange.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more info about Data Science Stack Exchange, visit their &lt;a href=&quot;http://datascience.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;website&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-08T22:02:38.063" LastActivityDate="2014-12-08T22:02:38.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2283" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-12-08T13:26:10.983" Score="0" Body="Data Science is a website part of the Stack Exchange network featuring questions and answers on topics such as machine learning, data mining and treatment of large data." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-08T22:02:40.777" LastActivityDate="2014-12-08T22:02:40.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2284" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2305" CreationDate="2014-12-09T12:25:49.340" Score="7" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of my recent answers got deleted while it got scoring of +12/-2 and for some time it was the accepted answer. I would consider this scoring to be rather positive. The answer that got deleted provided a different perspective then the rest of answers (and, let it be, it could be viewed as &lt;em&gt;slightly&lt;/em&gt; off-topic). I admit: there were things to correct (and those were corrected) and there could be areas to improve the answer, however there were no suggestions of any kind to improve the answer - it just disappeared. Sorry, but I don't get it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the policy here? I know the general policy, but this case seems odd for me. Especially that the general policy is to &quot;rather edit and improve then delete&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; want to argue: &quot;please undelete it!&quot;, that is not my point. Yes, I spend some time on writing it, so I did not like the idea that it was deleted. However, I am mostly interested in knowing what is the policy, because situations like this rather discourage to writing further answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Link to the deleted answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/126904/are-all-simulation-methods-some-form-of-monte-carlo/126908#126908&quot;&gt;Are all simulation methods some form of Monte Carlo?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer came back from the dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T14:19:25.153" Title="Why was an answer considered off-topic and when it was deleted?" Tags="|discussion|support|policy|moderation|deleted-answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2285" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-12-09T13:02:29.533" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag usage&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Consider asking on the main &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta site&lt;/a&gt;, if the question is about asking for a change in policy to all Stack Exchange sites.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-09T16:35:40.323" LastActivityDate="2014-12-09T16:35:40.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2286" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-12-09T13:02:29.533" Score="0" Body="Questions related to policies and guidelines of the Stack Exchange sites." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-09T16:35:24.910" LastActivityDate="2014-12-09T16:35:24.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2287" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2288" CreationDate="2014-12-09T13:19:39.230" Score="5" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that in the &quot;Questions&quot; view, I see some questions with a blue background, e.g., the first one here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vArHV.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this some new feature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-09T15:06:21.990" LastActivityDate="2014-12-09T16:58:31.327" Title="Why do I see some questions with a blue background?" Tags="|support|design|favorite-tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2287" CreationDate="2014-12-09T13:54:51.050" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This means that at least one of those three tags (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/time-series&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;time-series&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;time-series&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/arima&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;arima&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;arima&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/var&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;var&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;var&lt;/a&gt;) were favorited by you. This feature facilitates users finding questions of their interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, ignored tags makes questions labeled with them to appear with less visibility (shadowed?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the screenshot below. Just as an example, I added &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/repeated-measure&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;repeated-measure&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;repeated-measure&lt;/a&gt; as a favorite tag and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt; as an ignored tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pHLA5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-09T15:03:49.940" LastActivityDate="2014-12-09T15:03:49.940" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2287" CreationDate="2014-12-09T15:33:37.190" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;+1 to @AndreSilva.  Specifically, on the right side of the screen / screenshot under the blue box you see &quot;Favorite Tags&quot;.  Yours include &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;r&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;r&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/time-series&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;time-series&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;time-series&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/forecasting&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;forecasting&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;forecasting&lt;/a&gt;.  Questions with those tags will be highlighted for you on most CV pages (if you go to the tag's page, it wouldn't be).  In your example, the highlighted thread is tagged with &lt;code&gt;[time-series]&lt;/code&gt;.  Favorite Tags are added automatically by SE based on your pattern of answering questions.  If you don't want those threads highlighted, click the &quot;edit&quot; link next to Favorite Tags and add some nonsense (I have &lt;code&gt;[jkjkjk]&lt;/code&gt;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="930" LastEditDate="2014-12-09T16:58:31.327" LastActivityDate="2014-12-09T16:58:31.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2290" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-12-09T18:03:36.763" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported excerpt from &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/design/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-10T14:05:20.653" LastActivityDate="2014-12-10T14:05:20.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2291" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-12-09T18:03:36.763" Score="0" Body="&quot;Design&quot; refers to front-end elements, such as page layout, coloring conventions, etc." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-10T14:05:48.900" LastActivityDate="2014-12-10T14:05:48.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2292" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2295" CreationDate="2014-12-09T18:10:44.493" Score="3" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think whatever the difference between &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/definition&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;definition&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;definition&lt;/a&gt; (60 questions) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terminology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terminology&lt;/a&gt; (247 questions) might possibly be, in practice these tags are used interchangeably. Therefore I suggest hard-merging the less popular &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/definition&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;definition&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;definition&lt;/a&gt; into &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terminology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terminology&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update after @Glen_b's answer:&lt;/strong&gt; I find that tags that are subsets of other tags tend to create confusion, so I would argue this should be avoided. It seems to me that there is a lot of questions about definitions marked with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terminology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terminology&lt;/a&gt; and not with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/definition&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;definition&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;definition&lt;/a&gt;, and so having separate sub-tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/definition&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;definition&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;definition&lt;/a&gt; is not being very helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2 after further discussion:&lt;/strong&gt; After some further reflection, I realized that my objection to sub-tags was not as warranted as I originally thought. We actually have many sub-tags that are pretty successful, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/multiple-regression&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;multiple-regression&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;multiple-regression&lt;/a&gt; exists together with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/regression&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;regression&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;regression&lt;/a&gt; and they are both used a lot. So I must admit that my suggestion was not very well thought through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2015-10-06T16:36:44.907" LastActivityDate="2015-10-06T16:36:44.907" Title="Shouldn't we merge [definition] into [terminology]?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2293" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-12-09T18:20:12.217" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Favorite tags are a set of tags selected by a user on a Stack Exchange site. All questions marked as favorite are highlighted in the questions page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The preferences tab in the User Profile and on the right-hand side of every questions list page shows all Favorite Tags, and has an entry field to set them. They can also be set by hovering over the tag, and clicking on the icon (normal state: silver star) in the upper left of the hover-box to change it to a gold star. You can click on this again, once to change it to a red 'x' which makes it an ignored tag, and twice to go back to the normal silver star, and remove any special status from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag usage&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; use this tag for favorite questions, but &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/favorites&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'favorites'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;favorites&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: adapted excerpt and wiki from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/favorite-tags/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-10T14:05:43.267" LastActivityDate="2014-12-10T14:05:43.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2294" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-12-09T18:20:12.217" Score="0" Body="Favorite-tags are a set of tags that can be marked by a user. The questions that have favorite tags will be highlighted. Do not use this tag for favorite questions." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-10T14:05:35.597" LastActivityDate="2014-12-10T14:05:35.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2292" CreationDate="2014-12-09T22:46:45.417" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't investigated all questions using those tags; I go by recollection of having seen both used a few times recently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I recall seems to be consistent with 'terminology' being used in ways where 'definition' doesn't really fit, such as the sense &quot;how should I refer to/describe/explain this?&quot; type questions ... such as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/126779/how-to-describe-a-bin-in-a-histogram&quot;&gt;this recent question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... which use makes the two not-synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, by suggesting that &lt;code&gt;definition&lt;/code&gt; merge into &lt;code&gt;terminology&lt;/code&gt;, you'd only need that &lt;em&gt;terminology&lt;/em&gt; encompassed &lt;em&gt;definition&lt;/em&gt; - and for that, there may be some argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd lean toward keeping them separate, but it's not something I feel strongly about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2014-12-11T10:41:47.940" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2296" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-12-10T11:50:54.083" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tag synonyms are tags which mean exactly the same thing as another tag. They exist to group variations together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag usage&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How tag synonyms work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who can create tag synonyms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why a tag is a synonym of another tag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To request a tag become a synonym of another tag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to suggest synonyms, use the following thread: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1200/current-tag-synonym-candidates&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Current tag synonym candidates&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information on tag-synonyms, please read the meta.SE thread: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/70710/what-are-tag-synonyms-how-do-they-work&quot;&gt;What are tag synonyms?  How do they work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: adapted wiki from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/tag-synonyms/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="53690" LastEditDate="2023-02-12T14:28:36.313" LastActivityDate="2023-02-12T14:28:36.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2297" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-12-10T11:50:54.083" Score="0" Body="Questions about tag synonyms (how they work, who can create them, synonym suggestions etc)." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-10T17:00:38.157" LastActivityDate="2014-12-10T17:00:38.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2298" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-12-11T12:30:36.213" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/on-topic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;on-topic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;on-topic&lt;/a&gt; (or scope) is used to define what is pertinent to discussion. Generally, the scope determines what the site is about. Issues arising from &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/on-topic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;on-topic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;on-topic&lt;/a&gt; might have to do with whether a certain question is on-topic or not, but also can be used to evaluate whether an entire topic should be up for discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For current officially on-topic subjects on Cross Validated Stack Exchange, visit the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; page.  To express your opinion with regards to community standards to help guide future iterations of the community standards please visit &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1577/what-is-on-topic-on-cross-validated?noredirect=1#comment14837_1577&quot;&gt;the question that serves as clearinghouse for these types of issues&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: adapted wiki from &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/scope/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="196" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T12:48:13.640" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T12:48:13.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2299" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-12-11T12:30:36.213" Score="0" Body="Use this tag when examining what is on-topic or off-topic, and why, and how to deal with off-topic questions." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-03-06T10:55:11.387" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T10:55:11.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2300" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-12T00:42:11.057" Score="-3" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that community wiki status is sometimes applied forcibly to posts that moderators judge are not quite a good fit for this site -- too broad, too open-ended, or too likely to attract multiple answers, or for whatever other reason having some defect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the motivations behind this and sympathize to some extent, but I'd like to propose a change to this policy.  I propose a different policy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Moderators should avoid forcibly applying community wiki status, if the author didn't request it, except for big-list questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Big-list questions are arguably special and should be discussed separately.  But for questions that are not asking for a big list of X:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the question meets the criteria for closure (e.g., too broad, too subjective, off-topic), the question should be closed.  If the question does not meet the criteria for closure, it should be left open and should not be forcibly converted to community wiki.  Community wiki should not be used for questions that are somehow in the middle -- make a decision, either it meets the criteria for closure, or it doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the question is attracting poor-quality answers, moderators and the community should curate the answers (e.g., by deleting lower quality answers and answers that are redundant and do not add anything).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Forcible conversion to community wiki should not be used as 'closure lite' or as a way to deny reputation to users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My rationale:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the question should be closed, close it (put it on hold).  Putting a question on hold is not permanent.  It acts a signal to encourage people to edit the question, and puts a pause on answers until the question is improved so it meets site standards.  In the long run this will lead to higher-quality questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The current c.w. policy risks discouraging answers.  Reputation is a core part of the system; using community wiki denies people from receiving reputation for excellent answers, which may mean we don't get as much higher-quality answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, converting an question to community wiki after some answers have been posted leaves a bad taste in the mouth.  It violates the implicit contract with answerers that if they post a good answer they will receive reputation for people who upvote their answers -- and does so retroactively in a way that the answerer could not have anticipated, and after the answerer put in effort (possibly in an expectation that if others judge their effort valuable they will receive the reputation benefit).  This won't matter to everyone, but it may matter for some answerers.  Before you reject this because it doesn't matter to you, consider that others may feel differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I also find the current policy discouraging from the perspective of a reader, because it means my votes do not translate into any reward for the person who took the time to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: the current policy interferes with the incentive system that underlies StackExchange sites.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;CrossValidated is out of sync with the rest of StackExchange policies.  Standard policies on StackExchange strongly discourage use of community wiki in this way.  See, e.g., the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/227290/160917&quot;&gt;Stop using community wiki as a reputation denial mechanism&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/55997/160917&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/55997/160917&lt;/a&gt; (excerpt: &quot;A question should not be marked CW if it is possible to write valid, helpful and knowledgeable answers which contribute to SO.&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cooking.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/913/what-is-community-wiki&quot;&gt;https://cooking.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/913/what-is-community-wiki&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The StackExchange views on community wiki have evolved, based on experience with it.  I suggest that this site evolve its views similarly.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A recent example where this came up (but it's not the only one): &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/128616/2921&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s a real-world example of &amp;quot;overfitting&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?  Do you agree with my suggested policy, or do you like the current approach better?  Or would you suggest something else entirely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2921" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T01:53:54.613" Title="CrossValidated should not use C.W. as a rep-denial mechanism or for &quot;soft-close&quot;" Tags="|discussion|policy|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2301" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-12T01:05:49.097" Score="-1" ViewCount="315" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following question was recently asked on the main site, and quickly showed up on Hot Network Questions and gained many views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/128616/2921&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s a real-world example of &amp;quot;overfitting&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's work together to improve the question to make it shine, and make it as great an example of this site as we can.  This looks like something that could be a great question -- one that could serve as a wonderful resource, and might be of interest to many folks learning the subject, or teaching it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can we do to improve the question and the answers?  Please post suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Let's curate the answers.  Look through the answers, and try to pick out the best ones.  Vote up the good ones.  For the bad ones, vote them down, and where appropriate, flag them for deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it currently stands, only a small fraction of the answers actually try to answer the question that was asked (which asks for a &lt;em&gt;real-world&lt;/em&gt; example of over-fitting).  Many of the answers give artificial examples or try to give an intuitive explanation for what over-fitting is, which is nice but does not answer the question.  I suggest that we flag those answers for deletion, either by flagging them as &amp;quot;Not an answer&amp;quot; or flagging them for moderator attention with a custom comment.  Also, we can downvote those answers and vote to delete them once their total vote-count goes negative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Vote up the good answers, and edit them to improve them.  A few of the answers try to give real-world answers.  Let's vote them up, and then edit them to elaborate further so that the answer serves as a great example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I've edited the question to try to make it a bit more specific.  If you can see ways to improve the question further, I encourage you to edit it to refine it further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What else?  Other suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2921" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T19:37:10.497" Title="Let's curate &quot;What's a real-world example of “overfitting”?&quot;" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2300" CreationDate="2014-12-12T01:13:14.823" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree with this suggestion.  Having grown up on this policy, I don't have the same issues with it.  Here are some (rambling) thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of 'big-list' type questions on CV that are not really on topic here.  Under the strict policy you suggest, they should be closed and then subsequently deleted.  I gather this has happened on SO in the past.  The result of that would be to not only prevent the gaining of reputation, but taking existing reputation away.  On the other hand, making such threads CW seems like a useful way to split the difference and make an exception in exceptional cases.  Threads like favorite cartoons and favorite quotes have benefited me personally (I've used examples in my classes).  I'm glad they continue to exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;Note: Upon looking at the thread in question for the first time today, I notice @whuber's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/128616/whats-a-real-world-example-of-overfitting#comment244730_128616&quot;&gt;reasoning&lt;/a&gt; is fairly similar.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The fact that the favorite quotes thread is CW did not discourage me from posting a quote.  It may prevent someone, I don't know, but those threads have more answers than any other and I don't think they are lacking in sufficient posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the claim that votes &amp;quot;not translate into any reward&amp;quot;, this is incorrect: badges are accrued as they are with other posts.  In fact, the existence of these threads, which garner a lot of views, is one of the primary sources of rare badges like great answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T01:22:54.230" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2301" CreationDate="2014-12-12T07:29:17.483" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;By the way, we could make wikis few questions that appear here again and again and are so marked as duplicates. There are at least a few examples of questions that appear and it would be good if there were one &lt;em&gt;comprehensive&lt;/em&gt; answer, or set of answers, that could be referenced while marking duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The type of question that comes to my mind is, e.g., &quot;What is and how to interpret a p-value?&quot;. There are multiple threads for this so it is even hard to mark duplicates and reference the already answered questions since you have to review many of those by yourself to find the best. I imagine also that lack of a single comprehensive answer makes some people ask &quot;new&quot; questions that are in fact duplicates of others lost somewhere between hundreds of similar ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="35989" LastEditDate="2014-12-12T19:37:10.497" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T19:37:10.497" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2301" CreationDate="2014-12-12T10:59:55.953" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;At one level you urge just what we should be doing generally with every question, seeking to improve further what is good and working to correct and even delete what is wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, there is no problem, in my view, with your drawing attention on Meta to a particularly interesting question on the main site as worthy of attention and further effort. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, however, I suggest that your rewriting of the question goes much further than is appropriate. Edits should correct or improve presentation (grammar, spelling, punctuation, poor style, code and mathematical formatting, etc., etc.) and at most correct small and entirely uncontroversial errors. Even where a poster makes an obvious slip (e.g. confusing dependent and independent variable) it is best to flag it explicitly, as the poster may indeed be confused, on something basic as well as on something more advanced. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But edits should not usually be a rewriting of someone else's question to what the editor prefers. In this case you added a long interpretation of what the question means but kept use of the first person in writing. Whether we agree, individually or collectively, that it's now a better question is not to me the main point. &lt;strong&gt;Editing is not rewriting.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, it could be argued that the several answers that do not focus on real-world examples were underlining more general interest in over-fitting. If it is in order for you to steer the question in the direction you prefer, would it not be in order for someone else to edit the question to make it a wider-ranging question on over-fitting, and make more of the answers and comments fit better retrospectively? This is the dangerous territory you've entered. Once good taste or personal judgement is the arbiter, your good taste or judgement may not match anyone else's. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, in editing my own answer (which is, in principle, entirely in order) you introduced some arguably irrelevant material, which I've reversed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On down-voting answers: I think this is best reserved for answers that are wildly wrong, wildly irrelevant or obnoxious (spam, offensive, etc.). I hope you are not suggesting otherwise. You seem to be urging a much more aggressive approach to material you disagree with than fits well on this forum. Down-voting has its place, deletion is sometimes called for, but by far the best tactics are to show reasoned disagreements (e.g. in comments), to up-vote the better material, and most of all to provide better answers. Yet further, whenever a question is controversial, a variety of views and styles of answer in reply can be highly valuable. Most of all, you should never urge others to down-vote or even up-vote on particular answers; that's the politics of the gang or the crowd. People should always vote on their individual judgement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think your motives are excellent, but there is an excess of zeal here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2014-12-12T17:52:44.073" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T17:52:44.073" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2284" CreationDate="2014-12-12T14:19:25.153" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The deleted answer has been restored.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am guessing that &lt;strong&gt;the deletion of that post was a well-meaning response&lt;/strong&gt; to a (well-upvoted) comment by a community member claiming that it did &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; answer the question.  Subsequent edits to the answer appear to have addressed that comment, but evidently they were overlooked by &lt;em&gt;another&lt;/em&gt; community member who flagged the post as irrelevant.  At that point a moderator responded to the flag, most likely saw the upvoted negative comments, and perhaps made a judgment without reading through the entire post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It does not matter who those community members were,&lt;/strong&gt; nor who the moderator was: our site works based on trust in the well-meaning and competence of those who earn the privileges to moderate and curate its material.  I am certain everyone involved was acting on behalf of this community.  Let us therefore seek not to cast blame but to improve.  In this case I appreciate everyone's persistence in pursuing the issue, but would like to suggest that the same results likely could have been achieved much sooner and with less trouble by means of a suitable flag: in fact, it was @amoeba's flag four hours ago that first brought this issue to my attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In the interest of seeking a constructive outcome from this incident,&lt;/strong&gt; I would note that when one merely appends an edit at the end of a long post without changing the original, many readers will never get as far as the edit and will make their judgments based on what they read at the beginning.  It's always a good idea to &lt;em&gt;structure&lt;/em&gt; your posts--questions and answers--so that the first few lines tell readers what is coming.  Furthermore, when you want to improve a post, &lt;em&gt;change&lt;/em&gt; it rather than leaving the old material around to invite downvotes or worse. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T14:19:25.153" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2301" CreationDate="2014-12-12T16:07:41.350" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;+1 to @NickCox.  He has done an especially good job of talking about edits to questions, let me add that I think that goes double for answers.  As it happens, this same issue occurred yesterday with a very well-meaning user making changes to an old answer to correct what he thought were simple, innocuous mistakes on the part of the answerer.  In fact, he turned out to have been right, but I believe as a general policy it should be left to the answerer to make those changes at their discretion.  Here are my key positions:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do not edit someone else's answer to change what you disagree with.  This is not the proper use of edits.  Leave a comment and/or downvote.  The answerer can respond, and make changes or not as they choose, but either way future readers will be made aware of the issue.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even if it is factually untrue, do not edit to change errors.  Leave comments to ask the answerer for clarification / to point out the error.  If you feel strongly enough, you can downvote; you don't have to downvote, I rarely do.  It is just your strongest option.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Personally, I would probably not edit to make such changes even if nothing happened for a long period of time.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Although we may edit to correct, e.g., typos, typos are small things like spelling errors, not factual claims.  &quot;Build&quot; instead of &lt;em&gt;built&lt;/em&gt; is a typo. The distinction (probably) has no epistemic content in the context of a given answer.  Claiming a statistical model has a property is a factual claim.  We should let the factual claims of the answer remain as the author intended them.  I think it is for the answerer to clarify them.  My position is that we should not edit an answer to change a substantive claim.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I acknowledge that I have something of a double standard on editing: I feel fairly free to edit questions, but am quite reluctant to edit answers.  I only make superficial edits to answers, but often make substantive edits to questions when they are statistically confused and/or not clear English.  (However, I do not make changes outside of what I think the OP is trying to ask, and I typically leave a comment to the OP to make sure it still says what they want it to say.)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adding your own answer is another good option.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another suggestion in this thread is to delete answers that do not fit.  I disagree with this also.  I recently addressed this issue on meta.CV here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2265/7290&quot;&gt;When should answers be self-deleted?&lt;/a&gt;  (I should also note that asking moderators to delete answers that do not fit can also be dangerous, see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2284/7290&quot;&gt;Why was an answer considered off topic and when was it deleted?&lt;/a&gt;)  Although I do not have a problem with deleting non-answers (new questions, comments, spam, etc.), I think something that was intended as an answer (even if under a mistaken reading of the question) should be allowed to stay.  In short, answers should not be deleted for being incorrect (or in this case not fitting well).  As above, I think the proper remedies are to comment, downvote, or add another answer of your own.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T16:07:41.350" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2307" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-12-12T16:51:50.443" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Community Wiki is a flag/status that can be applied to answers and/or questions which lowers the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/edit-community-wiki&quot;&gt;barrier for editing&lt;/a&gt; and prevents any &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation&quot;&gt;reputation&lt;/a&gt; gain/loss from voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other references:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/11740&quot;&gt;What are &amp;quot;Community Wiki&amp;quot; posts?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/7237&quot;&gt;How does &amp;quot;Reputation&amp;quot; work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: adapted wiki from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/community-wiki/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-12T20:04:14.833" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T20:04:14.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2308" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-12-12T16:51:50.443" Score="0" Body="Community Wiki is a flag that can be applied to answers (and sometimes questions) which lowers the barrier for editing and prevents any rep gain/loss from voting." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-12T20:04:09.970" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T20:04:09.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2253" CreationDate="2014-12-13T07:25:54.123" Score="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Many of the good questions on DS.SE would be well-suited for CrossValidated&lt;/em&gt;. The rest are either a) suited just fine for either StackOverflow or SciComp, or b) just plain bad questions anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fact (read: strong opinion) is, the data science site shouldn't exist as a separate entity. The way I see it, its existence can affect CrossValidated somewhere along a continuum between two outcomes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It could have a positive effect on CrossValidated by attracting more users to the StackExchange network who would have otherwise never signed up at all. These users might then sign up for CV and start contributing here. It would be especially positive if these users had somewhat different backgrounds from the existing CV user base and could offer a different and expanded range of expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It could have a negative effect by dilution of CV's user base and concentration of CV's purview. This ties back to what I said above. It is entirely possible that every user who signs up for DS.SE is a user who would otherwise have signed up for CV, but now didn't. That potentially means fewer good questions and, of particular concern lately, fewer good answers from people that might have some real expertise to contribute. At the same time, the subject matter will also be split between CV and DS, making both sites less relevant, not to mention engendering confusion and duplication of question-answering effort (of which I suspect there is a limited maximum flow over time).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same two points could be made about StackOverflow, except that StackOverflow is a juggernaut and is far too big to be affected by anything other than its own half-decade of inertia. Indeed, the fact that it can coexist with Ubuntu, Linux, Programmers, ServerFault, Databases, Code Review, Theoretical CS, and a host of other specialized software-specific sites is a testament to this. CrossValidated is not StackOverflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on what I see over at DS, it has in fact attracted some new expertise, and I doubt that expertise has really been &quot;poached&quot; from CrossValidated's would-be user base. But the crossover has not happened, and I think this is to the detriment of both groups of users. The data scientists in academia and industry have already discovered that there has been an artificial gap between the computer scientists and the statisticians (and the economists and political scientists and sociologists and linguists and neuroscientists and business analysts and marketing researchers......). Over the last year they've rushed to close it, because mixing of expertise and exchange of ideas between two mature fields is possibly the best recipe for rapid advancement. The same benefits apply, I think, to a website that exists purely to facilitate the sharing of expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as CV's rejection of &quot;implementation&quot; questions goes, I think SciComp will take care of that problem (and here's to its success) in the same way that Open Data should take care of our rejection of &quot;dataset request&quot; questions. DS questions are either statistics questions, programming questions, or numerical/high-performance computing questions. Those that fall under more than one category can be split up and asked piecemeal on different sites. That is how the rest of StackExchange works, it seems to work well, and I'm a big fan of the model. There is no reason why it can't be applied to handle a new breed of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36229" LastEditorUserId="36229" LastEditDate="2014-12-16T16:37:52.057" LastActivityDate="2014-12-16T16:37:52.057" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2310" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2324" CreationDate="2014-12-14T23:32:34.937" Score="16" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes a duplicate question gets an answer before it gets closed as a duplicate. In some cases this answer is either better than the answer(s) in the &quot;main&quot; question, or at least adds something valuable to them. Such a situation can be &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; annoying, because it is not clear what future duplicate questions should be made duplicate of, information gets scattered, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically, such a duplicate question can be &lt;em&gt;merged&lt;/em&gt; into the &quot;main&quot; one; this copies all the answers into the &quot;main&quot; one, as if they were there all along. Only moderators can perform such merging. &lt;strong&gt;It is not clear to me what guidelines moderators use to decide on merging, and I would be grateful for explanations.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is one example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Main question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/27300&quot;&gt;Using principal component analysis (PCA) for feature selection&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A recent duplicate with a decent answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/126305&quot;&gt;PCA Feature Selection&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An old duplicate with a decent answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/82992&quot;&gt;Using principal component analysis (PCA) for feature selection in regression&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I flagged the recent duplicate for moderators attention suggesting a merge; my flag has been marked as &quot;helpful&quot;, but nothing else happened. &lt;strong&gt;What does it mean?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not flag the old duplicate, as I am less sure that it should be merged. E.g. the answer there is accepted; I guess in case of a merge, the answerer would loose the reputation associated with having an answer accepted, which is a pity. Still, reputation issues aside, I think it would be more convenient if this all was merged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2014-12-21T23:58:06.460" Title="What is our policy on merging duplicate questions?" Tags="|discussion|policy|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2311" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2314" CreationDate="2014-12-15T00:51:56.313" Score="11" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that people here are very squeamish and punctilious about editing questions of others, and rightly so (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2304/28666&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;editing is not rewriting&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;). But here is one particular situation that I would like to discuss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a well-upvoted question with an accepted well-upvoted answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/22329&quot;&gt;How does centering the data get rid of the intercept?&lt;/a&gt; The question is, as the title indicates, specifically about linear regression. However, @ttnphns's answer also explains what centering does for PCA (and provides a very helpful figure). As a result, new questions about centering in PCA get closed as duplicates of that one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that there is no way to guess from the title of this question that there is anything about PCA inside. So my intention is to edit the title to e.g. &lt;em&gt;&quot;How does centering the data get rid of the intercept? How does it affect PCA?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the OP was not asking about PCA. Is it okay under these circumstances to ignore OP's intention and proceed with broadening the title?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T16:52:53.360" Title="Is it okay to edit the title of a question to make it broad enough to fully encompass an existing/accepted answer?" Tags="|discussion|questions|editing|title|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2312" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-12-15T14:05:16.060" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For guidance about how to write good SE question title, refer to the Meta Stack Exchange FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10647/writing-a-good-title&quot;&gt;Writing a good title&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other post on CV Meta that provide guidance about how to write/edit titles are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stats.stackexchange.com/questions/575/is-there-a-style-guide-that-provides-guidelines-for-question-title-and-question&quot;&gt;Is there a style guide that provides guidelines for question title and question content?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1649/should-i-answer-the-question-title-or-the-question-body&quot;&gt;Should I answer the question title or the question body?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-15T17:05:41.107" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T17:05:41.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2313" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-12-15T14:05:16.060" Score="0" Body="What is allowable or desirable in question titles." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-16T09:10:38.577" LastActivityDate="2014-12-16T09:10:38.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2311" CreationDate="2014-12-15T16:52:53.360" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;A search of type &lt;code&gt;[edits][title]&lt;/code&gt; on Meta Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow Meta did not help much.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My two cents. I'd say we should be cautions to edit a title to encompass (all) existing answers. The recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/128616/whats-a-real-world-example-of-overfitting&quot;&gt;overfitting&lt;/a&gt; question asked for real world examples and it collected answers out of this scope. Not sure if the title should be edited in that occasion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, editing the question's example seems perfectly fine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the OP mentioned PCA in the question body.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the answerer of that question tagged it with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pca&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pca&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pca&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You would be adapting/improving the title to what already exists in the question as a matter of content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T16:52:53.360" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2315" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2318" CreationDate="2014-12-15T23:24:53.463" Score="11" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes code is an important part of an answer. Other times, code is interesting and potentially useful to others, e.g. how to construct a plot, but doesn't help the OP in answering their question. I try to append code for plots (partly as it frustrates me when I can't replicate or adapt for personal use the beautiful plots of others!) and if I find &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/125678/22228&quot;&gt;the code interesting, or OP expressed an interest&lt;/a&gt;, I'm likely to continue to do so, but for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/87746/22228&quot;&gt;workaday plot&lt;/a&gt; the temptation to &quot;provide, but hide&quot; is strong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the thread &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/425/shall-i-attach-pieces-of-code-to-my-answers&quot;&gt;Shall I attach pieces of code to my answers?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, the concept of a &quot;show/hide&quot; button for code was marked as rejected. But the reception to the later thread &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/891/do-we-need-to-hide-some-lengthy-content-in-answers-or-questions&quot;&gt;Do we need to hide some lengthy content in answers or questions?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; seemed positive! I'm not satisfied with the suggested solution of linking to a repository elsewhere - eg potential link-rot issues - and the presence of scrollbars on long code extracts only alleviates such concerns, doesn't resolve them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an answer (it happens to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/128719/22228&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, but I think that's unimportant) I included some code for data and plotting at the bottom, then quickly (to avoid spamming the main page) re-edited it, deleting the code, but inserting a link to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/revisions/128719/4&quot;&gt;code-containing revision&lt;/a&gt; by the graph. The result is that the code is stored on the main CV site, is accessible to interested readers, but does not clog up the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In retrospect I am not sure whether this was a good idea. There was support in the &quot;Shall I attach&quot; thread for the inclusion of such code, even if peripheral to the main answer, and I'm basically using a bit of a hack to conceal it. It certainly wasn't a use that edit history was intended for. Moreover I don't know whether edit history links are considered stable in the very long run on Stack Exchange (I suspect so because I believe licensing here requires authorial attribution which is visible via history, but on the other hand there are occasional rumblings that old comments on SE sites will someday be purged, so just because material is hosted here doesn't necessarily mean it's here to stay). Is this a practice I should actively engage in, use sparingly, or avoid altogether?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2014-12-18T15:42:45.560" Title="Am I abusing edit history by using it to hide code for a plot?" Tags="|discussion|answers|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2315" CreationDate="2014-12-16T18:23:16.053" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see any problem with using the revision history in this way.  It seems fairly clever to me.  One thing you should be aware of is that if you have too many edits (10, I think) your answer will be converted to CW automatically.  However, you can flag your answer and the moderators can convert it back.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect the edit revisions are at least as stable as github.  Regarding the concern that old versions can be curated like comments, you should know that deleted comments still exist somewhere.  For example, moderators can see them, I believe.  (Users with &gt;10k reputation can see deleted answers--and deleted questions, if you can find a link to them--but not comments.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2014-12-16T18:23:16.053" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2253" CreationDate="2014-12-16T19:25:05.083" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with @ssdecontrol.  I am generally skeptical of &quot;data science&quot; as the big new thing.  I do see that there is a place for the discussion / development of some new issues that have arisen in the internet age (pertaining to how to implement analyses when the amount of data is so large that it cannot be fit on a computer), but much of the buzz about DS seems to be marketing hype.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as having a separate SE site for DS, I suppose people can do what they like within SE's rules, but I don't really see a need for it.  There is the fact that it does not seem to be getting off the ground.  In addition, I gather that their best threads duplicate material that already exists here or on SO, that doesn't seem to bode well either.  I hope that users new to SE on DS will come over here to contribute.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I don't see the need for CV to expand so that it overlaps more with other existing SE sites.  Practical questions about coding and implementation do very well on SO and theoretical questions about coding and implementation can be well handled on Theoretical Computer Science.  Although I always use the word &quot;statistics&quot; as a catch-all, questions on the machine learning and data mining end of the spectrum are part of our mandate and have always been welcome here.  I think what we need isn't an expanded mandate, but just a larger number of such questions and users answering them to reach a better critical mass.  But I don't think more 'how do I make a neural network in MATLAB?' threads will benefit CV in that way and swapping Hadoop for MATLAB won't make any difference.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me address some specific points:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't know why people felt motivated to start a new SE rather than contribute here and at other existing SE sites.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is true that our purview is more clearly defined and theirs is more vague, and that we tend to close threads outside our purview but they do so less.  However, CV seems to be growing and DS seems to be dying (I don't mean for that to come off as snotty).  It isn't clear that our strategy is failing.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Better PR sounds great; at a minimum, it wouldn't hurt anything.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm a fan of the SE policy of having different topics covered by different sites.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2014-12-16T19:25:05.083" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2315" CreationDate="2014-12-17T01:37:08.600" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;My answer is simply: Please just show the code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To downplay the code, there are obvious possible signals, such as: The code is given at the end of the answer for those interested. Here is the code for those interested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the code is not interesting or useful or not in a language you use or can translate, you can ignore it in a flash. That comes really easily and you don't even have to practise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the code is any of those good things, excellent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People who provide code can be assured that many appreciate your time and effort and try to reciprocate when they can. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that even code someone never uses can be a stimulus. Sometimes I see something done easily in some other language, and think: I should be able to do that just as easily in my favourite language. Occasionally, something is apparently harder work than in your own favourite language, and then there is an enjoyable wry smile. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2014-12-18T15:42:45.560" LastActivityDate="2014-12-18T15:42:45.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2319" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-17T10:07:39.133" Score="4" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I found something strange, a question that is marked as a duplicate of another question that is closed as off-topic (while IMHO it was not off-topic, but that is a meta off-topic comment in here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q1: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/32248/effect-size-mean-squared-error-from-linear-mixed-model-in-r&quot;&gt;Effect Size/Mean Squared Error from Linear Mixed-Model in R&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q2: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/66120/partial-eta2-for-repeated-measures-anova-with-rs-car-package&quot;&gt;Partial $\eta^2$ for repeated measures ANOVA (with R&amp;#39;s car package)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This kind of &quot;duplicates&quot; make no sense: if the question is a duplicate of an off-topic question, then it is also off-topic so should be closed on those grounds. On the other hand, marking questions as duplicates of unanswered questions also makes no sense, as it does not provide any help to those who asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is of course closely linked to another discussion on meta: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1867/what-should-be-our-policy-on-duplicate-answers&quot;&gt;What should be our policy on duplicate answers?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO, it makes sense to mark questions as duplicates if there exists (1) a real duplicate question, (2) with a high quality answer because if there is a duplicate with one-sentence answer, then it is no help to redirect to it (generally, not always).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2014-12-17T15:20:23.720" Title="Duplicate linked to question with no answers" Tags="|discussion|moderation|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2320" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-12-17T11:18:29.367" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/exact-duplicates&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'exact-duplicates'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;exact-duplicates&lt;/a&gt; is referring to the process of identifying and closing questions that are exact duplicates of another question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/166707/165773&quot; title=&quot;Changes to “close as duplicate” (part deux)&quot;&gt;comprehensive guidance here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;we want to tell the user ...something like, “&lt;em&gt;Somebody already asked this. If that other question doesn't solve your problem, please clarify your question to explain how it's different.&lt;/em&gt;” Perfect: if the other question helps them, they're happy because they got an answer. If the other question doesn't help them, they know exactly what to do. No argument about how exact an &quot;exact duplicate&quot; needs to be...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Related articles at Stack Exchange blog&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/dr-strangedupe-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-duplication/&quot;&gt;Dr. Strangedupe: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love Duplication&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;strong&gt;duplication is not necessarily bad&lt;/strong&gt;. Quite the contrary — some duplication is &lt;em&gt;desirable&lt;/em&gt;. There’s often benefit to having multiple subtle variants of a question around, as people tend to ask and search using completely different words, and the better our coverage, the better odds people can find the answer they’re looking for...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...use your good judgment and please continue to close and merge duplicates as you see fit. However, bear in mind that cultivating and supporting a moderate amount of natural duplication actively &lt;em&gt;helps&lt;/em&gt; the community...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/handling-duplicate-questions/&quot;&gt;Handling Duplicate Questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...there are three classes of duplicate questions, from most clear to least clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Cut-and-paste duplicate questions. These questions are the very definition of exact duplicates; they are typically from users who willfully take the very same question and post it again... No grey area here. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Accidental duplicates. These questions aren't copy and paste, but they cover the exact same ground as an earlier Cross Validated question. The overlap is not ambiguous...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Borderline duplicates. These questions are ambiguous; they’re in the same ballpark as a previous question, but have subtle differences that may make them legitimately standalone questions. These are subject to interpretation...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported excerpt and wiki from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/exact-duplicates/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-18T16:58:16.440" LastActivityDate="2014-12-18T16:58:16.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2321" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-12-17T11:18:29.367" Score="0" Body="The process of identifying and closing questions that are exact duplicates of another question" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-18T16:58:20.630" LastActivityDate="2014-12-18T16:58:20.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2319" CreationDate="2014-12-17T15:20:23.720" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The implicit assumption behind the issues raised here seems to be that closing is a form of removing, hiding, or destroying something we do not want.  I would like to suggest that closing, on the contrary, is an act that &lt;em&gt;adds information and value to our site.&lt;/em&gt;  To understand this, bear in mind that &lt;em&gt;the threads associated with closed questions remain visible and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=closed%3Ayes&quot;&gt;searchable&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pointing to an off-topic as a duplicate is rare, but it is not inconsistent.&lt;/strong&gt;  Although questions can officially be closed for only one reason, often several apply.  Moreover, off-topic threads frequently collect comments (and, on occasion, answers).  Linking to such threads &lt;em&gt;is informative.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Closing duplicates of unanswered questions makes perfect sense.&lt;/strong&gt;  When the same question appears in two or more places, then for the purpose of deciding whether they are duplicates &lt;em&gt;it does not matter whether neither has an answer&lt;/em&gt;.  We want to link them so that all the answers (and, hopefully) comments appear together in a conveniently read, easily searched way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proposed solution--do not mark unanswered questions as duplicates--would only cause &lt;em&gt;unanswerable&lt;/em&gt; questions to proliferate and degrade our site.  As far as I can see, the only reasonable alternative is to &lt;em&gt;delete&lt;/em&gt; duplicate questions.  It is rare for moderators to do that, because duplicates are almost never phrased exactly the same way: they may contain different key words, for instance.  In many cases it might not be evident to a neophyte that two questions are really duplicates, because recognizing that might require understanding the meanings of related technical words or of making a simple mathematical transformation.  &lt;em&gt;The act of linking a question to a duplicate embodies such an insight&lt;/em&gt; and itself creates meaning.  This adds value to our site, whether or not either question currently has an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a problem, however.  It lies with the system's stock phrase, automatically applied when a duplicate is closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please ask a new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This obviously is not true when the duplicate does not have an answer--but there is no way anyone here on CV can modify this text to make it more accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2014-12-17T15:20:23.720" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2253" CreationDate="2014-12-19T00:21:51.547" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I also think having another closely related site creates more problems than it solves and that the data science site is an ill-conceived project. Others have already outlined the main reasons for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is at least the third attempt at creating another site (two “machine learning” attempts and now “data science”) in spite of warnings that the distinction was not clear and that much of the material would be welcome here anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect it also has a lot to do with “identity issues” and it's not clear that there is a lot we can do about it. I fully expect that once the new “Data science” fails and closes, someone will show up on Area51 and create yet another proposal along the same lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6029" LastActivityDate="2014-12-19T00:21:51.547" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2310" CreationDate="2014-12-19T23:35:53.337" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Merging is difficult (impossible?) to reverse and so is used only when the questions are such close duplicates of each other that all the answers to one would read acceptably as valid answers to the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps more merging should be done, but since the decision in each case requires  comprehensive review of both threads, careful thought, and great confidence in the correctness of the action, I usually am reluctant to perform this unilaterally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe merge proposals should be made here on meta as each case comes up, and debated and voted on by the community, just as tag synonym/merge proposals are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2014-12-19T23:35:53.337" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2325" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-12-21T17:41:01.877" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Reputation is a rough measurement of how much the community trusts you; it is earned by convincing your peers that you know what you're talking about. Basic use of the site, including asking questions, answering, and suggesting edits, does not require any reputation at all. But the more reputation you earn, the more &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;privileges&lt;/a&gt; you gain on Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information on how reputation impacts what functionality is available on the site, as well as how you can lay your hands on some, read the Meta Stack Exchange post: &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7237/how-does-reputation-work&quot;&gt;How does &amp;quot;Reputation&amp;quot; work?&lt;/a&gt; and be further enlightened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: adapted from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/reputation/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-22T02:12:00.510" LastActivityDate="2014-12-22T02:12:00.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2326" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-12-21T17:41:01.877" Score="0" Body="Reputation is a measurement of a user's contributions to the site, and the extent to which the community &quot;trusts&quot; that user with extra privileges." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-22T02:11:45.207" LastActivityDate="2014-12-22T02:11:45.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2327" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-29T23:58:46.413" Score="7" ViewCount="723" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like to answer end-of-chapter exercises in various econometrics textbooks. Most of the time, there's no solution manual for me to check my answers. I wonder if it is appropriate for me to post such questions as well as my suggested answers or is this type of question not welcome on Cross Validated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note that the self-study tag says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A routine question from a textbook, course, or test used for a class or self-study. This community's policy is to &quot;provide helpful hints&quot; for self-study questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue is that I'm really looking for corrections or improvements or confirmation that my suggested answer is correct rather than for helpful hints per se.  Please note that this is done as a past-time as opposed to as part of formal study at a University.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help that could be provided would be much appreciated. I don't want to post questions that are against the rules. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24617" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-30T16:47:41.230" LastActivityDate="2014-12-31T03:03:08.483" Title="Questions asking to check answers to end-of-chapter exercises. Appropriate or not?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2328" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-30T05:36:54.057" Score="4" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an account in Stack Overflow and as well in Cross Validated with different user id. Is it possible to link the two accounts from different user ID?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If yes , then how to link both the accounts so that I can view all my accounts on the same profile as like below pic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WvjDl.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62487" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-30T16:44:49.313" LastActivityDate="2014-12-30T16:44:49.313" Title="Managing different accounts in Cross Validated" Tags="|support|user-accounts|merge-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2328" CreationDate="2014-12-30T05:39:28.950" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please visit &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/merging-accounts&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/merging-accounts&lt;/a&gt; and follow the directions there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2014-12-30T05:39:28.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2327" CreationDate="2014-12-30T16:25:32.637" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's fine to ask these questions, just be clear about what you're doing.  You should include the &lt;code&gt;[self-study]&lt;/code&gt; tag, and show your work, state what you understand thus far, etc. Despite the fact that this isn't actually for a university course, people may choose to provide hints only.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Update:&lt;/em&gt;  I had missed your comment.  Just so you know, another option is to answer your own question with your answer.  That is completely acceptable here.  Whether it will better suit your purposes, I don't know, but you could try it if you like.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2014-12-31T03:03:08.483" LastActivityDate="2014-12-31T03:03:08.483" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2331" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-12-30T17:45:53.103" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;User accounts are identified generically by a user ID; typically a number, and accessible/viewable to the public via the URL http:///user/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported excerpt and wiki from the main &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/user-accounts/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site&lt;/sub&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-31T09:32:20.513" LastActivityDate="2014-12-31T09:32:20.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2332" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-12-30T17:45:53.103" Score="0" Body="Refers to user accounts either generically, or across the network." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2014-12-31T09:32:17.607" LastActivityDate="2014-12-31T09:32:17.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2333" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-01T03:24:00.770" Score="16" ViewCount="611" Body="&lt;p&gt;The dawn of a new year, 2015, now approaches, or has already approached, either way it means that it is now time to reset our Community Promotion Ads!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's twitter account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources for statisticians&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interesting in-site activities and events&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be &lt;strong&gt;220 x 250 pixels&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/2333&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5645" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2015-12-14T14:55:49.850" Title="Community Promotion Ads - 2015" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-01T03:24:00.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2333" CreationDate="2015-01-01T03:24:00.770" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/StackStats&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KNhKn.png&quot; alt=&quot;StackStats Twitter&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5645" LastActivityDate="2015-01-01T03:24:00.770" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-01T03:24:00.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2336" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-01T19:05:32.130" Score="3" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are topics which keep coming back in different forms such as normality testing of random variables. I thought maybe it makes sense to create a question with the best possible formulation, then put a few answers to it referring to good previous answers. This way we'd increase the probability that whoever is looking for an answer will find this Q&amp;amp;A in Google or SE search, and will be satisfied with a complete comprehensive answer. If someone missed the answer, then we'd know that there's this &quot;best answer&quot; to which we'd refer them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36041" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-01-04T23:06:54.083" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T09:28:37.197" Title="Does it make a sense to create the reference questions for popular topics?" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|search|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2253" CreationDate="2015-01-02T17:50:54.677" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had not seen that the new Data Science site had been created.  This is a huge mistake and should never have happened.  This will cause major confusion among a huge number of users and will make me question my participation.  Can this error be corrected before more damage is done?  How do we reverse course?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Data Science is at least 1/2 Statistics.  It would make sense to create a site such as Computational Science or Computer Data Science but not Data Science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2015-01-02T17:50:54.677" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2336" CreationDate="2015-01-04T23:04:31.170" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;..we'd increase the probability that whoever is looking for an answer will find this Q&amp;amp;A in Google or SE search, and will be satisfied with a complete comprehensive answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess the result of this idea would not work as expected. It indeed could increase the probability of such posts being found, but would that stop duplicate questions being asked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My hypothesis is that users who are asking recurrent duplicates do not perform at least a minimum search before posting them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One partial solution would be to edit the question's title (when it is confusing or disruptive) to reflect more accurately what the post is about. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10647/writing-a-good-title&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; post contains useful hints for writing SE titles (perhaps we could add something from it to our own &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1479/how-to-ask-a-good-question-on-crossvalidated/1483#comment6406_1483&quot;&gt;faq question post&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T09:28:37.197" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="793" CreationDate="2015-01-05T00:47:51.987" Score="24" Body="&lt;h1&gt;MATLAB&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://uk.mathworks.com/products/matlab/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MATLAB&lt;/a&gt; (MATrix LABoratory) is a multi-paradigm numerical computing environment and fourth-generation programming language. It is developed by MathWorks. MATLAB has a free, open-source counterpart named &lt;a href=&quot;https://gnu.org/software/octave/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Octave&lt;/a&gt; that is distributed on GNU-GPL license and offers access to a subset of MATLAB's original functionality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MATLAB questions get routinely answered in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/MATLAB&quot;&gt;SO&lt;/a&gt;. In addition to that one can check:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://uk.mathworks.com/help/stats/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Official documentation of the Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://uk.mathworks.com/examples/statistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Official MATLAB examples website&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://uk.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MATLAB Answers&lt;/a&gt; (A community Q&amp;amp;A website hosted by MathWorks)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MIT's &lt;a href=&quot;http://ocw.mit.edu/resources/res-18-002-introduction-to-matlab-spring-2008/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Introduction to MATLAB&lt;/a&gt; course.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Undocumented (and officially unsupported) MATLAB functionality is available in Y. Altman's &lt;a href=&quot;https://undocumentedmatlab.com/matlab/wp-content/cache/all/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Undocumented MATLAB&lt;/a&gt; website.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11852" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-11-11T09:03:32.387" LastActivityDate="2023-11-11T09:03:32.387" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-05T00:47:51.987" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2341" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-01-05T16:18:59.057" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;Help Center page on search&lt;/a&gt;. Includes advanced search instructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange search is currently powered by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.elasticsearch.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Elasticsearch&lt;/a&gt; engine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported excerpt and wiki from &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackoverflow.com/tags/search/info&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow Meta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-01-05T19:18:43.960" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T19:18:43.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2342" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-01-05T16:18:59.057" Score="0" Body="For questions about search and advanced search features. Also, for finding specific threads." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T19:46:51.097" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T19:46:51.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2343" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-01-05T16:34:12.630" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an alternative to off-topic software-related subjects visit the following post to get assistance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stats.stackexchange.com/questions/793/internet-support-for-statistics-software&quot;&gt;Internet Support for Statistics Software&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-01-05T19:18:39.043" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T19:18:39.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2344" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-01-05T16:34:12.630" Score="0" Body="The scope of statistics software-related questions on Cross Validated" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-01-05T19:18:36.800" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T19:18:36.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1479" CreationDate="2015-01-06T22:26:21.190" Score="18" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Writing good titles&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10647/writing-a-good-title&quot;&gt;Mark Harrison's CW answer&lt;/a&gt; on Meta Stack Exchange brings a list of useful hints for writing meaningful Stack Exchange titles.  These are an expanded version of that guidance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Make the topic stand out.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the most important filter on a question. People scan content in the front page very fast. Users need to know what the question is about just by looking at the title. Make sure the necessary keywords are included in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, let's take a look at the following title:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2691/making-sense-of-principal-component-analysis-eigenvectors-eigenvalues&quot;&gt;Making sense of principal component analysis, eigenvectors &amp;amp; eigenvalues&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP (&amp;quot;original proposer&amp;quot;) wants to understand better what is PCA, eigenvectors and eigenvalues. Very simple. In the body he provides more details and arguments about the way he wishes to understand such subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Keep it short.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not necessary to explain the question in the title, but what it is about without being too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/20523/difference-between-logit-and-probit-models&quot;&gt;Difference between logit and probit models&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/13314/is-r2-useful-or-dangerous&quot;&gt;Is $R^2$ useful or dangerous?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. Lead with the most important words.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Avoid general openings. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/79602/i-want-to-show-ebt-bs4-3t-s2&quot;&gt;I want to show $E(B(t)-B(s))^4=3(t-s)^2$&lt;/a&gt; could be just:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Show that &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$E(B(t)-B(s))^4=3(t-s)^2$&lt;/span&gt; (tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/proof&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;proof&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;proof&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4. Make those words useful for searching.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Formulas and generic words add little information. Compare the previous example to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/79602&quot;&gt;How to compute moments of Brownian motion?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;5. Be specific.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, instead of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/21940&quot;&gt;Business Forecasting&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;write:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/21940&quot;&gt;How to incorporate seasonal patterns in forecasts?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;6. Don't start with &amp;quot;How do I...&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing in that style ensures that your title will fail criteria 1-3, and get less attention than it deserves.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This is a question site, and people will understand your titles are questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;7. Don't sweat replicating a tag keyword.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't use &lt;strong&gt;loose&lt;/strong&gt; tags in titles, unless they are substantial for its comprehension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example of a title where two tags are substantial:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/577/is-there-any-reason-to-prefer-the-aic-or-bic-over-the-other&quot;&gt;Is there any reason to prefer the AIC or BIC over the other?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/aic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;aic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;aic&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bic&lt;/a&gt; are essential for the title to be understood. Without them, we'd have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/577&quot;&gt;Is there any reason to prefer AIC?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although this title is useful, it begs the question &amp;quot;prefer it to what?&amp;quot;.  Both AIC and BIC appear to be important aspects of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example of a title where the tag is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; substantial:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/93326/regression-volatility-vs-return&quot;&gt;Regression - volatility vs return&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &amp;quot;regression&amp;quot; seems to be loose (better use it only as a tag). A better title could be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/93326/regression-volatility-vs-return&quot;&gt;Estimating the effect of volatility on losses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/regression&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;regression&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;regression&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/times-series&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;times-series&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;times-series&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/econometrics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;econometrics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;econometrics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hypothesis-testing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hypothesis-testing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hypothesis-testing&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/volatility-forecasting&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;volatility-forecasting&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;volatility-forecasting&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;8. Don't beg.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The surest way not to get a good or fast answer is to plead that you are desperate or have limited time.  Focus on asking a clear, interesting question: the answers will come flying in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;9. Use good English.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Misspellings, poor grammar, typographical errors, and inconsistencies all suggest you couldn't be bothered to make your question presentable.  Why should anyone bother to read or answer it, then?  We are considerate of people for whom English is not a first language, so don't let your ignorance of grammar or spelling stop you--but at least do your best to check everything as well as you can and try for consistency (an English-speaking friend could be helpful).  At a minimum, read your entire question (especially the title) after you have posted it and edit any errors immediately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;10. Avoid abbreviations and jargon where possible.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To keep titles brief, you might want to abbreviate (such as &amp;quot;PDF&amp;quot; for &amp;quot;probability density function&amp;quot;).  But &lt;em&gt;please&lt;/em&gt; spell out all abbreviations early on in the text of your question.  If the title refers to an arcane term or concept, consider defining, describing or explaining it in the leading lines of the question.  At least provide a link to a definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Want a good answer fast?  &lt;em&gt;Make the title interesting to everybody who might be qualified to answer your question.&lt;/em&gt;  That alone suggests avoiding jargon and arcane terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mark Harrison also says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, be flexible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Different questions benefit from different styles of titles. Applying any single hard and fast rule is probably a mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; Suggestions about writing good titles specifics to statistics are also welcome. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2016-07-29T20:02:29.750" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-06T22:26:21.190" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2346" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-10T00:03:45.423" Score="12" ViewCount="298" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reinforcement learning is part of ML and I know ML is a good topic here. However, I know there is a data science and a computer science site (and maths etc). I was wondering, where would a reinforcement learning question be better to ask?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28986" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-01-10T17:22:18.267" LastActivityDate="2015-01-10T17:22:18.267" Title="Which site is the best to ask about reinforcement learning?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|machine-learning|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2346" CreationDate="2015-01-10T15:56:35.550" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reinforcement learning is on-topic here, and I hope our ML side grows as much as possible, so I hope you will ask it here.  However, you should consider the nature of the RL topic about which you want to ask.  For example, if you wanted to ask about the mathematical analysis of various (asymptotics and such), you may prefer to ask on math.SE, etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2015-01-10T15:56:35.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2348" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-01-10T17:25:58.957" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Refer to the following CV meta &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'faq'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; post for more information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stats.stackexchange.com/questions/16/is-machine-learning-a-part-of-statistical-analysis&quot;&gt;Is machine learning a part of statistical analysis?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-01-16T15:40:25.533" LastActivityDate="2015-01-16T15:40:25.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2349" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-01-10T17:25:58.957" Score="0" Body="The scope of machine-learning related questions on Cross Validated" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-01-11T20:58:36.473" LastActivityDate="2015-01-11T20:58:36.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2351" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2352" CreationDate="2015-01-15T13:36:22.867" Score="19" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked about integer programming before on CV and it was locked as off topic. I'm unable to find a site dedicated to math programming and optimisation on stack exchange. Any one has idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20551" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-01-15T17:42:25.177" LastActivityDate="2015-01-26T09:16:48.480" Title="Are mathematical optimisation questions on topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2351" CreationDate="2015-01-15T15:57:54.380" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Optimization &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; isn't part of our site's interests.&lt;/strong&gt;  Like Calculus, Linear Algebra, Computer Science, and other disciplines, it is a tool we use, respect, and enjoy, but is not otherwise of interest in its own right.  So, just as we tend to send pure Calculus, pure Linear Algebra, &lt;em&gt;etc.&lt;/em&gt; questions (which do not have any explicit connection to statistics or machine learning) over to Mathematics, we will also close pure optimization questions.  And just as we sometimes do answer questions about Calculus, &lt;em&gt;etc.&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;when they are clearly addressing a topic in statistics or machine learning,&lt;/em&gt; we sometimes answer optimization questions.  But that's rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There are two places to look&lt;/strong&gt; for communities that would answer pure optimization questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites#name&quot;&gt;Existing SE sites.&lt;/a&gt; Use the menu at the top to filter by category.  I don't see any good candidates for general questions about optimization.  However, some sites will field suitably framed questions of that nature, such as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/&quot;&gt;Math Overflow&lt;/a&gt; (for research-level questions in optimization techniques, perhaps), &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Mathematics&lt;/a&gt; (primarily for elementary problems, such as Lagrange multiplier questions, etc.), &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Mathematica&lt;/a&gt; (which is interested in computer solutions using &lt;em&gt;Mathematica&lt;/em&gt;--which despite the apparent narrowness can be an effective way to get answers, because &lt;em&gt;Mathematica&lt;/em&gt; programs frequently are like executable mathematics), &lt;strong&gt;and especially&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scicomp.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Computational Science&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more extensive look (which requires browsing through a hundred Beta sites, unfortunately) also turns up &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Data Science&lt;/a&gt;, which might like to address certain kinds of techniques that are used in data mining.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Proposed SE sites (&quot;Area 51&quot;)&lt;/a&gt;.  I searched for &quot;Optimization&quot; and found nothing.  If you're energetic and dedicated you might consider starting a proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:58:32.040" LastActivityDate="2015-01-15T15:57:54.380" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2354" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-01-16T12:21:40.457" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;About the scope of R questions on Cross Validated SE: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;R questions require statistical expertise to be understood or answered. Pure programming question will be closed as off-topic and/or migrated to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow SE&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For additional guidance visit the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;, and also the CV meta &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'faq'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt;  post about R:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1/how-to-answer-r-questions&quot;&gt;How to answer R questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-01-16T15:40:39.770" LastActivityDate="2015-01-16T15:40:39.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2355" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-01-16T12:21:40.457" Score="0" Body="For R related topics such as: scope, migration, markdown and guidance about how to ask/answer on the main site" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2015-01-16T14:42:38.220" LastActivityDate="2015-01-16T14:42:38.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2356" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-01-16T20:37:48.633" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-01-16T20:37:48.633" LastActivityDate="2015-01-16T20:37:48.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2357" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-01-16T20:37:48.633" Score="0" Body="Questions about attracting *new* users to visit and participate on Cross Validated" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-01-16T23:56:53.827" LastActivityDate="2015-01-16T23:56:53.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2358" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-17T16:15:37.697" Score="8" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;For some time now I've had problems with rejecting suggested edits in the suggested edits review queue. Usually the majority of edits is actually an improvement but when the exceptions occur the system won't let me reject those and instead displays a generic error message: &quot;An error has occured&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I don't know if this is a problem in the system or with my browser. Did someone else experience this? If so, I'd be grateful on tips how to fix it if it is related to the browser/settings/similar. I'm using Firefox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26338" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-01-19T11:38:59.283" LastActivityDate="2015-01-19T11:38:59.283" Title="Error in the suggested edits review queue" Tags="|bug|review|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2359" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2360" CreationDate="2015-01-18T08:08:23.817" Score="8" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if it's against site rules or some unwritten stats.stackexchange.com etiquette. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's not I'm wondering if it's considered to be appropriate (in the sense of wise) to make a second bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly some questions are so ill-formed that they have no chance of being successfully answered, and so creating another bounty would just waste reputation points. I'm not well-informed enough to know for sure if my bounty question was one of those, but I suspect it was not hopelessly ill-formed, although it was also not a very interesting question, as it related to a rather specific research scenario. However, I wonder if the extra points (me chucking in 200, say, instead of the 100 I already put in) are likely to make a difference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9162" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-01-19T11:35:02.463" LastActivityDate="2015-01-19T11:35:02.463" Title="Is it appropriate to offer a second bounty when the first one has expired with no answer?" Tags="|discussion|bounty|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2359" CreationDate="2015-01-18T11:07:12.263" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're mixing questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are repeated bounties against any rules?&lt;/strong&gt; Apparently not. Your reputation is yours, to gamble away if you think it's worth the risk. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is offering them regarded as poor behaviour?&lt;/strong&gt; I haven't detected any feeling against repeated bounties, but then they seem to be rare.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Would a second bounty work?&lt;/strong&gt; An optimist would argue that you are just trying harder and just need someone competent in a particular field to notice the second bounty who didn't notice the first. A pessimist would ask what grounds you have for thinking that the second bounty would fare any better. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, I think it is better to think about re-wording the question. If you linked your question here, you might get informed guesses about why it attracted so little attention.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I never am influenced by the size of a bounty or even the existence of one. A bounty doesn't pull any question into the limits of my expertise. Bounties don't even make questions more noticeable to me, as I have stopped checking specifically for questions with bounties. But this is human behaviour; there might be bounty hunters here! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you are referring to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/132552/is-the-alre-method-of-standardization-rescaling-appropriate-for-proportion-data&quot;&gt;Is the ALRE method of standardization/rescaling appropriate for proportion data?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2015-01-18T11:07:12.263" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2333" CreationDate="2015-01-18T17:50:08.270" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.khanacademy.org/math/probability&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tBoiM.png&quot; alt=&quot;Learn probability &amp;amp; statistics online for free&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2015-01-18T17:50:08.270" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-18T17:50:08.270" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="793" CreationDate="2015-01-19T11:54:40.983" Score="22" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Julia&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Julia is a new language with MATLAB-like syntax but Lisp-like semantics and a Lisp-style macro language.  Julia has growing capabilities for statistics, and, its main advantage, is blazing fast!   To learn about Julia, start with   &lt;a href=&quot;https://julialang.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://julialang.org/&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and, especially,   &lt;a href=&quot;https://julialang.org/community/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://julialang.org/community/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Julia has several online discussion groups including &lt;a href=&quot;https://discourse.julialang.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;julia-users&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://discourse.julialang.org/c/domain/stats/12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;julia-stats&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-11-09T06:24:48.227" LastActivityDate="2023-11-09T06:24:48.227" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-19T11:54:40.983" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2363" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-01-19T16:44:40.573" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-01-19T16:44:40.573" LastActivityDate="2015-01-19T16:44:40.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2364" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-01-19T16:44:40.573" Score="0" Body="Etiquette is the norms and standards of accepted behavior and politeness in our community" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-01-19T19:32:42.320" LastActivityDate="2015-01-19T19:32:42.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2365" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-01-19T17:07:43.677" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Users with 2k reputation have the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackoverflow.com/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;privilege&lt;/a&gt; to edit any question or answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users who have not reached the level of 2k reputation are allowed to suggest edits. These are not applied immediately, but go into &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/review&quot;&gt;a queue&lt;/a&gt; where users who have edit privileges can vote to approve or reject them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the edit gets approved, there is a 2 reputation bonus for the user who made the suggestion. If the edit is rejected, a reason will be displayed on the suggested edit page. One can track suggested edits under the suggestions section of the activity tab on the account profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suggested edits feature also applies to users who don't have 20k reputation to suggest edits to tag wikis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;More&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/76251/how-do-suggested-edits-work&quot;&gt;How do suggested edits work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; Reference: adapted excerpt and wiki from the main &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/suggested-edits/info&quot;&gt;Meta SE&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-01-19T19:32:47.727" LastActivityDate="2015-01-19T19:32:47.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2366" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-01-19T17:07:43.677" Score="0" Body="Edits suggested by users without the full edit privileges (&lt;2k for questions and answers; and &lt;20k for tag wikis)" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-01-19T19:32:50.250" LastActivityDate="2015-01-19T19:32:50.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2367" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-01-19T17:12:34.090" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;bounty system&lt;/a&gt; is a way for users with over 75 reputation to provide a 50 to 500 rep incentive to answer a question that's at least 2 days old. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bounties expire after seven days. After a bounty expires, there is an additional 24 hour window for the bounty to be awarded so that late answers may be considered. If it remains unawarded and one or more answers posted during the bounty period have a score of 2 or more, half the bounty will be automatically awarded to the one with the highest score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16065/how-does-the-bounty-system-work&quot;&gt;How does the bounty system work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3330/why-cant-i-just-offer-a-bounty-for-a-question-right-off-the-bat&quot;&gt;Why can&amp;#39;t I just offer a bounty for a question right off the bat?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/76374/does-loss-of-reputation-cause-loss-of-privileges&quot;&gt;Does loss of reputation cause loss of privileges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: excerpt and wiki imported from the main &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/bounty/info&quot;&gt;Meta SE&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-01-19T19:32:45.113" LastActivityDate="2015-01-19T19:32:45.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2368" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-01-19T17:12:34.090" Score="0" Body="A bounty is a way to get additional attention for a question by offering some of your own reputation for great answers." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-01-19T19:32:39.617" LastActivityDate="2015-01-19T19:32:39.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2370" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2371" CreationDate="2015-01-20T23:47:12.683" Score="13" ViewCount="15096" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been several discussions on meta about how to organize frequently asked questions, and one idea is that one can simply write and answer such a question, creating a thread that can later be used to close duplicates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Good approximations to FAQs are possible by someone just writing a good question and then answering it really well. (@NickCox in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2336&quot;&gt;Does it make a sense to create the reference questions for popular topics?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I have time in a couple of weeks I'll start a controversial one to see how the process works, e.g. FAQ: How do you interpret a large P-value? (@FrankHarrell in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2004&quot;&gt;Common Issues and FAQs&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think nobody attempted it so far. While reviewing PCA questions, I noticed that technical questions about the relationship between SVD and PCA are asked every now and then (example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/122879/&quot;&gt;Why are the singular values of a standardized data matrix not equal to the eigenvalues of its correlation matrix?&lt;/a&gt;; more examples: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/72224&quot;&gt;two&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/96482&quot;&gt;three&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/64636&quot;&gt;four&lt;/a&gt;, etc.), but there is no one thread that is good enough to be &quot;canonical&quot;. The only pretty good thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3869&quot;&gt;is on math.SE&lt;/a&gt; and we cannot use it for closing duplicates here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I decided to try it out, by writing and answering a question myself: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/134282&quot;&gt;Relationship between SVD and PCA. How to use SVD to perform PCA?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;FAQ: Relationship between SVD and PCA, or how to use SVD to perform PCA?&lt;/strike&gt; (original title)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you think it makes sense? Or is it a waste of time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2015-01-21T16:31:20.293" Title="I attempted to make a FAQ-style question; does it make sense?" Tags="|discussion|questions|closing-questions|exact-duplicates|meta-faq|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2370" CreationDate="2015-01-21T00:46:20.637" Score="13" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;one idea is that one can simply write and answer such a question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, the Stack Exchange model clearly allows for this strategy; you're explicitly allowed to write-and-answer your own questions. If they're &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt; to others, it doesn't particularly matter why you want to do it. There are already checks in place to avoid abuses of this approach (not that I expect any).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've used the answer-your-own-question strategy myself -- really wanting a good discussion of interpolation that I could point to in answering other questions (it cropped up as an issue in a bunch of posts over the course of a couple of months at one stage), I wrote and answered one on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/64538/how-do-i-find-values-not-given-in-interpolate-in-statistical-tables&quot;&gt;interpolation in statistical tables&lt;/a&gt;. In those other questions where I wanted to mention interpolation in my answer, doing justice to the issues would lead to long answers that were distracted by side issues. It's so handy to be able to include a sentence like &quot;&lt;em&gt;On the other hand, if you're working from tables, you can just use &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/64538/how-do-i-find-values-not-given-in-interpolate-in-statistical-tables&quot;&gt;interpolation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&quot; as part of a discussion of some other issue. That way if the reader doesn't know about it (and I seem to encounter so many people these days who aren't familiar with even the basics) they can at least get some decent coverage at the link (without worrying about link-rot), and I can proceed on the basis that the content of the post is already available, without bothering the significant number of people for which the single sentence mentioning interpolation is sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I've come to refer to that question later, I have improved on the original answer I posted a couple of times, though it still lacks an entire subsection I'd like to include. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general principle, I think it (answering a tailor-made question to address a specific issue that you want to have a canonical answer on) is an excellent strategy for particular situations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such answer-your-own-question exposition on some specific issue style posts are very rare here, so I don't think there's any substantive danger in doing so when you feel the need. The usual mechanisms for encouraging good posts, discouraging bad ones and removing superfluous ones will still function as they should.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, I'd love to see a few subject matter experts do one or two such posts -- I imagine Xi'an or Dianne Cook or rvl or Rob Hyndman (to name a few such reasonably active experts, hopefully without offending a substantially larger number of other experts that I have not also mentioned for any good reason) could write some great answers to questions that haven't yet been &lt;em&gt;asked in just the right way&lt;/em&gt; as to invite a really good exposition on some specific issue within their area of knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main downside risk I see is that such questions might be mostly ignored, but the cost is relatively low so it's hardly a great issue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the up-side, a very well-written question (and I think my example above perhaps fails on that score) will likely invite other answers. Indeed, the back-and-forth between knowledgeable people in discussing some issues on other questions has in some cases been even more valuable (at least to me) than the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Indeed, in some circumstances, we could also simply post good questions and see if a comprehensive answer of one's own even proved necessary -- look at some of Jeromy Anglim's questions, for example; he frequently posts questions I am certain he could write quite a good answer to. So that's another arrow in the quiver.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I think you should simply go ahead and do it where you think it's needed, and not worry about it. You're surely able to judge when the right question for the answer you need to write doesn't yet exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, I don't even think the opening paragraph on your question is really required, nor even to identify it as a FAQ (unless people tend to use searches containing 'FAQ', in which case it's potentially quite helpful to keep it). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either it's a good question or it isn't. Either it's a good answer or it isn't. So if it's a useful question and a useful answer, there's no problem, and no issue (and votes will - albeit noisily - signal opinion on the value). On the other hand, if it isn't useful the system that's in place is designed to deal with that too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's simply no reason to hold back from doing what you think will help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2015-01-21T11:20:51.840" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2372" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-01-21T13:29:31.107" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Visit the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'faq'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; tag, to access the actual FAQ content on CV Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported excerpt from the main &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/meta-faq/info&quot;&gt;Meta SE&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-01-21T15:20:48.987" LastActivityDate="2015-01-21T15:20:48.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2373" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-01-21T13:29:31.107" Score="0" Body="This tag should be applied to questions that are about FAQs, but are not necessarily FAQs themselves." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-01-21T15:21:05.987" LastActivityDate="2015-01-21T15:21:05.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2374" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2375" CreationDate="2015-01-21T17:23:51.340" Score="14" ViewCount="298" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am always second-guessing my calculations and to be honest multivariate calculus is not my strong point. Is it all right to post questions where you have done the derivations but would like more pairs of eyes to look at it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36540" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2015-01-21T17:31:27.147" LastActivityDate="2015-02-03T22:54:16.443" Title="Is it ok to post questions where you want to have your calculations checked by someone?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-02-09T20:04:04.167" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2374" CreationDate="2015-01-21T17:28:48.390" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is fine, but with two caveats.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You should probably add the &lt;code&gt;[self-study]&lt;/code&gt; tag, and be explicit about your situation.  (Be sure to read its &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/self-study/info&quot;&gt;wiki&lt;/a&gt; as well.)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It isn't clear from your description that there is a lot of &lt;em&gt;statistical&lt;/em&gt; content to your proposed questions (I assume there is, or you wouldn't be asking here).  Depending on how much of your question would be about the statistical aspect vs. how much would be just a double check on your math skills, it may be more appropriate to post your question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;math.SE&lt;/a&gt; instead.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2015-01-21T17:28:48.390" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2376" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-01-22T14:53:00.520" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag was created in the early stages of the site to collect ideas and suggestion about the site's name, which in the end became &quot;Cross Validated&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for issues connected with the current name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2015-01-23T13:39:15.890" LastActivityDate="2015-01-23T13:39:15.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2377" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-01-22T14:53:00.520" Score="0" Body="Questions about the name of the site: &quot;Cross Validated Stack Exchange&quot;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-01-23T13:39:23.657" LastActivityDate="2015-01-23T13:39:23.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2351" CreationDate="2015-01-26T09:16:48.480" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;To expand on the on-topic side of @whubers answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, there are applications of optimization that are on topic here: both optimization applied to the &quot;usual&quot; fitting of models and hyperparameter optimization. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, I think one fundamental difference between CV and more &quot;mathematical&quot;  sites is that stats is about noisy data. In contrast most optimization heuristics I'm familiar with assume well behaved smooth target functions. So I'd also conster questions about &lt;em&gt;optimization of noisy target functions&lt;/em&gt; on topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4598" LastActivityDate="2015-01-26T09:16:48.480" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2333" CreationDate="2015-01-27T04:48:51.323" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/data-request&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qmo8t.png&quot; alt=&quot;Need datasets? Request anything at Open Data&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1437" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:57:29.717" LastActivityDate="2015-01-27T04:48:51.323" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-01-27T04:48:51.323" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2380" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-01-28T12:10:23.957" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange sites encourages users to participate and vote on questions and answers. Several &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges&quot;&gt;badges&lt;/a&gt; are awarded as a consequence of voting (e.g.: supporter, critic, civic duty, electorate, suffrage, vox populi and sportsmanship). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Visit the help center for more guidance about &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-up&quot;&gt;upvoting&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-down&quot;&gt;downvoting&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-01-28T23:26:02.653" LastActivityDate="2015-01-28T23:26:02.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2381" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-01-28T12:10:23.957" Score="0" Body="Peer voting on questions and answers is the primary way users gain reputation, and also which items are sorted at the top." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2015-01-28T14:58:41.720" LastActivityDate="2015-01-28T14:58:41.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2374" CreationDate="2015-01-29T17:43:40.720" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might want to consult your professor or the group that handles academic dishonesty at your institution. The way it works at our institution, this would classify as an unauthorized source of help that could lead to an honor code violation (academic sanction potentially leading to expulsion) unless the professor specifically said that you could work with others on the assignment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the professor says that it is OK to get help from others, you'll probably want to ensure that the scope of &quot;others&quot; is everyone and not just the professor, TAs, and classmates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62528" LastActivityDate="2015-01-29T17:43:40.720" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2384" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-01-30T13:42:51.123" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Learn more about chat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;Chat FAQ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further reading: &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/chat&quot;&gt;http://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/chat&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported excerpt and adapted wiki from the main Meta &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/chat/info&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2015-01-30T15:38:23.023" LastActivityDate="2015-01-30T15:38:23.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2385" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-01-30T13:42:51.123" Score="0" Body="Chat is the real time, stateful web chat that's a part of every Stack Exchange site." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-01-30T16:44:45.700" LastActivityDate="2015-01-30T16:44:45.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2386" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-01-30T13:52:42.473" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The accepted answer can be recognized by a green checkmark under the vote arrows. Accepting an answer is encouraged but never required. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Learn more about accepted-answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/help/accepted-answer&quot;&gt;What does it mean when an answer is &quot;accepted&quot;?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/help/self-answer&quot;&gt;Can I answer my own question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: adapted excerpt and wiki from the main Meta &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/accepted-answer/info&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-01-30T16:44:43.493" LastActivityDate="2015-01-30T16:44:43.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2387" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-01-30T13:52:42.473" Score="0" Body="The answer the question owner thought best met their needs." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2015-01-30T15:41:19.523" LastActivityDate="2015-01-30T15:41:19.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2388" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2393" CreationDate="2015-02-01T16:55:50.233" Score="13" ViewCount="351" Body="&lt;p&gt;What fraction of visitors first find the site via Google, other search engines, links from other sites, tips from friends or colleagues, etc.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2669" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2015-02-02T15:24:31.270" LastActivityDate="2015-02-04T23:46:50.700" Title="How do people initially find the CV site?" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2388" CreationDate="2015-02-02T12:08:15.407" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Possibly this should be a comment rather than an answer as I do not have access to any site statistics, but judging from traffic levels to questions I have asked or observed, it seems there are several different audiences who come across the content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have asked several questions whose viewing figures are low, averaging just a handful of views per day, but almost all those views occurred in a couple of spikes: these occurred when there was activity that promoted the question to the main page for a few hours, or sometimes (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/124961/reporting-degrees-of-freedom-for-welch-t-test&quot;&gt;on reporting Welch degrees of freedom&lt;/a&gt;) over a couple of days when I put a bounty on. My guess is that most of these viewers were regular SE users, probably registered and occasional contributors on CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions which make it to the &quot;popular questions&quot; sidebar across SE sites also seem to get a boost in traffic but generally temporary and in the hundreds. I'm guessing the boost mostly comes from SE users who are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; CV regulars. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently received the &quot;famous question&quot; (10,000 views) for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/89179/real-life-examples-of-distributions-with-negative-skewness&quot;&gt;Real life examples of distributions with negative skewness&lt;/a&gt;. That came within one year of the question being asked, which judging by other &quot;famous questions&quot; (browse the full list &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/28/famous-question&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) is a fairly short but by no means record period of time - some examples take a couple of years to accrue the pageviews. Such traffic is implausible from internally generated traffic and I think it's safe to presume very few readers are registered SE users. In that case it is very likely that the traffic is search engine based: when I search google, that question is 2nd ranked for &quot;negative skew example&quot;, 3rd for &quot;skewed distribution example&quot;, a front-page result for &quot;skew example&quot; and &quot;negative skew&quot; and has even reached the third page for the very wide search-term &quot;skewed distribution&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an indication of the effectiveness of SE at SEO! It also suggests we are writing for different audiences at different times. I think for a lot of the more technical and obscure content our users are basically writing at and for each other. But other content that has a wider and more general audience, which perhaps ought to change the way we approach it. On realising so many people were making use of my question I recently copy-edited it down to make it more useful and readable (~20% reduction in wordcount). While I was tempted to delete some of my initial discussion of examples of symmetric and positively skewed distributions, I realised that since the search engine rank was so high for &quot;skew&quot; and not just &quot;negative skew&quot;, for many of the search-engine landers that content might actually have been what they were looking for! Presumably questions like this figuring highly in search results increases awareness of the site but I don't know how this works in terms of conversions to new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other questions have had big spikes in pageviews due to sharing of links on external sites, but at least sharing by our own users seems to only account for a handful of the 369 &quot;famous questions&quot;. Compare the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges&quot;&gt;publicity badges&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/59/announcer&quot;&gt;Announcer&lt;/a&gt; - shared a link to a question that was visited by 25 unique IP addresses, 249 awarded&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/60/booster&quot;&gt;Booster&lt;/a&gt; - shared a link to a question that was visited by 300 unique IP addresses, 12 awarded&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/61/publicist&quot;&gt;Publicist&lt;/a&gt; - shared a link to a question that was visited by 1000 unique IP addresses, 3 awarded&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would also be interesting to know whether such external traffic spikes are temporary. Obviously even CV users could share a &quot;plain&quot; link to the question that doesn't identify them as the referrer, and people who are not registered on CV could not use this option, and none of this is tracked on the badge system. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reddit.com/domain/stats.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A couple of questions have been reddited for instance.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-02-04T23:46:50.700" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2390" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2391" CreationDate="2015-02-02T23:39:07.947" Score="5" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noted that the old duplicates and the new duplicates have different formatting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions that are now getting closed as duplicate get a bluish plaque on top saying &quot;This question already has an answer here: ...&quot; But the questions that were closed as duplicate long time ago have a grey plaque on top saying &quot;Possible duplicate: ...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?page=1&amp;amp;tab=newest&amp;amp;q=is%3aquestion%20duplicate%3ayes&quot;&gt;at all the duplicates sorted by date&lt;/a&gt;, then the borderline between these two formats seems to pass around January 2013, currently page 19. On page 20 duplicates are already mostly of the old format (even though it seems to depend on the closing date, not on the posting date).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The old format looks quite obviously inferior: it has strange wording (&quot;possible&quot;?), does not display the number of answers in the linked question, and does not update the title of the linked question if it gets edited (the link seems to be &quot;frozen&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I searched the meta.stackexchange, but could not find any reference to this behaviour. I assume that the format was changed at certain moment, but why are the old duplicates not displayed in the new format? This seems weird. Any explanations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is one of the old duplicates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/36036&quot;&gt;How to deal with missing values in PCA?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you start editing this post, you will see that it starts with the following text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; **Possible Duplicate:**  &#xA;&amp;gt; [Replacement of NA values for PCA analysis](https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/35561/replacement-of-na-values-for-pca-analysis)  &#xA;&#xA;&amp;lt;!-- End of automatically inserted text --&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so the link to the dup is actually hard-coded into the question text. Well, I thought if I edit this question (and remove this automatically inserted plaque), it will trigger automatic re-generating of the HTML page and it will get the &quot;new&quot; blue duplicate plaque. This did not happen! I was able to erase the old hard-coded plaque, but the new one did not appear. The post was marked as duplicate without any link to the dup. I edited again and inserted the hard-coded plaque back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is weird.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2015-02-03T15:55:02.813" Title="&quot;Possible duplicate&quot; label vs. &quot;This question already has an answer here&quot;" Tags="|support|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2390" CreationDate="2015-02-03T15:55:02.813" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have finally managed to find some relevant meta.SE threads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/177245&quot;&gt;Shouldn&amp;#39;t the closed-as-duplicate banner update when the title of the target changes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before February 6, 2013, closing a question as a duplicate caused the duplicate text header to be inserted into the question text. It was static and forever, though it can be manually updated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On February 6, 2013, this process changed and the duplicates are no longer stored as text in the question itself [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/181915&quot;&gt;Two kinds of Duplicate closing are too confusing - suggestion for a possible fix&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/247142&quot;&gt;Replace auto-inserted markdown duplicate banners with real duplicate banners&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently few people think it's worth implementing: these suggestions remain un-implemented and poorly upvoted. Pity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2015-02-03T15:55:02.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2374" CreationDate="2015-02-03T22:54:16.443" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel like this question is almost a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2327/questions-asking-to-check-answers-to-end-of-chapter-exercises-appropriate-or-no/2330#2330&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is a great idea, but as per Gung's suggestion in the above link, you may want to consider answering your own question rather than including the answer up front. Feedback can then be given through comments and if you are severely wrong another answer can be submitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13684" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2015-02-03T22:54:16.443" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2388" CreationDate="2015-02-04T22:24:55.580" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cannot tell you how people &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; find this site, but I can share some statistics provided I am not too &quot;specific.&quot;  During the lifetime of this site (including pre-beta and beta phases, up through the beginning of February 2015, four and a half years in),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A strong majority of visits were referred by search engines.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Half of the rest were referred from other sites.  Most of these were google.com or stackoverflow.com.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The remainder were direct traffic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the search engine visits used an unknown search term.  The most popular search phrases among those that are known include &quot;statistics stackexchange&quot; and &quot;statistics stack exchange,&quot; which perhaps should be considered &quot;direct traffic.&quot; But these are a tiny fraction of the new visits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some related numbers to ponder.  Most of them can be gleaned from information readily available to anybody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As anyone who looks at our main page can tell, we have had 50,000 questions asked.  The number of answers posted is almost the same.  These are a minuscule fraction of all visits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have information on the number of comments posted, but would guess there would be several times as many as the number of questions plus answers: perhaps a half million total, just a few percent of all visits.  (Some of us average many comments per visit, btw. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The total number of votes (up, down, accepted, etc.) is roughly 1.5% of the number of visits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of edits is less than 10% of the total number of posts--very few posts are edited by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The vast majority of visits therefore involve passive interaction only:&lt;/strong&gt; no posting or voting of any kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2015-02-04T22:24:55.580" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2394" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-05T01:37:38.520" Score="2" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;Machine Learning (in general) is on topic (see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/492/are-the-machine-learning-questions-on-topic&quot;&gt;Are the &amp;quot;Machine Learning&amp;quot; questions on topic?&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am working with the &lt;code&gt;h2o&lt;/code&gt; package and the documentation is .. obtuse.  It is hard to use and generally uninformative.  I want to ask (and maybe answer) questions that document things like &quot;here is the code to upload a text file to h2o from your interface&quot; or &quot;here is how you start the evaluation of data using a pre-loaded and pre-built rf/glm/gbm/dl/nn/... &quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you tell me if doing this is good or bad, or if I should ask these questions elsewhere, like in Stack Overflow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22452" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2015-02-05T17:46:30.957" Title="Can I ask questions about an R package for machine learning with unclear documentation?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|r|machine-learning|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2394" CreationDate="2015-02-05T16:21:49.687" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your only question / planned answer for the thread is &quot;here is the code to upload a text file to h2o from your interface&quot;, then the question will be fine &lt;em&gt;on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you want to talk about &quot;the evaluation of data&quot;, that is on-topic here, even if code is appended.  There is certainly nothing wrong with having code (&lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;SAS&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Stata&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;MATLAB&lt;/code&gt;, etc.) as part of a question or an answer.  My opinion has always been that what is important is what the OP needs explained, regardless of how the question is phrased.  If what the OP needs to know is about the machine learning, then it is best here, but if what they need to know is about the code, then it belongs on SO.  (If they need both, then it could be either, but we can defer to the OP.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just try to make your questions &lt;em&gt;real questions about machine learning&lt;/em&gt;, not primarily about code.  Also note that we are a pure Q&amp;amp;A site; we don't really do tutorials.  However, if you want to put a tutorial together, that would be a good candidate for a CV blog post.  For more on the CV blog, see:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/870/7290&quot;&gt;We are making the community blog&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1071/7290&quot;&gt;Is there a way to make the blog more prominent? Should we?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1109/7290&quot;&gt;A call for participation on the Cross Validated Blog&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2015-02-05T17:46:30.957" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2396" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-02-09T13:06:55.757" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the answer is accepted and has zero score (accepted and zero score), the question is considered answered. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the main site, there is a tab showing &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/unanswered&quot;&gt;unanswered questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-02-09T20:03:46.403" LastActivityDate="2015-02-09T20:03:46.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2397" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-02-09T13:06:55.757" Score="0" Body="Questions with no answers, or with answers that have zero score or less and none of these is accepted" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-02-09T20:03:42.810" LastActivityDate="2015-02-09T20:03:42.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2399" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-11T10:12:14.147" Score="10" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some answer are so interesting that I would like to print them, to read them again later on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also like to take advantage of the latex format, instead of printing the whole page, and print a pdf with just the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this possible? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40252" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-02-11T12:27:16.500" LastActivityDate="2015-02-13T20:48:06.020" Title="Printing pdf with just the answer, rather than the whole page" Tags="|discussion|support|printing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2400" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-13T07:07:04.540" Score="11" ViewCount="271" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a new member of this group. How can I write the R code while commenting or posting? I read also the previously asked questions related to this but don't get my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68801" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2015-02-13T18:09:38.470" LastActivityDate="2015-02-13T18:53:39.267" Title="How to write R code in my posts?" Tags="|support|markdown|user-interface|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2401" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-13T10:08:59.467" Score="4" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that some questions with many tags get low views. Is that a coincidence? If I want to avoid getting low views, should I use fewer or more tags? I have no intention of abusing tags to artificially &lt;em&gt;increase&lt;/em&gt; the number of views; I just don't want a &lt;em&gt;decrease&lt;/em&gt; in views due to not understanding how this works. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastActivityDate="2015-02-13T10:08:59.467" Title="Number of tags versus number of views" Tags="|support|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2402" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-13T14:00:14.617" Score="12" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a new interesting page, called TagOverflow (I came to it from math SE Meta). Its results for Cross Validated are &lt;a href=&quot;http://stared.github.io/tagoverflow/?site=stats&amp;amp;size=64&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  Or, copied in here:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SncoC.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For discussion here:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What can this teach us about CV?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What methods were used in TagOverflow? Can we do it better?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should this (or something like it) be included in SE network?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2015-02-13T15:52:35.053" LastActivityDate="2015-02-15T16:30:28.903" Title="New interesting page: TagOverflow" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2400" CreationDate="2015-02-13T14:54:08.590" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you are writing a question or an answer, a set of icons is visible above the text field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wLenC.png&quot; alt=&quot;Icons&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One icon is a pair of curly braces, $\{\}$.  To add a block of code, highlight the block and click the curly braces.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This is a block of `code`&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will see that the curly braces are just adding four spaces at the beginning of each line.  When  you have a block of code within a list you will need &lt;strong&gt;8&lt;/strong&gt; spaces (four to keep the list indentation intact and four more for the code highlighting), which you will have to add manually.  Deeper indentations can be handled similarly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This begins my list of stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Here is a block of code nested within the list&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a continuation of the first list item, indicated by indenting it four spaces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a second-level list item, created by a four-space indentation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another second-level item&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;A block of code, indicated by indenting 12 spaces.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another second-level item    &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is recognized as the second list item because it was preceded by a numeral and &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; indented.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to mark a small part within a sentence as code, surround it with backticks (`).  For example, &lt;code&gt;this is formatted as code&lt;/code&gt; within this sentence.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need to add backticks within your code, they will be fine within blocks of code (as seen above), but to add them inline, use the escape character \ immediately before each.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Advanced Techniques&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Syntax highlighting&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;r&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;r&lt;/a&gt;, then the code will be syntax highlighted (although not very well...).  When the question does not have this tag and you want the code highlighting, then preface &lt;em&gt;each&lt;/em&gt; code block with the magic line&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;!-- language: lang-R --&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will have to add this HTML comment before &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; block of &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; code you want highlighted.  On the other hand, if you will have more than one block of code, and you want &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; syntax highlighting for all of them, use &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;!-- language-all: lang-r --&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; instead (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/184109/187282&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for more information).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be indented.  If all works correctly, this line will be invisible and the code will be highlighted (perhaps after a slight delay).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other languages are treated similarly: replace &quot;R&quot; by the name of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Interactions with MathJax&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MathJax delimiter for $\TeX$ markup is the dollar sign \$.  Unfortunately, MathJax attempts to process text within code blocks.  When it encounters one dollar sign it looks for the second--and creates indentation problems in the code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;x &amp;lt;- list(a=1, b=2)&#xA;y &amp;lt;- x$a&#xA;z &amp;lt;- x$b # This line is *not* indented originally: MathJax is doing it!&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One work-around is to append a little \$-containing comment after each offending line, as in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;x &amp;lt;- list(a=1, b=2)&#xA;y &amp;lt;- x$a # $ This dollar sign terminates the MathJax processing.&#xA;z &amp;lt;- x$b # This line is now indented correctly.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other work-around is to de-indent the offending line by 4 spaces.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2015-02-13T18:53:39.267" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2402" CreationDate="2015-02-13T15:36:01.140" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the output from a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network_analysis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;social network analysis&lt;/a&gt;.  (I don't know much about SNA, but we have a tag for it, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/social-network&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;social-network&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;social-network&lt;/a&gt;.)  Specifically, this is an &lt;a href=&quot;http://mathinsight.org/undirected_graph_definition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;undirected graph&lt;/a&gt; where the sizes of the nodes are proportional to the number of questions with that tag (actually, it's probably the log or square root, etc., of the number [&lt;em&gt;no it isn't, note the comment from @PiotrMigdal below&lt;/em&gt;]), and the weights of the edges is proportional to the number of questions with both tags.  By default, the colors are the result of community detection, a kind of clustering of nodes in networks.  I notice that you can change this, however.  Importantly, notice that by default these are only the top 64 tags (although this can be changed as well).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some specific answers:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think this is pretty neat.  It gives us one way of exploring the structure of the threads on CV.  Under the (I think reasonable) assumptions that most of the threads are tagged appropriately and that the tags represent meaningful topics within statistics and machine learning, this tells us about the volume of interest (i.e., number of questions) in different topics within our purview and their interrelationships.  There seem to be five primary clusters, for example.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. A $\color{blue}{\rm modeling}$ cluster, anchored by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/regression&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;regression&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;regression&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;r&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;r&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;b. A $\color{purple}{\rm basic\ statistics}$ cluster, anchored by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hypothesis-testing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hypothesis-testing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hypothesis-testing&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/statistical-significance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;statistical-significance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;statistical-significance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;c. A $\color{green}{\rm machine\ learning}$ cluster, anchored by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/classification&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;classification&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;classification&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;d. A $\color{red}{\rm somewhat\ more\ mathematical\ take\ on\ statistics}$ cluster, anchored by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/probability&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;probability&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;probability&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/distributions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;distributions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;distributions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;e. A $\color{orange}{\rm time\ series}$ cluster, composed entirely (at least within the first 64 tags) of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/time-series&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;time-series&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;time-series&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/forecasting&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;forecasting&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;forecasting&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The analytical methods used were based in &lt;a href=&quot;http://faculty.ucr.edu/~hanneman/nettext/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;social network analysis&lt;/a&gt;, no doubt built on a great deal of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SQL&lt;/a&gt; [&lt;em&gt;no it isn't, note the comment from @PiotrMigdal below&lt;/em&gt;].  Maybe someone here could do it better, but this was pretty sophisticated and I notice that there are only two CV users who are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/social-network/topusers&quot;&gt;listed&lt;/a&gt; as having answered more than one question on the &lt;code&gt;[S-N]&lt;/code&gt; tag.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;SE could adopt this as part of, or something similar to, its &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;data site&lt;/a&gt;, if the developers wanted.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-02-15T16:30:28.903" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2405" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2406" CreationDate="2015-02-13T19:32:41.423" Score="7" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I got a notice on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/137518/proof-for-linear-combination-of-multivariate-normal-x/137521#137521&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;. This is the first time I have received a notice. I understand comments. Now I am wondering what this &quot;notice on answer&quot; is? I am also interested to know who gives these notices to the answers, because no name is displayed as there would be if someone made a comment. Are the notices used for answers only or are they applicable to questions as well?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13177" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2015-02-13T22:42:20.720" Title="What is a &quot;notice on answer&quot;? Who gives them?" Tags="|discussion|notifications|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2405" CreationDate="2015-02-13T19:37:36.253" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are referring to a &quot;Post notice.&quot;  These can be added to posts for various reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Citation needed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This post does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this post by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.&#xA;  current event&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Post is related to a rapidly changing event.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Insufficient explanation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We're looking for long answers that provide some explanation and context. Don't just give a one-line answer; explain why your answer is right, ideally with citations. Answers that don't include explanations may be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only moderators can add these notices.  I added one to your original post because it was brief and telegraphic: it clearly did not meet our site standards and was at risk of being downvoted and even deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you amplified your answer, and I observed that you had done that, I removed the notice.  Unfortunately, there is no notification mechanism to let me (or other moderators) know that a change has been made to such an answer.  Consequently, you can still find a few answers on our site that now look great but still have post notices.  If you come across anything like that, then just flag it for moderator attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2015-02-13T19:37:36.253" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2399" CreationDate="2015-02-13T20:48:06.020" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll summarize the options. Two solutions are offered in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/128703/259867&quot;&gt;Can I print a single answer?&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Userscript &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/3307/print-this-post&quot;&gt;Print this Post&lt;/a&gt; by Manishearth which suppresses everything on the page except the selected posts. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stackprinter.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;StackPrinter&lt;/a&gt;, which prints all posts on the page (optionally, suppressing comments). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One more solution (mine) is &lt;a href=&quot;https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/29863189/mse/savetex.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Save Q&amp;amp;A as LaTeX&lt;/a&gt;, which converts both the question and its answers to LaTeX. One can delete the question and unwanted answers before printing, although the question is useful for context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For illustration, I used &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/137544/dummy-variables-to-control-clustered-sample&quot;&gt;Dummy variables to control for clustering&lt;/a&gt; and copy-pasted LaTeX output into &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.overleaf.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Overleaf&lt;/a&gt;, obtaining &lt;a href=&quot;https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/29863189/mse/dummy-variables-control.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this PDF&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user56674" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2015-02-13T20:48:06.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2408" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2410" CreationDate="2015-02-14T08:53:17.567" Score="7" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I wanted to mark a duplicate of a question about defining maximum likelihood, but was unable to find the &quot;main&quot; question since it used &quot;MLE&quot; in title rather then &quot;maximum likelihood&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/112451/mle-in-layman-terms&quot;&gt;Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) in layman terms&lt;/a&gt;). Finally someone merged the initial question, the one that I suggested as a duplicate, and the one that I refer to in the link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there exist (and they do) questions that are prone to be duplicated, like the one I refer to, wouldn't it be a good idea to slightly edit their titles to be more informative and easier to find via search? In this case I would edit &quot;MLE&quot; and changed it to &quot;maximum likelihood (MLE)&quot; however there were discussions on if it is good to make such edits or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think? Of course, I understand that &quot;minor edit&quot; could be easily misunderstood and abused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK, there doesn't seem to be disagreement in here so I edited this title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-02-15T20:22:57.127" Title="Editing abbreviation in the title" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|editing|title|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2408" CreationDate="2015-02-14T14:47:37.050" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think in this particular case it would be a good edit, &lt;strike&gt;but mainly&lt;/strike&gt; especially because the title &quot;MLE in layman terms&quot; is otherwise very short; there is some room to expand it. Go ahead and replace it with &quot;Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) in layman terms&quot;, why not!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;But often&lt;/strike&gt; Sometimes titles with abbreviations are quite long already, and then I would be reluctant to replace e.g. &quot;PCA&quot; by &quot;principal component analysis (PCA)&quot; -- and  even occasionally make &lt;em&gt;an opposite&lt;/em&gt; edit, for the sake of brevity. I do always try to make sure, however, that the abbreviation is spelled out in the question body (and occasionally edit solely for this purpose).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case it was (&quot;MLE&quot; was fully spelled out); so I am not sure I understand why you failed to find it via search. What did you search for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2015-02-15T13:00:37.700" LastActivityDate="2015-02-15T13:00:37.700" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2408" CreationDate="2015-02-14T15:28:58.373" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although I also prefer shorter titles, I am less worried about their length than @amoeba.  At any rate, I agree that you should go ahead and edit the title.  The title and the tags are often what people have access to when searching / perusing the site.  Getting them right has an enormous influence on the organization and usability of the site.  Your own case is a great example of this; you couldn't find the thread you wanted&amp;mdash;and knew was there&amp;mdash;because the title wasn't quite right.  In cases like that, I would always strongly suggest editing the title so that it is easier to find and accurately reflects what the thread is about.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2015-02-14T15:28:58.373" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2411" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2413" CreationDate="2015-02-16T17:59:17.180" Score="2" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would &lt;a href=&quot;https://superuser.com/questions/877415/pattern-recognition-for-youtube&quot;&gt;such question&lt;/a&gt; could find place here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am looking for software that would allow to match supplied image in&#xA;  video frame. I plan to use it to data-mine Hearthstone videos to get&#xA;  data on what decks are better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Couple of years ago I saw a guy (I think he's Ukrainian) to&#xA;  demonstrate something similar. He would print screen live feed from&#xA;  his web cam and then would cut part of image and then supply it to the&#xA;  pattern recognition software he was running and it would apply border&#xA;  on matching part on live feed while he was moving camera. It would&#xA;  match it under certain angle. Since Hearthstone cards are always face&#xA;  up it should be possible to reuse this. I tried looking for this video&#xA;  and software without luck. If you know a peace of software that could&#xA;  do something similar(with some tweaks perhaps) or other good idea how&#xA;  to get my hands on Hearthstone game data please let me know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68817" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:18:04.350" LastActivityDate="2015-02-22T12:26:45.740" Title="Pattern recognition for youtube" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2412" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-17T20:51:54.003" Score="10" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;Did you noticed that recently multiple homework questions are posted? Just a few examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/138093/question-in-following-pictures&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/138093/question-in-following-pictures&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/138091/question-in-following-picture&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/138091/question-in-following-picture&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/137860/tough-probability-question&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/137860/tough-probability-question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/135456/question-on-a-probability-question&quot;&gt;Question on a probability question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/135975/could-someone-help-me-check-my-answer-on-this-probability-question&quot;&gt;Could someone help me check my answer on this probability question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As one of the comments suggested at least two of those could have been actually posted during an ongoing exam!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas what could be done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2020-03-07T23:16:41.293" Title="Frequent homework spam" Tags="|discussion|moderation|homework|spam|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2411" CreationDate="2015-02-19T17:39:30.633" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As per the comments -- probably not. If you're asking about the pattern recognition software, there is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;StackExchange site for software recommendations&lt;/a&gt;. If you're asking for where you could find game data, you could try the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opendata.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Open Data StackExchange site&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Hearthstone subreddit&lt;/a&gt;, or even the &lt;a href=&quot;http://gaming.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;gaming StackExchange site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36229" LastActivityDate="2015-02-19T17:39:30.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2414" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-02-22T12:37:28.973" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;On Cross Validated, &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/self-study/info&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt; questions are welcome, but they are treated &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stats.stackexchange.com/questions/12/how-should-we-deal-with-obvious-homework-questions&quot;&gt;differently&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*homework questions are tagged &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'self-study'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported excerpt from the main &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/homework/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2015-02-22T15:32:22.847" LastActivityDate="2015-02-22T15:32:22.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2415" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-02-22T12:37:28.973" Score="0" Body="Discussion and controversy around questions that are explicitly stated as, presumed, or suspected to be homework questions, or other routine questions from a course or a textbook. They are tagged with [self-study]." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-10-11T16:21:21.463" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T16:21:21.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2416" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-02-22T12:40:21.620" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Spam&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (lowercase) disruptive messages, especially commercial messages posted on a computer network or sent as e-mail&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Use on meta&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/spam&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'spam'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spam&lt;/a&gt; tag is used for questions that relate to use of the spam flag option, asking the community about a users posts when spam is suspected or identifying a spam trend that isn't obvious, but has become prevalent for group action or discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Further information&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/58032/how-does-the-spam-flag-work&quot;&gt;What are the spam and offensive flags, and how do they work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/57497/limits-for-self-promotion-in-answers&quot;&gt;Limits for self-promotion in answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported excerpt and wiki from the main &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/spam/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-02-23T05:41:42.250" LastActivityDate="2015-02-23T05:41:42.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2417" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-02-22T12:40:21.620" Score="0" Body="Questions about suspected user spam, the spam flag or combating spam as a community." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-02-23T05:41:50.967" LastActivityDate="2015-02-23T05:41:50.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2418" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2420" CreationDate="2015-02-22T21:43:17.320" Score="11" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that multiple questions that ask about R packages are voted to migrate to SO (I also do this). This is consistent with the fact that CV is not about programming. On the other hand, &quot;I am looking for R package that does something&quot; is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; really a programming question and I would say that this kind of question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;also off-topic on SO&lt;/a&gt;. So maybe the unwritten policy of migrating those to SO is not valid? What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2015-03-05T00:35:32.353" Title="Redirecting &quot;looking for package in R&quot; to SO" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|migration|r|software|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2418" CreationDate="2015-02-22T22:40:40.793" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; uses a fairly stringent definition of what constitutes a programming question (perhaps just as we have a fairly strict definition of what constitutes a statistical / machine learning question).  A question that simply has to do with how to use, say, &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; is not &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; a programming question.  One good rule of thumb is that programming questions should have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/5963269/1217536&quot;&gt;reproducible example&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve&quot;&gt;MCVE&lt;/a&gt;.  A question about programming that doesn't have one should not be migrated until it has been edited to include such.  A question that &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; have one (e.g., 'what is the package for _______') should not be migrated, but should simply be closed here as off-topic (&quot;because it is not about statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, or data visualization&quot;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recognize that this may seem harsh to people who want help and are upset that we are not providing it.  However, there is no guarantee that any given question must fit in somewhere on the SE system.  Many general R questions can go to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;r-help listserv&lt;/a&gt;&amp;mdash;that's what it's for.  In addition, we can point people to our meta.CV thread that lists &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/793/7290&quot;&gt;Internet Support for Statistics Software&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2015-02-22T22:40:40.793" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2412" CreationDate="2015-02-22T23:30:44.443" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As discussed (rather extensively and accurately IMO) in the comments, there isn't much more that we can do.  I think our homework &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/self-study/info&quot;&gt;policies&lt;/a&gt; are good ones.  We just have to be vigilant.  (For example, on a recent SS Q, a new user gave an &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/138777/7290&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; that I thought was possibly too complete and I left him a quick note, but a more experienced user gave a good SS &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/138797/7290&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; later.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond vigilance, we need to be unafraid of closing such questions.  It is best that such questions always get a comment to help them use the site more productively (for both us and them), and that will help cue potential answerers to the fact that full answers should not be given.  If a user repeatedly asks questions that violate our policy, downvotes and closevotes, coupled with more strongly worded comments, is the best we can do.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2015-02-22T23:48:54.417" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2253" CreationDate="2015-02-23T05:18:16.633" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm relatively new to CV, and have very little history with SE, but as a practitioner with feet in both statistics and data science (you can put those in quotes if you want, I usually do since among practitioners both can be so broad you could have &quot;statisticians&quot; talking better about SQL than they do about MLE and &quot;data scientists&quot; rabid about Hadoop and clueless about a t-test). I talk with a lot of industry folks, I work in federal government and contract for private firms. I'm not an expert at anything, so this is just my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think our role should be to try and moderate the divide that is happening between &quot;traditional&quot; statistics and &quot;fast-paced&quot; data science. It may be that in other areas, statisticians have angst that data scientists get their glory and give none back, and data scientists see statisticians as slow and inflexible, but we should not be perpetuating that myth. To the extent that we can be welcoming and cross-over, and I think we would be doing the entire field (to include statistics and data science) a huge favor that may not be recognized for a while. I recognize there are aspects of data science (managing Big Data) that do not belong at CV - but every analytical tool, even visualization stuff that is very basic analysis, should be addressed at CV. And we should be careful to not be overly condescending when a poster comes at us with limited theoretical knowledge but has a good handle on working with data - that is the type of person who could run from a statistician. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just my newbie opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42898" LastActivityDate="2015-02-23T05:18:16.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2418" CreationDate="2015-02-28T21:54:24.967" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen other forums migrating such requests to &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Software Recommendations&lt;/a&gt;, though that forum tends to be a still defining itself and not known for prompt responses or well moderated. Right now as it covers a broad range of topics and not people who are say, experts in R or what it does in this case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;R packages based on this forum's core competency I believe would be appropriate here due to the original core purpose of R and its continued primary use even though it's use is definitely branching out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though in general, I would prefer any such requests that '&lt;em&gt;are migrated&lt;/em&gt;'go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Software Recommendations&lt;/a&gt; than the bigger black hole of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; which is supposed to be programming questions.. not which software package should I use....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know I have recommended R packages over in Software Recommendations on several questions as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59478" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2015-03-02T21:43:02.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2418" CreationDate="2015-03-03T22:24:28.897" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that this would depend on the question being asked. If someone is looking for a data manipulation package like &lt;code&gt;plyr&lt;/code&gt; for example, I would think that would be a SO question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if the question is more about how to implement a particular model in R, then surely this is straightforwardly a statistics question? R, as with any programming language, can be used for things other than statistics - I presume this is why general programming questions are referred away to SO. But if the question relates to doing statistics &lt;em&gt;IN&lt;/em&gt; R, I would think that this fell within the purview of this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether there is a particular package that implements the model directly or it has to be implemented by hand probably shouldn't be used to discriminate which questions should go where. Equally, I don't think that model implementation questions should be removed from Cross Validated either, because that would reduce its usefulness substantially to practitioners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The major factor to consider here is probably more around question quality and whether the person has made an effort to do their own &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/quality-standards-error&quot;&gt;research on the subject&lt;/a&gt;. If there is no evidence that they have made an effort, then the question probably contravenes other rules around question quality and can be closed on that basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13684" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2015-03-05T00:35:32.353" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2425" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2427" CreationDate="2015-03-05T23:01:30.700" Score="18" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Our community-modifiable default off-topic close reasons are&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Self-study questions (including textbook exercises, old exam papers, and homework) that seek to understand the concepts are welcome, but those that demand a solution need to indicate clearly at what step help or advice are needed. For help writing a good self-study question, please visit the meta pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because it is not about statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, or data visualization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions about obtaining specific datasets are off-topic on Cross Validated. You are welcome to post this question to the Open Data site instead, thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&amp;quot;This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network&amp;quot; cannot be modified and will always be an option.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I would like to add another default reason&lt;/strong&gt; that in a friendly, polite, and helpful fashion says something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question appears to focus exclusively on programming, debugging, or performing routine operations within an application. It cannot be migrated to StackOverflow because it does not meet their standards or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve&quot;&gt;needs more information&lt;/a&gt;. You might be able to get an answer at one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/793&quot;&gt;support links we maintain&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you favor this, please suggest a better wording (and/or upvote suggestions you like); and otherwise, please explain why making this a default close reason might not be a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Important Edits&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In attempting to implement this, I discovered a severe length limitation and pared back the proposed text (including the link) to fit the space provided.  I managed partially to incorporate a suggestion made in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2427&quot;&gt;the answer by Gung&lt;/a&gt;--there is a link to SO guidance for creating a Minimal Complete Verifiable Example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having succeeded in meeting this limit, I then (re-)discovered a limitation on the number of close reasons: we cannot have more than three!  &lt;strong&gt;I am therefore asking for your suggestions about how to incorporate this suggested fourth reason within the three we are allowed.&lt;/strong&gt;  It probably needs to be rolled into the second close reason (&amp;quot;...not about statistics etc.&amp;quot;), perhaps in this abbreviated form (which uses every allowable character):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because--to be understood and answered--it does not require any knowledge of statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, or data visualization. If it focuses on programming, debugging, or performing routine operations within a statistical computing platform, visit the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/793&quot;&gt;support links we maintain&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Previous discussions on this topic occurred at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1749/can-we-clarify-the-off-topic-closing-options&quot;&gt;Can we clarify the off-topic closing options?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2149/migrating-software-syntax-to-stackoverflow-or-datascience&quot;&gt;Migrating software syntax to StackOverflow or DataScience?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1335/how-to-ask-question-related-to-the-use-of-r&quot;&gt;How to ask question related to the use of R?&lt;/a&gt; (this has a number of examples worth contemplating).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1640/why-was-this-question-migrated-to-stackoverflow-it-does-not-mention-programming&quot;&gt;Why was this question migrated to StackOverflow? It does not mention programming at all&lt;/a&gt; (this discussion occurred primarily within the comments).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2015-03-10T13:32:13.163" Title="Shall we add &quot;this is just a software question&quot; to our default close reasons?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|software|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2425" CreationDate="2015-03-05T23:18:34.513" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The suggestion makes sense but I have yet to make up my mind regarding whether it would be better to have an extra field for this or to amend the option&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because it is not about statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, or data visualization.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because it is not about statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, or data visualization, or it focuses too heavily on aspects of programming/debugging. For this you might be able to get your question answered at one of the support links we maintain.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably not the best wording for it but it might be a starting point for an alternative suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an additional comment I wonder whether we should migrate such questions at all. There is of course no doubt regarding ones in the spirit of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;How do I do this thing in R/SPSS/Matlab/Stata&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am thinking of are questions of the sort&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I'm trying to program this estimator but I don't know where the error in my code is&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;because to figure this out it might require the statistical knowledge behind the given estimator or test statistic. I think this type of question would be better served here given that many of our users have extensive knowledge of statistical packages but rarely have the chance to apply this knowledge here in the statistics context. If anything this skill is mostly used for illustrating the theory behind something. But statistics shouldn't be just about the theory (only my view) and an important part is the application for which this kind of question would be useful. Maybe we are restricting ourselves too much by migrating too often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26338" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2015-03-06T01:14:05.280" LastActivityDate="2015-03-06T01:14:05.280" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2425" CreationDate="2015-03-06T04:20:37.437" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the idea, and I like the current phrasing.  I think we'll end up with a system that operates more smoothly with this as a default option.  I think having to type a custom comment is sometimes discouraging for people, and so they either go with migration (when it will just have to be closed on SO), or the &quot;not about statistics...&quot; option (which often isn't quite true).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do worry about making the suggested text longer, but it would be nice if it could be more specific than &quot;...it does not appear to meet their standards.&quot;  I wonder if something like &quot;...it does not appear to meet their standards (e.g., coding questions need a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve&quot;&gt;&lt;s&gt;MCVE&lt;/s&gt; reproducible example&lt;/a&gt;).&quot;  I suggest this because I would guess 99% of the threads that don't meet their standards do not by virtue of lacking a MCVE.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Update:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Hmmm, I would prefer they be separate, but if you can only have three then we're stuck.  Still, I would prefer the reasons be more distinct.  The current text makes it possible that someone would misread it and slur the two reasons together.  ('What do you mean that my programming question doesn't require any knowledge of statistics to answer?')  I might try:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because EITHER it is not about statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, or data visualization, OR it focuses on programming, debugging, or performing routine operations within a statistical computing platform. If the latter, you could try the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/793&quot;&gt;support links we maintain&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The custom reason comment allows for 500 characters.  If this reason must be 100 less, we get 400.  My suggested text above is 377 characters.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd still like to get the reproducible example in.  We could also try:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because EITHER it is not about statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, or data visualization, OR it focuses on programming, debugging, or routine operations in software without a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve&quot;&gt;reproducible example&lt;/a&gt;. If the latter, you could try at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/793&quot;&gt;links here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That clearly required me to use very sparse text, but it is 395 characters.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2015-03-09T03:02:41.240" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2428" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2429" CreationDate="2015-03-10T21:55:30.020" Score="6" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to do a community talk about hypothesis testing and want to focus on significance testing and p-values in particular. They have been a bit in the news as well recently (with some journal banning their use) and I wanted to try and present a balanced viewpoint on what they show and what they don't, reporting effect sizes, alternatives etc. So basically I do not have a specific question but wanted some hints on where to start reading about this to formulate the understanding and material for an informal talk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what I was wondering if I asked the CV community about some must read online and offline resources on this topic, would that be a valid question given that it is quite broad? I would guess this is not an acceptable question but wanted to confirm. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36540" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-03-11T14:02:06.093" LastActivityDate="2015-03-11T14:02:06.093" Title="Question about recommended readings" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|references|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2428" CreationDate="2015-03-11T03:23:20.440" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This doesn't seem like a bad question, or that it should be off-topic necessarily, to me.  Questions asking for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/references&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;references&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;references&lt;/a&gt;, and questions asking about the theoretical / philosophical aspects of hypothesis testing have long been on-topic.  Instead, I see two potential issues:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Try to frame your question in such a way that there can be a right answer or an answer that can justifiably be selected as the accepted one.  It may be worth reading the classic SE blog post &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/real-questions-have-answers/&quot;&gt;Real questions have answers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Be careful that your question doesn't become too diffuse.  You are asking about a lot of topics (&quot;what they show and what they don't, reporting effect sizes, alternatives etc.&quot;).  That isn't necessarily out of bounds&amp;mdash;it depends on how well you can weave them together.  If necessary, you can ask a series of focused questions, where each in turn ties in to the threads that preceded it (by linking, etc.).  Also be aware that some of those topics have already been discussed on the site, so be sure you've searched thoroughly first.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2015-03-11T03:23:20.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2431" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-16T20:00:27.603" Score="10" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 2015 Community Moderator Election is now underway!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community moderator elections have three phases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nomination phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Primary phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Election phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please visit the official election page at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for more detail, and to participate!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/election&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;election&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;election&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-03-16T20:00:27.603" Title="2015 Community Moderator Election" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-03-16T20:00:27.603" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2432" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-16T20:00:40.617" Score="15" ViewCount="361" Body="&lt;p&gt;In connection with the moderator elections, as with our last session in 2013, we will be holding a Q&amp;amp;A with the candidates.  This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation.  Participation is completely voluntary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2460/2015-moderator-election-qa-questionnaire&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how it'll work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;During the nomination phase, (so, until Monday, March 23rd at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 4:00 pm EDT on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post &lt;em&gt;one question per answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The first two will be guaranteed to be included, the latter ones are if the community doesn't supply enough questions. This will be done in a single post, unlike the prior instruction.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into at current.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the phase, the Community Team will select &lt;strong&gt;up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community&lt;/strong&gt; provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions. We reserve some editorial control in the selection of the questions and may opt not to select a question that is tangential or irrelevant to moderation or the election. That said, if I have concerns about any questions in this fashion, I will be sure to point this out in comments before the decision making time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Once questions have been selected, a new question will be opened to host the actual questionnaire for the candidates, containing 10 questions in total.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&amp;amp;A.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any questions or feedback about this new process, feel free to post as a comment here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5645" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2015-03-23T21:05:12.720" Title="2015 Moderator Election Q&amp;A - Question Collection" Tags="|discussion|moderation|election|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2432" CreationDate="2015-03-16T20:00:40.617" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a set of general questions, gathered as very common questions asked every election. As mentioned in the instructions, the first two questions are guaranteed to show up in the Q&amp;amp;A, while the others are if there aren't enough questions (or, if you like one enough, you may split it off as a separate answer for review within the community's 8). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In your opinion, what do moderators do? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5645" LastActivityDate="2015-03-16T20:00:40.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2432" CreationDate="2015-03-16T20:16:00.910" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you have a vision for the future of the site that is different from how it is now?  In other words, do you hope to move the site in a new direction in any respect?  If so, what, and how would that be an improvement?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2015-03-16T20:16:00.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2435" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2436" CreationDate="2015-03-16T22:36:32.057" Score="7" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;The post &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/141285/approaches-for-generating-synthetic-survey-data-with-dependent-answers&quot;&gt;Approaches for generating synthetic survey data with dependent answers?&lt;/a&gt; closed for being too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post is now far less broad (Vass edited it extensively, I've since tidied it a little) -- indeed there are many far broader questions on site that remain open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closure should be a way to help people improve their questions. I think that's happened (I don't think it's a perfect question -- just an answerable one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's consistent for this post to stay closed as too broad, yet as far as I can see it remains on only one vote to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone who voted for it to remain closed clarify what's still too broad about it? What would it need to make it even more narrowly focused so that it's no longer overly broad?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-03-16T23:52:11.590" Title="Can anyone suggest why this post has not reopened?" Tags="|discussion|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2435" CreationDate="2015-03-16T23:52:11.590" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;All this question needed was a reopen vote. That would have kicked this question back into the reopen queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was one reopen vote cast after Vass's edit, but it was cast &lt;em&gt;while the first reopen review was still happening&lt;/em&gt;. So when the verdict of that review turned out to be &quot;Leave Closed&quot;, that reopen vote's power to kick questions up to the queue was tragically stymied. But since the post was not reopened, that vote was never cleared, so the original reopen-voter couldn't re-use their vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simple, right? (Has the word 'reopen' totally lost meaning for anyone else? Just me? Okay fine.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6123" LastActivityDate="2015-03-16T23:52:11.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2432" CreationDate="2015-03-17T02:35:52.403" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;In your opinion, is there a serious threat/challenge that Cross Validated currently faces? If yes what is it? Do you believe that as a moderator you could contribute more towards dealing with it, and if yes, how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28746" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T02:35:52.403" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2432" CreationDate="2015-03-17T12:24:45.220" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;What other sites on SE system are you active on, if any? Compared to these sites, how would you characterize the atmosphere and style on CV, if it is any different? How are you going to handle questions and topics that are borderline between CV and these complementary areas of expertise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T12:24:45.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2439" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-03-17T13:34:01.323" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;What are community moderators?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators are site users who have been elected by the community based on not only their knowledge in the topic domain, but also because they are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;patient and fair&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;lead by example&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;show respect for their fellow community member in their actions and words&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators have the very highest level of privilege in our system:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moderator votes are binding. Any place we have voting (close, open, delete, undelete, offensive, etc), that vote will reach the threshold and take effect immediately if a single moderator casts a vote.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moderators can lock posts. Locked posts cannot be voted on or changed in any way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moderators can protect posts. Protected posts cannot be answered by new users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moderators can see all data in the system, including votes and user profile information.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moderators can place users in timed suspension, and delete users if necessary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moderators can perform large-scale maintenance actions like merge questions and batch retag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moderators have access to the moderator flag queue&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How do community moderators work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following guidelines are provided to all our community moderators, and all moderators of any type are expected to abide by them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As a moderator, your actions now represent our community; please act accordingly. You are in a position of the highest trust.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your goal is to guide the community with gentle — but firm — intervention. &lt;strong&gt;Respect&lt;/strong&gt; your fellow community members at all times; demonstrate &lt;strong&gt;fairness&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;impartiality&lt;/strong&gt; in your actions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keep the discussion reasonably on topic by providing visible feedback to indicate where and why things have gone off topic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Regularly check for and deal with posts &lt;strong&gt;flagged for moderator attention&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the case of serious disputes, communicate directly with users via email to help &lt;strong&gt;mediate and resolve disputes&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;When should I seek out a community moderator?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't hesitate to &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;flag posts for moderator attention&lt;/a&gt; any time there is something you feel strongly needs to be brought to the attention of a moderator. And if it is extremely urgent, you can always mail the address provided in the footer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;.Reference: Imported excerpt and wiki from the main &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/election/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-03-18T08:18:28.677" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T08:18:28.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2440" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-03-17T13:34:01.323" Score="0" Body="Elections are held to choose moderators for non-Beta Stack Exchange sites" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-03-18T08:18:22.430" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T08:18:22.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2441" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-03-17T13:42:11.037" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathJax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MathJax&lt;/a&gt; is used to write mathematical expressions on this site. Its syntax is essentially the same as LaTeX.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported excerpt and wiki from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/tags/mathjax/info&quot;&gt;Mathematics Stack Exchange Meta&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2015-03-17T13:57:26.203" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T13:57:26.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2442" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-03-17T13:42:11.037" Score="0" Body="For questions about MathJax, which is used to write mathematical notation on this site" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-03-17T14:13:43.113" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T14:13:43.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2432" CreationDate="2015-03-18T16:34:43.853" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The multiple objectives of any SE site create an inherent tension,&lt;/strong&gt; forcing us to make decisions that trade off between&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Being accommodating to people (especially new visitors) who just want a question answered (quickly),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Creating high-quality, canonical answers to clear objective questions,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Establishing a well-functioning set of semantic links to make it easy for people to get answers themselves, and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Rewarding community members for their participation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, a visitor might post a question that is not initially perfect: it might include a request for code (&lt;em&gt;off topic&lt;/em&gt;) with an indication that a statistical procedure is needed (&lt;em&gt;on topic&lt;/em&gt;).  It might refer to a procedure that is obscure to the wider statistical community (&lt;em&gt;unclear&lt;/em&gt;) but well-known within a subcommunity (such as &amp;quot;cumulative match scoring&amp;quot; in the face-recognition literature).  Any of the actions available to us--closing, deleting, commenting, editing, up/down voting, flagging, and even private conversations--will have positive and negative ramifications.  &lt;strong&gt;With many questions (and answers), there is no one best action to take.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How should we act?&lt;/strong&gt; As a general moderation strategy, should we lean towards&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Providing friendly welcoming comments and editing new posts for readability, &lt;em&gt;even when they initially are not up to our standards&lt;/em&gt; (objective 1),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Quickly closing any questions that require improvement--&lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; those that seem to be code-oriented--so that we are not plagued by bad questions and a low answer rate (objective 2),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Insisting on appropriate tags and evidence of prior research--such as providing links to related questions--before we allow a post to stay open (objective 3), or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Making sure &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot; questions and answers are closed and deleted as soon as possible so that people don't accumulate reputation and badges merely for a large quantity of bad work (objective 4).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of these strategies, if pursued dogmatically, can be carried too far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators routinely have to make difficult decisions that will be good for some of these objectives but bad for the others.  A good moderator is aware of this and has a principled, consciously developed strategy for making them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;As a moderator, where do you plan to strike a balance among these objectives?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please don't say you will accomplish all four: we have extensive evidence that it can't be done.  What principles will you apply when no possible action is good?  Which objectives do you want to favor the most?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T16:34:43.853" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2444" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-19T12:29:41.267" Score="10" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/142443/simple-non-linear-regression-problem&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;, a user was regressing car price on mileage. The user wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm trying to modelize a simple use case : predicting the price of a&#xA;  car based on its mileage, with RStudio. I know it's a really naive&#xA;  model, juste one variable but it's for comprehension purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, explicitly acknowledging the shortcomings of their naïve approach. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem that the user was experiencing was that with a simple linear regression, they obtained negative predictions. They asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How to get a curve instead of a straight line ? I suppose that lm can&#xA;  only generate straight lines (ax1+bx2+....+A)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and also showed what they were looking for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'd like to get such visreg (red curve) : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/APfNk.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I answered saying that you can easily get curves in R by including quadratic (or higher) terms in the &lt;code&gt;lm&lt;/code&gt; command. I also suggested nonparametric regression, as that can also yield smoother and curved regression lines. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What surprised me was that my answer was downvoted because I didn't supply a warning about heteroscedasticity, and I was told that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On this site, even if OP asks for it, you should not give advice that&#xA;  would get them into trouble; at least not without a warning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this really a formal rule of this site? It seems to me utterly pointless in this situation to point out possible modeling problems when the OP herself starts out by pointing out that this is a naïve approach. I think it is quite obvious that a good model with good possibilities for making inference is not the objective -- the question is about how you get a curved line! Was my answer insufficient and/or misleading and not meeting the standards of this site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20995" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-03-25T02:17:09.047" Title="Giving advice without warnings" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2444" CreationDate="2015-03-19T13:01:33.643" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm quite sure it's not a formal rule. Though it's clearly a sound principle (&amp;amp; recall that answers are for all future readers, &amp;amp; not just the original asker of a question) it can be hard to know where to draw the line in particular cases. At any rate people are entitled to down-vote according to their own opinion of which side of the line an answer falls on. Common practice here (again, not a formal rule) is for down-voters to explain their reason &amp;amp; to reverse the down-vote if the answer is edited to remove that reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the commenter in this case didn't explicitly say he down-voted your answer, so there's a possibility it may have been someone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion on this particular case, for what it's worth, is that the evident heteroskedasticity in the example data set merits a mention at least, &amp;amp; that your edit in response to criticism does improve your answer (+1).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2015-03-19T13:12:16.603" LastActivityDate="2015-03-19T13:12:16.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2444" CreationDate="2015-03-20T05:01:12.763" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is incumbent on the more knowledgeable, when they give advice, to also inform the asker when their choices may not be particularly suitable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's certainly possible to take the position &quot;I just answered the question as asked&quot;, and to an extent, I can sympathize with that, but (to take it to an extreme, in order to illustrate a point) imagine someone goes to the doctor with a question like &quot;which is more likely to lead to an improvement in my sore neck - arsenic or cyanide?&quot;. The doctor &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; simply answer the question (presumably by reasoning that since arsenic should kill you more slowly, your neck might well improve before you died), but most people would regard that as very poor advice from the doctor, and argue that in fact the doctor should focus on pointing out that both those options are extremely bad ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, somewhere between someone asking a question about an innocuous activity, and someone asking about a dangerous one, there's a large spectrum of more or less inadvisable ones, and there are times when we should be saying so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's &lt;em&gt;certainly&lt;/em&gt; not our job to try to generate some optimal analysis every time; indeed, often simple (if somewhat suboptimal) analyses - if they contain no dangerous surprises - may be actually good advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we have to figure out where to draw the line and when to say &quot;wait, this may not be such a great idea as is&quot;. I'd certainly have mentioned something about the issue in that particular case (if I was answering the question), but given the details of the question (it's for &quot;comprehension purposes&quot;) I wouldn't have downvoted your earlier answer (and didn't when I read it). The OP doesn't appear to be attempting inference (tests, CIs, standard errors, etc), so the issue of heteroskedasticity is more about efficiency. I don't think it's necessarily that huge a deal; suitability (or unsuitability) of the model for the mean would worry me more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while I wouldn't downvote in your case, there is some further point along the spectrum of questionable actions at which I'd say &quot;actually, that's not good advice&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally someone comments about what the problem is when they think there's a big enough problem to downvote, but it doesn't always happen (and you have no way to know who downvoted you if they don't tell you they did). The best thing you can do is try to understand people's comments and where it makes sense, try to accommodate them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2015-03-25T02:17:09.047" LastActivityDate="2015-03-25T02:17:09.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2448" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2489" CreationDate="2015-03-20T11:47:57.863" Score="13" ViewCount="328" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are making questions to nominees (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2432/2015-moderator-election-qa-question-collection&quot;&gt;2015 Moderator Election Q&amp;amp;A - Question Collection&lt;/a&gt;), however until now we have only &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; nominees while there are two moderator positions, so the questions and voting would be a formality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why there is so little interest in being a moderator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally would consider it, but I am afraid I could not have enough time for moderator duties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas or comments? This one seems quite important for this site but there is very little interest in Moderator Election in our community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2016-03-20T13:34:41.757" Title="Two Nominees for 2015 Moderator Election" Tags="|discussion|moderation|election|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2444" CreationDate="2015-03-20T11:52:50.117" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;To echo others: the comment was not presented as a formal rule, and is not a formal rule. It's itself advice, and good advice so far as it goes, but clearly more could be said. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own view for the question discussed is that advising people to consider quadratics, let alone higher-order polynomials, is advice somewhere between dubious and misguided. That's naturally a judgment call. Positively, I say that  because fitting exponential decline seems a much, much more natural starting place. Negatively, I say that because quadratics and cubics may be non-monotonic and may predict negative prices and may even do either within the range of the data. That's difficult to defend when better models appear to be better starting places. Indeed, to my eye a quadratic is predicting negative prices within the range of the data. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise put, in this specific case, quadratics and cubics won't even necessarily solve the perceived problem of negative predictions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, recurrent issues: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It may be advisable to tailor advice to the perceived level of the question or questioner. That is always tricky, and not just because it may be hard to estimate. &#xA;(In this specific case, the OP does not seem to grasp exactly what logarithms imply.) &#xA;The stance of the forum is that questions and answers of real value should always be of interest to people other than the OP, much though many posters have interest only in their own immediate question. So, often there is a judgment call on addressing a very specific question directly or trying to broaden it, or even to shift it in more interesting or useful directions. (But advising that the OP needs help from a professional with greater expertise is often the right thing to do.) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Imparting caution is advisable, almost always. Often a question can be answered at least in part, but a complete answer on what should be done depends on any or all of (a) knowledge of the real goals of the analysis (b) explanation of the underlying scientific or practical context (c) access to a dataset. It is common that any or even all of those are not given adequately to allow a full answer. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Rewriting the question may be needed. Sometimes the question needs even to be turned around completely if the OP is not to remain wrong or confused. For example, it is common for posters to focus on some detail of significance testing when the larger unstated question implies that the test they are using is inappropriate or some quite different focus is needed. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2015-03-20T15:00:14.987" LastActivityDate="2015-03-20T15:00:14.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2450" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-20T22:34:04.677" Score="6" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since I don't have the enough reputation to &quot;add a comment&quot; (less than 50), I was surprised that I can't find the way to send a private message to another user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44724" OwnerDisplayName="Darwin PC" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-03-23T17:22:35.800" LastActivityDate="2015-03-23T17:22:35.800" Title="Sending a private message to another user?" Tags="|discussion|support|users|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-03-23T21:48:00.413" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1607" CreationDate="2015-03-20T22:35:55.073" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;If they do not supply contact information in their profile, then you cannot contact them privately through this site.  SE does not work that way.  We respect our users' wishes to remain private.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think there is an emergency--for instance, if a user might inadvertently have posted sensitive information and you wish to warn them--then please just flag their post for moderator attention.  When you raise the flag you will be able to explain the reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2015-03-20T22:35:55.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2452" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2453" CreationDate="2015-03-21T14:40:19.127" Score="13" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading a paper on &lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.322.213&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;multiple change-point model&lt;/a&gt; and do not understand one of the equation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it considered on-topic to ask questions about a paper like that? On the one hand, it's clearly statistics. On the other hand, the question may be so specific that it may not contribute towards &quot;building a knowledge site&quot;. Plus, I'm not sure about the community's reception towards question about specific paper (vs. question about general statistical concept.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20148" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-03-22T13:14:00.673" LastActivityDate="2015-03-22T13:14:00.673" Title="Is it okay to ask question about a specific paper / model?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|references|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2452" CreationDate="2015-03-21T14:54:53.933" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see any necessary problem with asking a question like that.  Here are some things to be sure you do:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide a complete and correct citation for the paper.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide a link to the paper.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Paste into the body of your question the equation / text you need help understanding (i.e., don't just say 'I need help with equation 5').  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Paste in enough of the context that the question can stand on its own and potential answerers don't &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to read the paper to answer your question, if they don't want to.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recognize that the existence of &lt;strong&gt;4&lt;/strong&gt; seems inconsistent with &lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt;, but you should do all four.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;N.B., you say that your question is statistical.  I have no reason not to take you at your word.  But if your question were only about, say, the &lt;em&gt;derivation&lt;/em&gt; of the equation, 'how does equation $i$ fall out of equation $i-1$', it may be a better fit on SE's &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;math site&lt;/a&gt;.  Likewise, if it were about the economic implications of the equation, it may be a better fit on SE's &lt;a href=&quot;https://economics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;economics site&lt;/a&gt;, etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:51:38.237" LastActivityDate="2015-03-21T14:54:53.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2452" CreationDate="2015-03-21T18:22:22.080" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's fine. After all, a &quot;knowledge site&quot; doesn't mean a statistical textbook or encyclopaedia&amp;mdash;those exist already, &amp;amp; answering specific, even idiosyncratic, questions is almost the raison d'&amp;ecirc;tre of CV, certainly its forte. If you follow @gung's advice the question will be as potentially useful to other people as it can be; if it happens not to help anyone else, no harm done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2015-03-21T18:22:22.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2455" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2463" CreationDate="2015-03-23T00:47:36.100" Score="14" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;election page&lt;/a&gt; there is a link &quot;review history&quot; under each nomination. It's supposed to display the list of nominee's reviews, but it does not. The reason is a recent tweak of user profile pages: the tab &quot;activity&quot; has been renamed &quot;all actions&quot; and its URL was changed accordingly. The election page has outdated links. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case this does not get fixed quickly, the functioning links to the reviews of present nominees (in alphabetical order) appear below. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/44952/chris-c?tab=allactions&amp;amp;sort=reviews&quot;&gt;Chris C reviews&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/48639/emcor?tab=allactions&amp;amp;sort=reviews&quot;&gt;emcor reviews&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/805/glen-b?tab=allactions&amp;amp;sort=reviews&quot;&gt;Glen_b reviews&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/17230/scortchi?tab=allactions&amp;amp;sort=reviews&quot;&gt;Scortchi reviews&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user56674" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-03-24T11:13:34.340" Title="Links to review history on the election page are broken" Tags="|bug|status-completed|election|review|profile-page|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2456" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-03-23T17:35:52.690" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for for general questions about users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag usage:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider adding complementary tags, when the question is about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;accounts of users: &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/user-accounts&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'user-accounts'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;user-accounts&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;new users: &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/new-users&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'new-users'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;new-users&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;user interface* elements (inputs, checkboxes, etc): &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/user-interface&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'user-interface'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;user-interface&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*For questions about the design of elements, use &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'design'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;design&lt;/a&gt; (without &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/users&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'users'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;users&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-03-23T21:37:08.473" LastActivityDate="2015-03-23T21:37:08.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2457" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-03-23T17:35:52.690" Score="0" Body="For general questions about users." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-03-23T21:36:36.637" LastActivityDate="2015-03-23T21:36:36.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2458" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-03-23T17:38:31.333" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For questions about the user interface elements (inputs, checkboxes, etc) that make up this site. For questions about the design of elements, use &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'design'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;design&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported excerpt and wiki from the main &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/user-interface/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-03-23T20:54:14.690" LastActivityDate="2015-03-23T20:54:14.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2459" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-03-23T17:38:31.333" Score="0" Body="For questions about the user interface elements (inputs, checkboxes, etc) that make up this site. For questions about the design of elements, use the design tag." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-03-23T21:37:22.427" LastActivityDate="2015-03-23T21:37:22.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2460" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-23T20:04:09.103" Score="20" ViewCount="576" Body="&lt;p&gt;In connection with the moderator elections, we are holding a Q&amp;amp;A thread for the candidates. Questions collected &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2432/2015-moderator-election-qa-question-collection&quot;&gt;from an earlier thread&lt;/a&gt; have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as the space for the candidates to provide their answers. Due to the lack of submission count, we have selected all provided questions as well as our back up questions for a total of 9 questions. I did try splitting whuber's question into two but ultimately condensed it into a single one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a candidate, your job is simple - post an answer to this question, citing each of the questions and then post your answer to each question given in that same answer. For your convenience, I will include all of the questions in quote format with a break in between each, suitable for you to insert your answers. Just &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/c62a6fba-ef6b-469c-a522-6262036df371/view-source&quot;&gt;copy the whole thing after the first set of three dashes&lt;/a&gt;. Oh, and please consider putting your name at the top of your post so that readers will know who you are before they finish reading everything you have written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once all the answers have been compiled, this will serve as a transcript for voters to view the thoughts of their candidates, and will be appropriately linked in the Election page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck to all of the candidates!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1)&lt;/strong&gt; What other sites on SE system are you active on, if any? Compared to these sites, how would you characterize the atmosphere and style on CV, if it is any different? How are you going to handle questions and topics that are borderline between CV and these complementary areas of expertise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2)&lt;/strong&gt; Do you have a vision for the future of the site that is different from how it is now? In other words, do you hope to move the site in a new direction in any respect? If so, what, and how would that be an improvement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3)&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2443/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The multiple objectives of any SE site create an inherent tension&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, forcing us to make decisions that trade off between accommodating askers, creating canonical resources, establishing discoverability of content, and rewarding community members for their participation. With many questions (and answers), there is no one best action to take. As a general moderation strategy, how do you believe we should act? Where do you plan to strike a balance among these objectives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4)&lt;/strong&gt; In your opinion, is there a serious threat/challenge that Cross Validated currently faces? If yes what is it? Do you believe that as a moderator you could contribute more towards dealing with it, and if yes, how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;5)&lt;/strong&gt; How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;6)&lt;/strong&gt; How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;7)&lt;/strong&gt; In your opinion, what do moderators do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;8)&lt;/strong&gt; A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;9)&lt;/strong&gt; In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5645" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2015-03-26T18:11:40.323" Title="2015 Moderator Election Q&amp;A - Questionnaire" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2432" CreationDate="2015-03-23T20:24:36.337" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cross Validated has struggled with finding the line between statistical questions that happen to involve programming, which are on-topic, and programming questions that happen to use statistical tools, which aren't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please explain how you will draw this line, ideally by providing examples which are &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; on either side of that line. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7250" LastEditorUserId="7250" LastEditDate="2015-03-23T21:05:12.720" LastActivityDate="2015-03-23T21:05:12.720" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2333" CreationDate="2015-03-23T21:46:26.800" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://worldstatisticsday.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tSZhY.png&quot; alt=&quot;World Statistics Day 2015&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2015-03-23T21:46:26.800" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-03-23T21:46:26.800" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2455" CreationDate="2015-03-24T11:13:34.340" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apologies for breaking all these URLs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've pushed out a change to make these link go to the right place (the links you posted here no longer work).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24254" LastActivityDate="2015-03-24T11:13:34.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2460" CreationDate="2015-03-24T12:18:25.737" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Glen_b&lt;/strong&gt;'s answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I copied and started working on the questions before Alecos' and Nick's edits above. I'm not going back to change it now. It shouldn't make any substantive difference.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before starting I apologize for the length of this post -- there were many questions, some quite searching. I suggest you look for the questions you're most interested in rather than try to read the whole thing (in any case I come back to similar themes in several of my answers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What other sites on SE system are you active on, if any? Compared to these sites, how would you characterize the atmosphere and style on CV, if it is any different? How are you going to handle questions and topics that are borderline between CV and these complementary areas of expertise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/users/330679/glen-b&quot;&gt;asking and answering questions&lt;/a&gt;  on StackOverflow since before CrossValidated existed - just under 5 years; I've been active enough there to have four Yearling badges on that site, with (at the time I write this) 82 posts in all. Some of my answers have been quite well received - my &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12119019/r-select-multiple-elements-from-a-list/12119050#12119050&quot;&gt;highest rated answer&lt;/a&gt; there is currently 3 votes shy of a 'Good Answer' badge. I've asked three questions. All but a few of the 82 posts I've made there are related to R (the others being of a statistical nature related to things like C and SPSS for example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On math.stackexchange I've been &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/users/47748/glen-b&quot;&gt;answering questions&lt;/a&gt; there about 2.5 years - long enough to have a couple of &quot;Yearling&quot; badges (and 33 answers). About 80% of my answers relate to statistics or probability, and the remainder are just other mathematics questions of various kinds. My highest ranked answer is a series of leading questions for a homework question involving linear algebra and calculus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think both of those sites have a greater fraction of  short-answer &quot;routine bookwork&quot; questions which tend to produce a &quot;fastest gun in the west&quot; mentality (and the greater volume in both places tends to encourage that approach further). Answerers in those places often tend to just answer such questions plainly. CrossValidated has a carefully cultivated approach of giving thoughtful guidance on such questions. This involves considerably more effort on the part of answerers, moderators and other participants -- including askers. While the effort is higher, I think the outcome is generally better, since it helps people come to understand the questions and the answers. Many askers are able to arrive at their own solutions, which is far more valuable. This approach also demystifies statistics, helping to reveal the underlying logic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, StackOverflow's questions are (necessarily) focused to a larger extent on the mechanics of code, and math.stackexchange tends to largely concentrate on very tightly focused, specific mathematical problems (I think variation on &quot;how do I do this question?&quot; would characterize most of the posts there), and 'fastest gun in the west' raises its head again. CrossValidated seems to have a larger fraction of relatively subtle questions about how to get from some vaguely expressed question of interest to a question that can be answered with data and issues with the resulting analysis -- and in which different experts can have quite different, often illuminating takes not only on how to approach it, but even on what might make a good answer. The questions often involve a lot of effort at clarification before the underlying issue is revealed – askers of statistics questions understandably often don't even know what it is they want to know! A question ostensibly about t-tests eventually turns out to need an analysis involving mixed-effects logistic regression, for example. Perhaps unsurprisingly, comment threads are often very long, and the resulting answers tend to be a lot longer on average than the other sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think one difference is a relatively more collegial atmosphere here. [This is not to suggest collegiality is absent from the other two, nor in any way to imply that they're in any way 'doing it wrong' -- the differences in style (such as they are) are to a large extent a product of the kinds of questions that are asked, and also the much larger volume of questions.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd handle questions at the borderline with these groups exactly as I have so far. If a question is posted to any site that is on topic for both that site and a second site, there's no problem to solve: it should stay where it was posted. If it's off topic here but on there, it should move. If I am in doubt, I lean toward being conservative - give the original poster the benefit of the doubt and assume they chose to post it where they did for a reason. There’s also the opinions of other voters when questions are nominated for closure as on topic elsewhere, so if I’m unsure, there will be other opinions - usually quite soon. I've dealt with many questions that have moved, often both answering a question and voting to close it as being on topic elsewhere. Sometimes where a post is probably on topic but could do better elsewhere, I instead encourage the original poster to consider flagging their own post to ask a moderator to move it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you have a vision for the future of the site that is different from how it is now? In other words, do you hope to move the site in a new direction in any respect? If so, what, and how would that be an improvement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think any major change should not come from me, but from the community more generally - via open discussions on our meta site. That's how site-specific policies are discussed, informally voted on and occasionally modified, though usually we're talking about a minor change in emphasis rather than anything big.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bigger changes, especially any that require programming, tend to be discussed on meta.SE and again, that's for the broader community to discuss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the site does what it does very well, so I wouldn't want to change it too much. I think the challenge will be trying to maintain its best aspects in the face of rapid growth, and that's a community effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to see a minor change in emphasis on a couple of points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;occasionally I think some posts are put on hold more quickly than necessary; where feasible I'd like to encourage change-before-closure. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think many new users need guidance - someone to explain how to find out what the conventions and expectations are. I try to do that when I can, and I'd like to encourage more of that.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as the site keeps growing those kinds of encouragement will need to come from ordinary users of the site -- moderators will tend to have their hands full, and will likely need to lean more on the tools provided rather than extended discussion. We have lots of new users every day, and at best a handful of moderators can only discuss things with a very small percentage of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the changes I'd like to see are ones that come from more participation by ordinary users. I'll try to facilitate that, and where possible to lead by example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2443/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The multiple objectives of any SE site create an inherent tension&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, forcing us to make decisions that trade off between accommodating askers, creating canonical resources, establishing discoverability of content, and rewarding community members for their participation. With many questions (and answers), there is no one best action to take. As a general moderation strategy, how do you believe we should act? Where do you plan to strike a balance among these objectives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with several parts of the questions here, this is not entirely a theoretical question for me -- my response largely represent what I already try to do*, and what I will aim to do as a moderator where I can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*(except that some of the things I presently can only vote for, or raise in some other capacity – comments to the poster, flags, and so on, I could actually do as a moderator)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The various choices of action should be based on the particular characteristics of the situation - the specific issues with the post, and in some cases the history of similar posts by the same user. I don’t have a fixed and unchanging set of rules -- the number of variables is quite large, but I will explain what I can for some situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many cases, where time permits and signs are encouraging, I feel we should try to guide new users - for many users whose question is not so far from suitable, a few words of suggestion (or a quick edit) are often sufficient to convey the right idea. In those cases, putting a question on hold can be held in reserve, for cases where some guidance proves inadequate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some other cases, the question is relatively more poor, and for those questions it makes more sense to put the question on hold until the question improves. In some cases we can help with that, but (for example) where the user hasn't learned from guidance, I think it's sometimes necessary to ask that they fix (or help to fix) the post themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The choice of approach is partly subjective, but often the indicators of problem posts become clear with a little experience helping new users with their questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a frequent participant in review queues, we see posts where such choices can be difficult sometimes. One thing I frequently do after voting on such choices is to look back and see how other people voted, which helps me see how I stand in relation to other voters -- particularly the more experienced ones. This helps to give a more consistent style across questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Encouraging good use of tags and titles is something I think can often be done by example (if you add tags to a post it helps users understand more about how tags work), but sometimes it makes more sense to encourage the original poster to fix it themselves. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regular removal of duplicates and occasional merging of posts is one important part of encouraging canonical answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Detecting &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; posts, on the other hand, is something that moderators and many high reputation users do all the time -- but almost anyone can help: flagging a post with serious problems is something almost any user can do.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In your opinion, is there a serious threat/challenge that Cross Validated currently faces? If yes what is it? Do you believe that as a moderator you could contribute more towards dealing with it, and if yes, how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see a number of possible challenges. One is that with rapid growth we've seen a drop in the proportion of questions getting answered. Both questions and answers per day are growing, but questions grow more quickly than answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A second challenge is that as the sheer volume of questions grows, it becomes harder for ten or twenty active people to curate them all - to fix mistakes in questions or answers, to identify duplicates and off-topic questions, to ask for clarification of issues, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To some extent yes, though mostly indirectly. We're beyond the point where one or two more moderators will affect those particular challenges much -- but fortunately these things don't need moderator privilege to deal with. Let's consider a few actions and the reputation you need: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Essentially anyone who is registered can offer an answer or suggest an edit and it only takes 15 reputation to vote up or flag a post. Those four things are the lion's share of what we need more of. We have thousands of users that can do this -- and this is where I think we can best encourage more participation - answers, suggested edits, votes and flags. Editing to improve a post is part of curating the site. If you would like a healthy site, find one question you can answer and start typing, or one post that needs some work to be a clear, useful post and click that &quot;edit&quot; link at the bottom. Even if you can't provide a full answer to a question, you can encourage someone who does, by upvoting good answers. Flag posts that need moderator attention. Moderators can't be everywhere - tell them what needs fixing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At 50 reputation you can comment everywhere. Is a question ambiguous or unclear? Ask for clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At 500 reputation you can start accessing review queues. If you review one late post or one new user's first post, you're actually &lt;em&gt;helping to moderate the site&lt;/em&gt;. It's not just the people with the diamond who can moderate. We have over 600 users who can review posts. (My own first reviews were in September 2012; my reputation was below 1000 at the time.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone should take a look at what they can do. You might be surprised how may ways you have to make the site better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So even if I were a moderator, I see my ability to deal with these challenges as mostly trying to encourage ordinary users to help out more -- those challenges are really challenges for all of us who want the site to continue to be successful and useful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a series of steps that can be taken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first is simply to discuss the issue with the user (there's the possibility of private chat for example), and conversation is always the first avenue. Most people will respond, if approached in a reasonable way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Occasionally stronger action is required, and moderators have several options if stronger action becomes necessary. These have been discussed on our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1303/what-is-a-super-ping-and-what-does-it-mean-if-i-get-one/1304#1304&quot;&gt;meta site&lt;/a&gt;, for example, and can even include things like suspension. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone who generates a large number of arguments and flags is disruptive of the wider community, and harmful to the long term health of the site; giving lots of good answers doesn't change that assessment. It may be a tragedy to lose an active participant, even temporarily, but the alternative - an increasingly dysfunctional site that leads to the loss of even more-valuable members - would be worse. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me this is not a theoretical question, because it's something I've already dealt with in my capacity as an involved ordinary user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'd do pretty much what I've done already when that's happened - simply raise the issue and discuss it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, there are several meta posts where I did exactly that (please, go ahead and review my meta questions to see this), and one or two minor queries raised on chat or in comments. These issues are nearly always resolved satisfactorily one way or another. However, moderators have the ability to have that discussion in private where necessary -- my preference would be to discuss in public whenever that's reasonable, as now, because I think moderation should try to be as open as possible, but I have no problem doing it privately, especially if there's any question of sensitivity or privacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In your opinion, what do moderators do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the shallow sense, what moderators is not a matter of opinion: the privileges and duties are laid out; I won't labor the point by reiterating them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the broader sense, moderators keep the site &lt;em&gt;effective&lt;/em&gt; - on topic, clear of spam, reasonably polite, and so on. There are a number of effectively 'janitorial' administrative tasks that the site can't take care of on its own, and now and then some &quot;guidance of people&quot; is needed that occasionally requires more than ordinary peer pressure, again with the aim of keeping the site effective. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;StackExchange sites are intended to be long term repositories of good questions with good answers; a lot of what moderators do is, in one way or another, ultimately based around keeping it that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general principle I think this isn't a good thing, since it retrospectively alters the light in which those things will be seen (in fact, I see this as a design flaw). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even as a moderator, I think we should be able to 'take off the badge' when not acting in the capacity of a moderator (presumably this would necessitate something like instituting a second 'moderator' account for moderators, attached to but separate from their normal one). When I answer a question, or ask one, or comment on a statistical problem with an answer (rather than things like formatting, layout or style), I'm just being an ordinary user and my words shouldn't have any 'official' weight attached to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in terms of my own use of the site it's not that great a concern for me. There's a couple of my less polite comments in the past that I'd rather not see the diamond on, for example and with things like those, when I encounter them I may well delete some (but this is not unusual, I delete some of my old comments when I see them already). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This depends on the particular capacities in which we're judging effectiveness. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My stated aim in my nomination was to help the moderators more than I presently can. While I have more than 20K reputation, and access to moderator tools (and use them almost every day), moderators can still do numerous things that I cannot. Some jobs require a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly in that sense, access to those additional privileges that come with the diamond will give me greater scope to give aid where it's needed. In particular, I'd be able to help out with things like moving posts to other SE sites, removing spam and various of the other moderator tasks that I can't presently do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some tools that moderators have access to may also make me a little faster at things I can presently do. Since time is finite, faster means doing more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other senses, I will actually be less effective. I presently answer a lot of questions on the site. I expect that with the additional duties I'll be taking on, I'll be answering a lot fewer questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2015-03-25T20:52:46.197" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2460" CreationDate="2015-03-24T18:10:33.407" Score="15" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1)&lt;/strong&gt; What other sites on SE system are you active on, if any? Compared to these sites, how would you characterize the atmosphere and style on CV, if it is any different? How are you going to handle questions and topics that are borderline between CV and these complementary areas of expertise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not very active on any other SE sites. I look things up on Stack Overflow from time to time, but I think any answers of mine there were migrated from Cross Validated. If a question is borderline, &amp;amp; not simply misplaced, it's often necessary to clarify its statistical aspects by asking about them in comments; if it becomes apparent that it would be more suitable for another site, best to move it quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2)&lt;/strong&gt; Do you have a vision for the future of the site that is different from how it is now? In other words, do you hope to move the site in a new direction in any respect? If so, what, and how would that be an improvement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's been some discussion about what happens if the Data Science beta doesn't take off &amp;amp; what will happen to the questions that are currently off-topic both here &amp;amp; on Stack Overflow. First I don't think there are very many; second I'd be in favour of making them on-topic here: but in any case it'll be something to be discussed &amp;amp; decided on by all CV members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3)&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2443/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The multiple objectives of any SE site create an inherent tension&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, forcing us to make decisions that trade off between accommodating askers, creating canonical resources, establishing discoverability of content, and rewarding community members for their participation. With many questions (and answers), there is no one best action to take. As a general moderation strategy, how do you believe we should act? Where do you plan to strike a balance among these objectives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I regard creating canonical resources as of prime importance, with establishing discoverability of content a close second. So I'd be trying to mitigate the effect of prioritizing these aims on accomodating the wishes of askers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a question's unclear, I don't think it's a kindness to the asker to keep it open&amp;mdash;answers to different interpretations accumulate, important points are hidden in long comment threads, edits to the question render prior answers &amp;amp; comments irrelevant &amp;amp; confusing. But askers often need help to clarify questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a question's a duplicate, the answer(s) in the duplicated post should help the asker. But it often needs an explanatory comment to explain why, or another link to address a subsidiary part of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4)&lt;/strong&gt; In your opinion, is there a serious threat/challenge that Cross Validated currently faces? If yes what is it? Do you believe that as a moderator you could contribute more towards dealing with it, and if yes, how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Glen_b's answer to this is spot on. I'd like to emphasize that improvement of questions &amp;amp; answers comes more from dialogue than from anything else&amp;mdash; it's easy to vote to close  a question as unclear; harder to explain to the OP in what respects it needs clarifying, but more useful. I'd encourage that &amp;amp; try to set a good example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;5)&lt;/strong&gt; How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd try to smooth things over &amp;amp; patch things up, but if that didn't work I'd have no compunction in suspending or banning someone who was making others' experiences of the site unpleasant. The near-universal civility throughout CV is a cornerstone of its success &amp;amp; no single person's contributions are nearly as important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;6)&lt;/strong&gt; How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the time simply by writing a comment explaining why; we don't have to to maintain a pretence of moderatorial unanimity or infallibility. There'd be exceptions where private communication would be more appropriate&amp;mdash;mainly, I think, where the reason for closing concerns a member's conduct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;7)&lt;/strong&gt; In your opinion, what do moderators do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Day-to-day I think it'll be mainly dealing with the flag queue, merging duplicates, deleting spam, converting answers to comments, &amp;amp;c. Sometimes it'll be more difficult: resolving disputes between members&amp;mdash;&amp;amp; I'd measure my success at that by how often I don't need to do anything beyond talking with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;8)&lt;/strong&gt; A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not especially concerned. I've never found it necessary to worry about whether a moderator's speaking as just another CV member or ex cathedra, &amp;amp; I imagine most regular users of the site feel the same way. I would however take extra care to recall that I'd be  representing CV, more so than before, &amp;amp; also to avoid new users' taking suggestions as orders or being inclined to give undue weight to my opinions on statistical matters because of the diamond.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;9)&lt;/strong&gt; In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be able to use sensibly the additional privileges moderators have in order to improve the site, as well as having another avenue of communication (e-mail) for dispute resolution in private.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2015-03-26T18:11:40.323" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2466" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-03-24T18:56:21.373" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Users with at least 15 reputation can flag posts that have quality problems which they are unable to address themselves, thereby bringing them to the attention of the site's moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported excerpt and wiki from the main &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/flags/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2015-03-24T20:07:39.653" LastActivityDate="2015-03-24T20:07:39.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2467" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-03-24T18:56:21.373" Score="0" Body="For questions about the flagging process, how flags are handled, etc." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-03-25T12:19:12.870" LastActivityDate="2015-03-25T12:19:12.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2468" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2486" CreationDate="2015-03-25T00:15:33.167" Score="37" ViewCount="4017" Body="&lt;p&gt;I notice that regular Review Queue patrollers often leave a stock comment, particularly on &amp;quot;first posts&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;low quality posts&amp;quot;. There are many issues that arise time and again, for example an answer which is just a link with no description, where we encourage the author to write more in case the link goes dead, or a question which should be flagged as self-study and we would prefer the author to show their attempt. Are these comments produced by template, through the review mechanism itself, or is there simply a list to copy and paste from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="22228" LastEditDate="2023-03-31T20:30:50.650" LastActivityDate="2023-11-07T15:59:22.937" Title="How best to leave comments on questions and answers in the review queue?" Tags="|support|comment|review|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2468" CreationDate="2015-03-25T00:31:51.203" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;[Edit: It looks like the queues seem to have improved a little in recent times -- I find it easier to figure out why something closed for example -- so to an extent some of the gripes here may be a little out of date.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I definitely agree that the interface in the various review queues is not as helpful as it should be -- it hides essential information that you then need to go elsewhere to find. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, trying to assess a &quot;reopen&quot; review - what's the first, most critical thing you need to know? &lt;em&gt;Why it was closed in the first place&lt;/em&gt; -- but it's not on the screen! In the interface it takes fiddling around to get it - it's usually actually quicker to open the original in a new tab. That sort of thing makes me wonder if the person designing that interface actually does reviews. Other review queues have similar problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When doing various reviews I often pop up several additional tabs to get all the information I want to judge a review - most of which really ought to be readily available in the review screen I think, either directly or via links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd usually recommend doing your final review actions (such as voting to close or whatever) in the review screen, so you at least get credit toward the badges, but the rewards-per-effort are pretty pathetic compared to other badges (250 reviews for a silver badge? much wow; compare that to a Constituent badge. &quot;Yay, I clicked, gimme a silver badge.&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the &quot;Stock comments&quot;, some kinds of comments are generated in the process of voting to close (perhaps in some cases only if doing it on the post itself rather than in the review queue, I'd have to look through everything to be sure) - instead of appearing in a blue box, a standard comment will appear under the name of the person who voted by selecting some option in a dialog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other comments are just pasted or typed. For example, I recently gave something like this comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your question appears to be routine bookwork. Please add the &lt;code&gt;self-study&lt;/code&gt; tag and read its &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/self-study/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt;, modifying your question to follow the guidelines where necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do a lot of comments like that, but for me they're usually just typed from scratch every time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gung has some stock comments, but to me they usually seem to be the same each time, so I expect he's pasting them. I did seriously consider setting some script up to autogenerate the regular ones for me but I've never gotten around to trying to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-06-02T06:00:30.593" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T06:00:30.593" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2471" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2472" CreationDate="2015-03-25T07:29:52.607" Score="12" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/references&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;references&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;references&lt;/a&gt; has 718 questions, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/references/synonyms&quot;&gt;synonyms&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/books&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;books&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;books&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sources&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/resources&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;resources&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;resources&lt;/a&gt; and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/references/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt; that seems to cover &lt;em&gt;requesting&lt;/em&gt; references:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;References&quot; is our generic tag for questions seeking information&#xA;  about books, papers, presentations, videos of lectures, on-line&#xA;  tutorials, etc., regarding any subject matter that is on-topic for&#xA;  Cross Validated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reference-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reference-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reference-request&lt;/a&gt; currently has four questions (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/143264/1352&quot;&gt;one of them&lt;/a&gt; I just retagged) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/reference-request/info&quot;&gt;no tag wiki&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose adding &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reference-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reference-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reference-request&lt;/a&gt; as a synonym to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/references&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;references&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;references&lt;/a&gt;. (I don't have five votes, so I'm posting here.) Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meta question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1007/1352&quot;&gt;Tags for references&lt;/a&gt; is related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2015-03-26T12:43:20.360" Title="Proposal: add reference-request as a synonym for references" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|tag-synonyms|references|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2471" CreationDate="2015-03-26T12:42:56.320" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two tags are now merged, and all threads tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reference-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reference-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reference-request&lt;/a&gt; have been updated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2015-03-26T12:42:56.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2473" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-26T15:03:20.233" Score="27" ViewCount="719" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure where to bring up this issue, but the CV meta seemed as good a place as any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently I was reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/139290/a-psychology-journal-banned-p-values-and-confidence-intervals-is-it-indeed-wise&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about whether the banning of p-values and confidence intervals by the journal &lt;em&gt;Basic and Applied Psychology&lt;/em&gt; was a good idea.  As a research psychologist with a great interest in statistics, this issue is of great interest to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While reading the responses to these questions, I came across this comment, which was upvoted 10 times:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Great idea. Using statistics just hides the unscientific nature of this field.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that this comment was made in jest, but to me, this comment comes across as both off-topic and quite rude.  Whether psychology is &quot;scientific&quot; has absolutely no bearing on whether banning the use of p-values and confidence intervals is good policy.  However, what concerns me more is that many research psychologists use CV on a regular basis (including me).  This sort of comment that makes a blanket statement about my field makes me feel unwelcome at CV, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case for other research psychologists.  Moreover, the question on which the comment was made was highly upvoted, and the decision by &lt;em&gt;BASP&lt;/em&gt; was highly publicized, meaning this comment is likely to be seen by other research psychologists with an interest in this issue.  I think the comment should be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I flagged the comment as rude, but my flag was declined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have used CV regularly for almost three years, and this is the first time I have had a problem of this kind, so I don't necessarily think that this incident reflects any deeper problems with CV.  This incident does, however, touch a sore spot with me and with research psychologists generally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question to the community is, is this comment appropriate for CV, and if so, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This edit was added about a month after the original post, after I've had some time to think about the various responses&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has been a bit of discussion about why I found the original comment offensive.  Psychology is defined as the &quot;science of human behavior&quot;, so I hope it should be clear that comments that claim that psychology is not a science (and is more similar to an art than a science) might be viewed as offensive by people who call themselves &quot;scientists of human behavior&quot;.  If the comment was germane to the linked question, however, I would not have flagged it for deletion.  I do not think a comment about the scientific status of psychology is germane to whether the policies of BASP are statistically valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, of course, another complicating factor to this particular incident, and that is that people are more prone to questioning the scientific validity of psychology and other behavioral sciences than they are of disciplines like physics.  Let's take an extreme example -- for hundreds of years, inventors have submitted patents to the US Patent Office for perpetual motion machines, despite the fact that such a thing is completely impossible.  Yet, despite the existence of these crackpot patents, few people would use the patents to say something like &quot;These patents just reveal the unscientific nature of the field&quot;, whereas they might use the existence of parapsychology journals to say something like &quot;These journals just reveal the unscientific nature of the field&quot;.  Moreover, the perception that psychology has very real consequences for things like scientific funding, so this is not a trivial issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, going back to the original comment, I think that when I originally made this post, I misunderstood the overall purpose of comments.  The StackExchange model encourages clean, on-topic questions and answers, and it appears that comments aren't held to the same standard.  This is the main reason I flagged the comment for deletion rather than leave a comment of my own on the question (which is something I have now done).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prior to this discussion, I also never really understood the purpose of the chat room, which is why I did not think to start a chat with Aksakal.  This is something I may well do in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, as a result of this post, I have learned a lot about the various tools on CV, CV policy, and the different opinions of the moderators about how to handle requests for deletion.  In the future, I may very well be more proactive with how I use comments on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11091" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2015-05-18T16:43:56.683" Title="Why is a comment that maligns my field not inappropriate for CV?" Tags="|discussion|policy|comment|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2473" CreationDate="2015-03-26T15:35:24.087" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suppose its an opinion expressed as a comment and since it is not ad hominem, there is no reason to delete it else its censorship. I'm not sure a comment can and should be considered off-topic in the first place. Off-topic we usually only apply to questions and sometimes answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A comment can be offensive and then it is removed. I think the difference would be if someone said &quot;Patrick S. Forscher or his work is unscientific&quot;. I'd worry more about why so many people share that sentiment (as a trained psychologist myself, I share it too!). I guess our job as research psychologists is to help correct that sentiment in public by our deeds (e.g., you with your nice answers and questions on CV), not censorship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B y the way, such comments regularly pop up here, usually economists and medical doctors are the butt of the jokes (see my own &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/25811/is-the-r-language-reliable-for-the-field-of-economics/25812#25812&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, aimed at economists). That attitude of some statisticians making jokes of other people's research is made into a joke about statisticians by Stephen Senn &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/108301/8413&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8413" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2015-03-26T15:41:13.950" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2473" CreationDate="2015-03-26T18:46:06.260" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all--and most importantly--I am sorry you feel bad about that comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In coming to a decision about the flag, I considered several aspects of the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Relevance.&lt;/strong&gt;  Despite your claim that the comment is off-topic, a huge underlying issue in that thread is whether banning the use of a standard tool for pursuing scientific investigations is an appropriate strategy for a legitimate branch of science.  I suspect the initial reaction of many people to the BASP announcement may have been something like what was expressed in the comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to test relevance is to imagine replacing &quot;psychology&quot; by other fields that make claims to being scientific.  At two extremes are parapsychology and atomic physics.  In either context, the comment would make sense and be apt.  If parapsychologists abandoned hypothesis testing, they would have a much harder time keeping up the pretense of being scientific.  If physicists did, the first question they would hear is &quot;but isn't that unscientific?&quot;  In both cases the comment is apt, so why wouldn't be relevant to psychology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The claim that a large group of people--such as research psychologists--would be sorely offended by such a benign offhand remark is certainly surprising.  If that were true, we would have to conclude there are some profound concerns in the profession about its scientific nature, or lack thereof: and doesn't that even more amply demonstrate the relevance of the remark and the need to address it rather than suppress it?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Correctness.&lt;/strong&gt;  Comments are frequently incorrect or downright false. That's frustrating because they cannot be downvoted or edited and extensive debates within comments are discouraged.  But that's how it is.  Usually, factuality plays almost no part in making keep-or-delete decisions: people have a right to be wrong in public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, I feel that the implication you are drawing (&quot;BASP banned hypothesis testing, therefore social psychology is unscientific&quot;)--which to be fair may be a broader conclusion than intended by the commenter--ultimately reflects a limited and incorrect understanding of the editor's decision.  But that's a matter that can constructively be discussed by posting an answer in that thread.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tone.&lt;/strong&gt; Given the dissonant juxtoposition of its preface, &quot;Great idea,&quot; and the consequent charge of being unscientific, it is difficult to read the comment in any other way than sarcasm.  It is equally difficult to interpret it as personally rude or insulting.  I won't defend the tone--it comes across as a little sharp--but it doesn't appear to transgress any boundaries of impropriety.  We should all err on the side of generosity when reading comments and not take them too much to heart nor interpret them in an overly broad or personal fashion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we, then, unilaterally delete this comment?  As I see it, that amounts to a request to limit discourse and suppress an idea that has relevance and could constructively be discussed.  On balance, because the comment does not appear to breach the norms of this community, I could see no justification to remove it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, what should we do about comments that offend valued contributors to our community?  If the sole test is to be that &lt;em&gt;somebody&lt;/em&gt; feels offended, then we are left with no consistent or rational way to decide what material should remain visible on our site.  The tests we do have (of which the strongest is that &lt;em&gt;ad hominem&lt;/em&gt; remarks are not tolerated) are clear and practicable.  Removing comments solely because they might be construed by someone as being negative about some branch of science seems like it would head too far down a very slippery slope that would force us eventually to abandon the comment mechanism altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Might I suggest, then, that you consider the possibility that this comment may have a more benign interpretation and that it was written without malign intent?  The best course of action might be to post a constructive &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; in that thread and ignore the comment altogether rather than drawing undue attention to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2015-03-26T18:46:06.260" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2473" CreationDate="2015-03-26T18:52:11.250" Score="13" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromwell%27s_rule&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cromwell's rule&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; : &quot;I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may&#xA;  be mistaken.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This wise rule (modernized perhaps by substituting &quot;probable&quot; for &quot;possible&quot;, and maybe changing the gory religious reference), should have been all along supplementing the SE-wide catch-phrase and policy &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Be Nice&quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, &quot;Be Nice&quot; is more wide-reaching that it appears: it essentially asks from us to &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; nicely, rather than only &lt;em&gt;speak&lt;/em&gt; nicely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for the less-sensitive to polite suggestions, Cromwell's rule implies &quot;don't transmit an &lt;em&gt;objective&lt;/em&gt; sense of certainty when there isn't one&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I believe that the comment that led to this meta-question violates exactly that: it transmits a sense of objective certainty -when there is none. It speaks as though the &quot;unscientific nature of this field&quot; is as widely accepted as the movement of earth around the sun. And it isn't (that's easily verifiable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it was something along the lines of  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;I am not yet persuaded whether psychology is truly a scientific discipline or not, and I know that many other people share these doubts. The adoption of statistical tools may have provided a false sense of &quot;scientific status&quot; to psychologists themselves, leading them to not worry enough -and not work enough on- the scientific foundations of their field. So maybe a move away from such tools, which moreover appear to have been misused, may be beneficial after all&quot;&lt;/em&gt;,  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I conjecture that the OP would not feel the way he felt with the actually posted comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the comment does violate the Cross-Validated &lt;em&gt;culture&lt;/em&gt;, if not the SE &lt;em&gt;rules&lt;/em&gt;. But then, this does not make &quot;deletion&quot; the only route that should be taken. After all, I have to, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that I may be mistaken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28746" LastEditorUserId="28746" LastEditDate="2015-03-26T23:17:31.563" LastActivityDate="2015-03-26T23:17:31.563" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2477" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-27T03:01:18.277" Score="2" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I answered this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/143578/jelly-donut-puzzle-what-can-statistics-say-about-these-donuts/&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/143578/jelly-donut-puzzle-what-can-statistics-say-about-these-donuts/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer got downvoted but that is not the point. The point is that the question got -4 votes, and all answers got -1 or -2 votes. However, it is protected by moderator. I did not see anything wrong with the question, other than possibly it is ill-posed. I have never seen this situation before. Shouldn't question protection be used to avoid spam answers on very popular and useful questions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67393" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-03-29T02:22:55.327" Title="What happened to this question?" Tags="|discussion|questions|votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2473" CreationDate="2015-03-27T12:27:58.957" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with most of what has been said so far. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimers: I didn't see the original comment or add +1 to it.  My comments can easily be sharper than average here, so I am not posing as a nice guy, but I would never dispute a moderator's judgement on my comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Comments can be sharper than answers, but they must not be offensive. But give and take is needed: comments must be seen in context and be judged knowing that people can disagree in good faith on what is amusing or not and what is fair comment or not. Comments are often the community's way of having fun, with all that is implied. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Adding +1 on a comment is not, as I understand it, strictly an upvote. It shows approval of some kind but it has no effect on reputation. Some badges may be awarded depending on the scores for comments that someone receives, but that's secondary and trivial here. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Part of the problem is clearly that without a following comment explaining why a previous comment got your +1, no one can tell exactly why +1 was given. When I get +1s on comments, the reasons seem to vary, including &quot;agree strongly&quot;, &quot;interesting point&quot;, &quot;helpful reference&quot;, &quot;very amusing&quot;, &quot;hi Nick!&quot;: elaboration is hardly needed. I suspect without any evidence that the most common single reason among those 10 +1s was something like this: Wicked comment, but I found it amusing. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have wanted to be able to put -1 on a comment. Clearly I know that I can flag something obnoxious or add my own comments. But reasons can include a thread being already too long or too heated; the comment already being a digression from the question; my wanting to indicate a polite boo as well as a polite cheer backing comments are I think are correct, interesting, or helpful.  Adding +1 to those comments you think are most telling is the best way to add your own minute cheer, but I have wanted -1 too. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2015-03-27T12:37:53.827" LastActivityDate="2015-03-27T12:37:53.827" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2473" CreationDate="2015-03-27T14:19:08.703" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that we have to balance two imperatives on CV:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We need to preserve information that is germane to on-topic threads and provide information about statistics, machine learning, data mining and data visualization.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Material that offends someone or makes some class of people feel unwelcome should be deleted.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should these two be balanced?  It's hard to say in the abstract; it will probably require case-by-case judgments.  I should say that I have been consistently impressed by our moderator team and thankful for their (extensive) efforts to keep CV running smoothly.  For what it's worth, &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0394800818&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;if I ran the zoo&lt;/a&gt; I'll tell you just what I'd do:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In one hypothetical case, if person A said that a $t$-test is a parameter estimate divided by its standard error, and person B found that offensive, I would leave that content on the site nonetheless.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In another hypothetical case, if person A made a comment that isn't particularly relevant and doesn't communicate any information about statistics, and person B found that offensive, I would delete it, even if it had been highly upvoted.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems completely unambiguous to me.  Note that I did not include anything about person B's reasoning behind feeling offended.  That strikes me as immaterial.  The rationale could be totally bogus&amp;mdash;I just don't care.  I would leave a note to the original commenter explaining the situation, however.  I would also be open to arguments that addressed the case on its merits, but I would not give any weight to 'slippery slope' arguments.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2015-03-27T14:19:08.703" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2480" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-03-27T22:52:25.143" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions relating to the Cross Validated SE's blog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-03-27T23:16:18.083" LastActivityDate="2015-03-27T23:16:18.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2481" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-03-27T22:52:25.143" Score="0" Body="Questions regarding the Cross Validated blog" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-03-27T23:16:09.223" LastActivityDate="2015-03-27T23:16:09.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2477" CreationDate="2015-03-29T01:30:39.790" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the record, I didn't downvote the question. I definitely think it was ill-posed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can't know why people downvote if they don't say, so the following is just a guess at a possible motive for some of them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since 4 of the close votes treated it as a self-study question (not mine, I voted 'unclear what you're asking'), I expect several of the downvotes were for not following the self-study guidelines: there seems to be a tendency to downvote those recently (not necessarily the same people that vote to close), even when from brand new posters. This is a tendency I generally disagree with, since the people that ask but don't follow the guidelines tend simply not to know what's expected (people who continue to try it on after having it explained, on the other hand, no longer get that benefit of the doubt -- if they keep failing to follow community expectations after a couple of pointers, I vote-to-close and downvote without compunction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'd like to see happen with a question like that is that it gets an answer that shows how the question is compatible with different interpretations that lead to entirely different answers (since telling people the question is unanswerable rarely seems to deter them). As is often the case, such an answer takes some work to compile. I started one but was unlikely to finish it for a few days (if at all)... and meanwhile the question unsurprisingly closed (making it impossible to post any answer unless the question changes and it gets reopened). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know of a good way within the present format for SE to deal with the situation of trying to show-by-example why an ill posed question of that sort doesn't have one answer, since the site is designed to close them. Perhaps (i) a blog post would be a way of dealing with an example or two of that type, illustrating the problem by given several takes on the question (including takes on what any missing information might be) and showing how much the answers differ, or (ii) to post a reworded/similar question as community wiki, and invite different interpretations as different answers by way of illustrating the problem with such ill posed questions. In either case, later questions could then be linked to it as an explanation of why such questions don't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why it was protected, chl is likely correct. But protection in any case can be used whenever a lot of low quality answers are being posted from accounts with low reputation; I actually debated protecting it myself (a fair number of users here have that privilege though it's rarely used).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2015-03-29T02:22:55.327" LastActivityDate="2015-03-29T02:22:55.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2483" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2484" CreationDate="2015-03-29T21:03:53.037" Score="11" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't see anywhere that it specifies whether or not we have to use all of our votes in elections. I know that process for determining winners is STV, under which it is possible to include voters who didn't use all of their votes, but I just wanted to verify that my votes would still be used. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17661" LastActivityDate="2015-04-02T03:02:41.720" Title="Using all votes in Elections" Tags="|support|election|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2483" CreationDate="2015-03-29T22:16:20.050" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, your votes will still be used.&lt;/strong&gt;  You may cast just one or just two out of the three you are allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I base this conclusion on having analyzed (in detail) &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/11120/how-to-visualize-the-voting-choices-in-the-moderator-elections/11134#11134&quot;&gt;the results of some other elections.&lt;/a&gt;  A close look at some of those data summaries and visualizations will show that some voters cast incomplete ballots but their votes contributed to the results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:10.070" LastActivityDate="2015-03-29T22:16:20.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2468" CreationDate="2015-03-30T20:23:08.080" Score="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A compendium of comments I've found useful. Feel free to add more. The suggested replies to Answers &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6312/22228&quot;&gt;have been moved here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Questions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Self-study&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is this a question from a course or textbook? If so, please add the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-self-study-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; tag &amp;amp; read its &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/self-study/info&quot;&gt;wiki&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Is this a question from a course or textbook? If so, &#xA;please add the [tag:self-study] tag &amp;amp; read its &#xA;[wiki](https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/self-study/info).&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please add the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-self-study-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; tag &amp;amp; read &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/self-study/info&quot;&gt;its wiki&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Please add the [tag:self-study] tag &amp;amp; read its &#xA;[wiki](https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/self-study/info). &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please add the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-self-study-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; tag &amp;amp; read &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/self-study/info&quot;&gt;its wiki&lt;/a&gt;. Then tell us what you understand thus far, what you've tried &amp;amp; where you're stuck. We'll provide hints to help you get unstuck. Please make these changes as just posting your homework &amp;amp; hoping someone will do it for you is grounds for closing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Please add the [tag:self-study] tag &amp;amp; read its &#xA;[wiki](https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/self-study/info). Then tell us what you understand thus far, what &#xA;you've tried &amp;amp; where you're stuck. We'll provide hints to &#xA;help you get unstuck. Please make these changes as just &#xA;posting your homework &amp;amp; hoping someone will do it for you &#xA;is grounds for closing.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please type your question as text, do not just post a photograph or screenshot (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3176/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). When you re-type the question, add the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-self-study-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; tag &amp;amp; read &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/self-study/info&quot;&gt;its wiki&lt;/a&gt;. Then tell us what you understand thus far, what you've tried &amp;amp; where you're stuck. We'll provide hints to help you get unstuck. Please make these changes as just posting your homework &amp;amp; hoping someone will do it for you is grounds for closing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Please type your question as text, do not just post a &#xA;photograph or screenshot (see [here](https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3176/)). &#xA;When you retype the question, add the [tag:self-study] tag &#xA;&amp;amp; read [its wiki](https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/self-study/info). &#xA;Then tell us what you understand thus far, what you've &#xA;tried &amp;amp; where you're stuck. We'll provide hints to help &#xA;you get unstuck. Please make these changes as just &#xA;posting your homework &amp;amp; hoping someone will do it for you &#xA;is grounds for closing.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reproducible examples&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Link is specifically for R-related questions)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please add a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/5963269/&quot;&gt;reproducible example&lt;/a&gt; for people to work with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Please add a [reproducible example](https://stackoverflow.com/q/5963269/) &#xA;for people to work with. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm voting to close this question as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;off-topic&lt;/a&gt; because it is about how to use R without a reproducible example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I'm voting to close this question as &#xA;[off-topic](https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic) &#xA;because it is about how to use R without a reproducible &#xA;example. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(For coding questions other than R)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please add a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve&quot;&gt;reproducible example&lt;/a&gt; for people to work with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Please add a [reproducible example](https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve) &#xA;for people to work with. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm voting to close this question as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;off-topic&lt;/a&gt; because it is about how to use  without a reproducible example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I'm voting to close this question as &#xA;[off-topic](https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic) &#xA;because it is about how to use &amp;lt;!--REPLACE_ME--&amp;gt; without a &#xA;reproducible example. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to CV, . Offering a minimal reproducible example would help immensely.  Until then, all we know is that you are having trouble with your script.  Without the example, every possibility is on the table, ranging from bugs in the code, to a misunderstanding of what it does, to a coding error or erroneous data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Welcome to CV, &amp;lt;USER&amp;gt;. Offering a minimal reproducible        &#xA; example &#xA; would help immensely.  Until then, all we know is that you               &#xA; are having trouble with your script.  Without the example, &#xA; every possibility is on the table, ranging from bugs in the        &#xA; code, to a misunderstanding of what it does, to a coding &#xA; error or &#xA; erroneous data.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ambiguous code / statistical question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions solely about how software works are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;off-topic&lt;/a&gt; here, but you may have a real statistical question buried here. You may want to edit your question to clarify the underlying statistical issue. You may find that when you understand the statistical concepts involved, the software-specific elements are self-evident or at least easy to get from the documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Questions solely about how software works are&#xA;[off-topic](https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic) &#xA;here, but you may have a real statistical question buried &#xA;here. You may want to edit your question to clarify the &#xA;underlying statistical issue. You may find that when you &#xA;understand the statistical concepts involved, the &#xA;software-specific elements are self-evident or at least &#xA;easy to get from the documentation.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No need to sign off/give thanks etc&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to CV. Note that your username, identicon, &amp;amp; a link to your user page are automatically added to every post you make, so there is no need to sign your posts. In fact, we prefer you don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Welcome to CV. Note that your username, identicon, &amp;amp; a &#xA;link to your user page are automatically added to every &#xA;post you make, so there is no need to sign &#xA;your posts. In fact, we prefer you don't. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On this site there's no need to say &amp;quot;thank you&amp;quot; at the end of your post - it might seem rude at first, but it's part of&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/behavior&quot;&gt;the philosophy of this site&lt;/a&gt; to &amp;quot;Ask questions, get answers, no distractions&amp;quot;, and it means future readers of your question don't need to read through the pleasantries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;On this site there's no need to say &amp;quot;thank you&amp;quot; at the end &#xA;of your post - it might seem rude at first, but it's part &#xA;of &#xA;[the philosophy of this site](https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/behavior) &#xA;to &amp;quot;Ask questions, get answers, no distractions&amp;quot;, and it &#xA;means future readers of your question don't need to read &#xA;through the pleasantries.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;New information in comments&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please do not give new information only in comments. Edit your question to add the new information. We want posts to be self-contained: comments can be deleted, and anyhow, information in comments is not well organized. Also, many people do not read comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Please do not give new information only in comments. Edit &#xA; your question to add the new information. We want posts to &#xA; be self-contained: comments can be deleted, and anyhow, &#xA; information in comments is not well organized. Also, many &#xA; people do not read comments. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Demands fast answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please don't say your question is urgent or ask people to answer quickly.  Remember that you are asking strangers to volunteer their time to help you for free.  People will respond at the rate that is comfortable for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Please don't say your question is urgent or ask people to &#xA;answer quickly. Remember that you are asking strangers to &#xA;volunteer their time to help you for free.  People will &#xA;respond at the rate that is comfortable for them.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Critical information for question behind link&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please paste in whatever context is necessary to understand &amp;amp; answer your question. We want this thread to remain valuable even if the link goes dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Please paste in whatever context is necessary to &#xA;understand &amp;amp; answer your question. We want this thread to &#xA;remain valuable even if the link goes dead.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Too broad&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions in the SE system are supposed to be narrow &amp;amp; concrete such that they can be given a definitively correct, factual answer in at most a few paragraphs. This isn't a site for discussions or opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Questions in the SE system are supposed to be narrow &amp;amp; &#xA;concrete such that they can be given a definitively &#xA;correct, factual answer in at  most a few paragraphs. &#xA;This isn't a site for discussions or opinions.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Refer to textbook&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This question is very broad, and I believe you would profit from reading an introductory level textbook. We have a helpful list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/170/1352&quot;&gt;free statistical textbooks.&lt;/a&gt; If afterwards you still have more specific questions, then please do ask them here. If you already &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; read such a textbook, please edit your question to make it more specific. Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This question is very broad, and I believe you would &#xA;profit from reading an introductory level textbook. We &#xA;have a helpful list of&#xA;[free statistical textbooks.](https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/170/). &#xA;If afterwards you still have more specific questions, then &#xA;please do ask them here. If you already *have* read such a &#xA;textbook, please edit your question to make it more &#xA;specific. Thank you!&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Specifically for forecasting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is very broad, and I believe you would profit from reading an introductory level textbook, e.g., the free online &lt;a href=&quot;https://otexts.org/fpp2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Forecasting: Principles and Practice&lt;/em&gt; by Hyndman &amp;amp; Athanasopoulos&lt;/a&gt;. If after reading this you still have more specific questions, then please do ask them here. If you already &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; read such a textbook, please edit your question to make it more specific. Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This question is very broad, and I believe you would &#xA;profit from reading an introductory level textbook, e.g., &#xA;the free online &#xA;[*Forecasting: Principles and Practice* by&#xA;Hyndman &amp;amp; Athanasopoulos](https://otexts.org/fpp2/).&#xA;If after reading this you still have more specific &#xA;questions, then please do ask them here. If you already &#xA;*have* read such a textbook, please edit your question to &#xA;make it more specific. Thank you!&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5148/&quot;&gt;More reasoning behind this comment can be found in this Meta answer.&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Specifically for neural networks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is very broad, and I believe you would profit from&#xA;reading an introductory level textbook. We have a helpful list of&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/226911/&quot;&gt;textbooks and courses&lt;/a&gt; about neural networks. If afterwards you still have more specific questions, then please do ask&#xA;them here. If you already &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; read such a textbook, please edit&#xA;your question to make it more specific. Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This question is very broad, and I believe you would &#xA;profit from reading an introductory level textbook. We &#xA;have a helpful list of &#xA;[textbooks and courses](https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/226911/) &#xA;about neural networks. If afterwards you still have more &#xA;specific questions, then please do ask them here. If you &#xA;already *have* read such a textbook, please&#xA;edit your question to make it more specific. Thank you!&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Has been discussed extensively before&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Similar questions have been discussed multiple times before. Please &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;search the site&lt;/a&gt;, noting the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;tips&lt;/a&gt; on advanced search options, and tell us what you found and why it didn’t meet your needs. This demonstrates that you’ve taken the time to try to help yourself, it saves us from reiterating obvious answers, and above all, it helps you get a more specific and relevant answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Similar questions have been discussed multiple times &#xA;before. Please &#xA;[search the site](https://stats.stackexchange.com/search), &#xA;noting the &#xA;[tips](https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/searching) on &#xA;advanced search options, and tell us what you found and &#xA;why it didn’t meet your needs. This demonstrates that &#xA;you’ve taken the time to try to help yourself, it&#xA;saves us from reiterating obvious answers, and above all, &#xA;it helps you get a more specific and relevant answer! &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Duplicate question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think you will find the information you need in the linked thread. Please read it. If it isn't what you want or you still have a question afterwards, come back here &amp;amp; edit your question to state what you learned &amp;amp; what you still need to know. Then we can provide the information you need without just duplicating material elsewhere that already didn't help you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I think you will find the information you need in the &#xA;linked thread. Please read it. If it isn't what you want or &#xA;you still have a question afterwards, come back here &amp;amp; &#xA;edit your question to state what you learned &amp;amp; what you &#xA;still need to know. Then we can provide the information &#xA;you need without just duplicating material elsewhere that &#xA;already didn't help you.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Off-topic (only about software)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions that are only about software (e.g. error messages, code or packages, etc.) are generally off topic here.  If you have a substantive machine learning or statistical question, please edit to clarify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Questions that are only about software (e.g. error &#xA;messages, code or packages, etc.) are generally off topic &#xA;here. If you have a substantive machine learning or&#xA;statistical question, please edit to clarify.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Deleted and re-posted a closed question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Include link to deleted instance within the parentheses)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  Please do not simply delete and repost [a closed question}(...). &#xA;  Instead, please follow our guidance to edit and improve the closed &#xA;  post. Any edit will automatically put it up for a vote on &#xA;  reopening, and if enough voters agree that the post now is &#xA;  acceptable, it will be reopened.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vandalism&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please do not vandalize your question. When you posted on SE, you gave up exclusive ownership of the content under &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/licensing&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 4.0&lt;/a&gt;. If there are no answers, you may delete your own question (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/what-to-do-instead-of-deleting-question&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;): just click the faint gray 'delete' at lower left (your account needs to be registered for this). Otherwise, the thread will remain according to SE's rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Please do not vandalize your question. When you posted on &#xA;SE, you gave up ownership of the content under&#xA;[CC BY-SA 4.0](https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/licensing). &#xA;If there are no answers, you may delete your own question &#xA;(see &#xA;[here](https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/what-to-do-instead-of-deleting-question)&#xA;): just click the faint gray 'delete' at lower left (your &#xA;account needs to be registered for this). Otherwise, the &#xA;thread will remain according to SE's rules.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;XY Problem&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It sounds to me like the problem you're trying to solve is &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;X&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, and you're wondering if &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;Y&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; is a good way to go about it. Is that fair? Because if your real question is &amp;quot;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;X&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;?&amp;quot; then I would suggest only asking about that. As it is written right now, the question appears to be an &lt;a href=&quot;http://xyproblem.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;XY Problem&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;It sounds to me like the problem you're trying to solve is &#xA;`&amp;lt;X&amp;gt;`, and you're wondering if `&amp;lt;Y&amp;gt;` is a good way to go &#xA;about it. Is that fair? Because if your real question&#xA;is &amp;quot;`&amp;lt;X&amp;gt;`?&amp;quot; then I would suggest only asking about that. As &#xA;it is written right now, the question appears to be an &#xA;[XY Problem](http://xyproblem.info/).&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cross posted question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please don't cross post on multiple SE sites. Cross posting is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/64068/&quot;&gt;against SE policy&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; wastes a lot of people's time. Decide which site you want your question on &amp;amp; only post there (or delete the copies elsewhere, as appropriate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Please don't cross post on multiple SE sites. Cross &#xA;posting is &#xA;[against SE policy](https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/64068/) &#xA;&amp;amp; wastes a lot of people's time. Decide which site you &#xA;want your question on &amp;amp; only post there (or delete the &#xA;copies elsewhere, as appropriate).&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Screenshot of equation, but not self-study&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hi, there are blind and visually impaired users of this site who interact with it using screen readers. The screen readers can't handle the equation in your screenshot. Please edit the post to include the equation as TeX. If it helps, we have some &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1605/155836&quot;&gt;resources on using LaTeX on Cross Validated&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Hi, there are blind and visually impaired users of this &#xA;site who interact with it using screen readers. The screen &#xA;readers can't handle the equation in your screenshot. &#xA;Please edit the post to include the equation as LaTeX. If &#xA;it helps, we have some &#xA;[resources on using LaTeX on Cross Validated](https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1605/155836).&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Multiple closely related questions from same author&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You have asked multiple very closely related questions. Please edit each of them to provide links to the others. This is so that people asking for clarifications or providing answers are aware of the context and do not duplicate efforts. Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;You have asked multiple very closely related questions.&#xA;Please edit each of them to provide links to the others.&#xA;This is so that people asking for clarifications or providing &#xA;answers are aware of the context and do not duplicate efforts. &#xA;Thank you!&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The Answers section moved to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6312/22228&quot;&gt;new post&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reference request, &amp;quot;Please do a search,&amp;quot; etc.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the years that this site has been active, variations on this question have been asked hundreds of times. There's a limit to how many questions can be linked as duplicates, but this should help you get started. If you feel these questions do not address your needs, &lt;strong&gt;please [edit] to explicitly state what you want to learn.&lt;/strong&gt; But first, do a search.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5549/faq-best-practices-for-searching-cv&quot;&gt;FAQ: Best Practices for Searching CV&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;In the years that this site has been active, variations on this question have&#xA;been asked hundreds of times. There's a limit to how many questions can be linked &#xA;as duplicates, but this should help you get started. If you feel these &#xA;questions do not address your needs, **please [edit] to explicitly state what you&#xA;want to learn.** But first [search](https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5549/).&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Asking for using MathJax&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hi. Welcome to CV. This is a MathJax-enabled site. Please use this facility to typeset your mathematical expressions for better legibility. For a quick guide, check this Meta CV post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1604/instructions-on-how-to-use-latex-on-crossvalidated&quot;&gt;Instructions on how to use LaTeX on CrossValidated&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Hi. Welcome to CV. This is a MathJax-enabled site. Please use this &#xA;facility to typeset your mathematical expressions for better &#xA;legibility. For a quick guide, check this Meta CV post: &#xA;[Instructions on how to use LaTeX on CrossValidated](https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1604/instructions-on-how-to-use-latex-on-crossvalidated).&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Query (partly) based on ChatGPT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt; Courtesy to a brief &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/64563153#64563153&quot;&gt;conversation&lt;/a&gt; in Ten Fold&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  It seems you have sought a response from ChatGPT and (partly) used &#xA;  it to frame your post. Please note that ChatGPT and similar Large &#xA;  Language Models are often highly unreliable in formulating &#xA;  coherent statistical assertions. Apropos to that, it is a common &#xA;  precedent here to abstain from using such to create a post, and &#xA;  to tread with caution here. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="1352" LastEditDate="2023-11-07T15:59:22.937" LastActivityDate="2023-11-07T15:59:22.937" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-03-30T20:23:08.080" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2487" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-30T23:28:29.043" Score="11" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is closely related to an old question on  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/912/handling-look-at-this-link-type-of-answers&quot;&gt;Handling “look at this link” type of answers&lt;/a&gt;, which focussed on what the community's response towards such link-only answers should be, and is technically answered by the SE policy in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;How To Answer guide&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Provide context for links&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Links to external resources are encouraged, but please add context&#xA;  around the link so your fellow users will have some idea what it is&#xA;  and why it’s there. Always quote the most relevant part of an&#xA;  important link, in case the target site is unreachable or goes&#xA;  permanently offline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many cases low-quality &quot;answers&quot; which include little more than a bare link would make a perfectly good comment, but a poor answer. The susceptibility to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link rot&lt;/a&gt; is a genuine concern - more so now that CV has got older, and its effects are starting to set in! So the policy seems very sensible to me, and my question is more about how, as an end user, I should take regard of it when I encounter such an answer on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvoting a relevant and helpful link seems harsh - particularly to a new user unable to post comments for technical reasons. But it would presumably be the most appropriate response if this was felt to be an &quot;answer quality&quot; matter to be resolved by voting. If on the other hand we treat such &quot;answers&quot; as suffering a fundamental functional problem, then some sort of rectification is preferable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One possibility is editing the answer to include more context, so it is no longer just a link. But this is something that the original answerer is usually better placed to do. Another option is to convert the answer to a comment, which would be its more natural place - but that is something for Moderators. If this is the preferred response, presumably regular users should use the &quot;not an answer&quot; flag to bring this to their attention? In the review queue, there is also an option for &quot;recommend deletion&quot; (I believe high-rep users have this tool even outside the review queue). But completely removing a &lt;em&gt;relevant&lt;/em&gt; link also seems unsatisfactory, for obvious reasons. Are these deletion recommendations sent to a queue which is checked manually by Moderators, who could convert to comment instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that most of the time, if we encounter such an &quot;answer&quot;, the appropriate response would be to flag it - at least, if we did not have time or knowledge to edit in the contextual information necessary to render it a self-contained answer, or thought that the link was so extraneous that it was not even worth saving as a comment. Is this a fair summary of the situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2015-04-06T21:26:09.877" Title="Should &quot;link only&quot; answers be flagged/recommended for deletion/downvoted?" Tags="|discussion|answers|flagging|hyperlinks|link-only-answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2488" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-31T20:01:46.993" Score="32" ViewCount="390" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cross Validated's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election/3&quot;&gt;3rd moderator election&lt;/a&gt; has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the 2 new moderators are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/805&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/flair/805.png&quot; alt=&quot;Glen_b&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/17230&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/flair/17230.png&quot; alt=&quot;Scortchi&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They'll be joining &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;the existing crew&lt;/a&gt; shortly — please thank them for volunteering, and share your assistance and advice with them as they learn the ropes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For details on how the voting played out, you can download the election results &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election/3&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opavote.org/results/5714987150475264/0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;view a summary report online&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27774" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-03-31T20:01:46.993" Title="2015 Community Moderator Election Results" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2448" CreationDate="2015-03-31T20:43:45.373" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the end it does not matter how many people ran for these positions: two extremely well qualified and respected people won.  I am glad to welcome them to the moderator pool.  I trust that in future elections we will be equally well served by community volunteers coming forward in this manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2015-03-31T20:43:45.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2490" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2492" CreationDate="2015-04-01T20:50:07.413" Score="12" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've observed that there are a small number of questions tagged as &quot;rstudio.&quot; Is this strictly necessary? It seems to me that it would prevent splintering of R-related questions across multiple tags if one were a synonym for the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-04-01T23:11:02.520" LastActivityDate="2015-04-02T01:40:36.567" Title="Do we need a unique &quot;rstudio&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|r|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2490" CreationDate="2015-04-01T20:51:02.443" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, we do not need a distinct rstudio tag because rstudio is simply a convenient interface to R, not a separate language with its own peculiarities. Making rstudio a synonym of r appears to solve any residual need to consolidate R-related tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2015-04-02T01:40:36.567" LastActivityDate="2015-04-02T01:40:36.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2490" CreationDate="2015-04-01T21:02:42.847" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for bringing our attention to that! I have removed this tag from the three threads. Obviously, we don't need such a tag on Cross Validated as it targets a particular UI specific to R (even if this is probably the most useful and least intrusive :-). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastEditorUserId="930" LastEditDate="2015-04-01T21:08:27.797" LastActivityDate="2015-04-01T21:08:27.797" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2473" CreationDate="2015-04-02T01:29:48.777" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me address it as if a similar comment had been directed at my own field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'd been doing the review, I'd very likely have let the comment stand. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While personally offensive behavior would need to be removed (so &quot;You're an idiot&quot; as a comment would be removed without hesitation), broader classes of comment like &quot;statisticians don't know what they're doing&quot; would be more likely to stick around, even if a certain level of sarcasm and snarkiness might be present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[In fact I'm all &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; controversial points of view if they support the point, and respond properly to counterargument. Are comments the right place for that? Possibly chat is better, but I wouldn't intervene for a single comment or a single response. An extended back and forth would lead to 'move this to chat']&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What could lead me to consider deleting a comment of the second kind would be &lt;em&gt;relevance&lt;/em&gt; (does it clarify something about the question, or give/point to useful information while not  being an answer?), but given the particulars of the topic and the nature of the question, I'd nevertheless tend to lean toward 'let it stand' (but also 'let a similar kind of response to it stand').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(On the other hand, a &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; that's primarily &quot;&lt;em&gt;statisticians don't know what they're doing&lt;/em&gt;&quot; would constitute a &quot;rant rather than a question&quot;, and closed on that basis. I've seen a couple. It's not that it's offensive -- it's that it's &lt;em&gt;not really a question&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe psychology &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be argued to be unscientific*, and maybe statisticians &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; know what they're doing (sometimes I do wonder about us, so let's hear what the problem is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*  (as a broad proposition, I really don't agree, but I'd want to tolerate the argument -- I'd simply look for more than mere assertion, and if the comment stands, a comment in response is a fair place to ask if they can support such a general comment)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2015-04-02T11:12:05.593" LastActivityDate="2015-04-02T11:12:05.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2483" CreationDate="2015-04-02T02:11:48.873" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to confirm -- votes that had only one first choice, or only a first and second choice were present in the election that was held ... and were used in the way you would hope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a little piece out of the (publicly available) data file, with spaces added, some column headings not present in the original (for context) and some added comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;num   1st    2nd  3rd    terminal&#xA;votes choice ch.  ch.      zero&#xA;&#xA;...&#xA;1       1     2     3       0       # voted for candidate 1,2 and 3 in that order&#xA;1       2     3     4       0       # voted for candidate 2,3 and 4 in that order&#xA;1       1     0     0       0       # only voted for candidate 1           (A)&#xA;1       1     0     0       0&#xA;1       1     2     0       0       # only voted for candidates 1 and 2    (B)&#xA;1       1     2     4       0&#xA;1       1     3     2       0&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is &quot;candidate 1&quot; and so on is given by the order of the names near the end of the vote file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first column is always 1 for SE elections (identical votes are not aggregated, &#xA;but the file format supports such aggregation), and the last column is always 0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That these were used can be seen by the &lt;code&gt;Exhausted&lt;/code&gt; vote in round 2 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opavote.org/results/5714987150475264/0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. That's the votes like&#xA;the one I marked &quot;(A)&quot; contributing 38% of their vote toward electing one moderator, but then wasting the remainder of their vote, by then failing to express any opinion about the later candidates in respect of the second open position. While it's possible some of them might have felt there was &lt;em&gt;no way&lt;/em&gt; to distinguish the later candidates' suitability, I suspect the main cause for many of those is simply lack of understanding of how single transferrable voting (STV) works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People who voted &quot;1 2 0&quot; or something like that (such as &quot;(B)&quot; in the above) used more of their vote. There was no third round (but it was possible there could have been one), so the absence of their third choice had no impact at all, and as it happened, no votes other than &quot;1 0 0&quot; were prematurely exhausted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They all counted as they should for an STV election.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2015-04-02T03:02:41.720" LastActivityDate="2015-04-02T03:02:41.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2497" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-02T20:20:36.860" Score="4" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have asked a question on this community prior to this question. It was well-answered, and I adore this community. However, I have a question. It appears to be centered around statistics, but I also noticed that it is open to questions on machine learning, and that there are a lot of questions in that category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I have recently seen a community called &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Data Science&lt;/a&gt;&quot; that also appears specific to my task, even having a more computer-centric approach, with a focus on machine learning as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which communities are better to post questions on machine learning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71822" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:50:40.830" LastActivityDate="2015-04-02T20:35:43.957" Title="Which community is better for machine learning questions?" Tags="|discussion|machine-learning|datascience-stackexchange|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-10-19T12:49:31.550" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="793" CreationDate="2015-04-03T10:22:40.563" Score="18" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Stan&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stan is an open-source, probabilistic programming language implementing full Bayesian statistical inference and penalized maximum likelihood estimation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stan has very good &lt;a href=&quot;http://mc-stan.org/documentation/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;documentation&lt;/a&gt; (including detailed &lt;em&gt;Language Manual&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/stan-dev/stan/wiki&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;github Wiki page&lt;/a&gt; and active &lt;a href=&quot;http://discourse.mc-stan.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stan users&lt;/a&gt; mailing list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="35989" LastEditDate="2017-11-08T10:49:09.887" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T10:49:09.887" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-04-03T10:22:40.563" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="793" CreationDate="2015-04-03T10:25:56.967" Score="14" Body="&lt;h1&gt;JAGS&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;JAGS is Just Another Gibbs Sampler.  It is a program for analysis of&#xA;  Bayesian hierarchical models using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)&#xA;  simulation  not wholly unlike BUGS.  JAGS was written with three aims&#xA;  in mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;To have a cross-platform engine for the BUGS language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;To be extensible, allowing users to write their own functions, distributions and samplers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;To be a plaftorm for experimentation with ideas in Bayesian modelling&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://mcmc-jags.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://mcmc-jags.sourceforge.net/&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Online forum for JAGS users can be found on JAGS &lt;a href=&quot;http://sourceforge.net/p/mcmc-jags/discussion/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;sourceforge page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2015-04-03T10:25:56.967" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-04-03T10:25:56.967" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2500" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-04-03T16:40:50.543" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Markdown is a lightweight &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/editing-help&quot; title=&quot;editing help&quot;&gt;markup language&lt;/a&gt; used across the entire Stack Exchange network for &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/22186/how-do-i-format-my-code-blocks&quot; title=&quot;How do I format my code blocks?&quot;&gt;post formatting&lt;/a&gt;. The language takes many cues from existing conventions for marking up plain text in email; it is designed for maximum readability and &quot;publishability&quot; of both its input and output forms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported excerpt and wiki from the main &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/markdown/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-04-04T09:49:40.320" LastActivityDate="2015-04-04T09:49:40.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2501" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-04-03T16:40:50.543" Score="0" Body="Lightweight, plain-text markup language used across the entire Stack Exchange network for post formatting." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-04-04T09:51:10.000" LastActivityDate="2015-04-04T09:51:10.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2502" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-04-03T16:52:49.510" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the question is about answers which have &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8231/are-answers-that-just-contain-links-elsewhere-really-good-answers/8259#8259&quot;&gt;only links as piece of information&lt;/a&gt;, use the tag &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/link-only-answers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'link-only-answers'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;link-only-answers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported excerpt from the main &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/hyperlinks/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-04-04T11:01:47.383" LastActivityDate="2015-04-04T11:01:47.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2503" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-04-03T16:52:49.510" Score="0" Body="HTML links, generally those created within the network on questions, answers, or the site itself." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-04-04T09:51:02.777" LastActivityDate="2015-04-04T09:51:02.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2504" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-04-03T17:01:12.687" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported excerpt and wiki from the main &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/link-only-answers/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers that depend &lt;em&gt;entirely&lt;/em&gt; on the information available on another page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Examples:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.example.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;reference to some URL&quot;&gt;&quot;this will help you&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;do as described &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.example.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;reference to some URL&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to be immediately helpful to readers (and avoid &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link-rot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link-rot&lt;/a&gt;), we prefer answers that provide at least a summary of the solution directly, with links used to offer &lt;em&gt;additional&lt;/em&gt; information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;See also:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-questions&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange FAQ -&gt; Why are some questions or answers removed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Answers that do not fundamentally answer the question may be removed. This includes answers that are … barely more than a link to an external site&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange -&gt; How to Answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Provide context for links&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A link to a potential solution is always welcome, but please add context around the link so your fellow users will have some idea what it is and why it’s there. Always quote the most relevant part of an important link, in case the target site is unreachable or goes permanently offline. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/8259/165773&quot; title=&quot;canonical explanation&quot;&gt;Are answers that just contain links elsewhere really “good answers”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;links... should &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; be the only piece of information in your answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An analogy would be if you are standing at 100 Main St. and you ask where 98 Main St. is. A good answer would be &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&quot;It is the next building over&quot;. &lt;em&gt;points at building&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you instead include a link, you are saying &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&quot;I'll direct you to a tourism information booth, and they will be able to provide you with your answer and much more!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Which is great, however, you haven't answered their question at all, you've deferred the answering to somewhere else...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/225370/your-answer-is-in-another-castle-when-is-an-answer-not-an-answer&quot;&gt;Your answer is in another castle: when is an answer not an answer?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vAUaw.png&quot; alt=&quot;A, NAA, A, NAA, VLQ&quot; title=&quot;A, NAA, A, NAA, VLQ&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-04-04T09:50:46.193" LastActivityDate="2015-04-04T09:50:46.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2505" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-04-03T17:01:12.687" Score="0" Body="Link only answers are answers that are barely more than a link to another page." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-04-04T11:01:50.023" LastActivityDate="2015-04-04T11:01:50.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2506" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-04-06T15:01:51.550" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Badges (along with reputation) are what makes Stack Exchange sites tick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a question about how the badge system works, or a question about a specific badge, this is the tag to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Want to know more?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Visit the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges&quot;&gt;Badges page&lt;/a&gt; for a list of available badges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FAQ: &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/67397/184576&quot;&gt;List of all badges with full descriptions&lt;/a&gt;, provides an intensive information regarding each badge, how it gets awarded, and exactly what it means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported excerpt and adapted wiki from the main &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/badges/info&quot;&gt;Meta stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-04-06T19:21:34.400" LastActivityDate="2015-04-06T19:21:34.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2507" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-04-06T15:01:51.550" Score="0" Body="Badges are awarded to encourage and incentivize positive community actions within the site" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-04-06T19:21:31.650" LastActivityDate="2015-04-06T19:21:31.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2487" CreationDate="2015-04-06T16:48:47.270" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I flag link-only-answers as &quot;not an answer&quot;. I also vote to delete them in the low quality review queue, because even though it is possible such links to be helpful, the way the information is provided is not adequate to the Stack Exchange format. This is the minimum recommended procedure I understand from reading a compilation of such matter available &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/link-only-answers/info&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators can convert answers to comments, but they will not have the time to check all cases. If someone come across with a link-only-answer, which the link is useful, it is ok to flag for &quot;moderator attention&quot; and ask/suggest for the comment conversion, explaining why. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leaving a comment to the OP asking for more context in the answer is a possible option, but not required. Editing the answer to include more information can be considered a &quot;radical edit&quot;, which is a custom reason for rejecting edit-suggestions from &amp;lt;2k rep users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2015-04-06T16:48:47.270" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2487" CreationDate="2015-04-06T19:30:04.933" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with @AndreSilva.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are hoping that the moderators will convert it into a comment, it is probably helpful to post a comment under the answer noting that it is more of a comment than an answer.  This may make the task of categorizing the type of non-answer and deciding the appropriate course of action (i.e., delete vs. delete and convert) faster and easier for the moderators.  I will often leave a comment like the following:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Welcome to the site. At present this is more of a comment than an answer. You could expand it, perhaps by giving a summary of the information at the link, or we can convert it into a comment for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2015-04-06T21:26:09.877" LastActivityDate="2015-04-06T21:26:09.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2510" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-09T00:38:22.983" Score="13" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;The unfortunate collision of the word &quot;kernel&quot; as in &quot;kernel density estimate&quot; and the separate use as in &quot;reproducing kernel Hilbert space&quot; is making the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel&lt;/a&gt;  tag kind of confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag wiki summary has as its second sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;DO NOT USE this tag for [kernel-trick] which is reserved for kernel methods in machine learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(as was @gung's suggestion &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2168/9964&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). But the first page of the &quot;active&quot; page for the tag currently shows only 4/15 questions about kernel smoothing and the remaining 11 about RKHS kernel functions. So it seems that the outcome of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2167/9964&quot;&gt;this discussion&lt;/a&gt; from last fall wasn't enough to clean up the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current space of kernel-related tags seems to be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel&lt;/a&gt;, supposed to be for KDE-style kernel functions but in practice a mix of both (264 questions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-trick&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-trick&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-trick&lt;/a&gt;, for RKHS-style kernel functions and related issues (85 questions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-density-estimate&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-density-estimate&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-density-estimate&lt;/a&gt;, for KDE in general (78 questions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-regression&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-regression&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-regression&lt;/a&gt;, 5 questions of which 4 are about Nadaraya-Watson kernel regression (analogous to KDE) and 1 is about RKHS kernels&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the name &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-trick&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-trick&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-trick&lt;/a&gt; isn't the most intuitive name when you're thinking about kernel methods, especially when there's the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel&lt;/a&gt; tag popping up first. So I propose either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;renaming &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-smoothing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-smoothing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-smoothing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;completely removing &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel&lt;/a&gt; and sorting it into &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-density-estimate&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-density-estimate&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-density-estimate&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-regression&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-regression&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-regression&lt;/a&gt; as appropriate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In either case, people who should be using &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-trick&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-trick&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-trick&lt;/a&gt; will then hopefully pause after typing in &quot;kernel&quot;, see two options, and hopefully read the tag summaries and pick the correct one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm happy to do that sorting (a few at a time during low-traffic times).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9964" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T14:13:35.113" Title="The kernel tag is a mess – should it be changed?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-10-16T20:46:30.627" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2511" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2513" CreationDate="2015-04-10T02:27:45.463" Score="2" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have discovered this site only recently, and coming from a non-mathematical or computer background, but with quite a bit of interest in statistics and scientific methodology, I've come to enjoy it very much, and spend many hours trying to learn, and challenging myself. So thank you to the many of you out there that have made CV great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contradistinction to other more casual sites, CrossValidated requires serious work before even posting a question, resulting in a much higher standard of content. Predictably, it is often the case that a post in CrossValidated is ranked at the top when doing a browser search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is in this sense that it is somewhat anticlimactic, and possibly counterproductive (?), when, having come across just the right return on a Google search within the Q&amp;amp;A's repository of CV, it turns out that the question is unanswered with multiple moderators' comments indicating that there's already an answer to the question on a different post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though it is easy enough to just follow the link to whatever &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; answer is, one may claim that the fact that CV encourages specificity and detail necessarily narrows some responses at the expense of generality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I wonder if it would be beneficial to encourage more answers on the same or closely related topics, inviting redundancy, and to some point repetition to one, cover all possible aspects of the fields of interest in CV, and two, make up for the collimated nature of the Q&amp;amp;A's with some overlap in the responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67822" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-04-10T16:30:19.003" LastActivityDate="2015-04-11T08:13:08.707" Title="Asking for clarification on the benefits of redundancy or multiple questions and answers on one topic" Tags="|discussion|policy|exact-duplicates|search|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2511" CreationDate="2015-04-10T09:06:30.003" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;My feeling is that questions along the same lines are going to get answers along the same lines&amp;mdash;better to encourage &lt;em&gt;distinctive&lt;/em&gt; questions if we want the answers to have wider coverage. We try to do that by linking to duplicates &amp;amp; near-duplicate questions &amp;amp; asking what's not covered in the answers there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it counter-productive when I answer a question only to discover later on that someone else has answered what's essentially the same question already (often rather better): I could have saved time by linking to the prior question, perhaps with an explanation of how it was related if that wasn't obvious, or, if I had anything worth adding, by writing a brief complementary answer or comment; or I could have been inspired by the other answer to write something I wouldn't have thought of by myself. I also find it anticlimactic when a search turns up half a dozen posts on a topic I'm interested in but the questions &amp;amp; answers are all much the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2015-04-10T10:34:20.043" LastActivityDate="2015-04-10T10:34:20.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2511" CreationDate="2015-04-11T06:56:07.643" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's clear policy that exact duplicates should close (since we want to be able to find the &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; answer or answers to that question, not just an answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the question should be retained* so that the different ways of asking a question lead to the same answer. As far as I understand, that's the typical case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*(I think dupes should almost never be deleted -- unless its word-for-word and has no answers; either they're so close that a separate question is no use whatever -- in which case merge it -- or they're expressed in a slightly different way that someone might hit with a search, which suggests the question has value even if it means the same thing.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion a search that hits a closed duplicate is a success, as long as the link covers what the person wanted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the point of closure of duplicates -- what it's &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; -- is to get the best answers to that particular question in one place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, sometimes questions aren't quite duplicates -- a near duplicate probably contains some useful information that may help but the details may be different enough that another answer or set of answers is worth having for that specific issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also indication that we could take more care to explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; we're closing; even the newer, friendlier close messages can sometimes be confusing and even confronting, and the purpose of closing may be unclear. There's sometimes a tendency to see closing as criticism or punishment when it's actually part of how SE is supposed to work. Done right it helps people find good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's support (including founder-support) for the position of perhaps not closing when sometimes we might be inclined to. For example, there's &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/handling-duplicate-questions/&quot;&gt;this blog post from Jeff Atwood&lt;/a&gt;; see the section under &amp;quot;Borderline duplicates&amp;quot;, including:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These have [...] subtle differences that may make them legitimately standalone questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There’s often benefit to having multiple subtle variants of a question around, as people tend to ask and search using completely different words, and the better our coverage, the better odds our fellow programmers can find the answer they’re looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do think we sometimes have a tendency to &amp;quot;over-categorize&amp;quot; and lose subtle shades of distinction between questions that may help users, so we should perhaps consider whether there can be value in tolerating some posts that may seem like duplicates at first blush. As mentioned at the blog post, we can use other tools than close-as-duplicate to get people to see those other good answers - good use of tags, and links to closely related posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2015-04-11T08:13:08.707" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2514" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-11T22:52:49.083" Score="7" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was trying to implement the EM algorithm (on GMM) in code, however, I was getting that in high dimension, I get numerical issues when computing the E-step:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$p(j|x^{(t)}) = \frac{ p(j) N(x^{(t)} | j; \mu_j, \sigma^2_j) }{\sum^{K}_{j=1} p(j) N(x^{(t)} | j; \mu_j, \sigma^2_j)}$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was going to ask about different numerical or mathematical methods or any method that could make this equation be computed without a NaN or divided by zero issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where is this question a good place to ask? I am sure people have run the EM algorithm before, so this should be a known issue and it seems that it should be well known how to fix it. Or at least I am sure I am not the first one to try to fix such an issue. Is CV a good site to ask this type of question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a boundary code, mathematics, ML question so I was not sure where I could get a useful response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28986" LastActivityDate="2015-04-11T22:52:49.083" Title="Where should I ask a question about numerical issue about the EM algorithms?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2515" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2516" CreationDate="2015-04-12T14:20:21.407" Score="1" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of my questions got an obviously wrong &quot;This question may already have an answer here&quot; attached to it (I give an explanation at the end of the question):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/145962/is-the-standard-intuition-for-bessels-correction-in-unbiased-sample-variance-wr&quot;&gt;Is the degrees-of-freedom explanation for Bessel&amp;#39;s correction in unbiased sample variance wrong?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is very annoying since many people won't bother reading the question and this is definitely reducing the chances of getting an answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is there any possibility how you can get rid of such a wrong suggestion again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: I obviously made the mistake of thinking that &lt;em&gt;everybody&lt;/em&gt; saw this comment at the beginning of my question. It is of course helpful to get feedback as to whether questions could have answers already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2015-04-12T15:27:22.820" Title="How to get rid of wrong &quot;This question may already have an answer here&quot;?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2515" CreationDate="2015-04-12T15:04:18.233" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It isn't really &quot;attached&quot; to your question.  It is just a comment.  When that comment was left, it put your question into the close vote review queue.  It will take 5 close votes to close it as a duplicate (unless a moderator agrees, in which case it will be closed immediately).  At present, two people have voted (one of whom was me), both to leave open.  I find it likely that nothing will happen to your question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt anyone will read the comments first, and finding that comment, not read your actual question.  I think most people read the questions and answers, and not the comments at all.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2015-04-12T15:04:18.233" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2517" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2518" CreationDate="2015-04-13T19:16:18.590" Score="11" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a new review queue user, I'm slightly intimidated by the possibility of misjudging a new post's quality.  I would find it comforting to see how other, more experienced, users have reviewed in the past in order to judge my response.  I know that it is possible to go to a specific user's profile and see their review history, and individually look to see any edits that were made to actions tagged as &lt;code&gt;review&lt;/code&gt;, but is there a more intuitive way to judge what the general response is to posts? A kind of history of reviews, with their outcomes? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an addendum; how have other users gotten the feel for review queues? Trial and error? Would love to hear thoughts.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44952" LastEditorUserId="22228" LastEditDate="2015-10-19T18:19:21.100" LastActivityDate="2015-10-19T18:19:21.100" Title="Learning from previous review decisions" Tags="|discussion|review|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2517" CreationDate="2015-04-14T01:47:54.933" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a lot of sympathy. I still find it hard to judge reviews a lot of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The system gives much less feedback/information than it would be useful to know, especially when you're just starting out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) skip what you're quite unsure of. Someone else will deal with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) on the other hand, don't be afraid of making the occasional mistake -- we all do. Fortunately, things aren't only relying on you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) The two review queues you can access are ones that are often fine. Your task is mostly to notice the problem posts. One way is to look at it as having layers like an onion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;is there some very bad problem that needs to be addressed? (spam, something really offensive, a user under 13 giving personal information, or something else that clearly contravenes the user agreement)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the big problems, most of the time, you just &lt;em&gt;flag it, and move on&lt;/em&gt;. It's a moderator's problem now. If you can vote to close or whatever, feel free to do that. But the flag's the important one.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;new users' first posts often need an edit. You can suggest edits. Don't worry about it if it's just one or two spelling mistakes in unimportant words. Make at least some substantive changes, rather than only cosmetic ones - though titles tend to be more important, so lean toward fixing those. Often posts need a lot of work -- suggest good tags, fix obvious formatting problems, try to make the post clear. If you do decide there's enough of a problem there to edit something, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; fix everything you can (so once you're editing, then fix minor spelling errors too).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;with first posts, you're also serving an educational function. New users often don't understand how things work. If it doesn't seem like anything you should flag or vote on (if you can vote to close, say), maybe you can post a comment to suggest something to the user. New users may not know where the help is, for example (even though they need it), or that you can't post questions in answers, or how community norms for homework go or any of a vast number of other issues. You have a chance to give the site a friendly face and the new user a nudge in the right direction.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;don't pass up the opportunity to upvote a first question or first answer that's pretty good. If the poster has put effort in to make a decent question or answer, encourage them. If you suggest some fix to them (or someone else does) and they fix it ... vote it up then. Encouraging people when they're doing well is at least as important as the guidance we offer on posts with problems.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that you can vote to close yet, so you may not have that option (you'll see what you can do when you use the queue).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing you can do to see how posts were handled (whether you did anything or not) is to paste the URL somewhere (right click the title when you review it and you should have an option to either copy the address or open it in a new tab, or possibly both), and then come back a while later (or the next day if need be), and load that location to take a look at the post. Was it deleted? Put on hold by community vote? Held by a moderator? Edited? Commented on? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, while I was typing my answer, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/146207/mcmc-estimation-for-multivariate-stochastic-volatility-model&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; was in the first post review queue. Take a look at it now to see how it was dealt with. Two users voted to close as too broad (five users with enough privilege to do so can close a post that way), and a moderator agreed (so the post closed right away). There were other problems with the post of course, but the most important thing is dealt with. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll sometimes see things happen you don't agree with (it happens to me every day). If it's a really big deal you can either respond to a comment with polite comment in response (but the main aim with comments should be to do things to improve the post), or if there was an action you really think is mistaken to the extent that it's a problem, you could bring it up on meta. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T00:45:10.123" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2510" CreationDate="2015-04-14T14:12:00.253" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am posting this answer mainly to try to kindle some further discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I wrote above, after posting my question (that you link to) I went through all PCA questions and retagged all kernel PCA ones to [kernel-trick]. But I did not touch kernel SVM questions. I think that manual retagging all such machine learning questions to [kernel-trick] would be a good thing to do, and if you are up to it -- go ahead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This will have an added benefit that you will be able to use this opportunity to edit, close, or answer some of the questions you go through.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more difficult question is what to do with the remaining questions, and here I am not sure. I agree with @gung that [kernel-regression] can be removed. Leaving [kernel] tag intact will make people use it instead of [kernel-trick], as it is currently happening every now and then. So I think the best course of action would be to merge [kernel], [kernel-density-estimate]=[kde], and [kernel-smoothing] into one tag that starts with [kernel-...].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess [kernel-density-estimate] might be the best candidate, but I am not sure.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some possibilities:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-smoothing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-smoothing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-smoothing&lt;/a&gt; $\rightarrow$ &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-density-estimate&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-density-estimate&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-density-estimate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kde&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kde&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kde&lt;/a&gt; $\qquad\qquad\rightarrow$ &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-density-estimate&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-density-estimate&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-density-estimate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-regression&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-regression&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-regression&lt;/a&gt; $\rightarrow$ &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-density-estimate&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-density-estimate&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-density-estimate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel&lt;/a&gt; $\qquad\quad\, \rightarrow$ &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-trick&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-trick&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-trick&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2015-04-15T03:46:05.120" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T03:46:05.120" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2333" CreationDate="2015-04-14T14:36:05.040" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/793/internet-support-for-statistics-software&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GGfkr.png&quot; alt=&quot;Internet Support for Statistics Software&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2015-04-14T14:36:05.040" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-04-14T14:36:05.040" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2517" CreationDate="2015-04-14T17:27:08.860" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Glen_b has provided a nice answer.  I agree with most everything (except&amp;mdash;being very opinionated by nature&amp;mdash;that it's hard to judge a lot of reviews).  Here's my 2&amp;cent;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just go ahead and do something.  Do whatever seems like the right thing to you, but do something.  There isn't necessarily any such thing as the 'right' action really anyway.  For the most part, what turns out to be 'right' emerges from the collective actions of the community.  For that to be the case, you need to throw your actions into the mix.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if your opinion goes against the consensus, it is difficult to do much harm.  If you leave a comment that someone else disagrees with, they can leave another comment.  Edits can be rolled back.  A flag can be declined by the moderators.  It would take four additional close votes to actually close a question, but it can be re-opened without much difficulty.  Etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just give it your best shot and do something.  In my opinion, most new posts need some editing, so edit.  Many new questions need some kind of additional information or clarification that the OP doesn't recognize, so leave them a comment.  If there is nothing worth editing and no comments are necessary, that suggests (to my mind) that an upvote is in order.  Or you could just leave a friendly comment (e.g., &quot;Welcome to CV.&quot;) as @kjetilbhalvorsen often does.  Just do something and you'll be fine.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2015-04-14T17:27:08.860" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2510" CreationDate="2015-04-15T06:34:29.493" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A similar thing happens with the &quot;clustering&quot; tag on SO. One third want to load-balance their web server, one third are about database clusters, and one third is about cluster analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO stackoverflow needs some &quot;this tag is ambiguous, choose a better tag&quot; function. &lt;em&gt;People do not read tag descriptions&lt;/em&gt; (the Android app doesn't display them anyway). If a user types &quot;kernel&quot; he should have to choose from KDE, kernel-trick, etc. and not be allowed to use the ambiguous version. (Aliases don't work - on SO clustering is aliased to cluster-analysis, and we get plenty of mistaggings there. Instead, multiple alternatives should be offered: load-balancing won't turn up when a user searches for clustering either!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7828" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2015-04-15T14:13:35.113" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T14:13:35.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2523" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2525" CreationDate="2015-04-15T17:58:08.037" Score="8" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am referring here to recent question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/146533/versus-vs-how-to-properly-use-this-word-in-data-analysis&quot;&gt;versus (vs.): how to properly use this word in data analysis&lt;/a&gt; that asked about proper usage of &quot;versus&quot; word in describing relations between variables in data analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me such a question is off-topic since it is about English language usage rather than statistics. My argument is that if the question would ask about describing the same things but in language other than English it would considered be bluntly off-topic (and possibly unanswerable for most of us).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about word usage in statistical reports were closed several times before as off-topic, while the one I refer to seems not to provoke votes for being off-topic. So my question is: are this kind of questions off-topic or not? What are the criteria? And &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; this kind of questions are not off-topic, then maybe we need &lt;code&gt;[statistical-language]&lt;/code&gt; tag as poster of the linked question suggested..?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-04-17T04:13:31.287" Title="Are questions on statistical language valid and do we need statistical-language tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|on-topic|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2523" CreationDate="2015-04-15T18:25:53.887" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've argued the other way in the thread cited, both by commenting against this point of view and by answering the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we can agree that questions such as these do seem to straddle a border. The question is how much of the question is on each side. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My position is pragmatic. If a usage question is only in small part about meanings or senses that are statistical, then I agree that it belongs elsewhere. Where the primary thrust of the question is statistical, and we can reckon that the answer should be of use or interest to many people here, then it should stay. Thus a question about cause, say, would have some statistical flavour, but more crucially is common to many sciences, and indeed disciplines, so the grounds for keeping it would not be clear; but this question to me seems firmly in our camp. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that the question is phrased in English is incidental here; that's the language of the forum any way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T18:25:53.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2523" CreationDate="2015-04-15T18:26:37.587" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technical statistical usage sometimes departs from colloquial English usage.  (Examples abound, such as the transitive use of &quot;to learn&quot; in the ML community and the use of singular nouns among statisticians to refer to entire families of distributions.  And that's not even touching on the severely technical meanings of &quot;confidence,&quot; &quot;error,&quot; &quot;fit,&quot; &quot;probability,&quot; &quot;sample,&quot; and so on!  &lt;em&gt;Statistics is a foreign language,&lt;/em&gt; no matter what your native tongue might be.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, to the extent a question might require statistical/ML expertise to understand or answer, and to the extent its answer might differ from colloquial usage, I think such questions are on topic.  As a moderator, all I ask is that any &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; supply objective arguments and refer to authoritative references for support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T18:26:37.587" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2523" CreationDate="2015-04-16T00:48:50.770" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The general question&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think questions that are about statistical terminology (the correct use of statistical jargon) are on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone asks about &quot;what does &lt;em&gt;significance&lt;/em&gt; really mean in statistics?&quot; then that's right on topic here, in my book. [If they ask about, say, the meaning of the word &quot;linear&quot;, that's strictly a mathematics question but should probably be tolerated here because a complete answer relevant to statistics would highlight the use of the constant term (I think &lt;code&gt;homogeneous coordinates&lt;/code&gt; may be the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformation_matrix#Affine_transformations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;term for that&lt;/a&gt;) in linear models, which an ordinary mathematician's explanation might not bother to mention, but will be central to most statistics usage. Some judgement is required as to the degree of relevance.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, some questions ask about words or phrases that are just about ordinary English usage. They belong on english.SE (generally not ELL, unless it's clearly something that would be understood by an ordinary user of English). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The somewhat more specific question&lt;/strong&gt;, and the issue that it raises:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a recent question about the statistical meaning of &lt;code&gt;versus&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe  the premise of the question is false -- there's no particular &lt;em&gt;technical&lt;/em&gt; meaning of &quot;&lt;em&gt;versus&lt;/em&gt;&quot; in statistics -- in statistical writing it's being used in its ordinary English sense (or, perhaps arguably, in some situations its ordinary mathematical sense), though sometimes subject to fairly ordinary English mistakes, or sometimes common habits in particular areas; that it might be used or misused in a specific way doesn't alter that it's English usage rather than a technical term (or at least not a stats one). The mention of this premise means the question falls in neither of the situations I mention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the question carries the premise that it's a technical term (whether right or not), english.SE shouldn't accept it (they're not in a position to judge whether it's a technical term in stats), so it shouldn't be migrated by us. There may be some argument it really belongs on math.SE but I wouldn't lean that way myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So -- assuming it's decided that the premise is mistaken, which is certainly open to some debate -- the question then is 'does a question about a mistakenly-supposed technical term remain open here?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's why I think that's a matter of judgement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the impression that the word is statistical jargon with a specialized meaning is very uncommon -- something idiosyncratic to the OP or their experience made them post -- then the question is unlikely to help other users who come here, and should probably close as off topic (preferably with a comment that it takes its plain English meaning so the poster understands where to ask further questions about the usage of the word absent the premise).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if it's something people might come to the same conclusion about then it should remain open here, and be answered. In addition, where there's uncertainty, the impulse should lean toward erring on the OP's side (i.e. interpreting the question somewhat generously). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I lean toward saying that the default position should be that such a question should remain open here, but case by case decisions would be needed. It's certainly one I'd prefer not to use my diamond on*, unless I was adding a fifth vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* (I wish I could take that diamond off and just vote as an ordinary user in such cases)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[In the particular case of &quot;versus&quot;, I think Nick's answer in particular makes the question clearly belong here.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2015-04-17T04:13:31.287" LastActivityDate="2015-04-17T04:13:31.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2527" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2533" CreationDate="2015-04-21T17:49:02.627" Score="21" ViewCount="392" Body="&lt;p&gt;Users like whuber, Glen_b, gung, Peter, Frank, Jeromy, .... I see your edits, comments and answers everywhere! I was just wondering how much of your time you spend on stats.se? Do you have scheduled hours every day or do you hop in when you find time? I have been lurking for a long time and would really like to contribute to the community which has helped me learn so much. Please share some of your tips on user involvement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34645" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-04-22T20:08:13.683" LastActivityDate="2015-04-28T16:10:38.517" Title="How much time do the top rep users spend on stats.SE?" Tags="|discussion|participation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2528" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2529" CreationDate="2015-04-22T15:26:57.190" Score="11" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading the third point (collecting data) on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;this list&lt;/a&gt;, I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/147625/what-is-the-best-method-for-collecting-up-to-date-information-regarding-world-wi&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; (What is the best way of collecting birth rate data?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: why is &quot;collecting data&quot; listed as on topic, however, when this question about collecting data is posed, it's put on hold as off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74180" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T00:11:06.173" Title="Why is data collection listed as on topic, but a data collection question was closed as off topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|data|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2528" CreationDate="2015-04-22T15:51:47.667" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question concerns looking for existing datasets rather than generating data of your own, but please note that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about obtaining particular datasets are off-topic (they are too specialized) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Beta &lt;a href=&quot;https://opendata.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Open Data site&lt;/a&gt; most likely would be interested in fielding such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:57:29.717" LastActivityDate="2015-04-22T15:51:47.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2528" CreationDate="2015-04-22T16:18:32.507" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sort of things that are on-topic are the statistical aspects of data-collection &lt;em&gt;methods&lt;/em&gt;: sampling schemes, surveys, experimental design, &amp;amp;c. So if you want to investigate whether patients with some disease have higher blood pressure than normal, CV would be the right place to ask about choosing an appropriate sample size; but not about how to use a sphygmomanometer, or where to find data on the range of normal blood pressure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2015-04-22T16:18:32.507" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2531" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2532" CreationDate="2015-04-23T11:50:00.060" Score="5" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a range of browsers, I've found that $\LaTeX$ tables no longer seem to work on this site. Neither of these posts display correctly: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/142057/if-i-have-a-2x2-table-of-proportions-of-treatment-effects-what-is-the-best-test&quot;&gt;How to test for a synergistic effect of A &amp;amp; B with proportions of treatment effects, if I don&amp;#39;t have the full 2x2 table?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/27257/significant-predictors-become-non-significant-in-multiple-logistic-regression/27260#27260&quot;&gt;Significant predictors become non-significant in multiple logistic regression&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Were these misformatted in the first place? Their Latex looks okay to me but perhaps they did not display correctly before - I know I have seen some other instances of Latex tables but they may have been constructed differently. Or has support for Latex tables changed? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see the same problem on &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/943539/72968&quot;&gt;Maths SE&lt;/a&gt; so it isn't specific to CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T12:33:05.420" Title="Have Latex tables stopped working?" Tags="|support|bug|math-display|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2531" CreationDate="2015-04-23T13:49:32.263" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think &lt;code&gt;\begin{table}&lt;/code&gt; has ever worked on the SE system.  (There is a relevant thread on meta.SE from 2009 here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/16356/187282&quot;&gt;Why can't table markup elements be used?&lt;/a&gt;)  I don't believe it is supported by Mathjax.  To make a &quot;table&quot; in $\LaTeX$ / Mathjax on the SE sites that support it, use &lt;code&gt;\begin{array}{}... \end{array}&lt;/code&gt;.  I have an example here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/63247/7290&quot;&gt;DF for regression SS in multiple linear regression when sigma is known&lt;/a&gt;, and I discussed the issue on meta.SE here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/192843/187282&quot;&gt;Is there any markdown to create tables?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T13:49:32.263" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2527" CreationDate="2015-04-24T01:08:41.810" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess my comments grew long enough for an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of those users will have different profles of time spent per day and how it's achieved. Some aren't here so much nowadays but were very active in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me it varies. I don't work full time atm so I spare a little time each day, but I recently reduced my time here. I do a little when I first wake up or when going to bed, plus ten minutes when I can squeeze it in (e.g. at lunch), or if there wasn't time then, maybe 15 minutes in the late afternoon. Unless I'm busy with other things, more time on the weekends. Some days I don't answer anything, and then it might only be 10 minutes total -- it's more &quot;do something every day&quot; than &quot;spend lots of time&quot;. Many edits, reviews or comments can be squeezed into 10-15 minutes; I type quite quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over a few years, a little time every day adds up to thousands of actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of my longer answers have many edits... often that's a case of 'write a 5 minute answer' because that's what time I have spare, then add a paragraph or two later. Maybe I'll come back even later and add a diagram or a reference. It's rare for me to have the time to construct a single long answer in one go. Even when it looks like a one-edit answer, it has often been constructed off-line in several short bursts then posted. (On SO that seems to be regarded as not good practice -- they have an issue with 'fastest gun' answers where people post very short answers quickly to draw early votes that are needed to get an answer noticed and then build it up to a good answer. Recently here we average a good deal less than one answer per question so it's not so much an issue if someone makes an answer in small pieces.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're interested in strategies for generating reputation with moderate time investment, I think a good long term strategy is to check regularly, answer 1 or 2 questions that relate to what you know (i.e. make a few reasonably substantive answers than many short ones) and improve the question in ways that help people find it / makes them want to read it (good titles, appropriate tags, clarity).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="930" LastEditDate="2015-04-28T16:10:38.517" LastActivityDate="2015-04-28T16:10:38.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2535" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-04-24T15:39:07.940" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathJax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MathJax&lt;/a&gt; is used to write mathematical expressions on this site. Its syntax is essentially the same as LaTeX.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MathJax help currently points to an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.math.harvard.edu/texman/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;introduction on the Harvard web pages.&lt;/a&gt;  Additional help is available on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://tex.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;SE TeX site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2015-04-24T15:39:07.940" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T15:39:07.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2536" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-04-24T15:39:07.940" Score="0" Body="Mechanisms for displaying mathematical notation." OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2015-04-24T15:39:07.940" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T15:39:07.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2537" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-24T19:42:18.827" Score="8" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;First I answered &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/143999/on-forecasting-the-mean-squared-error-and-realized-volatility&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question on March 30 (the same day as the question was posted). Later I got two upvotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then a bounty was started on that question some time in mid-April. I received two upvotes during the bounty period (April 11 and April 14). &lt;br&gt;&#xA;(I am not 100% sure, but I think both April 11 and April 14 fall within the bounty period; how can I check what period the bounty was on?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer was never accepted. There was only one other answer that got only one upvote in total and was not accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was hoping to get half of the bounty following the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;bounty rules&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you do not award your bounty within 7 days (plus the grace period), the highest voted answer created after the bounty started with at least 2 upvotes will be awarded half the bounty amount. If there's no answer meeting that criteria, the bounty is not awarded to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- but that did not happen. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; What could be the reason I did not get (half of) the bounty?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2015-04-26T08:01:16.483" Title="Why was the bounty not awarded to me?" Tags="|support|answers|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2537" CreationDate="2015-04-26T08:01:16.483" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @whuber correctly pointed out, my answer was not &lt;em&gt;created after the bounty started&lt;/em&gt;. Therefore, I did not get half the bounty when it expired. Puzzle solved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastActivityDate="2015-04-26T08:01:16.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2539" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-28T11:56:59.937" Score="15" ViewCount="419" Body="&lt;p&gt;It probably could be stated as a fact that &quot;interesting&quot; questions get more interest, answers and votes, while the &quot;common&quot; ones receive less attention on CV. I recently noticed that it happens (not so rarely) that this kind of &quot;boring&quot; questions are more susceptible to receive a low quality or even plainly &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; answers. This can happen in any thread, however what I noticed is that in such cases from time to time such answers get accepted, upvoted and &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; downvoted even if they are not correct. What can we do as a community about it? The up/down-voting mechanisms are not working if some threads are ignored, but on another hand there is too many questions to review all of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-04-28T13:35:43.500" LastActivityDate="2015-04-28T18:52:28.527" Title="Low profile low quality answers" Tags="|discussion|answers|moderation|votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2539" CreationDate="2015-04-28T12:29:11.563" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll frame this more widely in these terms: people here may readily disagree with (a) someone else's upvote or (b) the OP's acceptance of an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearing (b) out of the way: An OP's acceptance of an answer is their exercise of their privilege. In principle, they are free to accept an answer they find helpful and need pay absolutely no attention to the votes and comments of other members or even the merits of other answers. I quite often find the answers accepted to be bizarre choices. Sometimes it can just be an early answer, or an answer that the OP wanted to hear for reasons that are not always good. But I don't usually find it helpful, or regard it as polite, to challenge an acceptance as wrong-headed, nor does that seem typical behaviour on this forum. (In some other forums, Meta seems awash with complaints on Why was this answer accepted?, and so forth.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all cases, you can and should record your dissent by &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;voting in the other direction &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and/or &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;commenting on weaknesses or errors in answers &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and/or &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;posting your own answers that are, in your view, more correct, constructive or cogent. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't judge on your impressions that there is a particular problem with certain kinds of threads. Which questions are classified as &quot;interesting&quot;, &quot;common&quot; or &quot;boring&quot; is too difficult to discuss. The definitions are tautological (interesting questions ... attract more interest) or too personal to be important, or for useful discussion the criteria need to be made explicit. More crucially, you don't give any examples of threads where you think our mechanisms are not working. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many threads here on Meta highlight that we have a long tail of fairly poor questions. The biggest single reason appears to be that statistics attracts a large number of users who are unable or unwilling to put a lot of effort into learning statistics! What else is new? So, many questions are very confused or insoluble and it's often the case that despite discussions they don't become clearer or more soluble. But I am not clear that you are identifying a new or different problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2015-04-28T18:52:28.527" LastActivityDate="2015-04-28T18:52:28.527" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2539" CreationDate="2015-04-28T12:51:40.690" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;As well as, or instead of, taking any of the actions @NickCox has discussed, we can flag or vote to close the common questions as duplicates (preferably soon after they're asked), thus ensuring they're linked to a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2015-04-28T12:51:40.690" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2542" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-28T15:04:01.977" Score="2" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we could use a site dedicated to programming in R (similar to the Mathematica SE). I went ahead and made a proposal in Area 51 (&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/86736/r-statistical-computing?referrer=lTBO59pTDuoy68xwMssL0w2&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5536" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-04-29T03:07:35.887" LastActivityDate="2015-05-04T15:41:05.677" Title="New proposal at Area51: R statistical computing" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|r|area51|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2542" CreationDate="2015-04-28T19:55:59.883" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The issue of an R-specific SE now appears to be moot, as &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/86736/r-statistical-computing?referrer=lTBO59pTDuoy68xwMssL0w2&quot;&gt;judging from the link&lt;/a&gt; the proposal has been closed with the message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Announcements&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The R community embraced Stack Overflow as &lt;em&gt;The&lt;/em&gt; place&#xA;  for R support and went on to gain a strong following on our Cross&#xA;  Validated site. – Robert Cartaino♦ 2 hours ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/users/5/robert-cartaino&quot;&gt;Robert Cartaino&lt;/a&gt; is &quot;the Director of Community Development for the Stack Exchange Network&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2015-04-28T22:06:54.230" LastActivityDate="2015-04-28T22:06:54.230" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2542" CreationDate="2015-04-28T21:43:36.527" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;StackOverflow defines the following &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topics&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a specific programming problem, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a software algorithm, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;software tools commonly used by programmers; and is&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a practical, answerable problem that is unique to software development&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SO does not define &lt;em&gt;programming&lt;/em&gt; per se, so we'd have to go elsewhere. According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_programming&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Computer programming (often shortened to programming) is a process&#xA;  that leads from an original formulation of a computing problem to&#xA;  executable computer programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK. So how many R questions in SO are asked in the context of developing executable code, or at least in the context of developing a standalone, self-contained R package? How many are asked about the software algorithm (which, in case of R, would probably be a statistical method, and hence more on topic at CV)? How many are asked about IDEs for R? There are some, I imagine, but mostly the questions are along the lines of &quot;How do I tweak &lt;code&gt;ggplot&lt;/code&gt; to do this&quot; or &quot;How do I manipulate &lt;code&gt;data.table&lt;/code&gt; to get that&quot;. None of that leads to executable code; at best, you can say that the code being created is batch code, i.e., simply sequences of R commands and functions, although you could probably refer to some of that code as scripts if they involve control flow and/or input parameters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, I come to the conclusion that R questions have been off-topic on SO to begin with, for all these years, unless they deal specifically with development of R packages (checking the inputs, establishing dependencies, interacting with the S4 object system, etc.). In other words, R community should be grateful that their stream of off-topic questions is being tolerated on SO. Having a dedicated site would have been a better idea. I feel really weird every time I flag R questions and send them to a website that primarily deals with OOP in Java and C#.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would feel the same way about other statistical packages like SAS and Stata. Just like in the case of R above, you don't create reusable executable code in SAS or Stata to solve problems with arbitrary inputs (although you could, of course, write &lt;a href=&quot;http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/mcrolref/61885/HTML/default/viewer.htm#macro-stmt.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SAS &lt;code&gt;MACRO&lt;/code&gt;s&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?program&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stata &lt;code&gt;program&lt;/code&gt;s&lt;/a&gt;), but rather to deal with your single existing data set trying to answer your specific research question. Judging from CV activity in these tags, these software titles are all but dead -- not an impression you would get from their annual user conferences, though, or from the expensive looking booths at professional conventions. The users of these packages, however, are but a very humble minority on CV -- may be because the strong emphasis on R intimidates them here; but mostly because the documentation in these packages is so much more extensive than the typical R listing of available options, and because the tech support type questions are answered in other online communities that SE system failed to incorporate -- as well as by the real tech support that these commercial software vendors do provide. (IMHO, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.statalist.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Statalist&lt;/a&gt; should have migrated to SE platform when they closed the mailing list format a year or so ago, instead of forming a traditional forum on which I miss everything that makes the SE platform so productive like edits, extensive tagging and multiple tiers of response. While the R questions get bounced to the Java/C# SE site, Stata questions are getting bounced away from the SE system to statalist.org.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2015-05-04T15:41:05.677" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2550" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-01T01:50:05.107" Score="5" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update (6th May: 2015): We now have the updated user pages.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Old Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I really like the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/04/two-new-user-pages-one-new-stat-this-ones-big/&quot;&gt;new user pages&lt;/a&gt; that are being rolled out over the stack exchange network. &#xA;I was curious whether there was a timeline for implementing the new user page for Cross Validated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183" LastEditorUserId="183" LastEditDate="2015-05-06T04:23:50.863" LastActivityDate="2015-05-06T04:23:50.863" Title="When will Cross Validated get new 2015 Stack Exchange user pages? (Update: they are now available)" Tags="|feature-request|design|profile-page|user-interface|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-05-13T16:11:22.847" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2550" CreationDate="2015-05-01T03:16:29.363" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The nearest I have to an actual answer is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/253359/list-of-communities-with-base-css-updates-completed&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;; the new profile pages will appear when the CSS changes go through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At that link there's a list of SE sites that have been done and a list of sites that have not (including Cross-Validated). The lists are in no particular order and there's no indication of when they'll go through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are more sites done than remain to be done. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my best guess at the expected time is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19478/the-many-memes-of-meta/19514#19514&quot;&gt;in about 6 to 8 weeks&lt;/a&gt;. I think we can reasonably assume that to be the mean of an exponentially distributed random variable, so it doesn't matter when you ask, the answer will be unchanged, even though the most likely time is much sooner than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2015-05-01T04:01:16.353" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2552" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-03T10:24:42.827" Score="2" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;Honestly I don't know where else to put this question, so here goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to subscribe to certain tags, but I do not want to receive daily mails, each of a different tag. How do I change this? Thanks. ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40252" LastActivityDate="2015-05-03T10:24:42.827" Title="Changing the parameters/settings of my subscription" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2553" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-03T13:41:29.233" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am really puzzled that this question received no response, it does not seem to be a difficult question, it is simply asking for the opinion of when to use one method over another. Is this because it is a dumb question (very possibly), or hard to answer (perhaps in depth, but I would be grateful for any insights), or is it somehow off topic? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/148357/arima-vs-random-forest&quot;&gt;ARIMA vs. Random Forest&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just want to know because I really thought this was the place to ask it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69240" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2015-05-04T05:38:28.267" Title="Is there anything wrong with this question?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2553" CreationDate="2015-05-03T15:18:40.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Statistics has more nooks and crannies than a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17zvthaTiw4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Thomas' English Muffin&lt;/a&gt;.  Knowing how well you can forecast with an ARIMA vs. a random forest strikes me as very specialized.  It may be that there are few people who feel sufficiently expert in both areas to comment.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also notice that your question has had rather few views.  You might try something to get the question to attract more attention overall.  It may be the few people who could answer haven't even seen it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2015-05-03T15:18:40.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2555" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-05-03T15:20:42.290" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Area 51&lt;/a&gt; is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Exchange&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Network&lt;/a&gt; staging zone. It's where groups of experts come together to build new Q&amp;amp;A sites that work just like Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Area 51 has &lt;a href=&quot;http://discuss.area51.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;its own discussion site&lt;/a&gt; which acts as its own meta site – but for some discussions about proposals related to statistics/data, this site might be a more appropriate place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="148698" LastEditDate="2022-03-11T19:07:46.017" LastActivityDate="2022-03-11T19:07:46.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2556" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-05-03T15:20:42.290" Score="0" Body="For questions concerning proposals for other sites on Area 51, the Stack Exchange Network staging zone where experts come together to build new Q&amp;A sites. Area 51 has its own discussion site which acts as its own meta site – but for some discussions about proposals related to statistics/data, this site might be a more appropriate place." OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="148698" LastEditDate="2022-03-11T19:07:46.017" LastActivityDate="2022-03-11T19:07:46.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2557" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-04T01:31:45.200" Score="37" ViewCount="492" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two hours ago (ish), a new user posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/149548/p-value-f-statistic-test&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question on two-tailed F-values - how to do them in R. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He (or she, but I'm going to say he) was told to take it to SO. So, he did what he can see to do -- he deleted* his question here, and subsequently reposts on SO. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* it's no longer deleted right now. See the update.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To little surprise, they see it as a &lt;em&gt;stats&lt;/em&gt; question, and migrate it &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/149562/p-value-f-statistic-test&quot;&gt;straight back here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP has already been told it doesn't belong here, and deletes the second copy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's a new user who has been scared into deleting his own question, &lt;em&gt;twice&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's acted in good faith but risks getting himself &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/86997/what-can-i-do-when-getting-we-are-no-longer-accepting-questions-answers-from-th&quot;&gt;auto-banned&lt;/a&gt; from being able to ask questions at all (and no, making a new account won't work either) -- a new user has no way of knowing this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm somewhat disturbed by the eventual outcome here, especially in the way a new user that seemed to be trying to do the right thing was run around and ended up with a really bad outcome (two deleted questions). I think we should aim to find a way to do better than this for our new users, even if their questions do eventually close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For openers, I think:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) we need to avoid just saying &quot;it belongs on SO&quot;. If it looks like a stats computing problem, there's a good chance we're wasting everyone's time. If you're not looking to see what happens to these posts when they go there, you probably should avoid sending people there. (Better to close a question, but we can do more than that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Even if we do decide to send them there, we need to make sure that new users know not to delete and repost. If it (deleting their own post) happens enough to a low rep user, it can kill their ability to post and &lt;em&gt;we mods can't fix that ban&lt;/em&gt;. Generally it's better to migrate (and a few more heads get to have some input). But we should &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; migrate a poor question -- we have to improve it first, just as if it was a question here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) We also migrate too readily. Don't just migrate everything you think has something to do with computing; again, if you're not paying attention to what happens to these posts when they get migrated there, don't be quite so hasty. They often come straight back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) If a question must close, then so be it, but we should seek to give as much help as we can on the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5) I think we do need to take a slightly more lenient attitude to these questions (especially with new users). If you look back two or three years ago we have many similar questions that remained open, were answered and got upvotes. Some have a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of upvotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: In respect of (5) (and in turn, (1) and partly (3)) -- in particular there's a category of posts that if asked here tend to be migrated to SO and if asked on SO would tend to be migrated here, because enough people there see it as fundamentally a stats question to migrate (it would also include a fraction of the posts we close instead of migrating). To me this isn't a tenable situation, and I think we should look at trying to actually take a larger portion of those posts that a substantial portion of both sides think fit on the other side. This is not the same thing as taking a large fraction of posts that clearly belong on SO. I don't think this will vastly increase our volume -- it's not like the migrations are in the tens per day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to the main question: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;What are good ways to improve the outcome here?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some followup:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I undeleted both questions; hopefully that helps avoid risking an auto-ban. I closed as duplicate the migrated one (which rejected the migration, oddly - I thought close as duplicate was one option that didn't reject the migration).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original needs to be improved -- initially it should be clarified even if it migrates or we send the OP somewhere else; I think it can be rephrased to a statistics question (&quot;How do I calculate two-tailed p-values with an F-test?&quot; -- which certainly is on the 'requires statistical expertise' -- they shouldn't be dealing with that on SO) with a small R-component (i.e. giving the line of code required to implement the explanation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this particular question is actually a stats question in disguise ... there are a bunch of issues about two-tailed F tests that are often handwaved or glossed over that should be discussed before going anywhere near how to implement any of it in any packages -- and I think once the statistical issues are clear, the computer problem is trivial (and would likely survive on SO if asked as its own question, though I doubt it's necessary).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2015-05-07T12:21:17.163" Title="I think we need to talk about the SO/CV interface again" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|migration|new-users|stackoverflow|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2553" CreationDate="2015-05-04T05:29:52.177" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's hard to read. I know it's not a long paragraph, but something about reading in a web browser makes paragraphs of even modest length feel like an eternity. I always use lots and lots of line breaks when I post here and I appreciate it when others do the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or just look at any post by one of the top users. You very rarely see paragraphs bigger than you'd find in a newspaper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems trivial but it makes a huge difference. There is a relatively small (and possibly shrinking) number of active, knowledgeable users on this site. Even a tiny difficulty in answering a question can be a good excuse to skip it. That's especially true when, as gung said, the topic is specialized and chances are any answer will involve some research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &quot;power load functions&quot; are not something most people will be familiar with. You absolutely must describe your data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally, I hate to say it but it's also kind of a &quot;let me Google that for you&quot; question. I know because I Googled &quot;time series random forest&quot; and I immediately got 5 results that seemed like they'd be directly helpful. I'll post them in a comment on the question itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36229" LastEditorUserId="36229" LastEditDate="2015-05-04T05:38:28.267" LastActivityDate="2015-05-04T05:38:28.267" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2557" CreationDate="2015-05-04T08:15:04.700" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often, but not always, vote to close many such questions. Why? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is no axiom that all questions have a place somewhere on SE.&lt;/strong&gt; Questions on the routine use of some language don't belong here and they don't belong on SO if they are not about a (non-trivial) programming problem raised by the poster's own code. For example, questions about &quot;How do I do X in Y?&quot; don't belong in either place. I don't pose as a hard man in saying that, as I am active on SO too, I have answered thousands of such questions about Stata on Statalist and I respect greatly those who do similar things for SPSS, SAS, R, Python, MATLAB, Excel, etc. in appropriate forums. (It remains axiomatic also that people should Read The Fine Documentation.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The argument is pragmatic as much as one of principle.&lt;/strong&gt; If any and every question on use of statistical programs is allowed here, then we would be swamped. Traffic could easily rise by a factor between 2 and 10. If that happened, I think many active members would feel that the forum was too busy to manage. If that's not so, then we need a policy on precisely what is allowed, and we do have one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I don't buy any implication that people new to the forum, or to statistics, or to any statistical computing platform have a right to ask different questions or a broader range of questions here.&lt;/strong&gt; If the question on-topic. that is fine. If not, not. If I walk into a shop and the answer is &quot;Sorry, we don't sell that here&quot;, then that's the way it is. I expect a similar attitude from new members. It's a little wry when new members start ruling for themselves what is on-topic as against moderators or members with moderate or high reputation, but there you go. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I try always to follow the statement on what is on-topic at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Members who think the policy is too hard on certain kinds of statistical computing questions need to say what policy they would prefer. We've been around this more than once during my time on the forum (2 years) and no one ever has different wording to offer that buys widespread assent. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Members who think that particular decisions are being made in conflict with the policy need to spell that out, because if so decisions need to be revisited, which is always in order. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does the example raised by @Glen_b bear on this? I have to say that as posted I think it is a weak question and doesn't really belong in either forum. I have no objection to people trying to improve it, but the main obligation is with the OP to improve it. (In particular, posts with the flavour &quot;I don't understand&quot; are making statements, not asking questions, a hard principle to learn.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elsewhere I am intensely interested in historical questions but here I don't find what was allowed a few years ago to be a compelling argument. A forum is allowed to, indeed expected to, evolve as it matures and works out its own style, policy and &lt;em&gt;modus operandi&lt;/em&gt;. History is especially irrelevant for new users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2015-05-04T13:45:17.773" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2560" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2561" CreationDate="2015-05-04T13:24:20.820" Score="4" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whenever I make a post on a stack exchange account, over any of my accounts, I will almost always write &quot;thanks very much for any help&quot; at the end. This frequently gets edited out, I was wondering why? For examples, see here: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/149635/box-jenkins-forecasting-with-arimap-d-q-models&quot;&gt;Box-Jenkins Forecasting With ARIMA(p,d,q) models&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/149615/showing-a-time-series-is-regular&quot;&gt;Showing a Time Series is Regular&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/147298/combining-force-of-mortality-for-f-and-m-to-find-l-x&quot;&gt;Combining Force of Mortality for F and M to find $l_x$&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have omitted my customary &quot;thanks very much for any help&quot; here, it may be noted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41431" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2015-05-04T13:53:04.253" Title="The editing of &quot;thanks very much&quot; at end of posts" Tags="|discussion|editing|etiquette|signatures|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2015-05-06T21:39:19.067" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2560" CreationDate="2015-05-04T13:51:24.573" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason why &quot;thanks&quot; and other salutations are edited is to remove noise from questions/answers, so readers can know what posts are about more easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following posts have complementary information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2950/should-hi-thanks-taglines-and-salutations-be-removed-from-posts&quot;&gt;Should &amp;#39;Hi&amp;#39;, &amp;#39;thanks&amp;#39;, taglines, and salutations be removed from posts?&lt;/a&gt; (main Meta SE site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1992/whats-the-site-policy-on-removing-text-such-as-thankyou-or-this-question-is/1996&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the site policy on removing text such as &amp;quot;thank you&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;This question is too easy&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (CV meta).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2015-05-04T13:51:24.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2557" CreationDate="2015-05-04T14:27:02.077" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It belongs on R.SE. This was a straight R.SE question that just fell between the cracks. To avoid confusions like this one (and many others), I think the idea of setting up R.SE should be revived, even though the powers that be at the SE level close the proposals within minutes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastActivityDate="2015-05-04T14:27:02.077" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2557" CreationDate="2015-05-04T15:25:38.900" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well done Glen for sorting this out! I think the OP in fact got good advice in the very first comment&amp;mdash;to clarify their question, that questions purely on programming are for SO, &amp;amp; even what function to look into using&amp;mdash;but they didn't know how to act on it. One, hopefully uncontroversial, lesson we can learn from this straight away is to take especial care to explain to new users what they should do &amp;amp; what will happen next: &quot;Edit your question to make clear [...] &amp;amp; then, if it is purely to do with programming, it can be migrated to SO.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2015-05-04T15:25:38.900" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2564" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-04T16:27:12.143" Score="20" ViewCount="338" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A design update is now live!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the changes are not visible; these tweaks go along with recent updates that were made to Stack Overflow:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We moved the site's CSS to a newly refactored LESS system, so that it's easier for us to fix SE network CSS bugs globally and launch new features in the future. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We updated the graphics to SVG for retina support. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We've fixed a LOT of obscure bugs that arose when new features were not thoroughly tested across the entire network.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We have launched a shiny new user profile!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Visually it should &quot;feel&quot; the same as the old site with slight layout adjustments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This update should retro-actively fix most of the old design bugs. If you see any new bugs, or old ones not yet fixed, please post an answer here to let us know!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75177" LastEditorUserId="75177" LastEditDate="2015-05-05T14:34:16.137" LastActivityDate="2015-06-04T14:51:49.917" Title="Site design updates are live!" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2565" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-05T02:08:57.930" Score="5" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curious if there is any effort to implement a &quot;personal notebook&quot; feature in StackExchange? This would be a feature of an individual account, similar to the current question-asking interface, where one can write up notes, ideas, and other personal details about the various Math, Stats, Code, and other features that Stack Exchange offers, and have them available as a personal resource (or even public, if one chooses to make them available). Questions that one asks could then be associated with these, if desired, to better organize one's thoughts as ideas and understandings are formed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;StackExchange offers a nice typeset interface with its LaTeX (and other) support that allows for writing up ideas, and having a separate notebook area of an account where one can use these tools to explore ideas would be exceptionally useful as folks like myself explore these technical fields and ask questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as with questions, as one writes about a topic for his or her notes, StackExchange could offer suggestions for similar topics that could be explored, linked to, and otherwise interacted with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a feature could contribute to collaboration and sharing among friends and colleagues, or simply be a library of one's personal ideas that can be accessed from anywhere. I know I'd use it extensively, and am wondering if others also see use in it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74884" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-05-22T14:39:02.740" LastActivityDate="2015-05-22T14:39:02.740" Title="Personal notebook feature for StackExchange?" Tags="|feature-request|participation|user-interface|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2557" CreationDate="2015-05-07T00:42:21.610" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a typical question for someone learning R. R's docs are essentially incomprehensible for newbies, especially if someone's learning statistics at the same time. In fact many R old dogs tell newcomers to Google the answers when they complain for poor documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I don't think we should be supporting R programmers here. It would only perpetuate the unacceptable state of this package's documentation. Whoever cares for R should contribute to its documentation directly. It's open source software, so it's easy enough to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take a look at examples of F-test documentation in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-patched/library/stats/html/var.test.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;R&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stata.com/manuals13/rtest.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Stata&lt;/a&gt;. R's examples are four lines of code with two lines of comments like &quot;# Do x and y have the same variance?&quot;. Stata's doc has 10 fully documented examples with comprehensible text. The biggest difference is that Stata's help (in 19 pages!) is pretty much self-contained. This is very important for a beginner. An experienced dude will get a clue from R's doc, and will know what to do or will know where to get the rest information. The newbie will check the doc, get no idea of how to use the function and come here to ask a question. Stata and other commercial packages figured that a new user needs self-contained help sections, where the help has 99% of what you need to run the function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it very difficult to write this in R? No. It's boring and time consuming, but whoever wrote the code must know all the stuff that Stata guys know. In fact, that's what I do quite often when using R's functions: I go pull SAS or Stata's doc to understand the method, then simply check the syntax in R's docs. This must stop. The basic usage of the R's functions should be explained in R's documentation, so we should stop supporting R users in this regard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36041" LastEditorUserId="36041" LastEditDate="2015-05-07T12:21:17.163" LastActivityDate="2015-05-07T12:21:17.163" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2564" CreationDate="2015-05-10T16:35:59.000" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The favorite star noticeably moves to the right when it's enabled. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When greyed out, it's aligned with the voting arrows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3QqQB.png&quot; alt=&quot;before&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When yellow, it is not aligned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/j99t7.png&quot; alt=&quot;after&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The screenshots are from this meta post; the main site shows the same behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user56674" LastActivityDate="2015-05-10T16:35:59.000" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2569" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2570" CreationDate="2015-05-12T00:36:42.797" Score="14" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to bring this up here rather than mass-flagging a whole bunch of questions as duplicates (and also avoiding the issue of choosing one as the &quot;base&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/151730/test-if-two-coefficients-are-statistically-different-in-logistic-regression&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; question from today is a new member of a group of many questions (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/93524/testing-whether-two-regression-coefficients-are-significantly-different-in-r-id?lq=1&quot;&gt;a&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/94083/how-to-compare-whether-the-coefficients-of-two-independent-variables-statistical?lq=1&quot;&gt;b&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/147101/how-to-change-the-null-hypothesis-of-the-coefficient-in-the-least-squares-fittin?lq=1&quot;&gt;c&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/128704/calculating-ci-and-sd-for-individual-regression-lines-from-a-multiple-factor-glm?lq=1&quot;&gt;d&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/5025/how-to-test-if-the-slopes-in-the-linear-model-are-equal-to-a-fixed-value&quot;&gt;e&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/84066/regression-test-coefficient-on-variable-is-greater-than-coefficient-on-interacti&quot;&gt;f&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/142741/f-test-for-hypothesis-beta-1-beta-2-2-beta-3-in-a-regression/142749#142749&quot;&gt;g&lt;/a&gt; and probably more) all with slight variations between them. In a case of a single duplicate of a prior question, what to do is quite straightforward. But in this case, there are numerous historical duplicates, quite a few with (broadly the same) good answers, though none have really addressed the topic in its entirety - thus providing additional difficultly in determining which one should be &quot;promoted&quot; as the primary question. Potentially there could be mergers here as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I just go ahead on a flagging spree and let the moderators sort it out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4485" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2015-05-12T23:36:25.863" Title="Many (historical) duplicate questions - how to pick a &quot;canonical&quot; question?" Tags="|discussion|support|exact-duplicates|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2569" CreationDate="2015-05-12T01:43:26.247" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A. There's a number of levels of association of similar questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;$\quad $ (4 by my reckoning, if we also count 'not quite similar enough to do anything'):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Where the questions are exact duplicates, to the extent that they invite identical answers - and both have answers - they should usually be merged (preferably into the better question; if they're of similar quality, merge into the older one). If they don't both have answers, treat as 2.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Where the questions are asking the same thing - to the extent that answers to one will solve the other question, but the answers themselves don't really &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; the other question, one should close as duplicate; again the better/more canonical question should normally survive, though the quality of answers and age are other factors to consider. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Where the questions come close to asking the same thing, but in a different way -- in a way that invites questions that to some extent explore different aspects of the issue -- then they should probably both stay open, but be linked (both ways) via comments. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2511/asking-for-clarification-on-the-benefits-of-redundancy-or-multiple-questions-and/2513#2513&quot;&gt;this earlier post&lt;/a&gt; for some discussion of that issue (see the Jeff Atwood quote in particular)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;B. I suggest doing it in stages&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I suggest taking care of flagging any you think should merge first. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Then depending on your privileges, either vote to close as duplicate or flag the ones that should close as duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Then link (via a comment in each) any that should still stand separately but where the answers to the other question may still be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I'd also suggest that with wholesale flagging, to avoid overwhelming the flag queue -- about half a dozen flags at a time is no problem, but two dozen in a day on the same thing (some people can do that many) might lead to missing a more urgent flag (such as a spam flag). If it's a lot, spread it out a bit. This also has the advantage that if posts do get bumped, the front page isn't full of old questions all on one topic.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2015-05-12T01:43:26.247" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2571" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-05-12T14:56:22.300" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;On-topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Data collection&lt;/a&gt;, i.e., &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2528/why-is-data-collection-listed-as-on-topic-but-a-data-collection-question-was-cl&quot;&gt;aspects of data-collection methods: sampling schemes, surveys, experimental design, etc&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2096/questions-about-datasets-possible-exceptions&quot;&gt;Statistical features and concepts of datasets&lt;/a&gt;. Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/74776/what-aspects-of-the-iris-data-set-make-it-so-successful-as-an-example-teaching&quot;&gt;What aspects of the &amp;quot;Iris&amp;quot; data set make it so successful as an example/teaching/test data set&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/109710/good-data-example-needed-with-covariate-affected-by-treatments&quot;&gt;Good data example needed with covariate affected by treatments&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/173060/what-exactly-is-big-data/173063#173063&quot;&gt;Large data&lt;/a&gt;; relating to &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2714/are-questions-related-to-big-data-on-topic-here&quot;&gt;theoretical aspects of the data and implementation of algorithms over it&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Off-topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions asking for &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;particular datasets&lt;/a&gt; are off-topic. The Stack Exchange site &lt;a href=&quot;http://opendata.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Open Data&lt;/a&gt; would likely be interested in fielding such questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-09-25T21:39:03.947" LastActivityDate="2015-09-25T21:39:03.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2572" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-05-12T14:56:22.300" Score="0" Body="For questions discussing about statistical datasets. Note that questions which asks for particular datasets are off-topic in Cross Validated" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-05-13T03:45:46.060" LastActivityDate="2015-05-13T03:45:46.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2573" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-05-12T18:25:35.443" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-05-12T18:25:35.443" LastActivityDate="2015-05-12T18:25:35.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2574" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-05-12T18:25:35.443" Score="0" Body="A short &quot;thank you&quot; type of message concluding a SO post. A signature usually includes the user name or alias." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-05-13T03:45:56.803" LastActivityDate="2015-05-13T03:45:56.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2569" CreationDate="2015-05-12T21:13:04.217" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been reviewing a large number of older questions some months ago (I went through the [pca] tag in its entirety), trying to tidy them up and systematize as much as possible. I have encountered a similar situation a couple of times. @Glen_b gives good general recommendations in his answer, but I think I can make several more points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Everybody agrees that it's good to have a &quot;canonical&quot; thread with clearly and concisely formulated question and high quality answers. Try to find a candidate thread among all near-duplicates. Some things to consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; have to be the oldest question;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It should better be well-upvoted (to increase visibility);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It should be concisely (!) and clearly formulated;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there is an accepted answer, it should better be good;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can edit the question to make it better.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If such a thread exists, edit it to make it as good as possible. Pay special attention to the title and the tags.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Check if some other threads contain answers that could be moved into this canonical thread. Is so, flag those for moderator attention and suggest to merge; make sure to explain why (otherwise moderators might not get what you are after and will refuse to act upon your flag). Note that only relatively rarely can answers be seamlessly moved between threads.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the original answers and the merged-into answers together still do not satisfactorily answer the question, answer it yourself!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Now other threads can be closed as duplicates of the new &quot;canonical&quot; one. Go around and vote to close. Sometimes questions might already be closed as duplicates of some other question; in this case I find it helpful to flag them for moderator attention suggesting to change the duplicate link. If you convincingly explain why you suggest that, moderators will do that. I had to use this option a couple of times.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, none of the threads is good enough to be canonical. In this case, &lt;strong&gt;consider writing a perfect question and answering it yourself.&lt;/strong&gt; If you do it very well and your Q&amp;amp;A gets well accepted and upvoted by the community, you can then vote to close all other (older!) questions as duplicates. I had to do this once, leading to more than a dozen of older questions being now closed as duplicate of my new Q&amp;amp;A. In some cases these questions were already closed as duplicates of one another, so I had to change all that (via moderators).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2015-05-12T23:36:25.863" LastActivityDate="2015-05-12T23:36:25.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1538" CreationDate="2015-05-13T17:11:49.617" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the problem is more fundamental to the way stackexchange works. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many questions are poorly written, with very poorly written titles. I get the impression that few people bother to edit questions. And once answers appear (often within a few minutes), it would be hard to substantially edit the question without making some answers look stupid. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The solution, I think, would be for new questions (or maybe only new questions by people without a lot of points), be only available for editing the question and title, and for commenting. Of course, at this stage the question could be closed, as it is now. Don't allow answers yet. Once the question and its title are approved by some kind of vote (like we do now for closing questions), then all the comments up to then get archived (because presumably they were used to edit the question, so now are irrelevant), and the question is available to answer. With this change, there would be no more partial answers to ambiguous questions. And no more posted comments that refer to a version of the question that has been substantially edited. First, let the community clarify/approve the question, and only then allow answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the speed this community works (look at the process for closing questions), my guess is that most questions would be edited and approved (or closed) within a few hours. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But of course this is not something that can be done on only one site of the many on stack exchange. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25" LastActivityDate="2015-05-13T17:11:49.617" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2577" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-15T00:50:45.300" Score="3" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I wrote a small package to provide a formula interface (and some other bits) to the &lt;code&gt;glmnet&lt;/code&gt; R package. This came about after I &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29093868/formula-interface-for-glmnet&quot;&gt;posted on StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt; asking whether there was an existing package that provided the functionality I was looking for. Nobody answered, so I assumed the answer was negative. After writing the package, I then answered my own question and provided a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Hong-Revo/glmnetUtils&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;download link&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's now occurred to me that this might also be on-topic on CV; and there might be an audience of people working with &lt;code&gt;glmnet&lt;/code&gt; who'd find it useful but missed the post on SO. Would it be acceptable to (essentially) repost the question and answer here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1569" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2015-05-15T15:46:14.857" Title="Plugging your software: allowed?" Tags="|discussion|policy|r|software|cross-posting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2577" CreationDate="2015-05-15T02:11:23.183" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand your description, this would be a pure software / how-to question.  As such, it would be off-topic.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, however, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/glmnet&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;glmnet&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;glmnet&lt;/a&gt; tag.  You could leave comments (where it seems appropriate) on tagged questions.  You could also edit the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/glmnet/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt;.  Moreover, in answering questions with the tag, it might be fine to mention the package along with the disclosure that you are the author.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2015-05-15T02:11:23.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2577" CreationDate="2015-05-15T02:55:15.560" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see your valuable contributions quite regularly here; thanks for those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for asking first, as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SE network has a fairly clear policy on self-promotion, which you should look at. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/behavior&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/behavior&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/57497/limits-for-self-promotion-in-answers&quot;&gt;Limits for self-promotion in answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/182212/what-signifies-good-self-promotion-or-self-promotion-part-infinity&quot;&gt;What signifies &amp;quot;Good&amp;quot; self promotion? (or: Self Promotion Part Infinity)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more than you'd care to read: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=self+promotion&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=self+promotion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where there's a question to which 'my software solves that problem' would be an answer or part of an answer, you're allowed to mention software you made or helped make or are otherwise associated with -- as long as you clearly identify your association each time (saying 'my package ...' is usually sufficient). [However, as gung notes, the sort of question to which that would be a complete answer is fairly likely to be off topic here. On the other hand, there can be answers to which some mention of software would fit quite well.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does tend to be frowned on is anything that looks like an attempt to advertise*. For commercial products there are ads, and for open software there's also a program that operates to 'get the word out'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*  (and I know that on SO in particular, asking and answering your own question which includes a link to software you were involved with is highly likely to draw the ire of moderators or other involved users; in your case it's probably surviving on the basis that you wrote it in response to your original question, rather than posting the question in order to give that response)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the specifics of your question - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;should one repost a question-and-answer from there to here. The broad principle is that reposting of questions to multiple places should be avoided &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help/ontopic&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please note, however, that cross-posting is not encouraged on SE sites. Choose one best location to post your question. Later, if it proves better suited on another site, it can be migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's some flexibility -- in particular, where one site is likely to offer different &lt;em&gt;kinds&lt;/em&gt; of answers, the same question might fruitfully appear on both - we have tolerated some reposted questions before. But since here the purpose is to display &lt;em&gt;exactly the same answer&lt;/em&gt;, I'd say that 'different takes on the problem' doesn't apply, and the principle stated in the help will be the one that's more relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;should one repost &lt;em&gt;that particular&lt;/em&gt; question - my feeling would be &quot;probably no&quot;, since it would very likely be closed as off topic (even aside all the previous considerations).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2015-05-15T03:14:48.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2580" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-16T00:18:26.600" Score="5" ViewCount="316" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few months ago, I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2473/why-is-a-comment-that-maligns-my-field-not-inappropriate-for-cv?noredirect=1#comment6835_2473&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on the CV meta asking about why a flag for deletion that I added to a comment was declined.  This question generated what I think was some very interesting discussion.  In particular, @NickCox made an interesting point that there is no way to downvote a comment as a way of saying &quot;this comment is inappropriate and/or does not add to the discussion&quot;, in contrast to how questions and answers are handled in the StackExchange model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm actually somewhat surprised that comments are handled so different than questions and answers.  I personally would appreciate a way to indicate that I think a comment does not add to the discussion without outright flagging the comment for deletion and/or responding to the comment (responding to some comments can sometimes take a thread off-track, so in some cases I would prefer to have a downvote feature rather than posting a new comment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question is, is there any reason why downvoting is not enabled on comments, and if there isn't, could downvoting on comments be implemented on CV and other StackExchange sites? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11091" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2015-09-16T15:11:36.427" Title="Downvoting comments" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|status-declined|comment|votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2581" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2582" CreationDate="2015-05-17T21:49:29.917" Score="10" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just had a quick look at the first-post review queue to see if there were any questions I could helpfully edit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer was no (in the time I had to do so), so I pressed 'skip' for each of these questions. When I returned to the main CV page these posts were then listed on the front page (oops). Is this what usually happens, or do these posts actually stay in the review queue for other users (and just show up on my front page)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions in point were the three following ones: I added some further-details-please comments to the latter two just in case they had in fact popped out of all the review queues...apologies for any additional work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/152761/16974&quot;&gt;Does this discrete distribution have a name?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/152760/gaussian-processes-cubic-correlation-model&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/152760/gaussian-processes-cubic-correlation-model&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/152758/16974&quot;&gt;Chi-squared vs ANOVA test&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16974" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-05-18T00:13:35.280" Title="Review queue and skip button" Tags="|support|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2581" CreationDate="2015-05-17T22:37:03.447" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't worry, you're not going to hurt anything by clicking &lt;code&gt;Skip&lt;/code&gt;. Thanks for doing your bit to help. It's appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clicking &lt;code&gt;Skip&lt;/code&gt; means &quot;I can't decide, let someone else look at it&quot;. So if you weren't clear on whether those were okay, that was the right thing to do. The fact that the post was visible on the main page was not a consequence of you clicking &lt;code&gt;Skip&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second post you mention also was automatically put into the &quot;Low Quality&quot; queue and is also now in the &quot;Close&quot; queue, so it will be getting multiple sets of eyes pass over it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few comments on the &quot;First Post&quot; queue -- since people asking their first question or posting their first answer won't generally know how the system works their stuff is put into a review queue, so more experienced people like yourself will take a closer look. The idea is to look for a number of things like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;does the question or answer meet the site standards (on topic, clear, etc*)? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if a question, is the title clear and relevant? &#xA;(will it help others with a similar question to find this post?) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;is it appropriately tagged?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(not a complete list!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* it's also a great place to spot the occasional spam posts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on what you see you might comment to guide the poster**, or edit, or vote to close/flag for moderator attention, and so on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;**  (pointing out a relevant page of help, for example, or seeking clarification)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you finish taking all the actions you think are needed, click &lt;code&gt;I'm Done&lt;/code&gt;. If it has no obvious problems, you click &lt;code&gt;No Action Needed&lt;/code&gt;$^\dagger$, and as mentioned already, if you really don't know, click &lt;code&gt;Skip&lt;/code&gt; and no harm done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$^\dagger$ (even if it ends up out of the first post queue as a result, other people can still see the post on the normal &quot;new&quot; and &quot;active&quot; pages, so if you get this wrong once in a while it still doesn't matter very much.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2015-05-18T00:13:35.280" LastActivityDate="2015-05-18T00:13:35.280" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2583" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-05-18T13:39:24.020" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;New users have &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/new-user&quot;&gt;restrictions that are removed&lt;/a&gt; when their reputation is at least 10.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Getting started as a new user can be hard, and possibly even frustrating. Here are some effective approaches to get you going, preferably also in the order specified:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Visit the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; (after taking the tour), which contains lots of valuable information.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7931/faq-for-stack-exchange-sites&quot;&gt;Read the FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, failure to do so is asking for problems.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Read questions from the Cross Validated meta site, tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For other questions targeted towards new users, use also &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/new-users&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;new-users&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;new-users&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: excerpt and wiki adapted from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/new-users/info&quot;&gt;meta Stack Exchange site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-05-18T16:12:49.297" LastActivityDate="2015-05-18T16:12:49.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2584" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-05-18T13:39:24.020" Score="0" Body="Users who may be new to the Cross Validated SE Q&amp;A format, and generally have a low reputation score, which starts from 1 at the time of registration." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-05-18T16:12:31.347" LastActivityDate="2015-05-18T16:12:31.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2585" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-05-22T14:20:58.533" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-05-22T14:20:58.533" LastActivityDate="2015-05-22T14:20:58.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2586" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-05-22T14:20:58.533" Score="0" Body="Questions about the various user interface and email elements used to notify users of events on the site." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-05-23T08:00:13.743" LastActivityDate="2015-05-23T08:00:13.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2587" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-05-22T14:33:23.503" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tag wikis are made of two parts: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;em&gt;excerpt&lt;/em&gt; which is displayed on question lists and the tag hover menu. It is the part shown when clicking on the &quot;show excerpt&quot; link in a tag wiki.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/V80vP.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;em&gt;body&lt;/em&gt; which contains detailed information about a tag wiki.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the excerpt is displayed there is a clickable item, usually labelled &quot;Learn more&quot; that will cause the body to be displayed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the term &quot;tag-wiki&quot; is used when referring only to the body part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported excerpt and wiki from the main meta &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/tag-wiki/info&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-05-23T08:00:09.817" LastActivityDate="2015-05-23T08:00:09.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2588" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-05-22T14:33:23.503" Score="0" Body="A &quot;tag wiki&quot; is an editable page that briefly summarizes the topic of the tag and that may provide links to existing questions that are often useful to many people." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-05-23T08:00:04.827" LastActivityDate="2015-05-23T08:00:04.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2589" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-23T11:24:33.587" Score="5" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quite often, we link in answers or comments to other questions, because a specific answer to that question seems helpful or presents another aspect. But we do not link to that specific answer, because there is technically no anchor of it. So someone following our link has to browse through all the answers, if we forgot to mention with our link (what happens quite often), whose specific answer we mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's wrong with adding an anchor to answers? One could then link to them like in forum postings. Of course, it would be technically a bit more difficult, as forum postings don's raise by upvotes. But on the other side, it would be easier for users as they don't accidentally read the wrong answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28705" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-05-25T18:04:30.677" LastActivityDate="2015-05-25T18:04:30.677" Title="How to link to a specific answer?" Tags="|feature-request|answers|hyperlinks|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2589" CreationDate="2015-05-23T14:42:23.437" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you click on the faint gray &quot;share&quot; at the bottom right of an answer, a small box will pop up with a link highlighted.  This link is an abbreviated version of the full link (it takes up fewer characters, which is useful for pasting into comments or chat) and has your usernumber appended to the end.  If people subsequently click that link, a tally will be kept (secretly) by the SE system; when the tally reaches 25, you will earn the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/59/announcer&quot;&gt;announcer badge&lt;/a&gt;.  You can also delete your usernumber to save even more characters, but you would not progress towards the badge.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other way, which gets you the full link, is to navigate to the answerer's userpage -&gt; answers, then right click the link to their answer and 'save link as'.  For the record, this will also not record progress towards announcer.  I used to use this method before I learned how 'share' works. It is sufficiently inconvenient that I don't see any point in doing it anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-05-23T14:42:23.437" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2591" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-05-25T18:16:16.080" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-05-25T18:16:16.080" LastActivityDate="2015-05-25T18:16:16.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2592" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-05-25T18:16:16.080" Score="0" Body="Tag wiki excerpts are the most visible portion of tag wikis. They're shown when hovering over a tag, on the Tags page, and in the autocomplete suggestions when adding tags." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-05-25T19:20:16.843" LastActivityDate="2015-05-25T19:20:16.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1927" CreationDate="2015-05-26T14:19:20.067" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For guys arriving here now, the hyperlinks on the Cross Validated (CV) tour page were fixed (as stated by cardinal).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where is the FAQ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;CV's Tour&lt;/a&gt;. For quick comprehension about how the Stack Exchange sites work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;CV's Help Center&lt;/a&gt;. This is the FAQ. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/whats-meta&quot;&gt;What is Meta?&lt;/a&gt; This will help understanding what the meta site is for and how it works.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Posts on CV meta tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt;. These posts are complementary guidelines developed by our community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2015-05-26T14:19:20.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2595" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2596" CreationDate="2015-06-03T00:41:18.237" Score="9" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;SVG versions of a few logos are available &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/q/347&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Is there an SVG version of the CrossValidated logo available somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36229" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:45.643" LastActivityDate="2015-06-04T13:35:49.647" Title="Is there an SVG version of the CV logo?" Tags="|support|images|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2595" CreationDate="2015-06-03T02:20:08.160" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can get the SVG logo as it's shown on the site: &lt;a href=&quot;http://cdn.sstatic.net/stats/img/sprites.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://cdn.sstatic.net/stats/img/sprites.svg&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It comes with several other sprites attached, so you'll need to &lt;a href=&quot;https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/q/31575/&quot;&gt;crop the SVG file&lt;/a&gt; to get just the logo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user56674" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:46:19.653" LastActivityDate="2015-06-03T02:20:08.160" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2597" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-04T13:36:50.047" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-06-04T13:36:50.047" LastActivityDate="2015-06-04T13:36:50.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2598" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-04T13:36:50.047" Score="0" Body="For questions about the images used on Cross Validated or about using images in your own posts." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-06-09T17:21:03.343" LastActivityDate="2015-06-09T17:21:03.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2564" CreationDate="2015-06-04T14:51:49.917" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The colour choices for normal links and visited links in the hot network questions is counter-intuitive, as visited link get emphasised instead of de-emphasised:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UoVzl.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36423" LastActivityDate="2015-06-04T14:51:49.917" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2333" CreationDate="2015-06-24T20:55:22.193" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://thisisstatistics.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ue3a4.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tagline to show on mouseover&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T20:55:22.193" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-06-24T20:55:22.193" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="793" CreationDate="2015-06-25T19:09:18.417" Score="10" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Fortran&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortran is one of the main languages in which statistical algorithms have been coded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/fortran&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; often has Fortran questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20170303232835/http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Fortran/Source_Code/Statistics_and_Econometrics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Directory&lt;/a&gt; (archived) has links to many Fortran codes in statistics and econometrics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26910" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-11-11T09:11:14.540" LastActivityDate="2023-11-11T09:11:14.540" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-06-25T19:09:18.417" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2606" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2772" CreationDate="2015-07-03T02:06:21.173" Score="18" ViewCount="439" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, it took a while, but I'm finally done with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2510/the-kernel-tag-is-a-mess-should-it-be-changed&quot;&gt;this effort&lt;/a&gt;: every question in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel&lt;/a&gt; has been sorted into &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-trick&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-trick&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-trick&lt;/a&gt; and/or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-density-estimate&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-density-estimate&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-density-estimate&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel&lt;/a&gt; is now empty; a moderator should destroy it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Synonymizing &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-density-estimate&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-density-estimate&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-density-estimate&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-smoothing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-smoothing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-smoothing&lt;/a&gt; would remove the slight misclassification of lumping kernel regression in the KDE tag. I didn't count as I read them, but I would very roughly estimate that maybe 15% of questions currently in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-density-estimate&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-density-estimate&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-density-estimate&lt;/a&gt; are actually about kernel regression, and another reasonable portion are about kernel functions in general (not specific to KDE or regression). There are also a handful of questions in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-regression&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-regression&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-regression&lt;/a&gt;, which should also be synonymized to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-smoothing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-smoothing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-smoothing&lt;/a&gt; if that's what's happening.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The relevant tag wikis need to be updated. Since I don't have direct editing privileges on them, I figured I should wait to propose anything until exactly what's happening with the various kernel smoothing tags is finalized.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edited to bump. It seems like no one now disagrees with the proposal of making both &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-density-estimate&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-density-estimate&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-density-estimate&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-regression&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-regression&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-regression&lt;/a&gt; into synonyms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-smoothing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-smoothing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-smoothing&lt;/a&gt;, and leaving &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-trick&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-trick&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-trick&lt;/a&gt; as is. If anyone does have comments about that, please say so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9964" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2019-10-06T20:40:30.557" Title="The [kernel] tag is dead" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|tag-deletion|blacklist-request|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2607" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-04T18:19:29.880" Score="13" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Help Center has a page for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt;. Part of it states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about &lt;strong&gt;obtaining particular datasets&lt;/strong&gt; are off-topic (they are too specialized). The &lt;a href=&quot;https://gis.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;GIS site&lt;/a&gt; welcomes inquiries about obtaining geographically related datasets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems strange to link to the GIS site but not to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opendata.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Open Data&lt;/a&gt;, which exists specifically for this purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate Open Data is only in beta, but recent SE announcements make clear no beta site is in imminent danger of being culled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, quite a few requests that get closed here are for economic data, and these requests seem to be considered on-topic on &lt;a href=&quot;https://economics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Economics SE&lt;/a&gt;, as can be seen from their &lt;a href=&quot;https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/data-request&quot;&gt;data request tag&lt;/a&gt;. If GIS is linked from our on-topic help, I think it might be worth including Economics too. Perhaps something like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about &lt;strong&gt;obtaining particular datasets&lt;/strong&gt; are off-topic (they are too specialized). The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opendata.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Open Data site&lt;/a&gt; is suitable for general requests for publicly available data. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://gis.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;GIS site&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://economics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Economics site&lt;/a&gt; welcome inquiries about obtaining geographic and economic datasets respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:57:29.717" LastActivityDate="2015-12-23T15:48:01.717" Title="Should the Open Data SE be linked to from the &quot;On topic&quot; help center page?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|data|help-center|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2607" CreationDate="2015-07-08T07:15:04.567" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;GIS is a graduated site. Economics &amp;amp; Open Data are still in beta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ISTM that it doesn't make a lot of sense to start changing help pages to point to sites that might not exist in six months time: it just adds an unnecessary maintenance burden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, the network (as a principle) does not create fixed migration pathways to beta sites. Individual questions can be migrated to beta sites, but fixed pathways for speedy migration voted for by non-mod high-rep users are reserved for graduated sites, for the same reason of avoiding unnecessary maintenance burdens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(This is not an SE Inc answer: just my impression of how things work.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3794" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T07:15:04.567" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1823" CreationDate="2015-07-08T07:23:28.360" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, don't edit out the spam. Downvote the post. Flag the post as spam. Then let the system do its job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Editing out the spam text places an unnecessary barrier in the way of other people flagging it as spam, because you're now relying on them to go into the revision history to verify that it's spam, and then flagging it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bots use the spam in the version present upon deletion. Deletion happens automatically and quickly once enough people have flagged it as spam. So stop editing out the spam. Just flag it and move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3794" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T07:23:28.360" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2580" CreationDate="2015-07-08T07:29:51.007" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a comment is not constructive, then flag it as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that your wording &quot;&lt;em&gt;this comment is inappropriate and/or does not add to the discussion&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is, for this purpose, a different way of saying &quot;not constructive&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Non-constructive comments are clutter that should be removed. So they're qualitatively different to incorrect answers. Hence there's a flag for them, rather than a downvote button.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3794" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T07:29:51.007" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2611" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-09T15:51:20.003" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some questions where both the question and answer are excellent.  This is unsurprising, there are some excellent folks on cross-validated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a &quot;library&quot; where I store excellent and useful articles.  I use it for bibliography, and when I have to &quot;dust off&quot; a subject it is my first stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wish there was a convenient way to make the question and answer into a pdf with a decently formatted bibliographic reference as a header.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you suggest something less klugy than &quot;print to file&quot; and manual annotation.  Do we have a &quot;save&quot; button somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22452" LastActivityDate="2015-07-09T15:51:20.003" Title="I want to save it as a reference" Tags="|feature-request|printing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-07-10T12:18:31.493" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2612" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4557" CreationDate="2015-07-10T22:45:24.997" Score="4" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recurrent issue in our forum is applied analysis questions. Not only are there ample examples in the CV network, but it comes up in Meta repeatedly. I think questions of the nature are appropriate for this network, but I would say less than 1% of these questions are detailed enough to get appropriate answers. It reflects poorly on the community. How can CV improve this situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose we create an &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;analysis&lt;/a&gt; tag to guide users on what constitutes adequate information to get high quality answers. If users are not able to conform the question to these standards, it should be closed for being &quot;too broad&quot;-- since it forces us to answer in an abstract, turnkey manner that is too nebulous to be useful (if we can answer at all). This is exactly the approach that we take with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; which is similarly problematic. With self-study, our site policies have improved our answers and questions &lt;em&gt;dramatically&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no existing analysis tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose that the analysis tag be written in the following fashion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Analysis&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;  For questions dealing with the applied analysis of a specific dataset or design of experiment. Posters may be either statisticians or non experts in the field. Questions need to address the following issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The field of application (e.g. biostatistics, econometrics, social sciences...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A basic statement of hypothesis or hypotheses&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A detailed description of the dataset including the sampling method used, measures collected, the measuring methodology (e.g. mass spectrometry, questionnaire, physical exam)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Basic proposed data analysis plan&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Precise description of the problems encountered&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If others concur, I am happy to resurrect some unanswered &quot;analysis&quot; questions and post in a comment that the user should consult the &quot;analysis&quot; tag to improve the quality of the post. If it is not addressed in a week, we can close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a statistician, working with other scientists to discover what they want to do is my favorite part of the job. At work I encourage others to follow this discipline. What might we add to this tag to make it better applicable in this circumstance and &lt;em&gt;invite&lt;/em&gt; more non-statistical researchers to participate in the forum?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T20:49:16.217" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T20:49:16.217" Title="Create [analysis] tag? + Update 2017: Delete [analysis] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|on-topic|tag-proposal|burninate-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2613" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4551" CreationDate="2015-07-13T15:19:34.693" Score="7" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/confidence&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;confidence&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;confidence&lt;/a&gt; tag - it does not have a description and it is hard to guess what is its purpose? Is it about confidence intervals (it has multiple questions tagged both [confidence] and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/confidence-interval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;confidence-interval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;confidence-interval&lt;/a&gt;). If yes, then it should be marked as synonym. However if it is not so, then it seems to be ambiguous and is seems to be used incorrectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we do anything with this tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-07-13T17:33:10.720" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T09:37:38.477" Title="Ambiguous [confidence] tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2613" CreationDate="2015-07-13T17:27:39.323" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's interesting. I find a post like this one &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/146598/confidence-measures-for-gaussian-mixture-models&quot;&gt;Confidence measures for Gaussian mixture models&lt;/a&gt; to be an appropriate use of the word confidence, in the sense that they are interested in reporting the uncertainty around a number of predicted clusters using a mixture model, but an &lt;em&gt;interval&lt;/em&gt; is not an appropriate reporting tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the vast majority of these posts can be classified under either &quot;confidence interval&quot; or &quot;hypothesis testing&quot;. I think posts such as the above could be classified as uncertainty. Conversely, perhaps no tag is necessary in that case. Any statistical practice should have an associated method to measure uncertainty... that's basically what we do as statisticians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T17:27:39.323" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2613" CreationDate="2015-07-13T17:31:23.340" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have 94 questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/confidence&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;confidence&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;confidence&lt;/a&gt;, in which &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bconfidence%5D+%5Bconfidence-interval%5D+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;19&lt;/a&gt; are tagged [confidence] + [confidence-interval].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding 75 questions tagged [confidence] but not [confidence-interval], at least &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bconfidence%5D+-%5Bconfidence-interval%5D+interval+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;41&lt;/a&gt; has to do with confidence intervals. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, we have 60 questions out of 94 tagged with [confidence] and which relates to confidence intervals - 64% from total.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if we exclude [confidence] questions which were closed or which contain the words 'band', 'limit' (confidence bands; confidence limits), there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bconfidence%5D++-%5Bconfidence-interval%5D+-interval+-band+-limit+closed%3A0+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;32&lt;/a&gt; posts to investigate more closely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T17:31:23.340" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2616" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-15T19:24:00.377" Score="3" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use several Stack Exchange sites, with Stack Overflow being the most usual for me. I strongly agree with the points threshold (needed for every action in the Stack Exchange sites). I've never had trouble earning enough points to allow me to do various things (down vote, comment, edit). I earn most of my points because of the questions I ask. I don't think that I ask too many questions, so I think I've got good balance so far.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that here on Cross Validated my questions (and many others that I see) get few views and also few upvotes. As far as I understand the norms of the site, if the question shows it was well asked and it deserves attention, you should upvote. I try to follow that when I read other's questions. I understand that Stack Overflow might have 500 times more users than Cross Validated and that might account for the difference. Also, given the characteristics that questions about statistics typically have (they need lots of comments to understand what the OP was referring to and if they tried this or that), I believe that many questions end up with a lot of discussion in the comment section and zero answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I am astonished by the diversity of the questions being asked here and the amount of time and knowledge that is needed in order to approximate to a solution. I believe that we need tons of new members in order to cover so much variability. The statistical knowledge of people asking here is also very variable (I consider myself as one who is just starting to understand and apply it to my research but I've seen some questions that fly really high). So I wonder how to raise the happiness of the users. Questions come in at a much higher rate than the answering rate. I have asked some questions that, in spite of having upvotes, do not get much attention. My only question that did grab some attention was 99% about programming in R (in fact was migrated from Stack Overflow). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found questions I want to comment on to get further into the analysis and help but I can't get the points needed (again, first you need points for question or answers and it seems a bit like a vicious cycle). All these situations keep me wondering if I'm the only one that is having this concern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43209" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2015-07-16T13:55:10.343" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T13:55:10.343" Title="Dead end Questions" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|users|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2617" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-21T23:03:54.933" Score="6" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just wanted to try and see if I can cook up some simple Python routines to allow translation of commonly used models into code that we can then use some inference engine on. So, basically I am trying my hand at designing some probabilistic programming framework and learning some things in the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to seek some advice on designing some software that can be flexible enough to allow translation of most commonly used graphical models to code. In particular, I wanted some advice on class design and suitable representation (factor graphs versus different representation for directed/undirected graphs etc.). Would this kind of question be considered on-topic on CV? The design issue clearly belongs on SO but the folks here are more knowledgeable regarding the models themselves and can advise better on what these objects should include/represent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36540" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T13:16:33.377" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T13:16:33.377" Title="Would question seeking advice on software design involving probabilistic programming be on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|software|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2618" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-24T12:17:27.563" Score="3" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;From time to time there are questions that provoke answers that reach far beyond the initial question, for example, explain in detail some basic issues, or use detailed examples of some specific methods to answer a general question. Would editing questions' tags so that they apply also to such answers be ok? In most cases this would be adding broader tag to a question that is focused on some specific issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2015-07-24T13:14:19.330" Title="Tagging answers nor questions" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-07-24T14:30:45.307" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2618" CreationDate="2015-07-24T13:14:19.330" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe this is a good thing to do.  Tags are mostly a way to try to maintain the organization of the content on the site, and bear in mind that the real goal is to build up a permanent repository of high quality statistical (ML, etc.) information via questions and answers.  Since much of that information is in the answers (more accurately, it is in the combination of the question and the answers), I think those facts imply that answers can be given some consideration in deciding the appropriate tags for a thread.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2015-07-24T13:14:19.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2620" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-25T06:02:13.333" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shouldn't we name the caret tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/new/r-caret&quot;&gt;r-caret&lt;/a&gt; for consistency with SO?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The main reason is compatibility. Another minor reason is we frequently migrate questions CV &amp;lt;-&gt; SO. So if you migrate SO-&gt;CV, the tag is instantly wrong. This creates constant need for tag cleanup and mistagging.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The reason for the SO tag naming is &lt;strong&gt;disambiguation&lt;/strong&gt;, not a violation of why we don't have language-specific tags.&#xA;It is to disambiguate on SO from posts about 'caret', referring to an onscreen text-cursor ; and they use 'punctuation' for the operator/punctuation symbol.&#xA;This is also the reason that SO tag can't and shouldn't change.&#xA;So all that is not up for discussion, and the SO-side usage won't change.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7291" LastEditorUserId="7291" LastEditDate="2015-07-30T18:57:55.423" LastActivityDate="2015-07-31T00:38:57.943" Title="Shouldn't we name the caret tag &quot;r-caret&quot; for consistency with SO?" Tags="|discussion|tags|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2621" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-27T05:34:55.577" Score="14" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edit: added more precise info at the bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was brought to my attention today in chat discussion with moderators of other SE sites that we don't seem to have all of the question-limits that SO has, after I mentioned a particular user that was posting (and often deleting after downvotes) a large number of very low quality questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like (on the basis of that discussion) the Community team (i.e. people who do the admin work of SE) is looking at the impact of doing so (how many users would be affected), but I figured I would raise the question of whether people would seek this if we had the option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already have &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; limits in place, because I saw a user hit one the other day. I don't know what is in place and what isn't right now, but it looks like we may not have all the limits our own help suggests we do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having all of it in place would reduce the ability of new users to post many poor questions - they would progressively only be able to ask weekly, then only after improving their existing questions (though it's possible a few of our current users with very large numbers of downvoted and deleted questions and very few upvoted questions might not be able to lift the block at all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think it's a bad idea, feel free to downvote (it's okay, that's how this is supposed to work) and/or comment or post some specific thoughts. If you think we should seek to do it, you know, do the converse things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there's some support I could turn it into a feature request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: more precise information&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/243460/rolling-question-rate-limits-are-now-network-wide&quot;&gt;currently have the rolling rate limits&lt;/a&gt; but do not currently have the full-bans where you can't post until you fix some old questions (including fixing self-deleted ones and undeleting).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2015-07-30T04:06:10.970" Title="Should we have full SO style question rate limits/temporary blocks and eventual bans?" Tags="|discussion|post-ban|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2621" CreationDate="2015-07-27T10:18:28.600" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems hard to answer this without knowing quantities and (for most of us) without being able to see what moderators can see. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I naturally approve of the unstated principle that we should not discuss individual cases explicitly in public. Nevertheless, policy here often follows from precedent, in the sense that it can take a user being a nuisance in a particular way and irritating enough people to become conspicuous before we can decide what is unacceptable behaviour. (Some times, fortunately, people who prefer their own rules for posting and discussing to those of the forum jump before they are pushed.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Posting (and often deleting after downvotes) a large number of very low quality questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly we want to discourage such posting. Deleting low quality questions is public-spirited, however. But what is a large number here? I feel confident that I would have noticed any such user with 100 questions. I can recall one intermittently active user who has posted many questions over the years, mostly when a puzzling passage is encountered in their reading and they ask for clarification without, it seems, reading around very much in other places. But their net contribution is positive. I can recall one user who very intermittently seems to ask slightly different versions of the same highly cryptic question. That person is puzzling rather than a real nuisance. Perhaps other cases are in mind. Any way, can you put some numbers on these statements? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Having all of it in place would reduce the ability of new users to post many poor questions - they would progressively only be able to ask weekly, then only after improving their existing questions. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a guess, this would just drive most of the posters with very weak questions straight off the forum. That seems harsh. Many very poor questions just aren't improved at all, but making it more difficult for posters even to try again would be tough. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's possible a few of our current users with very large numbers of downvoted and deleted questions and very few upvoted questions might not be able to lift the block at all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, how we can comment on this possibility? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T10:18:28.600" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2623" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-27T13:52:06.860" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A post ban is an automated ban (unlike an account suspension which is &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/a-day-in-the-penalty-box/&quot;&gt;a manual temporary penalty&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible error messages include: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sorry, we are no longer accepting questions [answers] from this account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Visit the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/86997/what-can-i-do-when-getting-sorry-we-are-no-longer-accepting-questions-from-this&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; for guidance about what to do in such situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/84668/how-does-stack-overflow-attempt-to-prevent-low-quality-questions-and-answers&quot;&gt;How does Stack Exchange attempt to prevent low-quality questions and answers?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/help/asking-rate-limited&quot;&gt;Why is the system asking me to wait a day or more before asking another question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1479/how-to-ask-a-good-question-on-crossvalidated&quot;&gt;How to ask a &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; question on CrossValidated?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1390/how-should-questions-be-answered-on-cross-validated&quot;&gt;How should questions be answered on Cross Validated?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported excerpt and adapted wiki from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/post-ban/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2015-07-27T17:45:04.923" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T17:45:04.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2624" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-27T13:52:06.860" Score="0" Body="A post ban means that a user is blocked from asking new questions, or posting new answers." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-07-28T07:38:25.983" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T07:38:25.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2625" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2627" CreationDate="2015-07-28T14:50:23.913" Score="8" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;While searching around google, I found the following site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://statsstackexchange.booksmedia.net/questions/140362/how-to-fit-a-stochastic-matrix-to-given-data&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Potentially Fake Site! (Doesn't load on mobiles)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I almost logged in to it using my google account, then noticed the bizarre URL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a real SE site? It looks identical as far as I can tell to &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;http://stats.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the random questions on the right all appear to link to other fake sites. Like this for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://fitnessstackexchange.computer-electronics.net/questions/25660/breathing-during-running&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://fitnessstackexchange.computer-electronics.net/questions/25660/breathing-during-running&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except &quot; fitnessstackexchange.computer-electronics&quot; probably looks illegitimate enough for more people to catch on. It looks like a big site! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83483" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-07-28T16:13:29.210" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T18:07:54.037" Title="Is this version of the site real, or a phishing scam?" Tags="|support|copycat-sites|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2625" CreationDate="2015-07-28T15:02:00.320" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like a scam.  I notice that I have an account &lt;a href=&quot;http://statsstackexchange.booksmedia.net/users/7290/gung&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;there&lt;/a&gt;, but I've never seen that site before.  I wouldn't log in there.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T15:02:00.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2625" CreationDate="2015-07-28T15:50:19.973" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;That kind of site is called a &quot;SCRAPER.&quot;  It's great that you brought it to our attention.  It is spoofing the entirety of SE, not just stats.  (I investigated using a browser in a virtual machine.)  The recommended response is described in two answers to the meta SO post &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/200177/updated-procedure-for-reporting-scrapers&quot;&gt;A site (or scraper) is copying content from Stack Exchange. What do I do?&lt;/a&gt;.  Briefly,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Send all reports of SCRAPERs to us via the form on the contact us page, linked at the bottom of every page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use the &quot;Other&quot; reason on the form (fortunately, we don't get enough of these reports to justify making SCRAPERs their own category/reason). Please include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the URL of the copied post&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the URL of the original post on SE&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;for high-rankers, the search string you used (and the name of the search engine, if not Google)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;any other details you noticed and want to share, because you're awesome&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you see a scraper URL outranking the original source of content in Google, please tell us about it: &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/scraperspamreport&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://bit.ly/scraperspamreport&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't seen the latter, so I haven't reported to Google, but I did contact the SE team with this info.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Update&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have received these messages from the SE team and want to reproduce them here because their thanks really apply to the OP and everyone else reading this thread and helping out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Message 1&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thank you for reporting this content. I've passed the information along to the person at our company who handles such issues. It's the diligence of users like you that helps us stay valuable!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please note, bringing these sites into compliance (or getting them to no longer serve our content) is often a long and arduous process. You may not see immediate results. However, rest assured that we're working on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Message 2&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I checked with our network engineers and they blocked the IP that was proxying our sites. Anything they haven't cached already will show a CloudFlare error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thanks for the report,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange Team&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T18:07:54.037" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2628" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-29T14:09:31.323" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;How to proceed when finding a copycat site? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the rules in&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/200177/updated-procedure-for-reporting-scrapers&quot;&gt;Updated procedure for reporting SCRAPERs&lt;/a&gt;, you should:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Send all reports of SCRAPERs to us via the form on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackoverflow.com/contact&quot;&gt;contact us&lt;/a&gt; page, linked at the bottom of every page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use the &quot;Other&quot; reason on the form (fortunately, we don't get enough of these reports to justify making SCRAPERs their own category/reason). Please include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;the URL of the copied post&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;the URL of the original post on SE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;for high-rankers, the search string you used (and the name of the search engine, if not Google)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;any other details you noticed and want to share, because you're awesome&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following post is a case study about reporting copycat sites:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2625/is-this-version-of-the-site-real-or-a-phishing-scam&quot;&gt;Is this version of the site real, or a phishing scam?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: adapted excerpt and wiki from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackoverflow.com/tags/copycat-sites/info&quot;&gt;meta Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-07-31T00:39:39.143" LastActivityDate="2015-07-31T00:39:39.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2629" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-29T14:09:31.323" Score="0" Body="Sites that look very similar to Cross Validated SE attempt to imitate the site, or use its data without attribution to trick users. Please read the full tag wiki before making a question about these sites." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-07-31T00:39:42.517" LastActivityDate="2015-07-31T00:39:42.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2630" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-29T23:05:15.147" Score="3" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;Glen_b and I have been debating how to edit &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/163837/linear-regression-with-x-values-under-trigonometric-transformation&quot;&gt;this particular question&lt;/a&gt;. My view is that a title specific to the contents of the question is necessary as a summary of the question contents. The title, as I edited it, allows one to quickly understand that the question is about using trig functions in regression without venturing further than the &quot;headline.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, Glen_b's title is less descriptive of the question body than mine. Its generality may have merit, though, as it can include several types of transformations for regression analysis under its aegis. Rather than face an avalanche of questions asking &quot;how do I apply __ transform in my regression,&quot; we might use this question to capture many transformations at once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think that Glen_b's approach is desirable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Imprecise question titles are a pet peeve of mine, as it requires one to read the question body to discern whether the result is relevant to what I'm after. This peeve may not have wide appeal, in which case I'll accept that I'm an outlier.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Collecting &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; transformations used in regressions into a single question, which is itself about just trig, seems like a  very larger task, especially if we admit every transformation satisfying the title &quot;Linear regression with transformed $x$ values.&quot; This would appear to include $\log(x)$ and $\log(x+c)$ for some small $c$ (since we need to account for $x$ values which may be 0), $\sqrt{x}$, polynomials, and splines. I'm not sure whether or not the title admits things like Gaussian processes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While I appreciate that Glen_b is forward-looking in his attempt to service future users, I'm not sure that expanding OP's question does a great service to OP. OP asked about one specific transformation and may be overwhelmed by a very expansive response.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I hope that Glen_b finds my summary of his position fair &amp;amp; accurate; he and other CV members are, of course, welcome to make their own cases one way or the other -- my intention in describing his argument is merely expository.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2015-08-01T01:16:51.580" Title="What is the proper balance between question &amp; title specificity?" Tags="|discussion|questions|editing|title|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2630" CreationDate="2015-07-29T23:34:16.017" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd better explain my actions and position. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I answered the OP's question in the specific (i.e with direct reference to the details of their question) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I made the title more general --&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;changing &quot;Linear regression with sine/cosine elements&quot; to &quot;Linear regression with transformed x values&quot; and answered the more general version of the question as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(general titles with specific bodies are common here; the aim of the more general title was to get hits from users searching for things like &quot;transformed x&quot;, while deliberately leaving the question body concrete for the mathematically weaker reader who tend to find it easier to go from the concrete to a similar concrete problem; I think the mathematically able reader who finds it easy to go from the general to the specific would probably find the solution obvious in any case)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The ultimate point (beside answering OP's specific problem and redirecting some kinds of searches) was to provide a question/answer that other specific &quot;how do I deal with &lt;em&gt;this particular transformed-x&lt;/em&gt;&quot; type questions could be closed-as-duplicates of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's an older question in similar style (but different specifics) that I point to in my answer, but I thought the new question was more easily generalized, and that's why I worked on it. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think having an ever-increasing host of specific &quot;how do I fit this transformed-x&quot; questions is counterproductive. Once this issue is resolved, the older one might even be closable, but I'm not overly concerned about it either way (e.g. if it stayed open but with a link to the new one that would also do), as long as we don't end up with dozens of specific versions of this style of question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I want to revert the title, but I wasn't going to have an edit war; as such I have for the present left the title as user777 changed it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Clearly user777 is trying to do the best for the site; we just don't see eye to eye about the right way to proceed here. I support the choice to post the question to meta.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2015-07-29T23:40:13.480" LastActivityDate="2015-07-29T23:40:13.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2632" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2633" CreationDate="2015-07-30T00:05:03.720" Score="10" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/162547/why-is-pearsons-%CF%81-only-an-exhaustive-measure-of-association-if-the-joint-distri&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, which received two outstanding answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I can only select one as correct I decided to award a bounty to the other one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought it might be preferable if bounties of this sort could skip the wait period and just be awarded immediately. This would mean they don't sit in the 'featured' column for a day. It's not that I mind waiting to award the bounty, but it seems to me that a question which already has an answer worthy of an extra bounty is the least likely question to need additional featuring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9162" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2015-08-11T01:41:27.390" Title="What's the rationale for the 24 hour wait period for bounties to reward existing answers?" Tags="|discussion|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2632" CreationDate="2015-07-30T01:10:15.320" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;(before looking at the linked question, as a general principle)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One advantage of featuring an answer you take the trouble to award a bonus to is that more users get to see a very good answer or answers, benefit from it, and upvote it (or all of the useful answers) as well. It's often hard to get reputation here - especially for newer users - so good answers deserve any recognition they can get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also gives us the chance to upvote a question that drew good answers (which suggests it is worth an upvote). Don't miss the chance to let your reputation show those good answers to others for at least one day. [Some answer-awarders leave it a week to give maximum exposure to the good answer.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I applaud your choice to accept one and bounty the other; I've done the same when faced with a difficult choice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(after looking at the linked question)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ah, &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; question. Well, whuber and myself, we at least don't need reputation, but I'm glad you found the answers helpful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2015-08-11T01:41:27.390" LastActivityDate="2015-08-11T01:41:27.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2630" CreationDate="2015-07-30T17:41:44.790" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the proper balance between question &amp;amp; title specificity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1479/how-to-ask-a-good-question-on-crossvalidated&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, there is some guidance about writing titles. The item number 2 says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Keep the title short: it's not necessary to explain the question in the title, but what it is about without being too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A key part is 'the title should express what the question is about'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original title of that question was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Linear regression with sine/cosine elements&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not reflect what the question is about, because the connection between 'linear regression' and 'sine/cosine variables' is empty. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suggestions of &lt;code&gt;Glen_b&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;user777&lt;/code&gt; add the term 'transformation' to improve the connection between the method (linear regression) and the data (sine/cosine transformed variables): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Glen_b suggested:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Linear regression with transformed $x$ values&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;user777 suggested:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Linear regression with x values under trigonometric transformation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both are better than the original title. Note that the four points made in Glen_b's answer here would still be applicable under user777's title suggestion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1390/how-should-questions-be-answered-on-cross-validated&quot;&gt;answers the original poster's question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The general part of the answer emphasizes the sine/cosine transformations are irrelevant to the specific issue raised by the OP.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other questions with the same reasoning, but with different examples of transformation could still be marked as duplicates.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;3 won't let 4 happen.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2015-08-01T01:16:51.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2620" CreationDate="2015-07-31T00:38:57.943" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with @chl. SO has a particular convention with its tags, just as CV does. Both are designed to suit different needs, so there's no reason to expect them to coincide. Matching SO convention in this area would break with the package-only convention that exists on CV, so this tag would be a peculiarity among tags. CV doesn't have the ambiguity problem with caret-as-text-character, meaning that there's no ambiguity on our side. This is exclusively an SO problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastActivityDate="2015-07-31T00:38:57.943" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2636" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-31T20:44:58.710" Score="10" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've asked on the CV Meta &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1950/5739&quot;&gt;before&lt;/a&gt; about who is attending the Joint Statistical Meetings, and who wants to match the usernames and faces. Honestly, I am jumping from session to session during the day, and then from a business meeting to a reception in the evening. But I thought I'd bring this up again for the benefit of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Propose time and place to meet up as an answer. Comment if you are coming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2015-07-31T20:44:58.710" Title="JSM 2015 mixer?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2638" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2639" CreationDate="2015-08-05T10:34:54.293" Score="10" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/164677/prediction-intervals-for-forecasts-using-spectral-analysis?noredirect=1#comment313278_164677&quot;&gt;interacting with a new user who has a question I think is interesting&lt;/a&gt;. To move the discussion forward, he really needs to show a picture. Unfortunately, he can't do that yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somewhat surprisingly, I didn't find the reputation threshold for including pictures in questions (or answers) in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;list of privileges&lt;/a&gt;. Nor did searches on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=include+picture+in+question&quot;&gt;meta.SO&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=include+picture+in+question&quot;&gt;meta.CV&lt;/a&gt; yield anything particularly helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have two factual questions and one question I'd like to discuss. The factual questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What's the reputation (or other) threshold for being able to include pictures in questions?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What's the reputation (or other) threshold for being able to include pictures in answers?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Maybe the site admins could include this info in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;list of privileges&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question I'd like to get y'all's opinion on is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does this reputation threshold for including pictures make sense for CV?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me like there are far more questions that would profit from pictures on CV than on many other SE sites. So keeping new users from posting pictures raises a higher hurdle for them on CV than on, say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;SO&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Academia.SE&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://workplace.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Workplace.SE&lt;/a&gt;, where you will rarely-if-ever see a picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, I'd propose allowing new users to include pictures in questions and answers on CV, or reduce the rep threshold (maybe to 5, so the first upvoter could ask them to edit the question and include the picture).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2016-07-14T19:10:37.357" Title="Is there a reputation threshold for including pictures in questions (and answers)?" Tags="|feature-request|new-users|images|privileges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2638" CreationDate="2015-08-05T12:17:29.217" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a test, I just included an image in an answer with a new account:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Idhqb.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Idhqb.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you see, you only need 1 reputation -- which everyone gets -- to do that. (Since it's a useless answer, I also deleted it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't tested posting questions at this point (I hesitate to spam the site with tests). I'll try to find out for sure whether the limit applies to questions, but it would seem odd to allow a rep 1 user to use images in answers but not questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Taking whuber's comment as encouragement to do so, I'll expand on my earlier comment:)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, in the past, we've (as in 'we active users') been quite happy to put an image in the post if posters include a link to the image (they're easy to upload to imgur, but any non-dodgy site where you can access the image directly would do). While I haven't had to do that for someone for a long time, I'd be happy to do it any time I saw that it was needed; if a user with sufficient reputation to do so didn't take care of it already (as often happens), a flag would suffice to alert a moderator to the need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Helping a new user who is taking the trouble to illustrate an aspect of their question is a reasonably pleasant task and it's not like we're overwhelmed with such requests at the moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2015-09-13T23:27:22.847" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T23:27:22.847" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="793" CreationDate="2015-08-06T13:47:03.533" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;NONMEM&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A fortran based non-linear mixed effects modelling software with very powerful algorithms including ODE solvers. It is a commercial software made by ICON plc that is widely used in the pharmacometrics community. It has a steep learning curve but once you get used to it, you'll probably not need to use another non-linear mixed effects modelling software. It needs to be used alongside other statistical tools like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.r-project.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;R&lt;/a&gt; to analyse and visualise modelling results. It can also be used alongside &lt;a href=&quot;http://psn.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PsN&lt;/a&gt; for automated covariate analysis and visual predictive checks, simulation, etc. For more on NONMEM, visit &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.iconplc.com/solutions/technologies/nonmem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ICON plc&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20151222213234/http://accp1.org/pharmacometrics/theory.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;short tutorial&lt;/a&gt; (archived) gives a very concise introduction to pharmacometrics and non-linear mixed effects modelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35574" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-11-09T07:01:58.550" LastActivityDate="2023-11-09T07:01:58.550" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-08-06T13:47:03.533" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2641" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2642" CreationDate="2015-08-06T13:59:18.273" Score="20" ViewCount="279" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lately I've been perusing old, unanswered questions when I have a few minutes. I come across ones like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/130832/explanation-that-the-prior-predictive-marginal-distribution-follows-from-prior/164974#164974&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, where the question is more or less fully addressed in the comments. Since these are very old, OP interest is of little concern. But it seems to me that for the benefit of anyone stumbling onto the question, an answer may be worthwhile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My approach was to answer, with a credit to the comments. But, I'm curious, is there some standard etiquette for answering old questions when a comment-answerer seems unlikely to write a full answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28462" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T21:01:43.397" Title="Etiquette for answering old questions addressed in comments?" Tags="|discussion|answers|comment|etiquette|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2641" CreationDate="2015-08-06T16:28:45.090" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;The basic policy is clear enough -- don't answer in comments, answer in answers. Some SE sites are very strict and simply remove anything in comments that looks like an answer. Others run a bit looser. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone does answer in comments and you expand it into an answer, then as long as you give credit where you rely substantially on someone else's text, there's no issue as far as I can see; you're actually doing the right thing -- putting an answer on a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T16:28:45.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2641" CreationDate="2015-08-06T21:01:43.397" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that it is better to provide an answer for otherwise unanswered questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, if there is an answer in the comments that is substantively the same as the answer I would have otherwise given, I just go ahead and give my version despite the fact that it already exists from someone else.  They had the opportunity to convert their comments into an answer if they had wanted to.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are uncomfortable with this, another option is to just copy the answer from the comments and make your answer community wiki.  You don't get any points for it, but the question is answered.  You can find an example in which I did this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/109917/7290&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T21:01:43.397" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2644" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2645" CreationDate="2015-08-06T21:29:45.177" Score="7" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curious about why &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/164905&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about the popularity of arXiv among statisticians is not off-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In full disclosure, I flagged it as off-topic and the flag was declined. To me, this decision, along with the numerous up-votes, indicates that the question is -- by moderator and popular consensus -- on topic. I'm fine with that and I get the connection to arXiv and its importance within the scientific community which obviously includes statisticians. But doesn't that mean that a question about the popularity of Scottish meat pies or Celine Dion among statisticians could also be on topic? Slippery slope and all that...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it should be a &quot;Community Wiki&quot; question like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/89376&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; about having to learn SAS before practicing statistics in the private sector?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9249" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T16:13:50.057" Title="Why is the question about arXiv not off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2644" CreationDate="2015-08-06T22:10:19.333" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was a tough call.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CW tends to be used here for questions likely to generate useful and interesting replies, but where no single objectively best reply seems possible.  It might also be applied to questions of a rapidly evolving nature (if such questions are deemed so important that they shouldn't be closed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the arXiv question, it was posed in a way that at least seemed to allow the possibility of a unique objectively valid answer that would be permanently useful.  (Nevertheless, when I first saw it I paused over the &quot;close&quot; button for a long time.)  I was delighted that several such answers have since appeared, differing only in the evidence they use to support their common conclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T22:10:19.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2646" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2648" CreationDate="2015-08-07T13:58:13.327" Score="4" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to see (or generate / retrieve) data on things like which tags are the most widely viewed ones on CV, or what fraction of answers receive an upvote (or the distribution of upvotes on answers)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67799" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-08-07T17:11:23.667" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T17:11:23.667" Title="Data on things like tag views and upvote fractions" Tags="|discussion|tags|data-visualization|site-statistics|data-explorer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2647" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2649" CreationDate="2015-08-07T14:12:04.570" Score="6" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adaboost is an early example for a boosting algorithm. Does that make the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/adaboost&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;adaboost&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;adaboost&lt;/a&gt; tag a candidate for a tag synonym with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/boosting&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;boosting&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;boosting&lt;/a&gt;? Or is the policy that special cases can get their own tag? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, is there such a thing as a threshold? It seems obvious that there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/normal-distribution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;normal-distribution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;normal-distribution&lt;/a&gt; tag although there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/distributions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;distributions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;distributions&lt;/a&gt; tag, of which the former is a special case, so to speak. I would find it bizarre if, for example, someone came up with a &lt;code&gt;standard normal-distribution&lt;/code&gt; tag on top, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67799" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2015-08-07T15:40:02.720" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T20:17:44.537" Title="Tag synonym question, with an application to adaboost and boosting" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2646" CreationDate="2015-08-07T15:05:22.370" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange system has a &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;data site&lt;/a&gt; (more information &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/help&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).  There you can get data on any of the network sites.  You will need to extend your account to the data site, and know SQL, but then this should be possible.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T15:05:22.370" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2647" CreationDate="2015-08-07T15:35:41.167" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tags are one of the most important aspects of the site, and play a major role in organizing the information here.  But a tag can be created by anyone whose reputation is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/create-tags&quot;&gt;&gt;300&lt;/a&gt;.  So we have lots of tags (1,300, by my count), many of which are not very good in one way or another.  They often have no wiki excerpt and their names and usages can be unclear or ambiguous.  Cleaning them up, adding / removing tags from questions, providing wikis, etc. will always be a work in progress.  You can suggest a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms&quot;&gt;synonym&lt;/a&gt; for a given tag if your reputation is &gt;2500 and you have a total answer score of $\ge$5 that tag, then it awaits 5 upvotes to be ratified.  Rest assured that you will wait forever.  I created a meta CV question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1200/7290&quot;&gt;Current tag synonym candidates&lt;/a&gt;) to make such suggestions more salient and open for discussion.  That may be a more productive option.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, there is no real rule &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;.  The truth is that we have what has been created and hasn't yet been changed.  I think at best we can aim for a reasonable consensus position (which in turn is likely to be continuously evolving).  Ultimately, that position will be a weighted average of unawareness, indifference, and what seems to most usefully organize the information on the site (pardon my cynicism ;-).  The latter can definitely change over time.  We have lots of tags that are proper subsets of others, well beyond just &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/normal-distribution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;normal-distribution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;normal-distribution&lt;/a&gt; $\subset$ &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/distributions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;distributions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;distributions&lt;/a&gt;.  I agree that &lt;code&gt;[standard-normal-distribution]&lt;/code&gt; would be unnecessary, but that is a judgment and a contingent one.  The users (I am not one of them) who contribute to and follow the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/adaboost&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;adaboost&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;adaboost&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/boosting&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;boosting&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;boosting&lt;/a&gt; tags should try to decide what is best at this time.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T20:17:44.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2650" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-08-07T17:15:49.150" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;More info about Stack Exchange Data Explorer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/faq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange Data Explorer FAQ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/06/introducing-stack-exchange-data-explorer/&quot;&gt;Introducing Stack Exchange Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported excerpt and wiki from the main &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/data-explorer/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2022-06-01T11:16:50.113" LastActivityDate="2022-06-01T11:16:50.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2651" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-08-07T17:15:49.150" Score="0" Body="The Stack Exchange Data Explorer (SEDE) allows one to create and run queries against copies of the databases of Stack Exchange sites." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-08-08T01:03:51.433" LastActivityDate="2015-08-08T01:03:51.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2652" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2653" CreationDate="2015-08-08T16:30:21.687" Score="7" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw it before &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/163039/revisions&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, but now I can't. I checked meta SE and found &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/104579/260336&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;. I was able to see my rejected edits in &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/math/query/45755/my-rejected-edits&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Math SE&lt;/a&gt; (I'm 140308) but not in &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/45755/my-rejected-edits&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stats SE/CV&lt;/a&gt; (I'm 44339 ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44339" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2015-08-08T21:09:53.157" Title="How to find the list of my rejected edits?" Tags="|support|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2652" CreationDate="2015-08-08T17:21:16.547" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In your user profile choose &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/44339/bclc?tab=activity&amp;amp;sort=suggestions&quot;&gt;All actions, then choose Suggestions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2015-08-08T17:21:16.547" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2654" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-08-09T20:54:13.790" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;An initiative created in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stats.stackexchange.com/questions/674/first-cross-validated-journal-club&quot;&gt;earliest years&lt;/a&gt; of Cross Validated SE to &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stats.stackexchange.com/questions/667/cv-journal-club&quot;&gt;boost the chat popularity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CV's Journal Club discussed scientific papers related to statistics and data mining techniques. &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stats.stackexchange.com/questions/667/cv-journal-club&quot;&gt;There were 7 meetings total of the Journal Club&lt;/a&gt; until March, 2012.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-08-10T13:51:16.750" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T13:51:16.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2655" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-08-09T20:54:13.790" Score="0" Body="An initiative created to boost the chat popularity in the beginning of Cross Validated SE." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-08-10T13:51:42.177" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T13:51:42.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2656" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-08-12T16:59:35.500" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;; bugs or feature requests regarding the help center and its pages should have this tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported excerpt and wiki from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/help-center/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-08-14T21:08:05.107" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T21:08:05.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2657" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-08-12T16:59:35.500" Score="0" Body="For issues regarding the help center of Cross Validated SE." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-08-14T21:08:18.517" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T21:08:18.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2658" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2683" CreationDate="2015-08-13T10:59:05.943" Score="5" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;While editing question, sometimes one needs to check that the correct tags are present. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes one needs to check the tag information in order to say it is relevant or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for checking that, would it be nice, if the tag details appear on hover, while editing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84191" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-08-13T15:25:14.097" LastActivityDate="2015-09-02T10:53:02.537" Title="Display tag excerpt on hover when editing questions?" Tags="|feature-request|tags|editing|tag-excerpt|user-interface|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2659" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2660" CreationDate="2015-08-15T13:27:55.810" Score="7" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/plm&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;plm&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;plm&lt;/a&gt; tag has no tag wiki, no explanation. What is it for?  I would like to add an tag wiki, but need first to know why it is there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2015-08-15T21:18:22.957" LastActivityDate="2015-08-15T21:18:22.957" Title="What is the [plm] tag for?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2659" CreationDate="2015-08-15T13:39:39.223" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's used in only 25 questions at the time of writing; the few I looked at all make reference to R's &lt;a href=&quot;https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/plm/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;plm&lt;/code&gt; Linear models for panel data&lt;/a&gt; package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recall that anyone with over a certain reputation can create new tags&amp;mdash;we can write tag wikis without worrying about their original motivation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2015-08-15T13:39:39.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2661" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-18T12:43:48.080" Score="9" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.askubuntu.com/q/14237&quot;&gt;(Stolen shamelessly from Meta.AskUbuntu.)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;StackOverflow recently introduced &quot;just in time&quot; &lt;em&gt;tag warnings&lt;/em&gt;. These warnings are meant to provide users with just-in-time information to help them avoid common mistakes in the tag they're using (e.g. SQL questions should mention the engine they use).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what they look like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AZhJW.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AZhJW.png&quot; alt=&quot;tag warning&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think CV could benefit from these tag warnings, and I'll self-answer with a proposal for an &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;r&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;r&lt;/a&gt; tag warning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do y'all have other tags and warning proposals? Warnings can include links and basic HTML formatting. Please post below and upvote/downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T10:13:11.093" LastActivityDate="2015-08-19T06:24:53.753" Title="Do we want tag warnings?" Tags="|feature-request|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2661" CreationDate="2015-08-18T12:43:48.080" Score="8" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Proposed &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;r&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;r&lt;/a&gt; tag warning&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If your question is of the following type: &lt;em&gt;&quot;How do I do X in R?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, then CrossValidated is not&#xA;  the best place to ask. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/795/1352&quot;&gt;Here is a list of&#xA;  support resources for this kind of&#xA;  question.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;CrossValidated is a good fit if your question is of this type: &lt;em&gt;&quot;What&#xA;  model is appropriate here? (Pointers to R packages would be&#xA;  appreciated.)&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2015-08-19T06:24:53.753" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2663" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2792" CreationDate="2015-08-19T14:40:47.713" Score="10" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seems to be a fair amount of redundancy in the tags containing imputation in them. As of this writing, I observe the following distribution of imputation tag usages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;data-imputation: 160&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;multiple-imputation: 617&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;imputation: 4&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly multiple imputation is just one (very popular) variety of imputation, so perhaps we only need the tags imputation and multiple-imputation. To me, data-imputation appears to be somewhat redundant: I don't know what one would impute if not data!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2015-11-03T12:09:38.673" LastActivityDate="2015-11-03T12:09:38.673" Title="Do we need data-imputation, multiple-imputation and imputation tags?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2664" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2666" CreationDate="2015-08-21T10:08:22.500" Score="13" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seem to be quite a few questions that refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_method&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fisher's or Stouffer's method&lt;/a&gt; for combining p-values, but without the corresponding &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/combining-p-values&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;combining-p-values&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;combining-p-values&lt;/a&gt; tag. Would it help the site to tag those questions? Or should that tag perhaps be merged/aliased with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meta-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meta-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meta-analysis&lt;/a&gt; tag? (I don't have enough rep to edit directly, someone will have to review and accept the edits.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Examples (changed):&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/121841/6432&quot;&gt;Weighting p-values&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/20126/6432&quot;&gt;Testing two-tailed p-values using Stouffer&amp;#39;s approach&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/21233/6432&quot;&gt;Why is Stouffer&amp;#39;s method often used with one-tailed $p$-values rather than two-tailed $p$-values?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/163614/6432&quot;&gt;Why does Stouffer&amp;#39;s method work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/158225/6432&quot;&gt;Why is my combined p-value, obtained using the Fisher&amp;#39;s method, so low?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Examples (not yet changed):&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/133187/6432&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/133187/6432&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/146191/6432&quot;&gt;Multiple hypothesis correction for meta-analysis with missing p-values&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/129677/6432&quot;&gt;Combining multiple p-values&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/52366/6432&quot;&gt;How to combine p values?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/38099/6432&quot;&gt;What are good references for the different methods of combining p-values?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/20616/6432&quot;&gt;Combining p-values for averaging technical protein quantification replicates in python&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/103080/6432&quot;&gt;Integrating p-values (or z-scores) with missing values&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following search seems to be helpful, too: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bp-value%5D+combining&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bp-value%5D+combining&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6432" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T17:22:03.743" Title="Many threads about combining p-values without the [combining-p-values] tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2664" CreationDate="2015-08-21T10:45:54.353" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes it would.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it happens, the [combining-p-values] tag did not exist until around one week ago, when I created it and single-handedly tagged around 10 questions with it. There was some activity in several questions about Fisher's method and it prompted me to create this tag; I felt that [meta-analysis] is too general. I was not sure what is the best name for the new tag and asked in chat if this name is okay; @gung replied that it sounds fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I originally estimated that around 30 threads should be tagged with this tag and was going to re-tag them all, but got distracted (and lazy). So to properly finish what I started, other relevant threads should be found and re-tagged. Your list is helpful here; in fact, you can do it yourself by suggesting edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several things to keep in mind about re-tagging old threads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Don't re-tag a lot of questions (say, more than 5) in one go. This will fill the front page with the similar old questions and people can get annoyed. It's better to do it in several steps, e.g. 5 questions at a time each day.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you edit an old question, proof-read &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt;. Don't just put a tag on it; check the spelling and the grammar; remove &quot;thank you&quot;s; consider if the title can be improved (it often can) by making it more precise; capitalize the first letter of the title and put a question mark in the end if it is formulated as a question; etc. etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;After you read a question anyway, you will most likely either want to upvote or to downvote it. Do it. (Don't be afraid to downvote old confusing unhelpful questions.) The same goes for its answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the process of reading all the old threads on a certain topic, you might discover some duplicate questions. Vote to close them as such. Also vote to close as unclear questions that are unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is partially because I felt I didn't have time to deal with points 2-4 that I did not finish the re-tagging. In general, I find that tidying old questions can take a lot of time (but is also a very good thing to do).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2015-08-21T14:10:21.250" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T14:10:21.250" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2667" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2670" CreationDate="2015-08-25T12:39:13.673" Score="4" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to create a new tag for Julia language, which already &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/tags/julia-lang/info&quot;&gt;exists&lt;/a&gt; in Stack Overflow. But, as I do not have a question in order to create a tag, I wanted to know how do I do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: So, there seems to be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/25672/does-julia-have-any-hope-of-sticking-in-the-statistical-community&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; on Julia, on which I have added the tag and thus, created it. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/julia-lang/info&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/julia-lang/info&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84191" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2015-08-25T17:46:23.550" Title="Creating a new tag for Julia language" Tags="|support|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2668" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-08-25T12:42:47.800" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://julialang.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Julia&lt;/a&gt; is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments, such as Ruby, Python, R or Matlab. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library. The library, mostly written in Julia itself, also integrates mature, best-of-breed C and Fortran libraries for linear algebra, as well as highly proficient random number generation, FFTs, and string processing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More libraries continue to be added over time. Programs written in Julia are organized around defining and overloading functions with different combinations of argument types. Part of what makes Julia so expressive is that argument types are user-defined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The core of Julia is implemented in C and C++ and its parser in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheme_%28programming_language%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Scheme&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;femtolisp&quot;). For just-in-time generation of 64-bit or 32-bit optimized machine code the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;LLVM&lt;/a&gt; compiler framework is used depending on platform or user override.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The C API enables Julia with the capability of being called from C without needing to copy data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Julia is based on LLVM and compares in speed with C and Fortran, while having syntax similar to MATLAB and R. Although it is still in its infancy, it is maturing quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Resources for Julia:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://julialang.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Official website&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/manual/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Julia manual&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/julia-dev&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Julia development forum&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84191" LastEditorUserId="84191" LastEditDate="2015-08-26T00:54:44.753" LastActivityDate="2015-08-26T00:54:44.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2669" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-08-25T12:42:47.800" Score="0" Body="Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments.&#xD;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84191" LastEditorUserId="84191" LastEditDate="2015-08-26T00:54:51.010" LastActivityDate="2015-08-26T00:54:51.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2667" CreationDate="2015-08-25T17:46:23.550" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've always thought that tags are a very important part of keeping the content on CV well organized.  If there is a tag that really should exist to facilitate that task, you should create it.  That said, @Glen-b's point resonates here: if there aren't any questions whose content needs to be indexed by a given tag, there isn't really any need for that tag to exist (yet).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, be aware that it a tag exists on only one thread for a certain period of time (I think it's six months), the SE system will automatically delete it.  The idea is the same: there isn't really a set of information related to that topic that needs to be held together by the tag.  Please don't add it to extra threads just to make the tag stick, but search around, there are probably more relevant threads that could be connected.  If there aren't, the tag really should go; it can always be re-created in the future when it does become needed.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2015-08-25T17:46:23.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2671" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2672" CreationDate="2015-08-27T05:55:43.473" Score="2" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had got a reputation of 225 (200+) on a day, but wasn't awarded the Mortarboard badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, just wanted to know whether the badge is still active or is the explanation of the badge wrong; so that it doesn't create confusion in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84191" LastEditorUserId="1956" LastEditDate="2015-10-02T12:03:23.897" LastActivityDate="2015-10-02T12:03:23.897" Title="Problem with the Mortarboard badge?" Tags="|support|bug|status-bydesign|reputation|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2671" CreationDate="2015-08-27T07:51:20.407" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Association bonuses (and bounties, had you had any) don't count toward the total. It comes from upvotes (+10 per answer vote, +5 per question), accepted answers (+15), and the odd +2's you get for stuff like suggested edits being accepted (eventually they don't count any more either), &lt;strike&gt;and accepting an answer yourself&lt;/strike&gt;. (turns out I was wrong about that last one.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're not easy to get. Three decent answers and a couple of acceptances will get you close, but it helps if you have some carry-over upvotes from an answer or two the previous day (people upvoting the next day).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[If you pass 200 but then spend points (say setting up a bounty), you can lose your &quot;passed 200 in a day&quot; as well. I've been caught by that one a bunch of times.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2015-08-27T13:34:03.063" LastActivityDate="2015-08-27T13:34:03.063" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2673" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2674" CreationDate="2015-08-27T08:35:04.743" Score="14" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;What percentage of your upvotes would you estimate occurs after, say, 24h have elapsed since you gave an answer? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My impression is that this percentage is very firmly in the single digits (~3-5%) in my case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when I started out on CV, my understanding of this site was that it aims (surely among other things) to become a repository of answers to common questions which would be seen and appreciated by other readers than just the OP. Whether or not that is the case is not easy to say, but if it is, that does not seem to translate into upvotes that occur after a question has disappeared from the top of the stack of active questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67799" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-08-28T22:30:43.157" LastActivityDate="2015-08-28T22:30:43.157" Title="When do upvotes occur?" Tags="|discussion|votes|participation|site-statistics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2673" CreationDate="2015-08-27T12:07:29.557" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;See this blog post I wrote for the CV site, &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.blogoverflow.com/2012/10/voting-behavior-and-accumulation-of-old-votes-on-cv-i-know-i-need-to-work-on-my-titles/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Voting behavior and accumulation of old votes on CV (I know I need to work on my titles)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. As of 2012, there was non-trivial accumulation of upvotes for older questions, they are somewhat invisible to regular interaction though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ppuFG.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/355912/aggregate-days-since-post-creation-that-a-vote-was-cast&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; I have updated the query to return the aggregate counts of &lt;code&gt;Vote Day - Post Day&lt;/code&gt;. Since the data dump only releases statistics on the day a vote was cast, a vote within 24 hours can either occur on the same day (a value of 0) or the following day (a value of 1). In total, these only account for 54% of all historical votes on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long story short, I don't see any real problems. But increasing visibility to older, high quality posts likely is not a bad thing. A good way to do this and simultaneously answer new questions is to point out duplicates. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2015-08-27T12:07:29.557" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2333" CreationDate="2015-08-28T17:09:56.677" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/90327/geomatics-and-remote-sensing?referrer=8G2asYAyI_To9RoVf1VtPg2&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/ads/proposal/90327.png&quot; alt=&quot;Check out the Area 51 Remote Sensing Proposal&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79636" LastEditorUserId="79636" LastEditDate="2015-08-31T17:26:56.070" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T17:26:56.070" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-08-28T17:09:56.677" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2676" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-30T17:58:29.937" Score="2" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11581/remote-sensing-in-geoscience&quot;&gt;this discussion&lt;/a&gt; that took place about 1 year ago and considering all the comments, I want to have a similar discussion here since CV is a community somehow related to remote sensing because concepts like &lt;strong&gt;classification&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;pattern recognition&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;PCA&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;fuzzy theory&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;ICA&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;change detection&lt;/strong&gt; have a lot of applications in RS.  I suspect there are some geodesists, photogrammetrists, remote sensing experts who attend in this community to solve their problem and I want them participate in this discussion.  I think that there are concepts in remote sensing that cannot be covered just in Cross Validated + GIS and I have given some reasons &lt;a href=&quot;https://gis.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4019/19874&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/q/21707/142064&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/q/21610/142064&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So are you interested in having a new site?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If yes, What do you want the proposal of the site be named?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Will I have the support of some members of this community if I make a proposal for a new site or change the name of the current proposal?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If yes, which percent you think will commit in the new site?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just beg you that participate in the discussion. Even a small comment will be considered. I'm really confused about the name of the proposal and have some doubts about whether we really need a new site or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://gis.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4021&quot;&gt;a similar question&lt;/a&gt; was asked in GIS.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, a chat room has been created: &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/27633/remote-sensing-experts-room&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/27633/remote-sensing-experts-room&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79636" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T08:41:05.607" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T13:35:34.557" Title="Are people in this community interested in having a new site for other Geospatial technologies?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2677" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2678" CreationDate="2015-08-30T20:53:32.727" Score="11" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently answered a question on CV and the asker checked my answer. Subsequently, the question was put on hold as off-topic. I invested time and effort into answering this question, and I believe along with the asker that my answer was helpful. Will my reputation points for answering this question be revoked because the question was deemed off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7616" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-08-31T12:02:13.633" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T12:02:13.633" Title="What happens to reputation score if checked answer to on-hold question?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|closing-questions|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2677" CreationDate="2015-08-30T23:11:30.917" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm surprised you haven't run into this several times already!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing an answer that helps the user (which you clearly did) doesn't make the answer on-topic. It's nice to help a user when we can but the question must still be on topic to stay open. [I've given dozens of answers to questions that were marked off topic - indeed, after reflection, I have marked as off topic a few questions I gave answers to myself.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several things you can do about a question marked off-topic:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- where possible, you can encourage the OP to edit the question to make it more clearly on-topic (or if you could edit it yourself if you don't change the general sense of the question)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- if there's another SE site for which it is clearly on topic you can flag to migrate (and perhaps earn reputation there)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- if there's another SE site for which it &lt;em&gt;would be&lt;/em&gt; on topic after an edit you can encourage the OP to edit to make it so (or again, edit yourself if you don't change the sense of the question), and you can flag to migrate  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I presume you refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/168978/multi-class-logistic-generalized-additive-models/168979#168979&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;. In that case, to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on topic&lt;/a&gt; here, it would need to ask a more clearly statistical question than &quot;which package do I need?&quot;; with some (different) edits it might be on topic on StackOverflow or possibly another SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't lose reputation when a question is closed. Deletion, however, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7237/how-does-reputation-work&quot;&gt;can affect reputation&lt;/a&gt; in some circumstances (see the answer, under &quot;Additionally&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2015-08-30T23:11:30.917" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2679" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-31T08:32:27.250" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/169390/what-is-a-predictive-distribution&quot;&gt;What is a predictive distribution?&lt;/a&gt; was closed for being duplicate to this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/72697/understanding-bayesian-predictive-distributions&quot;&gt;Understanding Bayesian Predictive Distributions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the last question is specifically about Bayesian predictive distributions, while the newly closed one was general, not specifically Bayesian. So it is not a duplicate, and I request that it to be reopened. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Predictive distribution is a concept that can also be treated by non-Bayesian methods!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-09-01T10:08:48.653" Title="Why was a question about predictive distribution closed?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2680" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-08-31T12:30:42.623" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/tour&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tour&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt; is for questions about the Cross Validated &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt; that is accessed through the help menu in the top bar. The tour gives a quick overview and introduction to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: Imported excerpt and wiki from the main &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/stackexchange-tour/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="79696" LastEditDate="2018-11-10T12:24:34.760" LastActivityDate="2018-11-10T12:24:34.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2681" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-08-31T12:30:42.623" Score="0" Body="The tour contains an introduction to Cross Validated SE. It can be accessed through the help menu in the top bar. Use this tag for questions about using this tour." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-08-31T13:32:16.060" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T13:32:16.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2679" CreationDate="2015-09-01T08:59:22.370" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with @Glen_b there. But you've written a great answer on a rather neglected topic &amp;amp; I hope you've not been put off adding to it as promised. It's up to you of course, but if I were you I'd probably ask a new question on non-Bayesian predictive inference &amp;amp; put my answer there.&lt;sup&gt;&amp;dagger;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other references (just in case you haven't already seen them):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lawless &amp;amp; Fredette (2005), &quot;Frequentist prediction intervals and predictive distributions&quot;, &lt;em&gt;Biometrika&lt;/em&gt; , &lt;strong&gt;92&lt;/strong&gt;, 3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bjornstad, (1990), &quot;Predictive Likelihood: A Review&quot;, &lt;em&gt;Statist. Sci.&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;5&lt;/strong&gt;, 2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;dagger; I decided to ask anyway: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/169623/17230&quot;&gt;What non-Bayesian methods are there for predictive inference?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-09-01T10:08:48.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2658" CreationDate="2015-09-02T10:47:27.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't really find  &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/168035/display-tag-excerpt-tooltips-when-editing-a-question&quot;&gt;this thread on SO&lt;/a&gt; useful. Maybe the feature has been discontinued and/or because the thread is outdated (2014).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I have found a temporary solution, which might help address the problem for the time being. As @amoeba has mentioned, this is a very common problem, and displaying tag excerpts would really help people while editing questions, for tagging and untagging relevant tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upon clicking on a particular tag, it gets flattened and then the excerpt gets displayed, as shown in the screenshot below (&amp;lt;-- which have been captured today 02 Sept. '15)&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MTQ9v.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MTQ9v.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screen Shot&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84191" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2015-09-02T10:53:02.537" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2684" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-04T14:44:31.750" Score="11" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm color blind, and I have a hard time distinguishing between the neutral and pressed up and down vote colors. I have already had my votes locked on a few questions by trying to up-vote them when they were already up-voted. Does anyone else have this problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could the contrast between these colors be increased or a boarder added to help distinguish between voted and non-voted questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36757" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-09-04T15:14:33.660" LastActivityDate="2015-09-21T23:36:06.593" Title="Modify colors for up-vote and down-vote arrow" Tags="|feature-request|design|votes|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-09-23T22:03:26.433" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2685" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-07T03:37:36.260" Score="16" ViewCount="481" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen a spate of questions of a form more or less along the lines of &quot;Is this working correct?&quot; just lately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this is good from the point of view that the poster is clearly making a proper attempt, the difficulty is that if the answer is &quot;yes&quot;, there's often nothing else to say, which means (unless you're creative enough to find &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; worthwhile to add) to post an answer (basically amounting to the comment &quot;yes&quot; as an answer) is to break SE's rules about very short answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, it's a Q&amp;amp;A that seems less likely to benefit other readers than a question with a &quot;real&quot; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been trying to encourage OPs to rephrase into a more answerable question, but I am not sure what a good approach to this really is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;do we tolerate &quot;yes&quot; answers to these questions? I have leaned this way in the past but because of what seems to be a narrower utility of these questions I wonder if that's a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;do we try harder to push OPs to ask questions that have longer-than-one-line answers? (This might be good if there's a concrete suggestion we can offer them. While I can sometimes suggest something, I'd love to have a more generally applicable approach to changing the question that could be offered.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;do we come up with a different line altogether, anything from closing them to putting up with having a large set of questions that can't be properly answered (but hopefully avoiding either of those)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really don't know a good way to go with these so I don't have a preferred option of my own. Any suggestions or discussion would be welcome&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple of recent examples that (at the time they were posted at least) were more-or-less of the type that concern me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/171372/changing-sigma-limits-for-proof&quot;&gt;Changing Sigma Limits for Proof&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/171054/is-my-work-acceptable-fitting-a-normal-distribution&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/171054/is-my-work-acceptable-fitting-a-normal-distribution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an older question in somewhat of the same vein:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/133249/which-distribution-do-i-get&quot;&gt;Which distribution do I get?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many more questions at least have the potential to encourage such answers, but (because the answer wasn't 'yes') avoid the problem, but they, too, highlight the potential problem, since we can imagine a slightly different attempt at the question which would have the 'yes' answer, such as this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/50737/implication-of-convergence-in-rth-mean&quot;&gt;Implication of convergence in rth mean&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which asks &quot;&lt;em&gt;My question is whether the following steps are sufficient or not&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to which sort of question &quot;yes&quot; is certainly a potential answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know I've also answered quite a few (maybe half a dozen, maybe more) where I was able to say &quot;yes, but&quot;... but on several of those it took quite a good bit of thinking to come up with a &quot;but&quot;. I don't think that's always possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2015-09-09T11:09:12.813" Title="A difficulty with self-study-like questions of the form &quot;Is this correct?&quot;" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|closing-questions|homework|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2686" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2687" CreationDate="2015-09-07T20:13:24.737" Score="5" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I go to the &quot;Users&quot;  page and search for myself, clicking on the &quot;all&quot; reputation tag, I &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Reputation&amp;amp;filter=all&quot;&gt;find myself&lt;/a&gt; displayed with the following three tags in the following order: [pca], [dimensionality-reduction], [hypothesis-testing].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if I go to my profile, I see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/28666/amoeba?tab=tags&amp;amp;sort=votes&quot;&gt;the following top tags&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;588 -- pca × 119  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;184 -- dimensionality-reduction × 32  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;107 -- factor-analysis × 16   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;97 -- hypothesis-testing × 27&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;95 -- r × 24,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where the first number is apparently the total score of my non-wiki answers in the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why is the Users page displaying [hypothesis-testing] instead of [factor-analysis]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-09-08T13:15:03.267" Title="How exactly are three user's tags selected for the &quot;Users&quot; page?" Tags="|support|tags|profile-page|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2686" CreationDate="2015-09-08T00:55:26.797" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe what is happening is they are summing all votes within the given period.  For example, in the &lt;code&gt;week&lt;/code&gt; listing, the top three tags listed are the tags on which you had received the most total votes over the past week; in the &lt;code&gt;month&lt;/code&gt; listing, you see the tags with the most total votes over that period, etc., up through &lt;code&gt;all&lt;/code&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, on the &lt;code&gt;tags&lt;/code&gt; tab on your userpage, the tags are listed in the order of upvotes for &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; only.  Should a user not have any upvotes for answers, the tags on their userpage are ordered by number of posts with the tag.  It may be instructive to consider @Tim, who has asked many good questions, but does not really answer questions on the site.  His &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users?page=3&amp;amp;tab=reputation&amp;amp;filter=all&quot;&gt;listing&lt;/a&gt; has degrees-of-freedom as the third tag (one question with 105 upvotes), but his &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/1005/tim?tab=tags&amp;amp;sort=votes&amp;amp;page=1&quot;&gt;userpage&lt;/a&gt; lists hypothesis-testing, time-series, mathematical-statistics as his top tags (all with no answers, but with 53, 38, and 31 questions respectively).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2015-09-08T00:55:26.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2685" CreationDate="2015-09-08T02:09:32.747" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;To borrow from @cardinal, sometimes &lt;em&gt;rules&lt;/em&gt; should be treated as '&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ux8nTqyB6Bk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;guidelines&lt;/a&gt;'.  In that vein, if the complete answer really were &amp;quot;Yes.&amp;quot;, I think that should be allowed, although in general I think answers that could be elaborated at least a little should be.  For example, answers that are very short and do not yet have any upvotes are automatically entered into the low quality review queue.  I have seen answers that I would typically think are too short, but that do fully address the question upon inspection, and voted &lt;code&gt;Looks OK&lt;/code&gt; numerous times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there used to be a close vote reason called &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/4818/187282&quot;&gt;Too Localized&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was removed from the list of possible close reasons I gather, in large part, because it was believed to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/184154/187282&quot;&gt;misused&lt;/a&gt;.  But it was not considered to be necessarily an invalid close reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;5(A). &amp;quot;Too Localized&amp;quot; is no longer necessary since the specific off-topic reasons now address its main use case. (new)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Too Localized was, by far, the most misused close reason in our surveys, with both Community Managers and Moderators deeming over 50% of randomly sampled TL closures to not have merited closure (including on SO).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today, TL &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; used helpfully on code dump questions on SO, but the new OT reasons are where this is now correctly addressed. SO can use &amp;quot;Large blocks of code with requests for debugging without meaningful supporting info&amp;quot; as a specific OT reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue that the questions you are describing are somewhat analogous (for us) to &amp;quot;code dump&amp;quot; questions on Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Scortchi's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2685/a-difficulty-with-self-study-like-questions-of-the-form-is-this-correct#comment8207_2685&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; strikes me as the ideal solution.  If the answer cannot be broadened into something that could be of wider utility, I think a simple &amp;quot;Yes.&amp;quot; (as an official answer, or in comments if you are more comfortable that way) and closing the question seems the appropriate way to handle these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2015-09-08T02:09:32.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2685" CreationDate="2015-09-08T13:57:27.830" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel there usually &lt;em&gt;ought&lt;/em&gt; to be more to say. If you ask someone to check your working you want to increase your confidence that you've got the right answer by having them agree with you; but you also want to to learn new ways to check similar problems&amp;mdash;quick checks to show your results are roughly what they should be, an intuitive explanation of the answer, proofs or references for methods that you used just because they seemed reasonable, how to arrive at the same results by a different method, the making explicit of assumptions you'd made implicitly, &amp;amp;c. And your confidence increases more when they give such reasons for agreement than when they just say &quot;looks all right&quot;&amp;mdash;which meshes nicely with our goal of providing not over-short answers that may be useful to more than one person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;do we tolerate &quot;yes&quot; answers to these questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think not, for the same reasons we don't tolerate answers like &quot;Use a t-test&quot; or &quot;Read this blog post&quot;. They should be comments, even if they appear to satisfy the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;do we try harder to push OPs to ask questions that have longer-than-one-line answers?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think so; as I commented, there's often going to be something in particular they're unsure about. But we don't want to make people jump through hoops &amp;amp; insist on their editing their questions just because the &lt;em&gt;wording&lt;/em&gt; allows &quot;yes&quot; as a potential answer. Wouldn't it be a little picky to insist on changing &quot;Is this the correct way [&amp;hellip;] ?&quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/171372/17230&quot;&gt;Changing Sigma Limits for Proof&lt;/a&gt; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;do we come up with a different line altogether, anything from closing them to putting up with having a large set of questions that can't be properly answered&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should place questions equivalent to a big &quot;code dump&quot; on hold, as good answers would be impractically broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/171054/17230&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/171054/17230&lt;/a&gt; is one where the OP's approach is perhaps acceptable to whoever's marking their homework, &amp;amp; where perhaps they just hope someone will check the basic calculations. Nonetheless they'd surely benefit from being prompted to at least consider&amp;mdash;it's a self-study question, so they shouldn't simply be told&amp;mdash;under what conditions it'll be good enough for government work.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2015-09-09T11:09:12.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2690" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-09-09T13:07:56.247" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Favorite questions are marked by clicking the star below the question's score. It is searchable by using the &lt;code&gt;infavorites:&amp;lt;user&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; query (where &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;user&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; could be &lt;code&gt;mine&lt;/code&gt; to search your personal set of favorites).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported excerpt and wiki from the main Meta Stack Exchange site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-09-09T22:29:33.863" LastActivityDate="2015-09-09T22:29:33.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2691" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-09-09T13:07:56.247" Score="0" Body="Questions about the favorite question feature. For questions about favorite tags, use (favorite-tags) instead." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-09-09T22:29:28.270" LastActivityDate="2015-09-09T22:29:28.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1419" CreationDate="2015-09-10T13:18:21.020" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;To typeset an operator, it is much better to use &lt;code&gt;\operatorname&lt;/code&gt; instead of &lt;code&gt;\mathrm&lt;/code&gt;, as explained on tex.SE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/48459/whats-the-difference-between-mathrm-and-operatorname&quot;&gt;What's the difference between \mathrm and \operatorname?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare (first line uses &lt;code&gt;\mathrm&lt;/code&gt;, second line uses &lt;code&gt;\operatorname&lt;/code&gt;):&#xA;$$\mathrm{Var}[x] + 2\mathrm{Var}[y] - \mathrm{E}[x]\mathrm{E}[y]$$&#xA;$$\operatorname{Var}[x] + 2\operatorname{Var}[y] - \operatorname{E}[x]\operatorname{E}[y]$$&#xA;and notice small white spaces &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; the operator name in the second line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted by @cardinal, MathJax supports &lt;code&gt;\newcommand&lt;/code&gt;. The best way to use it is to put into the formula where the operator first appears, because putting it into a separate formula creates an annoying empty line (see @Zen's answer). So whenever you first need variance, you can type &lt;code&gt;\newcommand{\Var}{\operatorname{Var}}&lt;/code&gt;, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$$\newcommand{\Var}{\operatorname{Var}} \Var[x]+\Var[y]$$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and this will be displayed as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$\newcommand{\Var}{\operatorname{Var}} \Var[x]+\Var[y]$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All subsequent formulas can simply use &lt;code&gt;\Var&lt;/code&gt; in them, e.g. &lt;code&gt;$\Var[z]$&lt;/code&gt; will become $\Var[z]$.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:34:32.380" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T23:12:18.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2693" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2697" CreationDate="2015-09-12T20:02:19.580" Score="-12" ViewCount="388" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderator behavior is a very crucial point for a community. This means that such people have to be evaluated in a very strict manner. All the time. Otherwise they tend to derange and misuse their power.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moderator gives partially wrong answer and deletes the correction post.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the same step copies the answer in the next step and earns credit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are admins allowed to delete correction-posts from users even if they gave a wrong answer? When it comes to math there is no negotiation what could be wrong or right. It should be possible to point out mistakes without getting punished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/65640/how-to-calculate-2d-standard-deviation-with-0-mean-bounded-by-limits&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; where &quot;whuber&quot; gave a partially wrong answer based on the question of OP. I replied with my post and explained why he is wrong. What followed is not a discussion. My comment simply got deleted without an answer. His post remains wrong. This is not only discouraging since I've seen many incorrect answer and now took an evening to gain some points which should allow me to comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next thing is a plain copy of my answer in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/172209/ols-in-terms-of-means-and-sample-size&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; from the same person, just minutes after his deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a very shameful and discouraging behavior. Such a moderator should be degraded or at least tainted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Never give a person too much power for an unlimited time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87513" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-09-13T02:47:23.617" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T13:11:14.243" Title="Bad behaviour from a moderator has a negative impact on the community" Tags="|discussion|comment|moderation|deleted-answers|privileges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2693" CreationDate="2015-09-12T22:26:07.423" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Added in Edit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: Now that two of us are accused of abusing our position as moderators, I'm not sure I can contribute anything further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have said of each of us that you think we're abusing our positions; you have the right to email the people that oversee us (yes, even us completely unpaid volunteers). See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/28867/what-recourse-do-i-have-if-i-believe-a-moderator-has-abused-his-her-privileges&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt; which explains how to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In respect of the first post you link to, the stackexchange network is deliberately designed (not by any of us talking here) to work a particular way. This includes that - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. Answers must be answers, questions must ask questions. You are not allowed to post comments as answers and if you do they will be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. novice users don't have the ability to make comments; this is deliberate -- to make sure new users at least understand how the system works before they start commenting. The system worked correctly in this case because it seems you're not yet in a position to understand the appropriate site behavior (including that you don't comment in answers), and so it looks to me like you shouldn't in fact be free to comment until you've learned more about how it works. The site works this way for a reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c. moderators are not only given the ability to delete comments posted as answers, &lt;em&gt;that's one of the things they're tasked with doing&lt;/em&gt;. That's what moderators are elected &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt;. whuber not only acted as he should, he was chosen by the rest of us to do exactly that, and the site would be far poorer without his efforts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d. If he had not deleted your non-answer, &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; would have as soon as I became aware of it. I expect any of the other moderators would do the same. It's our job. In a typical day, I will delete several posts like that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in the first case, you've accused him of wrongdoing when he did what he's supposed to do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[The correct action for a user without the reputation to comment if you feel his answer is wrong (it isn't actually wrong but that's not the present issue), is to post a better answer. Many of the active users - the people who bother to vote - are very experienced and knowledgeable statisticians with the ability to tell a good contribution from a poorer one. If the people who vote on the site agree that your answer is actually better, you'll get some upvotes, and it only takes a small handful of upvotes to earn the reputation required to be able to comment. If your answer is less spectacular or does not improve on existing answers, you might require several more answers to get the needed reputation.]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;With respect to the second post -- I see &lt;em&gt;no evidence whatever&lt;/em&gt; that whuber &quot;copied&quot; your answer. There are some similarities, as you would see if two people answer the same question; this is not only common on the site, it's exactly as you'd expect. [Several times on other questions I've given answers with closer similarities to answers of his than his was to yours .... without anybody accusing me of any misbehavior.] However, in several respects, his answer is clearly better than yours. The person who asked the question -- who as far as I can see saw your answer before whuber posted - nevertheless chose his to give the tick to; that is, Repmat also thought it was a better answer. Presumably that first upvote is his as well. [Anyone with even passing familiarity with this site would already know that it would be ludicrous to expect whuber should need to do anything of the kind, since he knows vastly more than most people on the site (only a tiny handful are in his league, myself not included), has no need of reputation and has many times shown that he doesn't care about getting more (if he did, he could easily have far more than double his current reputation).]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you've drawn my attention to the question, I shall certainly be upvoting whuber's answer, since it's the best answer I see on the page; it's better than yours in several important respects, and I think Repmat chose wisely in awarding the tick. In his position, I'd have done the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see nothing whatever that supports your second accusation against whuber. Unless you have something substantially better to base it on than the similarities we'd expect to see in answers to the same question, I don't see there's anything to respond to.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T04:46:16.967" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2695" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-09-13T02:58:54.597" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Privileges control what you can do on Cross Validated SE. Gain more privileges by increasing your reputation (points you receive from your fellow users for posting helpful questions and answers). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use the privileges tag for questions about privilege notifications and privilege wikis. Milestones for each privilege are available from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported excerpt and wiki from the main &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/privileges/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-09-13T14:23:29.200" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T14:23:29.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2696" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-09-13T02:58:54.597" Score="0" Body="Privileges are abilities to do and see more on the site that you earn with increased reputation." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2015-09-13T03:41:53.570" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T03:41:53.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2693" CreationDate="2015-09-13T13:11:14.243" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nali, I do owe you an apology.&lt;/strong&gt;  The proper way to proceed when I encountered a flag on your first post was to (1) recognize that you are a relative newcomer and welcome you to our site and (2) add a comment explaining why your post had to be deleted.  I could plead extenuating circumstances, but that would just be an excuse.  I am sorry about the misunderstandings that arose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This site warmly welcomes constructive, collegial debate about the correctness of answers.&lt;/strong&gt;  We do everything we can to support this, such as providing people the ability to change others' posts, to comment on posts, and to add their own answers.  One aspect that takes some time to appreciate is the relative status of &lt;em&gt;posts&lt;/em&gt; compared to &lt;em&gt;comments.&lt;/em&gt;  A post--that is, a question or answer--has first class status.  It will be as permanent as anything can be; the history of its edits is maintained and can be reviewed; it can be voted up and down.  A comment has secondary status: comments could disappear at any time, can be changed only during a short period of time, and cannot be voted down.  If you are convinced that some answer to a question is wrong, then please consider formulating a better answer and posting that.  Just make sure you answer the question and do not respond solely to the other answer.  (We don't make that rule: it is how all SE sites work.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as your second concern about &quot;copying&quot; goes, please recognize that &lt;strong&gt;any answer not only has to be correct to be of any value: it also has to &lt;em&gt;communicate.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; When two people post the same numerical answer to a question but one explanation is difficult (or impossible) to understand and another gets right to the point with a clear explanation, then it is much more valuable.  Thus we all strive to be not only right, but also to be &lt;em&gt;understood&lt;/em&gt;. This is especially the case with statistical questions, because &lt;em&gt;statistics is not mathematics&lt;/em&gt;. (And even in mathematics, clear communication is valued.)  Many questions permit multiple interpretations and may have differing correct answers.  For these reasons we welcome multiple answers to questions and sometimes those answers can look superficially similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T13:11:14.243" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1419" CreationDate="2015-09-13T14:36:48.173" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;For Corr, Cov and Var I usually use &lt;code&gt;\DeclareMathOperator{\Corr}{Corr}&lt;/code&gt;, which, done once in an answer, allows me to just write &lt;code&gt;\Corr(X,Y)&lt;/code&gt; whenever I need it later, which displays:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$\DeclareMathOperator{\Corr}{Corr} \Corr(X,Y)$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like Amoeba's answer, this ensures spacing is done correctly in a way that &lt;code&gt;\mathrm&lt;/code&gt; doesn't. But see &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/67506/newcommand-vs-declaremathoperator&quot;&gt;newcommand vs. DeclareMathOperator&lt;/a&gt; on TEX.SE: Amoeba's answer apparently has the advantage that &lt;code&gt;newcommand&lt;/code&gt; gives more flexibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But note I can still do &lt;code&gt;\DeclareMathOperator{\E}{\mathbb{E}} \E(X,Y)&lt;/code&gt; and produce:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$\DeclareMathOperator{\E}{\mathbb{E}} \E(X,Y)$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course I can reuse these in a later piece of $\LaTeX$ too: $\E(X)+\Corr(X,Y)$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In a document &lt;code&gt;DeclareMathOperator&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/238272/25866&quot;&gt;can only be used in a preamble&lt;/a&gt; but this doesn't seem to cause any difficulty on here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:34:32.380" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T14:36:48.173" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2699" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2700" CreationDate="2015-09-14T05:24:30.097" Score="4" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to comment on my own, active bounty, open question, here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/167922/classify-users-by-the-pages-they-liked&quot;&gt;Classify users by the pages they liked&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and for some reason the page is not responding to my click on the &quot;add comment&quot; button.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am using Firefox with windows 10.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67447" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T08:32:44.800" Title="Cannot add comments to my own post" Tags="|support|status-completed|comment|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2699" CreationDate="2015-09-14T06:21:07.247" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't see anything about either the post or your account that would lead this to happen (unless you were doing it from a second account).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do occasionally have temporary issues of a similar nature (with Firefox, and it has happened in both Windows 7 and 8) that are usually resolved by reloading the page, restarting the browser, or re-logging into the site. One time it didn't resolve until I restarted the computer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2015-09-14T06:21:07.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2701" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2702" CreationDate="2015-09-15T01:47:47.240" Score="11" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7k1HM.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7k1HM.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I flagged both of them as obsolete as they both are not fruitful any more. But my flags are declined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this community have some other rules in this case? I often do it in stackoverflow and have never had the flags declined. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comments are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/172461/how-to-prove-that-frac-leftx-i-barx-rights-leq-fracn-1-sqrtn/172466#comment325860_172466&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/172461/how-to-prove-that-frac-leftx-i-barx-rights-leq-fracn-1-sqrtn/172466#comment325896_172466&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89481" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T17:39:54.170" Title="Why were the flags (as obsolete) on these comments marked as declined?" Tags="|discussion|moderation|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2701" CreationDate="2015-09-15T13:25:55.660" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I appreciate your interest in helping curate this site and hope you will continue to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I declined the second flag, I can explain. It was a simple mistake. The system does not clearly present a flagged comment to the reviewer: it shows the whole sequence of comments and attempts to bring the flagged one to the top of the screen. Due to ongoing re-display of marked-up material above it, the positioning is sometimes incorrect. In this case the comment presented to me appeared to be &quot;Will, but tomorrow, now I have to prepare tomorrows class.&quot; I could see why this might be flagged as &quot;too chatty,&quot; but nevertheless it was still current, and so I declined it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had been the one to field the first flag, I might also have declined it.  It is still relevant to a key issue that initially confounded several respondents.  When an action may be difficult to reverse--such as removing a comment--I prefer to take it only when it seems clear it will improve the site and is consistent with our policies.  When there is some doubt, it is best to leave things as they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T13:25:55.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2580" CreationDate="2015-09-16T15:11:24.907" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not likely to be implemented any time soon — I'm putting a &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-declined&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt; on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/3620/208518&quot;&gt;If a comment is wrong, respond to it with another comment. That provides a lot more information than a downvote which could mean anything.&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/3620/208518&quot;&gt;(...)&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/3620/208518&quot;&gt;In terms of the value of upvoting comments: if a comment indicates that an answer is wrong, the upvotes on that comment indicate support for the reason given. They're almost like downvotes for the answer, IMO - just without rep getting involved.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72321" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2015-09-16T15:11:24.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2704" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2705" CreationDate="2015-09-17T19:33:47.940" Score="44" ViewCount="693" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have only taken introductory statistics courses, and those were several years ago.  I haven't taken any other advanced math courses either, so my math skills are clearly not strong enough to answer questions.  I tried to participate by engaging in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/78579/89026&quot;&gt;a softer question&lt;/a&gt;, but it is clear I don't even have the knowledge to add meaningful insight there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also tried to contribute by flagging obsolete comments, but scouring older posts for obsolete comments doesn't seem like a good use of my time nor the flag reviewers' time. Furthermore it seems like I don't have a good handle on what is considered obsolete here because I have a 33% decline rate (although a sample size of 6 isn't very large).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know there are badges for asking questions but seems like all I'm doing is taking without contributing.  I don't want to just take if it can be avoided because that seems parasitic, but I don't know how I can contribute without spending years studying statistics first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible for me to contribute, or should I just get comfortable with the idea that all I can do is ask questions periodically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;This post is in no way related to my current negative score on my answer to the question linked above.  I didn't realize my answer was negative when I posted, and it wouldn't have been a factor regardless. &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Nor is this question driven by me feeling mistreated at anytime.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89026" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2015-09-19T22:51:56.923" Title="What is the best way to give back to the community when I don't have the math skills?" Tags="|discussion|new-users|participation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2704" CreationDate="2015-09-17T22:42:48.697" Score="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, thank you for contributing to our site already. I've noticed you several times and have already been glad of your positive presence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;there are a good number of more or less easy questions here, but they tend to come in &quot;waves&quot;. In particular, there are lots of &lt;code&gt;self-study&lt;/code&gt; questions, some of which are quite simple (posted by students at the start of a subject like one you've completed). If you keep in mind the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/self-study/info&quot;&gt;guidelines&lt;/a&gt; on answering such questions there's often a useful contribution to be made.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;there's thousands of unanswered questions; our unanswered questions rate is one of the higher ones on the SE network (for a variety of reasons). The high voted ones won't likely be ones you can respond to (since they've been looked at a lot, so high-voted ones that don't have an answer are probably tricky to answer for one reason or another), but among the ones with few votes there's quite a few which are simple to answer and some of those will be within your skills.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;more &lt;em&gt;votes&lt;/em&gt; are sorely needed. On questions where you are able to tell a more helpful answer form a less helpful one, vote up a good answer. Vote up interesting, well-researched or thought provoking questions, or ones that generate interesting answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your English skills are apparently excellent, so there's the opportunity to suggest edits; often questions are in terrible shape and every bit of that stuff helps.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;sometimes linking to a related answer (or flagging a duplicate) can be very helpful. If you remember a relevant answer to a different question, a link in comments can be an important contribution. The value of that sort of 'site curation' is easy to underestimate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;even when a simple question has been correctly answered, sometimes a correct but more technical answer is less helpful to an OP who has few mathematical skills than a wordier one pitched at the &quot;right&quot; level.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;don't worry too much if some of your answers generate discussion,  disagreement or even downvotes. I can point to plenty of my own answers that were wrong, or where I misunderstood, or gave a poor answer, and some of those were quite rightly downvoted. Being wrong is a crucial aspect of learning, and many of the most valuable contributions on the site are in the discussions in comments over a contentious point. &lt;em&gt;I've learned a lot from being wrong&lt;/em&gt;! &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wrong or contended answers are actually more broadly helpful in their own way - as long as someone explains why they're wrong or not the whole story - since that will correct not just the misconceptions of the answerer but also misconceptions of later readers that might otherwise never have their understanding challenged. So I've also learned quite a lot from other people being wrong too.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ask good questions! We have lots of questions, but not always so many good ones. Having some people around who can express a question clearly and thoughtfully is the lifeblood of the site (it's hard to answer a question if it doesn't get asked). If you have something you want to know about that you can't find a good answer by searching, go ahead and ask. Getting someone else to give a good answer is adding value we wouldn't have otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;you can also contribute here on meta. You represent a lot of the readership/users of the site, but that readership is vastly under-represented as far as guiding how we operate. Opinions given on meta are part of the guidance on how the site works (upvoted answers to meta questions are actually a way to guide the informal policies under which we try to operate), but they mostly come from answerers, rather than askers and readers. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In respect of the first two points above, here are some useful searches which might suggest other searches to try:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=[self-study]%20answers%3a0&quot;&gt;new unanswered self-study&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?tab=relevance&amp;amp;q=[self-study]%20answers%3a0&quot;&gt;relevant unanswered self-study&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=beginner+answers%3A0&quot;&gt;relevant unanswered &quot;beginner&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=basic+answers%3A0&quot;&gt;relevant unanswered &quot;basic&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Search engines can also be used fruitfully in ways the on-site search &#xA;  does less well on (searching information in comments for example). If your&#xA;  Google-fu is good, you can get good results that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2015-09-18T22:36:31.907" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2706" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2708" CreationDate="2015-09-18T18:36:07.930" Score="8" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;In reviewing other user's edits, it seems like recently a lot of users with very low ratings (ie $\sim 100$) are editing other user's questions. I've seen quite a few edits are clearly wrong, such as turning a mixed effects model from &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;y ~ x + (1 | ID)&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;y ~ x + (1 / ID)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and other cases of adding &quot;Thanks for the help guys&quot; etc. to the end of a post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought a minimum rating was required to edit other's posts? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76981" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T13:00:28.047" Title="New users editing questions" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2706" CreationDate="2015-09-18T20:57:28.467" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2708/89026&quot;&gt;gung&lt;/a&gt;'s answer there are some things you can do if you notice a pattern of bad edits from a user (regardless of their rep).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ping them in chat, if they've used chat before.*&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Talk to a moderator in a private chat room, and let the moderator handle the issue.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*: I would like to extend an open invitation to everyone to ping me in chat if they think I'm doing something wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89026" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T13:00:28.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2706" CreationDate="2015-09-18T20:59:37.767" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are minimum reputation levels to earn the privilege to edit: 100 to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit-community-wiki&quot;&gt;edit CW posts&lt;/a&gt;, and 2k to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;edit non-CW posts&lt;/a&gt; (and 20k to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/trusted-user&quot;&gt;edit tag wikis&lt;/a&gt;).  There is no minimum to &lt;em&gt;suggest&lt;/em&gt; edits, however.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suggested edits just need to be approved by reviewers like you and I.  When you are reviewing edits, you have several options: one that I use in cases like you're describing is the &lt;code&gt;approve and edit&lt;/code&gt; option.  From there, I just delete the added 'thanks' and approve the rest.  Of course, if the edit is completely incorrect, you should feel free to reject it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2015-09-18T20:59:37.767" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2709" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2771" CreationDate="2015-09-20T22:04:11.133" Score="6" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do we need the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/natural-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;natural-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;natural-language&lt;/a&gt; tag? I see it's pretty much used as a synonym for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nlp&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nlp&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nlp&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2015-10-07T14:26:56.333" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T13:18:34.243" Title="Do we need the [natural-language] tag, separate from [nlp]?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2709" CreationDate="2015-09-21T05:19:58.663" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As there are two tags, namely &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nlp&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nlp&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nlp&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/natural-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;natural-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;natural-language&lt;/a&gt;, I think the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nlp&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nlp&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nlp&lt;/a&gt; tag can be merged in with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/natural-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;natural-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;natural-language&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; As @amoeba has clearly pointed out, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nlp&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nlp&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nlp&lt;/a&gt; would be confusing as it can be both natural language processing and neuro-linguistic programming, so &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/natural-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;natural-language&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;natural-language&lt;/a&gt; should be an apt tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84191" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2015-10-07T14:27:49.493" LastActivityDate="2015-10-07T14:27:49.493" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1072" CreationDate="2015-09-21T21:02:08.037" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yajMs.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yajMs.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Arrow picture&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above was clipped from DBA.SE.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting a circle/something around the arrow seems like a good move to me.  That would make the distinction clear for users with bad monitors and/or are color blind.  I vote we go this route.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89026" LastEditorUserId="89026" LastEditDate="2015-09-21T23:36:06.593" LastActivityDate="2015-09-21T23:36:06.593" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2712" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-09-21T22:12:22.740" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The user profile page is a collection of data about a particular user, accessed at a URL of &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;site&amp;gt;/users/&amp;lt;userid&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/users/current&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;). You can access this page by clicking on anyone's username, such as your own in the top bar or the flair box shown next to questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The profile page contains a biographical block that includes your reputation, league standing, account age, last date seen profile stats, and About Me. Privately to the owner of the profile, it will also display hidden details such as helpful flag and visited day statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported excerpt and adapted wiki from the main &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/profile-page/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-09-22T15:19:51.440" LastActivityDate="2015-09-22T15:19:51.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2713" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-09-21T22:12:22.740" Score="0" Body="The user profile page, which contains a list of all the questions, answers, and an audit trail of the user's activity on the site." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-09-22T15:19:56.603" LastActivityDate="2015-09-22T15:19:56.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2714" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2715" CreationDate="2015-09-22T12:14:53.830" Score="6" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions which are problems faced when applying stats techniques to large(or big) data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/173634/colinearity-in-r-for-dataset-with-40-variables&quot;&gt;A similar question for reference&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that theoretical questions about Big Data are on-topic here, as they deal with applications of stats and visualization techniques and algorithms on large data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, the problems like: &lt;strong&gt;How should I use &amp;lt; this algorithm &gt; when the data is large?&lt;/strong&gt; on-topic here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or do they need to be migrated to the DataScience SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84191" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-09-22T15:21:18.807" Title="Are questions related to Big Data on topic here?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|data|datascience-stackexchange|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2714" CreationDate="2015-09-22T14:25:27.527" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to be on-topic, as long as the question is well worded/asked. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aquestion+%5Blarge-data%5D+closed%3A0+algorithm&quot;&gt;this search&lt;/a&gt;, there are some examples which I think relate to what you are asking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/90687/clustering-algorithm-for-my-situation&quot;&gt;Clustering algorithm for my situation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/346/what-is-a-good-algorithm-for-estimating-the-median-of-a-huge-read-once-data-set&quot;&gt;What is a good algorithm for estimating the median of a huge read-once data set?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/3377/online-algorithm-for-mean-absolute-deviation-and-large-data-set&quot;&gt;Online algorithm for mean absolute deviation and large data set&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2015-09-22T14:25:27.527" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2714" CreationDate="2015-09-22T14:53:58.927" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with @amoeba.  I see no problem with the question, &quot;How should I use &amp;lt; this algorithm &gt; when the data is large?&quot;  If you are asking for code / packages, etc., that would be off topic.  But how having so much data it won't fit on your computer affects the usage of a machine learning algorithm seems well within our mandate.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2015-09-22T14:53:58.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2717" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2721" CreationDate="2015-09-22T16:51:05.710" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed a few times that there is an entry in the revision history that the question was tweeted.  What is this all about? I haven't seen this on other StackExchange sites, but maybe I just haven't noticed it yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a full list of questions tweeted you can go here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/StackStats&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://twitter.com/StackStats&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/173458/revisions&quot;&gt;Here is an example&lt;/a&gt; picked at random from the tweets on that feed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89026" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2015-09-22T19:04:55.237" Title="Tweeted in edit history?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2719" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-09-22T18:12:13.850" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-09-22T18:12:13.850" LastActivityDate="2015-09-22T18:12:13.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2720" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-09-22T18:12:13.850" Score="0" Body="For questions relating to sharing a post or promoting the site on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-09-22T21:25:28.567" LastActivityDate="2015-09-22T21:25:28.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2717" CreationDate="2015-09-22T18:54:28.247" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I contacted a friend on another SE chat who gave me &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/183407/301021&quot;&gt;this link&lt;/a&gt; and they also posted it above as a comment by an anonymous user.  Basically the accepted answer said that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;it looks like each [SE controlled Twitter] account is set up to automatically tweet a new status every 3 hours&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In analyzing the links sent out by the Twitter stream it strongly appears that this is the action of a bot and not the action of a user promoting content in an attempt to get an &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/59/announcer&quot;&gt;&lt;kbd&gt;Announcer&lt;/kbd&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/60/booster&quot;&gt;&lt;kbd&gt;Booster&lt;/kbd&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/61/publicist&quot;&gt;&lt;kbd&gt;Publicist&lt;/kbd&gt;&lt;/a&gt; badge.  This is because links generated by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2721/89026&quot;&gt;&lt;kbd&gt;share&lt;/kbd&gt;&lt;/a&gt; link follow a distinct format of: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;base url&amp;gt;/&amp;lt;q|a&amp;gt;/&amp;lt;question id | answer id&amp;gt;/&amp;lt;user id&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The links shared in the Twitter stream drop the user id section so any user trying to earn badges like this couldn't earn the badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems on Facebook this work is done &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/244189/avoid-sharing-bad-questions-at-facebook&quot;&gt;manually&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89026" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2015-09-22T19:04:55.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2722" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-24T10:42:37.247" Score="20" ViewCount="248" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/974/what-motivates-people-to-answer-questions&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; post and I was fascinated by the answers given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am currently a 2nd year PhD student in Statistics and this page has helped me tremendously, up to the point where I decided to create a user and participate actively in the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that getting badges and scores motivates me to to further participate but there are other factors that play in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I intend to put my CV profile on my Curriculum Vitae (CV) for various reasons.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I like to participate in discussions on topics that I am fascinated about with like-minded people. I also like the open criticism/academic vibe in the discussions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I feel that I am learning and becoming more sharp in the subjects the more I participate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I feel a sense of approval and recognition when I'm here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When one looks into how many badges are awarded, there is an obvious trend. I.e. there seems to be a large stream of new users, that create profiles and then do not participate all too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are rather few badges that have been given out for comments and voting specifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that there are some things that can be done to further motivate new users to use this stack exchange and participate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: &lt;em&gt;Have these things been reviewed/discussed, are there any remedies that have worked in the past? Do we need to expose new users to other motivation factors?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68057" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2015-09-24T15:31:11.247" Title="How to motivate people to be more active on CV" Tags="|discussion|participation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2722" CreationDate="2015-09-24T15:04:18.813" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I might be totally wrong, but I think more activity in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/18/ten-fold&quot;&gt;Ten Fold chat room&lt;/a&gt; would be a positive force.  After reading the answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1492/89026&quot;&gt;this question on Meta&lt;/a&gt; it is clear that many people would disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm more active on DBA.SE than here for a variety of reasons.  One of the any reasons why I enjoy spending time over there is the chat.  Chat lets me rub shoulders with the giants, gain insight into the life of a full time DBA, highlight questions/answers that are exceptional or interesting, gives a palatable feel of community, etc.  In short it adds a social draw which I value. This social draw feeds more engagement, at least for me, into the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do work from home so that may be part of the reason why I appreciate the social draw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89026" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2015-09-24T15:04:18.813" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="793" CreationDate="2015-09-24T21:54:07.527" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;ROOT&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://root.cern.ch/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;ROOT&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a general purpose data-analysis framework written in &lt;em&gt;C++&lt;/em&gt;.  It is the &lt;em&gt;de facto&lt;/em&gt; choice for any kind of analysis in the particle physics community, although it is not limited to that community.  It provides many specialised functionality through libraries, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Minuit&lt;/code&gt; is a minimisation library original written in &lt;code&gt;Fortran&lt;/code&gt;, now reimplemented in &lt;code&gt;C++&lt;/code&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://roofit.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;RooFit&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a fitting framework focused on maximum likelihood fitting,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;RooStats&lt;/code&gt; is a statistics package built around &lt;code&gt;RooFit&lt;/code&gt; used to provide tools for statistical significance calculations, limit setting, etc,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tmva.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;TMVA&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a multivariate analysis library which implements numerous machine learning algorithms like neural networks, decision trees, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ROOT&lt;/em&gt; provides language bindings in other programming languages like, &lt;em&gt;Python&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Go&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Ruby&lt;/em&gt;.  It also provides various I/O facilites to handle very large datasets (multi-gigabyte), as well as visualisation facilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The package is developed as a joint effort by Fermilab and CERN.  The homepage has extensive &lt;a href=&quot;https://root.cern.ch/documentation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;documentation&lt;/a&gt; that include getting started tutorials, code examples, as well as an extensive &lt;a href=&quot;https://root.cern.ch/doc/master/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;reference manual&lt;/a&gt;.  To get help, one can go to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://root.cern.ch/phpBB3/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;web forum&lt;/a&gt; or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://groups.cern.ch/group/roottalk/default.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;mailing list&lt;/a&gt;.  Unfortunately to signup for the mailing list, one needs to get a lightweight CERN account (no restrictions though, anyone can get it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90365" LastEditorUserId="90365" LastEditDate="2015-09-24T22:02:54.023" LastActivityDate="2015-09-24T22:02:54.023" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-09-24T21:54:07.527" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2725" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2726" CreationDate="2015-09-25T04:36:22.453" Score="4" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/68950/how-to-calculate-the-probability-of-the-outcome-of-a-vampire-the-masqurade-roll&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on another stack.  The question is on-topic there, however it is not getting a lot of traction.  More to the point, I am asking for an equation or formula, and they are giving me &lt;a href=&quot;http://anydice.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AnyDice&lt;/a&gt;&amp;Dagger; scripts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I understand I will need to edit in a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; more context (there are assumptions made in the language of that post that would not apply here.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I &lt;em&gt;barely&lt;/em&gt; passed high school stats... 10 years ago.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would that question be considered on topic here?  Even if on topic, and presuming I edited in the correct level of context, would that be a &lt;em&gt;good question&lt;/em&gt; for here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;Dagger; A site which outputs the probability of some types of dice rolls.  Neat, but not what I need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90384" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:45:52.247" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T20:29:58.940" Title="Would this question asking for an equation or formula be on topic here?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2725" CreationDate="2015-09-25T06:01:02.517" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes; it would be on-topic on this site, but the question's context needs to be clearly explained, as the folks here might not understand role-playing game terms like &quot;vampire&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I see that these terms do not get in the way of the question or in any way make it difficult to understand. So, you can omit those terms and ask the question as a pure statistical dice probability question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dice&lt;/a&gt; questions are very well on-topic here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84191" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2015-10-05T20:29:58.940" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T20:29:58.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2727" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-09-25T13:48:43.477" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-09-25T13:48:43.477" LastActivityDate="2015-09-25T13:48:43.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2728" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-09-25T13:48:43.477" Score="0" Body="Mainly for questions about citing content of scientific/technical articles in Cross Validated posts, or the opposite. Other (meta) subjects relating to papers and the CV site." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-09-25T21:39:01.377" LastActivityDate="2015-09-25T21:39:01.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2253" CreationDate="2015-09-26T00:28:17.383" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think my answer may have the advantage of seeing how things have played out in comparison to others who have answered earlier, but...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the data science site is &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; necessary. It's true that there's plenty of overlap between statistics questions and data science questions. There's also plenty of overlap between statistics questions and mathematics, but I don't think anyone believes this means that CV should be merged into Mathematics anytime soon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as such, the questions data scientists have are not necessarily the same as traditional statisticians. I think most of us would agree that &quot;how do you run neural networks on a cluster efficiently?&quot; doesn't exactly belong here, but it doesn't exactly belong on SO either. It very naturally belongs on DS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lots of statisticians feel like data scientist is just a sexier name for statistician or data analyst. But I would say the distribution of challenges faced on a daily basis by people with the title data scientist is fairly different than the distribution of challenges faced by people with the title statistician. Data science is just as much, if not more so, about handling data as it is about analyzing. Given that they do have a unique cross section of problems, it would make sense that they have their own discussion groups. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus, I don't want to have wade through any more questions about whether we could use gradient descent in place of maximum likelihood estimation (50% jk).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76981" LastActivityDate="2015-09-26T00:28:17.383" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="974" CreationDate="2015-09-26T12:43:30.740" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Besides all the the more substantial reasons that are given above, of which I share most, if not all:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, it feels &lt;em&gt;efficient&lt;/em&gt; to help: Having the answer 90% ready in the form of parts of slides that I have used in teaching or an exercise I have asked implies that I can sometimes answer questions somewhat quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, I get inspiration here for my own teaching, as questions are sometimes nice questions for my problem sets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67799" LastActivityDate="2015-09-26T12:43:30.740" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2732" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-27T12:44:54.667" Score="19" ViewCount="795" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seems to be an obsession in machine learning as well as traditional regression modeling for feature selection.  The majority of analysts do not seem to understand that feature selection is not a required part of modeling and can often stand in opposition to optimal prediction.  How can we better get this general point across?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2015-09-28T07:44:27.160" LastActivityDate="2015-12-31T17:18:13.270" Title="Feature selection" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2733" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2734" CreationDate="2015-09-27T22:14:41.840" Score="3" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've done a simulation with R and would like to post it on my blog explaining the steps I took. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The program simulates a player playing at a famous game and is aimed at estimating the probability of winning but I'm not sure it is correct and cannot check it using google because I changed some basics assumptions and therefore should get a different answer. Normally I would check it myself by hand, but I got a result I cannot explain and therefore I would like to hear someone else's opinion on the hypothesis, the process and the conclusion before post it on my blog. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be on topic to ask it on cross validated? Is there a better statistics site to ask this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68622" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T01:08:02.063" Title="Where to ask if a simulation is correctly performed?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2733" CreationDate="2015-09-28T01:08:02.063" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;If framed as &quot;please check my code&quot; it's probably going to be seen as off topic here (that may fly at say codereview; or stackoverflow might accept it depending on how it's presented). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If framed as a question about the methodology to solve a probability problem (rather than inherently a code problem), it might be seen as more nearly on topic here. (For an explanation of what kind of code related questions &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be asked, see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you break it into two questions (&quot;is this a correct approach to solving the probability problem&quot; and &quot;does this code correctly implement the approach&quot; you may be able to get each answered in different places).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T01:08:02.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2735" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-28T09:17:29.537" Score="3" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;For two days I've been meeting a strange identicon in place of the true one. This is about my own profile, and also about some other people profile. The identicon is this&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qx8id.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qx8id.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see my posts now &quot;signed&quot; with it. I have to click and go to my profile to see the original identicon&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jwl1w.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jwl1w.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same is for some other users. A snapshot of the questions page dated Sep 28, 12:00. Note Marko's alien identicon. It is not the one found on his profile.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vtp0w.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vtp0w.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What has happened to the site or my computer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3277" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T09:17:29.537" Title="Strange identicon" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2736" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2825" CreationDate="2015-09-28T10:17:00.113" Score="10" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aside from a bounty how can I give incentive to users to answer my question?&#xA;I know there is this new bounty feature, but I was wondering if there are other ways too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68622" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-11-27T15:28:58.480" LastActivityDate="2015-11-27T15:28:58.480" Title="Aside from a bounty how can I give incentive to users to answer my question?" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|unanswered-questions|participation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2737" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2740" CreationDate="2015-09-29T19:30:44.423" Score="9" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pZFIb.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pZFIb.png&quot; alt=&quot;Far too many &amp;quot;Late Answers&amp;quot; in the review queue&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On inspection, it looks like many &quot;late answers&quot; from years ago have been added to the review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a change to, or an error in, the algorithms that select which answers get added to the queue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-10-01T13:38:15.347" LastActivityDate="2015-10-01T18:35:18.903" Title="Why are there 500+ entries in the Late Answers queue?" Tags="|support|bug|status-bydesign|review|late-answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2738" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2755" CreationDate="2015-09-30T10:08:29.200" Score="11" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed the SO Careers tab in the drop down list of sites like ServerFault, etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/US6Ie.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/US6Ie.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As SO careers also have data scientists and analyts careers in them, would it be sensible if we also have that drop-down?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wanted to have a discussion with the community folks before asking a question on the Meta SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wasn't sure about the relevant tags for the question, please modify the question, if you find any relevant tags missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84191" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-09-30T16:27:56.813" LastActivityDate="2015-10-07T12:33:22.163" Title="Having a SO Careers in the drop down?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|user-interface|careers|top-bar|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2732" CreationDate="2015-10-01T07:11:10.987" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/strong&gt; Frank and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2732/feature-selection?cb=1#comment8347_2732&quot;&gt;Scortchi&lt;/a&gt; have a point for prediction - but the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/66448/17230&quot;&gt;question Scortchi proposes&lt;/a&gt; doesn't really address people's concerns about assessing a variable's relevance. I think this is a pertinent question to which we don't yet have a good answer. Apart from point 9 in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/20856/1352&quot;&gt;gung's answer here&lt;/a&gt;, which says that no technique will save the analyst from having to actually think about his data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there may be an unstated philosophical/epistemological/teleological point here: &lt;em&gt;WHY do people actually want to model?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they want to model for prediction, then things are easier. I fully agree with Frank and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2732/feature-selection?cb=1#comment8347_2732&quot;&gt;Scortchi&lt;/a&gt; here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, often people model data to &quot;understand a predictor's relevance&quot;, to use terms that are not loaded with technical meaning. This usually takes the form of inferential statistics (and can lead to an unhealthy obsession with p-values), but things like variable importance in random forests aim in the same direction. As do formal causal models.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that this is a legitimate aim of data analysis, both in an academic and an applied context. However, understanding a predictor's relevance runs into problems that we don't see if all we aim for is a good overall response prediction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this second situation, we could argue for &quot;tapering effect sizes&quot; in the sense of &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B008UBJ0VQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Burnham &amp;amp; Anderson&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; has an impact, it's just that effect sizes taper off to insignificance. This would argue for keeping everything in the model... except for the bias-variance tradeoff (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2732/feature-selection?cb=1#comment8347_2732&quot;&gt;@Scortchi's suggestion&lt;/a&gt; to link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/20836/1352&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;) and non-identifiability. So we need some kind of dimension reduction or regularisation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, dimension reduction mangles predictors beyond recognition, so assessing a variable's relevance after, say, PCA, will be &lt;em&gt;hard&lt;/em&gt;. And regularization can introduce an element of arbitrariness that can be hard to defend - if a predictor's relevance depends on your Bayesian priors, this is a weak point in your argumentation. Optimal choice of lasso or elastic net parameters can at least remove this element of arbitrariness, and then we can look at standardized parameter estimates in an elastic net, so this is something I like, although I don't know of any actual research on assessing variable relevance via elastic nets (pointers would be most welcome).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately (again), this seems like we would need to push people towards one very specific kind of model: elastic net-based regularization. But what do we answer those people that are using some other kind of model, for whatever reason, and find that it does not work well with the full set of predictors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, we can argue that you only have understood a process well if you can predict it well. So, to assess a variable's importance, build prediction models with and without that variable (and any transforms of the variable you want), test the models out-of-sample, and see whether prediction accuracy goes down. (Diebold-Mariano type tests can be used for disciplines that can't get away from p-values.) This is actually my preferred position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is the problem that nominally out-of-sample tests actually aren't, because people will run this sequence iteratively in building their models. In addition, it is &lt;em&gt;hard&lt;/em&gt; to get an approach like this accepted in disciplines that traditionally don't tick like this, like psychology. Not to speak of the &lt;em&gt;fascinating&lt;/em&gt; discussions you can have about how to actually measure a prediction's accuracy, where the arbitrariness discussed above creeps in again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2015-10-01T07:11:10.987" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2737" CreationDate="2015-10-01T13:36:27.430" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There were more than 500 entries because the criterion for sending late answers to the queue has changed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before the change only late answers from users with reputation up to 10 had their answers sent there; now the threshold is 50. With this new criterion, many old and late answers posted by users with reputation ranging from 10 to 50 were sent retroactively to the review page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the Meta reference pointed out by JNat:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/266696/can-we-raise-the-bar-for-reputation-for-late-answers-to-enter-the-review-queue&quot;&gt;Can we raise the bar for reputation for late answers to bypass the review queue?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2015-10-01T18:35:18.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2741" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-10-01T15:18:47.733" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-10-01T15:18:47.733" LastActivityDate="2015-10-01T15:18:47.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2742" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-10-01T15:18:47.733" Score="0" Body="Answers which are added to questions &gt;30 days after the question was posted." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2015-10-01T18:20:32.337" LastActivityDate="2015-10-01T18:20:32.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2743" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-10-01T15:32:03.587" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;General questions about careers and relating to Cross Validated SE.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://careers.stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow Careers&lt;/a&gt;, which is a Stack Exchange service that allows programmers (and data scientists) to post resumes and companies to post job listings. It's free to &lt;a href=&quot;http://careers.stackoverflow.com/cv/get-one&quot;&gt;post your resume&lt;/a&gt;, while listing jobs commands a &lt;a href=&quot;http://careers.stackoverflow.com/employer&quot;&gt;fee&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-10-01T22:42:27.710" LastActivityDate="2015-10-01T22:42:27.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2744" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-10-01T15:32:03.587" Score="0" Body="For questions about careers with scope somehow relating to Cross Validated SE." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-10-01T22:42:30.583" LastActivityDate="2015-10-01T22:42:30.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2745" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-10-01T15:37:08.910" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Various links that appear in the top bar, such as: user profile link (or login), review, help-center, inbox, reputation change indicator, search box, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/207420/the-new-top-bar-is-out-on-meta-consider-it-a-beta&quot; title=&quot;doing it live since then&quot;&gt;Year of 2013, on the precipice of December 4&lt;/a&gt;, a &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/12/a-new-top-bar-for-stack-exchange/&quot; title=&quot;A Bigger, Blacker Bar&quot;&gt;newly designed top bar swept the Stack Exchange network&lt;/a&gt;. It's black and uniform across all sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; Reference: imported excerpt and adapted wiki from the main &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/top-bar/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-10-01T22:42:33.383" LastActivityDate="2015-10-01T22:42:33.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2746" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-10-01T15:37:08.910" Score="0" Body="The black bar across the top of every Stack Exchange site" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-10-01T22:42:22.953" LastActivityDate="2015-10-01T22:42:22.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2747" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-01T22:23:34.030" Score="8" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;This started as a discussion on chat and it grew into a larger discussion than I anticipated. I'm going to move it over here as suggested by &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/24437419#24437419&quot;&gt;Gung&lt;/a&gt;. Here are some links to allow others to follow the original discussion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/24401160#24401160&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/24401160#24401160&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/24414928#24414928&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/24414928#24414928&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/24424525#24424525&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/24424525#24424525&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/24435728#24435728&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/24435728#24435728&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Initially I was asking just about whether I should remove &quot;Please help&quot; type endings from questions, like I did here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/174696/revisions&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/174696/revisions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the conversation mostly focused on what makes an edit &quot;too small&quot; and/or &quot;trivial.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should pleas for help be removed from questions as part of a larger edit?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the guidelines for a &quot;trivial&quot; edit?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89026" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-10-02T14:05:17.570" Title="Editing posts protocol: &quot;Please help&quot;, and trivial edits" Tags="|discussion|policy|editing|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2747" CreationDate="2015-10-01T22:23:34.030" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on the discussion in chat and here my understanding is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pleas for help should be removed as part of a larger edit, just like &quot;Thanks&quot;, and &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;poster's name/signature&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Smaller edits produce benefits (they make threads more readable for future readers, and set a better example of the site's standards and expectations for future posters) and costs (they clog up pages sorted by recency of activity (the home page, user's favourites, etc.), denying attention to more recent questions, or those with new answers or more substantial edits). The benefit/cost ratio is most advantageous if&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A question has high visibility: on popular threads with thousands of views, an edit will benefit many future readers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A question is freshly posted, or recently bumped to a high position on the front page: reduces the &quot;costs&quot;, as an edit will not bump another thread from the activity page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When activity on the site is slow: during busy times, questions fall off the front page very quickly and adding minor edits to the activity stream will only make this worse.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When you are editing only one or a couple of questions. If you have a large batch of edits you are working through (e.g. as part of a systematic re-tagging&lt;sup&gt;&amp;dagger;&lt;/sup&gt;), consider throttling your activity by only submitting a few at a time so you do not clog the front page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In general when you edit, fix everything you can. If the only fix isn't going to make a worthwhile difference, then think twice, before editing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&amp;dagger;&lt;/sup&gt; Which you should discuss here on Meta before embarking on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89026" LastEditorUserId="89026" LastEditDate="2015-10-02T14:05:17.570" LastActivityDate="2015-10-02T14:05:17.570" CommentCount="12" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-10-01T22:51:01.923" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2738" CreationDate="2015-10-01T23:42:50.123" Score="13" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Yes!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a grand idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89026" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2015-10-01T23:42:50.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2738" CreationDate="2015-10-01T23:43:53.257" Score="-2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a terrible idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89026" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2015-10-01T23:43:53.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2738" CreationDate="2015-10-01T23:45:25.677" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Meh.....&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really care either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89026" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2015-10-01T23:45:25.677" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2752" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2753" CreationDate="2015-10-02T11:07:29.447" Score="2" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question:   &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/174791/sum-of-gaussian-mixture-and-gaussian-scale-mixture&quot;&gt;Sum of Gaussian mixture and Gaussian scale mixture&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In its current form it is clear enough. The OP did not specify the word &quot;independent&quot;, but it is quite clear that is intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please vote for reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-10-07T14:39:08.703" Title="Why was this question closed as unclear? Please vote to reopen it!" Tags="|support|closing-questions|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2752" CreationDate="2015-10-02T12:06:51.700" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can answer 20% of why this question was closed, being one of the five close voters. The question has been edited since, and may well be edited again, so I won't make a running commentary on whether I think the &lt;em&gt;current&lt;/em&gt; state of the question deserves to be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is my general thought process about question clarity, which I ran through when looking at the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In principle a question should be clearly and unambiguously stated in the self-contained text of the question itself. This includes the title &amp;mdash; if the title and body ask for different things, I would urge the original poster (OP) to urgently clarify what they want and may vote to close.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nevertheless, the OP often reveals what they &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; want in the comments. Therefore, if the &lt;em&gt;totality&lt;/em&gt; of the OP's question and comments are unclear or contradictory, I would vote to close even if the original question was clear in its own right (because if the OP has asked an apparently clear question but this is not what they intended to ask, they need to go back and edit; if the question was left as it is then the thread of questions and contradictory comments will cause confusion to future readers).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I generally think unclear or confusing questions should be closed as quickly as possible. This approach may sound aggressive, but it is not my wish to remove such questions altogether &amp;mdash; just to give breathing space for editing and clarification to occur. &lt;em&gt;By the time different answers start appearing, interpreting the question in different ways, a thread can degenerate very quickly.&lt;/em&gt; If the thread is left up for future public consumption, readers are going to find it a nightmare to find the information they were searching for. If a question (and comments) are unclear to me, they are likely to also mystify the future readers that this site should be doing its utmost to cater for.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I remain somewhat cautious about deeming questions unclear if that might be because I don't understand something, but someone with more expertise in an area would understand it immediately. If I see someone I know is a subject expert commenting on the thread, I will pay heed to their opinion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, on point (1) the question had a clear title and I thought it had the potential to be a nice little question. But the body of the question did not define its terms clearly. On point (2), if you read the comments, there are clear contradictions between the question body and statements by the OP about what situation they are dealing with. On point (3), the question's lack of clarity has already attracted an answer that the OP was unsatified with. (4) The fact that Prof. Xi'an thought what the OP was after (looking at both question &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; comments) was &quot;impenetrable&quot; was conclusive enough that it &quot;wasn't just me&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastActivityDate="2015-10-02T12:06:51.700" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2738" CreationDate="2015-10-05T04:26:16.660" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As per the response received, the question/request has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/267374/having-so-careers-in-the-drop-down-for-crossvalidated&quot;&gt;posted&lt;/a&gt; on the Meta site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes votes:      11 (11+, 0-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neutral Votes:  3 (4+, 1-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No Votes:      -2 (0+, 2-)     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84191" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2015-10-07T12:33:22.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2756" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2757" CreationDate="2015-10-05T18:07:54.983" Score="7" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following two tags look synonymous:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/expectation-maximization&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/expectation-maximization&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/e-m&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/e-m&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-10-06T16:25:08.760" Title="Merging tags e-m and expectation-maximization" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2756" CreationDate="2015-10-06T14:47:53.457" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As this case seemed to be very clear-cut and as there were only very few (5) questions tagged with [e-m], I suggested to manually retag them to [expectation-minization] and have the issue solved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was done and the issue is solved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with @whuber, however, that in general massive manual retagging is something to avoid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2015-10-06T16:25:08.760" LastActivityDate="2015-10-06T16:25:08.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2758" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-06T16:55:16.070" Score="8" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; all of the suggestions have been implemented, thanks @Scortchi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A couple of weeks ago a suggestion came up on meta to merge [natural-language] and [nlp] tags: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2709&quot;&gt;Do we need the [natural-language] tag, separate from [nlp]?&lt;/a&gt; The Q has 6 upvotes, the A has 8 upvotes. Nothing happened.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In July @Dougal finished a massive work to eliminate the [kernel] tag and posted a specific suggestion of how to merge/synonimize/rename other  kernel tags: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2606&quot;&gt;The [kernel] tag is dead&lt;/a&gt;. It got 14 upvotes. Nothing happened.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In June @gung posted two suggestions in the &quot;main&quot; thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1200&quot;&gt;Current tag synonym candidates&lt;/a&gt; that seem &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; clear-cut and currently have 6 upvotes each. Nothing happened.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One and a half years ago I posted this suggestion: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1970&quot;&gt;Let us merge [mixed], [mixed-effect] and [mixed-model] tags&lt;/a&gt; that got 25-1=24 upvotes. Nothing happened.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am concerned by how these discussions go.&lt;/strong&gt; In none of these cases (!) was there a negative opinion voiced. So nobody seems to be objecting, a lot of people seem to be agreeing in the comments and via the upvotes, but no action is undertaken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are moderators waiting for a certain number of upvotes to accumulate? I guess there are no strict rules here (?) and the required level of explicit consensus might depend on how controversial the suggestion might appear to moderators. This makes it ultimately up to a subjective judgement of moderators -- which is completely fine with me, but then it would be helpful if moderators explicitly stated their opinions in such discussions. Currently it is difficult to understand why some of the suggested tag changes are swiftly acted upon and some others get completely stuck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;More importantly, what can we do about it? How should we deal with tag moderation more effectively?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2015-10-26T13:32:07.990" Title="Why is it sometimes so difficult to initiate a tag change here, and how should we deal with that?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|moderation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2758" CreationDate="2015-10-06T23:14:21.177" Score="3" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One problem I see for moderators is there's no real way to &quot;set a reminder&quot; for anything you want to act on in the future but can't (/shouldn't/etc) act on right now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Votes on meta questions that could lead to an action by a moderator are a good example of a place where it's important to be able to say something like &quot;Check the status of this in 72 hours (/a week/tomorrow), because I may need to act on it&quot;. Moderators often come to these threads early (since we're notified when they post) but may not remember to check back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This situation - where you recognize now that an action may be needed in the future but there won't be any 'trigger' to do anything then - is a problem I raised on meta.SE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/257565/allow-moderators-to-leave-themselves-reminder-notes&quot;&gt;Allow moderators to leave themselves reminder notes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(only to have it closed as duplicate of something it's quite clearly not an actual duplicate of -- I ruled out the exact thing it later closed as a duplicate of, right in the question). It got a little support via votes, but it would have needed a lot more support to go anywhere, especially since it closed. So much for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have a good solution to this (or rather, I believe I do, as indicated above ... but I can't do anything much about it).  [Edit: well, &quot;ping moderators&quot; in some fashion, as amoeba mentions, is of course always an option.]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There's also no clear indicator of what is &quot;sufficient&quot; to indicate that we should take an action. There's no person and no set criteria which say &quot;yes, that vote passes, now let's add it to the tasks that someone needs to take care of&quot;. When anyone can vote at any time, who says a vote passes? [Also, some of the time at least there's no clearly identified alternatives to vote for, sometimes just a single option that has a few upvotes, in which case sometimes it's not even clear we're really holding a vote rather than just discussion.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have a good suggestion for how do we deal with having a time point and one or more criteria by which to be able to say &quot;okay, this vote's officially over, did the proposal get over the line?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In some cases (such as some kinds of retagging operation) you don't necessarily need a moderator to do it.  If its one of those &quot;retag a few at a time by hand&quot; ones, anyone with edit privilege should be able to retag them (though it would be sightly easier for those users with the higher level ability to edit just the tags). In those cases, as long as there's at least some reasonable support you can point to here, there should be &lt;em&gt;no problem whatever&lt;/em&gt; just doing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So at least in some cases, the issues in (1.) and (2.) are moot; anyone who cares enough to do it (and who is able to) just needs to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2015-10-07T00:13:51.057" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2760" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-11T13:57:34.603" Score="20" ViewCount="934" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should questions about machine learning (ML) be asked here or at &lt;a href=&quot;http://datascience.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Data Science.SE&lt;/a&gt;?  When Data Science was still a proposal, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2026/data-science-se&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt; indicated these questions should be asked here.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2253/cv-and-data-science-semi-identical-twins&quot;&gt;Later&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2254/crossvalidated-vs-datascience-what-is-different&quot;&gt;discussions&lt;/a&gt; indicated the two sites should be merged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour page&lt;/a&gt; says &quot;Cross Validated is a question and answer site for people interested in... machine learning.&quot;  This is also a fully graduated (i.e. no longer in beta) site.  However, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Data Science tour page&lt;/a&gt; says &quot;Data Science Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for Data science professionals, Machine Learning specialists, and those interested in learning more about the field.&quot; A mod there claims that CV is the right site for &lt;em&gt;statistics,&lt;/em&gt; not ML questions, but that DS is for ML questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of this posting, the ML tag has 4,128 questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and 498 &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot;&gt;there&lt;/a&gt;, which might suggest they fit better here.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, the opposite conclusion might be reached by noting that under &quot;all questions&quot; the totals are 65,571 &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and 1,505 &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;there&lt;/a&gt; so ML questions are 6.3% of questions here and 33% of questions there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where do ML questions belong?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80594" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:50:40.830" LastActivityDate="2017-10-25T01:57:12.387" Title="ML questions: here or at Data Science?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|datascience-stackexchange|machine-learning|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2760" CreationDate="2015-10-12T11:54:40.383" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Machine learning is on-topic here at Cross Validated&amp;mdash;see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1577/17230&quot;&gt;What is on topic on Cross Validated?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/492/17230&quot;&gt;Are the “Machine Learning” questions on topic?&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;amp;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/16/17230&quot;&gt;Is machine learning a part of statistical analysis?&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1057/17230&quot;&gt;Should Machine Learning SE be merged with CrossValidated?&lt;/a&gt;. That doesn't seem to have ever been contested. (It's interesting to note that a &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/26434/machine-learning&quot;&gt;Machine Learning SE site&lt;/a&gt; never took off, &amp;amp; had to be merged with CV&amp;mdash; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1061/17230&quot;&gt;Incoming… Machine Learning Questions&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though Data Science's &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; isn't filled in yet, the tour page you link to &amp;amp; the 500 questions with the &lt;code&gt;machine-learning&lt;/code&gt; tag (which don't seem much different in general from machine learning questions on CV) suggest machine learning's also on-topic at DS. When it comes out of beta, and as the no. users increases, I'd expect what's on-topic to be defined more clearly, &amp;amp; more narrowly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there's currently an overlap, but it's a little premature to decide what to do about it: whether it's tolerable, or whether machine learning questions should be migrated to one or the other site. Personally, I'd prefer them to stay here: at the least, there are many problems, techniques, &amp;amp; theories that it'd be impossible to allocate exclusively to one of the disciplines of Machine Learning &amp;amp; Statistics&lt;sup&gt;&amp;dagger;&lt;/sup&gt;; at the most, Machine Learning &amp;amp; Statistics aren't two distinct disciplines but two cultures&lt;sup&gt;&amp;ddagger;&lt;/sup&gt; within the same discipline, between which we shouldn't be building artificial barriers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;dagger; &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/q/8381/3361&quot;&gt;Your&lt;/a&gt; &quot;[...] Cross Validated (an ML reference) [...]&quot; would come as a surprise to many statisticians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;ddagger; &lt;a href=&quot;http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ss/1009213726&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Breiman (2001), &quot;Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures&quot;, &lt;em&gt;Statist. Sci.&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;16&lt;/strong&gt;, 3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:50:40.830" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T12:12:54.993" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2760" CreationDate="2015-10-12T18:40:31.563" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fxZiC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fxZiC.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says so on StackOverflow, so it must be true!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39632" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T18:40:31.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2763" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-10-13T13:50:44.360" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For more information on deleted-questions, refer to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-questions&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-10-14T00:37:13.990" LastActivityDate="2015-10-14T00:37:13.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2764" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-10-13T13:50:44.360" Score="0" Body="For subjects relating to deleted questions on Cross Validated SE. For deleted answers, use tag 'deleted-answers' instead." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-10-14T00:37:11.253" LastActivityDate="2015-10-14T00:37:11.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2765" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2785" CreationDate="2015-10-13T15:06:21.870" Score="7" ViewCount="355" Body="&lt;p&gt;A comment was posted on my answer to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/121428/linear-model-decomposition/121434#121434&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; about a year ago, expressing surprise that the answer got so many upvotes given that it isn't very detailed. The comment was up-voted a few times, and my answer has subsequently been down-voted, so I guess people agree. But I wonder what's wrong with leaving some details up to the OP to figure out. I have posted plenty of detailed answers, with examples, for other questions, but in this case I think I did correctly identify what was needed (component-plus-residual or added-variable plots), and pointed to a couple of R packages that offer these. The OP apparently found the answer helpful, and had commented to that effect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really care about the reputation points. I do care about my time. I wonder how much hand-holding is expected, and I wonder about establishing an expectation where people don't have to do any digging at all to get their questions answered. Are we really here to offer silver spoons?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52554" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-10-19T11:28:24.967" Title="Hand-holding versus guidance when answering" Tags="|discussion|answers|policy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1538" CreationDate="2015-10-13T20:59:05.407" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did wonder something similar on WordPress SE vs UX SE. My &lt;a href=&quot;https://wordpress.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4004/5433&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to it was simply down to the number of views that the site has. The number of votes per view was similar across the two sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25145" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:45:09.007" LastActivityDate="2015-10-13T20:59:05.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2767" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2768" CreationDate="2015-10-14T02:44:12.797" Score="3" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;Initially, I will give you an example to understand my question: e.g., the tag &lt;code&gt;r&lt;/code&gt; has many questions in the &quot;Cross Validated&quot; community, then sometimes new users ask questions with content about a bug in R, or something about R packages, and we know that questions with this content are being closed frequently, as was discussed in this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1527/should-most-r-tags-be-replaced-with-package-tags&quot;&gt;Should most R tags be replaced with package tags?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when a tag has many questions that are considered off-topic by the Cross-Validated community, is that a reason to consider creating a new site, &amp;amp; how would we go about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84020" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2015-10-14T14:53:56.400" Title="When could a &quot;tag&quot; become a &quot;stack exchange community&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|tags|on-topic|r|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2767" CreationDate="2015-10-14T13:41:05.630" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Area 51&lt;/a&gt; is the Stack Exchange site for proposing new Stack Exchange sites. If your idea for a new site comes from observing commonalities among off-topic questions on Cross Validated, it'd be sensible to discuss it first here on CV's Meta &amp;amp; to link to your proposal if you decide to make one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your example&amp;mdash;questions involving R&amp;mdash;has been much discussed. As @AndreSilva points out, there was a proposal for an R Stack Exchange site, but it didn't go anywhere. Currently we welcome questions that arise from using R, or other statistical software, on Cross Validated when they're &lt;em&gt;statistical&lt;/em&gt; questions. (Understand &quot;statistical&quot; here in a broad sense&amp;mdash;encompassing machine learning, data visualization, &amp;amp;c.) The majority that aren't are programming questions, &amp;amp; have a home on Stack Overflow, as @NormalHuman points out. A minority are better suited to other Stack Exchange sites (see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://askubuntu.com/questions/tagged/r&quot;&gt;https://askubuntu.com/questions/tagged/r&lt;/a&gt;). Some fall into a grey area where it's not clear, perhaps not even to the person who asked it; many of us try to encourage &amp;amp; facilitate the asking &amp;amp; answering of questions in a software-agnostic fashion. We also maintain a collection of links: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/793/internet-support-for-statistics-software&quot;&gt;Internet Support for Statistics Software&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:23:04.643" LastActivityDate="2015-10-14T14:53:56.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2769" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2770" CreationDate="2015-10-14T18:17:12.567" Score="14" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently offered my first bounty on this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/175223/approaches-to-compare-differences-in-means-with-differences-in-proportions&quot;&gt;Approaches to compare differences in means with differences in proportions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One user answered, and while I thought his answer was helpful, it mostly confirmed what I already believed, so I wanted to wait and see if anyone else would offer a different perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No additional answers, though, and I received a message to the effect that the bounty would be auto-awarded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9XM2G.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9XM2G.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I didn't worry about manually awarding it, because I thought it was taken care of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it didn't get awarded. After doing some research, I believe that the answer did not qualify for auto-award due to not having 2 upvotes, but this requirement is not reflected in the message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My questions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible for a moderator to unexpire this bounty so that I can award it to the answer?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should we change the message to reflect that the bounty &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be auto-awarded if the answer meets certain criteria?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39632" LastEditorUserId="202450" LastEditDate="2023-02-09T15:25:06.603" LastActivityDate="2023-02-09T20:53:26.103" Title="Improve messaging on upcoming bounty expiration" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|bounty|notifications|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2769" CreationDate="2015-10-14T22:13:46.367" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moderators can't do anything about what happened to the bounty, sorry. In fact there are very few circumstances in which we can do anything at all with bounties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I definitely agree that the &amp;quot;will be auto-awarded&amp;quot; message is somewhat misleading about what the situation is, because it seems to suggest either that there's nothing &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; do and it will definitely award the bounty; or possibly even that somehow it is &lt;em&gt;already too late&lt;/em&gt; for you to award the bounty yourself. What it actually means is something nearer to &amp;quot;Award your bounty in the next 24 hours; after the 24 hour period the bounty auto-award script will run&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we also can't really do anything about the message, which is system-wide (we can do the same thing you can do - post a question on meta.SE about it; that &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; get some traction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way it operates is discussed here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16065/how-does-the-bounty-system-work&quot;&gt;How does the bounty system work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(About half-way down the page see the answer to the question &amp;quot;What is automatic awarding?&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[That's part of the community FAQ which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7931/faq-for-stack-exchange-sites&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few meta posts that relate to bounty messages, some with what look like good suggestions, such as these (although possibly some of them may be a little outdated by subsequent changes, there are some good ideas to be found):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/111926/explain-auto-award-after-you-have-x-hours-to-award-the-bounty&quot;&gt;Explain auto-award after “you have X hours to award the bounty”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/78975/tentatively-award-bounty-better-control-of-auto-award&quot;&gt;Tentatively award bounty : better control of auto-award&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2023-02-09T20:53:26.103" LastActivityDate="2023-02-09T20:53:26.103" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2709" CreationDate="2015-10-15T13:18:34.243" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've mapped &lt;code&gt;nlp&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;natural-language&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T13:18:34.243" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2606" CreationDate="2015-10-15T13:24:26.767" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I'm going to map &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-density-estimate&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-density-estimate&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-density-estimate&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-regression&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-regression&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-regression&lt;/a&gt;  to a new &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-smoothing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-smoothing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-smoothing&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T13:24:26.767" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2606" CreationDate="2015-10-15T13:41:04.637" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;With regard to blacklisting &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel&lt;/a&gt;, please read: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/239189/225179&quot;&gt;How should we make tag blacklist requests?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;mdash;site mods can't blacklist tags themselves. &lt;s&gt;Noting that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel&lt;/a&gt; hasn't recrudesced, &amp;amp; that SE might well take that as grounds for not blacklisting it, I'd rather not bother.&lt;/s&gt; It has, &amp;amp; @amoeba's had to deal with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Upvote this answer if you agree it's not worth the candle.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Downvote this answer if you disagree, &amp;amp; think the dead &amp;amp; buried &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel&lt;/a&gt; still needs a stake through its heart.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T15:34:40.970" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1492" CreationDate="2015-10-16T02:07:55.360" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree with one of your metrics - I hope that I am allowed to do that if I have a good reason.  I think the zeroth metric to return is value.  Value can hard to measure because it can mean different things to different people.  One person's cost is another person's benefit, sometimes.  Metrics should be built to measure and allow value to be maximized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off, CV is one my favorite sites.  It really is.  I can learn.  I can be challenged.  There is a community of excellent and admirable folks who treat each other well and if you treat them well and with respect you can ask good questions and get good (and sometimes truly amazing) answers.  I am on here at least daily.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to tell you something personal, but brief.  I had a neighbor that I tried to build any sort of connection with for years.  One day I was making cookies, and had a thought.  Even though I had sugar, I went and asked if I could borrow a cup of sugar.  They loaned it to me, and in return I brought them some cookies.  The next day there was a knock asking if they could borrow some butter.  One day!  By giving my neighbor a chance to give, I got the chance to have a good friend.  It was a good win, and a win-win.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of different demographics that use the various Stack Exchange sites, and I think that CV as-it-is offers things that other, adjacent technical ones (Stack Overflow, mathematics, computational science) do not - an entrance to the community for &quot;entry level folks&quot; or even &quot;highly capable but new-to-statistics&quot; folks.  For me that &quot;entrance&quot; or &quot;accessible participation&quot; has been through the older unanswered questions.  I have earned &quot;necromancer&quot; by looking through unanswered questions under my favorite tags and seeing a &quot;gem&quot; that I know just the right answer for.  There is a lot (whole honking lot) that I don't know and so having the right (non-zero) questions down my (atypical) alley has been good.  If all the questions were answered then I would not have had that opportunity.  This community would have been a lot more closed to me.  Being able to answer questions, even if they are sometimes less technical, is like CV giving me the chance to share a cup of sugar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that I have oblique (pun intended) view into here is that this site, I think, returns very great value to the technical community.  I will see someone who acts &quot;newbish&quot; asking several questions on a topic, and a few months later will see a published article on the topic.  The person who published ins't always the &quot;newb&quot;, but I suspect they were encouraged to go down the road they did because of the newb's question.  I would bet that between 10% and 25% of tough questions here result in things like masters theses, PhD dissertations, and other peer-reviewed/published work and software packages that result in substantial improvement in the field.  Seriously - I think you should apply for an NSF grant on the topic.  I think that CV could be responsible for several hundreds to thousands of meaningful steps forward in statistics, the field that is most applied outside of directly engineering a product.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Nobel Prize&quot; syndrome causes folks who found buried treasure in their backyard to go try to climb mount impossible.  I think that all treasure is buried in backyards.  I think that one of the things that CV does is help folks figure out how to look around where they are and find the unknown and fun, and that is where buried treasure is always found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have never successfully used chat here.  I think that it missed its window.  Around 10 years ago it would have been the only way to go.  Now, unless it is a longer-term conversation, perhaps like on the back-side of Wikipedia pages, I don't know if it is ever going to gain traction.  Is it really such a bad thing if it doesn't catch on?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22452" LastEditorUserId="22452" LastEditDate="2015-10-16T12:49:02.977" LastActivityDate="2015-10-16T12:49:02.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2775" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-16T09:39:17.947" Score="16" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/177136/does-the-function-y-atb-exp-ct-have-a-name-can-it-be-linearized-how&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was just migrated to stackoverflow (well, an hour ago).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see a great deal of it's pretty solidly on topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;What is this function called?&quot; is not a SO question, it's a CV question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Is this function linearizable?&quot; --- there's no way that's an SO question. It's  a stats question. How are SO people to be expected to talk about the fact that it depends on how the error enters the model?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;How do I estimate the parameters?&quot; (paraphrasing) &lt;em&gt;is a statistics question&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are right in the &lt;em&gt;title&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's code in the question, but the code related parts are not central to the statistical aspects, and the existence of code -- or even a question about code -- doesn't mean the statistical aspects don't belong here. At most I think the OP could have been encouraged to separate some aspects of the question off, but we have &lt;em&gt;no business sending stats questions to SO&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone involved, please take a look at my answer, and explain to me how a question which has an answer like that belongs anywhere but here -- because if that's our standard, I clearly have no clue whatever how any of this works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help me understand the basis for this choice. I really don't understand how those questions at least don't belong here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I happen to feel that some of the remainder also belongs here, because it also contains some statistical aspects, but the parts I mentioned should be sufficient.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2015-10-16T14:56:02.040" Title="Can any of the people involved in the migration of this question explain why?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|migration|stackoverflow|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1846" CreationDate="2015-10-16T09:47:37.133" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is clear that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/big-list&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;big-list&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;big-list&lt;/a&gt;  is a bad tag; it is a meta tag, it is used inconsistently, and it should go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, batch-removing &amp;amp; blacklisting a tag seems to be a complicated procedure that requires an intervention of SE developers; site moderators cannot do it. In contrast, &quot;burninating&quot; a tag simply means manually removing the tag from all questions; this can be done by anybody (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/239191&quot;&gt;see here&lt;/a&gt;). If we burninate &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/big-list&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;big-list&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;big-list&lt;/a&gt;, it seems unlikely that it will appear again (at least not often): it is not a tag that will come to many people's minds; so blacklisting does not necessarily seem to be needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Therefore my suggestion is to manually remove &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/big-list&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;big-list&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;big-list&lt;/a&gt; from all 37 threads&lt;/strong&gt; (cleaning them up, if needed, along the way). This can be easily done in several goes. Yes, it will bump the threads, but it's not a big deal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2015-10-16T09:47:37.133" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2777" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-10-16T12:05:49.003" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-10-16T12:05:49.003" LastActivityDate="2015-10-16T12:05:49.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2778" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-10-16T12:05:49.003" Score="0" Body="For questions about the (former) public/private beta phases of Cross Validated`s progress through the Area 51 site creation process." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-10-16T21:50:37.927" LastActivityDate="2015-10-16T21:50:37.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2779" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-10-16T12:17:57.063" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions that are about &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stats.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Cross Validated meta&lt;/a&gt; itself, rather than the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Cross Validated&lt;/a&gt; main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Learn more about the meta site on our &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/help/whats-meta&quot;&gt;help-center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: adapted excerpt and wiki from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackoverflow.com/tags/meta/info&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow meta&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-10-16T21:50:22.057" LastActivityDate="2015-10-16T21:50:22.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2780" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-10-16T12:17:57.063" Score="0" Body="For questions about Cross Validated meta" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-10-16T21:50:33.063" LastActivityDate="2015-10-16T21:50:33.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2775" CreationDate="2015-10-16T14:48:37.980" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note: I was one of the close voters.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are right that those questions are in the title. However, I interpreted 'how to fit this model in R?' as the real question.  (According to my reading, the central sentence is &quot;I can fit the model using nls without a random effect, but am having trouble getting the model to converge&quot;.)  Things like 'what the name of the function is' could certainly stay here, but I interpreted most of that, including &quot;can it be linearized&quot;, as looking for leads that would help the OP fit the model.  The OP listed some R code, and (while acknowledging the possibility of other software) would clearly have preferred a solution to fit the model in R.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suggestion was made by someone who I suspect is very knowledgeable about these issues that the OP would be able to get the help he needs on Stack Overflow (which is my priority).  Therefore, I voted to migrate.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I continue to hold that if the OP gets that help and is able to fit the model, the main issue will have been addressed, even if he never learns the function's name or if it could be linearized. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I respect the fact that people can have a difference of opinion on this.  I have always believed that the criterion for what site a given thread belongs on depends on what the OP needs explained.  This will always be an interpretive act on the part of the voter, sometimes more than others.  For example, there have been several occasions where I have voted &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to migrate a question about R code, because I could see that the reason the OP had used the code incorrectly was because they misunderstood the underlying statistical issues.  Thus, explaining the code or correcting it would not have been a real solution; the OP just needed to understand the ideas and they would have been able to generate correct R code on their own.  Trying to figure out what an asker really needs / wants to know is tricky and people will occasionally get it wrong.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2015-10-16T14:56:02.040" LastActivityDate="2015-10-16T14:56:02.040" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2782" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2784" CreationDate="2015-10-19T10:12:50.973" Score="6" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am used to calling this thing &quot;covariance matrix&quot; and only very rarely see and here it being called &quot;variance-covariance matrix&quot;. However, our tag here is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/variance-covariance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;variance-covariance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;variance-covariance&lt;/a&gt;. It used to slightly annoy me all the time, so I have recently created a tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/covariance-matrix&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;covariance-matrix&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;covariance-matrix&lt;/a&gt; and voted to make it the synonym of the main tag. The voting has not finished yet$^*$, but in the meantime I see that my newly created tag is being used by other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes me wonder: shall we maybe have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/covariance-matrix&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;covariance-matrix&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;covariance-matrix&lt;/a&gt; as the master tag, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/variance-covariance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;variance-covariance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;variance-covariance&lt;/a&gt; as its synonym? I tried some google searches to establish the usus: &lt;code&gt;&quot;covariance matrix&quot;&lt;/code&gt; search gives 3 mln results, and &lt;code&gt;&quot;variance-covariance matrix&quot;&lt;/code&gt; only 400k (this is included in 3 mln too). On google scholar the numbers are 900k and 100k respectively. So it seems that &quot;covariance matrix&quot; is indeed a more common expression used over 80% of the times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am going to post two answers, please upvote the one with your preferred master tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;$^*$The voting is likely to never finish; apart from me, only one single person (@gung) has taken part in it so far. Sad as it is, we will need a moderator to create this synonym one way or another.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2015-10-22T09:59:38.343" LastActivityDate="2015-10-22T09:59:38.343" Title="What tag name do you prefer: [covariance-matrix] or [variance-covariance]?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2782" CreationDate="2015-10-19T10:17:27.673" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;The master tag should be &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/variance-covariance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;variance-covariance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;variance-covariance&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2015-10-19T10:17:27.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2782" CreationDate="2015-10-19T10:18:40.067" Score="16" Body="&lt;h3&gt;The master tag should be &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/covariance-matrix&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;covariance-matrix&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;covariance-matrix&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2015-10-19T10:18:40.067" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2765" CreationDate="2015-10-19T11:28:24.967" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You needn't pick out which functions to use from the &lt;code&gt;car&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;effects&lt;/code&gt; packages. Examples of how to apply statistical methods, using any software (even if not specifically requested by the OP), can certainly be useful, but their provision isn't a necessary condition for a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, merely name-checking something the OP ought to look into makes for a rather meagre answer, which would typically benefit from a brief explanation of at least &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;how it relates to the question&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;what exactly it is (perhaps by giving a reference)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's often some ambiguity in questions &amp;amp; answers (what &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a &quot;net effect&quot; anyway? which of added variable &amp;amp; component-plus-residual plots shows it? are either of those the same as partial-regression plots?), resolving which gives readers confidence that they're not going to be sent off on a wild-goose chase, &amp;amp; doesn't amount to hand-holding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in my opinion, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2015-10-19T11:28:24.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2786" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2787" CreationDate="2015-10-19T23:02:46.407" Score="11" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2517/learning-from-previous-review-decisions/2518#2518&quot;&gt;This question is rather related to an earlier question by Chris C about &quot;learning from other people's reviews&lt;/a&gt;, and somewhat related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2468/how-best-to-use-the-review-queue&quot;&gt;my previous post on how best to use the review queue&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tend to be fastidious when reviewing, so only apply &quot;No Action Needed&quot; on about 20% of reviews (excluding skipped reviews). I wondered whether this was normal and having look at other reviewers, I found some apply &quot;No Action Needed&quot; to 80%+ of reviews.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it hard to imagine 80%+ of posts really need no action, based on what comes my way in the review queue. Of course, it's possible they apply the reverse strategy to me: skipping many posts with clear problems (maybe especially those that look hard to fix) and NANing the decent ones, whereas I tend to skip posts that &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt; okay, superficially, but which I don't feel I can &lt;em&gt;certify&lt;/em&gt; as &quot;acceptable&quot; since their content lies beyond my expertise. Or perhaps they see First Post review as little more than triage to weed out clearly poor or inappropriate content, so (if we imagine different &quot;layers&quot; of review we could perform) they may not take the review to quite the same level of depth:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Absolutely minimal&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Appropriately flag&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;spam&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;content in a foreign language or patent nonsense&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I am having this problem too&quot; or &quot;link only&quot; answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Appropriately handle copy-and-pasted homework questions (if necessary inform about self-study tag, tell OP to show us where they are stuck, possibly vote to close in worst cases)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly none of this material should survive First Post review, and all of this can be caught without subject knowledge expertise or even carefully reading through the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Requires effort but minimal expertise&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Remove salutations, thanks and signatures&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fix spelling and grammar errors; formatting (particularly $\LaTeX$ and code formatting and indentation)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make title clearer and more specific if necessary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vote to close as unclear if a question is written in such poor English as to be indecipherable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This at least requires superficial engagement to read through the post's text, but not substantive expertise. I could perform all these actions without knowing anything about the topic of the post. Editing the title requires thought, but since OPs often pick one that's too generic, it might be improved simply by summarising the final point of their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Requires more expertise and/or more effort&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adding relevant tags &amp;mdash; so long as I can recognise the subtopic, then even if I know little about the area I can usually improve on the OP's tags: they rarely know which tags we have available. On questions I don't substantively understand, sometimes I can't even pin down the topic well enough to find a relevant tag (this is most frustrating when the one tag the question has is clearly irrelevant, and really should be replaced by something else).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Checking for a duplicate question. This takes both effort (searching) and judgment (two questions might be presented and worded quite differently, but with the same core concept; it may take a degree of familiarity with the subject matter to identify that this is the case). I have a good memory for duplicates but rarely actively search for dupes unless I suspect one exists; perhaps I should be searching as a matter of course? In topics outside my area of expertise, I would struggle to identify whether two questions are duplicate or simply related (though this can be resolved by posting a link in a comment and letting more expert users identify whether this counts as a duplicate or not).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Check a question contains enough information to answer it &amp;mdash; this is often possible even if I wouldn't want to venture an answer. The simplest case is &quot;could you include (a sample of) your data&quot;, while with probability questions we may need to clarify &quot;are the variables intended to be independent&quot; or similar. If the question clearly doesn't contain enough information, it may be necessary to vote to close it as unclear. But it is often the case that, outside my area of expertise, I have little idea whether a topic expert would regard the question as sufficiently clear to be answerable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Check an answer substantively addresses the question &amp;mdash; even if I don't fully understand the answer (or indeed the question), it's generally possible, with a little familiarity with the topic, to ascertain whether an answer is at least germane to the question, and proposes some kind of solution. If not, it may be necessary to flag the question for moderator attention. If the answer is good, it should be upvoted, but I don't like doing this unless I understood (at least well enough to strongly suspect it's correct).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these require reading a question or answer closely and thinking in a critical and evaluative way about its content. The further its content lies from my sphere of knowledge, the less capable I am of performing this. Particularly when it comes to evaluating questions, perhaps these tasks are best handled by potential &lt;em&gt;answerers&lt;/em&gt;, rather than reviewers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly reviews are multilayered, and we can't expect every reviewer to put total effort into every review, or only to review questions they are technically qualified to answer. On the other hand, CV is very fortunate that none of our review queues are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sisyphean tasks&lt;/a&gt;. If there is a post that lies outside our area of expertise, and there is no obvious issue to deal with, there seems no very strong reason (other than it adding one to our review queue score!) to say &quot;superficially it looks okay, no action needed&quot;, if we could instead skip the review and have it passed on to a user with more (even if not masterful) topic expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My philosophy generally has been &quot;do what you can&quot; &amp;mdash; fix, flag or vote (up/down/close) &amp;mdash; and if there is nothing (further) I can see to do, opt for &quot;No Action Needed&quot; (or &quot;I'm Done&quot;) if I'm &lt;em&gt;confident&lt;/em&gt; that the post is now good to go, but &quot;Skip&quot; if I think it would benefit from fresh eyes (perhaps even after my fixes). In many situations this means I get through the &quot;requires effort but minimal expertise&quot; before pressing Skip, and I will generally only NAN (or &quot;I'm Done&quot;) if I reached the &quot;requires more expertise and/or more effort&quot; part of the checklist (though may not have done a full search for duplicates, completely understood an answer, etc). Is this an overly cautious approach? Should I feel I've &quot;done enough&quot; at a more minimal level of effort, and perhaps leave the rest for potential answerers to decide on? It certainly seems pointless (more work for everyone) to skip a post with no superficial flaws in the hope that the review will be &quot;passed on&quot; to someone with more subject expertise, if that post is then reviewed by someone who is &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; looking for superficial issues anyway. In this sense it would help if we were all reviewing to a somewhat comparable depth. Do my checklists leave anything important out? What's a realistic expectation for the depth of a review, particularly when you hit a post on the edge or even outside of your expertise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2015-10-20T19:59:42.817" Title="How much effort is meant to be put in to reviewing a First Post?" Tags="|discussion|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2786" CreationDate="2015-10-19T23:58:27.270" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some people certainly put more effort in than others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A number of our regular reviewers (you among them) put in effort above the average (one regular reviewer who I won't name stands out above the rest in terms of time per review and on a number of other indicators of both effort and quality); the dedication of our careful reviewers and editors is a big part of why CV works as well as it does. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few reviewers do cause me particular concern because their average review time is astoundingly short, especially on the first post queue. I am a pretty fast reader but I could not even &lt;em&gt;read&lt;/em&gt; a post in the time some reviewers manage to click &quot;Looks Okay&quot; in, let alone ponder editing the post or adding tags, consider whether to make a comment to encourage improvements or request more information -- and that's not everything that should be considered for a first post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those same &quot;fastest gun&quot; reviewers also seem to miss many important problems, and that concerns me even more, because it defeats the entire purpose of the review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clicking &quot;looks okay&quot; on posts that are &lt;em&gt;obviously&lt;/em&gt; not okay makes more effort down the track for others. Better to leave it in the queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[When I see someone new posting and their first post is in bad shape, but isn't in the queue any longer, you can bet I go and look who did that. And then start checking what else they did recently. Everyone makes the odd mistake and new reviewers should be expected to make more ... but there are limits to what's plausibly mere error and then we're getting into deliberate choice to let extremely poor posts through without so much as a comment.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators also get access to summary statistics on people's reviews. We can, if we choose, see information about review queues and how people perform. (It's not something I want to use to police the queues, I'd much rather trust our high reputation members to treat reviewing seriously.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would ask the rapid-fire reviewers out there -- if you're not feeling like you want to put some effort into improving first-posts one day, just avoid the first post review queue at that time. If you just aren't sure about a post, it's okay to click 'skip'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes posts are both brief and perfectly fine and you really can just click &quot;Looks Okay&quot; fairly quickly and move on, but it looks to me that more often than not a first post needs some improvement. If you're regularly letting 80% of new posts through as okay, you're certainly missing things - and some of them matter*.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My philosophy generally has been &quot;do what you can&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's exactly how it's supposed to work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With some posts where I want to make some fixes but realize there's more to be checked, I have (on rare occasions) clicked &quot;skip&quot; in the queue, but opened the post in another tab to make the changes I want. Maybe I can fix the spelling, title and tags, add a comment for the poster but leave much of the body content for someone with more knowledge than me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first post queues needn't be perfect new user filters, but there are certainly times when they could work a little better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I broadly agree with your points in your post; I am not sure there's any way to really assess how much effort we're &quot;meant to&quot; put in to the reviews beyond the advice we already have about the purpose of the queue and what seems broadly to work well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I have once or twice seriously considered whether friendly warnings or even more serious action (such as review suspensions) might be warranted in some cases. I'd prefer not to have to do that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2015-10-20T01:30:08.533" LastActivityDate="2015-10-20T01:30:08.533" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1970" CreationDate="2015-10-25T10:05:23.617" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixed-effects&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixed-effects&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixed-effects&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixed&lt;/a&gt; are now synonyms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixed-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixed-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixed-model&lt;/a&gt; (the master tag).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2015-10-25T13:58:29.740" LastActivityDate="2015-10-25T13:58:29.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2790" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4703" CreationDate="2015-10-25T15:05:35.010" Score="12" ViewCount="263" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tags on SE can be made synonyms with or without merging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Non-merged synonyms have a bit of a weird behaviour. Take a look e.g. at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/books&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;books&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;books&lt;/a&gt; which is a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/references&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;references&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;references&lt;/a&gt;. If I search for [books], I get redirected to the search for [references], and the questions tagged with [books] are included into the search, try &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/books&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/books&lt;/a&gt; (880 results). If somebody writes a question and tags it with [books], it will automatically be re-tagged to [references] at the moment of posting. If somebody edits an old question tagged with [books], it will automatically be re-tagged to [references] too. If I see a question tagged with [books] and mouse-over this tag, I see tag wiki excerpt from [references].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;questions tagged with [books] are still displayed with [books], and &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if I browse &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags&lt;/a&gt;, I see [references] with only &lt;code&gt;× 713&lt;/code&gt; question count and [books] appears with &lt;code&gt;× 168&lt;/code&gt; question count and its own tag wiki excerpt (which can be seen pretty much nowhere else) --&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;and both of these things are somewhat annoying.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Merging&quot; simply means that all the questions with [books] are silently and instantly re-tagged to [references]. According to the meta.SE thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/70710/what-are-tag-synonyms-and-merged-tags-how-do-they-work&quot;&gt;What are tag synonyms and merged tags? How do they work?&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;All good tag synonyms should eventually be merged (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/262280/show-total-number-of-questions-in-synonym-group-at-all-occasions/262288#262288&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/strong&gt; This retags all questions tagged with a synonym – which is not automatically done when a synonym is created. As merging is not (easily) reversible, it should be done with caution and only when a synonym is established. Only moderators can perform a merge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, shall we be merging all our &quot;established&quot; tag synonyms?&lt;/strong&gt; How should we define when a synonym is &quot;established&quot; enough? I would say 1-3 months trial period after a synonym is created should be enough. If so, should we go over all existing synonyms and do the merges?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is even a special tab for the un-merged ones on the tag synonyms page, clearly indicating that the SE system is inviting the mods to do the merges:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms?filter=merge&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms?filter=merge&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms?filter=merge&quot;&gt;http://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms?filter=merge&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-09-05T12:20:31.643" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T12:22:53.873" Title="Should we be merging our non-merged tag synonyms as a matter of course?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|policy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2758" CreationDate="2015-10-26T13:32:07.990" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Re @Glen_b's #2: I proposed in a comment that when someone with the necessary privilege to make a tag synonym feels that a proposed synonym has enough support they should say that they're going to implement it; &amp;amp;, after a short time, if no-one objects, do so. That seems like a practical solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2015-10-26T13:32:07.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2663" CreationDate="2015-10-28T16:35:14.443" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;we only need the tags [imputation] and [multiple-imputation]. To me, [data-imputation] appears to be somewhat redundant&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I've already written in the comments above, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/imputation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;imputation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;imputation&lt;/a&gt; is since 2013 a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/data-imputation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;data-imputation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;data-imputation&lt;/a&gt;. However, it is a &lt;em&gt;non-merged&lt;/em&gt; synonym, and that's why 4 questions that were originally taged with [imputation] still remain to be tagged with this (obsolete) tag. This can clearly be confusing, as demonstrated by your question. That's why I suggest to merge all our non-merged tag synonyms: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2790&quot;&gt;Should all our non-merged tag synonyms be merged (or removed)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am posting this answer in order to draw attention to this merging issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2015-10-28T16:35:14.443" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2794" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-31T02:08:21.620" Score="33" ViewCount="2752" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using machine learning techniques for computer vision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am unsure of where to address my questions about computer vision. Sometimes the questions are about manipulating the image and sometimes they are about the machine learning algorithm I am using. Mainly I want to know where to ask questions about the intersection fields of computer vision and machine learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28986" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-10-31T11:00:04.907" LastActivityDate="2020-11-17T12:07:21.587" Title="Stack Exchange site to ask questions about computer vision?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|machine-learning|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2794" CreationDate="2015-10-31T20:19:50.797" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about the machine learning algorithms (as long as they're actually about the algorithms and not about specific implementations) are clearly on topic here. In this case the fact that the data is coming from vision will probably be relevant, but may not be central to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about what image manipulations make sense to perform are probably more on topic and more likely to get a good response at &lt;a href=&quot;https://dsp.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Signal Processing&lt;/a&gt; (about &quot;the art and science of signal, image and video processing&quot;), which has &lt;a href=&quot;https://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/image-processing&quot;&gt;an active &lt;code&gt;image-processing&lt;/code&gt; tag&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about specific implementations of any of the above may be on topic at either of those sites, but also look at Stack Overflow, &lt;a href=&quot;https://scicomp.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Computational Science&lt;/a&gt;, and maybe &lt;a href=&quot;http://codereview.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Code Review&lt;/a&gt;, depending on what the problem is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9964" LastActivityDate="2015-10-31T20:19:50.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2796" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2797" CreationDate="2015-11-01T05:57:42.400" Score="10" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/179321/computing-covariance-matrix-from-the-given-variances/&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; the correctly copied excerpt from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jordan/papers/CSD-04-1330.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt; paper used&lt;/a&gt; reproduces a typo that would make the findings of the paper invalid. The correct simulation setting is found in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/Papers/spc_jcgs.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paper cited within the paper used&lt;/a&gt;. (&lt;em&gt;It is clear that one cannot use the variance in the  paper the OP uses, an error variance of $300$ instead of $1$ would invalidate any findings.&lt;/em&gt;) &#xA;Should we fix the excerpt presented and break compatibility with the original text or not? I checked other version of the paper used by the OP (&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0406021v3.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://papers.nips.cc/paper/2628-a-direct-formulation-for-sparse-pca-using-semidefinite-programming.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) and all have the same typo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11852" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-11-01T23:23:59.627" Title="Correcting authors' typos in excerpt from papers" Tags="|discussion|support|editing|references|papers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2796" CreationDate="2015-11-01T06:58:51.647" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;My thoughts first on what one does if one is writing a question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you're quoting a paper, &lt;em&gt;you should quote it verbatim&lt;/em&gt; and then explain why the original is wrong (including quoting the correct statement from the earlier reference). If you really want to make it obvious, include &quot;[&lt;em&gt;sic&lt;/em&gt;]&quot; inside the quote, immediately after the part that's wrong to highlight that's what the original &lt;em&gt;says&lt;/em&gt;, which will alert people to the fact that it probably isn't right, and have them looking for the explanation of the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you're not making a direct quote you don't necessarily need to give the wrong statement but you should probably mention the issue to save people some confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if one is pondering editing a question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think the same conventions apply, except I'd lean toward doing it in comments and giving the OP the opportunity to correct their own post first.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2015-11-01T23:23:59.627" LastActivityDate="2015-11-01T23:23:59.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2798" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-03T13:36:52.657" Score="18" ViewCount="288" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been answering questions from users with reputation 1, knowing fully well that chances for reward in points from up-votes, or acceptance of the answer, are low. In great part it is simply that a number of these questions tend to be less specialized and more amenable to my amateur condition; also it is a good exercise, and a community service. So no complaints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is not uncommon to see the user vanish into thin air, because they unregister, find the answer elsewhere, lose interest, take up spelunking instead feeling that it is a less slippery sport than statistics; or perhaps they are intimidated or overwhelmed by the predictable comments regarding the need for a self-study tag, or insinuations that they are simply dumping their homework on the site. I don't know the full spectrum of patterns, yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question I want to raise, though, is whether it would be fair for the moderators or four-star general users to have the latitude or privilege to accept the answer by proxy after a certain period of time &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; they happen to run into the post, and consider that the question has been properly addressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this has been addressed before, just drop a quick comment (always preferable to the cold downvote :-) ), and I'll happily erase the post, as I typically do with all my bad ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67822" LastEditorUserId="72321" LastEditDate="2015-11-10T11:06:29.973" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T11:06:29.973" Title="Drive-by Questions - Should Answers Be Accepted by Proxy?" Tags="|discussion|status-declined|answers|accepted-answer|new-users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2794" CreationDate="2015-11-04T02:29:54.407" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;There used to be this Stack Exchange proposal: &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/86832/image-processing-and-computer-vision?referrer=74BBq_SrGKgBKe2Pr1WaGA2&quot;&gt;Image Processing and Computer Vision&lt;/a&gt;. But it got closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[image-processing] is the #1 tag on our Signal Processing site. After 11 months in development, the Community Team has reviewed this proposal and concluded that we should not try to split this subject off into another site. – Robert Cartaino♦ Apr 6 at 15:53&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastEditorUserId="12359" LastEditDate="2016-11-10T22:03:57.973" LastActivityDate="2016-11-10T22:03:57.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2800" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-11-04T11:49:59.277" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-11-04T11:49:59.277" LastActivityDate="2015-11-04T11:49:59.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2801" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-11-04T11:49:59.277" Score="0" Body="The scope of data-mining related questions on Cross Validated" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-11-04T23:35:51.050" LastActivityDate="2015-11-04T23:35:51.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2802" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-11-04T11:59:08.133" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-11-04T11:59:08.133" LastActivityDate="2015-11-04T11:59:08.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2803" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-11-04T11:59:08.133" Score="0" Body="The scope and guidelines of basic statistics questions in Cross Validated SE" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-11-04T23:35:54.427" LastActivityDate="2015-11-04T23:35:54.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2804" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2807" CreationDate="2015-11-05T21:01:41.893" Score="11" ViewCount="322" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/best-practices&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;best-practices&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;best-practices&lt;/a&gt; tag which currently has no usage guidelines. Currently it mostly seems to be used on questions which are very broad, particularly where there might be multiple approaches (e.g. project management, data analysis, modelling strategies, how to write code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have had a couple of edit requests in the review queue asking to add the tag to various questions, and in the absence of usage guidelines it isn't completely clear where it would be appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/174856/a-question-about-semi-supervised-classification-with-unseen-classes&quot;&gt;On this question&lt;/a&gt;, I could understand why the tag was being added (the question includes the phrase &quot;Is this an example of semi-supervised classification and what are good approaches one can take to this kind of problem?&quot;).  I rejected the edit in that case, as the question seems rather too specific compared to other questions with the tag. I felt that if this question deserved a &quot;best practices&quot; tag, then almost all  questions should - after all, don't most questions (at least about plotting and data analysis; mathematical statistics or probability not so much) want to know what would be &quot;best practice&quot; in their situation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/172316/a-statistical-approach-to-determining-if-data-are-missing-at-random&quot;&gt;On this question&lt;/a&gt; I felt that &quot;what is a sensible way to approach&quot; determining &quot;if the missing data are 'missing at random' or 'missing not at random'&quot;  seemed sufficiently broad to make the tag worthwhile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But on reflection it is hard to see how to make a principled decision about this, and I can understand that other people might not draw the same distinction that I did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to see if there's community consensus on what usage guidelines should be for &lt;code&gt;[best-practices]&lt;/code&gt;. It seems to make particular sense in situations where there are a variety of practices but some of which are generally deemed superior to others (for instance, in regression modelling, stepwise regression is regarded as &quot;not best practice&quot;). But I can't see obvious black and white limits about where the domain of &quot;best practice&quot; should end. If it were applied to &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; question where, at some stage, an analyst has to make some sort of choice between methods, then it would become one of the most frequent tags on the site - but its value in identifying content related to professional practice (which is the use it currently seems to serve) would be almost entirely diluted. Although at the moment it does seem to serve some kind of (undefined!) purpose, I can even see an argument for getting rid of it entirely, if it turns out to be impossible to pin down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update (Dec 21):&lt;/strong&gt; All threads that had &lt;code&gt;[best-practices]&lt;/code&gt; as the only tag have been re-tagged. This tag would now be ready to be burninated (by SE admins) if community agrees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T02:35:36.940" Title="What should the &quot;best practices&quot; tag be for?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-deletion|meta-tags|burninate-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2804" CreationDate="2015-11-08T22:39:45.947" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on the difficulty formulating a clear scope for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/best-practices&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;best-practices&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;best-practices&lt;/a&gt;, and the comments that it seems to be a &quot;meta&quot; tag (which is generally not considered best practice), there seems to be a strong case for getting rid of this tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder whether questions like the following might benefit from something like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/professional-practice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;professional-practice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;professional-practice&lt;/a&gt; as an alternative:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/16889/ideas-for-lab-notebook-software&quot;&gt;Ideas for &amp;quot;lab notebook&amp;quot; software?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/3814/how-to-annoy-a-statistical-referee&quot;&gt;How to annoy a statistical referee?&lt;/a&gt; (possibly)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2910/how-to-efficiently-manage-a-statistical-analysis-project&quot;&gt;How to efficiently manage a statistical analysis project?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/7467/quality-assurance-and-quality-control-qa-qc-guidelines-for-a-database&quot;&gt;Quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC) guidelines for a database&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The scope for this would be something along the lines of &quot;issues specifically relevant to the working practices of a statistician or analyst, but not necessarily a question that is statistical in nature&quot;. We certainly have historically accepted questions that might otherwise have belonged on Workplace SE, Academia SE or even Lifehacks SE, except that they were most relevant for people working in the field of statistics or data analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2015-11-09T16:53:28.627" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2804" CreationDate="2015-11-09T16:19:03.797" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: the tag was burninated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, 'best-practices' is a meta tag and should go. On contrary to 'self-study' it does not have a clear scope which would justify keeping it here. In summary, it is what you said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;.....but its value in identifying content related to professional practice (which is the use it currently seems to serve) would be almost entirely diluted....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In response to Silverfish's answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd rather see 'best-practices' leaving, without needing a substitute tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2016-09-20T02:35:36.940" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T02:35:36.940" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2798" CreationDate="2015-11-10T11:06:14.233" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I stated in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2798/drive-by-questions-should-answers-be-accepted-by-proxy#comment8598_2798&quot;&gt;my comment above&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been addressed and declined &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3669/would-it-be-possible-to-have-a-community-accepted-feature&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/3672/208518&quot;&gt;The top answer in that post&lt;/a&gt; nails it down pretty well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of up-votes shows the level of acceptance by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the &amp;quot;accepted answer&amp;quot; has no up-votes, but yours has 12, clearly yours is the community-accepted answer :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72321" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T11:06:14.233" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2810" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-13T22:10:29.143" Score="31" ViewCount="947" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the etiquette for editing questions?&lt;/strong&gt; How much is it OK to modify? What are the guidelines and what are the limits?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am concerned that once a question has been edited, the difficulties facing the initial user may not be as conspicuous because the editor may have inadvertently filled in some critical conceptual gaps in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Data sets&lt;/strong&gt; are sometimes presented in different ways including JPEG screenshots. How should they be reformatted, in particular to avoid presuming R familiarity or preference? On this issue I got moderator guidance from @whuber advising to format them as text (usually comma delimited), or else include the data in the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should &lt;strong&gt;plots&lt;/strong&gt; be always left untouched?  Beyond subjective, aesthetic considerations, perhaps some subtle change in the presentation or the data may occur that defeats the purpose of the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do you all agree that improving the &lt;strong&gt;grammar&lt;/strong&gt; to make the question understandable is an OK reason for an edit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is reformatting with &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\LaTeX{}$&lt;/span&gt; to beautify equations OK without exceptions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67822" LastEditorUserId="44269" LastEditDate="2022-12-09T18:26:51.410" LastActivityDate="2024-03-14T00:26:17.630" Title="Editing questions: dos and don'ts" Tags="|discussion|editing|etiquette|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2810" CreationDate="2015-11-14T00:26:57.140" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;[Just to make clear, though my answers should always be read this way: this is personal opinion]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't need to have any intention of answering a question to edit it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the difficulties facing the initial user may not be as conspicuous because the editor may have inadvertently filled in some critical conceptual gaps in the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where feasible, it's important to have a question and answer that will be understood by and be useful to more people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mostly you should lean toward letting the OP's phrasing stand, but you can certainly encourage the OP to clarify. While some people would lean toward &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; fixing misconceptions in the question, if it's a side issue to the main question &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; fixing it is likely to clarify that misconception for the OP it may be okay. (It can sometimes be hard to be sure, though.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concern you mentioned is certainly possible so if you do edit, care must be taken - and you can always invite the OP to change anything back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the case of plots, and beyond subjective, aesthetic considerations, perhaps some subtle change in the presentation or the data may occur that defeats the purpose of the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such things are always a small risk with edits. If you're aware of the possibility, it's unlikely to be a major problem. Note that edits can be rolled back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How should data points be posted to avoid presuming R familiarity or preference? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly avoid editing to make anything &lt;em&gt;R&lt;/em&gt;-specific; if it's already R-specific that's different. It's perfectly possible to edit to produce a cleanly-formatted ASCII table, for example, which will copy-paste (or easily be read) into a wide variety of packages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. something formatted like this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    A     B&#xA;    4     2&#xA;    4    10&#xA;    7     4&#xA;    7    22&#xA;    8    16&#xA;    9    10&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... is not R-specific but will read straight into R with a copy-paste (type &lt;code&gt;OPdata=read.table(stdin(),header=TRUE)&lt;/code&gt; then paste, press Enter and you have a data frame; or just read from &lt;code&gt;clipboard&lt;/code&gt; rather than &lt;code&gt;stdin&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: plain ASCII text in a standard form (space delimited or comma-delimited, compatible with CSV) is desirable -- these can be read by almost anything. This is uniformly better that an image of numbers (since it contains the same information but can be used by answerers) ... but be &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; careful you don't change the data!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On this issue I got moderator guidance from @whuber advising to format them as text (usually comma delimited), or else include the data in the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's sensible advice; I'd add space-delimited to the mix of what's fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should plots be always left untouched?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have enough context to know what things you're proposing to fix, but &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; you wouldn't alter a plot. &lt;em&gt;Always&lt;/em&gt; is too strong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some situations where I have edited a plot. One example is where there's a small plot with &lt;em&gt;gigantic&lt;/em&gt; amounts of white-space around it (a plot smaller than 1/10 the size of a standard page (A4 or 8.5x11), say 3x2.5 inches sitting in a field of white pixels the size of a page. In that case I cut out almost all the white space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you all agree that improving the grammar to make the question understandable is an OK reason for an edit in some cases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, almost always.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is reformatting with latex to beautify equations OK without exceptions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nearly always, it's a good thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;em&gt;without exception&lt;/em&gt;? That's hard to say, since exceptions may be things we haven't thought of. But in this case I can think of a few possible exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i. If I expect a post will move to SO I try to avoid LaTeX. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ii. If an equation can as easily be read as pseudocode (e.g. can very easily be turned into say a formula in R if left as is) I'm less inclined to edit it because there's another way to use it as it stands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is filled with requests for absolutes. That's not going to happen. Don't look for ironclad rules here. Just act sensibly, change things in ways that will clearly improve the post for as many people as you can, but with respect for the OP's intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one is to edit (which is a very good thing to do), it's necessary to accept that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You will occasionally make mistakes (of judgement, say)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Even when you act in very sensible ways, people will disagree occasionally; there can be legitimate difference of opinion&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't get too bothered about these things unless there seem to be a lot of problems, in which case you may need to attempt to move your expectations toward the community norms more. Mistakes are not irretrievable -- as the saying goes, it's not rocket surgery&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.waywordradio.org/rocket_surgery/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and definitely put me down in the &quot;the data &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt;&quot; column. &quot;Datum&quot; is singular, &quot;data&quot; is a plural noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2015-11-20T12:52:58.137" LastActivityDate="2015-11-20T12:52:58.137" CommentCount="30" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2810" CreationDate="2015-11-16T11:53:48.317" Score="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a series of side-notes to @Glen_b's excellent answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The editing process&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Editing is a public service.&lt;/strong&gt; Even some small edits can just clean up a post and make it easier for everyone to read, which is a positive contribution. Often an edit can change a question that looks too messy to wade through to one that looks readable. Editing can and should help the OP, who should get more and quicker attention (and, although this is a side-effect, who should also get feedback on their presentation for future questions). It helps others too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Editing does not impart a moral judgment.&lt;/strong&gt; We can't confidently and consistently  distinguish between over-hasty, lazy presentation and someone struggling with one, two or even all three of a second language; statistics they really don't understand; and a medium that is unfamiliar. That said, I will on occasion comment firmly that a question (or answer) is just too messy to be worth anyone's time to edit. If the OP isn't able or willing to fix the presentation, then that is the end of the story: we are all volunteers here and there is no obligation to be infinitely helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Editing even one small thing requires a careful decision.&lt;/strong&gt; It will bump the question momentarily to the top of the active list. Some people are irritated to re-open a post of interest to find one minute change. But even threads that have seen many posts can carry errors worth correcting. Nevertheless, for this and other reasons, it is good advice that if you edit, edit everything that you spot as deserving change, so as to make the edit worthwhile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Editing titles, tags and commentary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Editing just the title can be valuable.&lt;/strong&gt; Posters can be especially blind to typos in the title. Considering that titles are key for later searches, even trivial misspellings can be a nuisance. It's common that titles are too long and/or carry useless words (&lt;em&gt;please help&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;question about&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;how to analyse my data&lt;/em&gt;). On the other hand, sometimes you need to flag to posters that they should think up a better title themselves. (It's a fact of life in a forum that some members use eccentric or inadequately informative titles as a criterion for what to ignore, so improving them may seem a disservice too.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Editing the question itself can help.&lt;/strong&gt; Cut out wording such as &amp;quot;My question is&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;The question I would like to ask is&amp;quot;. Feel free to add a question mark when needed grammatically or to emphasise a precise and concise question, say by isolating it as a single paragraph or by recasting it in bold. If you can't identify a clear question at all, that is cause for comment rather than an attempt to rewrite the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Editing the tags on a post can be valuable&lt;/strong&gt;. Posters often omit tags that are highly relevant (e.g. &lt;code&gt;data-transformation&lt;/code&gt;) or specify tags that are fairly useless (e.g. &lt;code&gt;mathematical-statistics&lt;/code&gt; for almost any post). A sensitive exception is the &lt;code&gt;self-study&lt;/code&gt; tag, which ideally should be added only by the original poster to show self-awareness of the condition. Otherwise, disagreement over tags is easy enough to fix, so it is fine to edit if you are confident that you can improve tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edits should remove greetings&lt;/strong&gt; (at the beginning of a post) &lt;strong&gt;or signatures&lt;/strong&gt; (at the end) &lt;strong&gt;and any material that looks irrelevant to the question&lt;/strong&gt;. That includes polite (or even not so polite) expressions of how confused the poster is, how much time they have already spent working on the problem, how grateful they will be for an answer and (especially) how urgent or important the question is. Other comments that can usually be cut include claims that the question is quick, easy or simple: sometimes such claims are just wrong, and when they are right they don't illuminate the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edits should focus attention on the technical content of a question&lt;/strong&gt;, rather than the human side. In a busy world, being able to read that content quickly and easily is a bonus for all. (I leave open whether it's a benefit that editing sometimes makes it clearer that there is no underlying precise and concise question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Editing issues with statistics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edits can change presentation in any aspect, but as far as possible should only clarify, not change, the statistical content&lt;/strong&gt; that defines the question being asked. Aspects of presentation to edit can include grammar, spelling, punctuation, and other styling of text, math, code or data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edits should not change strange or even incorrect uses of statistical terms, or any other dubious statistical content, even for obvious errors&lt;/strong&gt;. Naturally, you should only change the language if you are confident that you are right (or have better taste or style...)! (Don't worry too much about this; a mistaken edit can be reversed.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, as often, a small tension between the immediate, short-term aim of helping the original poster and the ultimate, longer-term aim of building an archive of high quality answered questions that should be of interest or use to many readers (in many cases, long after a poster may have disappeared from the forum). But &lt;strong&gt;any errors, omissions, or confusion in the statistical content of a question are likely to be part of the OP's problem and should be left as posted&lt;/strong&gt;. Someone who edits a question may not intend to answer it, but can help by publicising difficult points in comments. For example, &lt;em&gt;you say that you want to apply multivariate regression, but you only have one response variable, so I think you mean multiple regression&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edits can introduce or improve mark-up of mathematics, code and data, but should not change even poor notation choices, which could be part of the problem.&lt;/strong&gt; I would correct trivia, as when someone has posted &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\beta2$&lt;/span&gt;, but it's evident that they mean &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\beta_2$&lt;/span&gt;, but if in doubt, do not edit, but rather comment. &lt;em&gt;There seems to be a square missing from your variance formula.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Editing graphs and code&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edits should rarely replace someone's graph&lt;/strong&gt;. But here is a further  situation where that does seems right: when presented with a very crude hand-drawn graph that someone has scanned or photographed, you may  without loss be able to do a much better job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Any editing of code should be done with caution&lt;/strong&gt;, especially if incorrect or inappropriate code may be part of the problem. In such cases answers should explain and suggest ways to improve or correct the code. There are limited exceptions. For example, long lines of code are awkward or annoying to read if they require horizontal scrolling. Editing the code to fit within the visible question window -- using any essentially cosmetic change -- is a small public service. You can also insert blank lines to divide the code into smaller coherent blocks. But you need to be sure that your edits do not change the meaning of the code or affect whether it runs as written. When in doubt, do not touch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Appendix: common statistics typos&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a list of some common typos arising in statistical literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seekers of &lt;em&gt;causal&lt;/em&gt; links should never be &lt;em&gt;casual&lt;/em&gt; in reading proofs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Software: Proprietary names include MS Excel, MATLAB (although to avoid shouting Matlab is, IMHO, good practice) and emphatically Stata (not STATA).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The following statisticians' and scientists' surnames end with &amp;quot;s&amp;quot;, so watch out.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus whatever is&#xA;attributed to them is tagged with (e.g.) Jeffreys or Jeffreys', but not&#xA;Jeffrey's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frank Ephraim Grubbs 1913–2000&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Larry Vernon Hedges&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harold Jeffreys 1891-1989 (not to be confused with William Hamilton Jefferys III 1940=)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Colin Lingwood Mallows 1930-2023&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brian W. Matthews 1938- (Matthews correlation)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John P. Mills fl.1926 (Mills ratio)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Robert Hough Somers 1929-2004 (Somers' &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$d$&lt;/span&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stanley Smith Stevens 1906-1973 (scales of measurement: NOIR)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Herbert Arthur Sturges 1882-1958 (Sturges' rule for histograms)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Samuel Stanley Wilks 1906-1964 (but note Martin Bradbury Wilk 1922-2013)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peter Ross Winters 1929-2018 (Holt-Winters)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frank Yates 1902-1994&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Here are some other surnames that are often mangled in writing.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ole Eiler Barndorff-Nielsen 1935-2022&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Carlo Emilio Bonferroni 1892–1960&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Carl Harald Cramér 1893-1985 (NB accent)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Student 1876-1937 was William Sealy Gosset (not Gossett)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Richard A. Leibler 1914-2003 (not Liebler)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;George Pólya 1887-1985 (NB accent)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alfréd Rényi 1921-1970 (NB accents)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Henry Scheffé 1907-1977 (NB accent)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gideon Schwarz 1933-2007 (not Schwartz) (BIC)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hermann Amandus Schwarz 1843-1921 (not Schwartz) (Cauchy-Schwarz)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leonard Henry Caleb Tippett 1902–1985 (not Tippet)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bernard Lewis Welch 1911-1989 but Roy Elmer Welsch 1943-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frank Wilcoxon 1892–1965 (not Wilcox or Wilcoxin)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Charles P. Winsor 1895-1951 (not Windsor; hence Winsorize not Windsorize)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some people cited in statistics share surnames. Were they relatives?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bernoulli family. There were lots of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Playfair family. John Playfair (1748-1819) was brother of William&#xA;Playfair (1759-1823).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pearson family. Karl Pearson (1857-1936) was father of Egon Sharpe Pearson (1896-1980).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coxes. Gertrude Mary Cox (1900-1978) was unrelated to David Roxbee Cox&#xA;(1924-2022).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kendalls. Maurice George Kendall (1907-1983) was unrelated to David George Kendall (1918-2007).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some bad Greek and Latin is common.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;polychotomous&amp;quot; is bad Greek, probably arising from a misunderstanding&#xA;of &amp;quot;dichotomous&amp;quot;, which is &amp;quot;dicho&amp;quot; + &amp;quot;tomous&amp;quot;, not &amp;quot;di&amp;quot; + &amp;quot;chotomous&amp;quot;.&#xA;&amp;quot;polytomous&amp;quot; is better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One criterion, two or more criteria. So never &amp;quot;a criteria&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;data&amp;quot; in Latin means &amp;quot;given things&amp;quot; and is a plural. What this implies&#xA;for modern languages is discussable. See also comments below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;strata&amp;quot; in Latin is another plural. &amp;quot;stratum&amp;quot; is the singular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people want to insist that &amp;quot;heteroskedastic&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;homoskedastic&amp;quot;&#xA;are the correct spellings. (There was no &amp;quot;c&amp;quot; in ancient Greek.) This&#xA;argument was published in &lt;em&gt;Econometrica&lt;/em&gt;.  Oddly enough, the spellings&#xA;&amp;quot;heteroscedastic&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;homoscedastic&amp;quot; are due to Karl Pearson, who was&#xA;no enemy of &amp;quot;k&amp;quot;; he changed his own name from Carl and founded the&#xA;journal &lt;em&gt;Biometrika&lt;/em&gt;. Fans of &amp;quot;k&amp;quot; should promise to write of&#xA;mikroekonomics and makroekonomics on the grounds that all the pertinent&#xA;roots of those words are all Greek too. See an entire dedicated thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/153526/why-are-there-two-spellings-of-heteroskedastic-or-heteroscedastic&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Finally, here is some not yet idiomatic English (prejudices ahead).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The expressions &amp;quot;a data&amp;quot; (to mean a dataset) and &amp;quot;a code&amp;quot; (to mean a&#xA;program) are not yet part of standard English. They are already&#xA;collectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using &amp;quot;skew&amp;quot; to mean &amp;quot;bias&amp;quot; is unfortunate, but general English usage has shifted strongly that way in recent years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the grey area between statistical terms we know (and sometimes love) and uses or abuses of the same words within and beyond statistics and science, see also the thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/202879/what-misused-statistical-terms-are-worth-correcting&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2024-03-14T00:26:17.630" LastActivityDate="2024-03-14T00:26:17.630" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2816" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2824" CreationDate="2015-11-22T13:59:32.080" Score="8" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;Somebody has just created &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/correlation-matrix&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;correlation-matrix&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;correlation-matrix&lt;/a&gt; tag by posting this  question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/182875&quot;&gt;Is every correlation matrix positive definite?&lt;/a&gt; Previously this tag did not exist, but of course there is well over a hundred older threads that could in principle be meaningfully tagged with it. I wonder if it is a good tag to have around, and if so, whether it should be slowly &quot;propagated backwards&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that we do have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/covariance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;covariance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;covariance&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/covariance-matrix&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;covariance-matrix&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;covariance-matrix&lt;/a&gt;, but only used to have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/correlation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;correlation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;correlation&lt;/a&gt; until now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2015-11-26T13:02:28.847" Title="Somebody has accidentally created [correlation-matrix] tag; what to do with it?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2817" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-11-22T14:35:51.020" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;The Death of Meta Tags&lt;/a&gt; for the official party line on meta tags, and the broader category of &quot;dependent&quot; tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: excerpt and wiki adapted from the main &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/meta-tags/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-11-23T00:11:25.393" LastActivityDate="2015-11-23T00:11:25.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2818" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-11-22T14:35:51.020" Score="0" Body="Meta tags are tags which describe something other than the question's content -- such as the author's skill level, the type of a post (e.g. big-lists, self-study), etc. Alternatively, they may be ill-defined concepts which make consistent application of the tag difficult or impossible." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-11-23T00:11:10.473" LastActivityDate="2015-11-23T00:11:10.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2819" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-24T10:45:54.780" Score="7" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes there are simple questions, often by newcomers, that could be answered by a one-liner (e.g. &quot;What method to use for my data?&quot;). In most such cases I provide a &lt;em&gt;comment&lt;/em&gt; rather than answer since it seems to be more consistent with the general answering policy. However, often such one-liners are helpful and seem to be enough for OP. Would you consider converting such comments to answers as a good or bad practice? The answers would be low quality, but in many cases would get approved (= more closed threads). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some recent examples:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/183316/correlation-values-arent-significant-but-the-coeficients-of-regression-are&quot;&gt;Correlation values aren&amp;#39;t significant but the coefficients of regression are&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/183307/what-test-should-i-use-to-explain-a-natural-phenomenon-in-three-variables&quot;&gt;What test should I use to explain a natural phenomenon in three variables?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases comments &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be possibly turned into answers and would probably get approved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice we often have not enough manpower (and we are lazy) to answer the simple questions. This produces thousands of unanswered simple questions, many of them that received some comments (basically, see any of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/unanswered&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/unanswered&lt;/a&gt; - most have on-topic comments, often helpful). In many cases lazy comment-one-liner is the only thing that OP receives on this site. The question is: is it better to provide them, even if low quality, as answers or leave as they are?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2019-02-15T21:35:58.940" LastActivityDate="2019-02-15T21:36:21.977" Title="Converting comment to answer in simple questions. Good practice?" Tags="|discussion|answers|policy|comment|new-users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2819" CreationDate="2015-11-24T11:45:34.417" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as the question is on-topic, not duplicate and well posed, answering with comments is a bad practice, because it can leave the post officially unanswered, which is bad for our site statistics. Also, the comment can't be voted down (likewise, if it is a correct answer the author will not receive credits for it; which is also bad). Moreover, regarding good content, an answer posted as comment will not have the visibility it would have if it was posted in the answer box, which is bad because future readers might overlook it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is always the possibility to expand the one line answer with an example, a complement covering other possible situations, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below, there are CV meta related questions which are worth reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2641/etiquette-for-answering-old-questions-addressed-in-comments&quot;&gt;Etiquette for answering old questions addressed in comments?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/832/comments-that-are-actually-answers#comment2366_832&quot;&gt;Comments that are actually answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/gis/query/983514/unanswered-questions-with-answers-in-comments-per-tag&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a query in Stack Exchange Data Explorer (SEDE) to help finding unanswered questions answered in comments (in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://gis.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5030/finding-questions-which-are-answered-in-comments/5031#5031&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; I write about options on how to proceed with them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2019-02-15T21:36:21.977" LastActivityDate="2019-02-15T21:36:21.977" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2821" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-11-24T16:32:51.683" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for any inquiries about the deletion of tags, including the process and etiquette of their deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related links:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/19753&quot;&gt;How can we get rid of misspelled and unused (or &quot;zombie&quot;) tags?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/176361&quot;&gt;Why did the [homework] tag get nuked instead of letting the community clean it up?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; Reference: imported excerpt and adapted wiki from the main &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/tag-deletion/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-11-26T16:05:42.430" LastActivityDate="2015-11-26T16:05:42.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2822" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-11-24T16:32:51.683" Score="0" Body="For questions about the process and etiquette of deleting existing tags." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-11-26T16:05:45.130" LastActivityDate="2015-11-26T16:05:45.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2816" CreationDate="2015-11-26T13:02:28.847" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;After the brief discussion in the comments above, I wrote a tag wiki excerpt for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/correlation-matrix&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;correlation-matrix&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;correlation-matrix&lt;/a&gt; and tagged a dozen of old threads with it, where it seemed the most appropriate. So it seems the tag is here to stay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2015-11-26T13:02:28.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2736" CreationDate="2015-11-27T14:21:19.450" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @Scortchi said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The most important thing is making your question clear &amp;amp; interesting to as many users as you can. Pay especial attention to the title &amp;amp; to selecting a variety of relevant tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; post specifically written to help users asking clear and  good questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1479/how-to-ask-a-good-question-on-crossvalidated&quot;&gt;How to ask a &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; question on CrossValidated?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@whuber still provides further guidance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...one should attempt to ask a question as briefly as possible. I suspect that any time a question exceeds one page, it will lose a majority of potential readers unless it is so engagingly asked and illustrated that people really enjoy reading through it. Even if one feel that offering many details is necessary, ask a question at the outset so that people know what it's about, whether they are interested in it, and whether they might be able to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another reference to read (from the main Meta Stack Exchange) is: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8010/how-can-i-get-answers-fast&quot;&gt;How can I get answers fast?&lt;/a&gt;, which is in accordance to what was already said here. An extra point I'd like to emphasize from there is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Keep refining/editing your questions until they are perfect.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;specially if someone leaves a comment asking for clarifications; respond to it as fast as you can (i.e., not only respond in the comments, but edit the question to clarify it too).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2015-11-27T14:32:14.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2826" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2827" CreationDate="2015-11-28T20:10:03.180" Score="0" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the low answer rate on CV (&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites#&quot;&gt;62% based on current information&lt;/a&gt;) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1365/cross-validated-voting-improvement-and-community-development&quot;&gt;discussions thereof&lt;/a&gt;, would it be possible to build a easy system to categorize questions, such that it becomes clear why they may not be answered &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; to make it worthwhile to answer them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize there is a system to flag questions in the form of closing/migrating questions as duplicate/low quality/other site, etc., but there is no option to flag a question as unlikely to be answered because it is a huge amount of time and effort and hardly worth it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where questions are classified as difficult or specialized, there should be an inherent bounty to encourage people to answer hard questions that are likely to garner only a handful of votes.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i.e. it would be nice if it was worth people's time to answer questions that are likely to have low traffic (and therefore up votes) due to specialization or difficulty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60822" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2015-11-30T10:11:33.727" Title="Nearly 40% of questions on Cross Validated are unanswered, is there a way to improve this?" Tags="|feature-request|answers|flagging|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2826" CreationDate="2015-11-28T22:03:55.227" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is out of our control: it would have to be implemented SE-wide by the developers.  In addition, it is intrinsic to the SE system.  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/50/tenacious&quot;&gt;tenacious&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/51/unsung-hero&quot;&gt;unsung hero&lt;/a&gt; badges exist in part to incentivize / reward users who answer lower visibility questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as creating a scheme to categorize threads and identify threads that are on less popular / more esoteric topics, the tag system is intended to do that  (although I certainly believe it requires constant maintenance to serve that role well).   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a particular thread that you believe will be of value, but will be more difficult to answer, and may not be sufficiently rewarded, you can place a bounty.  (An alternative, given that you may not have enough reputation right now to place a lot of bounties, is to mention it in chat.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2015-11-30T10:11:33.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2829" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2832" CreationDate="2015-11-29T00:44:11.100" Score="5" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been very slow about it, but in relation to this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1710/issue-with-students-t-tag&quot;&gt;Issue with [students-t] tag&lt;/a&gt;, I have finally re-tagged them all (bar the last couple which I will take care of after a suitable interval from my last few retags, perhaps later today) to either [t-test] or [t-distribution].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the best action to take with the empty tag? The linked question suggests making it a synonym of [t-test] (and I don't object to that if that's seen as a good option by people other than myself) but I wonder if that's really the best option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a lot of the uses of it since that post were [t-distribution] (perhaps near to half) and I think that mislabeling a [t-test] question with [t-distribution]&#xA;is slightly less bad than the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another alternative would be to ban the tag (on meta and meta.SO they talk about &lt;strike&gt;burninating&lt;/strike&gt;* blacklisting tags). I think this is less easy to achieve but may be worth considering pursuing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have an opinion please consider putting it as an answer, to enable voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*sorry, I used the wrong word there. I meant making it so nobody can recreate it or we'll be killing it again in a few months.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/burninate-request/info&quot;&gt;burninate-request&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It stands for simple deletion of a tag. Burninating tags does not imply that they will be merged with another tag, synonymized with another tag, or blacklisted altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/blacklist-request/info&quot;&gt;blacklist-request&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag is used in requests for adding one or more tags to the blacklist, preventing them from ever being recreated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Blacklisting a tag removes all occurrences of it from the target site and prevents anyone from ever using that tag again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags must be &amp;quot;quite bad&amp;quot; to be blacklisted. Generally, these are tags that could never convey any useful information or are actively harmful to the site. Because of the potential consequences of getting something wrong, only the dev team is able to add tags to a site's blacklist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if there's a consensus that the tag is horrible and needs to be made not-recreatable, we can request that (even then it may not happen, it depends on how bad the tag is understood to be).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T00:29:17.900" Title="What's the best thing to do with the [student's-t] tag now?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-deletion|blacklist-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2829" CreationDate="2015-11-29T01:58:06.857" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Update:&lt;/em&gt; If the tag is automatically destroyed after 24 hours without a thread (see @amoeba's comments above), it isn't clear that anything needs to be done.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;Because it seems likely to lead to some mis-taggings regardless of which tag it is made a synonym of, I would lean towards 'blacklisting' as the safest option.&lt;/strike&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2015-11-29T22:54:12.260" LastActivityDate="2015-11-29T22:54:12.260" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2829" CreationDate="2015-11-30T00:30:22.497" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;One reason &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/students-t&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;students-t&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;students-t&lt;/a&gt; can potentially keep reappearing is that it starts with &quot;Student&quot;. We don't have any other tags starting with this word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So instead of blacklisting this tag, I suggest to create &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/students-t-test&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;students-t-test&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;students-t-test&lt;/a&gt; as a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/t-test&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;t-test&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;t-test&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/students-t-distribution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;students-t-distribution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;students-t-distribution&lt;/a&gt; as a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/t-distribution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;t-distribution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;t-distribution&lt;/a&gt;. Then whoever starts typing &quot;student...&quot; in the tag field will get these two suggestions and will be likely to use one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2015-12-22T00:29:17.900" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T00:29:17.900" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2833" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-11-30T11:32:58.750" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Blacklisting a tag removes all occurrences of it from the target site and prevents anyone from ever using that tag again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags must be &quot;quite bad&quot; to be blacklisted. Generally, these are tags that could &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; convey any useful information or are actively harmful to the site. Because of the potential consequences of getting something wrong, only the dev team is able to add tags to a site's blacklist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;The Death of Meta Tags&lt;/a&gt; for a discussion of what makes a tag good or bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: import excerpt and wiki from the main &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/blacklist-request/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-11-30T16:50:29.407" LastActivityDate="2015-11-30T16:50:29.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2834" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-11-30T11:32:58.750" Score="0" Body="This tag is used in requests for adding one or more tags to the blacklist, preventing them from ever being recreated." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-11-30T16:50:23.910" LastActivityDate="2015-11-30T16:50:23.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2835" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-30T18:23:29.613" Score="5" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a question with a +50 bounty and I realized I would like to add to that bounty to attract even more attention to it. As far as I understand that is not currently possible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is a worthy new feature which adds to one's ability to add attention to other people's questions (not too different than placing the first bounty on someone else's post)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ADDED&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as per @gung comment, here is the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/183834/effect-size-and-bootstrapping-in-paired-t-test&quot;&gt;Effect size and bootstrapping in paired t-test&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8226" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T11:13:33.827" Title="Adding bounty to an already bountied question" Tags="|feature-request|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2835" CreationDate="2015-11-30T18:33:51.100" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;That seems reasonable, but it is beyond our control; it would have to be adopted by the developers.  You could ask on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;meta.SE&lt;/a&gt; (but also note that they keep tabs on site metas to stay aware of requests like this).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note however, that you can always add a bounty after the existing bounty has expired / been awarded.  The rules are that you may be required to add a bounty twice as large as the first (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;).  This may have a greater effect of attracting more attention to the thread though, in that it would reside on the featured list for twice as long in addition to the higher bounty level.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2015-11-30T18:33:51.100" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2838" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2841" CreationDate="2015-12-01T12:56:42.453" Score="6" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/wlln&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;wlln&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;wlln&lt;/a&gt;. Could you guess what does it stand for..? It has only 11 questions while the topic is pretty broad -- so I guess it is probably used less often than needed. Its name is hard to search if you do not know that it exists, so it is probably useless. Maybe it should be renamed or merged with other tag that has more informative name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-12-01T16:37:30.657" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T15:16:54.537" Title="Should we do something with [wlln] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2838" CreationDate="2015-12-01T13:08:05.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've made &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/wlln&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;wlln&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;wlln&lt;/a&gt; a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weak-law-of-large-numbers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weak-law-of-large-numbers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weak-law-of-large-numbers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2015-12-01T13:08:05.143" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2838" CreationDate="2015-12-01T13:08:54.780" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Could you guess what does it stand for..?&quot; -- yes, easily, since it's a common abbreviation for a standard term. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the fact that many of us here would know shouldn't be the test. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a technical issue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While &lt;code&gt;weak-law-of-large-numbers&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; fits in the character limit for tags, &lt;code&gt;strong-law-of-large-numbers&lt;/code&gt; would not. As such, Scortchi's suggestion of a synonym makes sense - since we can cut off the longer tag at 25 characters and then when someone starts typing it - it would bring up the shorter one which would remap to &lt;code&gt;slln&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, I think the long terms need to be synonyms of the short ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2015-12-01T13:14:47.713" LastActivityDate="2015-12-01T13:14:47.713" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2838" CreationDate="2015-12-01T18:36:29.643" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 3:&lt;/strong&gt; Re-tagging finished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2:&lt;/strong&gt; I wrote a wiki excerpt for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/law-of-large-numbers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;law-of-large-numbers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;law-of-large-numbers&lt;/a&gt;, put it on several most prominent old questions, and have now started retagging &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/wlln&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;wlln&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;wlln&lt;/a&gt; into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; While this remains not implemented since December (!), &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/law-of-large-numbers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;law-of-large-numbers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;law-of-large-numbers&lt;/a&gt; has been created by somebody in June &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/220775&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and was by now used 4 times. The answer below is updated accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no tag on CV for the strong law of large numbers. Moreover, it seems that there is not enough questions about various laws of large numbers to warrant two different tags for the strong and the weak laws:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aquestion+%22law+of+large+numbers%22&quot;&gt;is:question &quot;law of large numbers&quot;&lt;/a&gt; -- 62 results&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aquestion+%22law+of+large+numbers%22+score%3A5&quot;&gt;is:question &quot;law of large numbers&quot; score:5&lt;/a&gt; -- only 14 results&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aquestion+%22strong+law+of+large+numbers%22&quot;&gt;is:question &quot;strong law of large numbers&quot;&lt;/a&gt; -- 12 results&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aquestion+%22weak+law+of+large+numbers%22&quot;&gt;is:question &quot;weak law of large numbers&quot;&lt;/a&gt; -- 19 results&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The total number of threads that could possibly be tagged with any of the related tags is probably well below 50 (with probably only 10-20 &quot;notable&quot; questions). That's not that many. And currently these questions are not united by any tag at all, which is a pity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I would therefore suggest to use the generic tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/law-of-large-numbers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;law-of-large-numbers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;law-of-large-numbers&lt;/a&gt; as the only tag for all these questions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T15:16:54.537" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2842" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2845" CreationDate="2015-12-02T10:46:24.090" Score="7" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/causality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;causality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;causality&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/causal-inference&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;causal-inference&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;causal-inference&lt;/a&gt; that seem identical or at least closely related -- aren't they? Reviewing the posts tagged by both tags shows that there is not much difference between them. Maybe they should be merged? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2015-12-02T17:32:01.960" LastActivityDate="2015-12-11T11:28:07.253" Title="Are [causality] and [causal-inference] tags the same?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2843" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-02T13:27:28.960" Score="10" ViewCount="361" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is it that CrossValidated requires homework or the like to be tagged w/ &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt;, but Math SE did away w/ homework tag a long time ago? Why don't the arguments for no more homework tag in Math SE apply to CV? Why not treat all questions on CV the way self-study questions are treated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Math SE arguments for not having homework tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2012/one-of-my-students-may-be-getting-math-se-to-do-their-homework/16759#16759&quot;&gt;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2012/one-of-my-students-may-be-getting-math-se-to-do-their-homework/16759#16759&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14981/homework-tag-should-be-deprecated-votings-over-you-wont-believe-what-won&quot;&gt;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14981/homework-tag-should-be-deprecated-votings-over-you-wont-believe-what-won&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4154/a-consolidated-homework-policy/4160#4160&quot;&gt;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4154/a-consolidated-homework-policy/4160#4160&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1652/what-do-we-do-with-users-who-post-numerous-unlabeled-homework-questions/1661#1661&quot;&gt;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1652/what-do-we-do-with-users-who-post-numerous-unlabeled-homework-questions/1661#1661&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2012/one-of-my-students-may-be-getting-math-se-to-do-their-homework/2015#2015&quot;&gt;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2012/one-of-my-students-may-be-getting-math-se-to-do-their-homework/2015#2015&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2012/one-of-my-students-may-be-getting-math-se-to-do-their-homework/2021#2021&quot;&gt;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2012/one-of-my-students-may-be-getting-math-se-to-do-their-homework/2021#2021&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44339" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:22.773" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T11:44:35.800" Title="Why do Cross Validated and Math SE have different policies for homework questions?" Tags="|discussion|tags|policy|homework|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2843" CreationDate="2015-12-02T15:37:08.990" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Statistical questions are unlike mathematical questions.&lt;/strong&gt;  On the math site, a question will quickly be closed if it is not immediately clear what it means and what it is asking.  All other questions on that site might as well be textbook questions--there is really no basis for distinction, not even the level of sophistication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our community has learned to work within the SE framework to help people articulate the questions they come with.  These questions typically are vague, ill-formed, use non-technical language, and often are laden with inherent contradictions and misunderstandings.  It is remarkable that we can elicit an answerable question from most of these posts--and that makes our site uniquely valuable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, a question that is quoted from a textbook, test, or homework set is not the norm, for two salient reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It usually has been clearly and precisely framed in technical language.  It requires little or no context to understand and often needs only routine application of purely mathematical operations or elementary statistical thinking for its solution--all of which likely have been illustrated many hundreds or thousands of times in similar threads that vary only in minor details.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is almost never a &lt;em&gt;real world problem,&lt;/em&gt; which is specifically the kind of problem people are invited to pose on this site.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;The two-minute tour&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Get answers to practical, detailed questions. &lt;strong&gt;Focus on questions about an actual problem you have faced.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Emphasis added.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second point is dispositive: it suggests that the artificial, unrealistic, naive kinds of questions typically posed as homework and tests really don't belong here at all.  Perhaps we should redirect them all to the math site, but because we share an interest in the statistical interpretation, we not only tolerate them here, we even welcome them when they invite clear, illuminating, clever, and well-articulated solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2015-12-02T15:56:02.353" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2842" CreationDate="2015-12-02T17:34:18.410" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I read your question I first wanted to comment pointing out a possible difference in meaning between these two tags. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then I looked at what questions are tagged with each of them, and I actually see no difference at all. &lt;strong&gt;It's a mess!&lt;/strong&gt; Given this random usage, I agree that the tags should better be merged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/causality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;causality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;causality&lt;/a&gt; (35) $\leftarrow$ &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/causal-inference&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;causal-inference&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;causal-inference&lt;/a&gt; (225)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though the second tag has many more threads, most of them are actually about &quot;causality&quot; in general and not about some specific inference procedures. I have written a brief wiki excerpt for &lt;code&gt;[causality]&lt;/code&gt;, so the merge is ready to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2015-12-11T11:28:07.253" LastActivityDate="2015-12-11T11:28:07.253" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2843" CreationDate="2015-12-04T12:40:01.743" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why not treat all questions on CV the way self-study questions are treated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People come to CV to get real help on real problems, and they often succeed. I don't see why we should stop providing this help and instead start just giving hints and observing how the asker is progressing with the help of the hints (which is how I understand your suggestion of treating all questions as self-study). It would take much more time for those who are answering and would also take valuable time from those who did not come here to dig deep into statistics but who just need an expert's advice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. if I am writing an academic paper and just need a quick clarification of some technique that is not central to my topic, should I spend all the time being educated hint-by-hint how this technique really works? If I had infinite time, then it might be worth it, but everyone has to prioritize. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly prefer the system as it is working now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2015-12-05T11:44:35.800" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T11:44:35.800" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2848" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2851" CreationDate="2015-12-04T16:02:24.267" Score="6" ViewCount="526" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find tag wiki excerpts &lt;em&gt;extremely&lt;/em&gt; useful, much more so than full wikis (I doubt that many people ever come across full wikis because SE design buries them quite deep).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I write wiki excerpts I have been trying to put as much information in it as possible given the strict limit of 460 characters. If a wiki excerpt is much shorter than that, I usually try to expand it until it reaches the maximal capacity, because that's how I believe it will be most useful. When I mouse-over a tag I prefer to get &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; information and not &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I have very recently written tag wiki excerpts for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/elastic-net&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;elastic-net&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;elastic-net&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/total-least-squares&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;total-least-squares&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;total-least-squares&lt;/a&gt;; both approach this hard length limit and both were approved by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today I rewrote tag wiki excerpt for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/distance-covariance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;distance-covariance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;distance-covariance&lt;/a&gt;, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/177139/revisions&quot;&gt;my edit was edited&lt;/a&gt; and strongly shortened by @whuber with the comment &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Excerpt was too long: moved excess material to the wiki itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am unhappy about it because the excess material moved to the main wiki will be seen by almost nobody, whereas in the excerpt I think it could be useful. &lt;strong&gt;I thought that there can't be such thing as &quot;too long&quot; an excerpt:&lt;/strong&gt; the upper limit is given by the 460 allowed characters, and any length below that is not too long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the optimal length of tag wiki excerpts? What is the appropriate level of detail? The more detailed the better (as I thought)? Or the more concise the better (as per @whuber's comment)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2017-05-19T22:18:22.240" Title="What is the optimal length &amp; level of detail of tag wiki excerpts?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-excerpt|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2848" CreationDate="2015-12-04T16:34:22.197" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd go for the more concise the better, to increase the chance people actually read the tag wiki excerpt before using the tag &amp;amp; perhaps therefore use it correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The usage guidance, or tag wiki excerpt, is a short blurb that&#xA;  describes when and why a tag should be used on this site specifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mousing over a tag &amp;amp; reading the excerpt involves deciphering tiny white text on a grey background while simultaneously maintaining the cursor positioned over a small grey box. This aren't circumstances conducive to learning what distance covariance is; but to quickly checking what the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/distance-covariance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;distance-covariance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;distance-covariance&lt;/a&gt; tag is for, &amp;amp; what it's not for: I, for one, am grateful for brevity. When adding a tag to a question, you're presented with a box containing six tag wiki excerpts, which is updated as you type: concise excerpts aid a speedy choice of the correct tag. If 460 characters is a wise maximum bound it doesn't follow that approaching 460 is an optimum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the full wiki is buried very deep&amp;mdash;it's one click away from the excerpt pop-up&amp;mdash;, &amp;amp; it's the right place to read, in comfort, a fuller explanation of what the tag refers to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2015-12-05T14:14:46.157" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T14:14:46.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2848" CreationDate="2015-12-04T17:30:23.303" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will post my own answer so that we could have some sort of voting here. I am obviously for detailed excerpts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After my post, @whuber edited all excerpts that I mentioned to shorten them drastically. Here are the edits so that people can compare which version they prefer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/elastic-net&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;elastic-net&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;elastic-net&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/184175/revisions&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/184175/revisions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/total-least-squares&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;total-least-squares&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;total-least-squares&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/184871/revisions&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/184871/revisions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/distance-covariance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;distance-covariance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;distance-covariance&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/177139/revisions&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/177139/revisions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find that shortening e.g. the first excerpt from &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A regularization method for regression models that penalizes the size of regression coefficients $\beta_i$ and biases them towards zero. Elastic net includes two penalty terms, one proportional to $\sum |\beta_i|$ and another proportional to $\sum \beta_i^2$. When used alone, these penalty terms lead to Lasso regression and ridge regression respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A regularization method for regression models.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;makes it useless. Lasso, ridge, and elastic net could have exactly the same excerpt then. Honestly, I am baffled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update (May 19, 2017)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other answers (+1 to each) convinced me that conciseness &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; important and made me change my opinion. After all the discussions, we arrived to something like a compromise (but more on the @whuber's side of the spectrum). For &lt;code&gt;[elastic-net]&lt;/code&gt;, the excerpt reads as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A regularization method for regression models that combines the penalties of lasso and of ridge regression. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and by now I agree that this is better than my version above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-05-19T22:18:22.240" LastActivityDate="2017-05-19T22:18:22.240" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2848" CreationDate="2015-12-04T18:38:49.437" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like @Scortchi and @whuber, I prefer shorter excerpts.  (Besides aesthetic preference, I suspect they are more likely to be read.)  I think excerpts should mostly proffer tag usage guidance, and that more substantive and detailed information is better placed in the full wiki.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, what is &quot;shorter&quot; exactly?  To some degree &quot;shortness&quot; is in the eye of the beholder.  Moreover, it may not be fully possible for a reader to infer how a tag should be used without a brief note clarifying the nature of the thing in question.  As a result, I don't object to including some of that when: (a) appropriate, (b) made as briefly as possible, and (c) placed after the definition / basic usage.  That is, it would be somewhat less prominent, in what newspaper reporters used to call the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;inverted pyramid style&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put this more concretely, when the question is asked in the abstract, I would have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2849/7290&quot;&gt;responded&lt;/a&gt; as @Scortchi (+1).  Indeed, I have edited excerpts to shorten them and move information into the full wiki.  On the other hand, in the example given in @amoeba's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2850/7290&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;code&gt;[elastic-net]&lt;/code&gt;), I think the excerpt was perfectly appropriate and not excessively long.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As I say, I prefer shorter excerpts, but sometimes some brief information about the topic is necessary to help people could understand how the tag should be used.  For example, I wouldn't find &quot;a regularization method for regression models&quot; helpful for the elastic net, because that is equally descriptive of the LASSO and ridge regression.  Mentioning orthogonal and Demming regression in TLS could help people recognize that it is the tag to use.  Likewise, &quot;a measure of statistical dependence...&quot; is too nonspecific for my taste.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggested text for the three excerpts in question is below.  I do believe that every character you can trim increases the likelihood the excerpt will be read.  That said, I have attempted to retain as much of the informational content as possible.  I will acknowledge that these may need some work before they are posted; I'm not familiar with distance covariance and only somewhat with total least squares.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/elastic-net&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;elastic-net&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;elastic-net&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A regularization method for regression models that shrinks coefficients towards zero. The elastic net combines the penalty terms used for LASSO and ridge regression.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The numbers of characters are 326 (amoeba) &gt; 165 (gung) &gt; 46 (whuber). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/total-least-squares&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;total-least-squares&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;total-least-squares&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A method to fit a linear model by minimizing the errors in both X &amp;amp; Y (OLS minimizes errors in Y only). Orthogonal and Deming regression are special cases of weighted TLS. It is often used when both Y and X have measurement error.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The numbers of characters are 425 (amoeba) &gt; 230 (gung) &gt; 113 (whuber).  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/distance-covariance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;distance-covariance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;distance-covariance&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Distance (aka Brownian) covariance is a measure of statistical dependence between two random vectors of any dimension. DC(X, Y) = 0 iif they are independent. Sample DC is computed via the pairwise distances between all points. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The numbers of characters are 431 (amoeba) &gt; 226 (gung) &gt; 106 (whuber).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update by @amoeba&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following some additional discussion in the comments in this thread, we converged on the following excerpts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A regularization method for regression models that combines the penalties of lasso and of ridge regression. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A technique to estimate parameters $\beta$ of the linear model $Y=X\beta$ when both $Y$ and $X$ are subject to measurement error. Includes Orthogonal and Deming regression as special cases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A measure of dependence between two random variables (or two random vectors of any dimension). Also called Brownian covariance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;109 / 174 / 127 chars. I am accepting this answer as this level of detail roughly seems to be the consensus. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-05-19T19:05:51.850" LastActivityDate="2017-05-19T19:05:51.850" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2848" CreationDate="2015-12-04T18:45:17.860" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The purpose of a Wiki excerpt is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to supply as full and complete a definition as you can.  &lt;em&gt;It is to help people apply tags appropriately&lt;/em&gt;.  To be effective, the excerpt therefore should:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Be as short as possible, for otherwise it will be ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Be clear about what the tag means--but only to the point of distinguishing it from other possible tags that could reasonably be applied.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Distinguish it from related tags.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Provide guidance concerning how the tag is intended to be used (or not used).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some of the more effective examples, read the excerpts for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;r&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;r&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/clustering&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;clustering&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;clustering&lt;/a&gt; tags.  (To fully appreciate how those excerpts will appear, you will need to find a page on the main site that displays a tag--which can be done by clicking through the links in the preceding sentence--and hovering your mouse over the tag wherever it appears.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I warmly encourage qualified community members to review tags in subjects you are interested in, to create or modify their excerpts to meet these objectives, and--if you are so inspired--to supply additional information in the tag wiki itself.  If you want to write a review of a subject, though, then please consider our blog page: it's a much better alternative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2015-12-04T18:45:17.860" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2854" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2861" CreationDate="2015-12-06T00:00:24.130" Score="11" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering if we need the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/basic-concepts&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;basic-concepts&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;basic-concepts&lt;/a&gt; tag (221 threads). It looks like an archetypal &lt;em&gt;meta tag&lt;/em&gt; to me, and the SE policy is to not tolerate meta tags. We do have some particular exceptions to this rule on CV (such as [self-study]), but [basic-concepts] does not seem to be useful at all: it seems to be used randomly with many hundreds of &quot;basic&quot; questions not having this tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Therefore my suggestion is to eliminate it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that it has a lot of threads. We &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1846/what-could-be-done-with-respect-to-tag-big-list&quot;&gt;have recently manually removed&lt;/a&gt; another meta tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/big-list&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;big-list&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;big-list&lt;/a&gt;, but this involved editing below 40 questions. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2804&quot;&gt;There was a recent question&lt;/a&gt; about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/best-practices&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;best-practices&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;best-practices&lt;/a&gt; with what seems to be a consensus to get rid of this tag; but it has over 60 threads and manual removal will be tedious and annoying (because of bumping to the front page). With &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/basic-concepts&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;basic-concepts&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;basic-concepts&lt;/a&gt; we are talking about 200+ threads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we agree that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/basic-concepts&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;basic-concepts&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;basic-concepts&lt;/a&gt; is useless and should better be removed, can we actually ask SE developers to burninate this tag? SE developers can perform automatic no-bump removal of a tag from all threads; this is called &quot;burninating&quot; a tag. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/239190&quot;&gt;When to burninate&lt;/a&gt; on Meta.SE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You probably shouldn't bother [to remove a tag manually] if there are more than a few dozen questions. [...] For tags that involve large numbers of questions, just flag the burninate-request and leave a note for the mods that the cleanup is done. They'll pass this along to someone like me [SE admin], I'll verify that you didn't lie about the sanity-checking and cleanup, click a button, and it'll be like the tag never existed...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have re-tagged all the threads that had [basic-concepts] as the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; tag. This tag is now ready to be burninated. &lt;strong&gt;I am putting [burninate-request] tag on this meta thread.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T10:27:41.140" Title="Do we need [basic-concepts] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-deletion|meta-tags|burninate-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2855" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2856" CreationDate="2015-12-06T00:38:21.977" Score="16" ViewCount="278" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1486&quot;&gt;For the fourth year running&lt;/a&gt;, the Stack Exchange team is organizing a &quot;Winter Bash&quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;  Users earn &quot;hats&quot; for their gravatars by completing novel tasks (analogous to badges). Certain specific actions will trigger access to a (graphical) hat, which their gravatar can then &quot;wear&quot; at the user's option. Users will be able to see all the hats they've earned on &lt;a href=&quot;http://winterbash2015.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://winterbash2015.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;. That site will also have an FAQ to explain how things work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This event will run from 14 December 2015 to 03 January 2016. Individuals who don’t want to participate, don’t want to see hats, or are generally anti-hat will have an &quot;I hate hats&quot; option available (which will cause you not to see hats at all). The only visual change to the site itself will be the presence of the hats and the &quot;I hate hats&quot; button in the footer. Participation on one site does not affect accounts on other SE sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two answers aim to collect votes for a community poll: &lt;strong&gt;Please, indicate whether you think Cross Validated should participate in this event or not&lt;/strong&gt; (1 vote per user). Responses from the community are due by December 10.  Moderators will inform the SE team of our collective decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since results are effectively &quot;due&quot; about now (in fact this year we only need to say anything if the answer is no), I'm removing the &quot;featured&quot; tag now. People are still free to vote but I think the opinion is clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2015-12-10T03:19:00.793" Title="Should Cross Validated participate in the 2015 “Winter Bash”?" Tags="|discussion|participation|winterbash|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2855" CreationDate="2015-12-06T00:38:21.977" Score="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;, Cross Validated should participate in Winter Bash 2015.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2015-12-06T00:38:21.977" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2855" CreationDate="2015-12-06T00:40:24.227" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;, Cross Validated should not participate in Winter Bash 2015.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2015-12-06T00:40:24.227" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2854" CreationDate="2015-12-06T12:21:23.283" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not view that tag as problematic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I accept that it is a bit of a &quot;&lt;em&gt;how long is a piece of string&lt;/em&gt;&quot; type of tag but I can see that some newcomers might find it helpful. Especially when browsing the site for old answers and threads this can be a helpful tag. The fact that people use it (you mention 200+ threads) adds to its perceived utility by some. As every tag it has its misuses where users clearly ask involved questions that would never fit in a basic Probability or Statistics class (eg. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/44511/is-glmm-correct-for-data-with-several-binary-outcome-variables-per-subject&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) but in some other cases it makes some sense (eg. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/145444/fairness-of-a-coin&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me point out that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/basic-concepts&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;basic-concepts&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;basic-concepts&lt;/a&gt; is different from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/beginner&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;beginner&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;beginner&lt;/a&gt;. A basic concept is something that is fundamental to Statistics and/or Probability. A question on Fiducial inference for example could very well be a basic concept that a beginner would find totally unapproachable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11852" LastEditorUserId="11852" LastEditDate="2015-12-07T14:27:50.747" LastActivityDate="2015-12-07T14:27:50.747" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2859" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-12-06T13:23:48.430" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Winter Bash&lt;/strong&gt; is a special celebration that typically runs from December 15th until January 4th each winter (2012, 2013, 2014, and almost certainly beyond).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users who participate earn hats for their avatar, via various acts on Cross Validated SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported excerpt and adapted wiki from the main &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/winterbash/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-12-06T17:35:26.297" LastActivityDate="2015-12-06T17:35:26.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2860" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-12-06T13:23:48.430" Score="0" Body="For general questions about the Winter Bash (or holiday hats) celebration at the end of the year." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2015-12-06T17:35:12.720" LastActivityDate="2015-12-06T17:35:12.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2854" CreationDate="2015-12-06T17:01:01.900" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/basic-concepts&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;basic-concepts&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;basic-concepts&lt;/a&gt; is a meta tag, and our policy is not to have meta tags. See this this 2010 thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/264&quot;&gt;The final death of meta-tags?&lt;/a&gt; (that eliminated &lt;code&gt;[beginner]&lt;/code&gt; tag) and this 2010 blog announcement by Jeff Atwood: &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;The Death of Meta Tags&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/basic-concepts&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;basic-concepts&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;basic-concepts&lt;/a&gt; should go.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with it (as with most meta tags) is that there is no clear scope. Which concepts are basic enough to warrant this tag? Which are not? This is entirely subjective, hence the mostly random usage of this tag (leading to it not being helpful). This is contrast with subject-matter tags such as &lt;code&gt;[regression]&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;[clustering]&lt;/code&gt; which do have clear scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 13 Nov 2017:&lt;/strong&gt; The tag has been eliminated by @kjetilbhalvorsen. Thanks! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite multiple requests in chat and on Meta to burninate this tag, none of the mods was willing to help. So the tag was manually killed flooding the front-page with 100+ posts over the course of the weekend. I find this spectacularly ineffective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-11-13T10:27:41.140" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T10:27:41.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2863" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-08T17:58:03.260" Score="8" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know there is no Stack Exchange site for discussing career decision questions 'in general' but it would be nice to have this for the field of methodology and statistics. Many people are looking cross-entry from other fields, especially in the context of 'big' data science. Statistics is a very open field in general and a forum to exchange about directions and paths may be useful for many.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Cross Validated an appropriate place to ask such questions or where else may these questions (e.g., 'how can I transfer into the field of statistics from being an economist at xyz') be posed? Is there a different place I am not aware of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24515" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2015-12-09T23:54:09.320" LastActivityDate="2015-12-09T23:54:09.320" Title="Is Cross Validated an appropriate place to ask advice on career development questions in statistics?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|careers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2863" CreationDate="2015-12-08T19:14:07.407" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is CV an appropriate place to ask such questions?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, because the Stack Exchange platform has a policy that questions which seek primarily opinion-based answers are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can visit the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center page&lt;/a&gt; to learn more about which subjects are on topic in this community. I'd also like to recommend the following reading from the help center:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;What types of questions should I avoid asking?&lt;/a&gt; An excerpt of it is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the second question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Where else may these questions (e.g. how can I transfer to field of statistics from being an economist at xyz) be posed?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can ask in the CV's chat room &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/18/ten-fold&quot;&gt;Ten Fold&lt;/a&gt;. However, there you will find a more informal environment and only a few users participating in relation to the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2015-12-08T23:11:40.250" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2869" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-13T21:29:16.080" Score="11" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an announcement rather than a discussion entry. Stuff like that is definitely off-topic on the main site, and while I have reservations regarding the Meta, either, I'd still like to post this opportunity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Government Statistics Section of ASA is sponsoring Data Challenge 2016 to take place at the JSM 2016 meetings.&#xA;The contest is open to anyone who is interested in participating, including college students and professionals&#xA;from the private or public sector. This contest challenges participants to analyze a government dataset using&#xA;statistical and visualization tools and methods. There will be two award categories – Professional and Student.&#xA;One award in the amount of USD 500 will be given for entries in the Professional category. Three awards will be&#xA;given for entries in the Student category. These are $500 for first place, USD300 second place, and USD200 for third&#xA;place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One or more topic-contributed or poster sessions at the 2016 Joint Statistical Meetings will be established for&#xA;contest submissions. (Presenters are responsible for their own JSM registration and travel costs, and any other&#xA;costs associated with JSM attendance.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dataset for the GSS Data Challenge 2016 will be the Department of Transportation’s General Estimates&#xA;System (GES). The GES is collected by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA). GES&#xA;is a representative sample of police-reported motor vehicle crashes of all types. Crashes recorded in the GES&#xA;database must involve at least one motor vehicle traveling on a traffic way, have a corresponding police accident&#xA;report (PAR), and result in property damage, injury, or death. Because GES data are obtained from a probability&#xA;sample of police-reported crashes, each crash included in the database is associated with a sampling weight,&#xA;which can be used to obtain population estimates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The data encompass the years from 1988 to 2013. Contestants are free to use any or all of the data in their&#xA;analysis. Merging data from the GES with other data sets is also encouraged. A link to the website with the data&#xA;and other useful information (data dictionaries, manuals, etc.) is given here: &lt;a href=&quot;ftp://ftp.nhtsa.dot.gov/GES/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ftp://ftp.nhtsa.dot.gov/GES/&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contestants must submit the following to Wendy Martinez (martinez.wendy@bls.gov) by January 4, 2016.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;General description of the proposed research &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Analytic questions to be addressed &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How the General Estimates System (GES) will be used&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Preference for poster or presentation at the JSM 2016 Category&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Professional or Student&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your submissions help us plan for the JSM 2016 program.&#xA;Abstracts are then submitted by the contestant to the ASA for presentation at the JSM&#xA;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amstat.org/meetings/jsm/2016/index.cfm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.amstat.org/meetings/jsm/2016/index.cfm&lt;/a&gt; ). Group submissions are acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full description: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amstat.org/sections/sgovt/datach2016.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.amstat.org/sections/sgovt/datach2016.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastActivityDate="2015-12-13T21:29:16.080" Title="American Statistical Association Government Statistics Section Data Challenge" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2333" CreationDate="2015-12-14T14:55:49.850" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amstat.org/sections/sgovt/datach2016.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/diONp.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Government statistics section 2016 Data Challenge&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastActivityDate="2015-12-14T14:55:49.850" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-12-14T14:55:49.850" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2873" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-18T15:33:26.963" Score="2" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;We maintain &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/793/internet-support-for-statistics-software&quot;&gt;list of web pages, tutorials and help forums about statistical software&lt;/a&gt; that has its own &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2333/community-promotion-ads-2015&quot;&gt;community promotion ad&lt;/a&gt;, in my opinion it is nice idea to explicitly provide such links. But maybe we should go one step further and also create a meta-list of links to different &lt;em&gt;threads about books, online courses and other study materials&lt;/em&gt;. Such questions appear very often and often get duplicated, so maintaining single meta-list could help to build a single references repository similar to the software one. Community promotion ad would make it easier to find such page. This is not exactly consistent with SE policy on long lists etc., but maybe in this case it is not that bad idea..? What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T19:25:43.673" Title="Community promotion ad with books and references" Tags="|discussion|references|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2874" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-12-20T00:41:48.137" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-12-20T00:41:48.137" LastActivityDate="2015-12-20T00:41:48.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2875" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-12-20T00:41:48.137" Score="0" Body="Requests to have a tag &quot;burninated&quot; (or deleted) from the system. Use in case of uncertainty when requesting discussion, or when the popularity of the tag makes manual retagging followed by automatic culling of 0-question tags prohibitively difficult." OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2015-12-20T16:49:42.863" LastActivityDate="2015-12-20T16:49:42.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2876" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2878" CreationDate="2015-12-20T04:42:40.990" Score="1" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about renaming the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/convolution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;convolution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;convolution&lt;/a&gt; tag to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/tags/conv-neural-network/synonyms&quot;&gt;conv-neural-network&lt;/a&gt;, or creating a new &lt;code&gt;[conv-neural-network]&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;[cnn]&lt;/code&gt; tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most questions tagged with convolution are about CNNs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2015-12-21T10:21:03.907" Title="Renaming convolution tag to conv-neural-network, or creating a new conv-neural-network tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2876" CreationDate="2015-12-20T15:48:03.643" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I created a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cnn&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cnn&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cnn&lt;/a&gt; tag, and started retagging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastActivityDate="2015-12-20T15:48:03.643" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2876" CreationDate="2015-12-20T18:04:55.220" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/convolution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;convolution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;convolution&lt;/a&gt; tag currently has no excerpt or full wiki.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say the first thing is to create those.  In particular, the excerpt should (briefly) provide a clear understanding of what convolution &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; (i.e., it isn't a convolutional neural network), and explicitly state that the tag should NOT be used for CNNs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then we should create a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/conv-neural-network&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;conv-neural-network&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;conv-neural-network&lt;/a&gt; tag (and possibly a &lt;code&gt;[cnn]&lt;/code&gt; tag made immediately into a synonym).  Subsequently, there will have to be a process of re-tagging those threads that are actually about CNNs.  It is best to do that 3-4 threads at a time, and when traffic on the site is slower.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2015-12-21T10:21:03.907" LastActivityDate="2015-12-21T10:21:03.907" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2879" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2880" CreationDate="2015-12-23T05:26:02.110" Score="3" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/184380/mathbbes-n-when-s-n-takes-x-1-x-n-or-y-1-y-n&quot;&gt;$\mathbb{E}[S_n]$, when $S_n$ takes $X_1+...+X_n$ or $Y_1+...+Y_n$?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it is the same thing as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/184189/why-does-mathbbe-fracx-1-x-nn-mathbbex&quot;&gt;Why does $\mathbb{E}(\frac{X_1+...+X_n}{n})=\mathbb{E}(X)$?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;because the former involves conditional expectation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44339" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2015-12-23T13:04:49.013" Title="How is this question a dupe?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2879" CreationDate="2015-12-23T07:08:54.993" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it is quite a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course as soon as you apply the law of total expectation to the 50/50 part the expectation of the components are then each answered by that other question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[One might argue that it's a duplicate simply by applying linearity of expectation twice, but I think that's perhaps a bit indirect for a duplicate.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2015-12-23T07:08:54.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2607" CreationDate="2015-12-23T15:48:01.717" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think Open Data SE should be linked to from the “On topic” help center page for the following three reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Public betas are very unlikely to close. &lt;a href=&quot;https://health.meta.stackexchange.com/a/493/43&quot;&gt;Quote&lt;/a&gt; from a moderator: &quot; it's been a long time since Stack Exchange shut down a site that made it to public beta (private betas are different; several of those have failed.&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even if Open Data SE closed, we could move the content on some other sites, and in the meantime the user would have gotten their answer anyway.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's best to redirect the user to some place rather than nothing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:43:14.017" LastActivityDate="2015-12-23T15:48:01.717" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2732" CreationDate="2015-12-31T04:17:54.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One way to communicate &lt;em&gt;feature selection is not a required part of modeling&lt;/em&gt; would be to &lt;strong&gt;present non-trivial use cases wherein feature selection would be detrimental&lt;/strong&gt;, despite its utility in the assessment of variable importance as well as interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71607" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2015-12-31T17:18:13.270" LastActivityDate="2015-12-31T17:18:13.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2884" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2885" CreationDate="2015-12-31T13:44:05.467" Score="4" ViewCount="654" Body="&lt;p&gt;How to get a &lt;code&gt;\permille&lt;/code&gt; (&quot;‰&quot;, or per thousand) sign in MathJax?  For this post &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/52206/binomial-glm-and-different-sample-sizes/188834#188834&quot;&gt;Binomial GLM and different sample sizes&lt;/a&gt;  I need a &lt;code&gt;\permille&lt;/code&gt; sign, or &lt;code&gt;\textperthousand&lt;/code&gt;, but they do not work ... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2015-12-31T19:21:53.733" Title="How to get a \permille perthousand sign in mathjax?" Tags="|support|math-display|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2884" CreationDate="2015-12-31T15:23:13.227" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would $^0\!\!/\!_{00}$ be close enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2015-12-31T15:23:13.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2884" CreationDate="2015-12-31T19:21:53.733" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;An alternative to Glen_b's approach is to use &lt;code&gt;\unicode{x2030}&lt;/code&gt; ($\unicode{x2030}$), but that relies on the reader having local fonts installed that contain the character, and so may not show up for some, and may produce different results for different people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9462" LastActivityDate="2015-12-31T19:21:53.733" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2888" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-02T02:14:28.437" Score="19" ViewCount="574" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I have, in my own biased opinion, an amazing and beautiful answer that was given to a question that was changed so that the answer was eventually made irrelevant.  For the original question, in my personal opinion, it was an excellent answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is it inappropriate to make a new question, based on an earlier version of the original question, and supply my answer as an answer?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;More thoughts:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I really think the answer was a thing of beauty and I put some good time and thought into it.  I have received quite a few up-votes on much simpler answers to the same general topic and I feel that this answer would be valuable to the same audience.  I think that given the nature of the current question, that the answer will never &quot;see light of day&quot; or be found and accessible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE:&lt;/strong&gt; (request for clarification)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If I am going to ask the question, then answer it, how long is a reasonable time to wait for others to answer?  I am committed that if someone else has a reasonable answer to select theirs as best before putting my own answer &quot;into the ring&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22452" LastEditorUserId="22452" LastEditDate="2016-01-08T00:03:35.240" LastActivityDate="2018-11-26T22:56:26.090" Title="A beautiful answer to a question that changed" Tags="|discussion|answers|questions|editing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2888" CreationDate="2016-01-02T06:28:02.160" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have a good answer to a question that's no longer there, it would be a great pity to leave things as they are, rather than have the benefit of your effort available to be easily found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a problem that does come up a fair bit; generally once a good answer to a decent question that was posted appears, the poster should normally do no more than &quot;clean up&quot; the question (small edits); unless the answerer completely misunderstood the original question, the answered question should left asking whatever it was asking before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a number of possibilities here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If nobody has yet answered the current version of the question, it can be rolled back (you can do it or you could flag it I guess). The OP can then ask a new question if they want to ask something different. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If that's not suitable for some reason, you should feel absolutely free to post the old version of the question from the edit history as a new question (you must, however, credit its author and you should link to the original post). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You could write an entirely new question to which your previous answer is an answer; in some cases this may be a better choice.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2018-11-26T22:56:26.090" LastActivityDate="2018-11-26T22:56:26.090" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2890" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2891" CreationDate="2016-01-04T03:37:33.583" Score="3" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please see my comment &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/187564/stochastic-volatility-and-sdes#comment358903_187564&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. I am unable to delete it since the X used to delete it overlaps with the Related question links:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uchsc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uchsc.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way that I can delete the comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46427" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T07:47:58.237" Title="Can't delete previous comment" Tags="|bug|comment|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2016-01-04T07:34:14.703" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can think of a couple of ways...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can flag it and ask us diamond-mods to delete&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can disable MathJax, delete and then enable MathJax.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may also find the formatting sandbox in meta.math.stackexchange to be useful when typing complex mathematics for a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/370/formatting-sandbox&quot;&gt;http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/370/formatting-sandbox&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2016-01-04T07:47:58.237" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T07:47:58.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2892" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2893" CreationDate="2016-01-06T10:04:35.117" Score="20" ViewCount="441" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am curious about your experiences regarding the relationship between time and effort spent on preparing an answer and the number of upvotes it receives. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I do not even have proper data for myself, my subjective impression is that the correlation is, while probably still positive, not strong at all. So, I sometimes get quite a few upvotes on answers that I had considered posting as comments, and sometimes see little to no reaction to answers I had put quite some effort into.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I alone with this? Are there confounders to this relationship?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67799" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2016-01-06T12:04:39.527" LastActivityDate="2016-01-07T12:17:09.877" Title="Correlation between upvotes and effort" Tags="|discussion|answers|votes|participation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2892" CreationDate="2016-01-06T16:53:05.880" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there are several (confounding) factors here.  The biggest, by far, is the number of views a thread gets.  If no one views a given thread, there are obviously no opportunities for people to vote.  Moreover, every view isn't necessarily another actual opportunity for people to vote anyway; many of the views may come from the same people (who may have already voted or decided not to).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of views a thread gets is largely a function of the topic.  It is quite clear that some tags get consistently more views than others.  The title will also make a big difference in whether someone navigates to the tread.  The length / complexity of the question can make a difference as well: when someone lands on the thread and sees that it is going to take some work just to get through the question, they may decide it isn't worth their time (cf., this meta thread: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1382/7290&quot;&gt;Does length of a question influence probability of receiving an answer?&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The correlation between quality and votes isn't zero, however.  There have been a number of answers that I put some effort into, only to receive few votes.  But I have found that those are the answers that continue to accrue upvotes (albeit at a slow rate) over time.  Whereas other answers may have gotten a few upvotes immediately, but then stay at that level forever.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether your posts are getting many upvotes or not, be assured that they contribute to the site and that we appreciate your efforts here.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T16:53:05.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2892" CreationDate="2016-01-06T23:03:26.510" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd agree that there is at best a weak positive correlation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what is effort? It's not just the effort that went into an individual answer. The effort of following the forum over a few years needs to enter the accounting. So effort is obvious short-term effort $+$ whatever long-term effort is pertinent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over time on the forum, you learn at least subconsciously more about what the forum likes, as a collective set of preferences, and so learn a little about what works better. So, you get a little better at planning your effort. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a very partial list, in no particular order, of what helps to get upvotes. (It should be no surprise in a statistical forum that the response of upvotes depends on several covariates.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Writing clearly and fluently, with good command of English and strong self-editing, but also fairly concisely. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Graphs! For example, @Glen_b designs very clear, tasteful, customized graphs for many of his posts. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some rigour and professionalism in analysis, wide sense. Even at a low level small details such as careful use of terminology and notation and mathematical typesetting help greatly. At a higher level, outstanding answers may use whatever mathematics it takes to get to the root of things. Here @whuber is among the masters. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Analyses of real data. Or simulations. In general, really good examples. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some minor wackiness. Anything that evokes a wry smile. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Good lists of references. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Already having a fair reputation. It shouldn't be the case, as every answer should be up-voted only on its own merits, but having a good reputation for high-quality answers and forum maintenance attracts attention to your answers. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Multiple edits. Again, that in itself shouldn't be a reason for upvoting, but edits bump a thread to the top of the active list and draw attention thereby. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some of the things that don't help much: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Rants. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Rather obvious riding of hobby-horses. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Marginal or limited relevance to the question. This is difficult to manage. Sometimes a poor question can be steered gently but firmly in a different good direction that finds the pearl amid the grit, and that's all positive (except possibly for the poor OP). But anything looking like &quot;That reminds me obliquely of this different thing&quot; usually gets few upvotes (and occasionally gets flak), however good it might be as an answer to a different question. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Being sloppy. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Being wrong! &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2016-01-07T12:17:09.877" LastActivityDate="2016-01-07T12:17:09.877" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2892" CreationDate="2016-01-07T04:32:47.357" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think another important factor to take into account is preferential attachment -- if something has been voted on a thousand times, omg, I have to see what that question is too! Meaning, especially if you want to get particular about &quot;correlation,&quot; that there are important non-linear effects in popularity that do mess with a straightforward exchange of votes for effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52211" LastActivityDate="2016-01-07T04:32:47.357" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2896" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2897" CreationDate="2016-01-11T21:32:30.097" Score="5" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a moderator at MathOverflow. A user there suggested migration to Cross Validated of this post, &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/228170/probability-same-football-square-wins-all-four-quarters&quot;&gt;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/228170/probability-same-football-square-wins-all-four-quarters&lt;/a&gt;, but I wasn't certain it would be considered on-topic. If it is, then I will gladly migrate it over. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:58:32.040" LastActivityDate="2016-01-12T00:14:35.977" Title="Would this MO post on football squares be considered on-topic here?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2896" CreationDate="2016-01-12T00:14:35.977" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;First things first: It looks like the subject of the post is on topic. It's a probability question, and probability is one of our topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arguably it's not quite migratable yet (under the usual maxim of 'don't migrate things that would just close') since it looks on first read like the post isn't yet clearly explaining the situation, but my opinion is nevertheless that you can migrate, and we'll try to get the OP to clarify a little further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2016-01-12T00:14:35.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2898" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-12T23:16:21.937" Score="10" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed quite a lot of too-old-to-migrate software-heavy questions (mostly R, but not entirely) coming through the close review queue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are often clearly off-topic by current standards and I generally see merit to marking them as such. For example, they can be confusing to new users (and I note they are often highly-visited pages) in terms of what the scope of our site is. Some examples of the type of question I am talking about, though not all closed recently, are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/7457/22228&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/29525/22228&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/11924/22228&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have generally voted for closing them. But it has crossed my mind there is a disadvantage to this, which seems to have been the pattern when such votes have occurred: answers to coding questions can get out of date. People who use &lt;code&gt;ggplot2&lt;/code&gt; in R will be well aware that changes to that package have invalidated many of the (irritatingly SEO-friendly) answers on SO &amp;mdash; as well as some of the older ones on CV. (In fact, on CV, the issue is in some sense worse, because these tend to be our older inactive questions so are less likely to have been updated or attracted new answers than those on SO.) This is just one example and there is no reason to expect it to be unique. Closed questions, if not deleted, are going to leave old answers to ossify and unable to to be supplemented by fresher answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have my own views about what the scope of this site &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; include regarding computing questions, but that is a separate matter from what I am raising here, since I am not calling for new questions to follow any different criteria to what we have at the moment. But for old computing questions, from the early days of the site before consensus about our current (somewhat narrower) focus emerged, I wonder whether we should consider being more liberal with letting them stand open &amp;mdash; perhaps marked as &quot;grandfathered&quot; in some way so that new users do not mistake them as currently on-topic. (A &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;grandfather clause&lt;/a&gt;&quot; allows pre-existing exceptions to be exempted from newer standards. This seems to have happened to some extent on the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1337/statistics-jokes&quot;&gt;statistics jokes&lt;/a&gt;&quot; thread, for instance.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-01-26T12:30:40.987" Title="Should we consider grandfathering old R (and other programming-heavy) posts?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|closing-questions|r|old-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2898" CreationDate="2016-01-13T16:27:14.937" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a bit mixed on this.  In general, I think it is better to close such questions, but some questions could legitimately be grandfathered.  I'm not sure I can articulate where I perceive the borderline to be or provide a coherent argument for it.  (I have voted to 'leave open' on some such older threads, if I could find them I might be able to do better here.)  I guess the gist of it would be analogous to how I sometimes vote to leave open on other threads (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/1337/7290&quot;&gt;jokes&lt;/a&gt;) that don't really meet our criteria.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to note though, that there are two other options that may mitigate the issues with off-topic old threads:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have noticed that @whuber has sort-of-closed some old threads under a different status with a note attached that the thread is off topic, but does have continuing value.  (I'll try to find an example to link to here.)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Old threads that are off topic and whose content has become incorrect / out of date do not have continuing value.  They can be not only closed, but &lt;em&gt;deleted&lt;/em&gt;.  This means they will not lead future readers astray.  (To put this more bluntly&amp;mdash;but not meaning to come across as rude&amp;mdash;I do not see much argument in keeping open an old thread that is off topic and filled with incorrect and misleading information.)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T16:27:14.937" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2900" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-13T20:18:03.627" Score="19" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just found that on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Physics Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; they have the option to &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7056/what-is-the-function-of-cite-below-each-question-answer&quot;&gt;cite&lt;/a&gt; answers and questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lDnfb.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lDnfb.png&quot; alt=&quot;cite&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/189213/add-the-ability-to-cite-questions-and-answers&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;, this option is also available for example on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Mathematics&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Theoretical Computer Science&lt;/a&gt; Stack Exchange sites. There is no clear answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/189213/add-the-ability-to-cite-questions-and-answers&quot;&gt;a meta question&lt;/a&gt; regarding why this option is not globally available on all StackExchange sites, but the comments are slightly negative. I agree that in most cases it is not a good idea to use this in scientific articles, as also &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2051/can-i-cite-a-question-response-to-an-academic-paper&quot;&gt;discussed here&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;However, when for example writing a (technical) report, this option might be useful. Moreover, the option already seems to exist on the StackExchange network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90930" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:40:16.063" LastActivityDate="2017-09-14T12:43:48.020" Title="Why is there no cite option on Cross Validated?" Tags="|feature-request|user-interface|references|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2017-09-14T12:44:35.637" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2901" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-15T03:24:58.960" Score="16" ViewCount="451" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's 2016 now, and we've &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/272563/were-standardizing-the-sidebar-width-at-300px-on-all-sites&quot;&gt;made some changes to the sidebar size&lt;/a&gt;. As such, we can now restart the Community Promotion Ads for 2016!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind, we have updated some of the guidelines compared to previously - the changes are marked in bold in the Image Requirements section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's twitter account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;useful tools or resources for statisticians&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interesting in-site activities and events&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be &lt;strong&gt;300 x 250 pixels&lt;/strong&gt;, or double that if high DPI.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of &lt;strong&gt;150 KB&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/2901&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5645" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2016-06-22T21:55:55.950" Title="Community Promotion Ads - 2016" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2901" CreationDate="2016-01-15T03:24:58.960" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/StackStats&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rzwq1.png&quot; alt=&quot;StackStats Twitter&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5645" LastActivityDate="2016-01-15T03:24:58.960" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2903" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2904" CreationDate="2016-01-15T05:20:30.417" Score="17" ViewCount="412" Body="&lt;p&gt;[Edit: looks like the question is now undeleted; the principle of what should be okay remains]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those of you without the privilege to see deleted questions won't get anything out of the link, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/189183/confidence-levels-for-mean-of-measured-distribution&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; is a question that was posted 11 days ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it had sat there unanswered for a week and a half without any response, I gave a fairly lengthy partial answer yesterday-ish (depending on your time zone it may be 2 days ago), with some explanations of where further clarification would be required for a more complete answer (which explanations were much too long for a comment -- or even two comments)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP's response was to delete the question, which of course wasted the effort I had put into responding to the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find something like this happens ... well not &lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; often, but it's not all that rare either, and it seems to be happening more frequently. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least partly as a result of events like this, I find I'm less likely to actually post an answer a question from a low-reputation user than I would have been say a year ago. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answering rate is down to below half what it was say last January -- and of course there are a number of reasons why that would happen -- but this perception of the increasing risk of wasting my time is certainly a contributing factor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have on one previous occasion undeleted a post where the OP deleted pretty much as soon as I answered, but that (undeleting it myself) is not something I'd seek to do as a matter of course in relation to posts I'd put an answer on (I'd do it with someone else's answer though, as long as there was some value in the answer, since there's no danger of it being self-serving to do so then).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like OPs can only delete a question with an answer if there's only one answer and the answer isn't upvoted ... but that simply seems to be  encouraging OPs to delete as quickly as possible if they decide their question is no longer worth investing time to fix (rather than actually put in a little effort to fix it with an edit).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's a reasonable response to this sort of thing? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I just accept that I should exercise more caution and only answer questions I &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; think the OP is likely to delete? If I'm not the only one that feels that way, our answer rate will presumably drop even more quickly than it has been. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or should I post more low-effort answers, only investing more effort where the OP doesn't see fit to abandon ship at the first sign of difficulty?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or should I seek some assurance the OP won't delete as soon as I post a substantial answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really don't know what to do, but I'm getting quite cheesed off at the cavalier way answers can be just trashed because the OP feels like it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Edit 23Jan: I realize in retrospect the correct response to the question by the StackExchange model would have been simply to comment pointing out the biggest issues with the question and simply put the question on hold until it was improved, or eventually, to delete it if it was not &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251175/stack-overflow-is-not-yet-a-vast-wasteland-a-history-of-moderator-tooling&quot;&gt;e.g. see the discussion here as it relates to borderline questions&lt;/a&gt;. To quote from the link &quot;&lt;em&gt;rather a few borderline posts be deleted than the site be overwhelmed with garbage&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. So I probably did the wrong thing in trying to partially answer it at all.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2016-01-23T05:04:07.123" Title="To what extent should the deletion by the OP of answered questions be acceptable?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-questions|self-delete|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2903" CreationDate="2016-01-15T15:30:31.867" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;A useful principle governing these situations is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Respect what the community contributes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This clearly implies that whenever someone has made a substantial reply to a question, the thread should remain visible to all. If the question or any answer has an upvote, preserving visibility becomes even more imperative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a moderator, whenever I have encountered a unilateral deletion of such a thread I have reversed that deletion and left a comment to the O.P. explaining why. I can't remember any situation where there was significant objection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This principle applies, albeit more weakly, to threads in which there appear to be important contributions in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other courses of action are possible.  For instance, one could unilaterally repost the deleted question and self-answer it.  Although I can't immediately come up with a strong objection to this maneuver, I don't like it for its artificiality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with any important principle, there will be notable exceptions.  One that arises about once a year occurs when the O.P. discovers they have posted sensitive material.  In those cases we delete the question and also contact the SE team to remove the edit history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2016-01-15T15:30:31.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2903" CreationDate="2016-01-15T15:59:52.213" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me the overarching raison d'etre for CV is to create a body of high quality information about statistics, machine learning, etc., and only secondarily to provide short term assistance to individuals (although that is clearly worthwhile as well).  Working from that principle, I see several conclusions:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there is valuable information in the answer (even though the OP will most likely never provide the requisite additional information), then the thread should be undeleted.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If allowing such threads to remain deleted will discourage people from providing high-quality content in the future, the thread should be undeleted.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If neither condition is met, the thread can remain deleted.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the conditions are met, but the OP objects, I believe &lt;s&gt;moderators&lt;/s&gt; &lt;em&gt;developers&lt;/em&gt; have the ability to remove the connection between a post and its original author so that the post is subsequently shown as being owned / authored by the community user.  If that can be arranged, it seems like a viable compromise.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2016-01-15T16:20:02.770" LastActivityDate="2016-01-15T16:20:02.770" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2901" CreationDate="2016-01-17T16:06:58.600" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://opendata.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wqiQI.png&quot; alt=&quot;Need data? Open Data Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1437" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T16:06:58.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2901" CreationDate="2016-01-19T13:30:54.417" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/88933/urban-planning?referrer=qTlYS42TqxfLBTFbVGhdAg2&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/ads/proposal/88933.png&quot; alt=&quot;Discuss the real world. Start Urban Planning SE!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101158" LastActivityDate="2016-01-19T13:30:54.417" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2903" CreationDate="2016-01-21T23:37:38.553" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another useful principle is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Respect what the original poster asked&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE's own  2015 statistics highlight the surprising fact that all questions posted on this (entire) domain are down voted once.  Given that not all SE forums are equally harsh, some must be worse than others to maintain the average.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these down voted questions are asked by non-stupid people who have taken the time to register and ask what they feel are legitimate questions in areas they are not expert in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others ask simplistic questions (relative to expert standards) that then receive post doctoral level answers that are of absolutely no use to the originator.  If a child asks why is snow white, don't hand over a print out from a photo reflectivity analysis and a slideshow of electron energy jumps. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the true purpose of SE is not to provide assistance to individuals, it might be worth while changing the access policy to not allow all and sundry to post questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can well understand posters deleting questions that receive useless answers.  I have done the same, and have to convince myself to ask further ones.  I challenge you (as statisticians) to determine how many posters only post one or two questions, are patronised, and are never seen again.  Your example at the top is a case in point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I finish with something I'd like all to dwell on: &quot;Acceptable to whom?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74762" LastActivityDate="2016-01-21T23:37:38.553" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2901" CreationDate="2016-01-22T19:27:35.643" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/90327/geomatics-and-remote-sensing?referrer=8G2asYAyI_To9RoVf1VtPg2&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/ads/proposal/90327.png&quot; alt=&quot;Check out the Area 51 Remote Sensing Proposal&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79636" LastActivityDate="2016-01-22T19:27:35.643" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2903" CreationDate="2016-01-23T02:07:28.440" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To the OP, I looked at your long answer and some of it sounds rude. So it might have been painful to the questioner and maybe that's why he deleted his question and the thread. Here's a particular bit I thought was rude:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Now this here is a technical measurement. (you quoted the questioner's&#xA; irrelevant colloquialism)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your terminology is unfamiliar. Can you either avoid the jargon or&#xA;  explain its meaning? (you made fun of the guy essentially)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure you didn't intend to make fun, but I second a word used by Paul Uszak, &quot;patronizing.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101490" LastActivityDate="2016-01-23T02:07:28.440" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2901" CreationDate="2016-01-23T20:08:31.293" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://elki.dbs.ifi.lmu.de/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Vy99H.png&quot; alt=&quot;Because research needs bechmarking.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18215" LastActivityDate="2016-01-23T20:08:31.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2913" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-25T07:55:12.800" Score="14" ViewCount="374" Body="&lt;p&gt;My reading of the various pieces of stackexchange-network information about comments and chattiness would suggest that &quot;Welcome to our site&quot; comments on their own  (absent any other text such as being part of a comment seeking clarification)  would be seen as too chatty, but I've largely chosen to essentially ignore them in the hope that the members would sort out the CV policy on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, however, such comments are being flagged, which puts a greater onus on moderators to do &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; (available options are either to delete the comment or decline the flag*). Which means it's probably past time to work out what to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*... or to leave the flags to sit there and stare at you witheringly, but there's reasons why that's a bad idea long-term&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[My personal feeling is that the broader SE policy is there for a good reason, and that we should err on the side of staying with the network's general policies unless there's a good reason to choose otherwise -- so I'd lean toward removing them. I also see this as consistent with removing taglines and &quot;hello everybody&quot; and so on from questions. However - perhaps fortunately - where to draw the line locally is not really my decision.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So are they too chatty? (and ... &lt;em&gt;Should I reframe this as a vote?&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2016-01-28T17:01:55.280" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T17:14:07.477" Title="Are plain &quot;Welcome to our site&quot; comments too chatty?" Tags="|discussion|comment|policy|flagging|new-users|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2913" CreationDate="2016-01-25T14:14:10.280" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems relatively clear to me that such comments are too chatty / mildly incongruent with SE policy.  That said, it seems nice to welcome people to SE, especially in light of the fact that I have often seen CV being accused of being unfriendly to newcomers in meta.CV discussions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with @chl.  If I ran the zoo, I'd check the OP's userpage to see if they've been around since the comment was left.  If they had, I would delete the comment at that point&amp;mdash;it has served its purpose.  If they hadn't been around, but it's been a couple of days, they may be a drive-by asker and won't come back to attend to their question anyway; I'd probably delete.  On the other hand, if the comment hasn't been there long, and the OP hasn't been back in the interim, I'd let it stay and check back in a couple days.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2016-01-25T14:14:10.280" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2913" CreationDate="2016-01-25T14:54:32.080" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome messages are not noise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Early on in the life of this site, the SE Team actively &lt;em&gt;encouraged&lt;/em&gt; posting comments to help people feel welcome.  I therefore always decline flags that suggest those comments are &quot;too chatty&quot; and I usually keep the welcoming comment intact.  I personally make an effort to identify newcomers who are likely to contribute beyond some immediate question and I post such comments myself.  There is nothing like a tiny personal touch (inside this vast impersonal, troll-infested Internet) to make a big impact on a new user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many things about the SE system that do not work very well, in part because it maintains inherently conflicting objectives.  Each community therefore has to find, through trial and experience, an approach best suited to it.  Even after five years we have attracted only a very tiny sliver of the community of people who study, know, or care about statistics and machine learning.  We should continue to do everything we can to invite and keep more people.  Let's make them feel welcome and appreciated.  Let's not worry that doing so might violate some vague guideline about &quot;chattiness.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2016-01-25T14:54:32.080" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2913" CreationDate="2016-01-25T15:31:36.790" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say flag them for deletion on those threads that have a lot of comments &amp;amp; answers&amp;mdash;where clutter might be doing some harm&amp;mdash;else leave them be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the policy would be this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Welcoming new users to the site is a good thing; so please feel free to do so in comments, even if there's nothing else to say.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There's no need for purely phatic comments to be preserved for posterity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do delete your own once they've served their purpose, if &amp;amp; when you happen to come across them again. Don't feel obliged to hunt them all down&amp;mdash;you've got better things to be doing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When a post is looking cluttered, flag them for moderators to delete. If it isn't really, don't do anything&amp;mdash;moderators have also got better things to be doing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think precise criteria for when a thread is cluttered need to be established. When the flag queue's getting long, moderators can start to decline the &quot;too chatty&quot; flags they judge unnecessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2016-01-28T11:10:53.377" LastActivityDate="2016-01-28T11:10:53.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2917" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2924" CreationDate="2016-01-26T09:29:03.413" Score="0" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;A couple of days a go, I asked a question which was related to statistics, math, machine learning and computer science. First I posted it in here, then when I didn't get what I was looking for, I decided to post it also in math and computer science and I've got pretty interesting responses from mathematicians and  computer scientists. But later on, all of my questions were deleted by moderators and I was subjected by them as &quot;someone who wasted time of the others&quot; and etc. They got angry of me and wrote some negative comments about what I did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My intention was not really to waste anybody's time, actually I needed the opinion of different people from different fields. This is what is missing actually in the field I am working on. We don't have mathematicians, statisticians and computer scientists working together, so I decided to ask the same question in different sites and compare different responses from different points of views and that is what I was looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could share my first question on different sites, if it was possible, but unfortunately, I couldn't figure it out how and I think this is a limitation of the site itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this website gathers amazing scientists together and is a great place for between-field discussions. &#xA;I hope moderators, and the website admins can come up with an idea for such situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apologize if I made some people angry or upset. I was trying to view a problem from different angels and I would say the results was very interesting. I've got some mathematical proof, some experimental solutions and some machine learning approaches that could all solve a single problem via different approaches. But I believe we need to fill this gap between such fields.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure how to address those moderators and people (probably very experienced and good scientists) in here but I hope they read this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100372" LastEditorUserId="100372" LastEditDate="2016-01-26T09:53:05.317" LastActivityDate="2016-01-27T15:53:33.253" Title="How about letting a between-domain question be shared in multiple sites?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2917" CreationDate="2016-01-26T10:50:05.993" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;No one is angry or upset with you.  At least, not that I know of.  But Stack Exchange sites do have certain rules that you must abide by, if you wish to participate in this community.  One of those rules is: do not cross-post on multiple Stack Exchange sites.  You may refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/64068&quot;&gt;Is cross-posting a question on multiple Stack Exchange sites permitted if the question is on-topic for each site?&lt;/a&gt; for documentation of the policy and explanation of why the policy exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rules exist for a reason: they were chosen in a deliberate attempt to maintain high quality standards and make these sites work well.  It's not that we've never thought of the arguments you raise; we have given this some thought.  We do understand the arguments you raise about why you wish cross-posting was allowed, but there are other reasons why allowing cross-posting would be harmful, and the site has judged that the potential harms outweigh the benefits.  I do hope you'll respect that judgement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You shouldn't take it personally.  The rules must be enforced-- but no one is trying to single you out or make you feel unwelcome.  Now that you understand the rules, I hope you will continue contributing to Stack Exchange sites in the future, with this in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2921" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2016-01-26T10:55:32.137" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2253" CreationDate="2016-01-27T12:13:01.790" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question &amp;amp; related ones have also been discussed on the Data Science &amp;amp; Stack Exchange Meta sites, &amp;amp; on Area 51:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13/3361&quot;&gt;How is Data Science Different From Cross-Validated?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2174/3361&quot;&gt;How is this site different from CrossValidated&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.meta.stackexchange.com/q/86/3361&quot;&gt;What characterises the difference between data science and statistics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/266067/225179&quot;&gt;Difference between the Cross Validated and Data Science SE sites?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13476/106894&quot;&gt;Overlap with existing sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T08:41:05.607" LastActivityDate="2016-01-27T12:18:40.773" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2917" CreationDate="2016-01-27T15:53:33.253" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The acceptable way to do the nearest thing to what you want to do, according to the current consensus, is to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Link the question across the different sites&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Edit each version to suit the different topic area of each site,&#xA;rather than posting word-for-word copies&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first seems quite uncontestable: if someone who fancies answering is told about the other versions they can decide for themself whether they'd be wasting their time or not; &amp;amp; if it's useful to compare responses from different points of view, you should give others the chance to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second has been contested, but not successfully&amp;mdash;&amp;amp; rules are rules. I can't think of an example where there'd be a statistical answer &amp;amp; a mathematical answer &amp;amp; a computer-science answer to exactly the same question; reaching different audiences isn't held to be sufficient justification in itself  (&amp;amp; as @NickCox has pointed out, they're not completely different audiences).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2016-01-27T15:53:33.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2913" CreationDate="2016-01-27T17:28:24.907" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Deciding on whether to explicitly indulge on a &quot;Welcome to the site&quot; message for new posters is irrelevant if there is no agreement on what defines &lt;strong&gt;being welcoming&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The participants on our site are outstanding people, ready to help, educate, and lead by example in the pursuit of knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, confusion becomes all too apparent when receiving a new post at odds with the guidelines of the site. For instance, on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/195485/67822&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; Wang Nick asked a question that is probably the only real challenge in getting the main idea behind PCA - the idea that the components are contributed to by all variables. His first question. He or she starts off apologetically, &quot;I am new in PCA...&quot; and explains the problem. Nothing unusual; yes, asked a million times before, and answered beautifully on the site. Possibly someone in the applied sciences being thrown to the lions by a mentor, and being asked to just figure it out. Who knows?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first comment: &quot;How about reading some book on statistics?&quot; with one upvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point that I want to make is that CV is not a professional organization, where members are vetted through a qualifying process. Nowhere does it say that anybody without thorough comprehension of linear algebra should stay out - and how boring would it be if it did... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The truth is that we all use data all the time if we participate in the political discourse, organize our finances, work in a corporation, or even simply watch TV. People with some spark of interest look things up, and try to understand. In the process they (we) discover CV, and muster the courage to risk making a fool of ourselves posting a question. Some of the best questions are provided by wide-eyed first impressions of probability or statistical concepts on complete neophytes. I would never ask now &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/167051/67822&quot;&gt;&quot;Who are the bayesians?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Even though I don't know much more than I knew when I did, I have read too much about it and by Andrew Gelman since I wrote the question not to feel like a complete schmuck if I were to ask it now. But I can't think of any good questions that elicit a fraction of the interest that question raised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't know initially where the person comes from, what his level of mathematics is (although this is quite apparent to the more advanced users), whether they had any training in statistics before (same caveat here), or even their age. But they are showing interest. Perhaps the person asking that question will not just read, but write the next canonical book on statistics. Perhaps... a positive response to that first question...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would propose &lt;strong&gt;avoiding the following for first time questions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Down-voting first time posts&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Voting to close the question without a kind explanation&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Comments ad hominem&lt;/strong&gt; - nothing along the lines of &quot;as you should know&quot;, &quot;if you had done a minimum of research you wouldn't be asking this&quot;, &quot;your question is impossible to understand, makes no sense, without providing all this information that you obviously don't know, but should&quot;, etc. Simply state the facts in a plain, simple manner.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Assuming familiarity with tags&lt;/strong&gt;. If it seems as though it's a homework question, ask directly and instruct how to tag it appropriately; or if interested enough to comment in the first place, why not ask a more open-ended question about the background of the post? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How much nicer and productive, and encouraging is the comment by Richard Hardy: &quot;I cannot follow you question &lt;strong&gt;well&lt;/strong&gt; [my emphasis], but it seems that you might be confused about how PCA works. The principal components are linear combinations of original variables. Asking &quot;which variable should I retain&quot; does not make that much sense &lt;strong&gt;in the context of PCA&lt;/strong&gt; [notice he doesn't say - it makes no sense. Period... It is &lt;em&gt;in the context of PCA&lt;/em&gt; that is lacking in meaning].&quot; He gives the answer to the person, so that he can go back to scrutinizing whatever sources of information are at his level, &lt;strong&gt;but without judging&lt;/strong&gt;. A class act.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I often think of the quote in whuber's profile: &quot;Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's truly embrace in the first comments and responses the people who choose to learn, with or without &quot;welcome to the site&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67822" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T17:14:07.477" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2926" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-27T20:55:19.497" Score="7" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/192787/36229&quot;&gt;Interpretation of the variance of a slope&lt;/a&gt; is unclear because the OP seems to be confused by notation, and therefore the notation in the question is confusing. StatStudent pointed this out in the comments, and suggested (correctly in my opinion) that the question could be answered by resolving this confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went ahead and edited the notation to better reflect what StatStudent (and I) thought the OP meant, but then had second thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the right thing to do here? I'm torn between making the question clear to future readers, but potentially making the answers and comments confusing, or leaving the question confusing (and maybe harder to find by searching) but then having the answers correspond better to the question as it was asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36229" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-01-28T17:05:20.860" Title="A question is unclear, but resolving the &quot;unclarity&quot; is part of the answer" Tags="|discussion|questions|policy|editing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2016-01-29T12:22:34.247" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2928" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2929" CreationDate="2016-01-30T00:12:59.073" Score="26" ViewCount="487" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm talking about this puppy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qzm27.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qzm27.png&quot; alt=&quot;CrossValidated logo&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It kinda looks like a heat-map or correlogram, but I would expect the other diagonal to be picked out in green, were that the case. (My expectations may be flawed. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/269/what-should-our-logo-and-site-design-look-like/459#459&quot;&gt;post by the logo's seeming designer&lt;/a&gt;, but that doesn't explain. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What kind of graph is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44269" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2016-01-31T12:26:18.407" Title="What does the logo for CrossValidated represent?" Tags="|discussion|logo|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2928" CreationDate="2016-01-30T01:18:35.903" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;I took it to be a representation of the name &lt;em&gt;CrossValidated&lt;/em&gt; since it looks to me like a stylized depiction of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-validation_%28statistics%29#k-fold_cross-validation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;five-fold cross-validation&lt;/a&gt;. (Presumably the five-fold was chosen for its look rather than any suggestion that five-fold cross-validation was particularly representative.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that impression is accurate*, in each &quot;row&quot; of the image, the pale green block would represent the validation-set (test-set) for that fold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that it also sort of looks leaf-like I find rather attractive, personally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* Oops, I see now that amoeba had already indicated this in comments, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/269/what-should-our-logo-and-site-design-look-like/459#comment840_458&quot;&gt;with a link&lt;/a&gt;. Nice to know my impression was correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for what k-fold cross-validation &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;, a detailed explanation would really be a question for the main site. Besides the Wikipedia link above, Rob Hyndman gives some discussion &lt;a href=&quot;http://robjhyndman.com/hyndsight/crossvalidation/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;on his blog&lt;/a&gt;; however, I suppose a very brief outline - sufficient to motivate the appearance of the logo - is not out of order. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to properly assess the &lt;em&gt;out of sample&lt;/em&gt; behavior of some procedure (very important if you're interested in prediction, say, but also important in estimation because we want to generalize to the population, which is almost entirely outside our sample), we hold out some of our data from the data we use for estimation, in order to assess/validate (a.k.a. &quot;&lt;em&gt;test&lt;/em&gt;&quot;) the performance of the model on that part (by any criterion of interest; &lt;em&gt;mean square error&lt;/em&gt; for example). In k-fold cross validation we do this by dividing the data into $k$ equal pieces and performing $k$ such steps of estimation-then-validation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we are trying to see how well we'd predict some additional data, or if we want to compare the performance of two possibly very different models, for example, this avoids issues of overfitting (because we see how well the model does on data we didn't use in the fitting); we don't need to account for the fact that some models may have many more parameters for example, since they don't get an advantage from that when looking outside the data used in the fitting. [There's much more to be said but this isn't the place for it, and there are certainly better people to explain it than me.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So anyway if we divide our data into five equal-sized pieces (first putting the observations in random order) and hold one of those 5 pieces out, we would estimate on 80% of the data and test (validate) on the remaining 20%, but we'd do that five times, where each fifth would serve as the test set once. A diagram of the first two rounds of a 5-fold cross validation would look something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/H3T8u.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/H3T8u.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... and so on for a further three rounds. (The name of our &lt;em&gt;chat&lt;/em&gt; site -- &quot;Ten Fold&quot; -- also relates to cross-validation. Ten fold cross validation is common.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Note that a number of common regression diagnostics correspond to what you'd get with &quot;leave-one-out-cross-validation&quot; (LOOCV), which is $n$-fold cross validation, so if you look at common regression diagnostics that modern packages tend to provide, you have in effect already done a bit of cross-validation.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully the relationship of the above diagram to the first two &quot;rows&quot; of the site logo is clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Diagrams like this are often found in discussions of cross-validation. See, for example, figure 5.5, p181 of James et al &quot;Introduction to Statistical Learning&quot; (pdf of the 6th printing is downloadable from the website of the first author, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), which also depicts five-fold cross validation. (Reading pages 175-184 gives a nice simple introduction to some of these ideas.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2016-01-31T12:26:18.407" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2931" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-01T07:36:57.847" Score="12" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/273911/we-should-make-books-of-our-best-content&quot;&gt;This post about making books&lt;/a&gt; was posted to meta.SE very recently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of particular interest to me, though, was Monica Cellio's answer -- Mi Yodeya have made four books already, including one that had a print run. The total length of their four books comes to about 150 pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notably, the use of content is pretty straightforward under the license terms (as long as any such publication follows the rules of course).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making a book or books has been raised once or twice I think (not necessarily in a formal question here; but maybe in chat).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some interest in perhaps trying to organize something like that, or possibly several such books?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Markdown seems to be relatively easy to turn into other forms now, I think the biggest challenges would be organization of content/curation/editing type tasks. [This might be tricky time-wise for some of us.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if perhaps a more focused book rather than a collection of best posts might be a place to start -- e.g. there are some great relatively elementary posts that might be suitable as a book for people at an introductory level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T21:21:54.130" Title="A book using some of our content?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2932" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2945" CreationDate="2016-02-01T11:57:25.110" Score="10" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;On SO, the percentage of unanswered questions is 27%. On cross validated, 39%.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On cross validated, there is &lt;strong&gt;a lot&lt;/strong&gt; of unanswered questions. I suggest it is due to the high technical level required to answer them. I have myself huge difficulties to answer most of the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there ways to decrease this percentage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we encourage people with unanswered question to reformulate their question or to step down a level in the difficulty? Or to expand furthermore the problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there best practices in that cases, where you are willing to help but the questions are one step ahead of your competencies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also hope to get advice to make my questions clearer, to get response to my answers. But if these thought could help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83595" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2016-02-05T20:28:46.170" LastActivityDate="2016-02-07T13:17:52.937" Title="How to decrease the number of unanswered questions?" Tags="|discussion|unanswered-questions|site-statistics|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2933" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-01T12:46:03.770" Score="7" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I got points answering the following question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/189833/how-to-check-for-the-distribution-stability/&quot;&gt;How to check for the distribution stability?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As commented bellow the answer, a different answer that included the main points was answered a day before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I split the points gained with the other user?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81056" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T12:55:14.410" Title="Can I split reputation gained from a featured question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2933" CreationDate="2016-02-01T12:52:59.273" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has a short answer: You can't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it wasn't already the smallest possible bounty, you could perhaps offer a smaller bounty yourself, and award it to the other answer, but as it stands you can't do much other than vote for the other answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2016-02-01T12:55:14.410" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T12:55:14.410" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2935" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-02T02:49:47.017" Score="59" ViewCount="1725" Body="&lt;p&gt;[This post was inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathematica.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/926/mr-wizards-charitable-fund&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may have noticed that I award the occasional bounty - I like to give one when I see a particularly good answer or a question I think should get an answer. (What do I need 125K reputation for? It's not doing me any good there.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I only see a fraction of the posts on site, and while I have broad interests, I don't pay close attention to every kind of question. So it's a sure thing that there are many good answers I haven't seen, or that I saw once but have since forgotten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to see suggestions of good posts that deserve a bounty (one per answer*) -- answers that more people should see, or even questions that it would be good for the site to get a good answer to. Feel free to upvote any you agree with (whether you have nominated some or not); upvotes will certainly influence the judges but are not the only factor (encouraging good answers from newer users is another, for example)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* you can nominate more than one in separate answers, but for this exercise you can't nominate your own questions or answers (though I may do a self-nomimation one at a later time). You also can't nominate my answers (well, okay, you actually can -- I can't stop you -- but I couldn't bounty myself even if I wished to).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a few days from now, if there have been more than zero nominations, I will place the first bounty (it takes at least a day to before you can award one, though - longer if you let them stay in the queue to get exposure). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few days after placing that, I'll look here for another to start - up to the limit of available free slots for (maximum of three for any one user). As slots free up I'll add more bounties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a bounty is awarded, I'll mark it here (in the answer). I may telegraph my intent on some depending on how things go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A typical bounty I'd seek to offer for a good answer will be 100 points, but I may offer more or less as circumstances suggest (you can also suggest a higher bounty when you nominate, or in comments under a nomination). I will generally try to avoid the highest amounts (500 is possible under the bounty system but I don't want to outshine other people's bounties too much; all bounties deserve good attention).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some things you might consider if you're having trouble coming up with one (but you can nominate for other reasons):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Has an answer been especially helpful to you or given some special insight? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there an answer where you thought &quot;&lt;em&gt;why didn't the textbooks explain it like this?&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there an answer you wish you could show everyone?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there a great question you really wish had an answer?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the sort of thing that needs promotion, and would be a good post to suggest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope to spend at least 1000 points (i.e. perhaps about 10 bounties give or take) this way -- to award that number of bounties would take several weeks (since deserving posts should have some time in the bounty queue spotlight so people can see them) -- however, if it seems to be working well, I'd run it longer. [NB at this stage the total points awarded to nominated posts exceeds that target, which counts as a success.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[If anyone else feels particularly that they want to offer bounties on posts that come up, feel free -- but try to keep in mind that we shouldn't flood the queue, so I think we should keep it to no more than say five bounties running at one time across all nominations here. If you want to claim one in advance of setting the bounty - because you want to wait a few days - just say so on the post. If you do award a bounty, mark the post you bountied as was done in the linked post.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:49:54.420" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T20:01:19.057" Title="Help spread the wealth" Tags="|discussion|votes|bounty|" AnswerCount="23" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2935" CreationDate="2016-02-02T15:39:50.573" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not know if it is a memorable answer by the overall standards of CV, but the accpeted one here is the one I found most useful of all questions I have asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/139001/example-for-a-prior-that-unlike-jeffreys-leads-to-a-posterior-that-is-not-inva&quot;&gt;Example for a prior, that unlike Jeffreys, leads to a posterior that is not invariant&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Bounty started 9 Feb 2016. Now awarded.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67799" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T01:15:35.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2935" CreationDate="2016-02-02T16:48:19.820" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/193391/&quot;&gt;lacerbi's answer&lt;/a&gt; deserves some recognition because its bibliography is incredibly good. The articles cited here are incredibly helpful to me and I had not previously encountered them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[A bounty has been started on this answer, 5 Feb 2016. Now awarded.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-02-10T21:42:43.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2939" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-03T07:53:08.683" Score="5" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fixing typos usually results in changing a character or very few.&#xA;When trying to fix such typos (on other people questions), I get a message that the change is too short.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I bypassed that problem by adding some more characters and deleting them in another edit but it seems like a hack.&#xA;It seems that I also cannot revert to the previous version so 3 rounds are needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should typos be fixed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81056" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2016-02-09T18:45:14.613" LastActivityDate="2016-02-09T18:45:14.613" Title="Fixing typos and minimum change length" Tags="|discussion|editing|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2935" CreationDate="2016-02-03T09:18:28.213" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/189618/1352&quot;&gt;Anscombe-like datasets with the same box and whiskers plot (mean/std/median/MAD/min/max)&lt;/a&gt;, which currently has five upvotes and no answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe&amp;#39;s_quartet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anscombe's quartet&lt;/a&gt; a lot, since it wonderfully illustrates how summary univariate or multivariate statistics lose (you can also say &quot;compress&quot;) information. &lt;a href=&quot;http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/wiki/Main/DynamitePlots&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frank Harrell's example&lt;/a&gt; of very different data leading to identical dynamite plots is also very instructive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I'd really love to see an answer to the question linked above for pedagogical reasons, and I think encouraging this through a bounty or similar would be worthwhile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Started 27 March 2016. No answer was received in the bounty period, so it went unawarded.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2016-04-03T01:11:27.930" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2935" CreationDate="2016-02-03T09:27:46.533" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first clustering algorithm you will learn about is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-means_clustering&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;k-means&lt;/a&gt;. That is nice and good, but unfortunately people will sometimes think that k-means is the One Tool to solve all their clustering problems and neglect finding out about drawbacks and alternatives to k-means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In such cases, I find both &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/133841/1352&quot;&gt;Anony-Mousse's&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/133694/1352&quot;&gt;David Robinson's&lt;/a&gt; answers to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/133656/1352&quot;&gt;How to understand the drawbacks of K-means&lt;/a&gt; invaluable. Both answers are crafted with love, with lots of wonderful graphics, and I find myself recommending this question and both answers over and over. Both definitely qualify as &quot;answers I wish I could show everyone.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[First of two bounties begun 9 Feb 2016. 2nd bounty started 15 Feb. Now awarded.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T08:14:44.100" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2939" CreationDate="2016-02-03T09:42:11.480" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you really can't see anything else that needs fixing, perhaps best to wait until you get 2000 reputation points &amp;amp; the privilege of making edits which don't need review, &amp;amp; can be of any length, rather than mess up the edit history with work-arounds. But if you look carefully, there's often something else. The idea behind the rule is to avoid the review queue's being filled with tiny edit suggestions (even though our queue's usually empty at the moment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2016-02-03T09:45:32.513" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T09:45:32.513" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2939" CreationDate="2016-02-03T09:51:11.437" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general you should not fix a single letter typo; one exception would be if it's an important word in the title (since people search for those!). The fact that the system tries to prevent you from making very small edits is deliberate -- it tries to stop you because you probably shouldn't. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;editing-privilege page&lt;/a&gt; says &quot;Tiny, trivial edits are discouraged - try to make the post significantly better when you edit, correcting all problems that you observe.&quot; ... single letter edits are about as tiny as they come, so that's what it's asking you to avoid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I posted some of those links in comments in order that you saw some of the discussion of edge cases and potential exceptions (e.g. many one-character changes in mathematics may be the opposite of trivial; the abovementioned issue with title keywords)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T09:51:11.437" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2932" CreationDate="2016-02-03T13:49:02.427" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should we encourage people with unanswered question to reformulate&#xA;  their question or to step down a level in the difficulty? Or to expand&#xA;  furthermore the problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes we should encourage people to make their questions easier to follow. In many cases more explanation of the background, or of the aims of their analysis, or the addition of an example&lt;sup&gt;&amp;dagger;&lt;/sup&gt; to illustrate the issue, would help. On the other hand, extraneous material &amp;amp; excessive detail is off-putting. But we can't really tell them to ask an easier question just because the one they want to ask is too difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there best practices in that cases, where you are willing to help&#xA;  but the questions are one step ahead of your competencies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well you can do some research&lt;sup&gt;&amp;ddagger;&lt;/sup&gt;, or perhaps provide a partial answer if appropriate. But if you can't answer, you can't answer&amp;mdash;keep an eye open for questions you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; you know the answer, but aren't completely sure, give it anyway. Of course don't pretend to a certainty you don't have, explain your reasoning, &amp;amp; provide any relevant references. Even if you happen to be quite wrong you might provoke someone into writing a better answer or suggesting corrections to yours&amp;mdash;the person who asked the question, you, &amp;amp; future readers all win.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;dagger; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve&quot;&gt;Minimal working examples&lt;/a&gt; can be as useful in Statistics as in programming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;ddagger; A good place to start researching is, of course, Cross Validated; I suspect there are many duplicates &amp;amp; near-duplicates among unanswered questions. Sometimes a question just needs to be flagged as a duplicate; sometimes a short answer explaining just how answers to a linked post or posts relate to it is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2016-02-04T11:39:11.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2932" CreationDate="2016-02-03T17:14:25.060" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is worth considering that an &lt;strong&gt;unanswered question&lt;/strong&gt; is defined as a question that has no &lt;em&gt;upvoted&lt;/em&gt; (or accepted) answers and &lt;em&gt;is not closed&lt;/em&gt;.  Also, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;community user&lt;/a&gt; 'bumps' one unanswered question per hour to the top of the main page, which provides an opportunity for them to be addressed.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From these points, I would make a couple of tentative suggestions to any who wish to help lower our unanswered question rate:  When you see an unanswered question bumped by the community user, take a look at it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Often, these threads have very low views and have answers without any upvotes, perhaps because no one has ever paid any attention to them.  If there are any answers, see if they might merit an upvote (cf., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1900/7290&quot;&gt;CrossValidated's rather extreme up-voting problem&lt;/a&gt;).  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Also often, in my opinion, questions are not quite clear enough to really be answerable.  I will typically give the OP the benefit of the doubt in these cases, possibly leaving a comment prompting them to provide needed information.  However, the threads bumped by the community user are all at least one month old.  It is common for a drive-by asker to leave a marginally clear / unclear question, not return to monitor the progress of the thread, and be long gone.  Clicking on the OP's username will take you to their page where you can see if they are an active user and when they last showed up on the site.  You can make a reasonable guess about whether they will return to their question.  A question that may not be quite clear enough to be answered with an OP who will probably never return can be closed as &lt;code&gt;unclear what you're asking&lt;/code&gt; (cf., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1409/7290&quot;&gt;Should the standards for closing questions be relaxed somewhat for old questions?&lt;/a&gt;).  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are actions that should be doable even by someone who feels the questions are &quot;one step ahead of [their] competencies&quot;.  I strongly suspect that if all the questions that do have upvotable answers were given just one upvote, and all the not really quite clear enough questions where the OP will likely never return to clarify them were closed, our unanswered question rate would be much lower.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T17:14:25.060" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2931" CreationDate="2016-02-03T21:06:37.277" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Glen_b, I like this idea a lot. Wedged between the ever-rising tide of questions asking about how to use R, there's a bounty of great statistical content on CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how much of that content is well-suited for &lt;em&gt;introductory&lt;/em&gt; texts, though. There are a plethora of introductory probability and statistics textbooks (with a high variance in quality). But to my knowledge, there are not a great number of textbooks directly addressing how to do good predictive modeling with machine learning methods. The textbooks which do exist tend to fall along the lines of &quot;a first course in predictive modeling.&quot; These fill a niche and are certainly necessary, but after completion, there are not great subsequent resources. It's usually in this space where the difficulty of the material suddenly jumps like it found a spider under the toilet seat. People get stuck in the local minimum of looking at models with some particular flavor (trees, Bayes, kernels, neural nets), but being a good practitioner means knowing how to use appropriate tools for the problem at hand, and that point  seems to get swept under the rug of the oft-mentioned-but-rarely-examined &quot;domain knowledge.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose I'm imagining a book with the subtitle &quot;What is good decision-support, and how do we accomplish it?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the best form a book could take on would be a tour of the &quot;black arts&quot; of predictive classification, i.e. the topics that are incredibly helpful to practitioners but are rarely discussed in a single location. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Presently I'm putting together a presentation on the use and abuse of&#xA;different performance metrics. I was surprised to find that the&#xA;material I'm drawing from is scattered across a diversity of snippets&#xA;from different articles, but not any single resource. And my interactions with Prof. Harrell underscore just how subtle the question is.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My highly-upvoted post on Euclidean distance high-dimensional spaces is actually borrowed from an article on subtle-but-important points in the machine learning tradition. IIRC, that article was published 15 years ago, but its points remain just as obscure today as they were then... at least, in my anecdotal experience.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I had an up-vote for every time I spoke to an engineer who wanted to use random forest to do feature selection for a linear model... well, actually, I just might. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the use cases for uncalibrated models? When is using ROC ACU obviously and provably the wrong choice?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Why does everyone at the office get snippy when I mention gradient descent?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Machine learning tools tend to work best with atomic units. What are the options for working with data that is non-atomic? Networked, geospatial, time-series, clustered, hierarchical?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is probably neither here nor there, but nothing I ever learned in a linear algebra classroom has ever helped me actually do linear algebra in practice. Knowing how to set up your pipeline of functions and analysis so that you have convenient factorizations stored for future use in computing inverses  is huge!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hyperparameter optimization: most people use grid searches, but there are more intelligent ways to go about this, such as using surrogate models.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But these are just my observations from my very narrow view into modern applied statistics. My perspective, like anyone else's, is constrained by context, so perhaps I'm just making a big deal out of things that are important to my role.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess what I'm getting at is there's considerable value to the scattered uncommon insights that the specialists at CV have touched on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I might just be cranky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2016-02-03T21:21:54.130" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T21:21:54.130" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2947" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-04T13:30:43.613" Score="2" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noted that &lt;code&gt;\binom{}{}&lt;/code&gt; does not work, as before, and as it should:&#xA;$$&#xA;          \binom{3}{2}&#xA;$$&#xA;What I typed within double dollar signs is : &lt;code&gt;\binom{3}{2}&lt;/code&gt; which used to work. What I now see is just an error message (&quot;Math error&quot; or similar) in red.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-02-12T01:25:55.990" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T16:51:47.537" Title="&quot;Math Processing Error&quot; in red instead of a TeX formula" Tags="|bug|math-display|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="15" ClosedDate="2016-02-15T16:51:54.403" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2948" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-04T19:56:01.310" Score="7" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been reading the paper &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ressources-actuarielles.net/EXT/ISFA/1226.nsf/0/f84f7ac703bf5862c12576d8002f5259/$FILE/Jones98.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Efficient Global Optimization of Expensive Black-Box Functions&lt;/a&gt; by Jones, et al. and they describe maximizing the expectation of a metric they created, called the improvement metric, for global optimization and seems like a really neat idea. I thought to myself it would be a fun idea to try and follow their analysis but to formulate it under my own new metric. However, I have been unable to come up, conceptually, with any metric that seems like an intuitive thing to try to maximize (or minimize) to help guide an optimization algorithm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, with that said, I don't have any idea what sort of metric I would pitch as being a good one to explore, and so I wanted to know if there are any places on stack exchange that would be a good (or acceptable) place to ask a question like this?  I basically want to be able to ask the community as a whole to help me brainstorm ideas but I wasn't sure if this is allowable given that I don't have an idea for the metric formulated myself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98920" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2016-02-05T16:28:40.020" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T05:05:09.907" Title="Where can we ask open ended questions about research?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2950" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-05T09:47:32.637" Score="2" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't post an answer because the Captcha hangs. It keeps spinning indefinitely when I check &quot;I'm not a robot&quot;, and the reCaptcha button cannot be activated. I'm using Opera 12.x. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this something that can be fixed in SE software? (All things considered, I would rather not use a different browser.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36515" LastEditorUserId="36515" LastEditDate="2016-02-05T11:23:22.353" LastActivityDate="2016-02-05T11:23:22.353" Title="Can't post answer because Captcha hangs" Tags="|support|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2932" CreationDate="2016-02-05T12:28:50.843" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;(In this answer I leave aside the strategy of &quot;find questions you know the answer to and answer them&quot; ... since I take that as sufficiently obvious to everyone.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A lot of unanswered questions could probably close as unclear, too broad, off-topic or duplicate. So can vote-to-close or flag (as appropriate to what privileges you have) when you come across them. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A lot of questions have answers or part-answers in comments. If you see a question that - between all the comments - seems to be largely answered, you should feel free to put together the relevant parts and post an answer. (If you're essentially just quoting a comment or two, you need to credit the author or authors, but I think answers in comments are otherwise fair game. Some other SE sites delete any comment that has &lt;em&gt;even a small part of an answer&lt;/em&gt; as a matter of course; that's not how we work, but we could be a lot better about taking answers in comments to actual answers.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of new questions are really not clearly explained; anything you can do to encourage or guide new posters to produce answerable questions will help. (I expect many of us could answer more questions if the effort involved in getting a lot of our questions to a state where they can be answered at all were not taking so much time.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2016-02-06T01:59:40.353" LastActivityDate="2016-02-06T01:59:40.353" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2953" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-05T17:08:17.887" Score="19" ViewCount="374" Body="&lt;p&gt;This recent question has just been converted into a community wiki (CW): &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/194035&quot;&gt;When (if ever) is a frequentist approach substantively better than a Bayesian?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that the idea behind converting questions into CW is that they are rather opinion-based (but not enough to be closed as opinion-based) and invite many answers as opposed to one definite answer. But I do not understand where is the border here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. these two very related questions:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/167051&quot;&gt;Who Are The Bayesians?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/103625&quot;&gt;When are Bayesian methods preferable to Frequentist?&lt;/a&gt; -- are not CW (even though &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/41394&quot;&gt;List of situations where a Bayesian approach is simpler...&lt;/a&gt; is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I have the feeling that we are not being very consistent.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This recent question comes to mind: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/193990&quot;&gt;Approximate $e$ using Monte Carlo Simulation&lt;/a&gt; -- and it is not CW either, even though there are already several suggestions in the answers and one can imagine more answers appearing with various suggestions. As another example, we have plenty of non-CW &lt;em&gt;How to explain something to a layperson?&lt;/em&gt; questions with lots of good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So: What are the criteria to make questions CW according to our current policy?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having asked that, I should say that I find CW very unhelpful because it does not allow to gain rep. I do not see why the frequentist-vs-bayesian question should be CW and I would prefer that everybody would gain reputation from answers there. (Personally, I have started to draft an answer to this question earlier today but now I feel much less inclined to continue.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should we consider relaxing our criteria?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also like to point out that on some other SE websites (e.g. on academia.SE) having lots of opinion-based answers is considered okay, and such questions are not converted to CW. So it seems that our policy is not a general SE-wide rule, but a result of our own choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T17:12:23.253" Title="What is and what should be our policy on making questions community wiki?" Tags="|discussion|questions|policy|moderation|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2954" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-05T17:58:56.080" Score="3" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a very specific question that might actually be rejected at both places.  I, for one, have tried to push through an NLP site on StackExchange but such approaches tend to be merged and don't survive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question has to do with named entity recognition.  Are links typically tagged as named entities?  For example, if I have a link Obama.jpg, would that be counted as an entity (a person entity) or not.  So assuming that this is an answerable question, where would it best go?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8874" LastActivityDate="2016-02-10T19:21:07.233" Title="Practical NLP questions CrossValidated, Data Science, or Neither" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-02-15T16:53:17.620" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2932" CreationDate="2016-02-05T21:22:16.113" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some questions are unanswered even though they are interesting, well informed, well expressed, and well posed. I assume they are unanswered because the expertise to answer the questions does not exist on this forum. So, &quot;How to decrease the number of unanswered questions?&quot; Answer: CrossValidated somehow needs to attract more experts who could answer these questions. How to do that? These experts need to know that CrossValidated exists, so advertising to them might help. They need it to be worth their while to participate. The most obvious reward is money. CrossValidated pays with reputation points, but experts know they're good already and may not be motivated by that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71428" LastEditorUserId="71428" LastEditDate="2016-02-07T13:17:52.937" LastActivityDate="2016-02-07T13:17:52.937" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2953" CreationDate="2016-02-06T16:00:11.160" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[Posting an answer myself to enable people to vote.]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By now &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/193990&quot;&gt;Approximate $e$ using Monte Carlo Simulation&lt;/a&gt; became CW as well. I think that making such questions CW is an unfair, unreasonable, and harmful policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This policy is unfair.&lt;/strong&gt; If @Aksakal posted his (by now accepted) answer first, it could have been upvoted and accepted by the OP without many other answers appearing. Most likely (see comments above) the thread would not have been converted to CW in this case and @Aksakal would get his well-earned reputation. As he posted it after a flurry of other answers, the thread has become CW and he will not get his rep points. This is unfair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the amount of reputation depends on &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; the thread will end up being converted to CW, because the points earned before that moment are not retracted. There are answers with 100+ upvotes in popular non-CW threads that should  be CW according to the strict interpretation. Converting them now leaves this 1k+ rep points with the answerers. Other similar threads were converted to CW much earlier. Equally good answers did not earn any rep there. This is arbitrary and unfair too.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This policy is harmful.&lt;/strong&gt; We have reputation system for a reason. Making the thread CW takes away large part of the incentive to put effort into providing new or into improving existing answers. This is a &lt;em&gt;huge&lt;/em&gt; disadvantage.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This policy is unreasonable.&lt;/strong&gt; There is no reason to turn this question into CW. There is no StackExchange policy that prescribes doing it. The whole CW concept is outdated and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1594/28666&quot;&gt;&quot;largely deprecated&quot;&lt;/a&gt;: it is not possible since 2010 to post questions as CW; automatic conversion of answers to CW was discontinued in 2014; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11740&quot;&gt;What are “Community Wiki” posts?&lt;/a&gt; meta.SE FAQ does not say anything to this effect; &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/04/putting-the-community-back-in-wiki/&quot;&gt;Putting the Community back in Wiki&lt;/a&gt; 2014 SE blog post only says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a question attracting &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; large numbers of partial answers can be a sign of a topic that wants to be a wiki&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with &quot;very&quot; being in italics in the original. The approximating-$e$ question has 5 answers; that is not a &quot;&lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; large number&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I think we are being pedantic in following an outdated and detrimental policy and should seriously re-think it.&lt;/strong&gt; And we are not even following it consistently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion is to use CW status only for &quot;big list&quot; questions like the ones about jokes or quotes -- the ones that are essentially off-topic and are only here due to their &quot;historical importance&quot;.  Note that the answers there usually do not require much effort and so it is not too bad if they do not count towards reputation. In contrast, new on-topic questions that invite substantial answers requiring effort to compose &lt;strong&gt;should not become CW.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Update to clarify&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Anybody who thinks that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/193990&quot;&gt;Approximate $e$ using Monte Carlo Simulation&lt;/a&gt; should be CW please explain why &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/194352&quot;&gt;Why does the number of continuous uniform variables on (0,1) needed for their sum to exceed one have mean $e$?&lt;/a&gt; should not. &lt;em&gt;[@Silverfish makes an attempt in the comments.]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Anybody who thinks that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/165&quot;&gt;How would you explain Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to a layperson?&lt;/a&gt; should be CW please explain why &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/18058&quot;&gt;How would you explain covariance to someone who understands only the mean?&lt;/a&gt; should not.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Anybody who thinks that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2492&quot;&gt;Is normality testing &amp;#39;essentially useless&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt; should be CW please explain why &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/53&quot;&gt;PCA on correlation or covariance?&lt;/a&gt; should not.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Anybody who thinks that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/194035&quot;&gt;When (if ever) is a frequentist approach substantively better than a Bayesian?&lt;/a&gt; should be CW please explain why &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/577&quot;&gt;Is there any reason to prefer the AIC or BIC over the other?&lt;/a&gt; should not.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Anybody who thinks that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/5026&quot;&gt;What is the difference between data mining, statistics, machine learning and AI?&lt;/a&gt; should be CW please explain why &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/665&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the difference between probability and statistics?&lt;/a&gt; should not.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Anybody who thinks that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1595&quot;&gt;Python as a statistics workbench&lt;/a&gt; should be CW please explain why &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/3392&quot;&gt;Excel as a statistics workbench&lt;/a&gt; should not.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The border to me appears &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt; vague and &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt; arbitrary that the only consistent solution that I see is to remove it.&lt;/strong&gt; Substantial &amp;amp; answerable questions should not be CW. My suggestion is that all the above listed questions should not be closed and not be CW.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In addition, CW status is obviously not being used consistently (most glaring are examples 2 and 6), which creates massive unfairness.&lt;/strong&gt; It is not some peanuts of reputation that we are talking about. These are often threads with 100+ upvoted answers, i.e. we are talking about ~1k reputation being given or taken. The &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; way to make the situation fair is to remove the CW status (it does not work the other way round).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, I can see &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; argument for making the Frequentist-vs-Bayesian question CW because of its holy war topic. I disagree with this argument but I can see it. If this is the community's standpoint then I propose an intermediate solution that &lt;strong&gt;at least all non-holy-war questions listed above should not be CW.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(I would encourage anybody who posts an answer to defend the current CW practice to comment on all the examples above.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2016-02-11T15:21:51.957" CommentCount="27" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2954" CreationDate="2016-02-08T12:39:36.727" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Natural language processing is on topic here, as @amoeba points out. But I think it'd be a good idea to clarify the point of your question in its body. Do you want to know &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; to recognize named entities within HTML links (given the lack of usual orthographic or syntactic clues)? Asking what &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named-entity_recognition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;NER&lt;/a&gt; typically involves is a bit wishy-washy - it's likely to depend on the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="11852" LastEditDate="2016-02-10T19:21:07.233" LastActivityDate="2016-02-10T19:21:07.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2935" CreationDate="2016-02-09T04:46:53.877" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/172839/7290&quot;&gt;Getting Information out of Blackbox Models - RandomForest / XGBoost&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I closed the thread as a duplicate (and I continue to think that was correct), the answer is really good and has not gotten the votes it deserves, IMO.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Update:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(Actually, it isn't clear that it's possible to add a bounty to a closed thread.  That makes @amoeba's argument for merging stronger.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Bounty started 11 Feb 2016. Now awarded.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T23:30:20.230" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2939" CreationDate="2016-02-09T10:55:34.960" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please don't do minor changes, unless you can combine them with larger changes in the same post. Remember that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/178490/256777&quot;&gt;editing a question bumps it to the top of the &quot;active questions&quot; list&lt;/a&gt;. Add this to people having to sign off on your edits until you reach the 2k rep threshold, and at some point changing &quot;their&quot; to &quot;there&quot; actually turns from signal into noise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2016-02-09T10:55:34.960" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2935" CreationDate="2016-02-10T14:47:39.480" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/47771/what-is-the-intuition-behind-beta-distribution&quot;&gt;David Robinson's answer&lt;/a&gt; to the question about intuition about beta distribution deserves recognition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Bounty started 27 March 2016. Now awarded]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2016-04-03T01:12:16.563" LastActivityDate="2016-04-03T01:12:16.563" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2963" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-11T16:32:39.737" Score="2" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to see the MathJax equations but all I can see is the &lt;code&gt;$$&lt;/code&gt; with the text in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's happening ? Do I need to install a plugin? I'm currently using Chrome as browser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$ &#xA;accuracy = \frac{TP+FN}{TP+FP+TN+FN} &#xA;$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89021" LastEditorUserId="89021" LastEditDate="2016-02-11T16:51:54.883" LastActivityDate="2016-02-11T16:51:54.883" Title="Can't see rendered MathJax" Tags="|discussion|support|math-display|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2016-02-11T16:47:44.657" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2953" CreationDate="2016-02-12T17:12:23.253" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am posting a possible solution that doesn't address all of the points but may be a solution to mitigating the effects of losing reputation score for having a question become CW. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible for the moderators to let those whose reputation would be affected by having the original post become CW know beforehand so that they may decide to use those points as a possible bounty to highlight some other question of interest to them?  I am not sure why you are not allowed to keep the reputation in the first place, but this the reputation would still be taken away and at least used in some &quot;productive&quot; fashion by that user. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I pose this solution knowing that my own post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/195034/what-is-a-data-scientist&quot;&gt;What is a data scientist?&lt;/a&gt; could potentially go CW and now I wonder should I chance losing all that reputation and so instead place a large bounty, or should I roll the dice and gamble on the fact that it may not go CW. So I think a heads up (moderators if you are listening) would be nice :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98920" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T17:12:23.253" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2974" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-13T14:34:11.550" Score="0" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if it's OK to edit questions that do not format or punctuate text well.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89021" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2016-02-13T15:19:31.300" LastActivityDate="2016-02-13T15:19:31.300" Title="Is it wrong to edit badly formatted questions?" Tags="|discussion|editing|formatting|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-02-13T20:59:02.787" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2948" CreationDate="2016-02-15T05:05:09.907" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;That paper is good but pretty old, many things happened since then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the literature of Bayesian Optimization what you are trying to do is to come up with a new &lt;em&gt;acquisition function&lt;/em&gt; $\alpha(x)$, where $x$ is a point in the domain to be optimized (Jones et al. use Expected Improvement as their acquisition function) and $\alpha$ is some metric that takes into account exploration vs exploitation. People have been working on this problem for a long time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might want to check the literature review papers that I listed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/193306/optimization-when-cost-function-slow-to-evaluate/193391#193391&quot;&gt;my answer to this other question&lt;/a&gt;. In particular, you'll see that there are several common acquisition functions that people use in Bayesian Optimization:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Probability of Improvement (PI).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Expected improvement (EI), as per Jones et al.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lower confidence bound (LCB), or UCB for maximization (Srinivas et al., 2010)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Expected information gain (ES, or Entropy Search); see Hennig and Schuler (2012) and Hernández-Lobato et al. (2014).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that 1 and 2 belong to a more general class of generalized expected-improvement measures (see Schonlau et al., 1998).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Metrics based on entropy are somewhat more principled but much harder to compute. EI is the &quot;standard&quot; choice nowadays, although it is not always the best choice. Sometimes it is good to use a combination of acquisition functions (see Hoffman et al., 2011).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;References:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] Srinivas, N., Krause, A., Kakade, S. M., &amp;amp; Seeger, M. (2009). Gaussian process optimization in the bandit setting: No regret and experimental design. arXiv preprint arXiv:0912.3995.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] Hennig, P., &amp;amp; Schuler, C. J. (2012). Entropy search for information-efficient global optimization. The Journal of Machine Learning Research, 13(1), 1809-1837.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[3] Hernández-Lobato, J. M., Hoffman, M. W., &amp;amp; Ghahramani, Z. (2014). Predictive entropy search for efficient global optimization of black-box functions. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (pp. 918-926).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[4] Schonlau, M., Welch, W. J., &amp;amp; Jones, D. R. (1998). Global versus local search in constrained optimization of computer models. Lecture Notes-Monograph Series, 11-25.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[5] Hoffman, M. D., Brochu, E., &amp;amp; de Freitas, N. (2011). Portfolio Allocation for Bayesian Optimization. In UAI (pp. 327-336).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80479" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T05:05:09.907" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2977" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2980" CreationDate="2016-02-17T10:59:30.930" Score="1" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is quite obvious (so long as you read it in its entirety) that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/196807/answers-to-3d-linear-regression-in-closed-form&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question has incorrectly been marked as duplicate. It is worth reading the comments too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; Just to be clear, my question requests an answer that gives values of A,B and C explicitly rather than implicitly. Some readers may think that an implicit answer is just as good, but the implicit ones leave me with three simultaneous equations to solve. This is doable, but in practice its quite difficult to do without a chance of making a mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96274" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T12:29:20.977" Title="Overzealous marking as duplicate" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2979" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-18T14:35:42.700" Score="17" ViewCount="350" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have the following rank-related tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mann-whitney-u-test&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mann-whitney-u-test&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mann-whitney-u-test&lt;/a&gt; (271) -- ranksum test&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/wilcoxon&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;wilcoxon&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;wilcoxon&lt;/a&gt; (297) -- used for ranksum and for signed-rank&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/signed-rank-test&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;signed-rank-test&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;signed-rank-test&lt;/a&gt; (37)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sign-test&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sign-test&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sign-test&lt;/a&gt; (21)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spearman&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spearman&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spearman&lt;/a&gt; (134)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spearman-rho&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spearman-rho&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spearman-rho&lt;/a&gt; (107)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kendall-tau&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kendall-tau&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kendall-tau&lt;/a&gt; (74)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rank-correlation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rank-correlation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rank-correlation&lt;/a&gt; (101) -- most questions seem to be about Spearman's rho&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ranking&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ranking&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ranking&lt;/a&gt; (357)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ranks&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ranks&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ranks&lt;/a&gt; (70)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Problems:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strike&gt;&lt;code&gt;[wilcoxon]&lt;/code&gt; is ambiguous. Worse, one meaning of &lt;code&gt;[wilcoxon]&lt;/code&gt; is synonymous with &lt;code&gt;[mann-whitney-u-test]&lt;/code&gt; and another meaning is synonymous with &lt;code&gt;[signed-rank-test]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strike&gt;&lt;code&gt;[spearman]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[spearman-rho]&lt;/code&gt; are synonymous.&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strike&gt;&lt;code&gt;[rank-correlation]&lt;/code&gt; might be better off sorted out into specific types.&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[ranking]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[ranks]&lt;/code&gt; have somewhat unclear scope.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My current proposal is:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strike&gt;Create &lt;code&gt;[wilcoxon-rank-sum]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[wilcoxon-signed-rank]&lt;/code&gt; tags.&lt;/strike&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Done.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strike&gt;Make &lt;code&gt;[wilcoxon-rank-sum]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[mann-whitney-u-test]&lt;/code&gt; both synonyms of &lt;code&gt;[wilcoxon-mann-whitney]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/strike&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Done by @Glen_b.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strike&gt;Make &lt;code&gt;[wilcoxon-signed-rank]&lt;/code&gt; the synonym of &lt;code&gt;[signed-rank-test]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/strike&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Done by @Glen_b. Later reverted by @Scortchi, following @ttnphns' answer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strike&gt;Go through all &lt;code&gt;[wilcoxon]&lt;/code&gt; questions and move those about rank sum into &lt;code&gt;[wilcoxon-mann-whitney]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/strike&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Done by @mdewey.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strike&gt;Move all the remaining threads from &lt;code&gt;[wilcoxon]&lt;/code&gt; into &lt;code&gt;[signed-rank-test]&lt;/code&gt; via mod merge hammer.&lt;/strike&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Done by @Glen_b.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strike&gt;Merge &lt;code&gt;[spearman]&lt;/code&gt; into &lt;code&gt;[spearman-rho]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/strike&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Synonym created via voting. Merge done by @Glen_b.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;Sort as many questions as possible from &lt;code&gt;[rank-correlation]&lt;/code&gt; into &lt;code&gt;[spearman-rho]&lt;/code&gt; and/or &lt;code&gt;[kendall-tau]&lt;/code&gt; and/or &lt;code&gt;[goodman-kruskal-gamma]&lt;/code&gt;. It looks like there will be ~30 questions left though.&lt;/strike&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Done. Thanks @mdewey.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Go through &lt;code&gt;[ranking]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[ranks]&lt;/code&gt; and try to understand what to do with them. I leave this open for now because this involves 400+ threads.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-04-10T07:43:39.047" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T07:43:39.047" Title="Rank-related tags are an enormous mess" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-reorganization|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2977" CreationDate="2016-02-18T15:16:34.910" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there may be some doubts about the question's suitability for CV insofar as it asks for something different from the suggested duplicate. In no particular order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Deriving a solution for the equations in non-matrix form is more&#xA;Maths than Statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The desired form for the answer can be got by Googling or&#xA;with a computer algebra system. (Lack of research effort.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No-one needs to be able to calculate coefficient&#xA;estimates by hand nowadays&amp;mdash;&amp;amp; the numerical accuracy of results arrived at this way might well be an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There doesn't seem much point in making of CV a compendium of results&#xA;for particular cases.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Working out the answer would aid understanding more than looking&#xA;at it. (Is it a homework question?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless, these considerations don't seem overwhelming, &amp;amp; I couldn't see any harm in re-opening it (when I did it already had two re-open votes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2017-02-13T12:29:20.977" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T12:29:20.977" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2981" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4578" CreationDate="2016-02-19T11:40:37.670" Score="8" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pearson&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pearson&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pearson&lt;/a&gt; tag (220 questions) is ambiguous and seems to be used inconsistently: it can refer either to Pearson's correlation or to Pearson's chi-squared goodness of fit test.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I think it should be split into &lt;code&gt;[pearson-r]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[pearson-chi-squared]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Afterwards we should map &lt;code&gt;[pearson-chi-squared]&lt;/code&gt; (and &lt;code&gt;[pearson-goodness-of-fit]&lt;/code&gt;?) to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/chi-squared&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;chi-squared&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;chi-squared&lt;/a&gt; (1100).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T12:49:00.980" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T12:59:12.087" Title="What should we do with the ambiguous [Pearson] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|tag-deletion|tag-reorganization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1992" CreationDate="2016-02-20T01:58:17.667" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the perspective of a beginner trying to gain a foothold in machine learning through CrossValidated, a reasonably lenient policy on things like &amp;quot;thank you&amp;quot;s seems to be helpful, for several reasons that I haven't yet seen brought up in this thread:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I haven't seen any of this yet at CrossValidated, whose members have impressed me with their civility and generous help so far, but that isn't the case at a lot of other forums for related topics at StackExchange and other sites, particularly programming ones. There are two principal temptations which can ruin sites like this (both of which come from hubris): the experts who think they can't possibly be wrong and let everyone else know it, and their nemeses, amateurs who pretend to know a lot more than they do. If either one gets out of control, people become reluctant to post because they have to brace themselves for what sometimes amounts to outright abuse (I can name specific forums where semi-famous experts in various fields make a sport of ridiculing newbies and engage in shocking public meltdowns, but I won't). The damage from that sort of atmosphere is incalculable because we'll simply never know how many lurkers never signed up for the site or posted (as I have for many years in the forums I'm referring to). It can occur silently, with no outward signs like falling membership numbers, but with devastating effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Newcomers like me can't do much about the problem of supercilious experts (which I've seen no signs of so far at CrossValidated), but we can put a drop in the bucket towards solving its polar opposite by short expressions of gratitude and the occasional short disclaimer of inexperience. I would be less comfortable about posting if such niceties were regulated too aggressively, because it allows me to consciously nip a potential source of tension in the bud. Other posters, particularly ones who've spent years earning the right to speak on these issues, are less likely to misconstrue posts and take offense if gratitude and humility are expressible in reasonable proportions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The subject matter in forums like these can be highly technical and taxing to think about, plus working with data mining software can be frustrating at times. This can raise the tension level further, whereas the occasional expression of basic courtesy can reduce it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tone of voice is difficult to get across in Internet discussions, where people tend to freely mix on-point information with casual conversation; that's why in chat I consciously use emoticons a lot to avoid misunderstandings. &amp;quot;Thanks&amp;quot; etc. sometimes serve the same purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All three points suggest that an overzealous approach to editing out &amp;quot;thanks&amp;quot; and disclaimers etc. can actually reduce the quality of the answers in the long run. Why? If people don't post questions, there are &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; answers, regardless of quality or length. Fanatical text slashing can be as self-defeating as fanatical accounting, where 0 expenses and 0 income also equals a balanced budget. I don't see that happening here: in fact, the moderators have been generous in letting me ask questions verbosely, which can also end up reducing the amount of text in the long run by avoiding unnecessary replies based on misreading of questions. &amp;quot;Thanks&amp;quot; are in order for maintaining that balanced policy so far...when in doubt, I'd always lean towards a more lenient response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54091" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2016-02-21T16:46:01.320" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2983" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-22T08:24:44.563" Score="10" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently we migrated &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35537779/how-to-repeat-1000-times-this-random-walk-simulation-in-r&quot;&gt;question about repeating simulation function in R&lt;/a&gt; to SO. Initially I voted to migrate it to SO, however then it got quite nice answer by &lt;em&gt;Xi'an&lt;/em&gt; that focused on its &lt;em&gt;statistical&lt;/em&gt; content. This made me retract my  vote, however it was migrated since it gathered enough votes for migration. Now we have very purely formatted question and answer (SO does not allow for TeX) and they taken together do not really fit well to SO. We probably cannot migrate them back, but maybe we should be more careful about such decisions? Is it an example of on-topic or off-topic question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2016-02-22T14:07:43.830" Title="Migration that went wrong" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|closing-questions|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2983" CreationDate="2016-02-22T14:07:43.830" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It looks like the community made the right decision.&lt;/strong&gt;  Xi'an's answer was purely software-oriented, explaining how to use &lt;code&gt;cusum&lt;/code&gt; and an iterator in &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; to accomplish a calculation efficiently.  That makes it a fine answer--on Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, when a thread is migrated and we would like to take it back, we can contact the moderators on the destination site and ask them to reject the migration.  But it's hard to conceive of a case where a migration would obviously be wrong: our community consists of thoughtful and experienced people.  Although individuals may have differences of opinion, it is highly unlikely that any glaring mistake would be made.  Most likely the best solution for migration of any question that, in retrospect, appears to have some statistical content, would be to persuade the O.P. to re-post it with a focus on the statistical issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2016-02-22T14:07:43.830" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2985" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2986" CreationDate="2016-02-22T16:29:04.027" Score="13" ViewCount="337" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I was on Stack Overflow and they seem to have a lot more traffic and users there.  It seems to make sense to me because knew many more CS majors than stats majors in college.  This made me wonder about reputation-equality between sites.  I saw some decent reputation folks (~7k+, ~35k+) making posts that were downvoted to negative net values for basic errors.  That suggests that a ~7k on SO might mean much less than the same on CV in terms of representing expertise, or expectation of answer points given score.  If someone with only moderate expertise can get into the &quot;aristocracy&quot; of 10k+ then I am much less likely to give credence to an answer based on answerer reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question/s:&lt;/strong&gt;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the GINI score (or other appropriate measure) for user reputation across all of CV? SO?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How is each evolving over time?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does each evolution relate to new and engaged participant&#xA;&quot;acquisition&quot; rate or to user disengagement rate?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22452" LastEditorUserId="22452" LastEditDate="2016-02-22T18:14:22.017" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T18:56:03.497" Title="GINI score - what does the distribution of reputation across CV look like?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|stackoverflow|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2985" CreationDate="2016-02-24T14:52:44.757" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well thanks for nerdsniping me. My prior query in the comments is limited due to the idiosyncratic conventions of the data explorer to return only 50,000 rows. In that query I got around this problem by only selecting users with a reputation over 1 (people who sign up for the site and have their account associated &lt;em&gt;de facto&lt;/em&gt; get a rep. of 1). Apparently the Gini coefficient is pretty sensitive to how you treat these people though. If you plot the ECDF, just imagine keeping the curve at the same place, but stretching the X axis to the right by a large amount. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/440337/gini-based-on-reputation-all-people?CutOffReputation=100&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;new query&lt;/a&gt; that hops around that problem, in which you can input where the cut-off in reputation scores is considered. Here is a table of our site compared with several others, varying the cut-off at -100 (which effectively captures everyone - ?is Gini OK for negative values?), the cut-off above 1 (so eliminates those browsers who just had the 1 point) and 100 (who can also be browsers if they have the 100 boost from a neighboring site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                     Rep CutOffs    &#xA;    Site       &amp;gt;-100     &amp;gt;1     &amp;gt;100&#xA;--------------------------------------&#xA;Cross Validated 0.81    0.68    0.54&#xA;Stack Overflow  0.95    0.91    0.77&#xA;Mathematics     0.90    0.85    0.76&#xA;Theor. CompSci  0.64    0.45    0.41&#xA;GIS             0.82    0.74    0.60&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see the Gini metric is pretty sensitive to these cut-offs. The more people you cut-off the more equal the sites become. These appear to agree with my prior &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2086/1036&quot;&gt;post based on answers&lt;/a&gt; off-hand. Theoretical computer science is the most egalitarian, CrossValidated is in the middle with a few others, and Mathematics and Stack Overflow have the most inequality. (Others feel free to add sites to my table.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, does this have anything to do with your questions? I'm skeptical it does. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Off-topic rant - it is common in ecological models in social science for people to put inequality scores (Gini or others) on the right hand of regression models and interpret them as &quot;more inequality results in some particular outcome&quot;. I have a difficult time relating such inequality measures though (which are based on economic ideas such as egalitarian transfers of funds) to micro-level individual behaviors. Take for instance a really simple 4 person society, and try to write out how exactly changing the cash one person has to members of the group. Measures like Gini imply a whole complicated lot of functions that on their face seem at best over-complicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all academic though. I don't know how to encourage more users for the site - which is the whole point of the question. Talking about metrics like Gini as if they matter as an outcome is a bit red herring. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those interested, the GINI measure I calculate is based off the formula on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.had2know.com/academics/gini-coefficient-calculator.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this website&lt;/a&gt;. For a more academic reference though, Paul Allison gives two alternative formula in the reference below.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Allison, Paul D. &quot;Measures of inequality.&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/2094626&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;American sociological review (1978): 865-880&lt;/a&gt; | &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/_media/pdf/Reference%20Media/Allison_1978_Measurement.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PDF Link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T18:56:03.497" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2987" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-25T11:52:41.330" Score="12" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I have noticed a few suggested edits that included adding new information to an existing answer. Is that acceptable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My intuition is that edits should not add new information that the author did not include -- because it may compromise the responsibility and trustworthiness. E.g. if a nonsensical edit is suggested and somehow passes the review, it will look as if the original answerer had this bad idea, while it actually belongs to the editor of the answer. I think that in such situations, a new answer should be posted instead, or perhaps a comment under the existing answer prompting the original answerer to update his answer accordingly (so that the original answerer can decide on it himself/herself).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-02-26T00:23:53.467" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T21:43:09.230" Title="Is it acceptable to edit other people's answers to include new information?" Tags="|discussion|policy|editing|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-25T12:40:54.200" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say No in broad terms, but as usual much depends on the details. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Positively, substantial new information could help a thread considerably, but that should typically be added through comments or very possibly as part of an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what's substantial? For example, if someone edited a literature reference to add detail or to add a URL, that's an excellent contribution in my view. If the editor wanted to do that without claiming credit, that's fine too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Negatively, the purpose of editing (see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2810/editing-questions-dos-and-donts&quot;&gt;Editing questions: dos and don&amp;#39;ts&lt;/a&gt;) is essentially to clarify a question, including correcting trivial errors,  but not to amplify it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The possibility of a misguided or incorrect edit being accepted by mistake exists always, independently of this issue, and is to be matched by a rollback and/or further editing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T15:00:18.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2987" CreationDate="2016-02-25T16:06:54.637" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I agree with @NickCox that as a general policy answer edits should only be &quot;minor&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_editing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copy editing&lt;/a&gt;),&lt;/strong&gt; i.e. improve grammar, fix spelling and LaTeX mistakes, format the quotes and code blocks, insert full references and hyperlinks to papers, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Substantial (major) changes should not be made via edits; if you think that an answer is incorrect or not entirely correct, consider downvoting, and/or commenting, and/or posting an alternative answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However, I have encountered some situations where I think it is justified (with extreme care!) to violate this rule.&lt;/strong&gt; For example, if a highly upvoted / accepted answer in a popular thread contains some sloppiness or misinformation and if the answerer is not with us anymore or simply does not react to the comments, it might be worth to edit. It is practically impossible for a new answer in such a thread to get more upvotes than an existing popular answer; and there might be so many comments already present that a new comment would not be very noticeable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did it a couple of times, e.g. with the accepted answer here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/222&quot;&gt;What are principal component scores?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very rarely I have even decided to edit to improve an answer that was correct but I felt could be extended or clarified. E.g. the accepted answer here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/53&quot;&gt;PCA on correlation or covariance?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That said, I re-iterate: I do agree that our policy should remain that such edits are generally not allowed.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T21:43:09.230" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2990" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5673" CreationDate="2016-02-27T19:41:15.167" Score="21" ViewCount="989" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where should questions about operations research be asked? Is cross validated appropriate or are other sites within SE network better suited?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have had a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.or-exchange.org/questions/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.or-exchange.org/questions/&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;but that site does not seem to be terribly active (and, as noted &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5620/is-there-a-way-to-solicit-cross-validated-users-to-commit-to-a-proposed-operatio&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, is curently and possibly for ever shut down.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="11887" LastEditDate="2019-04-29T08:21:37.873" LastActivityDate="2021-12-23T17:22:54.260" Title="Where can I ask questions about &quot;operations research&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2991" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2993" CreationDate="2016-02-27T19:52:37.037" Score="10" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;The coupon collector's problem is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coupon_collector%27s_problem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;well-known example in probability&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searching the site for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=coupon+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;coupon is:question&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; suggests we have about a dozen posts on it, but that searching is complicated because we have e.g. some business/marketing questions where &quot;coupons&quot; turn up in the retailing context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It strikes me that &lt;code&gt;[coupon-collector-problem]&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;[coupon-collectors-problem]&lt;/code&gt; (that looks grammatically shoddy but I don't think you can have possessive apostrophe in a tag name?) or maybe just &lt;code&gt;[coupon-problem]&lt;/code&gt; might justabout be justified to tie these related questions together. Or is this too few to be worth doing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(When we had fewer it would have been much easier to pick them out from search results. My personal inclination is we now have enough, and searching is somewhat muddied by other uses of &quot;coupon&quot;, that it's justified to start a new tag.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-02-28T21:13:56.600" Title="Should we have a tag for the coupon collector's problem?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2990" CreationDate="2016-02-27T21:37:59.527" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there is no clear-cut distinction possible. This is something inherent to all interdisciplinary fields (e.g. Systems Biology). For the case of Operational Research I think that only a relatively small number of operational research questions could fit neither on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;CV&lt;/a&gt; nor on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://scicomp.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Computational Science beta&lt;/a&gt;. The website you mention is rather good too (when it is active). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question has a relatively clear statistical concept, I would suggest keeping in CV. If the meat of the question is on optimisation (e.g. &quot;&lt;em&gt;how to express X and Y constraints?&lt;/em&gt;&quot;), I would suggest moving it to &lt;a href=&quot;https://scicomp.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;scicomp&lt;/a&gt;. Questions without a clear Statistics or Optimisation scope would have to be judged in an individual basis (maybe they should be migrated in &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://economics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Economics&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://quant.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Quant. Finance&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11852" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:53:55.003" LastActivityDate="2016-03-27T08:24:28.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2991" CreationDate="2016-02-28T21:13:56.600" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. If something deserves an article in Wikipedia, it deserves a tag too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2016-02-28T21:13:56.600" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2994" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2995" CreationDate="2016-03-01T20:29:15.477" Score="14" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;Twice today a user has taken it upon him/herself to edit my post to remove what I think is a useful piece of visual information (the cover of a book which also has a graph that I make repeated reference to in the post). This user's edits don't have to pass the review queue because s/he has sufficient rep. Yet the user continues to override my reversion of the edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I do? I don't think a war of edits is particularly helpful. The user has not attempted to contact me to discuss the issue, so I can't tag him/her in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-03-02T23:01:57.693" LastActivityDate="2016-03-02T23:01:57.693" Title="A user insists on making a detrimental edit to one of my posts. What do I do?" Tags="|discussion|editing|moderation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2994" CreationDate="2016-03-01T20:36:08.787" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The preferred solution is to flag the moderators,&lt;/strong&gt; who have additional tools for limiting edits and, if necessary, limiting the abilities of individual users to interact on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mods can also create chat rooms and invite anybody--whether or not they have ever posted anything--to a private conversation.  Occasionally this has helped reconcile differences of opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2016-03-01T20:36:08.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2996" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-02T09:49:59.070" Score="5" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, I asked this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/199283/train-test-split-in-rs-caret-package&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/199283/train-test-split-in-rs-caret-package&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which was promptly downvoted and closed due to being off topic. I understand that, and I made a mistake to post it. However I have a question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I correct that my question falls into the category of &quot;OR it focuses on programming, debugging, or performing routine operations within a statistical computing platform&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so, would it be appropriate to migrate this question to stackoverflow?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would it perhaps be a good idea to automatically allow such migrations? I know some other stackexchange sites allow users to vote by saying &quot;this is off topic and it belongs to this other stackexchange site&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31914" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-03-02T23:05:01.527" Title="Migrating programming questions to StackOverflow" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|closing-questions|migration|stackoverflow|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2990" CreationDate="2016-03-02T11:50:17.903" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As has been noted, some topics do run &quot;across&quot; sites. I do have a background in OR/MS myself and lo and behold so far I have been on Mathematica.SE and a bit of Stats.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have specialized on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_dynamics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;System Dynamics (SD)&lt;/a&gt; which is a systems modeling paradigm introduced mainly by Jay Forrester in the late 50s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of a week ago I have proposed a new Stack Exchange site in &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Area 51&lt;/a&gt; which I have called &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/95927/business-simulation-and-modeling?referrer=F_RkKhnRJ6zHEOEwzGGm6g2&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Modeling and Simulation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. The core criteria for that site in my opinion are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use of &lt;em&gt;models&lt;/em&gt; (which includes conceptual models not only quantitative models)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and/or use of &lt;em&gt;computer simulation&lt;/em&gt; typically (but not exclusively) using common paradigms like System Dynamics (SD), Discrete Event Simulation (DES) or Agent-based Modeling (ABM)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;supporting decision making&lt;/em&gt; in management of a complex system (e.g. some link to optimal control)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is of course all fresh but instead of running around on very specialized sites there is merit I believe to have a dedicated page for &lt;strong&gt;Modeling and Simulation for Decision Support&lt;/strong&gt;. Especially since pages dedicated to OR/MS, or System Dynamics and other topics in this area are often raising too little interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe that is a site for you (and hopefully others) to help grow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Update&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of today I have created a proposal for &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/98921/management-science?referrer=F_RkKhnRJ6xMlbSbLunD4A2&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Management Science&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; on Area 51 which I feel is somewhat lacking -- and which has an even broader focus than Modeling and Simulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36678" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2019-04-27T17:24:38.890" LastActivityDate="2019-04-27T17:24:38.890" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2996" CreationDate="2016-03-02T22:53:17.970" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;So that this question ends up with an answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Am I correct that my question falls into the category of &quot;OR it focuses on programming, debugging, or performing routine operations within a statistical computing platform&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If so, would it be appropriate to migrate this question to stackoverflow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only if it meets the conditions to be on topic there*. Many programming questions do not (a lot fail by asking about problems but not providing a small reproducible example)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* we're not supposed to migrate questions which will simply close at the destination; indeed if it is closed there it will usually just bounce straight back. [In typically terse and colourful language often associated with programmer forums, this is usually expressed as &quot;don't migrate crap&quot;; the term tends to be used even with otherwise good questions that don't meet the site's standards.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would it perhaps be a good idea to automatically allow such migrations? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can flag for migration to any other site; if it seems to meet the topic and standards of the target site, we'll migrate for you. This is the preferred method (over deletion and reposting).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I know some other stackexchange sites allow users to vote by saying &quot;this is off topic and it belongs to this other stackexchange site&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So does ours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes our users with sufficient reputation will vote to close with a &quot;off-topic/migrate&quot; reason rather than the option under which yours closed -- but if it's going to close there anyway, the people on the receiving end (rightly) see it as us &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1305/please-do-not-migrate-low-quality-questions/&quot;&gt;simply wasting their time&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know that there's a need for any other migration pathway than the usual methods. Flagging is usually fast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do ask a software related question here and it closes, here's what you do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;consider whether it can be made clearly on-topic here; if so edit accordingly&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if there's a stats/ML part and a programming (say) part; if so, split it into two questions, keeping the stats one here and posting the other in a suitable forum. You can always link the two if need be.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if it's already clearly on-topic elsewhere on SE, flag to migrate&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if it could be made on topic elsewhere, edit then flag&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;finally, if it's not on topic on SE, consider the support forums (and other resources) that are mentioned in our close-reason text.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2016-03-02T23:05:01.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2999" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-03T15:43:56.140" Score="3" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I answered a question recently and then realized I needed to add material to provide a full answer, which I did. (I did this after the answer had received an upvote. I don't know if that's an issue.) I marked the new material with the heading &quot;Edit&quot; as I have seen elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that I have thought about the question and my answer even more, I would like to completely rewrite my answer in order to both generalize and clarify. Is that okay? If not, what are the alternatives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1047" LastActivityDate="2016-03-03T22:47:26.030" Title="Is it okay to substantially edit (i.e., completely rewrite) my answer?" Tags="|support|editing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3000" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-03T15:51:20.190" Score="4" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have given Bayesian answers to questions that do not have the bayesian tag. Sometimes my Bayesian answer is accepted and there's not tag to lead anyone there. Is it ever okay to add the tag? Do I even have the authority to do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1047" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-03-04T18:45:53.770" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T18:45:53.770" Title="Is it okay to add the bayesian tag if my answer is Bayesian?" Tags="|support|tags|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-03-12T09:29:00.830" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2999" CreationDate="2016-03-03T16:20:10.003" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's good to improve your answers. I think you just have to use common sense to decide when things that have happened since you wrote an answer (comments, references in other answers, up-votes) militate against changing it too much. And remember edits can always be rolled back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2016-03-03T16:20:10.003" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2999" CreationDate="2016-03-03T21:46:23.027" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a general rule, I think there is a difference between a full new write-up and making substantial changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding is extra material, citations, graphs, etc. is fine; I find it rather welcome actually! It shows that the author cared about his/her answer. On occasion I have upvoted answers that I originally thought to be &quot;mundane&quot; exactly because the OP took the time to make them better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Completely rewriting an answer is a bit odd especially in the case people have already down/upvoted a post. I would suggest to: A. &lt;em&gt;add this full rewriting as a new post&lt;/em&gt; and/or B. &lt;em&gt;just delete the previous post and write a new one&lt;/em&gt;. The votes/comments around a post were given for that particular answer or at least the general gist of it; not for the complete rewrite up of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11852" LastActivityDate="2016-03-03T21:46:23.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2999" CreationDate="2016-03-03T22:47:26.030" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;it is acceptable to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;- post more than one answer,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;- delete an answer you deem no longer adequate,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and that &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a complete rewrite is essentially identical (in the experience of an ordinary user) to deleting an inadequate answer and then posting a second better answer,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then I can't see any major issue in simply completely rewriting, as long as the question and other answers still all make sense by doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if some parts of other questions or answers (and to some extent, substantive comments) would look odd thereby, then it would be best to at least mention your answer changed substantially (indeed, I think it's usually a good idea in any case). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further if any part of the question, other answers or comments led you to change your answer, you should acknowledge that contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2016-03-03T22:47:26.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3000" CreationDate="2016-03-03T23:22:23.520" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would usually avoid adding the tag unless there was something about the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; that made it Bayesian or at the very least where a Bayesian approach was &lt;em&gt;notably&lt;/em&gt; natural or obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that adding the tag carries a degree of implication that the OP sought (or should have sought) a Bayesian answer -- if a non-Bayesian approach is just as reasonable, then I would not add the tag, because it could imply other answers (including answers that have not yet been offered) have mistakenly taken a non-Bayesian approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar considerations would apply when adding a tag implying a particular methodology when some other methodology might quite reasonably be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There can be something of a grey area; if you're not sure, one thing you could consider is to ask the OP if they're happy to have the tag there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2016-03-03T23:22:23.520" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3005" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3009" CreationDate="2016-03-04T21:05:44.783" Score="8" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a thread, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/199486/22228&quot;&gt;Real life examples of difference between independence and correlation&lt;/a&gt;, which currently reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is well known that independence implies zero correlation but zero correlation need not imply independence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came across plenty of examples using random variables supporting the latter result. Are there any real life examples to support this fact?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;strong&gt;Edit: @amoeba, @gung and I have performed some editing, so the second paragraph now reads:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came across plenty of mathematical examples demonstrating dependence despite zero correlation. Are there any real life examples to support this fact?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this does not seem to have been deemed a sufficient change for a successful reopen review.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thread is currently closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/85363/22228&quot;&gt;Simplest example of uncorrelated but not independent X and Y?&lt;/a&gt;, which is &lt;em&gt;itself&lt;/em&gt; closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/41317/22228&quot;&gt;How to show operations on two random variables (each Bernoulli) are dependent but not correlated?&lt;/a&gt; I'm not sure how much sense it makes to close a question as a duplicate of a duplicate in general, but can see some logic behind doing so in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think it's clear that, at its heart, the &amp;quot;real life examples&amp;quot; thread is getting at a different point to the other threads, which are rather more oriented towards mathematical statistics. Moreover it has two nice &amp;quot;real-life&amp;quot; examples posted in the answers, which wouldn't quite seem to fit as answers in the &amp;quot;simplest example of uncorrelated but not independent X and Y&amp;quot; that it's closed as duplicate of, and certainly wouldn't fit in the Bernoulli  thread that the &amp;quot;simplest example&amp;quot; thread was closed as a duplicate of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I seem to have been the only person who wanted to reopen in the thread's last reopen review, which suggests in its current state it is not viewed as sufficiently distinctive. But it does seem clear, at least to me, that the original poster (OP) was hoping for a thread quite different in character to our existing ones. Could someone suggest to what extent the wording of the question would need to be clarified/strengthened to emphasise the question's distinctive character, so that it could return as an open thread?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, if this question is to be viewed as essentially indistinguishable from the &amp;quot;simplest example&amp;quot; question, then perhaps this thread should be merged into that one (and presumably that one would be reopened, since if &amp;quot;real life example&amp;quot; answers were deemed acceptable there, then that thread is not redundant to the Bernoulli variable one). Personally, I don't find this alternative particularly attractive, because it strikes me there is worthwhile distinction between a minimalist &lt;em&gt;mathematically simple&lt;/em&gt; example, and a more heuristic/intuitive &lt;em&gt;real life&lt;/em&gt; example, but I think it would be more consistent than the current situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2016-03-27T23:44:08.890" Title="How far would this question about dependence and correlation have to be edited to not be deemed a duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3006" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-05T20:08:41.513" Score="5" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am really enjoying working through the problem &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/188993/use-of-random-forests-for-variable-importance-as-preprocess-before-another-analy&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  I could write a dozen articles for my question.  It is a good question, but it is extensible.  It addresses a big area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you recommend that I:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make a series of related questions of increasing sophistication but very narrow scope?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make my own blog and stop placing this string of content on CV?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make an single vast answer with multiple parts?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe I should turn it into &quot;wiki&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the ideal content for &quot;community wiki&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I convert it to wiki, can I make multiple, separated, answers to&#xA;the same question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;D - none of the above:  Can you suggest something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22452" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T20:33:12.093" Title="Follow-on to a question with too much scope" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|self-answer|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3007" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-06T07:42:08.730" Score="2" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is: What data science tools does Khan Academy use to track student performance? More specifically: I'm curious as to how they track their performance in relation to a student that is not using Khan Academy and with common core standards.  Or if they attempt to predict student performance? Or how they might see if schools do better after employing their product?  (Within the scope of data science/statistics)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an area of this site that I can ask this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91326" LastActivityDate="2016-03-06T07:42:08.730" Title="Is there an area to ask a question about how a company uses data science?" Tags="|discussion|support|questions|policy|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3005" CreationDate="2016-03-09T00:24:00.497" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I think both threads should be re-opened and I have voted for that.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Real life examples is one thing, simple examples is another thing, and a question clarifying some technical confusion about one particular case is yet another thing. They are all sufficiently different to remain non-duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is probably a good case for making the real-life and the simple-examples questions community wiki (my recent Meta question about CW notwithstanding). I have now edited the simple-examples Q to make it more explicitly CW-like (so that it asks about &quot;some simple examples&quot; and not about &quot;the simplest example&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update (Mar 28):&lt;/strong&gt; Both threads are re-opened now. Both were reopened via moderator action; for one of them the reopening vote failed and it only got reopened after I raised a corresponding flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-03-27T23:44:08.890" LastActivityDate="2016-03-27T23:44:08.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3011" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4823" CreationDate="2016-03-10T12:38:52.057" Score="4" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two very popular tags are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hypothesis-testing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hypothesis-testing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hypothesis-testing&lt;/a&gt; (3.4k questions) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/statistical-significance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;statistical-significance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;statistical-significance&lt;/a&gt; (2.4k questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two concepts are very much related, and whenever I happen to edit a question that has one of these tags I almost always feel that I should add another one too. Looking now at the top-voted questions in both tags, I don't see much of a difference in topics. However, I am not actively following any of these tags and so can easily miss some nuances. Hence my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should we maybe make them synonyms? If so, what is a better master tag?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or should we maintain some difference  in usage between these tags? If so, what should this difference be? Can we hope to enforce this difference, given 6k existing questions?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a very related &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/p-value&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;p-value&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;p-value&lt;/a&gt; tag (950 questions)&lt;strike&gt;, but I feel that it should stay separate. There are enough questions asking specifically about $p$-values, their meaning, and properties.&lt;/strike&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Update following @gung's comment:&lt;/strong&gt; Actually, [p-value] is used mostly interchangeably with the former two tags, so perhaps we should think of combining all three tags together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-03-10T20:58:32.430" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T09:44:06.683" Title="What is the difference between our hypothesis-testing, statistical-significance, and p-value tags? Do they need to stay separate?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3012" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3013" CreationDate="2016-03-10T15:18:52.283" Score="3" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few months ago I posted a question over at &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1600069/error-in-distance-between-points-in-spherical-coordinates&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; is related to error analysis, and it got no answer over there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it acceptable to re-post it here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10416" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:19:38.337" LastActivityDate="2016-03-11T01:17:31.680" Title="Can I post a statistics related question here that got no answer in 'Mathematics'?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3012" CreationDate="2016-03-11T01:17:31.680" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The normal approach would be to migrate, but I think it would be past the migration cut-off time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think in that case posting here would be okay. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2016-03-11T01:17:31.680" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2935" CreationDate="2016-03-11T13:56:17.813" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wolfies made an especially valuable contribution to this thread, in which s/he traced back a particular distribution to its originating author. Doing so provided direct refutation to the Wikipedia article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/201038/does-this-distribution-have-a-name-fx-propto-exp-left-fracx-mup-bet/201117#201117&quot;&gt;Does this distribution have a name? $f(x)\propto\exp(-|x-\mu|^p/\beta)$&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[bounty started 14 March 2016. Now awarded.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2016-03-27T01:36:42.357" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3016" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3020" CreationDate="2016-03-11T23:08:20.320" Score="8" ViewCount="316" Body="&lt;p&gt;These two threads seem closely related:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/17897/22228&quot;&gt;What are alternatives to p-values&lt;/a&gt; - an earlier thread, which originally was asked from quite a &quot;software implementation in R&quot; point of view, but received a rather more general response.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/200500/22228&quot;&gt;ASA discusses limitations of p-values - what are the alternatives?&lt;/a&gt; - a more recent thread, written in response to the recent ASA report on p-values and statistical significance, which is perhaps a bit more wider ranging, but whose answers bear some similarity to the earlier question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because they quote different stimulus material which the answers responded to, it wouldn't be possible to merge the two threads - answers to one question would not fit as answers to the other. But it is hard to see that the two threads are sufficiently distinct to justify both remaining open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm minded to suggest the former thread should be closed as a duplicate - there is some incongruity between the OP's search for &quot;how to do something other than p-values in R&quot; and the type of answers that it received, which seems a bit of a weakness. The second question is completely software agnostic and has a better focus on statistical issues, and arguably it's an advantage that it is more on top of current issues e.g. the ASA report (though being &quot;topical&quot; can arguably be a disadvantage as well, because it means the thread might &quot;date&quot; less well as academic discussion moves on beyond the ASA report).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-03-14T23:58:54.367" Title="Two threads about &quot;alternatives to p-values&quot;" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3017" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3041" CreationDate="2016-03-12T18:51:12.450" Score="5" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/201035/posterior-distribution-of-normal-with-gamma-prior&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; has been marked a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2635/conjugate-prior-for-a-gamma-distribution&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;. The former concerns the posterior of a normal likelihood with known mean and gamma precision; the latter, the conjugate prior of a gamma distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what way are these duplicates? What am I missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28462" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-03-28T17:07:11.840" Title="Might someone explain why this is marked as duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3005" CreationDate="2016-03-12T22:05:19.370" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please upvote this answer if, despite what @Silverfish and myself wrote, you think the threads are really duplicates and should stay closed as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2016-03-12T22:05:19.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3005" CreationDate="2016-03-12T22:07:35.520" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please upvote this answer if you could not care less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2016-03-12T22:07:35.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3016" CreationDate="2016-03-14T23:58:54.367" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think one solution might be to edit the title of the first (old) question. It is concerned with one specific quote from one specific author and it has an &lt;em&gt;accepted&lt;/em&gt; answer that does not talk much about &quot;alternatives to p-values&quot;, but instead criticizes the quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that thread is fine and can stand on its own if we change its title to reflect its actual content. I would suggest something like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ziliak (2011) opposes the use of p-values and mentions some alternatives; what are they?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- a bit cumbersome but rather precise. Feel free to improve on this suggestion if you decide to edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2016-03-14T23:58:54.367" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3024" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4480" CreationDate="2016-03-20T23:13:29.730" Score="10" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be helpful if the reopen review queue always explained why the questions were initially closed.  When reviewing close votes, the system shows the reasons other reviewers gave for closing the question, like this:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jSNQX.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jSNQX.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the re-open queue, however, the header sometimes just looks like this:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cxQMA.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cxQMA.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that the two messages should be combined, into something like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question was edited after it was closed. Should it be reopened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was initially flagged because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Reason #1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Reason #2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, one can click through to the question's page to see the closure reason, but it would be convenient to have this information on the page already, as is done during the initial closure. This information is not provided by the (more) link, which just explains what each button does. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7250" LastEditorUserId="72322" LastEditDate="2016-12-01T17:01:42.440" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T17:03:32.317" Title="Show reason for closure when reviewing questions for reopening" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|closing-questions|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3025" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3026" CreationDate="2016-03-23T12:55:38.257" Score="7" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/201989/1036&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was originally on stackoverflow and I flagged it to be migrated to this site. The question is framed in terms of choosing between two different SPSS procedures, which is a &lt;em&gt;statistical question&lt;/em&gt; - not a programming one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I flagged it for migration to here because it is a good (and subtle) question as well - what weights to use when you only have summary information. It is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/8580&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;question that has perplexed&lt;/a&gt; others as well, so I think it is appropriate to discuss on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Temporary closure is reasonable to clarify details of what the two methods do (so people do not need to look up the details in alternative documents), but that is not why the question was closed by the 5 individuals. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be a bit more general, while many questions come in the form of &lt;code&gt;How do I choose between A and B in software Y&lt;/code&gt; they can always be broadened to other contexts by stating the differences in the underlying models - which is software agnostic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically contrasting two software procedures is just a practical way most people encounter such issues. It is a steep hill to climb for many users to be able to formalize different software procedures in equations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-03-23T14:08:13.660" Title="Closed question - discussing differences between statistical procedures" Tags="|discussion|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3025" CreationDate="2016-03-23T14:08:13.660" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I reopened and unlocked the question.  The basis for this action is explained in a comment to the question, which points out the (many) statistical issues that need to be addressed.  Nevertheless, I think the community acted consistently and reasonably in closing the question, &lt;em&gt;because it is framed in a way that requires detailed knowledge of a particular software application in order to be understood.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When posts can be understood &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; by knowing software, we should encourage their authors to explain themselves in more universal terms (which, on this site, would be some combination of mathematical notation and English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2016-03-23T14:08:13.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3027" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-23T19:14:53.053" Score="7" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have a look &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#percentanswered&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and scroll to the bottom. You'll notice that (as of the day of this post) Cross Validated has the 3rd &lt;em&gt;worst&lt;/em&gt; record for percent of questions answered among SE sites. Only 61% of questions have been answered (that's 39% &lt;em&gt;unanswered&lt;/em&gt; questions). Compare this to the average across all sites: 88% (SD=10.3) answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As of Mar 23, 2016:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions Asked: 76360&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unanswered Questions: 30017&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll save you all the additional stats (for fear of this question remaining unanswered) and instead will use a picture to sum the issue up well: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uyXpD.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uyXpD.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;%Answered questions on SE sites&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;WHY&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was actually originally &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1538/why-is-our-answer-rate-so-low&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;3&lt;/strong&gt; years ago. In that time, the % of unanswered questions has actually increased: from ~25% unanswered in Feb 2013 to almost 40% in March 2016! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why do so many Cross Validated questions continue to go unanswered?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What's changed in the three years since this issue was last discussed?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible causes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not enough expertise (no one knows the answers).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not enough &lt;em&gt;experts&lt;/em&gt; (the ratio of questions : those knowledgeable enough to answer is too low)&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The same 20 people can't answer 30k questions...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not enough people &lt;em&gt;willing&lt;/em&gt; or interested in answering questions.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Perhaps due to laziness, lack of ease to answer, simplicity of the question (the &quot;&lt;em&gt;they should know that!&lt;/em&gt;&quot; excuse), length/complexity of question asked, lenght/complexity of required answer, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Too many people know &lt;em&gt;too little&lt;/em&gt; about stats (this one falls on the schools)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Too many questions. Questions get bumped down too quickly for people to see, and perhaps too few people are scouring older questions among relevant tags.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Too many duplicate questions that are not immediately apparent as duplicates.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Complex questions or too-specifically context-dependent worded questions mask the underlying statistical concept, which otherwise could be more easily searched&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answers are not useful and require people to come back for more&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No need to flex your stats muscle if the person is a beginner&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alternatively, vague answers or those that don't really answer the OP's question seem to be somewhat frequent. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Perhaps more questions that involve specific scenarios should have discussions in chat so that all aspects of an OP's issue can be addressed, instead of the need to create a half dozen specific questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Others?....&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I promise the purpose of this post is not to attack anyone or ruffle feathers. Cross Validated is to be a helpful source for stats information. If more than a 3rd of the questions continue to go unanswered (and that amount keeps increasing) the site is not doing its job as well as it could. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have the responsibility of recognizing &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; this might be the case so that we can &lt;em&gt;adjust&lt;/em&gt; the site's approach or its users' approach to using the site in order to improve the overall helpfulness &amp;amp; utility of Cross Validated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80624" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2016-03-23T20:52:58.900" Title="Why do so many questions on Cross Validated continue to go unanswered?" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ClosedDate="2016-03-23T19:16:28.823" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3028" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3042" CreationDate="2016-03-24T01:51:31.337" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the past few weeks I've been signing in every day to check various posts and noticed that I was getting close to an Enthusiast Badge, having accumulated 21 or 22 days out of the necessary 30. I signed in again a few hours ago, no more than half a day after popping in multiple times to check for responses to various questions, but found that my Enthusiast total had been wrongly reset all the way back to 1. It's clearly an error on the part of StackExchange's software, which apparently didn't record any of my multiple visits from yesterday, but I'm not sure how to go about getting it rectified, or what caused it in the first place. I searched CrossValidated and couldn't find any related topics, nor any links at StackExchange to report this. Are there any guidelines for handling Badge errors of this kind? Any help would be appreciated - thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54091" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-03-30T09:57:09.423" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T09:57:09.423" Title="How do users go about reporting errors in Badge Stats (particularly for participation badges)?" Tags="|support|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3029" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3059" CreationDate="2016-03-24T23:26:47.607" Score="6" ViewCount="567" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that some folks are asking large amounts of questions. I remember seeing one fellow ask over 10 questions in an hour!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is getting outrageous, should we introduce a limit on the maximum number of questions per time interval?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user46925" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-03-30T09:57:45.380" LastActivityDate="2016-04-01T12:21:31.827" Title="What are your thoughts on users who ask too many questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|participation|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3029" CreationDate="2016-03-25T00:44:31.417" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;I presume this is a tongue-in-cheek self-reference, but the question is a good one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take it as a general question -- so let us imagine that we face some case where someone posts a lot of questions. I don't think that some high number of questions a day is &lt;em&gt;automatically&lt;/em&gt; a problem in itself, as long as the usual conditions for a question to be suitable for the site are met.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if the questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;clear, well-formed, answerable &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; (i.e. not in the form of a thesis) that show some basic research (awareness of definitions, familiarity with basic explanations of concepts from a textbook or an on-line resource like Wikipedia, awareness of one or two related questions already on site)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;also relevant/on topic, not duplicates, not too broad, not opinion based etc and generally follow the various guidelines for asking a good question not already mentioned above&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then the raw number of questions is generally not of itself an issue. We'd get what -- 100 questions a day or more on site? (This is not based on checking the figures, but one can count how many pages of new questions posts appear in the last day or so readily enough - and I sometimes do that, so it's not hard to get in the ballpark)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good questions are the lifeblood of a question-and-answer site, and good questions are actually hard to write (a reasonably good question is harder to formulate, I think, than a reasonably good answer*) -- if someone who posts a lot of questions is taking the trouble to formulate their questions well, they're contributing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* From my own experience at least, good questions are very difficult. While I am satisfied with a good fraction of my answers, I don't know that I am really satisfied with any of my questions. As a result, when someone can write a good question, they're a treasure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To remove any hint of the personal from this -- at least as might be seen as personally relating to you -- let me discuss another user who in the past posted a lot of questions. As might be expected, the danger with posting more than a few questions a day was that there was a tendency &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1665/is-it-reasonable-to-downvote-a-fair-fraction-of-one-users-posts-for-lack-of-res&quot;&gt;not to do enough research&lt;/a&gt; and show a lack of thinking about comments on the question (which might often lead to suitable improvements) but simply to comment back almost instantaneously, often leading to a string of new questions in comments, each itself showing a lack of research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such an eventuality can be very frustrating and does lead to issues: you can for example end up with one user absorbing a lot of the effort of the people who are trying to edit, clarify or otherwise make questions answerable on site, at the expense of other people with questions -- not just because of the volume of the questions, but the lack of care in formulating them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Correspondingly, it would also be necessary to avoid, as far as possible, holding discussions in comments (which SE network policy already asks us to avoid, but which become more crucial if you want to post many questions) -- respond to comments by improving (i.e. editing) the question as far as possible, rather than generating further questions in comments, and wait long enough to understand the answers before posting any related questions$^\dagger$). Only respond in comments where you need to clarify the comment or to directly answer a question that (for some reason) could not be edited into the question in some way (this would be very rare).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$^\dagger$ Since answers may take a few days to appear, this would typically mean that a string of related questions should normally be spaced out over time. [Multiple unrelated questions could still appear on the same day, if the above considerations are followed.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a high volume of questions and a lot of posted comments, there's a strong risk of annoying users, so one must strive as far as possible to work &quot;above and beyond&quot; what would constitute an average question quality, and to make sure there's no risk of comments seeming to be trivial or thoughtless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result I think it's incumbent on a user that wants to post more than a a few questions a day to put in additional effort to make the questions they do post require less-than-average effort from others to make the questions answerable (so they're not 'hogging resources'), rather than posting low-effort low-research questions and failing to address issues with the questions when they're pointed out (which are obvious risks with a high volume of posts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So an acceptable but high question volume is possible, but quite difficult, since the level of effort required to make the questions suitable will also be high. In particular, it is doubtful someone could post more than about two questions in an hour and still be doing a reasonable job of it, unless they were already so expert that they hardly needed the answers. [I doubt I could post more than two adequate questions in a day myself.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, a limit on questions per day would be no guarantee of additional effort; better I think to encourage users to post better questions (via the usual tools --- comments, placing questions on hold, downvotes, closure/deletion etc) than to restrict the volume -- however, if someone posts enough bad questions, downvotes and closure will eventually limit their posting rate (the system does it automatically), but it tends to be fairly unusual to encounter it if one takes even a little care to post some good questions or improve old ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a corresponding danger with people posting a lot of &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; per day, of course -- they too will tend to risk being glib, poorly explained, same-ish, and not especially useful. One way for answerers to keep an eye on whether their volume is getting too high is to keep an eye on their acceptance rate (and on upvotes/downvotes -- though that sometimes tends to be a fairly noisy indicator, if you regularly get more than a tiny fraction of downvotes you're probably better to answer fewer questions with the same total effort). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do answer a lot of questions myself -- I will probably pass 3000 answers on site in the next 24 hours (edit: I did) -- so this is an issue that I try to keep in mind as I go along -- but my acceptance rate is pretty good (close to 1400 of my answers have been accepted) and my downvote proportion is very low (0.2% of the votes I get are downvotes), so at least by those crude measures I'm probably pretty safe. We have had users in the past with very high answer rates but pretty low rates of acceptance and much higher rates of downvotes; and in those cases there would be a reason to think that more work on the individual answers (with correspondingly fewer answers posted) is called for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2016-03-25T05:13:40.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3031" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-25T14:23:51.713" Score="14" ViewCount="554" Body="&lt;p&gt;We already have a thread for proposing &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1200/current-tag-synonym-candidates&quot;&gt;candidates for tag synonyms&lt;/a&gt;, but there doesn't seem to be a similar thread for proposing tags for &lt;strong&gt;deletion&lt;/strong&gt;. Similarly to the &quot;synonym&quot; thread, let's use this one to post proposals for tags deletions in answers, so to vote and discuss about them below the answers (rather than by opening new threads).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I am a moderator and I just got informed that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/124504/moderators-should-be-able-to-remove-burninate-a-tag-themselves&quot;&gt;moderator can't remove a tag&lt;/a&gt;, it can be done only by removing it from all the questions associated with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="35989" LastEditDate="2017-09-03T11:37:40.257" LastActivityDate="2019-06-26T15:38:15.617" Title="Tag-candidates for removal" Tags="|discussion|tags|moderation|tag-deletion|burninate-request|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2990" CreationDate="2016-03-27T02:36:44.200" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your question deals with algorithmic components of operations research, then Stack Overflow is another site where it could be on topic. As somebody with a background in OR, I try to be active there in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-optimization&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-optimization&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-optimization&lt;/a&gt;; other tags on Stack Overflow that get OR-related questions include &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/linear-programming&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;linear-programming&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;linear-programming&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/integer-programming&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;integer-programming&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;integer-programming&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nonlinear-optimization&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nonlinear-optimization&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nonlinear-optimization&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quadratic-programming&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quadratic-programming&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quadratic-programming&lt;/a&gt;, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoting a snippet from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow's help center:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We feel the best Stack Overflow questions have a bit of source code in&#xA;  them, but if your question generally covers [...] or a software algorithm&#xA;  [...] then you're in the right place to ask your question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or-exchange is not part of Stack Exchange, but looking through their user page, some of the users there are big people in the field!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2016-03-27T08:25:04.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3017" CreationDate="2016-03-28T17:07:11.840" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The thread is now reopened.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As nobody explained here why this should be a duplicate and as I could not see it myself, I voted to reopen. Unfortunately, this suggestion only got three upvotes and died out (even though I edited this thread at certain moment to push this Q again to the top of the Meta).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I raised a flag for moderator attention and  explained the situation (in the flag comment space) as best as  I could, linking to this Meta thread. As a result, one of the moderators reopened the thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this illustrates well &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that it tends to be much easier to close a question than to reopen it and that in general it tends to be difficult to revert previous decisions; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how such situations could be handled.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2016-03-28T17:07:11.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3028" CreationDate="2016-03-29T11:14:51.160" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main question here appears to be - how to report bugs and issues to Stack Exchange staff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to that is - post it here as a question, with as much detail as possible to help reproduce the issue. Put the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/bug&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bug&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bug&lt;/a&gt; tag on it and it will be seen by Stack Exchange staff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are suggesting a new feature or a change to an existing feature, tag it with &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/feature-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag required-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-request&lt;/a&gt; - this too will be seen by Stack Exchange staff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The secondary question is about the Enthusiast badge - the visit requirement is actually more than just looking at pages on the site - some sort of action is required (voting, asking, answering, commenting, flagging etc...) for a day to be counted. And days are UTC days, not local ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24254" LastActivityDate="2016-03-29T11:14:51.160" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3029" CreationDate="2016-03-29T18:47:29.150" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Users who ask too many questions are welcome, as long as the questions are decently good. Questions are very useful contributions to a QA community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(How good a question is is a bit subjective, just vote. If a user asks too many downvoted or closed questions, they will be banned from asking questions anyway.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastActivityDate="2016-03-29T18:47:29.150" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3044" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-29T22:17:06.607" Score="12" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;When users struggle for appropriate jargon, I often misunderstand what they're after. I feel like if I had a dental appliance, I could encourage more precise questions on this site. Nonetheless, I do not have such a tool. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I can't understand such a question, and I answer correctly and find out I'm wrong, do I delete my answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastActivityDate="2016-03-31T09:35:26.233" Title="If you misunderstand the question, should you delete your answer?" Tags="|discussion|answers|deleted-answers|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3044" CreationDate="2016-03-29T23:07:21.317" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;At least sometimes, yes, but not always. Consider a couple of cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the question was later edited to make it clear, or you conclude your own reading of it was mistaken (so that other people are unlikely to have read it as you did), then I think deletion or wholesale rewriting to address the new understanding of the question are usually reasonable choices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the question was, and remains, ambiguous and can be taken two ways -- even if you no longer think that your original interpretation is the correct one (perhaps from reading another answer, say) -- then there can be value in leaving the answer there, because other people looking for help on the question you thought you were answering may put it in a similar way to the posted question. Another alternative would be to retain the original answer and also answer the question as you now think of it (possibly with the original answer coming second), highlighting that there's two possible ways to take the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do either approach in 2., you may want to add a note at the start of your answer describing your changed view of the question but explaining why the answer is staying there. [Possibly the question should also be put on hold as unclear, but that is not itself a reason to delete the answer.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T14:55:07.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3046" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3047" CreationDate="2016-03-29T23:48:00.700" Score="13" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;Or more specifically, is there a peak time of day when a greater proportion of newly posted questions tend to get answered?  When are the experts online and actively answering?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And conversely, are there any &quot;dead times&quot; when newly posted questions tend to drift off the radar screen and remain unanswered?  When are the experts asleep or otherwise busy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please specify time zones in your answer - plus any other tips to improve the response rate, thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109510" LastEditorUserId="109510" LastEditDate="2016-03-30T00:03:28.943" LastActivityDate="2016-04-01T17:56:39.253" Title="Is there an ideal time of day to ask new questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3046" CreationDate="2016-03-30T00:35:51.130" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at the locations of the users with high reputations (which tend to include a lot of people who answer), and filling in those whose locations I know but who don't give one here, it looks like a little bit more than half the number come from the USA, Canada, and other countries that have similar time zones. The rest cover Europe (including UK), Russia, India, Australia, New Zealand, and many other places around the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's almost always some people active.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Purely anecdotally, there are relatively more answerers active when the North Americans are either at work or after work -- but at the same time, there are more people asking as well, so it's also easier for a question to disappear off the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Less anecdotally, there's a number of relevant data queries at data.stackexchange.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/111009/best-time-to-ask-question&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/111009/best-time-to-ask-question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;has pretty strict criteria$^\dagger$ but you might be able to modify it to suit your needs; it looks for when accepted answers that score more than 50 from users with more than 10000 reputation were posted (a very high bar, few users answers regularly satisfy all of those criteria, so you're mostly looking at posts from a small subset of good answerers). In any case, that suggests that UTC 12-22 may be somewhat better than UTC 1-8 with other times in between.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$^\dagger$ Only 4.7% (!) of answers were counted in those figures. Probably the biggest factor in what gets included is the 50 score limit on the post (that limit is more likely to be hit if a question is asked an answered when North America is active -- it can be somewhat harder to get upvotes on good answers at other times), with the 10K rep not far behind. I think both are too strict, cutting out a host of really good answerers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the criteria above would have also suggested that you wouldn't have the best chance to get a good answer right when I am posting this. There may be a lesson in that, also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at some other queries, the three high rep users  with the most accepted answers* will answer questions asked at any time -- in each case the times questions are posted which they answered are almost uniformly spread by time of day -- with a mild peak when people post more -- irrespective of when those answerers are active. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* (the only ones I checked but I expect that pattern will hold up for many more)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Why? because while they don't answer around the clock, when they are answering, the most-accepted answerers scroll back through the questions until they hit questions they've already seen; if you want to get the attention of our most prolific producers of accepted answers, it really doesn't much matter when you post)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2016-03-30T02:20:51.303" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T02:20:51.303" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3048" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3053" CreationDate="2016-03-30T01:03:53.513" Score="-4" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I write answers and use fancy Greek letters which fools naive people to think that I am a Mathematician (which I am not). So I sometimes put a disclaimer in bold (e.g. &lt;strong&gt;Disclaimer:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;I am not confident, I made this answer only after thinking for 30-60 minutes&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think such confidence disclaimers are helpful to be a good stackexchange citizen to make the lives of others a bit easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But at the same time, putting such confidence disclaimers manually is not elegant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think that it would be nice if, each answer, has a drop down menu that contains a list of confidence scores (e.g. &quot;little confidence (just started thinking)&quot;, &quot;moderate confidence&quot;, &quot;high confidence (expert)&quot;) with the the default value of &quot;unspecified&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Choosing a value from this list would cause the answer to be represented in a different way to indicate the self-claimed confidence degree of the guy who answered the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when the default confidence &quot;unspecified&quot; is chosen (which is chosen by default), everything works as normal the way stats.stackexchange.com works as if this feature doesn't exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100507" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-03-30T10:05:43.457" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T15:31:24.593" Title="Feature allowing to indicate answerer's confidence level" Tags="|feature-request|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3049" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3050" CreationDate="2016-03-30T01:13:42.527" Score="14" ViewCount="490" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example: &quot;Why are small sample sizes better?&quot; instead of &quot;Why do small sample sizes give more significant p-values for rare events?&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried this just as an experiment because I wasn't getting answers to other, more specific, technically phrased questions.  It got more interest and some really good, helpful answers, however I didn't feel great about doing this &quot;trick&quot;, and was asked politely (but quite rightly) to rephrase the question which I then did:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/203932/why-do-small-sample-sizes-give-more-significant-p-values-for-rare-events&quot;&gt;Why do small sample sizes give more significant p-values for rare events?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this underhanded, to be avoided, or a fair and common tactic to provoke a response, as long as the question is rephrased if and when requested?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109510" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-04-08T16:21:38.450" Title="Would you recommend phrasing questions controversially to provoke a response?" Tags="|discussion|questions|title|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3049" CreationDate="2016-03-30T04:43:21.993" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This part time cabinet maker and cross trainer will shortcut your power analysis with this one weird trick - statisticians hate him!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being provocative or controversial can garner more attention, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/55822/how-to-deal-with-a-fake-scientist&quot;&gt;more&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/55583/can-you-see-any-s-curve-in-the-scatter-plot&quot;&gt;attention&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/134647/this-is-purported-to-be-a-paired-t-test-i-doubt-it&quot;&gt;isn't&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/203655/is-frequentist-statistics-concerned-with-expectation&quot;&gt;necessarily&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/685/lies-damn-lies-and-statistics&quot;&gt;good&lt;/a&gt;.  (Be thankful you can only see the ones that weren't deleted.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While a more controversial title may get more people to respond in some way, it doesn't necessarily get what you need -- a high quality answer -- instead it will tend to garner &quot;snappier&quot; answers from driveby-answerers, and from the regulars it will often attract downvotes, close votes, flags ... or if you're really lucky, just edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also doesn't really help the site serve its purpose; this is intended to be a repository of high quality questions and answers, not clickbait.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T04:55:48.637" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3044" CreationDate="2016-03-30T14:41:53.477" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's up to you.  You can (and I have) delete your answer if you don't think it's relevant or contributes to the thread.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, you can also modify your answer to put a short note at the top:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I understood the question to be asking ____.  In light of that, I provided the answer below.  However, it now appears that the question is asking ____ instead, which my post does not address.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may be a reasonable strategy for a couple reasons.  Others may have the same understanding you originally had.  Your post adds to the clarity and value of the thread as a whole.  Likewise, a future reader may come across the thread looking for your answer based on the same misunderstanding of the question.  Moreover, someone might learn an additional fact serendipitously despite / because your answer is different.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2016-03-30T18:11:57.697" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T18:11:57.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3052" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-30T15:26:10.123" Score="0" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have begun posting questions in CrossValidated and recognized that many go almost unnoticed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realized that by periodically upvoting the corresponding comments the question may reappear as active, thus ending up to be more visible and for more times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess this is however tantamount to cheating, and it's worth knowing as a limitation of the system. Or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="107799" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T15:26:10.123" Title="Increasing visibility to questions by upvoting comments = cheating?" Tags="|bug|questions|comment|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3048" CreationDate="2016-03-30T15:31:24.593" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think this idea has legs, mainly for the reason given by @Kelvin: there are already adequate resources in the English language to indicate just where &amp;amp; why you have doubts about your own answer; selecting from a drop-down menu would be crude by comparison. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Dunning&amp;ndash;Kruger effect&lt;/a&gt; would further diminish the utility of such self-assessed confidence levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T15:31:24.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3044" CreationDate="2016-03-31T07:55:49.777" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends... If it is a short answer about some basic topic and you wouldn't cry after it, it may be a good idea to delete it. However if you made some effort for answering the question (and sometimes got upvoted for it!) than it may be better to leave it because it still can be helpful. Recall when you search the site, the search results refer to both questions and answers -- in the future someone may be searching for your &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you could do is alternatively:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rephrase it, so it fits to the question as it was initially understood by you and to the true question (not always possible),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;add lead, as proposed by &lt;em&gt;@gung&lt;/em&gt;, that describes as you understood the question,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;break your answer into two paragraphs with &quot;old&quot; and &quot;new&quot; answer, with some description of why the question can be understood in different ways, so it could lead to different answers (mixed strategy with 2),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;add another answer that answers &quot;the&quot; question, with providing the lead to the initial one (mixed strategy with 2).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So leave what could be helpful, but make sure that your answer is not misleading (by re-phrasing or providing a new one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2016-03-31T07:55:49.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3044" CreationDate="2016-03-31T09:35:26.233" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can post the &quot;wrong&quot; interpretation as a separate question and move the answer there (by deleting the original answer and reposting the answer). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24669" LastActivityDate="2016-03-31T09:35:26.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3057" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-31T13:50:59.840" Score="10" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a wealth of questions about cross-validation, such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/79905/cross-validation-including-training-validation-and-testing-why-do-we-need-thr&quot;&gt;Cross-validation including training, validation, and testing. Why do we need three subsets?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/19048/what-is-the-difference-between-test-set-and-validation-set&quot;&gt;What is the difference between test set and validation set?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/188955/is-it-necessary-to-split-dataset-for-cross-validation/188956#188956&quot;&gt;Is it necessary to split dataset for cross validation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/9053/how-does-cross-validation-overcome-the-overfitting-problem/9055#9055&quot;&gt;How does cross-validation overcome the overfitting problem?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1826/cross-validation-in-plain-english&quot;&gt;Cross-Validation in plain english?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which are, if not identical to eachother, do overlap by about 80%. Recently, someone asked the question &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/204667/cross-validation-purpose-need-and-utility#comment388498_204667&quot;&gt;Cross Validation - purpose, need and utility&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which would seem to overlap with each of those previous threads substantially. The author expressed doubt about many of the threads that I linked to, but I'm not sure that the author's doubt is a great reason to open a new thread which covers highly similar, if not identical, ground as previous threads. This is the same reason we have one canonical thread on the coupon-collector problem, not a separate one for each type of collectible item in existence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, we might look at this from the opposite perspective and say that we have a scattered collection of threads about how cross-validation is used and the problems it does (and doesn't) solve -- but no single, coherent, authoritative thread about cross-validation. I can see two ways to make CV better and more accessible in this regard:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;With malice aforethought, compose a question which fills in the interstitial gaps in our existing questions about CV, and then answer that question deliberately and authoritatively.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Consolidate existing threads to form a one-stop (or perhaps two-stop) shop of answers about cross-validation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally favor option 2, since lots of the work has already been done to lay the groundwork of what CV is. Option 1 will create yet another thread about cross-validation and will be harder to find unless it's highly up-voted immediately or you're the Rain Man of the search feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-03-31T13:50:59.840" Title="How many questions about cross-validation do we honestly need?" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3029" CreationDate="2016-04-01T11:47:24.247" Score="-9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that it is indeed a great idea to ask questions. However, one should be careful not to offend with lame questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user46925" LastActivityDate="2016-04-01T11:47:24.247" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3029" CreationDate="2016-04-01T12:21:31.827" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know&#xA;  there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things&#xA;  we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we&#xA;  don't know we don't know. -- &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;D. Rumsfield&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with using Q&amp;amp;A sites like CrossValidated for learning new stuff is that you can only ask about &lt;em&gt;known unknowns&lt;/em&gt; -- things you know that you don't know. Sites like this will never be a substitute to going through a handbook, attending lectures, or even participating in one of the multiple available online courses. Questions you ask and the answers you get cover the topics only partially. So asking multiple questions may lead to illusory and fragmentary knowledge if used instead of studying some topic by yourself. So I would say that there is also a &lt;strong&gt;risk for the person who asks&lt;/strong&gt; the multiple questions of gaining false sense of knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2016-04-01T12:21:31.827" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3061" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-01T17:52:55.000" Score="7" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Stats.StackExchange community, there's one tag called 'Time-Series'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About 16.2% of CV questions are related to Time-Series, so I would think that only a negligible part of these would not get answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my surprise, about 42.7% have no answers. (I just used the numbers that show on the right side of the site)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this an idiosyncrasy of our community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wish I could help people on this tag, but I cannot, since I'm trying to learn the subject myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way the community can solve this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40252" LastActivityDate="2016-04-01T17:52:55.000" Title="The scourge of the Time-Series Tag!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3046" CreationDate="2016-04-01T17:56:39.253" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My answer will not be about a time of day, but more about a couple of days period...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During weekends, the questions tend to receive an answer much later than if asked during the week days, at least in my perception. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40252" LastActivityDate="2016-04-01T17:56:39.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3063" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-01T19:31:56.987" Score="4" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many places on SE, if you paste the URL of a question or answer, it is displayed as the title of the question/answer, rather than the URL. After I noticed this, I expected it to be the case everywhere -- but, bafflingly, this is not the case for comments. I think it would be aesthetically appealing and helpful to render titles in comments. After all, the URL is currently truncated after so many characters, so clicking on a URL in a comment is totally blind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2016-04-01T19:41:14.767" LastActivityDate="2016-04-01T19:41:14.767" Title="In comments, why do SE-origin URLs not render as the title automatically?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3065" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3070" CreationDate="2016-04-05T08:44:16.893" Score="7" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/scoring&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;scoring&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;scoring&lt;/a&gt; tag -- what is it about? It does not have description. It's content is pretty chaotic: from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/55237/good-books-papers-on-credit-scoring&quot;&gt;Good books/papers on credit scoring&lt;/a&gt; (my initial guess for what is it about), to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/18832/scoring-new-observations-after-cross-validation&quot;&gt;Scoring new observations after cross-validation&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/134418/cut-score-determination-in-irt&quot;&gt;Cut Score Determination in IRT&lt;/a&gt; ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It probably needs some cleaning-up but it is hard to start as it is pretty ambiguous...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2017-11-19T12:24:01.420" Title="What are the [scoring] and [scores] tags about?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-reorganization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1479" CreationDate="2016-04-05T09:19:52.787" Score="11" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Use tags&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/tagging&quot;&gt;Tags&lt;/a&gt; allow us to sort and filter questions into categories that we are interested in. If you tag your question well, you will increase your chance that an expert in your particular problem will see your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you are done assigning good tags, &lt;em&gt;don't post your question yet&lt;/em&gt;. Instead, search through previous questions carrying your tags. You can do this simply by putting all your tags surrounded by &quot;[]&quot; in the search box. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/clustering+validation?sort=votes&amp;amp;pageSize=50&quot;&gt;Here is an example.&lt;/a&gt; Chances are you will find something that already answers your question. (If you do, don't forget to upvote the question and answer so the process improves further.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2016-04-05T10:09:37.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3067" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3068" CreationDate="2016-04-05T13:02:27.677" Score="5" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer just seems plain wrong to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/501/39632&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/501/39632&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question states that there are more features than observations, so backwards stepwise selection (which would require fitting the full model, which would not converge) just doesn't seem doable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, two considerations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The author is a diamond mod, so as a junior member of CV I would err on the side of being deferential, and someone already pointed out the problem.  The author's response didn't make a lot of sense to me.  (&quot;This is machine learning, so you can.&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the question were not a CW I think I would just -1 it, +1 the existing objection, and move on.  In this case though, I am wondering whether the traditional injunction against editing someone else's answer in a way that is inconsistent with the intent still holds here.  (Related question, but not on CW answers:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1263/should-i-edit-a-factual-error&quot;&gt;Should I edit a factual error?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39632" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-04-05T14:22:16.880" Title="Should I edit a Community Wiki answer that seems wrong?" Tags="|discussion|answers|editing|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3067" CreationDate="2016-04-05T13:38:09.873" Score="5" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You don't need to defer to moderators' opinions on statistical issues.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We abuse the CW feature to allow questions that don't meet our guidelines, but which nevertheless we like for some reason or other - in particular &quot;big list&quot; questions. This is an example.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the advice at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1263/17230&quot;&gt;Should I edit a factual error?&lt;/a&gt; applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2016-04-05T13:38:09.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3065" CreationDate="2016-04-05T21:17:28.650" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/scoring&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;scoring&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;scoring&lt;/a&gt;×40 and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/scores&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;scores&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;scores&lt;/a&gt;×78 are ambiguous and should be eliminated. We have a variety of other more specific tags that could be used instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/z-score&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;z-score&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;z-score&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/change-scores&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;change-scores&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;change-scores&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/scoring-rules&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;scoring-rules&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;scoring-rules&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/propensity-scores&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;propensity-scores&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;propensity-scores&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/credit-scoring&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;credit-scoring&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;credit-scoring&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fisher-scoring&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fisher-scoring&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fisher-scoring&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(all of them have clear scope and wiki excerpts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from that, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We do not need any tag for &lt;strong&gt;PCA or FA scores.&lt;/strong&gt; This is too specific  (and worse, is field-dependent; many questions ask about PCA/FA &quot;scores&quot; without using &quot;scores&quot; terminology). Just use &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pca&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pca&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pca&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/factor-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;factor-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;factor-analysis&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ratings.&lt;/strong&gt; For this we have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rating&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rating&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rating&lt;/a&gt; tag. Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/94192&quot;&gt;Intelligence Squared Scoring and Winner Determination&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Predictions&lt;/strong&gt;, as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/18832&quot;&gt;Scoring new observations after cross-validation&lt;/a&gt;. I guess &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/prediction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;prediction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;prediction&lt;/a&gt; would be appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;======= edit 15 Nov 2017 =============&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/scores&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;scores&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;scores&lt;/a&gt; is now empty. For most of them deletion was sufficient but there were a handful of each of the suggestions given above. I (@mdewey) voted to close a few too as unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;======= further edit 19 Nov 2017 ==========&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/scoring&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;scoring&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;scoring&lt;/a&gt; is now empty too&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="101426" LastEditDate="2017-11-19T12:24:01.420" LastActivityDate="2017-11-19T12:24:01.420" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-04-05T21:17:28.650" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2935" CreationDate="2016-04-07T07:59:46.543" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/22501/is-there-an-intuitive-interpretation-of-ata-for-a-data-matrix-a/22520#22520&quot;&gt;Is there an intuitive interpretation of $A^TA$ for a data matrix $A$?&lt;/a&gt; should be definitively awarded as it provides short but clear and pretty detailed answer for the very basic and very important question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Bounty started 7 April 2016, and has since been awarded]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-06-22T07:30:58.263" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3049" CreationDate="2016-04-08T16:21:38.450" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Glen_b provides a wonderful answer.  To date, though, I don't see a key point expressed anywhere in this thread:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A question that makes controversial or incorrect assertions is a confusing question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basic logic--the Propositional Calculus--explains why this is problematic.  When somebody makes a sequence of assertions $P_1, P_2, \ldots, P_n$ that seemingly imply $Q$, and then asks about the truth value of $Q$, &lt;em&gt;that truth value depends on the truth value of its antecedents&lt;/em&gt; (the $P_i$).  If any single one of them is demonstrably false, then $Q$ follows logically.  A question phrased in such way thereby becomes an uncertain question: does it ask about $Q$ or is it really asking about the $P_i$?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK, that explanation was too abstract.  Let's consider an example.  On the future SE health fads site [HealthFad.SE], this question could appear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Eating disgusting food is good for you.  Should I be eating lots of kale haggis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should we answer?  Should we point out that eating disgusting food is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; necessarily a good idea, or should we be addressing the specific merits of kale haggis?  &lt;strong&gt;Such questions are inherently ambiguous.&lt;/strong&gt;  We should vote to close them until they have been clarified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can successfully phrase a question in some appealing manner, then by all means do so.  Attention is good: it gets answers, it generates interest, and it can attract helpful people to the community.  But please don't do that in a way that degrades the quality of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2016-04-08T16:21:38.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3075" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-10T13:21:05.290" Score="3" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Badges such as &quot;Custodian&quot; (bronze) to &quot;Steward&quot; (gold) are awarded for each of the six review types. However, in browsing the list of users who have been awarded a badge, CV reports the same users in the same order with the same time and date of their award.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, it looks like -- across all 6 review types -- that the &quot;First Post&quot; badge information is being reported for all. Is this a bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78229" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2016-04-18T13:34:31.793" LastActivityDate="2016-04-18T13:34:31.793" Title="Bug in displaying the list of review badges" Tags="|support|bug|review|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3075" CreationDate="2016-04-10T14:47:05.710" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The list of &lt;em&gt;awards&lt;/em&gt; (not awardees) for, say, the &quot;Steward&quot; badge appears at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/110/steward&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/110/steward&lt;/a&gt; .  Awards are listed in reverse chronological order.  Individuals may be awarded the badge multiple times.  Each such award will be listed according to the time it was made.  Here is an excerpt showing multiple awards:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rUg4i.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rUg4i.png&quot; alt=&quot;Figure&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are various ways to link to this summary, including through each type of review listed in the review stats pages, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/first-posts/stats&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/first-posts/stats&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/close/stats&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/close/stats&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No additional filter is being applied according to where one links from: you will land on the same page regardless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-04-10T14:47:05.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3077" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3078" CreationDate="2016-04-11T13:12:17.880" Score="-2" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not see a clear distinction between &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/forecasting&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;forecasting&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;forecasting&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/prediction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;prediction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;prediction&lt;/a&gt; tags. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should they be made synonyms? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or should the distinction be made clearer (e.g. by expanding the currently very brief &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/forecasting/info&quot;&gt;description of the forecasting tag&lt;/a&gt; and/or editing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/prediction/info&quot;&gt;description of the prediction tag&lt;/a&gt;)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or ... ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T12:09:36.190" Title="Do we need both [forecasting] and [prediction] tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3077" CreationDate="2016-04-11T14:43:32.813" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, we need both. I think forecasting is more specifically about time-series data -- &quot;What happens next?&quot; Prediction the task of deploying a model to assess unseen data in some way. With prediction, there need not be any time-series component at all; you might just be interested in how well a model does against a holdout set of observations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Support of this can be found in Cressie &amp;amp; Wikle &lt;em&gt;Statistics for Spatio-Temporal Data&lt;/em&gt;, p. 17:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Uncertainty in data, processes or parameters means that there will be uncertainty in conclusions. Statisticians call this drawing of conclusions in the presence of uncertainty, &lt;em&gt;statistical inference&lt;/em&gt; (or just &lt;em&gt;inference&lt;/em&gt;); in this book, inferences will be either &lt;em&gt;estimation&lt;/em&gt; of fixed but unknown parameters, or &lt;em&gt;prediction&lt;/em&gt; of unknown random quantities. (Notice that &quot;forecasting,&quot; namely concluding something about the future, is a special case of &quot;prediction.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've edited this description into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/forecasting&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;forecasting&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;forecasting&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/prediction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;prediction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;prediction&lt;/a&gt; wikis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-05-22T12:09:36.190" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T12:09:36.190" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3079" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3084" CreationDate="2016-04-12T06:29:25.417" Score="6" ViewCount="290" Body="&lt;p&gt;In forecasting, there is a very common point forecast accuracy measure, the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) or Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD), which simply calculates the mean absolute difference between point forecasts and the corresponding actuals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the term &quot;MAD&quot; is also used in non-forecasting statistics, specifically in descriptive statistics, to denote the spread of a distribution by calculating the Mean Absolute Deviation between the distribution and (say) its median.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have just created an &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mae&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mae&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mae&lt;/a&gt; tag, put in a tag wiki &amp;amp; excerpt, and edited the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mad&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mad&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mad&lt;/a&gt; tag, suggesting that posters use &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mae&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mae&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mae&lt;/a&gt; if they are asking about the point forecast accuracy measure. I have also started to retag a few questions and will retag some more over the next days, to avoid bump-flooding the landing page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, there is no question as such here - this is more of a public service announcement (plus an attempt to raise awareness about the different tags, and an explanation we can send people to who wonder about the two similar tags in the future).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is part of my little project of improving forecast accuracy related tags. So far, I have also created a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mase&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mase&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mase&lt;/a&gt; tag, and I will look at whether a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mape&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mape&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mape&lt;/a&gt; tag makes sense in a few days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="1352" LastEditDate="2016-04-12T10:44:32.860" LastActivityDate="2016-04-15T08:21:19.457" Title="New tag MAE (related to MAD)" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3081" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-14T18:47:02.077" Score="8" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/205975/when-are-zero-correlation-mixed-models-theoretically-sound&quot;&gt;When are zero-correlation mixed models theoretically sound?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the above question is well formulated and worthwhile.  However, it didn't get any attention, so I put a bounty on it.  The bounty will now expire in two days.  Although it has now gotten 18 upvotes, it hasn't gotten any answers and has attracted only one comment.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can anyone think of anything that will help bring more attention to this question?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there anything that could be added / clarified that might make it more likely to attract an answer?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-04-14T21:06:26.817" Title="Suggestions for improving mixed models question" Tags="|discussion|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3082" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3083" CreationDate="2016-04-15T02:38:04.060" Score="13" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may be proprietary, but does someone know how they translate page views of questions and &quot;highly ranked&quot; (what does this mean?) answers into 'impact'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user75138" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-08-06T23:38:46.680" LastActivityDate="2016-08-06T23:38:46.680" Title="Is the CrossValidated impact &quot;people reached&quot; formula generally available?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3082" CreationDate="2016-04-15T04:39:51.790" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/244534&quot;&gt;&quot;People reached&quot;  stat&lt;/a&gt; is the sum of views on the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Non-deleted only&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answers&lt;/strong&gt; - Views of the parent question for answers that are:&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Non-deleted AND&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Score &gt; 0 AND&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Also meets one or more of the following criteria:&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;In the top 3 answers OR&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is the Accepted Answer OR&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Score at least 5 OR&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Has at least 20% of the total vote count&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user56674" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2016-04-15T04:39:51.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3079" CreationDate="2016-04-15T08:21:19.457" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Self-answered to mark this as resolved - no action required from anyone (apart from eagerly using the new &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mae&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mae&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mae&lt;/a&gt; tag, and referring anyone confused about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mad&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mad&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mad&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mae&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mae&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mae&lt;/a&gt; here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2016-04-15T08:21:19.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3085" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3086" CreationDate="2016-04-15T12:31:24.510" Score="5" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/error&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;error&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;error&lt;/a&gt; tag currently &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/error/info&quot;&gt;has the following tag wiki excerpt&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The error of an observed value is the deviation of the observed value from the (unobservable) true function value. Do NOT use this tag for SOFTWARE ERROR messages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am unhappy about the &quot;unobservable&quot;. Y'all may have noticed that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3079/new-tag-mae-related-to-mad&quot;&gt;I have been working on tags related to point forecast accuracy&lt;/a&gt;. Most questions in this area also carry the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/error&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;error&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;error&lt;/a&gt; tag, and the &quot;error&quot; in question is the one between the point forecast and the eminently observable future realization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose changing the tag wiki excerpt as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The error of an estimate or prediction is the deviation between this value and the &quot;true&quot; value. The &quot;true&quot; value may be unobservable (as in estimating regression parameters), or observable (as in forecasting or predicting future or yet-unknown realizations). Do NOT use this tag for SOFTWARE ERROR messages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, the tag wiki currently reads as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In statistics and optimization, statistical errors and residuals are&#xA;  two closely related and easily confused measures of the deviation of&#xA;  an observed value of an element of a statistical sample from its&#xA;  &quot;theoretical value&quot;. The error of an observed value is the deviation&#xA;  of the observed value from the (unobservable) true function value,&#xA;  while the residual of an observed value is the difference between the&#xA;  observed value and the estimated function value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The distinction is most important in regression analysis, where it&#xA;  leads to the concept of studentized residuals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Reference: Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest, I don't see how this can be salvaged to (a) give more information than the excerpt above, but at the same time (b) address estimating / predicting both unobservables and observables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I propose deleting the tag wiki altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm open to this confusion implying that we should have two &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; error tags, e.g., estimation-error and forecast-error or prediction-error. However, I don't really want to retag 443 questions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1653/1352&quot;&gt;Error tag is ambiguous&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think? I didn't want to change a tag with 443 questions without a discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2016-04-16T02:49:43.853" Title="The [error] tag and its wiki" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-excerpt|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3085" CreationDate="2016-04-15T14:17:44.247" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To incorporate some of @amoeba's suggestions, how about:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The error of an estimate or prediction is its deviation from the true value, which may be unobservable (e.g., regression parameters), or observable (e.g., future realizations). Use the [error-message] tag to ask about software errors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That has 234 characters instead of 308.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would leave the full wiki as is for the moment.  I think the ideas can be brought together and explained coherently.  I'll have to think about it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2016-04-16T02:49:43.853" LastActivityDate="2016-04-16T02:49:43.853" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3088" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3090" CreationDate="2016-04-26T09:08:20.980" Score="6" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking for a specific question related to the probability integral transform, i.e., the theorem which states that if $X$ has a continous distribution, then $F_X(X)$ has the uniform distribution. I read this question some time ago and I made the mistake not to favorite it, so I cannot retrieve it any more. This question had comments by user @whuber, which pointed out that the usual proof which assumes $F_X(x)$ to be strictly increasing is needlessly restrictive. I tried to look for questions about &quot;probability integral transform&quot;, both on Cross Validated and on Math Exchange, but the ones I found were not the right one: I guess the question didn't have &quot;probability integral transform&quot; in the title or maybe not even in the question body . I'm not sure how I could retrieve the question...I don't think I can search for comments by a specific user, and anyway since the user in question is very active, I would get far too many hits. Any suggestions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2016-04-26T14:17:52.513" LastActivityDate="2016-04-28T13:00:23.697" Title="I read a question sometime ago but I can't find it anymore" Tags="|support|search|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3088" CreationDate="2016-04-26T14:17:23.527" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's possible the post or the entire thread was deleted, in which case it will be inaccessible to most (and difficult even for moderators to find).  Let's assume that's not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although our site offers some useful search options (such as searching according to question or answer, number of votes, and so on) it can be useful to exploit Web search engines.  For instance, in this case you remembered the name of a user and some key words.  You can use them in a Google search like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/webhp?ion=1&amp;amp;espv=2&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8#q=site%3Astats.stackexchange.com%20whuber%20probability%20integral%20transform&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;site:stats.stackexchange.com whuber probability integral transform&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some promising hits.  The trick (obviously) is the &lt;code&gt;site:&lt;/code&gt; part of the search string.  It focuses on our entire site and it can pick up comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general rule, using my name in a Google search is not going to be helpful: in my role as moderator I have commented on a sizable proportion of all threads.  One &lt;em&gt;site&lt;/em&gt; search option I have found very helpful, though, is to include the id of any user you think might have contributed a question or answer.  You will have to use our own site search capability for this.  For example, I recall user &quot;glen_b&quot; wrote at least one nice answer about histograms.  A good way, then, to find this answer--and possibly others like it--is to look up his id (search for it on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;Users page&lt;/a&gt;) and include it in the search:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=user%3a805%20histogram&quot;&gt;user:805 histogram&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorting the results by votes brings the post I was looking for right to the top of a set of related posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-04-28T13:00:23.697" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3088" CreationDate="2016-04-28T00:14:55.740" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;@whuber has provided some good suggestions for search strategies.  You may still have difficulty finding it, however, and as he notes, it could have been deleted.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the apparent value of the information that was contained in the thread, and the difficulty finding it, another possibility is to ask a new question of your own.  You could ask a question with a better title and more appropriate tags, for instance.  That would make the thread easier to find in the future.  This benefits the sites mission in that we hope to create a repository of high-quality statistical information for future reference.  But if that information cannot be found by anyone, it isn't any good.  Thus, your new question, while arguably a duplicate, would do the site a service.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2016-04-28T00:14:55.740" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3091" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3093" CreationDate="2016-04-30T20:34:21.247" Score="9" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cronbach&amp;#39;s_alpha&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cronbach's $\alpha$&lt;/a&gt; is an estimate of the reliability of a psychometric test. It's admittedly rather field-specific, and I don't think many people outside of psychology or psychometrics have ever heard of it. Nevertheless, it and its properties seem to be squarely on topic as CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=cronbach+is%3Aq&quot;&gt;And we have no less than &lt;em&gt;149 questions on it&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/a&gt; But no tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Skimming through the first couple of questions, it seems like few questions mention Cronbach's $\alpha$ but would not profit from the tag. (Little wonder, since it's a rather specific thing.) Thus, I propose that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We create a tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cronbachs-alpha&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cronbachs-alpha&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cronbachs-alpha&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some Higher Being (moderator? SE developer?) mass-retags-without-bumping all questions that contain &quot;Cronbach's alpha&quot;, perhaps looking specifically at those questions that already have the five maximum tags.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll post a couple of possible actions. Please upvote whatever seems best to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T13:36:54.873" Title="Tag proposal: [cronbachs-alpha]" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3091" CreationDate="2016-04-30T20:34:47.453" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Create the tag, mass-retag-without-bumping. (Assuming this is possible.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2016-04-30T20:34:47.453" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3091" CreationDate="2016-04-30T20:35:52.803" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Create the tag, don't mass-retag - retag slowly, one question at a time, not too many all at once, so we don't bump-flood the landing page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2016-04-30T20:35:52.803" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3091" CreationDate="2016-04-30T20:37:48.487" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't create the tag. Who cares about Cronbach's $\alpha$, anyways?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2016-04-30T20:37:48.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3095" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3096" CreationDate="2016-05-01T19:39:28.760" Score="10" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed a user actively changing &lt;code&gt;bayes-network&lt;/code&gt; tag into &lt;code&gt;bayesian-network&lt;/code&gt;. Both tags have approximately the same number of questions (about 90 each), but neither has a description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are they duplicates? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should one be removed? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Could anyone create a wiki and an excerpt for the remaining one (or both)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2016-05-05T16:33:54.693" LastActivityDate="2016-05-06T05:10:05.267" Title="Tags: Bayes-network vs. Bayesian-network" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tag-synonyms|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3095" CreationDate="2016-05-06T05:10:05.267" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem has been solved. Closing the thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastActivityDate="2016-05-06T05:10:05.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3097" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-07T14:46:10.763" Score="3" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was trying to flag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/211306/36229&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/211306/36229&lt;/a&gt; to be moved to Stackoverflow, but the option seems to have disappeared. Was it removed? Did I just miss it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm using the mobile site, if that's relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36229" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-05-09T08:09:56.217" Title="&quot;Question belongs on another site&quot; close reason removed?" Tags="|support|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3097" CreationDate="2016-05-07T16:35:10.173" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't migrate the question because it's already been migrated from GIS:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/C5nSR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/C5nSR.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's off topic here just vote to close/delete and that will reject the migration. Then ask the GIS mods to re-migrate the question to Stack Overflow (though it's not a brilliant question so might not last long on SO either).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user7953" LastActivityDate="2016-05-07T16:35:10.173" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3091" CreationDate="2016-05-12T13:07:18.657" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe let's add &lt;code&gt;[cronbach-alpha]&lt;/code&gt; (without &lt;strong&gt;'s&lt;/strong&gt;) as a synonym..? I guess it will make searching easier since people may drop &quot;s&quot; in their queries. What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2016-05-12T13:07:18.657" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3100" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3101" CreationDate="2016-05-14T23:11:17.717" Score="12" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phylogenetic comparative methods (PCMs) are a branch of statistics focused on modeling evolutionary data (i.e., data on species' characteristics and phylogenetic relationships). I have found 24 questions by searching phylogen* (4 in 2012, 6 in 2013, 6 in 2014, 6 in 2015, and 2 so far this year). Stack Overflow already has a [phylogeny] tag that has been used 101 times, although it seems to be underused since searching phylogen* returns 404 questions. I would personally subscribe to a [phylogeny] tag, but as I am new here, I am not sure if 6 questions trickling in per year would be deemed worthy of a tag. What do people think, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/phylogeny&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;phylogeny&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phylogeny&lt;/a&gt; tag or no?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, I am very surprised that the PCM community hasn't tapped into Cross Validated more. I have been encouraging colleagues to come here because although there is R-sig-phylo, I think there is space for a forum where beginner to expert level PCM users can help each other with problems of varying difficulty. I'd describe myself as an advanced user, not expert, but I spend a lot of time helping beginner to intermediate level users who don't feel comfortable posting to R-sig-phylo. I think it would be great if more of that could take place in a forum like this.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114327" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-09-21T13:31:11.097" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T13:31:11.097" Title="Tag proposal: [phylogeny]" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3100" CreationDate="2016-05-15T14:04:58.810" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems fine to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a couple of points:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When you create the tag, be sure to create a tag wiki excerpt that states what it stands for, and provides some guidance on how to use the tag.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You may want to create a full tag wiki with more in-depth information as well.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't add the tag to all the relevant threads at once.  Do a few at a time and let some hours (or a day) pass in between.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You may want to add the tag to existing answers during slow periods.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When adding the tag to an existing thread, be sure to do whatever other edits might be merited at the same time.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2016-05-15T14:04:58.810" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2935" CreationDate="2016-05-15T16:40:38.957" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Brian Borchers provided &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/23132/35989&quot;&gt;very nice and detailed answer&lt;/a&gt; comparing gradient descent to other optimization methods in machine learning describing when and why it is used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Bounty awarded 23 May 2016]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-06-22T07:28:31.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3103" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3112" CreationDate="2016-05-15T19:02:57.520" Score="6" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are 3 questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/optunity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;optunity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;optunity&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/optunity&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/optunity&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this for? Is 'optunity' even a word? Should it be cleaned up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T14:16:12.093" Title="Is [optunity] a valid tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3104" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-17T09:35:04.290" Score="11" ViewCount="423" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering what the policy is on questions which look like a commercial organisation is asking how to solve a business problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's totally understandable that everyone needs a hand from time to time. Questions about sorting out obscure software, querying research papers, understanding some math are all fine as far as I'm concerned.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However every so often I see questions from people who are clearly employees at some company asking how to do their job. For instance, the following question seems to be asking how to build an online recommender system:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/212983/manually-update-ratings-in-recomender-system&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/212983/manually-update-ratings-in-recomender-system&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16663" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-05-22T10:52:09.980" Title="Policy on questions that read like, &quot;How should I do my job?&quot;" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|policy|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3104" CreationDate="2016-05-17T10:17:59.613" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question should be judged based on whether it is a good &lt;em&gt;statistics&lt;/em&gt; problem. Statistics are used in business, in academic research, in politics, in volunteer activities, and by some &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; weird people (ahem...) for fun and recreation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether a question posted to CV concerns a specific one of these use cases should not matter. What should matter is whether it is a good &lt;em&gt;statistics&lt;/em&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/212983/1352&quot;&gt;The question you link to&lt;/a&gt; could just as well concern a recommender system used by a high school guidance counselor. Or by a doctor. The OP could be an academic researcher building it, a freelance software consultant, or just someone building it for fun. All this should not matter. What should matter is whether it is a good question. (I find it &quot;unclear what you are asking.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T10:17:59.613" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3106" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3107" CreationDate="2016-05-17T10:27:14.167" Score="14" ViewCount="537" Body="&lt;p&gt;A frequent recommendation (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3101/1352&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2748/1352&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) for retagging or otherwise editing multiple questions is to do it when traffic is slow. Then edit-bumped posts will only push older questions off the first page. However, I have zero intuition of when traffic at CrossValidated is slow, or when it is busy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When is traffic slow or busy around here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'd assume that this is also relevant for other SE sites and was tempted to ask at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=when+is+traffic+slow&quot;&gt;Meta&lt;/a&gt;, but I guess answers will differ between sites, and I don't know whether to expect a simple query that one could customize for different sites as an answer to the &quot;general&quot; question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T06:28:13.530" Title="When is traffic slow on CrossValidated?" Tags="|support|tags|editing|participation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3106" CreationDate="2016-05-17T22:14:35.747" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on number of posts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Time of day: Looks like 3:00-7:00 (all times are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;UTC&lt;/a&gt;) is half as busy as 14:00-18:00 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;day of week: Saturday is the least busy day, followed by Sunday&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;combined: 6:00-7:00 Saturday is just over 20% as busy as 15:00-16:00 Wednesday&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;via this query --&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/51030/posts-by-day-of-week-and-hour-of-day&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/51030/posts-by-day-of-week-and-hour-of-day&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZBTQ6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZBTQ6.png&quot; alt=&quot;CrossValidated Traffic&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;foo &amp;lt;- read.table(&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/csv/51030&quot;,&#xA;  sep=&quot;,&quot;,header=TRUE)[1:24,1:8]&#xA;foo$Hour &amp;lt;- as.numeric(as.character(foo$Hour))&#xA;with(foo,plot(Hour,Monday,type=&quot;o&quot;,pch=19,&#xA;  xlab=&quot;Hour (UTC)&quot;,ylab=&quot;&quot;,ylim=range(c(0,foo[,-1]))))&#xA;for ( ii in 3:8 ) with(foo,lines(Hour,foo[,ii],type=&quot;o&quot;,pch=19,col=ii-1))&#xA;legend(&quot;bottomright&quot;,lwd=1,pch=19,col=1:7,legend=colnames(foo)[-1])&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More practically, just avoid the very busiest times (15:00 $\pm$ 3 or 4 hours on weekdays) and if you don't do too many per day (I'd suggest you don't take up more than about a fifth of the front page with bumped posts, for example) you should be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="1352" LastEditDate="2016-05-19T06:28:13.530" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T06:28:13.530" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3108" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-18T10:16:40.643" Score="6" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider these three questions (in chronological order):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/133067&quot;&gt;What exactly is a hyperparameter?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/149098&quot;&gt;What do we mean by hyperparameters?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/208225&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s in a name: hyperparameters&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's pretty clear that they are exact duplicates (currently only #2 is closed as a dup of #1). However, all three contain excellent answers. &lt;strong&gt;I would therefore suggest to merge all three questions into one of them.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the best candidate for the &quot;master thread&quot; is #3, because it has most answers,  most upvotes, and most views, despite being the newest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I flagged these threads for mod attention, but as per @Glen_b's suggestion I post this on meta too so that everybody could take a look and vote. Please upvote the question iff you agree that merging is a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T13:45:17.097" Title="Suggestion to merge several questions on hyperparameter definition" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|merge-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3109" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-05-18T10:21:12.747" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-05-18T10:21:12.747" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T10:21:12.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3110" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-05-18T10:21:12.747" Score="0" Body="When question A is merged into question B, it gets closed as a duplicate of B and in addition all the existing answers are moved from A to B. Only moderators can perform such merging." OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-05-18T10:21:12.747" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T10:21:12.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3108" CreationDate="2016-05-18T13:45:17.097" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think one potential difficulty is that the one that references &lt;em&gt;Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning&lt;/em&gt;* seems to be dealing with a different intent than the other two questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*(presumably Bishop's book, though it's not the only one by that title)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, the two questions that are already duplicates seem to be specifically dealing with what I'd have called a hyperparameter, but Bishop is using it for what I'd call a regularization parameter or a tuning parameter and for which I usually wouldn't say &quot;hyperparameter&quot; unless it was cast as a parameter in a hierarchy (e.g. if it was cast in a Bayesian framework, you might be able to make it a parameter of a distribution from which observation parameters were drawn).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is this difference that made me hesitate to merge them; I think the differences in the usage makes good answers to the other questions poor answers to that question on Bishop's use of the term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we rewrote the question the answers were merged into, or edited some of the  answers, we might be able to make it work tolerably well. An alternative (and perhaps a better one) would be to link the questions (perhaps noting the difference).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T13:45:17.097" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3103" CreationDate="2016-05-18T14:16:12.093" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I should probably volunteer that I created the tag so that I could locate these particular posts among Marc's because they're useful to point to in questions about global optimization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I justify this to myself in the same manner that I justified unilaterally making the Hauck-Donner Effect tag: these are questions that are thematically related but somewhat difficult to pin down in search unless you're a savant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community should override me if this is causing distress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T14:16:12.093" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3113" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-18T21:40:37.047" Score="3" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I received two upvotes and an answer check on a response to an OPs question but the CV system failed to register them. Here is a link to this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/213328/text-to-read-to-prepare-for-course-in-advanced-data-analysis-second-level-data/213330#213330&quot;&gt;Text to read to prepare for course in advanced data analysis (second-level data analysis graduate course)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems like a bug.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would this be happening? Is it too late to get the credit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78229" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T23:39:27.413" Title="Failure in CV to account for upvotes" Tags="|support|status-bydesign|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3114" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3115" CreationDate="2016-05-19T15:55:37.253" Score="7" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am curious why this site is called &lt;em&gt;Cross Validated&lt;/em&gt;, and not directly called &lt;em&gt;Statistics&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99064" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2016-05-19T17:39:37.147" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T17:39:37.147" Title="Why Cross Validated instead of Statistics" Tags="|discussion|site-name|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-05-19T17:26:44.660" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3114" CreationDate="2016-05-19T16:58:58.160" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Early in Stack Exchange history, it was expected that graduated sites would be on their own domain, like &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;http://stackoverflow.com&lt;/a&gt;. Since getting a catchy dotcom name at a reasonably cost is tricky, people came out with non obvious names such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://crossvalidated.com&quot;&gt;http://crossvalidated.com&lt;/a&gt;. Then the plan changed, but the name stuck around and the dotcom address now redirects here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/10/domain-names-the-wrong-question/&quot;&gt;blog post by Robert Cartaino&lt;/a&gt; explains the reasons for the change of plan. Newer sites are expected to have a name that describes the topic as clearly as possible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user56674" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T16:58:58.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3116" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3124" CreationDate="2016-05-20T07:53:49.017" Score="11" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;In R, there are two main packages for estimating mixed effects models: &lt;a href=&quot;https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/nlme/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nlme&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/lme4/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lme4&lt;/a&gt;. They have certain differences. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://glmm.wikidot.com/pkg-comparison&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;There are also other packages.&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In 2010, we had a well-received question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/5344/how-to-choose-nlme-or-lme4-r-library-for-mixed-effects-models&quot;&gt;How to choose nlme or lme4 R library for mixed effects models?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In 2013, we had a follow-up question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/64226/lme-and-lmer-comparison&quot;&gt;lme and lmer comparison&lt;/a&gt;), referring to the earlier question and noting that the answer might have changed in the intervening years. (The consensus appeared to be that the earlier answers were still valid.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now it's 2016, and I'd be interested in whether the situation is still as in 2010/2013. (Specifically, I'm most interested in panel data as per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/64226/lme-and-lmer-comparison&quot;&gt;2013 question&lt;/a&gt;, but I'm also interested in any other changes in the differences between the packages.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I just ask a new question, referring to the earlier ones? Or do something different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2016-05-30T14:15:02.990" Title="Updating/re-asking software-related questions" Tags="|discussion|r|exact-duplicates|software|old-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3117" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3128" CreationDate="2016-05-20T13:06:40.807" Score="13" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;There were a series of seven chat session called the CV journal club but no more after that. There still seemed to be plenty of interested people at the seventh based on the post for that session but after that it apparently stopped dead. Does anyone remember why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112728" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2016-05-21T02:30:16.273" LastActivityDate="2016-05-26T17:33:43.737" Title="What happened to the journal club?" Tags="|discussion|participation|journal-club|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3118" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-20T16:38:21.687" Score="5" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I make an existing thread easier to find using certain keywords? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, today I had a question, &quot;When does LASSO fail?&quot;. I searched this on Cross Validated and could not find an answer. However, with some effort I located a thread called &quot;When wouldn't I use LASSO for model selection?&quot; which essentially addresses the same question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to add &quot;When does LASSO fail&quot; to that thread somehow, so that other users could find that thread when searching for &quot;When does LASSO fail?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a good way to do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2016-05-20T16:55:46.290" LastActivityDate="2016-05-20T16:55:46.290" Title="Adding an alternative title to an existing thread" Tags="|discussion|search|title|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3119" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-20T20:57:30.060" Score="35" ViewCount="585" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that we have been closing more and more questions, and that we are moving them into the close votes review queue very quickly.  This seems to have evolved naturally, but I wonder if we have moved past the optimum point without anyone stopping to think about whether we are moving in the right direction.  I hope this thread will give us a chance to do so now.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas I used to think that most treads coming through the close vote queue should be closed, I am increasingly voting to leave open or just not voting at all on threads there (perhaps leaving a comment to the OP instead).  I am somewhat reluctant to list specific threads here, because people have voted on them and I don't want anyone to feel defensive.  However, I can make some general comments and people may be able to recognize cases that fall into that pattern:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;  (Actually, I have no problem with how this is working.)  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;off topic:&lt;/strong&gt;  I see two issues in this category:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;self-study questions:&lt;/strong&gt;  My impression is that any question that seems like it might be an assignment is immediately voted to be closed as self-study.  I do occasionally vote to close such questions immediately, but mostly I just leave a comment for the OP to add the tag and read the wiki.  (There is suggested text that people can use here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2468/7290&quot;&gt;How best to use the review queue?&lt;/a&gt;)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many self-study questions come with 'I have this question: ... I thought it might be ... but I can't figure it out'.  Such a case is 90% of the way to meeting our requirements, in my opinion.  True, it doesn't have the tag, but new users are very unlikely to know our policies and may well be trying to get help in a completely honorable way.  Even if they have less than that, it may still be viable to leave a comment and let them (potentially) edit.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having been notified to add the tag, if they don't add it after a reasonable period of time (maybe a few hours), it seems appropriate to vote to close, but not before and not without any comment (or so it seems to me).  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;... focuses on programming...:&lt;/strong&gt;  It seems to me that any question that even mentions &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; (e.g.) is often summarily voted to close.  I do continue to believe that we should focus on questions about statistics, machine learning, etc., and not about how to use software or tech support, despite the fact that you have to use software to do statistics, machine learning, etc.  Nevertheless, I often suspect the situation is more ambiguous than just whether code is listed with the question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a post may have a mix of statistical and coding questions, in which case, I believe the post could stay open to answer the statistical questions, and we could leave a comment explaining that the coding questions may not get an answer.  I have seen other cases where there was a coding error, but I suspect the reason the OP made a coding error is not because they misunderstood the code, but because they don't properly understand the underlying statistical concepts.  In that case, I believe the Q should stay open so we can address the 'real' issue.  Likewise, there are other cases where people are explicitly asking about code, but presumably wouldn't if they knew the statistical issues better.  I often leave the &quot;Ambiguous code / statistical question&quot; comment from the meta.CV thread linked above in situations like that.  Etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;unclear what you're asking:&lt;/strong&gt;  A lot of threads have been voted to close as unclear without a comment explaining &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; is unclear and what the OP could do about it to fix their question.  I recognize that there are some questions that are so thoroughly unclear you can't even state what it needs.  I would estimate those are about 10% of the unclear questions, though.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on how bad it is, I sometimes leave a comment, and sometimes leave a comment and vote to close.  (I rarely vote to close as unclear without a comment.)  In some proportion of those cases, the OP comments in reply or edits their question to clarify the points at issue.  There have been such cases where I have subsequently retracted my close vote.  I think more can be done here... &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;too broad:&lt;/strong&gt;  (I probably overuse this myself.)  I suspect there are relatively few threads that really are too broad, although some clearly do exist.  (I remember one question that read, more or less, 'how do you fit models, and how do you select one, and how do you interpret it?', &lt;em&gt;that's&lt;/em&gt; too broad.)  There have been a sizeable proportion (albeit probably less than half) of questions voted as too broad, that I think could have been given a brief, but broad, answer that may well have be useful for the OP and for future users.  The OP may then be able to ask a clearer, more specific question, or may find that even a one paragraph gloss is enough to get them started.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also wonder if such questions may sometimes / eventually pull out thoughtful answers that are real gems.  I wonder if a question like, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/11659/7290&quot;&gt;what basic tests can I run on each dataset to make sure that they don't have typos&lt;/a&gt;, might be closed as too broad today.  I myself have thought about asking a question or two before, but opted not to, because I couldn't formulate the question any better than, 'how should I think about ...' or 'what do people think about ...', where a broad, preliminary answer, or some discussion in comments might have put me on the right path forward.  As with &lt;em&gt;unclear&lt;/em&gt;, I think a comment to the OP may often be a better first action than voting to close straightaway.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;primarily opinion based:&lt;/strong&gt;  These are more commonly fine, in my opinion.  I am aware that SE policy is that all such questions be closed, so I admit I'm on shaky ground.  Nonetheless, I believe that opinion-based questions can sometimes be of real value to people and could be allowed here, if just made CW.  (Unfortunately, I do not have any clear guidance on how to draw the line, though.)  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Above, I have contrasted things I've seen with what I do.  I don't mean to hold myself up as the ideal that others need to match.  My own behavior is simply my most natural point of reference.  My goal here is to raise the topic for discussion.  I am open to changing my own policies as well.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;My title may be a little misleading.  The suggestion implied by the question isn't that a thread should spend a long time in the close votes review queue, or something like that.  If a thread is to be closed, I agree we benefit from it closing as quickly as possible.  Perhaps a better way to put it might have been 'Are we moving too many questions into the close votes review queue?'  There is some&amp;mdash;difficult to articulate&amp;mdash;line between voting to close and not doing so.  I wonder if that line has become too stringent.  Relatedly, I wonder if a comment might not be enough in some cases, and should often be added if we are going to vote to close.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, @Tim notes that he always does both, which strikes me as a good policy.  Below that, @GeneralAbrial &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3119/are-we-closing-questions-too-fast/3123#comment9924_3123&quot;&gt;makes&lt;/a&gt; a good point:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Part of the problem I have with the re-open interface is that the comments discussion is not visible -- so on a post on some obscure topic, precisely 0% of the question is clear to me, but if the comments say &quot;please clarify these three issues,&quot; I can usually figure out whether those points have been clarified. Absent those hints, I usually just Skip.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be difficult for an OP to know what / how to edit their question, and difficult for someone to subsequently determine if the problem has been rectified, if &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; is unclear was left unspecified.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have moved from a state of affairs where I used to think almost all of the threads in the close votes review queue should be closed (and those I didn't think should be closed were nonetheless understandable), to a situation where a large proportion (maybe close to half) don't necessarily need to be closed, in my opinion.  Yesterday, for example, a homework question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/213987/7290&quot;&gt;Why is a square root not a linear transformation?&lt;/a&gt;) was asked.  It labeled the question as an assignment, and included what the OP understood thus far.  So instead of voting to close without comment, I left a comment to add the self-study tag and read its wiki.  The OP added the tag in approximately 30 seconds.  Despite this, someone subsequently voted to close the thread as off-topic / homework.  (I had said I would avoid listing any specific examples so as not to make anyone feel attacked, but perhaps this will help make the topic clearer.  I apologize for any hurt feelings.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-05-24T15:34:48.547" Title="Are we closing questions too fast?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3119" CreationDate="2016-05-21T12:52:52.633" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe my vote to leave open / vote to reopen rates are rather higher than the norm on CV. I have also raised several majority &quot;close&quot;/&quot;leave closed&quot; votes on Meta where I disagreed strongly enough with the result. So in that sense I naturally sympathise with @gung's position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, I do prefer a quick close to a drawn-out one. The cost of a slow close is that answers begin to appear before the question is sorted out. The process of editing and reopening a question is slow and laborious. The process of sorting out a question once answers have been posted, though, tends to be even more laborious and the threads that result are often poorer in quality (messier and harder for later readers to work through).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think some of the substantive points of this question are, ironically, too broad! I have intended to raise several of them as standalone items in Meta threads of my own, if I get the chance. Let me just add some thoughts, currently rather unstructured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that &lt;strong&gt;self-study questions&lt;/strong&gt; are often closed too early - if the OP has clearly made an honest attempt at the Q, it's silly and premature to close it just because the &lt;code&gt;[self-study]&lt;/code&gt; is missing (but it happens). On the other hand if the OP has only made a &lt;em&gt;de minimis&lt;/em&gt; attempt - or claims to have made an attempt but puts no details in the Q - I'd rather close it and give the OP time and space to edit it. This is partly because self-study Qs seem to attract Math SE style &quot;fastest fingers in the West&quot; answers, and once one of these has arrived the OP loses incentive to improve the Q. Moreover, if the OP shows their attempt, it often illustrates a mistake or misconception that is worth addressing in its own right. This is often how self-study questions add the most educational value. If the OP doesn't show their attempt, this is lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A related and possibly more serious (IMO) issue with self-study questions is we are very prone to closing as duplicates when two questions have similar mechanics to solve - but I think we often do it in a rather broad way, so that someone with the mathematical or statistical sophistication of the OP may be unable to translate the application of one question to another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, I think this is more serious because the close-edit-reopen cycle seems to be even less agile for duplicates. So &lt;strong&gt;closing as duplicate&lt;/strong&gt; requires particularly careful consideration, both on self-study questions and others. &lt;s&gt;The page notice on questions closed as dupes doesn't seem to encourage OPs to edit if they feel what they really were trying to get at is distinguishable from the target.&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are quite a few close reasons that I think should usually (unless the question is beyond redemption and the OP does not seem to be acting in good faith) be accompanied with an explanation of what the close voter thinks needs to be changed for the question to be left open (and I'd extend this to reopen votes). I'd particularly say this for &lt;strong&gt;too broad&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;unclear what you're asking&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;self-study&lt;/strong&gt;. In the review process I am sometimes saddened at lack of engagement with OPs, who must find the process rather mystifying and disappointing. It would help if more read the help pages and &quot;how to ask a good question&quot; guides first, of course, but some aspects of this site's culture are not immediately obvious from the help pages. This is especially true when standards have changed over time but OPs have seen grandfathered Qs and presumed a question in similar vein would still be acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that some &lt;strong&gt;questions on programming&lt;/strong&gt; are closed despite a statistical component. In some cases it is worthwhile doing so so that the OP has the chance to separate out the statistical and programming aspects of the question - for instance to make the coding part work on a more minimal reproducible example, which brings the Q more within the scope of our site and renders it more useful to future readers. On balance I think we are probably too aggressive closing questions that include code, or which discuss statistical programming practices but I can sympathise with the view that &quot;there's nothing more boring than reading questions about software you don't know&quot;. Personally I think this is something that is worth a rehash of &quot;what software issues should we consider on-topic here&quot;, which is a vexed question! (For my money - algorithm questions should almost always be on-topic though sometimes they are currently closed; I might stretch so far as to say package recommendations particularly for more complex tasks should be more welcome here, but I think I'd be a minority voice; I wouldn't want the site to become a repository of SPSS how-to tutorials. I think this is going beyond the scope of the current question though.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also add something about &lt;strong&gt;dataset request&lt;/strong&gt; questions - for specific datasets they should clearly be off-topic but often people ask for datasets that are exemplars of certain statistical properties (but not caring so much what practical context the data are from), and yet their questions are often also being closed and they are being redirected to Open Data SE, which does not seem appropriate in my view (and has been discussed on Meta before).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2016-05-22T21:01:49.087" LastActivityDate="2016-05-22T21:01:49.087" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3119" CreationDate="2016-05-21T20:51:18.643" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;We shouldn't be chary of using the mechanism we've got to deal with questions that we think can't be or oughtn't to be answered before they're improved:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People tend to assume their questions are good ones &amp;amp; to discount somewhat comments to the contrary as quibbling. Closing a question kills false hopes of getting a useful answer without improving it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Giving specific guidance on how to improve a question in comments is often a great help, &amp;amp; never does any harm. But voting to close a question doesn't at all preclude this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Voting to close a question brings in other people, through the review queues, who can also help improve it. It sets the wheels in motion &amp;amp; doesn't rely on a single user to keep coming back to a question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If we're right that a question can't be or oughtn't to be answered before it's improved, then any answers it gets won't be good ones, or of the kind we want. Sometimes precipitate answers can lead to confusion, for the OP and for readers, especially if the question's edited later.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When closed questions get re-opened it's usually within a few hours of their being edited, &amp;amp; rarely more than a day. (I think&amp;mdash;it'd be interesting if there's any data available.) A faster response would be better, &amp;amp; I expect we'll get faster as the site grows, but that's not bad.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions that remain unanswered, un-upvoted, &amp;amp; closed are automatically deleted after nine days, de-cluttering the site. (If they're not closed they hang around for a year; &amp;amp; with two or more comments, for ever).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I'm not saying we always draw the line in the right place (I agree with some of the points you make on whether some kinds of question ought to be closed at all), but it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a matter of drawing a line, &amp;amp; I can't see the advantage of shilly-shallying&amp;mdash;at best, if someone edits quickly in response to a comment alone, an answer might appear a little sooner&amp;mdash;rather than acting promptly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2016-05-23T11:35:06.367" LastActivityDate="2016-05-23T11:35:06.367" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3104" CreationDate="2016-05-22T10:52:09.980" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given there has been no moderator comment on a policy (at this stage), this question seems like it might be on what we, as the community, think should be a good guideline or motto for answering questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like it to focus on, as @stephan kolassa has noted, good statistics AND positive sustainable answers - i.e. teaching how to fish, not handing a fish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sustainable answers are the ones that will discourage the selfish questions (can't be bothered learning, will just ask a forum) and encourage the learners - no matter what their statistical interest motivation is...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[maybe this question needs to be in a philosophy forum :) ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5638" LastActivityDate="2016-05-22T10:52:09.980" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3119" CreationDate="2016-05-23T11:32:34.560" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally do not see the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail-fast&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;fail-fast&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; policy that we implicitly adopted as something bad &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;. I think that the problem lies in slow re-opening. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often when I see off-topic-like questions (e.g., too broad, programming focused) I comment on them asking OP's for clarification and at the same time vote to close them. I do so because - from my experience - in the vast majority of cases either the OP responds or edits the question immediately (which leads me to retracting the vote), or he/she does not respond at all. The problem is when the question was edited, so that it is no longer unclear, or software-focused, but it still does not get re-opened because it did not receive enough votes. In my opinion the &lt;strong&gt;problem lies in us focusing more on closing than on re-opening questions&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not gain anything by leaving the off-topic questions opened. In most cases off-topic questions lead to off-topic answers, unclear questions lead to unclear answers, and low-quality questions lead to low-quality answers. In many cases such questions get one or two random upvotes and sometimes even get answered what makes them part of our large collection of low-quality questions. When such questions stay on the site they clutter the search results, which in effect leads to more duplicated questions since people do not find relevant search results among hundreds of off-topic questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;strong&gt;we should close off-topic questions fast, but re-open them even faster&lt;/strong&gt; if they got edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2016-05-23T12:56:52.930" LastActivityDate="2016-05-23T12:56:52.930" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3116" CreationDate="2016-05-23T12:53:31.637" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on the comments, I have set a bounty &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/64226/lme-and-lmer-comparison&quot;&gt;on the 2013 question&lt;/a&gt;, claiming that &quot;The current answer(s) are out-of-date and require revision given recent changes&quot;, which is not entirely correct but the closest &quot;bounty reason&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Now I'd just love for &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/124016/line-breaks-paragraphs-for-bounty-text&quot;&gt;the bounty text to respect the paragraph breaks I included&lt;/a&gt;...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit&lt;/em&gt;: I just awarded the bounty to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/64236/1352&quot;&gt;Ben Bolker's original answer&lt;/a&gt;, although there was not as much updating going on as I had hoped for. However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/64226/lme-and-lmer-comparison#comment407306_64236&quot;&gt;Ben posted a link to some additional recent thoughts of his&lt;/a&gt;, which he may include in his answer at some date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-05-30T14:15:02.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3125" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-24T02:22:57.290" Score="5" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I attempted to post a detailed question, focused on conceptual and statistical issues, not coding. The site rejected my post with an unexplained error message that my post looked like spam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also reviewed your &quot;asking help&quot; and &quot;visit the help center&quot; links. I believe I am on topic and provide sufficient detail and follow your guidelines. I also tried to post this question about the spam error on the meta site, thinking that is where to get help on posting. I was not allowed to post because I didn't have a reputation of 5. Perhaps that is because I rarely post, since I usually spend a great deal of time searching for similar questions for solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How then should I submit my post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am writing my original post here, since the comments section is too short. The first line is the title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why do VAR forecasted values radically change depending on which month historical data end?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am building a model to forecast housing variables using vector autoregression. I am encountering spurious results. My forecasted values change dramatically depending in which month the historical data end. I have several questions and appreciate any advice you could give. My questions are mostly conceptual and statistical. First I describe the purpose; then the data; a summary of the model, including a few lines of R code; then the problem, and finally I discuss several issues that could be causing the problem. My focus here is not on coding, but provide this information to clarify my approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Purpose:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The main purpose of the project is both the monthly and yearly forecasts, forecasting the balance of the current year plus two years. The forecast will be updated periodically. In my discussion here, I am mostly assuming that the last historical data available are as of December 2015 and am mostly interested in the 2016 prediction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Data and Transformations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My data start in 2000, are monthly and mostly non-seasonal.(*) I standardize sales and housing starts by dividing by the number of households. I also take the first difference (or the log of the first difference) of all variables to obtain stationary transformations of the variables. Data mostly come from government sources. I have both endogenous and exogenous data variables, which are listed and described below. I also have future values of the exogenous data, forecasted from an entirely other model and take them as given. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;endogenous variables:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d_sfhs_hh = the first difference (d) of single family home sales (sfhs) divided by the number of households (hh)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d_sfhp = the first difference (d) of single family home median prices (sfhp)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d_starts = the first difference (d) of housing starts (starts)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;exogenous variables:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;dl_interest_rate = logged first difference (dl) of the interest rate (interest_rate)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d_gdp = the first difference (d) of gross domestic product (gdp)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d_med_hh_inc = the first difference (d) of median household income (med_hh_inc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d_unmr = the first difference (d) of the unemployment rate (unmr)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Once I forecast my monthly values, I reverse the transformations (reverse the differencing and multiply out the number of households). I then aggregate these monthly forecasts to produce the yearly forecast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(*) Households use a &quot;seasonally adjusted&quot; variant, but since there is little seasonality in housing, the distinction is trivial. GDP is a mathematical transformation of quarterly data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Core Model Code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here are a few lines of modeling code. Obviously there are many other elements of code that I use to acquire, test, transform, visualize, model, reverse the transformations and report the data. But since this is not the forum for discussing R coding, I simply provide a few lines of core coding to clarify my modeling approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I combine the data as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;endog &amp;lt;- cbind(d_sfhs_hh, d_sfhp, d_starts)&#xA;     exog &amp;lt;- cbind(dl_interest_rate, d_gdp, d_med_hh_inc, d_unmr)&#xA;     exog_ &amp;lt;- cbind(dl_interest_rate_, d_gdp_, d_med_hh_inc_, d_unmr_)   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;exog_ are the future estimates of the exogenous variables, which I supply, since these are not predicted through VAR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;prediction &amp;lt;- predict(VAR(endog, p = 12, season=12, type = 'both', exogen = exog), dumvar = exog_, n.ahead = 24, ci = 0.95)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The principle problem that I am having is that my yearly forecasts vary greatly depending on which month I forecast from. I can also arbitrarily end the historical series at any point. For example, if I forecast using historical data through December of 2015, the VAR model forecasts a 7 percent decline in sales for 2016. If, however, I forecast using historical data through October of 2015, the model forecasts a 6 percent increase in sales for 2016. From what we know at the time of this post (May 23, 2016), 2016 sales are up from 2015 and the industry expects a 4 to 5 growth percent for 2016 compared to 2015.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While we expect large seasonal swings in monthly sales with a low during winter and high during spring, this seasonal variation should not affect yearly aggregations. It should make little difference whether our historical data stopped in October or December, except for 1) an increase in the margin of error because the October historical data has to forecast an extra two months and 2) an impact if there were some exogenous macroeconomic shock that took place during November or December. There were no significant shocks during these two months, so we expect the December forecast to be in line with the October forecast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I forecast one time period out (one month) the model forecast error is only about 2 percent. When I visually examine a 24 to 36 period (2 to 3 years) forecast, the seasonal pattern appears correct. However, aggregating these values over a year, can be very low or very high, suggesting systematic bias, perhaps auto correlation. The odd thing is that the bias can be either positive or negative, depending upon which month the historical data stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Potential Issues:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I can identify several potential areas that could be causing the problem, but don't have enough VAR experience to assess these and seek your advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;First, should I be using two separate models using non-seasonal data for monthly forecasts and seasonal data for yearly forecasts? This solution makes little sense to me, but suggest it any way because I am stumped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Second, I could be setting the p value (the maximum number of lags to include) incorrectly. AIC suggests a value of p=12, but I have also tried p=1 and several other values and while the choice of p affects the forecasts, I was hoping the correct value would stabilize my historical ending month problem. That said, I have my doubts that this is the cause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While I haven't tried all combinations of p values 1 to 12 for a variety of historical data ending months, I have tried a few combinations, such as p=1, p=2 and p=12 for October and December historical data ending months. I haven't yet found the type of convergence that I seek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At first I thought p=12 conceptually made sense because of the seasonal variation, but then I realized that a variable is seasonally correlated mostly with itself, i.e., May is always a good month for home sales and may be confusing seasonality with lagged causality. But VAR is also modeling the impact of lagged values of each variable against the others, which suggests looking at granger causality. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The granger causality test examines the impact of one variable on the future value of another variable. What I found is, for example, the price (d_sfhp) to housing starts (d_starts) granger test was most significant with 10 and 11 months, although not 12 months. Conceptually 10 to 11 months makes sense, compared to 2 or 3 months. A significant hike in home sale prices is not going to affect starts the next month. It can take almost a year from the point that the developer decides to build until she or he gets the permits and schedules the start of excavation. In this case, the lag effect is not weather related or other yearly seasonality, but the average administrative time it takes between the decision to build and the first shovel touching the ground. The US Bureau of the Census defines a housing start when excavation begins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Conceptually, each pair of values could have a different lag time for granger causality. For example, I would expect significant changes in the interest rate to have a much shorter lag time. Indeed, while granger causality between the interest rate (interest_rate) and sales (sfhs) was significant for most lags from 1 to over 12 months, the most significant was a 1 month lag. Note, however, that granger causality was much less significant for the log of the difference of interest rates (dl_interest_rate) and the difference of sales (d_sfhs). So, in the real world, causality is lagged by a different time period for each between pair of variables. In fact there could even be a negative lag. I discussed this with someone in real estate, who believed that consumers will respond to anticipated changes in the interest rate. For example, the financial news suggests that the Fed will raise the interest rate next month. Buyers, sitting on the fence will act (or delay) quickly in response to something that they believe will happen, which is a negative lag or just happened, which is a small positive lag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;VAR, at least in R implementation, only permits one value for p. Is that because it is a maximum lag? Hence in this discussion, probably a value of 10 to 12 for p, would be best because it captures the impact of price on starts, even though many degrees of freedom are lost on the impact of the interest rate on sales, since most of this is within the first month and the shorter lags for starts would not add power, but would cost degrees of freedom. I guess this suggests the trade off between the ease and flexibility of a VAR model and the parsimony that can be achieved with a structural model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, do you think the choice of p could be causing the historical ending month instability? I suspect not, but seek your response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Third, in R, does p affect the exogenous variables. In other words with a p of 5, would lags 1 to 5 of the exogenous variables enter the equation, or does p only affect the endogenous variables and only the contemporary value of the exogenous variable at t, not lagged at t-1, t-2, ... enter the equation? If the latter is the case, then one could achieve some parsimony by explicitly setting the lagged value of the exogenous variable. In my case, I would enter lag(dl_interest_rate), because the grangertest was highly significant for order=1. This too, I doubt is causing my issue one way or another, but seek your comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fourth, I wonder if the problem is the way that I have transformed the data. I chose these transformations because they achieve stationarity. Perhaps, instead there is cointegration and I should try another approach. Any advice on whether my approach here is causing the historical ending period issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fifth, I could be missing some important variables, but I doubt this would cause the issue at hand. Any thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sixth, I could be coding something incorrectly. While this is not the forum for detailed discussion of R coding, if your wisdom is that none of the above or other conceptual or statistical issues is the problem and it appears that the only explanation could be coding, then please point me in this direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thanks so much,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Joe&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79262" OwnerDisplayName="Joe" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2016-05-26T20:58:58.887" LastActivityDate="2016-05-26T20:58:58.887" Title="What to do about &quot;sounds like spam&quot; error?" Tags="|bug|questions|spam|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3119" CreationDate="2016-05-24T08:21:04.767" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some excellent and thoughtful comments in existing answers from long-standing members still leave a little scope for additional remarks, from the Dark Side if you will. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some respected colleagues here seem to be leaning towards an &lt;strong&gt;ideal of indefinite courtesy&lt;/strong&gt;, namely that people posting poor questions may require and deserve support until their questions have been rewritten as acceptable and that it's our duty to provide that so far as we can. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't vote for being rude (who does?), but I vote for being firm and for spending time and effort in ways that promote the best long-term interests of the site, which pivot on building up a core of well-posed, well-answered questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't buy the obligation to indefinite courtesy as a matter of practicality. We have guidelines on the kinds of questions we support, which over time have shifted and which in the future may be changed again. But at any one time &lt;strong&gt;many questions are just off-topic and/or poor&lt;/strong&gt;. Sometimes people just have not read the advice in the Help Center. Sometimes people are just trying to outsource their homework -- or even more frequently their basic thinking on Master's or research projects -- to the internet. Sometimes people are just naive or inexperienced and can't see that their question is not even barely answerable. It's not really a question of blame, although some questions do  deserve the quick closure or the lack of answers they get. Poor questions don't help the forum's long-term goals. In fact, they dilute the forum with fluff and flab. That's the nub of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any policy has to be tempered by practicality, not least the fact that people are busy and have other things to do. &lt;strong&gt;I don't think it's an especially good use of the time of people of high reputation&lt;/strong&gt; (~10K, ~100K) &lt;strong&gt;to be writing the same kinds of comments again and again to explain to people why they've posted rather poor questions.&lt;/strong&gt; We are not a help line on which every caller must be answered. If we don't explain that well enough, we need to revisit the documentation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't claim to be consistent, because I share in the conflict of motives here. Sometimes I just vote to close, half-hoping that someone else will explain directly to the OP why there is a move to close. Sometimes I add a comment myself. It's really hard to get the balance right, because often explaining the (sometimes several) reasons why a post doesn't pass muster is likely to appear hostile rather than supportive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2016-05-24T15:34:48.547" LastActivityDate="2016-05-24T15:34:48.547" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3117" CreationDate="2016-05-26T16:48:27.710" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was around when the journal clubs took place, so here is my take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The journal club (and the blog) were events outside the usual Q/A that a few involved community members took time to initiate. Neither built up much outside participation, so when those few motivated individuals stopped doing them, they effectively died.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was no negative push-back from the community, but to be viable they needed to have (many) more people participate and to help organize. So I chalk them up to a failed experiment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A long time ago, the community was more worried about attracting outside individuals - and these were things we thought might help to advertise CV. That isn't so much a problem now - we need to worry more about answering the tons of questions we have. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in short, there wasn't anything wrong with them, but they never really served any vital function to the community either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2016-05-26T17:33:43.737" LastActivityDate="2016-05-26T17:33:43.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3129" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3130" CreationDate="2016-05-27T16:55:28.260" Score="7" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the best way to view the most voted up (or highest scored) answers and questions at Cross Validated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31264" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2016-05-28T16:40:56.980" LastActivityDate="2016-05-28T16:40:56.980" Title="Most voted up answers at Cross Validated?" Tags="|support|answers|votes|search|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3129" CreationDate="2016-05-27T17:24:26.190" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use searches like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=score%3a100%20is%3aanswer%20wiki%3ano&quot;&gt;score:100 is:answer wiki:no&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=score%3a100%20is%3aquestion&quot;&gt;score:100 is:question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Replace &lt;code&gt;100&lt;/code&gt; by whatever lower threshold you wish to use.  I like to add &lt;code&gt;wiki:no&lt;/code&gt; to these searches to skip over the favorite jokes, &lt;em&gt;etc&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information, visit &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;the advanced search help page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-05-27T17:24:26.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3129" CreationDate="2016-05-28T15:14:09.267" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;@whuber has provided some good options.  Let me address this more directly:  If you are interested in &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt;, you can search for &lt;code&gt;is:answer&lt;/code&gt;, then just sort by votes.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2016-05-28T15:14:09.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3132" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-30T20:08:37.490" Score="11" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today a question about reporting results in APA style appeared:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/215448/how-to-report-non-normal-distrubution-and-wilcoxon-in-apa-style&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/215448/how-to-report-non-normal-distrubution-and-wilcoxon-in-apa-style&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;are such questions on- or off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is not much different than many other that we did not mark as off-topic. On another, infinitely many &quot;how to report in APA style&quot; questions may appear and such questions would not contribute anyhow to CV since in each case answer can be easily found in APA style guide, or online with little effort. Moreover, it's more about editorial stuff, than statistics. What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-05-31T09:35:01.437" Title="Are &quot;how to report in APA style&quot; questions on- or off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3132" CreationDate="2016-05-31T09:35:01.437" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;How to present the results of statistical tests is on topic, I think we'd all agree; interpretation of a particular style guide's recommendations for application in a specific case might well be considered as &quot;requiring statistical expertise&quot; analogously to some software questions that ask for help understanding the manual: but I'd draw the line at questions that seem to call for no more than citing the relevant section of the style guide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think at least there should be an explanation of why the answer's not obvious (which might also perhaps help motivate someone to answer it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2016-05-31T09:35:01.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3134" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-31T23:08:26.390" Score="17" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;When browsing unanswered questions, I very frequently find myself wanting to request the user who's asking a question to provide more context. Specifically, I often want to ask some form of &quot;What are you trying to do?&quot;, such as &quot;What is the goal of the analysis?&quot;, or basic questions about what the data at hand is like, such as &quot;Where does the data come from?&quot; or &quot;What's the sample size?&quot; or &quot;What's the base rate of the DV?&quot;. Here are the first five clear examples I saw by just looking at the current page 3 of the new queue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/215588/should-i-normalize-or-standardize-for-the-particular-case&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;: What is &quot;validity&quot; supposed to mean? What are the nodes and edges of the graph supposed to represent? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/215577/using-dic-to-test-which-data-should-be-used-different-sample-sizes&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;: What are $b_2$, $b_3$, and $y$? What is the goal of the analysis?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/215567/3-interaction-terms-in-generalized-linear-model&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;: Where does the data come from? What is the goal of the analysis?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/215565/estimate-number-of-positive-cases-using-previous-test-case-predictions&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;: Where does the data come from? Gung's questions in his comment are also on point.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/215564/hypothesis-testing-on-aggregated-data&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;: Where does the data come from and what is the goal of the analysis? The use of the term &quot;bookings&quot; gives the reader a clue, but far from the whole story.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems obvious to me that if one wanted a good answer to a data-analysis question, one would provide such basic information up front instead of waiting to be asked for it in a comment. But it's often missing. Perhaps the key reason is that people who are new to data analysis don't realize how much good data analysis depends on things like the goal of the analysis and the type of the data available. They have been misled by overly simplistic courses and textbooks that make it seem as if data analysis is just a matter of consulting a big book of formulae and rules, and there's little difference at the statistical level between predicting which horse will win a race and comparing explanatory models of political attitude propagation on Facebook. Aren't statistics just those weird numbers you put at the end of your results section that prove your research hypothesis is right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's true that this contextual information often isn't &lt;em&gt;crucial&lt;/em&gt;. One could take a stab at answering many of these questions as-is. However, when the asker provides more specific information, one can provide much better answers. In particular, one has a much better chance of understanding what the asker &lt;em&gt;really wants&lt;/em&gt;, if they phrased their question poorly—as novices often do, which is totally understandable. Sometimes the best response to a question is to focus not on what is explicitly asked, but on the asker's underlying point of confusion. Like a good teacher or consultant, we want to give askers the best guidance we can, not just answer the question literally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, if you agree with me that it would be nice for askers to provide context, in this sense, what can we do to increase the rate at which askers provide context in their first write-up of the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14076" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-05-31T23:08:26.390" Title="How can we encourage askers to provide context?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3135" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3136" CreationDate="2016-06-02T01:16:28.143" Score="11" ViewCount="738" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know how to link directly to a section-title of a Wikipedia page; I do it often to support an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also know how to permalink an article as it stands right now (so I can be sure it still says what it said when I was looking at it). I do this occasionally (particularly with pages that have changed to be substantially worse in the past).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I don't seem to be getting to work is linking to a section-title when I'm permalinking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know if it's possible? If so, how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T02:58:19.493" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T17:18:02.857" Title="Is there a way to permalink a section of a Wikipedia page?" Tags="|discussion|hyperlinks|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3135" CreationDate="2016-06-02T10:40:37.360" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are some possible links:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy#History&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theodicy&amp;amp;oldid=682868551&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theodicy&amp;amp;oldid=682868551&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theodicy&amp;amp;oldid=682868551#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theodicy&amp;amp;oldid=682868551#History&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can get #1 by browsing to the desired Wikipedia page, #2 by clicking on a section name in the Contents of that page, #3 by going to &lt;code&gt;View history&lt;/code&gt; of that page and choosing a particular revision, and #4 by clicking on a section name in the Contents of that revision page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Remark based on comments: &lt;code&gt;#History&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; to be in the very end of the URL, because it is an &lt;em&gt;anchor&lt;/em&gt; that is used by the client browser to scroll down the HTTP page; everything before the &lt;code&gt;#&lt;/code&gt; is used by the server to form the HTTP page itself.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T17:18:02.857" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T17:18:02.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3138" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-06T10:37:52.123" Score="2" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I login to StackOverflow and switch to have a look at CrossValidated, I need to login again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I first go to CrossValidated, I am already online at StackOverflow automatically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I login to StackExchange I am also online at both sites directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not a big deal, I can always login at CrossValidated (or StackExchange) but still wanted to know if I overlooked a checkmark somewhere (about shared login). Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify the different scenarios:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Scenario A&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1st.: Login at stackoverflow.com:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;→ new login needed at stats.stackexchange.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;→ new login needed at tex.stackexchange.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;→ automatically logged in at askubuntu.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Scenario B&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1st.: Login at stats.stackexchange.com:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;→ automatically logged in at stackoverflow.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;→ automatically logged in at tex.stackexchange.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;→ automatically logged in at askubuntu.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Scenario C:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1st.: Login at stackexchange.com:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;→ automatically logged in at stackoverflow.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;→ automatically logged in at stats.stackexchange.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;→ automatically logged in at tex.stackexchange.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;→ automatically logged in at askubuntu.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is noteworthy that I can see my sites (and reputation) in the drop down menu, even though not online in all sites. In the following screenshot I am logged in (only) to stackoverflow.com, but get also &lt;em&gt;notifications (rep change)&lt;/em&gt; from CrossValidated. If I click on CrossValidated (or TeX-LaTeX), I am redirected to the corresponding login site. This is what I previously described as &lt;em&gt;Scenario A&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3eQBN.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3eQBN.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117782" LastEditorUserId="117782" LastEditDate="2016-06-17T17:28:31.740" LastActivityDate="2016-06-17T17:28:31.740" Title="Why won't I automatically login to CrossValidated when already in StackOverflow?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3139" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-06T14:15:25.790" Score="2" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my profile I can see the following track of the vox populi badge:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2wNjG.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2wNjG.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if I want to vote a question, I get the message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nAGQE.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nAGQE.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there sort of a restriction to this badge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117782" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2016-06-06T14:24:42.787" Title="40 votes won't trigger the Vox Populi badge" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|votes|badges|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3141" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3168" CreationDate="2016-06-10T14:23:22.650" Score="7" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, the author of: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/217751/7290&quot;&gt;Volume representation of ring distribution (cylindrical coordinates)&lt;/a&gt; attempted to edit his own question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/revisions/217751/4&quot;&gt;edit 4 in the revision history&lt;/a&gt;).  Instead of going through, the edit went through the suggested edit queue (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/105964&quot;&gt;record&lt;/a&gt;) with the comment, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Answered some questions in the post because I can't comment.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is important here is that the editor was the OP.  He should have been able to edit his own Q without needing approval.  This often happens because an OP has multiple (typically unregistered) accounts.  However, that was not the case here.  The OP and the editor had the same usernumber &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/119177/billyziege?tab=topactivity&quot;&gt;119177&lt;/a&gt;, and he earned &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/119177/billyziege?tab=reputation&quot;&gt;+2 reputation&lt;/a&gt; for having his edit accepted.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happened here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-06-23T15:58:22.820" Title="Why did this edit go through the review queue?" Tags="|bug|status-completed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3142" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3143" CreationDate="2016-06-10T20:40:12.723" Score="2" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Update: not all badges in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges&quot;&gt;the list of badges&lt;/a&gt; are trackable in the badge tab of your profile - so badges that don't show up in the badges tab can still be earned (with few exceptions)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed that some badges that have been awarded in the past at CV seem to not be available any more (e.g. the &quot;Unsung hero&quot; badge). As mentioned e.g. in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2827/112731&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; such badges would be beneficial for some types of questions, as the CV community is smaller than e.g. the SO community, and questions receive very different attention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, I believe it would also just be more fun to track some of the &quot;more weird&quot; or &quot;anti-badges&quot;, especially like &quot;Unsung hero&quot;. I believe the keyword is gamification (see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1612/who-decided-what-badges-there-are-and-how-you-get-them&quot;&gt;this question and its answers/comments&lt;/a&gt;) - something our community could benefit &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; from my point of view, especially in times where more and more people have an idea of data analysis and machine learning, and which could therefore find CV an attractive community. We all see that this works well, especially for SO, where people love collecting them (note that e.g. the excerpt of badges displayed to a profile visitor are the &quot;3 rarest&quot; the user has...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions would be now: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the reason that some badges previously awarded are no longer available? What happened?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would there be support for introducing some more badges and (re)inventing some of the previously existing ones (including the &quot;more weird&quot; ones like &quot;Unsung hero&quot;?). Why/why not?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112731" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-06-10T22:27:24.763" Title="Introducing and (Re)Inventing Some Old and New Badges" Tags="|discussion|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3142" CreationDate="2016-06-10T22:07:31.010" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, almost all the badges are still earnable.  The rare exceptions are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/67/precognitive&quot;&gt;Precognitive&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/30/beta&quot;&gt;Beta&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/88/analytical&quot;&gt;Analytical&lt;/a&gt;.  That is, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/51/unsung-hero&quot;&gt;Unsung Hero&lt;/a&gt; badge can still be earned.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, not all badges are trackable from your profile page.  As @whuber notes, these issues are covered on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;meta.SE&lt;/a&gt;.  You can find a list of badges that cannot be tracked in this thread: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/263610/187282&quot;&gt;Why aren't all the badges shown on the track menu?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2016-06-10T22:07:31.010" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2935" CreationDate="2016-06-13T15:28:51.610" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1829/what-algorithm-is-used-in-linear-regression/1882#1882&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; comparing OLS algorithms is a well-written introduction into the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Bounty awarded Jun 20]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-06-22T07:30:02.370" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3145" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-13T18:29:15.747" Score="8" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sem&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sem&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sem&lt;/a&gt; tag is described as being for structural equation modeling, but a proportion (my hunch: 25%) of its use is for (econometric) simultaneous equation models.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it worth clarifying, or splitting the tag? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17072" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-06-14T09:18:12.880" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T09:18:12.880" Title="Clarifying the [sem] tag for simultaneous equation models?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3146" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-13T19:10:26.223" Score="4" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just found myself adding these three tags (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/numerics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;numerics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;numerics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/algorithms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;algorithms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;algorithms&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/computational-statistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;computational-statistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;computational-statistics&lt;/a&gt;) to the following question (noticing an offered bounty): &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1829&quot;&gt;What algorithm is used in linear regression?&lt;/a&gt; -- and it made me wonder if there are any worthy differences between these tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below I copy-paste the current wiki excerpts (and numbers of questions). Notice that all three wiki excerpts mention &lt;strong&gt;algorithms&lt;/strong&gt;, which seems to me the main topic of all these tags. Should we perhaps make them all synonyms? If not, what are the usage guidelines?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Worse,&lt;/strong&gt; browsing the highest voted [computational-statistics] questions, I am wondering if we need this tag at all. It seems that it is used either when [algorithms] can be used as well, or when [software] would fit more, or, most disturbingly, instead of [statistics] tag (which is deprecated on CV) i.e. only adding noise. I am thinking that we should perhaps get rid of this tag altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems I have two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should we merge [numerics] into [algorithms]? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What should we do about [computational-statistics]?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/algorithms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;algorithms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;algorithms&lt;/a&gt; (480) (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/algorithms?sort=votes&amp;amp;pageSize=50&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/algorithms?sort=votes&amp;amp;pageSize=50&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An algorithm is a a set of one or more computations that will produce a calculated result. All statistics methods are algorithms. Algorithms can be simple, such as calculating a percentage, or can be very complex and require a computer for fast and accurate results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/computational-statistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;computational-statistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;computational-statistics&lt;/a&gt; (336)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Refers to the interface of statistics and computing; the use of algorithms and software for statistical purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/numerics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;numerics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;numerics&lt;/a&gt; (47)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also known as Numerical Analysis, Numerics aims to provide methods and algorithms for numerical computations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-06-13T19:10:26.223" Title="What are useful differences (if any) between [algorithms], [numerics], and [computational-statistics] tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3147" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-13T19:21:58.397" Score="11" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is this Meta thread: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3031/tag-candidates-for-removal&quot;&gt;Tag-candidates for removal&lt;/a&gt;. During the last &lt;strike&gt;three&lt;/strike&gt; six months, it collected 8 answers with up to +12 upvotes. However, not &lt;em&gt;a single&lt;/em&gt; action has so far been taken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As burninating is something that can only be implemented by moderators (via contacting SE admin team), I would like to ask their opinions on how this process should work. What should be the rough criteria on when a suggestion gets &quot;approved&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update (Sep 27)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am bumping this thread, hoping to get an answer from one of the mods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the comments, @whuber pointed out that when a tag deletion seems appropriate, one of the first steps should be to edit the tag wiki excerpt to steer people away from using this tag. So e.g. the tag wiki excerpt for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dataframe&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dataframe&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dataframe&lt;/a&gt; (35 questions, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3032/28666&quot;&gt;12 votes for deletion&lt;/a&gt;) now says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag is deprecated. DO NOT USE IT. Use [r] instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question remains as to what to do after that. If the mods prefer that any such tag should be deleted manually like e.g. &lt;code&gt;[best-practices]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2804&quot;&gt;recently was&lt;/a&gt;, I would ask them to explicitly say so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2016-09-27T20:37:40.107" Title="Dear mods, what should be our protocol for tag burnination?" Tags="|discussion|moderation|tag-deletion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3148" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-13T20:49:49.237" Score="7" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being generically interested in long-memory processes (or long-range dependence as it is also called), I wanted to have a look at past questions about this topic. I've noticed, however, that there is no specific tag for this, even though there are already a number of question about long-memory processes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a few examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/6746/99484&quot;&gt;Predicting long-memory processes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/87314/99484&quot;&gt;Calculating the variance of sample mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/28637/99484&quot;&gt;Examining correlation and long range dependence in time series data with strong diurnal effects&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that it is a topic enough specific to be classified with a tag, and it is of interest to different fields, even applied fields (e.g., it is of interest to metrology, especially time and frequency metrology, which had to deal with long-memory processes long before their recognition by the mathematical community). In addition, having a tag might attract more questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be of interest?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99484" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T13:31:23.233" Title="Tag proposal: [long-memory]" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3145" CreationDate="2016-06-14T04:29:51.103" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, &lt;strong&gt;splitting&lt;/strong&gt; seems unnecessary since simultaneous equation models and structural equation models are essentially the same thing -- more precisely, simultaneous equation models are a special case of structural equation models (in the structural equation model world, so-called simultaneous equation models would be called path analysis models). This is according to, among others, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.irss.unc.edu/content/pdf/Bollen%20(1987%20SM).pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bollen 1987&lt;/a&gt;, who claims that this fact is well known. So anyway, to have two separate tags would seem to be splitting hairs, and I think it's actually rather convenient (for our purposes on this site) that they work out to have the same acronym and thus tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that said, I suppose it couldn't hurt to &lt;strong&gt;clarify&lt;/strong&gt; the &lt;code&gt;sem&lt;/code&gt; tag description to point out that some people using this tag will only have the special case of simultaneous equation models in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5829" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T04:29:51.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2935" CreationDate="2016-06-14T11:46:58.767" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this thread&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/105004/35989&quot;&gt;What is the difference between a loss function and decision function?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MånsT answers nicely about the difference between loss function and decision function. The question is trivial, but the answer provides condense but clear introduction decision-theoretic thinking in statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Bounty awarded 19 Jun 2016]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2016-06-22T07:33:09.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3151" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3152" CreationDate="2016-06-15T20:50:47.060" Score="21" ViewCount="252" Body="&lt;p&gt;After many years of helping our site, especially through extensive edits and brilliant responses, @mbq and @cardinal have been promoted to moderators emeriti.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the diamonds no longer appear next to their names, I hope they will continue to participate when they can. They will always be welcome and their voices will for ever carry great weight for me and, I am sure, for many others.  Please join me in congratulating and thanking them for their service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the future, though, how can visitors who were not with this site all along discover who the moderators have been?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Postscript&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After this eulogy was posted, @cardinal requested the opportunity to return to the trenches and has re-acquired the moderator diamond.  Welcome back, Cardinal, as our first resurrected (&lt;em&gt;zombie?&lt;/em&gt;) moderator!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2016-06-24T16:39:30.547" Title="How Can I Discover Former Moderators?" Tags="|discussion|moderation|election|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3151" CreationDate="2016-06-15T20:50:47.060" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;An historical record of all elections to date is maintained at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election&lt;/a&gt;.  There you can find summaries and links to the original election pages (which provide details right down to the voting records).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/128/sheriff&quot;&gt;Sheriff Badge&lt;/a&gt; is awarded to anyone who has served as an elected moderator for at least a year.  By linking to the list of awardees, you can see who has served as moderator and (by subtracting one year) deduce when they were elected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/127/constable&quot;&gt;Constable Badge&lt;/a&gt; was uniquely awarded to the original moderators who shepherded this site through its beta stage into into being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By searching this (meta) site for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=election&quot;&gt;&quot;Election&quot;&lt;/a&gt; you can find records of our elections, including who ran and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=election%20results&quot;&gt;outcomes.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2016-06-16T13:46:05.823" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3153" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3156" CreationDate="2016-06-16T07:00:02.727" Score="4" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I got Critic badge yesterday, but My user page &gt; Activity &gt; votes &gt; downvote say &quot;you have not cast any votes&quot;. It seems strange, so I report it. I have something likely come to mind. After I voted up for someone's question (maybe from 1 to 2 votes), I wondered I'd voted him before and did vote-down to cancel it. But I surprised because of two down by one click and I hastily did vote-up again (0 to 2). This is all I remember. Is this a bug ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Additional Information]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I found this is the reproducible problem. In this meta community, I've done vote-up and subsequently tried to do vote-down. The System prevented me from doing vote-down (i.e., I failed to do vote-down), but I got Critic badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119029" LastEditorUserId="24254" LastEditDate="2016-06-17T08:44:52.450" LastActivityDate="2016-06-17T08:44:52.450" Title="Q: Is this a Critic badge bug?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3154" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-16T19:13:18.110" Score="9" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/risk&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;risk&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;risk&lt;/a&gt; has no Wiki and seems to be used for several different topics, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bayesian risk&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;risk in finance applications such as Value at Risk (VaR)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;epidemiology and accidents (human health risks)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(see the top few most upvoted questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/risk?sort=votes&amp;amp;pageSize=30&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we write a Wiki for the tag and specify what it may and may not refer to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T23:44:57.553" Title="&quot;Risk&quot; tag: no Wiki, unclear usage" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3154" CreationDate="2016-06-17T00:16:46.997" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think for &lt;em&gt;statistical&lt;/em&gt; questions, only when risk is an expected loss does it make sense to tag in a question. To enhance the browsing and tagging experience, it would be useful to rename &lt;code&gt;risk&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;risk-function&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the other settings, &quot;risk&quot; tends to be specific to the field and not of particular statistical interest. I would advocate for deleting the risk tag on questions where it is application specific as it is a conflicting use of terms. In some applied questions, people have gotten away with using a tag like &lt;code&gt;finance&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;biostatistics&lt;/code&gt;, so that would seem a better option instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastEditorUserId="8013" LastEditDate="2018-01-05T23:44:57.553" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T23:44:57.553" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3153" CreationDate="2016-06-17T08:44:46.313" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have downvoted a few times - sure, you then &lt;em&gt;changed&lt;/em&gt; the votes to be upvotes, but the system recorded those downvotes, making you eligible for the badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24254" LastActivityDate="2016-06-17T08:44:46.313" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3157" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-17T13:59:02.033" Score="4" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new to CV, but really like some user's answer; Can I invite certain users to answer my question? (Other users still can answer, but I want to show a special message to certain user.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113777" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-06-17T14:09:18.210" LastActivityDate="2016-06-17T14:09:18.210" Title="Can I invite specific user to answer my question?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2016-06-17T14:35:24.090" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2935" CreationDate="2016-06-17T19:45:51.587" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/148166/17230&quot;&gt;How to represent kWh usage by year against average temperature&lt;/a&gt; is a wonderful illustration of how to build scientific knowledge into a model. (In this case it's science that many of us know but wouldn't think to use nevertheless.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2016-06-17T19:45:51.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3159" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-18T23:45:29.033" Score="-4" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure, how the closing of old, without activity, question works, but shouldn't there be a time limit, until the moderators (by voting among themselves?) are allowed to accept a valid answer to not answered questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Would it be possible to create a 2nd type of answer, with a different visual, just for this purpose. A community answer for questions without activity for 1 year where moderators would accept an answer by voting on it. All the users would see that answer as being accepted not by the OP, but by the community. And/or some could be removed automatically from the unanswered queue after 1 year without activity. To prevent unwanted deletion, the user would be warned by e-mail and, if unanswered, it would signal to automatically delete the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit2: Maybe I've expressed myself poorly. I'm not talking about whether the highest voted answer is accepted. I'm proposing a method to solve the ever increasing unanswered number of questions (e.g. those by 1 rep users done 3 years ago) that keep 'ruining' the stats of the CV community. I'm not saying that the community should superimpose on the user. I'm saying the community should be able to accept valid answers to dead questions, or delete them, since they are nothing but clutter in the site. If I try to search for certain things, those questions pop up, they don't help me at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should there be a time limit on a question, where the OP has no activity, until moderators are allowed to accept answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40252" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2019-01-14T16:26:15.823" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T11:12:09.463" Title="Allow moderators to accept answers in old questions from inactive users?" Tags="|discussion|moderation|unanswered-questions|site-statistics|old-posts|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3159" CreationDate="2016-06-19T13:51:02.050" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Accepted means accepted by the original poster (OP) of the question: that's an SE-wide definition easy to understand. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main consequence of good answers not being accepted is some lost reputation for those who posted those answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not what you are talking about, but I will add that the main consequence of the best answers not being accepted, but some other answer being accepted, is also some lost reputation for those who posted them. Here &quot;best&quot; can be highest voted (community verdict) or just your personal view of what is best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Win some, lose some: it is only a game. Like many relatively active people here, I can find several answers of mine that were the only answer and/or the highest voted answer but were not accepted. Oh well, I don't care. Who should care and why? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see threads where someone lost out because of lack of acceptance, and there are probably hundreds if not thousands, your upvote adding 10 to a reputation is worth 2/3 as much as the OP's acceptance adding to 15, and two such upvotes from two people are worth more. That's the way that the community shows favour. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll add also giving bounties as a way to right mild wrongs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, &lt;strong&gt;acceptance by the OP and community approval by upvoting and bounties are quite separate and different roads to rising reputation. There is no need to blur the difference by asking for something in between.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moderators must speak for themselves, but my wild guess is that they wouldn't want this responsibility either. &lt;strong&gt;It's not the job of moderators to decide what is best or even what is correct.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2019-01-15T11:12:09.463" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T11:12:09.463" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3161" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3162" CreationDate="2016-06-20T09:33:48.403" Score="12" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;So after some time I really found a question that matches mine&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/14051/clustering-with-some-cluster-centers-fixed-known&quot;&gt;Clustering with some cluster centers fixed/known&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;except it's asking in R and the only answer is not really satisfying for me. By now I came to terms that I will have to implement an algorithm myself, one that would fit the question heading. So my question is, should I post it as an answer or rather leave it be? Or do you think I may should ask my own question in my programming language, hope that a solution comes along and if not post my solution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119024" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-06-20T10:29:39.957" Title="Should I answer questions with a solution in another programming language?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3161" CreationDate="2016-06-20T10:29:39.957" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can answer the existing question. It's not really important what language you use to illustrate the algorithm; but explain it in English first, &amp;amp; then try to make the code as clear as you can (through comments, informative variable names, &amp;amp;c.) for people who aren't fluent in that language (which is much the same thing as making it as clear as you can for people who are fluent).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2016-06-20T10:29:39.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3163" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3164" CreationDate="2016-06-20T21:40:54.690" Score="8" ViewCount="330" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my view my questions must be super easy and I make obvious mistakes as I am naive and learning on my own as I tackle real life problems. Nonetheless my questions remain unanswered. Any idea what's the cause? I feel that something must be wrong with me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the unanswered questions of mine in Cross Validated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/211447/how-to-calculate-the-confidence-interval-of-the-mean-of-means-2&quot;&gt;How to calculate the confidence interval of the mean of means? (2)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/193370/when-to-assume-that-prx-x-y-y-mathcaly-1-prx-xy-y&quot;&gt;When to assume that $\Pr(X=x, Y=y) = |\mathcal{Y}|^{-1} \Pr(X=x|Y=y)$?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/214696/non-parametric-density-estimation-is-it-better-to-estimate-a-pdf-by-first-findi&quot;&gt;Non-parametric density estimation: Is it better to estimate a PDF by first finding its CDF?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/215654/what-does-the-akaike-information-criterion-aic-score-of-a-model-mean&quot;&gt;What does the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) score of a model mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of which I deleted in Cross Validated, and pasted it in Mathematics as I hypothesized that may it's due to me posting in wrong community:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1826755/is-this-probability-density-function-pdf-estimation-hat-f-x-mathcalx-t&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1826755/is-this-probability-density-function-pdf-estimation-hat-f-x-mathcalx-t&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Side note: not sure if related to the problem at hand, but one mistake I did is that I abused the &quot;self-study&quot; tag. What I really meant was some kind of self-learning where I try to tackle real life problems by having me learn individually. I think this is not what &quot;self-study&quot; is for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100507" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2016-06-21T01:04:12.010" Title="Why do some of my questions remain unanswered?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3163" CreationDate="2016-06-21T00:40:55.373" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I count correctly you have 8 answered questions and 5 unanswered, which is about average (we have almost 33K unanswered questions of a bit over 82K asked, so if that applied to you, you'd expect about 8 questions answered of 13). Many of your tags correspond to areas with low answer rates - questions with a tag like &quot;kernel smoothing&quot; only seems to get answered about 40% of the time for example (and some of your other tags fare worse than that), but you have a pretty good hit rate for the kernel-smoothing tag by comparison to the general proportion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;General points about the site as a whole:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there has been strong growth over time in the number of questions posted, including many more questions of poor quality requiring effort in one form or other from the same people who answer a lot of the questions -- the growth in the number of answers posted is much more modest, and the lower quality of questions compounds the problem (more time is being taken up with &quot;janitorial&quot; tasks).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that fewer questions are answered over time, a trend that has continued for several years now. We close more than we used to but the more we do that the fewer we'll answer. There's no clear solution outside of trying to attract more people willing to answer questions (as well as to help with the tasks of keeping the site running in other ways).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, because of limited time to answer questions, I tend to choose ones that are easier to understand first, or about which I think there's something important to say (so I tend to avoid questions that look close to well-trodden territory even if it's not an exact duplicate unless it's really focused or otherwise gives scope to say something that seems interesting). On top of all that, if a question will involve an hour of research or a similar amount of time explaining a sequence of issues, it's likely to push out all my other on site activity for the day -- and still might not produce an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some specific comments relating to your questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Broadly, many of your questions strike me as taking an &quot;odd&quot; or idiosyncratic point of view, and that means -- even when they're not actually hard -- they often involve quite a bit of untangling or clarification to answer. I sometimes find myself saying &quot;huh? maybe come back to this one&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In about half of the questions of yours I have read I have an intent to come back and see if I can attempt an answer but I often don't -- there's often fifty or a hundred other questions posted before I finish looking through the last 24 hours of posts. I imagine that some other people will have similar issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also a lot of your questions I really don't think I can give a good answer to -- sometimes they're outside the areas I know much about, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can you do about it? Try to be as focused/specific, clear, and well researched as you can; some questions might be broken into two shorter questions. Definitely try to read some books and or notes related to what you're interested in - reading widely will help frame your questions better (as well as improving your general understanding). Don't be afraid to come back and edit a question as you get more of a handle on it, and don't be afraid to post an answer yourself -- if it's less than ideal, people may offer brief comments where they wouldn't have time to answer it themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where you can, try to avoid broad or unfocused questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think some of the questions you post are pretty good / take an interesting line and I would encourage you to keep posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2016-06-21T01:04:12.010" LastActivityDate="2016-06-21T01:04:12.010" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3141" CreationDate="2016-06-23T15:58:18.040" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The user actually had two profiles created by mistake and proposed the edit from the other profile, not the one used to ask the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The profiles have since been merged, so now the edit looks a bit weird, but there's no issue here otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8588" LastActivityDate="2016-06-23T15:58:18.040" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3170" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3171" CreationDate="2016-06-27T14:23:42.050" Score="1" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have the badge system that encourage users use more features on the site. Does that make sense to give user more reputations after achieving badges like nice questions or nice answers? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113777" LastEditorUserId="113777" LastEditDate="2016-06-27T14:47:27.987" LastActivityDate="2016-06-27T15:50:44.020" Title="Can I get additional reputation reward from badge like nice question or nice answers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3170" CreationDate="2016-06-27T15:20:18.947" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reputation and badges are not simply rewards (and indeed, as rewards they're  fairly flimsy when one can earn very real rewards putting the same effort into other activities).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, reputation and badges also (and perhaps more usefully) serve as signals to others, but they signal different things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the present time I have a similar reputation to whuber (and I hope he will excuse me mentioning him in my answer), but he has a substantially higher number of &quot;Good Answer&quot; badges than I do (about 5 for every 3 I have, even though I have answered more questions). Good Answer badges are quite rare, so someone holding a lot of them tells you something important about the standard of their answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More of the story comes when you look at the tag badges, for example, whuber has a &lt;code&gt;spatial&lt;/code&gt; tag badge, spatial statistics being a topic on which he has vastly more knowledge than me. Knowing that he has that tag badge and I don't might help to indicate his relative expertise on the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some users on site that have a large amount of reputation that has been mainly gained from asking good questions. That certainly indicates important contributions to the site, but might give you a different view of their answer to some question when compared to a user of similar reputation which has been almost entirely earned on good answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reputation tells our readers only part of the story. Badges tell another part. Both can be useful in giving users a picture of the likely value of what is being said (if it's not otherwise clear). It's no guarantee of course -- anybody might have an off day and give an answer below their usual standard, for example, and ultimately an answer must stand on its own merits -- but such indications can sometimes be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2016-06-27T15:50:44.020" LastActivityDate="2016-06-27T15:50:44.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3172" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-28T16:22:14.327" Score="4" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I thought I had a good answer like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/220972/reduce-feature-levels/220999#220999&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;. But the answer got no up vote or comment and seems no one care. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I get attention to more users , with more feedback? Even down vote with a reason, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/23486/can-we-be-nicer-to-downvoters&quot;&gt;Zach here&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113777" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2016-06-28T16:22:14.327" Title="How can I draw attention and get feedback to my answer for improvement" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3174" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-30T18:11:39.597" Score="1" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question and got a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/24852/is-there-a-word-for-answering-a-question-with-a-question/24867#24867&quot;&gt;maieutic question&lt;/a&gt; in response.   After figuring out the answer myself I awarded answer credit to the person who put forth the effort to write the answer.  While this worked out well, it seems an interesting feature would be to allow the person asking the question to tag a comment as maieutic.  A maieutic tag would be a compliment as asking this type of question can sometimes be a greater feat than providing a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This type of question may also be a good response to newbies who are accustomed to the format of stack exchange, but are seeking to cross into a different field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92353" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:16.923" LastActivityDate="2016-07-01T11:32:33.910" Title="Tag for comments that contain maieutic responses" Tags="|feature-request|answers|comment|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3175" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-01T15:50:34.567" Score="48" ViewCount="3306" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is intended to be a &amp;quot;humorous and friendly thread on how to ask a horrible question&amp;quot; (&lt;em&gt;amoeba&lt;/em&gt;) which can help new users understand how to write good questions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We hope you will contribute one &amp;quot;suggestion&amp;quot; per reply.  Include (if you wish) its rank in the top ten reasons to close questions.  But please add some explanation of why your suggestion is bad and (also if you wish) how to improve such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One possible use of the replies in this thread will be targets of links provided in comments to closed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Example&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The title is &amp;quot;Statistics question.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a statistics site, this is meaningless.  Good titles attract good readers.  Make yours count.  Use key words that clearly indicate what your question is about and how it might differ from similar ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Often such titles reflect carelessness and lack of thought: they tend to be accompanied by questions elsewhere on our Top Ten list, such as copy-pasted homework.  Such posts will usually be closed within minutes without further explanation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;References&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See our &amp;quot;TenFold&amp;quot; chat thread beginning at &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/30673850#30673850&quot;&gt;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/30673850#30673850&lt;/a&gt; for the first incarnation of this list.  Thanks to &lt;em&gt;Amoeba, Scortchi, &lt;s&gt;user777&lt;/s&gt;, er, &lt;s&gt;GeneralAbrial&lt;/s&gt;, um, Sycorax &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\checkmark$&lt;/span&gt;, NickCox, Silverfish, Glen_b, usεr11852, Matthew,&lt;/em&gt; (and any others I may have overlooked) for your suggestions.  Feel free to borrow from and expand on those ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2022-08-24T09:17:12.240" Title="Top $k$ List of Reasons to Close a Question Immediately" Tags="|discussion|faq|questions|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="22" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3175" CreationDate="2016-07-02T00:30:48.820" Score="56" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Questions which are just photographs of your homework sheet or old exam paper&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FJHvI.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FJHvI.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why these questions are closed&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/self-study/info&quot;&gt;policy on self-study questions&lt;/a&gt;, which says that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is okay to ask about homework.&lt;/strong&gt; Homework is included in this self-study tag. This site exists to help people learn and provide a standard repository for questions in statistics and machine learning, both simple and complex, and this includes helping students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we ask that you fulfil certain conditions, including:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make a &lt;strong&gt;good faith attempt&lt;/strong&gt; to solve the problem yourself first. If don't seem to be making a genuine attempt, your question might be voted down or closed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be honest about the source of the question.&lt;/strong&gt;  Do this by adding the self-study tag and mentioning whether it is for some class in the question text.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just showing us a picture of the question doesn't show us what you've tried or where you're stuck, or indeed that you've made a good faith attempt at the question at all. Also, if you haven't typed anything, then we won't know what the original source of your question is. If your homework comes from a textbook, for instance, you should give a full reference (citation) to acknowledge its authorship. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Photographs of your question are also inconvenient for other reasons. They can be difficult to read, particularly if the quality of the photograph is poor. The text is inaccessible to users using &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_reader&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;screen readers&lt;/a&gt;. Moreover, the text is not searchable, either through our site search or external search engines &amp;mdash; this goes against our objective of producing a high quality repository of statistics questions and answers that future readers can learn from. If your question can't be found, then other people will not be able to learn from it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes people resort to taking a photograph of their homework because they do not feel able to copy the formatting. Our site has typesetting features for text and equations (using LaTeX) &amp;mdash; see our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/editing-help&quot;&gt;editing help&lt;/a&gt; for further information. There are situations where photographs are appropriate, for instance if you want to ask what an unclear piece of notation means (and because it's not clear to you what it is, you can't typeset it), you are struggling with how to use LaTeX for an equation or table (some of our helpful users may edit your question to assist you with this), or you need to show us a graph or diagram. However, even in these cases it's best for your question not to just consist of a photograph! Type the question you have, and show us a picture of what you can't type. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2016-07-03T19:29:47.273" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3175" CreationDate="2016-07-02T17:03:34.103" Score="32" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Questions which contain a large number of undefined abbreviations or acronyms&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of our close reasons is &quot;Unclear what you are asking.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm comparing an XYZ model to a YYZ model using the ABC and DAR statistics. Using the LLV test on the OOP dataset, my results are not good. Perhaps I failed at TTR?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CrossValidated is a site for everyone, not just working or practicing statisticians or scientists.  Questions that contain multiple (or sometimes even single) undefined abbreviations may be not understandable to a large number of otherwise interested readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a rule, good scientific writing should avoid unnecessary abbreviations, if you only use a phrase once or twice, please take the time to type out the entire thing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am confused by the formula for &lt;strong&gt;confidence interval&lt;/strong&gt; given in my textbook.  It seems to rely on the z-scores from the standard normal distribution, but I'm having trouble conceptualizing where the normal distribution comes into play in this situation (...describe situation...).  I'd like to know, what is the relation between the z-score and the &lt;strong&gt;confidence interval&lt;/strong&gt; in this situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may think that confidence interval is such a common term that everyone will immediately recognize CI as a substitute, but consider a very beginner searching for an answer to their question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Search: Confidence intervals and z scores&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have abbreviated to CI all your references to the subject of your question, this user will never uncover your question or answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you must repeatedly refer to a complex multi word term in your question or answer, please &lt;em&gt;define&lt;/em&gt; your abbreviation or acronym on first use&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm wondering about how Hyper-Complex Kahler Manifolds with a Holomorphic One Form (CKMwaH1F) ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One last point that follows from the previous.  Please avoid abbreviations completely in question titles.  Titles are meant to be consumed quickly and give a summary of content to tell the reader if they have possible interest in the question, you are only doing yourself a disservice if you alienate a few readers by using unknown abbreviations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there are counterexamples to this advice.  Some abbreviations have become so standardized in our common language that the abbreviation/acronym has &lt;em&gt;become&lt;/em&gt; the name, ANOVA being a prime example.  This poster urges you to use your best discretion, but lean towards utmost sympathy to your readers.  When in doubt, write it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74500" LastEditorUserId="1352" LastEditDate="2016-07-03T19:29:13.507" LastActivityDate="2016-07-03T19:29:13.507" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3178" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3180" CreationDate="2016-07-02T17:17:11.633" Score="8" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since CV is about statistics and machine learning, and this forum has been gaining popularity, can the organizers please share some statistics about CV. I'm sure a lot of folks would be interested in this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;number of registered users,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;number of active participants, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ave number of posts per day,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no of Qs and As, by month, from past n yrs,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the most prolific user, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;growth rate (based on any metric)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others please feel free to add to this list. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98646" OwnerDisplayName="horaceT" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-07-04T09:06:15.900" LastActivityDate="2017-12-24T05:11:29.480" Title="Statistics on Cross Validated usage" Tags="|discussion|participation|site-statistics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3175" CreationDate="2016-07-02T19:30:35.517" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally like the &quot;questions&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have a dataset consisting of vectors of numbers and I want to predict&#xA;  values from other vector of numbers. Any help will be appreciated. Thx&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why it gets closed?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, what is the question in here? Is there any? Nothing was asked, so it's hard to answer anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="35989" LastEditDate="2016-07-05T10:47:51.367" LastActivityDate="2016-07-05T10:47:51.367" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3178" CreationDate="2016-07-02T23:30:58.437" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of the sources of information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Users&quot; tab, which stares at you every time you use StackExchange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pCbIZ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pCbIZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That should be on screen every time your read or post on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you investigate it, it has a wealth of information - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KmN56.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KmN56.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;reputation&lt;/strong&gt; shows how much net reputation (upvotes + acceptances + bounties received - downvotes - bounties awarded) a user has received over the last week or month or quarter or year or in all time (depending on which item you click on in the next row of links under the circled link)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;new users&lt;/strong&gt; gives reputation stats for new users&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;voters&lt;/strong&gt;  gives stats on the number of votes awarded (for the last week/month/ etc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;editors&lt;/strong&gt;  gives stats on the number of edits made (for the last week/month/ etc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;moderators&lt;/strong&gt; tells you who the current diamond-moderators are&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Reputation leagues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While still on the &quot;Users&quot; page, scroll down to near the bottom of the page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rse8N.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rse8N.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has similar (though slightly less accurate) reputation information as from the Users page -- but you can find it going back in time. You want to know who had the highest reputation-gain in December 2015, or the most reputation at the end of May 2013? That will tell you.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange Data Explorer (SEDE). The one specific to CV is &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an interface to a queryable database of all the publicly available information about posts, posters and so on. If you know SQL (T-SQL) you can write your own queries. If you have no clue, almost any query you would care about has probably already been written. If you can write a &lt;em&gt;little&lt;/em&gt; SQL you may be able to fork an existing query to modify it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This database is updated each weekend (so unless you query it right after it updates it's not &lt;em&gt;quite&lt;/em&gt; up to date -- if you look at it on Wednesday it won't have information about a post you made on Monday afternoon). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the questions you ask, many already have queries at SEDE you can look at; try a search there. I describe some examples of search terms I used and queries that they locate below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just over a week ago there was a SE-blog about SEDE &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2016/06/learn-more-about-your-site-with-the-se-data-explorer-heres-how/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Among other things it conveyed the important information that there's an introduction written by Monica Cellio &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/tutorial&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can even download the whole database SEDE uses and look at it at your leisure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Numerous queries have been pointed to in questions or answers here. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2242/are-we-seeing-a-dramatic-drop-in-answers-per-question&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; points to some. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3106/when-is-traffic-slow-on-crossvalidated/3107#3107&quot;&gt;This post&lt;/a&gt; points to some others. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you gain sufficient reputation you get some direct summary information you can look at, but a lot of it can be had through SEDE.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at a few specific examples of getting information about things you mention, to get started:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;number of registered users,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Go to &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/queries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SEDE/stats&lt;/a&gt;. Search &quot;registered users&quot;. Click &quot;popular&quot;. Top query link is &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/18206/total-number-of-registered-users-over-time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Total number of registered users over time&lt;/a&gt;&quot;... sounds like a good start. Try it, once it has run* scroll down. A bit over 88000 registered users by late June.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* you'll need to answer the CAPTCHA first if you haven't made an account there&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;number of active participants,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest looking at the Users tab for this -- for example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as I post, there are 9 pages (9 x 36) + 4 users (=328) with more than 200 reputation this year. Not all are active, though some just have continued to gain rep from old answers. That's an upper bound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about SEDE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In SEDE, go back to the search bar, search for (say) &lt;em&gt;active users&lt;/em&gt;, and again choose the &lt;em&gt;popular&lt;/em&gt; tab (popular queries tend to be better written).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the first page of results is this query, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/45220/number-of-active-users-with-1-post-in-last-30-days&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Number of active users with &gt;= 1 post in last 30 days&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which gives 289.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ave number of posts per day,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, in SEDE, type &quot;questions and answers&quot; as a search. Among the list of popular searches is this query:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/6134/total-questions-and-answers-per-month-for-the-last-12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Total Questions and Answers per Month for the last 12&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which gives monthly figures. For example, for the month from 27 April to 27 May there were 2576 Q's and 1746 A's, or per day about 86 Q's and 58 A's were posted. (Note that a substantial fraction of new questions posted will close.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;no of Qs and As, by month, from past n yrs,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;see above query. There are others that go back 2 or 3 years&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the most prolific user,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what sense? &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Reputation&amp;amp;filter=all&quot;&gt;Reputation&lt;/a&gt;? Posted questions? Posted &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/197083/users-with-most-answers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;answers&lt;/a&gt;? Comments? &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Editors&amp;amp;filter=all&quot;&gt;Edits&lt;/a&gt;? Votes? &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/161292/bountifulii&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bounties&lt;/a&gt;? &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/27379/most-active-users-total-actions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Total actions&lt;/a&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;growth rate (based on any metric)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One measure can be computed from the Total Questions and Answers query above&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: There also appears to be a site that presents a variety of statistics for stackexchange sites (based on SEDE data by the look) -- CrossValidated's page is &lt;a href=&quot;http://sese.evbpc.com/Sites/Detail?SiteId=5c9d37da-6dff-e511-80c0-00155d918203&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-12-24T05:11:29.480" LastActivityDate="2017-12-24T05:11:29.480" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3175" CreationDate="2016-07-03T02:21:20.800" Score="28" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Not carefully developing a question to ask of your data&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/30737505#30737505&quot;&gt;Scortchi&lt;/a&gt; put it (his ellipsis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…] How can I analyze these data?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This quip exemplifies questions that describe a dataset and then ask what data-analytical, statistical, mathematical, programmatical, or machine-learning-ical tools to throw at the data—&quot;What do I do with the data?&quot;—without being reasonably specific about what the asker wants to achieve with data analysis. Data analysis is not a machine where you stick data in one end and get an APA-formatted results section out the other. It is a set of tools to help you answer questions about data. &lt;strong&gt;You need to decide on some questions to ask before the tools can do you any good&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid this problem, try to do two things whenever you ask a question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Provide &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3134/how-can-we-encourage-askers-to-provide-context&quot;&gt;broader context&lt;/a&gt;. Why are you looking at this data to begin with? What were you hoping to learn, at the big-picture level?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Focus your question enough to ask about a particular aspect of the data. Which variable (or variables) do you think of as the outcome? Are you interested in building a predictive model, identifying causes, summarizing a large dataset, searching for certain cases, or something else?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14076" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2016-07-03T19:28:50.160" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3175" CreationDate="2016-07-03T19:28:17.923" Score="24" Body="&lt;h1&gt;QUESTIONS THAT ARE TYPED IN ALL CAPS&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why these questions are closed&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Western languages differentiate between uppercase and lowercase letters. There are commonly agreed rules on when to use which. These rules are well ingrained in almost all speakers of English. The result is that, yes, we &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; read text that is in ALL CAPS, but it requires additional effort, simply because it does not adhere to commonly agreed rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want someone to help you, it is a good idea to make helping you as painless as possible. This includes (but is not limited to) making the minuscule extra effort of formatting your question more or less correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that we understand that many CV users are not native speakers of English. We do not expect letter-perfect command of English. However, not typing your question in ALL CAPS should be possible for anyone who is using the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One additional point: in the early days of the internet, typing in ALL CAPS was the visual equivalent of screaming. Many users here are old enough to remember that time and have the same reaction to a question in ALL CAPS that they would have to a question that was literally screamed at them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qtRnq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qtRnq.png&quot; alt=&quot;Figure&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Visit &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.comicskingdom.com/shared_comics/458fbe98-97e3-426c-86c4-404c2c150493&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.comicskingdom.com/shared_comics/458fbe98-97e3-426c-86c4-404c2c150493&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2021-03-30T17:56:52.037" LastActivityDate="2021-03-30T17:56:52.037" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3175" CreationDate="2016-07-04T08:28:44.640" Score="18" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Duplicates or near duplicates&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site aims to collect questions and high-quality answers that are useful not only for the OP, but also for other readers who face the same question. This site exists for over 5 years and has seen something like 83,000 questions (as of July 2016). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you have a question that, for example, relates to a key topic of an introductory or intermediate statistics class, there is a very good chance that somebody else already had a similar question on this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is therefore good practice to do a little search on this site before asking your own question. This has advantages for everybody:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is time-saving for those users who donate their time to answer questions and moderate this site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You may benefit from excellent answers that already exist, with no delay.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It helps keep the site uncluttered.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67799" LastActivityDate="2016-07-04T08:28:44.640" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3186" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3189" CreationDate="2016-07-04T13:05:26.670" Score="8" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just started wondering if there is anything that we can do with questions that are predestinated to become unnoticed and unanswered while having some potential. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take as example this recent question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/222023/when-have-i-to-stop-looking-for-a-model&quot;&gt;When have I to stop looking for a model?&lt;/a&gt; As I read it, it basically asks: is there anything that we can do in big data/machine learning scenario to find out that we are not going to learn anything more from our data. I'd say that this is an interesting question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP, prompted to edit, has tried to describe his problem in detail, but the question is pretty chaotic and I guess it may discourage potential answerers from reading it. I don't feel that upvoting it only to make it more visible would be a good way to go (it's not what upvotes are for). On another hand, making drastic changes so that it is more clear is not what edits are about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-07-05T13:22:52.313" Title="Can interesting question be rescued from unnoticeability?" Tags="|discussion|editing|votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3187" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3188" CreationDate="2016-07-04T16:36:03.317" Score="3" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Cross Validated post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/222077/polynomial-regression-with-slope-constrait-in-r&quot;&gt;Polynomial regression with slope constrait in R&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is marked as duplicate of another question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/220614/linear-regression-polynom-slope-constraint-in-r&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. I posted previous question as well but I asked it without an account, I was unregistered. Is there any way to comment on my previous question with my new account? I don't have enough reputation to comment yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121249" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T22:21:27.833" Title="How can a new user with not enough rep comment on a question that the same user has previously asked while unregistered?" Tags="|support|comment|reputation|new-users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3187" CreationDate="2016-07-04T19:57:22.477" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @whuber notes, you need to register and merge your accounts.  Here is my boilerplate text that provides the relevant information:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please register &amp;amp;/or merge your accounts (you can find information on how to do this in the &lt;strong&gt;My Account&lt;/strong&gt; section of our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;), then you will be able to edit &amp;amp; comment on your own question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-07-04T19:57:22.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3186" CreationDate="2016-07-05T13:22:52.313" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Posting my own, rephrased and more general, question helped: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/222179/how-to-know-that-your-machine-learning-problem-is-hopeless&quot;&gt;How to know that your machine learning problem is hopeless?&lt;/a&gt;. In the end my question received pretty big interest, number of up-votes and one very good answer. As a side effect, the initial question that I was referring to attracted much greater attention. So this case shows that posting my own question as &lt;em&gt;@Glen_b&lt;/em&gt; suggested, was a good way to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-07-05T13:22:52.313" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3191" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3192" CreationDate="2016-07-07T10:42:31.993" Score="12" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our help page &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; says:&amp;ndash;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If your question is about&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Programming&lt;/strong&gt;, ask on Stack Overflow.  If the language&#xA;  is statistically oriented (such as &lt;strong&gt;R&lt;/strong&gt;,&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;SAS&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Stata&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;SPSS&lt;/strong&gt;,&#xA;  etc.), then decide based on the nature of your question: if it needs&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;statistical expertise&lt;/em&gt; to understand or answer, ask it here;&#xA;  if it's about an &lt;em&gt;algorithm&lt;/em&gt;, routine &lt;em&gt;data processing&lt;/em&gt;,&#xA;  or details of the &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt;, then please refer to the collection&#xA;  of links to resources we maintain.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone tell the intent behind &quot;if it's about an algorithm&quot;? We don't regard questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/205/17230&quot;&gt;Fisher scoring&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/67380/17230&quot;&gt;Hartigan&amp;ndash;Wong&lt;/a&gt; as off-topic. I think we should clarify that clause (or else remove it altogether).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T22:20:45.017" Title="Algorithms apparently off-topic: should we edit the help page?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|help-center|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3191" CreationDate="2016-07-07T13:54:26.077" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe I originally formulated this clause.  The intended meaning of &quot;algorithm&quot; could more clearly be rendered as &quot;implementation of an algorithm.&quot;  It was not meant to suggest that (statistically-related) algorithms are off-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subject to further discussion, I would propose inserting the phrase &quot;the implementation of&quot; in the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T13:54:26.077" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3191" CreationDate="2016-07-07T16:44:45.257" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A possible alternative would be &quot;if it's about writing or implementing code,&quot;.  This distinguishes it from statistical algorithms altogether by using language specific to programming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60621" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T16:44:45.257" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3194" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3195" CreationDate="2016-07-07T17:41:01.220" Score="8" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;I occasionally come across a question that is poorly or awkwardly written, perhaps because the author doesn't speak English natively. How far am I allowed to go in editing the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I make as few changes as necessary?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or may I maximize clarity by heavily rewriting the question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, may I replace:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In one task that measures the times that participants take to respond to each item of a task some of the response times were considered outliers as they are more than 3SD above the mean of the participants' responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In an experiment measuring response times, I observed several outliers more than three standard deviations above the mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97925" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-07-07T22:20:28.797" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T22:20:28.797" Title="Is it appropriate to heavily rewrite a poorly written question?" Tags="|discussion|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3194" CreationDate="2016-07-07T18:09:28.660" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please don't guess what the original poster (OP) intended.&lt;/strong&gt;  When the meaning is clear but poorly worded, then rewriting should be fine.  The danger lies in making implicit assumptions (of which you might not even be aware) in formulating your original understanding of the question.  Be cautious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is what the commenting mechanism is for:&lt;/strong&gt; post a comment asking for clarification.  If possible, be specific about what needs clarifying and how that could be done.  Would it help to use grammatical english?  Provide a statistical context?  Explain terminology?  Given some sample data?  Then suggest so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some (very rare) cases, when the problems appear to stem from poor skills in communicating in English or mathematics, people will edit more aggressively.  When they do, they also post comments alerting the OP to the changes and asking them to perform a critical review of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T18:09:28.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3196" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3216" CreationDate="2016-07-08T07:27:31.583" Score="16" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/222702/58675&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/222702/58675&lt;/a&gt; shows a classical &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Errors-in-variables_models&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;errors-in-variables&lt;/a&gt; model (and in particular, since the calibration curve looks polynomial, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_least_squares&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;total least square&lt;/a&gt; may suffice). What is the right way to answer here? A link to the Wikipedia article is clearly not an acceptable answer. An answer which repeats, more or less, the Wikipedia exposition doesn't seem great too (it's total least squares...there isn't a lot more you can say, apart from the standard derivation). Should I simply point to the Wikipedia link in a comment? Or should I ask for actual data (a reproducible example), and give a real answer based on that? This would be better than just &quot;copying&quot; Wikipedia, because I would give an answer with actual numbers, maybe illustrating the use of some R package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T19:04:13.917" Title="What to do when a question has an answer on Wikipedia?" Tags="|discussion|answers|references|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3197" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-08T09:44:00.703" Score="17" ViewCount="308" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;@whuber&lt;/em&gt; asked recently about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3175/top-ten-list-of-reasons-to-close-a-question-immediately&quot;&gt;Top Ten List of Reasons to Close a Question Immediately&lt;/a&gt;, i.e. how &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to ask questions, but maybe let's address this from the opposite perspective: how to ask a &quot;great&quot; question? As &lt;em&gt;@whuber&lt;/em&gt; I'm treating this thread lightly and I think we could allow ourselves humorous answers because questions should be regarded based on their &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt; rather than form, but nevertheless, it &lt;em&gt;plays&lt;/em&gt; a role...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2016-07-08T22:31:35.820" Title="How to ask question that makes you famous and highly upvoted?" Tags="|discussion|questions|votes|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3197" CreationDate="2016-07-08T10:01:32.677" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;After actively observing CV for some time I'd say that the recipe for a question to get noticed and highly upvoted is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make it general rather then narrow,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use a short, meaningful, but &quot;catchy&quot; title,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make it nicely formatted, use &lt;code&gt;code formatting&lt;/code&gt; and $\TeX$,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It should consist of a few sentences and should not be one sentence: an overly long question would mean that people would not read it carefully,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bayesian&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bayesian&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bayesian&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/p-value&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;p-value&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;p-value&lt;/a&gt; tags, they always attract attention!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask about something controversial,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask as a high-rank user!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include mathematical formulas,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide an example,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't use &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2016-07-08T12:32:43.830" LastActivityDate="2016-07-08T12:32:43.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3197" CreationDate="2016-07-08T13:23:41.530" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Include any &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=XKCD%20is%3aquestion&quot;&gt;XKCD drawing&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-07-08T13:23:41.530" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3197" CreationDate="2016-07-08T19:32:40.197" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Derive insights from previous &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/28/famous-question&quot;&gt;famous questions&lt;/a&gt;, using your favorite &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt; tool. The concrete model will be left as an exercise to the reader. There will be a test.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2016-07-08T19:32:40.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3197" CreationDate="2016-07-08T21:36:49.983" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Find an unanswered question that has a attracted fairly little attention, perhaps because it was poorly worded or a bit vague, or a bit eclectic, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/222023/when-have-i-to-stop-looking-for-a-model&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; for example, on a currently hot topic, such as machine learning. Start a discussion about it here on meta, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3186/can-interesting-question-be-rescued-from-unnoticeability&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;. Then improve and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/222179/how-to-know-that-your-machine-learning-problem-is-hopeless&quot;&gt;re-write the question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7486" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-07-08T21:36:49.983" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2242" CreationDate="2016-07-09T10:36:09.663" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lately I have used a lot of my spare time to answer questions on CV. I do get a little frustrated when my answers receive no attention at all, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/222152/random-effects-not-appearing-for-some-levels-in-lmer-model-why-would-that-be/222202#222202&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/222384/paired-t-test-to-test-trends-in-regression-coefficients-between-groups/222597#222597&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/219140/is-it-possible-to-find-non-significant-result-from-one-way-anova-but-significant/219182#219182&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/218512/regression-with-independent-variables-accuracy-rates/218629#218629&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Now I'm happy to concede that these answers aren't as detailed or high-quality as some, but I hope that I at least gave &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; help to the OPs and that they may be of some help to others in a similar position in future. In some instances I spend a really long time trying to work out what the OP is actually asking. If the answers are seriously lacking then I would hope for a comment from the OP or someone else in the community. But just to get nothing deters me from answering similar questions again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7486" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T15:28:17.917" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3204" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-09T13:43:20.213" Score="11" ViewCount="486" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know there is the very popular SEMNET mailing list, but this is unmoderated and suffers from extended discussions that become quite heated and personal from time to time. Given the popularity of SEM in the social sciences and psychology, I have been wondering why we have so few questions on structural equation modeling on CV ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sem&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sem&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sem&lt;/a&gt; tag appears on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags?page=4&amp;amp;tab=popular&quot;&gt;page 4&lt;/a&gt; of popular tags, while &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/latent-variable&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;latent-variable&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;latent-variable&lt;/a&gt; is all the way down on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags?page=8&amp;amp;tab=popular&quot;&gt;page 8&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7486" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2018-04-05T17:02:20.717" Title="Why do we have so few questions on SEM and latent variable modeling?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3205" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3208" CreationDate="2016-07-13T07:58:41.817" Score="14" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just edited the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/online&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;online&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;online&lt;/a&gt; tag and noted some synonyms for &quot;online&quot; algorithms. Among them are &quot;dynamic&quot; algorithms, so I looked whether we have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dynamic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dynamic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dynamic&lt;/a&gt; tag or similar and whether making it a synonym for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/online&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;online&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;online&lt;/a&gt; would be warranted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have four tags containing the word &quot;dynamic&quot;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dynamic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dynamic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dynamic&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dynamic-regression&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dynamic-regression&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dynamic-regression&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/linear-dynamical-system&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;linear-dynamical-system&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;linear-dynamical-system&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dynamic-linear-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dynamic-linear-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dynamic-linear-model&lt;/a&gt;. From what I can tell, the last three are fine (though the last two could profit from a tag wiki).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dynamic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dynamic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dynamic&lt;/a&gt; is a mess. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dynamic&quot;&gt;It looks like it has been inserted in questions on specific techniques that happen to have &quot;dynamic&quot; in their name, or in other instances that have something &quot;dynamic&quot; about them.&lt;/a&gt; There is no common overarching theme. I don't, for instance, see a way to write a tag wiki, nor do I believe anyone will ever filter on this unspecific tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dynamic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dynamic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dynamic&lt;/a&gt; should be deleted and blacklisted, AKA burninated, so it won't be misused in the future. Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-07-14T06:59:24.663" Title="Burninate the &quot;dynamic&quot; tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-deletion|burninate-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3204" CreationDate="2016-07-13T19:05:14.427" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This community is user driven, and our most popular questions are asked by users of all experience levels and applied areas. Meta-questions like yours have been asked: &quot;Why don't we have more questions on X?&quot; And the answer is very obvious: Users of this site aren't coming here with curiosity/knowledge about X. The SE platform synergizes topics: questions that get frequent answers, upvotes, edits, and comments are exponentially more &quot;bumped&quot; than they would be in say forums (perhaps less so than in Reddit). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't mean the community is &lt;em&gt;unable&lt;/em&gt; to support questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sem&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sem&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sem&lt;/a&gt; or related. SEM is conceptually easy to do, but challenging to implement. The open-source alternatives are shoddy and can be tough to use, &lt;code&gt;lavaan&lt;/code&gt; is perhaps one exception; &lt;code&gt;OpenMX&lt;/code&gt; is almost impossible. M-plus is non-free software with a vibrant support community. The Muthens have provided detailed examples and discussions, and they frequent their own board answering forum questions fairly politely. Paid software users like to utilize the support services they have exclusive privilege to. On those boards, syntax and conceptual questions are on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, a large proportion of CV users are R users. While we now close strict R questions, a majority of questioners use R code or data to illustrate a problem and are looking for R code in an acceptable answer. Most of the time, answerers can fire up an R session and load that code, example data, and provide new syntax or plots to illustrate problems. R simulations to theory questions are frequently accepted answers here. To a lesser extent this is also true of Python. Contrast this with questions that use/illustrate a problem with Stata or SAS code: they go virtually unanswered. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect the community will be challenged by lack of access to M-plus, even in questions not directly about M Plus, and the popularity/accessibility of these questions will be somewhat low. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastEditorUserId="8013" LastEditDate="2018-04-05T17:02:20.717" LastActivityDate="2018-04-05T17:02:20.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3175" CreationDate="2016-07-13T22:20:11.487" Score="26" Body="&lt;h2&gt;What was the chance of this strange personal coincidence?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am perplexed; I just ended a relationship with a guy and 1 month later I meet another guy who has the same first name and the same first initial in the last name. Example : Torrence Tolley (1st guy) &amp;amp; Torrence Tiffen (2nd guy). What is the universe trying to tell me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that's a real post from our site!--but there have been plenty of others like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Strange and unusual things happen all the time:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Million-to-one chances crop up nine out of ten times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/95458-scientists-have-calculated-that-the-chances-of-something-so-patently&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;--Terry Pratchett&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an understandable explanation of the &amp;quot;law of very large numbers&amp;quot; expressed by Terry Pratchett, read Gina Kolata's NY Times article about research by Persi Diaconis and Fred Mosteller, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nytimes.com/1990/02/27/science/1-in-a-trillion-coincidence-you-say-not-really-experts-find.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;1-in-a-Trillion Coincidence, You Say? Not Really, Experts Find&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.  Former Royal Statistical Society president &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hand_(statistician)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;David Hand&lt;/a&gt; has written an entire book on this &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Improbability_Principle.html?id=raZRAQAAQBAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Improbability Principle&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; aimed at the layperson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2019-07-05T13:30:34.203" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3205" CreationDate="2016-07-14T06:59:24.663" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, I have removed all &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dynamic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dynamic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dynamic&lt;/a&gt; tags. For good measure, I also changed all &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dynamic-linear-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dynamic-linear-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dynamic-linear-model&lt;/a&gt; ones to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dynamic-regression&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dynamic-regression&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dynamic-regression&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's see what happens to the tags. If the tags remain, we can edit the wikis to point to this thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This just so I can accept my own answer so the issue is closed.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2016-07-14T06:59:24.663" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3209" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3211" CreationDate="2016-07-14T18:33:49.143" Score="4" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see graphs/charts/images appearing regularly in a post. How do I upload it to CV, and how do I place it in a text? I read the help pages on formatting, but still couldn't figure out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98646" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-07-14T19:07:53.187" LastActivityDate="2016-07-14T19:16:08.060" Title="How to insert an image in a question?" Tags="|support|images|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3210" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4351" CreationDate="2016-07-14T19:03:17.697" Score="5" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed today that we have a tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/l-moments&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;l-moments&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;l-moments&lt;/a&gt; without a description. For once, this isn't my fault. I hope that by bringing it to the attention of meta readers, we could create one. (I don't know anything about l-moments.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T15:43:31.773" Title="What is the [l-moment] tag for?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3209" CreationDate="2016-07-14T19:16:08.060" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JHm2A.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JHm2A.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2016-07-14T19:16:08.060" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3212" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3214" CreationDate="2016-07-14T19:44:28.960" Score="14" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;I admire some users that ask a very general question but get excellent answers. Such as this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/50/what-is-meant-by-a-random-variable/54894#54894&quot;&gt;What is meant by a “random variable”?&lt;/a&gt; I am talking about the long answer for this question by @whuber.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally think this is not a good question, because too general. If I am asking it, probability will be close by &lt;strong&gt;too broad&lt;/strong&gt; or get some answer like &lt;strong&gt;go to read a book&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why such question exist and can get good answers? How can I do that? I am assuming this is not repeatable because it is randomly selected by some high reputation users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113777" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-07-15T12:18:48.567" Title="How can I get excellent answers from a very general/high level question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3196" CreationDate="2016-07-14T21:33:24.180" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Setting aside the specific thread on the main site that motivated this question, I think we can address the title question more generally.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Namely, I think we should be mostly indifferent to what is posted elsewhere on the internet.  In this case, I think it shouldn't matter if a question is answered on Wikipedia, but we could apply the same principle to online statistics textbooks (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Engineering Statistics Handbook&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;), tutorial sites, (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;UCLA's statistics help site&lt;/a&gt;), etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A good deal of the information on CV is likely to be duplicated &lt;em&gt;somewhere&lt;/em&gt; on the internet.  Saying that we should only provide unique information would be too constraining.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The internet is an unstable place.  What happens if the information elsewhere changes?  This is particularly an issue with Wikipedia, which may not say tomorrow what it says today.  (It is possible to permalink a particular historical version of a page, but this isn't commonly done.)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question should not be closed because it seeks information that exists elsewhere.  (It should be closed if it seeks information that already exists on CV.)  If you have an answer that amounts to the same thing that is written elsewhere, I think you should be free to post it.  (That is, if it is your answer.  If you copy and paste, you should cite at a minimum, and under most circumstances you probably shouldn't post an answer that is &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; copied without any additional contribution.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2016-07-14T21:33:24.180" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3212" CreationDate="2016-07-15T12:18:48.567" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;By explaining what more you're looking for than you'd get from reading the relevant Wikipedia article, a textbook, or whatever a couple of minutes' Googling turns up. Bringing up some point of confusion or a difficulty in application presents people with a fun challenge (whether that's to explain something, or to work it out for themselves &amp;amp; then explain it) rather than a boring request for information readily available elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course questions that come down to &quot;explain $X$ to me&quot; sometimes get very good, original, answers&amp;mdash;like @Glen_b I think that's just luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2016-07-15T12:18:48.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3196" CreationDate="2016-07-16T18:08:29.417" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think an answer that only copies and pastes from Wikipedia, with appropriate attribution, is fine if it answers the question completely. Originality is nice, but shouldn't be required. I believe Wikipedia's license is compatible with Stack Exchange's. Copying and pasting more than a few sentences from sites without free licenses could be legally problematic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any answer to a question, even a very short one, should be posted as an answer rather than a comment, because otherwise Stack Exchange can't recognize the question as answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/224790/14076&quot;&gt;an example of an answer I just wrote&lt;/a&gt; that's basically just a copy-and-paste from Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14076" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T19:04:13.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3196" CreationDate="2016-07-16T19:36:59.313" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually I comment, and ask for clarification what part of the question is not already answered by Wikipedia. Then I vote to close as &quot;unclear what you are asking&quot; or &quot;too broad&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;unclear what you're asking&lt;/strong&gt; Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it’s hard to tell exactly what you're asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Wikipedia has a nice answer already, people should read that first, and then clarify where they did not understand Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;too broad&lt;/strong&gt;: There are either too many possible answers, or &lt;strong&gt;good answers would be too long for this format&lt;/strong&gt;. Please add details to narrow the answer set or to isolate an issue that can be answered in a few paragraphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often good Wikipedia articles &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; &quot;too long for this format&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example of such a question that IMHO is &quot;too broad&quot; (and answered by Wikipedia):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/223875/can-anyone-help-me-to-find-out-the-working-of-expectation-maximisation-clusterin&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/223875/can-anyone-help-me-to-find-out-the-working-of-expectation-maximisation-clusterin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually I consider &lt;em&gt;closing&lt;/em&gt; such questions to be appropriate. If they are well answered by Wikipedia, they are usually not well posed questions. If we don't close them, people will just waste their time on adding yet another slightly different answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, I also post an answer that cites &lt;em&gt;only the relevant paragraph&lt;/em&gt; from Wikipedia with an prominent link to hint that they should have read that page... I doubt that Wikipedia &quot;changing&quot; is a major problem for us; and users &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; go back in time with Wikipedia. Answers have time information that is accurate enough to find the Wikipedia page at that time, usually. I doubt that for this kind of questions, Wikipedia ever will change to a substantially worse article. If this ever happens, only one person needs to investigate this, and edit the question with the permanent revision URL. But in my opinion, we have more incorrect answers on SE than incorrect information in Wikipedia...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7828" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-07-16T22:00:12.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3217" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3219" CreationDate="2016-07-19T09:57:41.977" Score="7" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently we have no way of migrating Excel questions anywhere. They would be off-topic in most of the cases for &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;http://stackoverflow.com&lt;/a&gt;, so we shouldn't migrate them there. However, it seems that &lt;a href=&quot;https://superuser.com/&quot;&gt;https://superuser.com/&lt;/a&gt; is a place where &lt;a href=&quot;https://superuser.com/questions/tagged/microsoft-excel&quot;&gt;lots of Excel questions get answered&lt;/a&gt; -- maybe we should be able to migrate such questions there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:04:45.750" LastActivityDate="2016-07-19T13:53:45.393" Title="Shouldn't we be able to migrate Excel questions to SuperUser.com?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|moderation|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3217" CreationDate="2016-07-19T11:01:44.663" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We (at least, we as a site) can migrate questions to SU, (and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/222261/dynamic-yearly-monthly-charts-in-excel&quot;&gt;have&lt;/a&gt;, quite recently).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see this when I choose close/off-topic/&quot;This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7uDeh.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7uDeh.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you don't see it, I am not sure what privilege level this comes at though (20K? diamond mod?)  .... [Scortchi says that it's diamond-mod. I believe this recollection is correct.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can always close as off-topic and flag. Several high rep users frequently flag to suggest migration* (not all such requests turn into migrations, though - sometimes there are reasons not to -- e.g. it's off topic at the suggested destination; or it's actually on-topic here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[One such user flagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/224487/calculate-matrix-exponential-in-excel&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; not very long after you commented there.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-07-19T12:08:59.913" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3217" CreationDate="2016-07-19T13:53:45.393" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Only moderators have the ability to migrate questions to any site.  SE also imposes a limitation on the number of default sites made available in the migration dialog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The solution is to flag the thread and recommend a migration target.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In controversial cases, mods can contact mods at the intended destination site to ask them in advance whether they would accept the migration.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2016-07-19T13:53:45.393" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3220" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-20T15:08:13.170" Score="9" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I guess such question may have been asked before, but I was not able to find it using search field on meta.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should we do if a user edited his/her question &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; it was answered? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit your answer so it fits the new question?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or gently suggest OP to rollback his/her edit,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or if (2) does not work, rollback the edit yourself (?),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or do something different..?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2016-07-21T16:58:20.730" LastActivityDate="2016-07-21T16:58:20.730" Title="User edits question after it was answered - how to react?" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3220" CreationDate="2016-07-20T22:25:23.520" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've done different things in different circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I edit my answer to follow the question. This strategy is good if the updated question/answer is a better pair of posts (more likely to be useful to others) than the originals were. For example if the original answer points out an idiosyncratic misunderstanding in the question, I'm usually happy to move the answer. However, if it continues to happen that the question changes substantively I tend to ask the OP to instead post a new question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On occasion -- especially if the original Q &amp;amp; A were good -- I roll-back and ask the OP to post a new question (or if I have a sense that the OP would respond, I ask the OP to roll-back and post a new question -- it's better not to fiddle with questions if the OP can be induced to do so)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a few times I have simply edited some of the original question back in (to the question or more typically as a quote into my answer) -- this makes sense as long as that part of the answer has some value. I sometimes do the same with comments I respond to.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I have done other things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where possible, good questions/answers should be retained and questions should correspond to answers. As long as we try to make reasonable choices I'm not sure there's much value in dictating a single policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T22:25:23.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2935" CreationDate="2016-07-21T18:17:44.533" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rob Hyndman's answer to his own question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1444/how-should-i-transform-non-negative-data-including-zeros&quot;&gt;How should I transform non-negative data including zeros?&lt;/a&gt; at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/1630/60613&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/1630/60613&lt;/a&gt; brings a nice transformation function that I had never heard being mentioned. There are other great answers in that thread, but this was the one that most helped me (I was actually searching for another transformation for positive/negative data, and the &lt;em&gt;arcsinh&lt;/em&gt; really suited my application as it resembles the log1p transformation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Bounty awarded]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60613" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2016-07-27T03:08:07.887" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2935" CreationDate="2016-07-22T14:52:28.627" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Matthew wrote a good answer here about the computational steps involved in linear regression using linear algebra.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/154485/least-squares-regression-step-by-step-linear-algebra-computation&quot;&gt;Least Squares Regression Step-By-Step Linear Algebra Computation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Bounty placed and awarded]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-08-13T22:58:03.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3224" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3225" CreationDate="2016-07-25T13:46:00.833" Score="16" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is an example image &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; alt text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![enter image description here][1]][1]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0Tvxo.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0Tvxo.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example image &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; alt text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Example of an image with alt text][2]][2]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/i2R5o.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/i2R5o.png&quot; alt=&quot;Example of an image with alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect for most readers there is no discernible difference but I believe that some users, for example those who use &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_reader&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;screen readers&lt;/a&gt;, will experience a difference.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we include images in posts, should we be adding alt text as a matter of course? If we do, what is &quot;good&quot; alt text - should it attempt to describe the visual appearance of the image, or simply to identify what the image is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, should we add alt text to images on older posts, particularly on highly-viewed threads? Or is this something we should do only as part of a larger edit (e.g. fixing a typo or changing tags)? If we see that a low-rep user has made an edit request to add alt text to an image, should their edit be rejected as &quot;Changes are either completely superfluous&quot; or should it be approved as a potentially valuable addition? (At least, assuming that the editor is being reasonable and isn't trying to flood the front page with hundreds of such edits.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$*$ I may be wrong but I suspect alt text might be read by search engine robots and therefore have implications for the search engine optimization of an image. This may be an additional incentive to add useful alt text, for instance if you want an image to come up as a result when a particular name of plot is searched for on an external search engine. Hopefully an SEO wizard can inform me if this is indeed the case!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-07-26T12:03:00.690" LastActivityDate="2017-08-21T21:52:27.097" Title="Should images have alt text as a matter of course, and should alt text be added to existing images?" Tags="|discussion|editing|images|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3224" CreationDate="2016-07-25T17:17:21.033" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that we have at least a few vision-impaired readers who have mentioned this fact on our site (and no doubt many more who don't post or don't mention it), I think we should attempt to add at least brief alt text as a matter of course -- it's just a matter of replacing &quot;enter image description here&quot; with a description of the image. Even a brief one-sentence description is better than none, though longer descriptions are better still. Alternatively, describe it in the text of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for what to do with old posts I certainly suggest adding a description if you happen to be editing a post, but I wouldn't necessarily start a wholesale rewrite of old posts because we would bump thousands of posts. We should really only bump a few a day, so it would be years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-08-21T21:52:27.097" LastActivityDate="2017-08-21T21:52:27.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3226" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-26T12:35:54.387" Score="4" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have asked in a general/broad way &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/225677/105234&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; thinking that as related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/7815/105234&quot;&gt;What skills are required to perform large scale statistical analyses?&lt;/a&gt; would be well received and useful for me. Then the comments were that it needs (far) more editing to make it useful and answerable here.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Now that I have edited to include more information perhaps I have been too specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How much details should I add?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is the question, interpreting the results on-topic? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105234" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-07-26T13:11:58.760" Title="How to improve from too broad question to answerable question" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3229" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-27T19:54:27.387" Score="11" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some questions, often from new users, pose a practical problem of modeling or forecasting a behaviour of some system and ask for suggestions for modeling or forecasting techniques. In some cases the choice is really very broad, and I start thinking whether the question itself is not too broad (a reason for closing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the question is often specific; there is a concrete problem. But still there are so many possible solutions to be offered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should such questions be left intact? Closed? Edits be suggested?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2016-12-19T18:19:02.840" LastActivityDate="2016-12-19T18:19:02.840" Title="Suggestions on modeling or forecast techniques - too many possible solutions" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|new-users|too-broad|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3230" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-28T08:28:25.133" Score="2" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I know there are several general &quot;How to attract attention&quot; posts. But I don't know how to improve &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/224693/comparing-relative-error-measures&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt; given the tips because I feel it is really simple. I saw three options to increase readership:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Crossposting on math (which I know is discouraged)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bloating the question with things like &quot;Please help&quot; or &quot;it is really simple&quot; in the heading&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Posting in meta about my problem&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While one may think I just want attention (which I do), I would like to point out that I tried to use the most polite way to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have tips how to improve the question, make it clearer, or if you could just give me an outright answer there, I would appreciate it very much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119024" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-07-29T19:56:59.093" Title="Simple question needs simple answer but does not attract necessary attention" Tags="|discussion|questions|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3231" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3238" CreationDate="2016-07-28T08:39:54.077" Score="8" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/media&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;media&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;media&lt;/a&gt; tag (11 questions), am I missing something, or is it just misspelled &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/median&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;median&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;median&lt;/a&gt;..?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: In obvious cases I started re-tagging the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-07-28T12:39:04.757" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T00:30:21.993" Title="Is [media] tag just misspelled [median]?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3230" CreationDate="2016-07-28T09:38:20.577" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Crossposting on mathoverflow (which I know is discouraged)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be dramatically off topic on mathoverflow, which is for &lt;em&gt;research problems&lt;/em&gt;. Unless you are planning to publish in a mathematically-related journal somewhere, you probably shouldn't post there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might instead be on topic on math, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bloating the question with things like &quot;Please help&quot; or &quot;it is really simple&quot; in the heading&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pointless, since it would be almost immediately edited out, and likely annoy several of our frequent contributors, so it's more likely to cost you answers than gain them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;please help&quot; is utterly redundant since &lt;em&gt;everybody&lt;/em&gt; who posts a question wants help, that's why they're posting. It doesn't do anything to make your post a better question for the site -- in fact the opposite.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if it's really so simple, you should answer it. If you don't know the answer you also cannot actually know how simple it is to answer, you only assume it's simple -- but many questions that are easy to ask are impossible to effectively answer. Being told a question is simple is for me a &lt;em&gt;disincentive&lt;/em&gt; to answer because it belittles my contribution in answering a question - before I've even started. Why would I put effort into answering a question that you don't think takes any? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Posting in meta about my problem&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, sure, but the general advice doesn't change much from several posts here about how to improve questions and how to encourage answers. First and foremost you make it the best question you can. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[In spite of initially thinking there was a problem with the question] I now think this question is answerable, but it could be clearer. I had to reread it several times to see where I had misunderstood. [Now I understand it, I suspect it may be a duplicate. If I can't locate one, I will answer it -- assuming nobody beats me to it.]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You should as far as possible make sure you have posted in the one best place for your question. Is this a stats question at all, rather than a mathematics? If so how is it about statistics? (I realize its origin is in work with models, but the question itself seems (if I have it right) to be just about how percentages work. Consider whether you should request migration to math.SE; if you do think it is a stats question you should try to make that aspect of it clearer)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2016-07-28T16:02:17.910" LastActivityDate="2016-07-28T16:02:17.910" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3234" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-30T13:39:07.920" Score="6" ViewCount="400" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are general R related questions such as the one in the title of this question on topic on crossvalidated? I presume they're not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was looking for a specific tutorial at inside-r.org but now the website just redirects me to mran.microsoft.com and tutorials are nowhere to be seen. Google still shows results from inside-r.org but each page redirect to Microsoft's new website. I'm having trouble understanding what has happened... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE:&#xA;inside-r.org is gone. Please check this article for more information.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.r-bloggers.com/farewell-inside-r-org-where-to-find-alternative-r-resources/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.r-bloggers.com/farewell-inside-r-org-where-to-find-alternative-r-resources/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68622" LastEditorUserId="68622" LastEditDate="2016-08-05T17:42:46.590" LastActivityDate="2016-08-05T17:42:46.590" Title="Is &quot;Why is inside-r.org pointing at mran.microsoft.com?&quot; on topic on Cross Validated?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|r|software|references|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3234" CreationDate="2016-07-30T14:06:06.973" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;off topic&lt;/a&gt; here, and I doubt this particular discussion (aside from the question of on-topicness) would be on topic at any of the other SE network sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're free to raise it on our chat if you wish. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-07-30T14:06:06.973" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3031" CreationDate="2016-08-02T11:23:13.837" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Turns out that we have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/theory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;theory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;theory&lt;/a&gt; tag. Its wiki excerpt says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about statistical theory. Always include a more specific tag as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that it is a meta tag by definition. And so &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/264&quot;&gt;it should go&lt;/a&gt;. It does not seem to add any value, is used inconsistently, and is only causing confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2016-08-02T11:23:13.837" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3231" CreationDate="2016-08-03T12:52:50.357" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/media&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;media&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;media&lt;/a&gt; when used correctly does group together a bunch of conceptually related questions, so seems useful. But it poses typo/autocompletion issues with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/median&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;median&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;median&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose a change of name to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/statistics-in-media&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;statistics-in-media&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;statistics-in-media&lt;/a&gt;, which would be less prone to confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update (Sep 15)&lt;/strong&gt; by @amoeba: I have retagged all threads into &lt;code&gt;[statistics-in-media]&lt;/code&gt;. I wrote the following tag excerpt for it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions related to statistics in the media (TV, radio, newspapers, blogs, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-09-15T00:30:21.993" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T00:30:21.993" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3239" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-03T17:27:31.840" Score="17" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;Often, when editing other people's answers and questions, we have to deal with non-formatted tables, as people justifiably don't know how to type those in the text boxes and keep the table formatting. Currently, I usually encode the tables in the code sample format, such as this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;n Left Center Right&#xA;1 0.24 1      125&#xA;2 -1   189    -8&#xA;3 -20  2000   1+10i&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Becomes this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;n Left Center Right&#xA;1 0.24 1      125&#xA;2 -1   189    -8&#xA;3 -20  2000   1+10i&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, that looks like a misuse of the code formatting, but it's at least readable and promptly copyable. I was looking around the MathJax tutorial at &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;Math.SE&lt;/a&gt; and got around &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5044&quot;&gt;this part about arrays formatting&lt;/a&gt;, which is another possibility and I regard has been used previously on CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, this code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$$&#xA;\begin{array}{c|lcr}&#xA;n &amp;amp; \text{Left} &amp;amp; \text{Center} &amp;amp; \text{Right} \\&#xA;\hline&#xA;1 &amp;amp; 0.24 &amp;amp; 1 &amp;amp; 125 \\&#xA;2 &amp;amp; -1 &amp;amp; 189 &amp;amp; -8 \\&#xA;3 &amp;amp; -20 &amp;amp; 2000 &amp;amp; 1+10i&#xA;\end{array}&#xA;$$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generates this table:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$&#xA;\begin{array}{c|lcr}&#xA;n &amp;amp; \text{Left} &amp;amp; \text{Center} &amp;amp; \text{Right} \\&#xA;\hline&#xA;1 &amp;amp; 0.24 &amp;amp; 1 &amp;amp; 125 \\&#xA;2 &amp;amp; -1 &amp;amp; 189 &amp;amp; -8 \\&#xA;3 &amp;amp; -20 &amp;amp; 2000 &amp;amp; 1+10i&#xA;\end{array}&#xA;$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which looks much better but is harder to copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the best practice regarding table formatting then? Also, am I misusing the code formatting? I see I'm not the first to bring up MathJax arrays (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2531/have-latex-tables-stopped-working&quot;&gt;Have Latex tables stopped working?&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60613" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-03-12T21:53:55.740" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T21:53:55.740" Title="Table formatting: best practices regarding code sample format" Tags="|discussion|editing|math-display|formatting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2935" CreationDate="2016-08-03T20:08:54.213" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/84394/bill-woessner&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/84394/bill-woessner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could probably pick any of this user's answer for a bounty (as I have done already for his most-upvoted answer). The one comparing eigen- and Cholesky-factorization is particularly good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Bounty placed and awarded.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2016-08-13T22:57:33.417" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3239" CreationDate="2016-08-03T21:53:44.187" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the MathJax/LaTeX table formatting is nice, it's a lot of work. I would not ask anyone to do it as a matter of routine. The added value is small, despite the prettier appearance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we spend  a lot of time making perfect tables, fewer posts will be edited. Better several readable posts than one perfect one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this instance, I think &lt;em&gt;best is the enemy of the good&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2016-08-03T21:53:44.187" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3239" CreationDate="2016-08-03T23:58:15.150" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to express an active preference for the &quot;code format&quot; tables over Latex ones in most circumstances, particularly if the table has been aligned properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ease of copying tables of data into a spreadsheet or script for further analysis or graphing is a huge advantage and something I regularly make use of. I have occasionally had to copy Latex tables into a spreadsheet or script and found it a significant inconvenience. (Slightly easier to do it from the Latex source rather than just copying directly what's rendered in the browser, but there is still quite a lot of formatting to change.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latex tables are sometimes superior, particularly if you know that the table contains a lot of textual description or certainly isn't something someone is going to want to input into a script, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$&#xA;\begin{array}{c|ccc}&#xA;\times &amp;amp; \text{-ve} &amp;amp; 0 &amp;amp; \text{+ve} \\&#xA;\hline&#xA;\text{-ve} &amp;amp; \text{+ve} &amp;amp; 0 &amp;amp; \text{-ve} \\&#xA;0 &amp;amp; 0 &amp;amp; 0 &amp;amp; 0 \\&#xA;\text{+ve} &amp;amp; \text{-ve} &amp;amp; 0 &amp;amp; \text{+ve}&#xA;\end{array}&#xA;$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... or for which a &quot;clean&quot; layout or the ability to use Latex typesetting would be helpful, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$&#xA;\begin{array}{c|cc}&#xA; &amp;amp; x &amp;amp; y \\&#xA;\hline&#xA;x &amp;amp; x^2 &amp;amp; xy \\&#xA;y &amp;amp; xy  &amp;amp; y^2 \\&#xA;\end{array}&#xA;$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="22228" LastEditDate="2016-08-04T16:30:40.297" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T16:30:40.297" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4242" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-04T13:25:57.713" Score="13" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we could dramatically improve the review queue process if we could auto-populate the queue with questions that are suspect for more refined reasons than currently exist. In the same vein as to the thread about the top reasons to close out a thread &lt;em&gt;prima facie&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. the title is &quot;statistics question&quot;), I think we could actually work out some implementable logic for things that should get dropped in the review queue automatically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, the lowest-hanging fruit are the questions for which the only tag is R (or Python or Stata, but to a much lesser extent). At least nearly all of these questions are incredibly low quality -- revolving around either a failure to read the documentation, or clueless employees not knowing how to perform their jobs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my imagination, this would take the form of a simple set of rules that the mods/high rep users construct which are applied to new posts. Positive rule findings populate the review queue. An example of a single rule would be [&quot;question has 1 tag and that tag is in (R, Python, Stata)&quot;]. Or another example: the question is tagged &quot;mathematical-statistics and is less than $k$ words in length&quot; for some well-chosen $k$. Or &quot;the question title is in [statistics question, probability question] and the question contains a picture&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that the discussion of my suggestion for more refined low-quality review criteria has been side-tracked -- my central question was whether or not there's a way to create such user-defined review criteria, but it seems that people are focusing on how to devise such rules. My suspicion is that it is not currently possible to customize the review criteria, so my next question is how do we go about making that possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2016-08-08T15:29:40.433" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T15:29:40.433" Title="Customize criteria for automatic population to review queue?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|closing-questions|review|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4243" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-04T23:29:45.473" Score="21" ViewCount="493" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;Artificial Intelligence SE&lt;/a&gt; is now in private beta phase, and it looks like most questions asked there are on-topic here. There is already another SE with a large overlap, namely Data Science SE. What do you think of this new SE, and should we avoid another almost identical SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-11-27T23:00:50.630" LastActivityDate="2018-11-27T23:00:50.630" Title="After Data Science SE: Artificial Intelligence SE" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|ai-stackexchange|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3229" CreationDate="2016-08-05T09:36:26.317" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;One option is to provide a list of potential approaches and a corresponding set of general resources in meta - much as we do for questions about software (one package with links per answer); in this case one methodology with resource links per answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then when we go to close as too broad we can point directly to that assistance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a fair bit of work to do in one go but by doing one-per-answer it can be done piecewise - list a few major things, do those and then work down to other methods over time, as we see there's value in doing so. Such answers can be done by people familiar with the approaches they're writing about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2016-08-05T09:36:26.317" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4245" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-05T23:58:05.460" Score="2" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I saw that there is a new &lt;a href=&quot;https://scicomp.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Computational Science SE&lt;/a&gt; site and it seems to overlap considerably with scientific and statistical computing. Those questions seem to be welcomed on both sites. How do I distinguish where each question goes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a motivating example, I recently came up with a question where I couldn't figure out which site was appropriate. I wanted to compare scipy's implementation of PCA with my own. (The question can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38799205/why-are-my-manual-pca-reconstructions-not-matching-pythons-sklearns-reconstruc&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.) How would I know if this question was better for Cross Validated or computational science?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that I ended up submitting it to Stack Overflow even before these two sites occurred to me. That may have been a mistake on my part. Feel free to contribute more or better examples to distinguish where questions go where.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28986" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2016-08-07T16:41:15.280" Title="How do I know if my question belongs on Cross Validated or the Computational Science SE site?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4245" CreationDate="2016-08-06T00:21:37.647" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that in some cases a post can be on topic at more than one site. Generally you should just choose the best one (which may relate to the kind of answers you seek).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other cases a post may be excluded from the scope of one or even both sites, in spite of the fact that you think it should belong there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt; page discusses the scope of our site in some detail. See the opening section and the later part that mentions &lt;em&gt;programming&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, to be on topic here a question should be statistical in nature, rather than be about implementation details in some language. If you want to compare two algorithms, it &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be on topic. If you want to compare two code-blocks, it's likely off topic here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question relates to an error message it's almost certainly off-topic here (with some exceptions where the underlying issue is a clearly statistical one). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-08-06T02:26:56.713" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4243" CreationDate="2016-08-06T05:46:07.440" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that this kind of issue is endemic to SO and will only increase as sites proliferate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A proposal: there should be a proposal process where users can vote to merge sites, resulting in a permanent redirect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really, what's in a name? Cross Validation is an excellent name to catch the attention of anyone who's actually exercised curiosity + healthy skepticism about &quot;smart algorithms&quot; and so on, but inasmuch as it serves as a clue, it's an easy one for people to miss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20307" LastActivityDate="2016-08-06T05:46:07.440" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4248" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-09T21:17:37.030" Score="11" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;@amoeba and I had a lengthy (and hence not particularly productive, if the sheer length is any indication of the proximity to consensus) &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3227/5739&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt; of tag synonyms in the main &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1200/5739&quot;&gt;&quot;Tag synonyms candidates&quot;&lt;/a&gt; thread, and I think both of us got lost in this, so let's take it up to a higher level of a separate thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything weighted includes the following tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weights&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weights&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weights&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weighted-data&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weighted-data&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weighted-data&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weighted-sampling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weighted-sampling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weighted-sampling&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weighted-regression&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weighted-regression&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weighted-regression&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weighted-mean&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weighted-mean&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weighted-mean&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this stage, I quicked-and-dirtied wiki summaries for the first three, and  they are mostly driven by my personal opinion. (I am a survey statistician, so the production and the use of survey weights is my main line of business; I also hold strong opinions on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/27693/5739&quot;&gt;the proper use of terminology&lt;/a&gt;, so my approach is to make everything as clear as possible.) I have put a relatively strong language to avoid some of these confusing / ambiguous tags, and suggested to put something more specific to the problem at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, my take is that in &quot;tidy&quot; rectangular data sets, we can put weights:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;on observations/rows -- in which case they usually serve as the multipliers to the likelihood contributions / squared residuals in least squares problems. I am used to weights coming from probability sampling from finite populations, so they roughly represent the inverse probability of selection and response. Many other uses of weights, such as precision weights or frequency weights, as discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/faq/weights.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/faq/weights.htm&lt;/a&gt;, are probably deprecated by now, with the modern software allowing all the analysis in a better shape than what all of these historic tricks been used for. The problem-specific weights also arise in robust procedures, where the weights are used to limit the influence of outlying observations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;on variables/columns -- some literatures refer to regression coefficients as regression weights, for instance. And there are also weights in deep learning networks, and these weights are &quot;learned&quot; rather than &quot;estimated&quot;. Also, weights on variables come up in principal component analysis / factor analysis (in which case my preferred language is that of &quot;loadings&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also data sets auxiliary to the main data, such as those generated by computational Bayesian / Monte Carlo Markov chains. The importance sampling weight is the ratio of the &quot;true&quot; density of interest to the density of a convenient distribution to sample from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet another concept of weights may arise in model averaging, where the weights are attached to models rather than neither observations nor variables. For these, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/model-averaging&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;model-averaging&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;model-averaging&lt;/a&gt; may be a better home than &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weighted-mean&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weighted-mean&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weighted-mean&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet another use of weights is when the marketing folks try to aggregate ratings of a product from different users. I am not sure what to recommend here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is probably more than meets the eye.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I have been going through these trying to clean up (I started with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weighted-sampling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weighted-sampling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weighted-sampling&lt;/a&gt; retagging to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/survey-sampling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;survey-sampling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;survey-sampling&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/importance-sampling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;importance-sampling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;importance-sampling&lt;/a&gt; where appropriate), I discovered a wild variety of ways to use the idea of weights... and the topics and problems that people tag with these (often out of confusion). So that one can be clarified. Also, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weights&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weights&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weights&lt;/a&gt; can probably be cleaned and frozen/killed, as the one having fewest questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, we are seeking a community input to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;proper definition of weights as a concept;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;delineation of what to consider the weights on observations in rectangular data sets, and the best tag name for that;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;delineation of what to consider the weights on variables in rectangular data sets, and the best tag name for that;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what the concept of weights may mean for irregular data sets;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;other uses of weights in statistics / machine learning / data science, and whether these should go under some general tag, or have their own tags developed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me put some tentative ideas for up/down voting, but please feel free to express more on the topic. In particular, post your &quot;case studies&quot; of other uses of weights in statistics, with the specific posts that use weights in that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;: I am guilty of creating another tag, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/survey-weights&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;survey-weights&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;survey-weights&lt;/a&gt;. I will send the questions about &lt;em&gt;sampling design&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/survey-sampling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;survey-sampling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;survey-sampling&lt;/a&gt;, while the questions about &lt;em&gt;analysis&lt;/em&gt; with survey data and survey weights will go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/survey-weights&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;survey-weights&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;survey-weights&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T16:28:48.110" Title="Weights and everything weighted" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-reorganization|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4248" CreationDate="2016-08-09T21:19:29.443" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weights&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weights&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weights&lt;/a&gt; tag&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is too generic, and should be killed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Upvote: agree, this is too ambiguous; this needs to be cleaned, and further use is discouraged/limited&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downvote: keep it generic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comment: please provide your considerations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-08-09T22:53:43.357" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T22:53:43.357" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4248" CreationDate="2016-08-09T21:21:53.630" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weighted-sampling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weighted-sampling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weighted-sampling&lt;/a&gt; tag&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It needs to be refined. @StasK's inclination is to limit it to computational Monte Carlo where it means the ratio of the target to sampling density; a lot of other uses actually mean unequal probability sampling in complex surveys, and these should be tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/survey-sampling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;survey-sampling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;survey-sampling&lt;/a&gt; instead. There is also a small minority of questions where the tag is used for what &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weighted-data&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weighted-data&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weighted-data&lt;/a&gt; may be a better fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Upvote: limit this to a technical use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downvote: keep it generic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comment: please provide your considerations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-08-09T22:54:21.623" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T22:54:21.623" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4248" CreationDate="2016-08-09T21:25:19.223" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weighted-mean&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weighted-mean&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weighted-mean&lt;/a&gt; tag&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag is used when people are unsure what to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Upvote: make it a synonym / fold into &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weighted-data&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weighted-data&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weighted-data&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downvote: keep it generic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comment: please provide your considerations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-08-09T22:54:02.747" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T22:54:02.747" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4248" CreationDate="2016-08-09T21:33:28.373" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Usage of &quot;weights&quot;: in surveys&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Weights are used in analysis of complex survey data. The initial motivation comes from Horwitz-Thompson estimator, in which the weights are the inverse probabilities of selection. In most modern survey data sets, weights also account for multiple ways to reach the observation unit (e.g., through both landline and cell phones in phone surveys), nonresponse, and calibration/generalized regression estimation intended to improve precision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Upvote: questions that primarily deal with this use of weights should be (re)tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/survey-sampling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;survey-sampling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;survey-sampling&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downvote: such questions should be left alone as is.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comment: please provide your considerations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-08-09T22:56:04.837" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T22:56:04.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4248" CreationDate="2016-08-09T21:35:56.947" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Usage of &quot;weights&quot;: regression coefficients&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regression coefficients are referred to as &quot;regression weights&quot; in some literatures. I personally find this confusing, and would like to steer the site users to the more traditional statistical literature that talks about coefficients.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Upvote: questions that talk about regression coefficients as weights should have the weight-related tag(s) removed (possibly with an explanation to the OP why this is being done).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downvote: such questions should be left alone as is.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comment: please provide your considerations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-08-09T22:54:57.893" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T22:54:57.893" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4248" CreationDate="2016-08-09T22:57:46.003" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Usage of &quot;weights&quot;: in neural networks&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is simply no way we can possibly make neural network people to stop saying &quot;weights&quot;. This is a huge field, and model coefficients are &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; called weights there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not seem to be a big problem for our tags: there are only 6 questions tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/neural-networks&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;neural-networks&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;neural-networks&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weights&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weights&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weights&lt;/a&gt; together. We can easily remove [weights] from all these threads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upvote if you agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="22228" LastEditDate="2016-08-11T20:45:54.030" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T20:45:54.030" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2094" CreationDate="2016-08-10T03:13:53.750" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Q&amp;amp;A site for AI entered private beta, so you can now ask non-statistical AI questions there:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/93481/artificial-intelligence/visit&quot;&gt;http://ai.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12989" LastEditorUserId="12989" LastEditDate="2016-08-10T15:38:46.967" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T15:38:46.967" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4256" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-10T13:31:56.223" Score="5" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; I have now taken a bit of time to update the question, giving more detail into the origin and structure of the data. I hope it's more clear now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important that the solution is generally applicable however, since not all projects have the same setup.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have had my fair share of issues with some individuals here but I have yet not seen the kind of trigger-happy moderation like the kind shown &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/229165/categorization-of-variables-based-on-response-trends&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if you guys realize that it does actually take time to formulate a good question, to make it generally relevant for a wider audience. I have mentioned what I have tried, what I think the problem is.. The question is put on hold without a single comment about what needs to be clarified, boilerplate warning and put on-hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the vision for this QA site really? Are we as a community ok with this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3014" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T11:39:24.057" Title="Issues with trigger happy moderation" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|moderation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4257" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-10T16:50:08.693" Score="11" ViewCount="425" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is our stance on questions about non-statistical AI? Are they on-topic or off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask the question to know whether &lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://ai.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; has a partial or perfect overlap with CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can you please provide a couple of short examples of such questions? – amoeba ↵ 5 mins ago &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw some tags that seem to indicate non-stat AI may be on-topic, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/artificial-intelligence&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/artificial-intelligence&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fuzzy-set&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fuzzy-set&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fuzzy&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fuzzy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/23375/12359&quot;&gt;Are experts harmful?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/47454/12359&quot;&gt;Creating fuzzy values for binary data&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/209783/12359&quot;&gt;Fuzzy logic control model&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-11-27T23:01:47.410" LastActivityDate="2021-01-12T04:45:10.293" Title="What is our stance on questions about non-statistical artificial intelligence?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|ai-stackexchange|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4256" CreationDate="2016-08-10T20:15:15.063" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I observe that concurrent to my writing of this answer, the question has been re-opened. The question, to my reading, remains unclear, and I think the unclear elements of the question I name here still need to be addressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps I'm overstepping, but it would seem that the real issue here that OP would like to know why, precisely, the question was closed (the closure being the genesis of the personal attacks). I submit that I have experience working on a diversity of data science/statistics tasks, but I am having some difficulty discerning what your post is about. (Perhaps this should be a comment on OP's other post, but now it's too long to fit.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the particular areas that I think would benefit from clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You make reference to $a$, $b$, and $c$ without introducing what they&#xA;are. Is that piece of information contained in the plots? Perhaps,&#xA;but the plots are so small that I can't read them. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You discuss increasing/decreasing stimulus. Is a stimulus one of the&#xA;&quot;variables&quot;? Or is it something else? Is it synonymous with one of&#xA;your 12 observations? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You discuss categorization/clustering of your data. Categorization&#xA;suggests that you are performing a supervised learning task, e.g.&#xA;logistic regression, while clustering suggests an unsupervised task.&#xA;Which is it? If you know where increases or decreases occur with&#xA;respect to stimulus, you can label and classify those examples. But&#xA;it seems you hew towards the &quot;unsupervised&quot; meaning by reference to&#xA;DBSCAN and $k$-means. Remember that the essential part of clustering&#xA;(at least as I understand it) is that you're constructing groups of&#xA;&quot;nearby&quot; things, where &quot;nearby&quot; is characterized by the choice of a&#xA;distance metric. So perhaps deliberate selection of a distance metric&#xA;particular to your task will give traction.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My recommendation would be to sit down with a friend (who doesn't do work in your field and who is unfamiliar with this problem) and have him or her read your question. If they're not quite sure what you're after, work with your friend on how to refine and clarify the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, users of CV are often working with confidential or proprietary data, which causes them to be circumspect. I appreciate the difficulty, as I once worked on data that was very sensitive. However, without some concrete notion for readers to latch on to and fix in their minds, it is very difficult to formulate an answer. If this is the case, I suggest attaching your problem to some analogous or toy scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2016-08-10T22:30:47.107" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T22:30:47.107" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4256" CreationDate="2016-08-11T09:02:17.327" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since this is a meta discussion, I'll provide an answer as well, specifically addressing the issue of clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that there is a significant issue here on CV with respect to &lt;strong&gt;general &amp;lt;=&gt; specific&lt;/strong&gt; questions. My understanding of SE sites is that we want to accumulate useful information for a general audience. Thus it makes more sense to formulate questions in ways that make them as relevant for people as possible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good but possibly silly analogy would be as follows; say I want to know how to throw a baseball, because I don't know how to throw a ball. I could ask the question as &quot;how can I throw a baseball on a grass patch behind my house?&quot; or I can ask something like &quot;how to throw a hand sized ball outdoors?&quot;. The second alternative makes it immediately more relevant for wider audience, those who might want to throw a tennis ball, or a lacrosse ball, or a softball... I think putting the effort to generalize and make the question relevant for many people should not be penalized here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second issue is how much details one has the liberty to give. Now in this case the details are neither government nor corporate secrets. However they are research results and it is rather tricky what I am allowed to say and not say, especially considering the figures. There are novelty concerns for both academic and IP settings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, not all the details are relevant to the question, for example the exact definitions of $a_i$, $b_i$ and $c_i$, are not relevant to what I was trying to ask, IMHO. They can be increasing doses of a medication each, they can be measurements with increasing amount of time, amount of food or dollars received for a task in a behavioral experiment... The point is that $a_4$ is more $a$ than $a_3$. The underlying assumptions is that $a_1$ to $a_4$ are increasing level of stimulus of a specific kind, analogous with $b_1$ to $b_4$ and $c_1$ to $c_3$. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is to find variables that respond to $a$ or $b$ or $c$ and not to combinations of them. That's what I meant with classification or categorization. So yes it is supervised, if you in advance specify which clusters to find. As an alternative I tried to automate the process by adopting an unsupervised method to see if it would pick up the same clusters. They did not, as I have explained in the question body. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue here is that people seem to get stuck on details that are not going to be relevant for them. I am fairly certain that practically nobody here would be able to relate to the kind of processes $a$, $b$ and $c$ refer to. That's because I barely grasp how they work myself. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to explain the data as best as I can, and I am still willing to explain bits if someone is interested in the specifics of the problem at hand. At the end of the day I am looking for leads to solve a problem I have, I don't want to outsource my job to someone else. I think it's the more respectable thing to do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3014" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2016-08-11T09:22:12.483" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T09:22:12.483" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2094" CreationDate="2016-08-11T09:22:40.367" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kinda on the same vein with Glen_b, I'd probably say it depends on what aspect of AI you refer to. If it's a practical programming aspect then probably SO or Programmers would be the place to go. If it's an learning aspect, probably here or CS. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3014" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T09:22:40.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4248" CreationDate="2016-08-11T12:47:31.900" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Usage of &quot;weights&quot;: in meta-analysis&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You ask about other uses. In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meta-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meta-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meta-analysis&lt;/a&gt; thread there are occasional posts about alternatives to the standard inverse-variance weighted method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;======edited ===========&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seem to be three with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weighted-mean&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weighted-mean&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weighted-mean&lt;/a&gt; tag, two with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weighted-regression&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weighted-regression&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weighted-regression&lt;/a&gt; and one with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/weighted-sampling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;weighted-sampling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;weighted-sampling&lt;/a&gt; out of ~450. The last one seems justifiable as the OP wanted to meta-analyse data from survey samples but the other five seem tautologous to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;Upvote: delete tags on the five&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;Downvote: leave it&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;Comment otherwise&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming I can work out how to (and have enough rep) I am happy to do the deletion if it gets voted for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastEditorUserId="101426" LastEditDate="2016-08-12T15:17:03.313" LastActivityDate="2016-08-12T15:17:03.313" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4256" CreationDate="2016-08-11T15:16:02.040" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's try another tack -- one that I think is a better way to think about how this problem relates to CV in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People can reasonably have disagreements about where the line is to close or keep open questions. I agree with General Abrial's specific critiques about your question - but I disagree that these are reasons why it should have been closed initially or that those critiques are beyond what can be reasonably expected for people to hash out in the comments. I don't think there is much point in debating that though -- questions are too idiosyncratic for me to formulate more general guidelines beyond this particular instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators and users have discretion to shape the site. This is a good thing. That same discretion can result in either poor decisions or decisions you disagree with. (I'm reminded where the originator of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2011/1036&quot;&gt;CV had a question migrated&lt;/a&gt;.) The site is set up so that these decisions can be reversed. Besides asking a question on meta, you could pop into the chat room - I would have nominated to re-open same as I did after seeing this meta thread. I've used meta to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3025/1036&quot;&gt;protest decisions as well&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think there is a more general trend in how the site is run, you can bring that up in meta. That is an argument beyond one act by one person though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T15:31:00.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4263" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4558" CreationDate="2016-08-13T19:26:38.407" Score="10" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest merging &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/arch&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;arch&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;arch&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/garch&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;garch&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;garch&lt;/a&gt; tags, or making &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/arch&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;arch&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;arch&lt;/a&gt; a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/garch&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;garch&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;garch&lt;/a&gt; (I am not sure how I should formulate this correctly). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't see sufficient conceptual difference between ARCH and GARCH models to maintain both tags. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GARCH is more general, so I suggest keeping &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/garch&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;garch&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;garch&lt;/a&gt; as the tag name to remain. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/arch&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;arch&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;arch&lt;/a&gt; has 41 questions while &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/garch&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;garch&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;garch&lt;/a&gt; has 292; only &lt;strong&gt;11&lt;/strong&gt; questions are tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/arch&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;arch&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;arch&lt;/a&gt; without &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/garch&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;garch&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;garch&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have checked the questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/arch&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;arch&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;arch&lt;/a&gt; without &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/garch&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;garch&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;garch&lt;/a&gt; and I do not see that they would be sufficiently special to deserve a separate tag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the community agrees (we will see), how can this be done? It would be nice to get rid of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/arch&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;arch&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;arch&lt;/a&gt; in a way that it would not reappear soon thereafter and there would not be a need to raise the question again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; vote &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1200/current-tag-synonym-candidates/4270#4270&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; in the thread for suggested synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T05:38:58.890" Title="Let's merge/synonymize `arch` and `garch` tags" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4263" CreationDate="2016-08-14T12:38:48.440" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could &lt;code&gt;arch-garch&lt;/code&gt; become the replacing tag? The two abbreviations are often present together in lecture titles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://onlinecourses.science.psu.edu/stat510/node/78&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ARCH/GARCH Models&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stern.nyu.edu/rengle/GARCH101.PDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GARCH 101: An Introduction to the Use of ARCH/GARCH models in Applied&#xA;Econometrics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://public.econ.duke.edu/~boller/Papers/glossary_arch.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Glossary to ARCH (GARCH)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way, the single tag could show up when typing the first letters of either &lt;code&gt;arch&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;garch&lt;/code&gt;, in the &quot;tag box&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83945" LastActivityDate="2016-08-14T12:38:48.440" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4265" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-15T16:59:22.550" Score="5" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I feel I have some questions that people that just learned from book will not understand what I was asking, but some really good people feel it is no need to explain. How can I ask those questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example is this question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/229645/why-there-are-two-different-logistic-loss-formulation-notations&quot;&gt;Why there are two different logistic loss formulation / notations?&lt;/a&gt; I think I struggled for a long time on deriving two notations are the same in different optimization setting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a person just learn logistic regression form few classical statistics books may not seen another notation, and experienced people that writing statistics or machine learning software may think this is trivial just a notation problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I right such questions exist? Should I ask questions like this? Any other suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113777" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-08-15T22:30:29.603" Title="How to ask questions new learners would not easily understand but experienced persons feel trivial?" Tags="|discussion|questions|users|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4266" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4361" CreationDate="2016-08-16T12:09:14.330" Score="10" ViewCount="260" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/combination&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;combination&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;combination&lt;/a&gt; (113 threads). Some of these are combinatorics questions about counting combinations, some are about linear combinations, combining distributions, combining this, combining that... The tag has no wiki. I don't think this tag is very useful in any of its meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Proposed way forward&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Those Qs that are about combinatorics should be retagged [combinatorics] or if both tags are present, the [combination] tag simply deleted. I don't think it is relevant to separate combinatorics questions that are about &quot;combinations&quot; from other combinatorics questions by tags.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In other cases, the tag [combination] should on a case-by-case basis be either just deleted or retagged to something  more descriptive if there is something tag-worthy, say, [combining-forecasts].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24669" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-08-18T23:04:18.263" LastActivityDate="2016-11-08T10:07:25.303" Title="Ambiguous [combination] tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-reorganization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4267" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-16T17:38:11.010" Score="5" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;strong&gt;huge&lt;/strong&gt; number of questions about Bayesian vs frequentist approaches (913 in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=bayesian%20frequentist&quot;&gt;fast search&lt;/a&gt;), so maybe we should have separate tag for it..? I know that we already have &lt;code&gt;[bayesian]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[frequentist]&lt;/code&gt; tags, but since endless comparisons, maybe single tag would be helpful? I guess it could make searching (including searching for duplicates) easier. I imagine that this may be controversial, but what do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T13:33:30.790" Title="Should we have [bayesian-vs-frequentist] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4268" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-16T20:03:50.880" Score="7" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically, when visiting profile pages or looking at the HNQs the SE sites icons are exchanged for me. CV appears with SuperUser icon, while Personal Finance &amp;amp; Money (money.SE) appears with the Movies &amp;amp; TV (movies.SE) icon, for example. Not reproducible out of Stats.SE it seems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how it looks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G43Rt.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G43Rt.png&quot; alt=&quot;Recent inbox messages tab with wrong icons for Cross Validated&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60613" LastEditorUserId="24254" LastEditDate="2016-08-17T15:10:59.953" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T15:22:29.543" Title="Why am I seeing the SE network icons exchanged?" Tags="|bug|status-completed|user-interface|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4268" CreationDate="2016-08-17T11:28:59.537" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adam Lear commented on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/283497/hot-network-questions-website-icons-scrambled&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Hot Network Questions&amp;quot; website icons scrambled&lt;/a&gt; (thanks Glen_b for pointing this thread in the comments).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We have a race condition where when we update the favicon sprite map&#xA;  (which happened earlier today for a new private beta launch),&#xA;  depending on which web server you're hitting, you could end up with&#xA;  new cachebreakers and old images if you visit a site during a prod&#xA;  build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'll ask around tomorrow to see what, if anything, we can do about&#xA;  that. AFAIK this didn't used to be a thing, &lt;strong&gt;but it seems to be&#xA;  happening pretty reliably to folks with every site we launch now&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that's it then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;As of now this is not particularly related to CV, I suppose we could close the question already?&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not happening anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60613" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T15:22:29.543" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4272" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-08-18T23:05:57.727" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-08-18T23:05:57.727" LastActivityDate="2016-08-18T23:05:57.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4273" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-08-18T23:05:57.727" Score="0" Body="For issues with ambiguous/suboptimal tags that require manual reorganization (i.e. cannot be resolved by creating a tag synonym or deleting a tag)." OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-08-18T23:05:57.727" LastActivityDate="2016-08-18T23:05:57.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4274" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4279" CreationDate="2016-08-19T02:08:56.340" Score="4" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted a &lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.stackexchange.com/q/1446/185&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; about game theory concepts on the AI site, but it got closed as off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is within the context of reinforcement learning though, is it on-topic here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95569" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:53:09.823" LastActivityDate="2016-08-22T21:05:48.187" Title="Is game theory on-topic here?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4267" CreationDate="2016-08-21T21:34:07.030" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rather not.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I agree that such a tag could be useful, it seems that the combination of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bayesian&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bayesian&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bayesian&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/frequentist&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;frequentist&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;frequentist&lt;/a&gt; tags serves more or less the same purpose. There are 95 threads tagged with these two tags together, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bayesian+frequentist&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bayesian+frequentist&lt;/a&gt;, and looking through them it seems that most could in principle qualify for &lt;code&gt;[bayesian-vs-frequentist]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why I think such a tag is not particularly needed: we &lt;em&gt;already&lt;/em&gt; have its functionality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, its very name would imply some amount of confrontation, and I doubt this would be beneficial for our forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-08-21T21:34:07.030" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4278" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4324" CreationDate="2016-08-22T10:41:50.273" Score="6" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/231059/58675&quot;&gt;Compare the statistical significance of the difference between two polynomial regressions in R&lt;/a&gt; is an obvious duplicate of question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/140991/58675&quot;&gt;Comparing difference between two polynomial regression models in R&lt;/a&gt; (which is an &lt;em&gt;exact&lt;/em&gt; duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/141011/58675&quot;&gt;Comparing difference between two polynomial regression models in R&lt;/a&gt;). Now, as the new question is a duplicate of the other two, one should not answer it, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the user who posted the new question says that the two old questions have answers that are incomplete or unclear for him, given his level of knowledge of statistics. Question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/141011/58675&quot;&gt;Comparing difference between two polynomial regression models in R&lt;/a&gt; effectively only has an answer which explains why not to use &lt;code&gt;anova&lt;/code&gt; in this case (or better, not to naively use &lt;code&gt;anova&lt;/code&gt;), but doesn't explain what to do (it suggests AIC, but I agree with the commenter to the answer that that's not the right thing to do). Question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/140991/58675&quot;&gt;Comparing difference between two polynomial regression models in R&lt;/a&gt; has a first comment by user @Roland which in my opinion is great and answers the question correctly. However, it's a comment instead than an answer, and it would seem that the user who posted the new question doesn't understand it. I asked him what he doesn't understand exactly. What would be the right procedure to follow here? Flag the new question as a duplicate and add a more detailed answer, following @Roland's comment? Just flag the new question as a duplicate? Do something else? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T00:33:49.030" Title="A question is a clear duplicate, but the original question doesn't have an answer - only a (real good) comment. What to do?" Tags="|discussion|answers|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4274" CreationDate="2016-08-22T12:43:58.240" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Game theory is a part of mathematics more so than of statistics&lt;/strong&gt; / machine learning / data analysis (which is the scope of this site). As such, basic questions on game theory are more on topic on math.SE (1361 Qs in [game-theory], 397 in [combinatorial-game-theory], 109 in [algorithmic-game-theory]) and research-level questions are more on-topic on mathoverflow (154 Qs in [game-theory] and 119 in [combinatorial-game-theory]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, we only have a meagre 13 Qs in [game-theory] and the tag does not even have a wiki excerpt, suggesting that nobody really takes care of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/230619&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/230619&lt;/a&gt; despite receiving three upvotes seems to be much more suited for math.SE. I have just voted to migrate it there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update.&lt;/strong&gt; The post has been successfully migrated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Post Migrated Away to math.stackexchange.com by amoeba, gung, John, Andy, kjetil b halvorsen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-08-22T21:05:48.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4280" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4461" CreationDate="2016-08-22T13:47:13.580" Score="11" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;A week ago @JuhoKokkala raised the following Meta question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4266&quot;&gt;Ambiguous [combination]&amp;#160;tag&lt;/a&gt; -- and the consesus was that [combination] tag should be entirely removed and replaced by [combinatorics] where necessary. (Update: This has been done by now.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a conceptually related &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/permutation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;permutation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;permutation&lt;/a&gt; tag (261 threads) which is mostly used to refer to permutation-based hypothesis tests, but sometimes refers to combinatoric problems related to permutations. I don't think this lumping is helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposed step-by-step solution&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Create &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/permutation-test&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;permutation-test&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;permutation-test&lt;/a&gt; tag and tag a couple of most important related threads with it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Go through all [permutation] threads and remove the tag from all non-permutation-test-related questions, replacing with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/combinatorics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;combinatorics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;combinatorics&lt;/a&gt; where necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;After that, merge [permutation] into [permutation-test]. (This will affect at least 150 threads, so it's better to do it automatically via the merge).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Delete the [permutation] tag as confusing (i.e. delete the synonym mapping).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update (Feb 22):&lt;/strong&gt; All done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T14:02:38.153" Title="Ambiguous [permutation] tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|tag-reorganization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4281" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4282" CreationDate="2016-08-23T17:56:25.617" Score="6" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;When does a question icon switch from having a white background to having a green background? Some of the questions I have answered have white background icons and others have green, it seems that green is better than white. How is that determined? &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GeqQm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GeqQm.png&quot; alt=&quot;Icons are on the left&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not only when the answer is accepted. For example, from my home page&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mcXOL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mcXOL.png&quot; alt=&quot;Left icon when answer accepted, what about on the right?&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the two entries for &lt;strong&gt;On round robin $R^2$ values for three methods&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;On the left it has a green box with a one in it, on the right it has a grey box with a 5+ in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am guessing that this latter, right sided grey, or &quot;off white&quot; converts to green when someone marks the question as a favorite, is that so? Maybe try it, and see?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="99274" LastEditDate="2016-08-23T20:19:32.283" LastActivityDate="2016-08-24T15:13:55.150" Title="When does a question icon switch from having a white background to having a green background?" Tags="|support|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4281" CreationDate="2016-08-23T21:44:24.623" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has to do with whether a question has an accepted answer, and/or whether your answer was accepted.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you look at a list of questions, the icon is filled green if that question has an accepted answer.  Consider these three from the list generated by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/regression&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;regression&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;regression&lt;/a&gt; tag:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jUbxJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jUbxJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thread, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/231142/linear-regression-with-partially-known-coefficients&quot;&gt;linear regression with partially known coefficients&lt;/a&gt;, has one answer, which has been accepted.  The last thread, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/231117/how-to-calculate-bias-when-we-have-an-estimation-using-simple-linear-regression&quot;&gt;How to calculate bias when we have an estimation using simple linear regression?&lt;/a&gt;, has one answer, which has not (yet?) been accepted.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you look at your reputation page, you will see a filled green icon representing the reputation you gained from having one of your answers accepted.  Here is a section of your reputation page:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pDsFK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pDsFK.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the reputation gains from August 14th are expanded, you can see that the icon is filled green because you received 15 points from when your answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/222084/is-there-such-a-thing-as-an-adjusted-r2-for-a-quantile-regression-model&quot;&gt;Is there such a thing as an adjusted $R^2$ for a quantile regression model?&lt;/a&gt; was accepted (congratulations).  Note that the reputation you gained from the upvote is not filled green.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the screenshot of your homepage, &lt;em&gt;On round robin&lt;/em&gt; is green under questions because it is a question with an accepted answer. The square isn't green under reputation because you didn't earn that 5 points of reputation by having an answer accepted (but by having your question upoted).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-08-24T15:13:55.150" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4283" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-25T06:43:07.040" Score="9" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it acceptable for a single user to post more than one answer for the same question? Or should all answers be consolidated to a single post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/226935/algorithms-for-computing-multivariate-empirical-distribution-function-ecdf&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; I had posted an initial answer using one method. I then later posted a second answer pointing to an alternate approach. My thought was that both approaches may be of interest, but the two are really distinct answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a protocol for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2016-09-07T09:26:41.833" Title="Multiple answers to same question?" Tags="|discussion|answers|etiquette|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4283" CreationDate="2016-08-25T09:20:26.247" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Merely discussing more than one method doesn't really justify posting a separate answer for each, especially as a great answer would compare &amp;amp; contrast them. There isn't usually much sense in seeing votes as measuring the relative popularity of different methods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/68917/17230&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/68917/17230&lt;/a&gt;. The compare &amp;amp; contrast aspect is admittedly rather meagre: but it's there, &amp;amp; constitutes such merit as the answer has; &amp;amp; surely a better answer is going to go into more detail about the suitability of the different methods for different methods, &amp;amp; the relationships between them, rather than give some eighth method that trumps the seven already listed. What'd be the use of splitting this into seven answers so that people can vote up their favourites?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, for example, on occasion, you wanted to make all the arguments for a point of view in one answer, &amp;amp; the arguments against it in another; I'm sure no-one would mind, &amp;amp; perhaps it'd be rather fun. So I wouldn't say multiple answers were unacceptable; but they should be exceptions, for some particular purpose, &amp;amp; not just because you've got more than one thing to say (which is the case for many, if not most, answers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Note also that in this case your second answer is just a reference, which would be better as a comment anyway unless you intended to expand it.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @Glen_b &amp;amp; @kenorb have pointed out, the highly upvoted &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/25210/225179&quot;&gt;answer to What is the official etiquette on answering a question twice?&lt;/a&gt; says:&amp;mdash;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When you have two distinct answers, it's better to post two different answers than to put them both into one answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this begs the question. &lt;em&gt;Of course&lt;/em&gt; two different answers should be distinct: but you don't just &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; answers; is it better or not to write a single comprehensive answer? For the reasons above I say it's normally better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some comments on that answer are interesting: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/25209#comment809593_25210&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt; from a moderator on &lt;a href=&quot;http://cooking.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Seasoned Advice&lt;/a&gt;:&amp;mdash;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] in general we definitely don't want multiple answers on cooking.&#xA;  Yes, there are often a lot of facets or different ideas, but they're&#xA;  also often all connected, so it doesn't really make sense to split&#xA;  them up. It's much more useful to readers to have things presented in&#xA;  context in a well-organized way. It's also often true that the&#xA;  multiple parts of an answer aren't better or worse than each other,&#xA;  but simply different and all useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/25209/#comment578216_25210&quot;&gt;another&lt;/a&gt; from a Stack Overflow user:&amp;mdash;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] from my understanding of SO, multiple answers lead to confusion&#xA;  since as both answerer and asker, I expect the solution that worked to&#xA;  be accepted, the act being proof that it did, even in (so often) cases&#xA;  when from the question it's not clear (yet?) which one is most&#xA;  relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Statistics must be more like cooking than programming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-09-07T09:26:41.833" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4285" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4288" CreationDate="2016-08-27T14:16:44.537" Score="12" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes we decide to take care of confusing tags and this involves manual re-tagging. We all agree that one should only start mass re-tagging old threads after it has been discussed &amp;amp; approved on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a broad consensus that one should not re-tag too many threads in one sitting, because all edited threads get pushed to the front page and can become overwhelming or annoying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen advice (I believe by @gung, @Glen_b, and others) to limit oneself to only a couple of questions (let's say 3-4) at a time. I know patient people (@AndreSilva) who always re-tag only one single question per day. Some others  tend to re-tag more. I have recently started to re-tag 10 questions at a time in order to see what people will think about it. I think it's good to discuss it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What should be the approximate upper number of questions that one should be allowed to re-tag in one sitting?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This assumes that &quot;sittings&quot; are separated by at least half a day. It also assumes that this particular re-tagging action has been discussed &amp;amp; approved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please upvote ONE SINGLE ANSWER from below. Please do not downvote any.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-09-12T13:39:03.177" LastActivityDate="2016-09-12T13:39:03.177" Title="When re-tagging old threads, how many should one do at once?" Tags="|discussion|tags|editing|etiquette|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4285" CreationDate="2016-08-27T14:17:18.643" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do not re-tag more than 1 old thread at a time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2016-08-27T14:17:18.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4285" CreationDate="2016-08-27T14:19:37.253" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do not re-tag more than &quot;a couple&quot; (2-3) old threads at a time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2016-08-27T14:19:37.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4285" CreationDate="2016-08-27T14:20:24.137" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do not re-tag more than 5 old threads at a time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2016-08-27T14:20:24.137" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4285" CreationDate="2016-08-27T14:20:51.193" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do not re-tag more than 10 old threads at a time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2016-08-27T14:20:51.193" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4285" CreationDate="2016-08-27T14:21:03.773" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do not re-tag more than 25 old threads at a time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2016-08-27T14:21:03.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4285" CreationDate="2016-08-27T14:21:12.833" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do not re-tag more than 50 old threads at a time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2016-08-27T14:21:12.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4285" CreationDate="2016-08-27T14:21:23.133" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no limit. If you have the energy to re-tag 500 threads in one sitting, then thank you &amp;amp; Godspeed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2016-08-27T14:21:23.133" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4293" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4298" CreationDate="2016-08-28T21:02:41.473" Score="6" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question (A): &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/60108&quot;&gt;How to write the error term in repeated measures ANOVA in R: Error(subject) vs Error(subject/time)&lt;/a&gt; contains a link to this question (B): &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/51520&quot;&gt;Specifying the Error() term in repeated measures ANOVA in R&lt;/a&gt;, but I do not see question B in the &lt;em&gt;Linked&lt;/em&gt; list on the question A page and vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like the SE software does not &quot;get&quot; that these two questions are linked. Why is that? Is it a bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience, the &lt;em&gt;Linked&lt;/em&gt; list has always worked as expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T07:29:58.853" Title="A question is not displayed in the Linked list, even though it is linked" Tags="|bug|status-completed|hyperlinks|linked-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4294" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-08-28T22:48:38.120" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-08-28T22:48:38.120" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T22:48:38.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4295" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-08-28T22:48:38.120" Score="0" Body="The &quot;Linked Questions&quot; sidebar is a user-generated list of related questions shown when viewing a question. Its content comes from questions that users have linked in the question, their answers, or in comments." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2016-08-29T13:59:54.777" LastActivityDate="2016-08-29T13:59:54.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4296" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4297" CreationDate="2016-08-28T23:51:25.327" Score="12" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lme4&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lme4&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lme4&lt;/a&gt; (402) is an R package that has &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lmer&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lmer&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lmer&lt;/a&gt; (498), &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/glmer&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;glmer&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;glmer&lt;/a&gt; (168), and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nlmer&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nlmer&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nlmer&lt;/a&gt; (10) functions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nlme&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nlme&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nlme&lt;/a&gt; (119) is an R package that has &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lme&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lme&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lme&lt;/a&gt; (196) as a function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both packages fit [generalized] linear (and nonlinear) mixed models. Many questions deal with both packages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it useful to have all these separate tags?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that it seems that, e.g., &lt;code&gt;[lme4]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[lmer]&lt;/code&gt; are often used almost interchangeably. And in general, such a deep tag nesting is a bit annoying; e.g., every Q with &lt;code&gt;[lmer]&lt;/code&gt; could/should also be tagged with &lt;code&gt;[lme4]+[mixed-models]+[r]&lt;/code&gt;, i.e., this &lt;em&gt;automatically&lt;/em&gt; eats up 4 out of 5 possible tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So one could consider mapping all functions to the respective packages. This would end up with &lt;code&gt;[lme4]&lt;/code&gt; with 906 Qs and &lt;code&gt;[nlme]&lt;/code&gt; with 294 Qs. Or perhaps even map everything together to &lt;code&gt;[nlme-lme4]&lt;/code&gt; (or something like that) with 1138 Qs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is it a bad idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2016-09-06T14:39:50.537" LastActivityDate="2016-09-06T14:39:50.537" Title="Is it useful to have separate tags for lme4, lmer, glmer, nlmer, nlme, and lme?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4296" CreationDate="2016-08-29T08:09:30.293" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, mapping the function to the packages is a good idea. Maybe we should make all of them &lt;strong&gt;as synonyms&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;code&gt;[lme4-nlme]&lt;/code&gt; ? This is the simplest choice and anyone trying to use one of the listed tags would not have problems with finding appropriate one since they all will be synonyms to the more general tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, those functions are used in quite similar contexts, packages have similar authors etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; the tag was created and everything seems to work. I just added wiki to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="35989" LastEditDate="2016-08-31T20:15:47.780" LastActivityDate="2016-08-31T20:15:47.780" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4293" CreationDate="2016-08-30T07:29:20.823" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you probably noticed, the question was asked a long time ago, when the code handling the links had a bug. Editing didn't help much because we only do a full rebuild of the links when a link has been removed. So in order to fix everything up, I've first deleted the link, and then added it back. Now the posts are linked up just fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37296" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T07:29:20.823" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1689" CreationDate="2016-08-30T20:02:46.523" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This Q was mentioned in a recent discussion and I see that it is unanswered, so I thought I would answer.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What can be done when the tag name represents both a function of a statistical software, but its name also suggests a broader concept of usage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In general, this is a suboptimal situation. I would try to de-ambiguate the tag.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is not possible then the next best solution is to write a tag excerpt that provides a clear usage guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lme&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lme&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lme&lt;/a&gt; has the following excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;lme() is the function for estimating Linear Mixed Effects models in the nlme package for the R project for statistical computing. For general questions about mixed effects models, use the [mixed-effect] tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which sounds reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, it would be even better &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4296&quot;&gt;if we merge &lt;code&gt;[lme]&lt;/code&gt; into &lt;code&gt;[lme4-nlme]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and then the temptation to use this tag for mixed model questions that are not about &lt;code&gt;lme()&lt;/code&gt; function would disappear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And beyond that, are software function tags recommended or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current practice is that we allow tags for &quot;prominent&quot; software packages (such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lme4&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lme4&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lme4&lt;/a&gt; in R or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/scikit-learn&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;scikit-learn&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;scikit-learn&lt;/a&gt; in Python), but do not generally tolerate tags for specific software functions. I think this works fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T20:02:46.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4300" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4307" CreationDate="2016-08-31T09:48:54.680" Score="6" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've posted two questions on the main website asking about important topics in machine learning. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/232566/important-topics-in-machine-learning-right-now&quot;&gt;Important topics in machine learning right now&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/232307/subjects-in-machine-learning/&quot;&gt;Subjects in machine learning&lt;/a&gt;) They have both been rejected, the first would be a duplicate and the second would be opinion-based. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first one is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a duplicate, as someone else has pointed out in the comments. I asked to reopen it, no one has responded. The second one is, in my opinion, not opinion based either. It asks for what people come across frequently, not what they &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; they come across. Could anyone give me some advice on what to do? I've got a feeling that Cross Validated doesn't like these sorts of questions, but seeing as this website has lots of experienced professionals, it would in my opinion be silly to filter out these questions completely. Most questions on here blow my mind as I have near zero experience and I'd love to even get the gist of it, but right now that's kind of tough when you don't even know where to start. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129271" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T05:51:06.623" Title="Are questions such as &quot;What are important topics in machine learning right now?&quot; acceptable on this forum?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4301" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4311" CreationDate="2016-09-01T12:26:45.527" Score="3" ViewCount="499" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/joint-distribution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;joint-distribution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;joint-distribution&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bivariate&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bivariate&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bivariate&lt;/a&gt;, have been used interchangeably on Cross Validated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[joint-distribution] was used in 255 questions; it has an excerpt and a simple wiki. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[bivariate] was used in 126 questions; it has a simple excerpt and no wiki.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can they be considered synonyms? If not, would it be interesting to update the tag excerpts to emphasize what is (are) the difference(s) between them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2016-09-06T13:21:40.530" LastActivityDate="2016-09-06T13:28:27.710" Title="Differences between [joint-distribution] and [bivariate]?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|tag-excerpt|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4302" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4310" CreationDate="2016-09-01T14:20:28.500" Score="4" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/updating&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;updating&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;updating&lt;/a&gt; tag with 18 questions - all about Bayesian updating. Do we really need a separate tag? Maybe we should merge it with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bayesian&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bayesian&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bayesian&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-09-06T12:55:07.467" LastActivityDate="2016-09-12T19:32:03.797" Title="Should we make [updating] synonym for [bayesian]?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4303" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4304" CreationDate="2016-09-01T14:43:11.390" Score="4" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't get badge for 10k views on &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/96739/what-is-the-632-rule-in-bootstrapping/96750#96750&quot;&gt;What is the .632+ rule in bootstrapping?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17661" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T16:13:38.730" Title="10k views badge bugged?" Tags="|support|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4303" CreationDate="2016-09-01T15:09:30.373" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;famous-question&quot; badge is awarded to the asker after the question is viewed 10k times. In this case, you answered the question, which is why you did not get it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2016-09-01T16:13:38.730" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T16:13:38.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4305" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4308" CreationDate="2016-09-02T05:20:01.647" Score="11" ViewCount="636" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new, so may have a biased sample, but it seems a lot of the discussion on &quot;regularized regression&quot; focuses on methods that penalize some norm of the parameter (coefficient) vector. For example in this context &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/ridge-regression/info&quot;&gt;ridge regression&lt;/a&gt; is the $L_2$ variant and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/lasso/info&quot;&gt;LASSO&lt;/a&gt; is the $L_1$ variant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However in my experience* &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikhonov_regularization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tikhonov regularization&lt;/a&gt; is typically considered a superset of ridge regression rather than a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/ridge-regression/synonyms&quot;&gt;synonym&lt;/a&gt;. (*mostly geophysics inverse problems.) The usage I usually hear is more in line with the Wikipedia definition (linked above), where essentially any matrix can be used on the regularization term, i.e. not just the identity. For example a spatial derivative operator is commonly used in geophysics and computational photography, where the parameter vector represents &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/8998-surface-fitting-using-gridfit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gridded data&lt;/a&gt;. (This usage also seems to be consistent with Richard Szeliski's well-known &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=16605107453260999726&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Computer Vision textbook&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there another term that would be used for this generalized form of in statistics/machine learning? Is it just considered a special case of MAP estimation for correlated Gaussian errors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-10-08T00:04:32.010" Title="Is [tikhonov-regularization] really a synonym for [ridge regression]?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4306" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4719" CreationDate="2016-09-02T12:01:21.167" Score="6" ViewCount="354" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nested&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nested&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nested&lt;/a&gt; with 216 Qs and also &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/non-nested&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;non-nested&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;non-nested&lt;/a&gt; with 22 Qs. Neither tag has a wiki excerpt. Both are terribly ambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AFAIK, &quot;nested&quot; can refer (and this tag &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; being used to refer) to various conceptually different things that have little to do with each other:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nested data / nested experimental design (nested factors in ANOVA, nested random effects in mixed models, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nested models (e.g. doing LR test on two nested models)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nested cross-validation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update April 2016:&lt;/strong&gt; I looked through the last 50 threads tagged with [nested]. 39 are about nested data (split ~50:50 between ANOVA and mixed models); 1 is about nested models; 10 are about nested cross-validation. Among the [non-nested] threads, most seem to be about nested models.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest to split these two tags into three new tags, corresponding to the above categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Would &lt;code&gt;[nested-data]&lt;/code&gt; be an okay name for nested anova/lmer stuff? We could have nested-anova, nested-random-effect, nested-factor as synonyms. There is also a &lt;code&gt;[multilevel-analysis]&lt;/code&gt; tag, but people asking about nested anova do not usually use this terminology...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[nested-models]&lt;/code&gt; would do, wouldn't it?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do we need &lt;code&gt;[nested-cross-validation]&lt;/code&gt; tag, or can we retag these threads to &lt;code&gt;[cross-validation]&lt;/code&gt; and that's it?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-04-03T21:27:40.013" LastActivityDate="2017-05-09T06:51:24.263" Title="A pair of ambiguous tags: [nested] and [non-nested]" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-reorganization|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4300" CreationDate="2016-09-02T12:29:51.700" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;They'd be good for Quora or Yahoo answers or somewhere like that&amp;mdash;indeed see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/What-are-currently-the-hot-topics-in-Machine-Learning-research-and-in-real-applications&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.quora.com/What-are-currently-the-hot-topics-in-Machine-Learning-research-and-in-real-applications&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash;but these rather soft questions that seem to invite anyone &amp;amp; everyone to add their two pennorth to an ever-growing number of answers aren't generally seen as being appropriate for Stack Exchange sites, which encourage a focus on specific, practical, problems that people face when doing &amp;amp; learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2016-09-02T13:43:41.833" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T13:43:41.833" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4305" CreationDate="2016-09-02T14:06:35.470" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel responsible because it was me who suggested this synonym; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2866/28666&quot;&gt;the suggestion&lt;/a&gt; got several upvotes and was implemented in February (the respective answer is deleted so one needs 10k rep to see it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time of merge, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tikhonov-regularization&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tikhonov-regularization&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tikhonov-regularization&lt;/a&gt; had only 4 threads. Since then the synonym was not used a single time (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms&quot;&gt;see here&lt;/a&gt; in &quot;Renames&quot; column).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you say that &lt;em&gt;Tikhonov regularization&lt;/em&gt; in your field is understood to mean $$\|y-X\beta\|^2 + \|A\beta\|^2$$ with not necessarily $A=\lambda I$, then I agree that it is a bad synonym. It is also an almost useless synonym (it is practically never being used).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore we might want to delete the synonym mapping and, as a result, stay without &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tikhonov-regularization&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tikhonov-regularization&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tikhonov-regularization&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update Oct 8th: The synonym mapping has been removed.&lt;/strong&gt; There is currently no &lt;code&gt;[tikhonov-regularization]&lt;/code&gt; tag. Anybody with sufficient reputation can re-create it; however there would only be a handful (3-5) of questions where this tag would be appropriate, see @Carl's answer from Sep 14th, and so in my opinion such a tag is currently not particularly needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2016-10-08T00:04:32.010" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4306" CreationDate="2016-09-02T21:02:57.163" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You apparently are identifying a very nested topic. I have read about either well-or ill-defined other uses:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nested-anova&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nested-anova&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nested-anova&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nested-ancova&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nested-ancova&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nested-ancova&lt;/a&gt; (nested analysis of variance or covariance with nested nominal variables), &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nested-data&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nested-data&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nested-data&lt;/a&gt; (of which hierarchically structured data are a subclass), &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nested-sampling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nested-sampling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nested-sampling&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it definitely makes sense. Could this process lead to the need of a tag ontology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;REM: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/4717/what-is-the-difference-between-a-nested-and-a-non-nested-model&quot;&gt;What is the difference between a “nested” and a “non-nested” model?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~steve/maxent2009/images/skilling.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nested Sampling for General Bayesian Computation&lt;/a&gt;, Skilling, 2006&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83945" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2016-09-04T13:59:36.673" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4302" CreationDate="2016-09-06T12:54:32.807" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer is based on the discussion in the comments above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/updating&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;updating&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;updating&lt;/a&gt; tag is so ambiguous that we should not make it a synonym of anything; the tag has to be removed altogether. With only 18 threads, the easiest is to manually remove it and let the tag die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Renaming it into &lt;code&gt;[bayesian-updating]&lt;/code&gt; is another possible alternative, but I do not see that this would be such a useful tag, so I'd suggest we simply eliminate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; I have eliminated the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-09-12T19:32:03.797" LastActivityDate="2016-09-12T19:32:03.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4301" CreationDate="2016-09-06T13:04:18.680" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bivariate&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bivariate&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bivariate&lt;/a&gt; tag is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ProperSubset.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;proper subset&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/joint-distribution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;joint-distribution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;joint-distribution&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have updated wiki excerpts as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Joint probability distribution of several random variables gives the probability that all of them simultaneously lie in a particular region.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Joint probability distribution of two variables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Briefly looking at the questions, it seems that most questions in the &lt;code&gt;[joint-distribution]&lt;/code&gt; are actually about bivariate distributions, even though many of them are not tagged with &lt;code&gt;[bivariate]&lt;/code&gt;. Given that, we could consider mapping &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bivariate&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bivariate&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bivariate&lt;/a&gt;$\to$&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/joint-distribution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;joint-distribution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;joint-distribution&lt;/a&gt;. I do not have strong feelings about this. What do people think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-09-06T13:28:27.710" LastActivityDate="2016-09-06T13:28:27.710" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4312" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-06T20:07:52.757" Score="14" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am having the feeling that since 'recently' in the vague sense of the word there has been an upsurge in questions on CV whereas the number of people who can give qualified answers (to sometimes very specialized question, esp. from the field of machine learning) has stagnated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a very subjective impression that perhaps is related to recent interest and MOOCs on 'data science' and machine learning. I am wondering if anybody else had this experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24515" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-09-12T13:25:52.480" LastActivityDate="2016-09-12T13:25:52.480" Title="Is it true that the number of questions is growing while the number of answers can't keep up?" Tags="|discussion|participation|site-statistics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4283" CreationDate="2016-09-06T21:56:46.760" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you have two distinct answers, it's better to post two different answers than to put them both into one answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you put two very different answers in one, then one could be a great answer, and one could be a terrible way to do things, but the upvotes (or downvotes) on the good (or bad) answer will drag the other along with it to the top (or bottom).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/25209/191655&quot;&gt;What is the official etiquette on answering a question twice?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12989" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2016-09-06T21:56:46.760" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4312" CreationDate="2016-09-06T23:25:12.550" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been watching this for a long time now. While both questions and answers are growing, there's a somewhat faster increase in questions than answers, and over a period of a couple of years it can be quite alarming (and then there are occasional apparent rapid increases - &quot;jumps&quot; - in the level of questions that I have no good explanation for). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the problem that the answer rate isn't keeping up is likely to have many sources (among other explanations see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1538/why-is-our-answer-rate-so-low&quot;&gt;Why is our answer rate so low?&lt;/a&gt;), one source than we can do something about is that we are overly tolerant of poor quality and near duplicate questions. The biggest growth seems to be in that segment of poor and duplicate questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Duplicates can sometimes be hard to locate, even if you are confident you've seen one (it's usually worth a try, though because it makes the site much more useful when we do find them), but unclear/off-topic/ etc questions can often be spotted quickly and it takes very little effort to vote (or flag if you lack the voting privilege) to put them on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that there's a rapid growth of interest in data science and machine learning topics and that's certainly a part of the problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have had a few new people answering a lot of questions recently -- that's great to see, but there's lots more questions that we can deal with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to attract more people to answer, particularly in the areas of rapid growth though I am not quite sure how to do that. Bounties do seem to help a little to encourage budding answerers - and we've had a lot more bounties lately - but it's not going to be enough on its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the curation activity that goes on -- people who to try to make the tags  better, the people who quietly edit questions into good approximations of clarity and comprehensibility, the people who flag and vote to close and so on -- that all helps tremendously, and there are some people who contribute a great deal on that front. While that doesn't directly answer more questions, it keeps the site viable and useful and among other things makes it more attractive to answer questions, encouraging answerers to move from responding to one question to tackle more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2016-09-07T10:40:25.243" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4312" CreationDate="2016-09-07T09:49:19.753" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;In answer to Glen_b, I think the site management is outstanding. It seems however that the group of users who have questions but cannot answer any is much larger than the group of people who can answer questions (and may have some own ones once in a while). Related, statistics as a field is rather wide, the number of potential applications is huge, and the scope of both is growing rapidly, especially with adjacent fields like ML being integrated. So it may be harder for CV to maintain a critical number of experts with wide enough joint knowledge (and time) to provide a sufficient amount of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two further factors may also play for some people and I have seen them being discussed here on meta CV before. First I believe CV has a rather disastrous upvoting problem. I have seen questions with five answers while the question did not have any upvote, nor the answers. In my humble opinion, if you answer a question it probably was good enough to deserve an upvote. If somebody takes the time to answer your question, you should upvote it (nearly) regardless of the quality (nearly = except if wrong, off topic etc., see comments below). Whether an answer is great is decided by the community by giving even more upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, I have caught myself not giving an answer to newbies because in 90% of the cases you never hear from them again (again no upvote but also no accepted answer). I suspect the upsurge in questions is related to an instream of new users. So potentially more experienced users may be discouraged from answering these questions by earlier experiences of this kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24515" LastEditorUserId="24515" LastEditDate="2016-09-07T13:32:38.453" LastActivityDate="2016-09-07T13:32:38.453" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4316" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4317" CreationDate="2016-09-09T13:08:22.710" Score="8" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;As explained &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/334195/the-right-way-to-migrate-my-question&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, I asked a question on Stack Overflow. A user with high reputation suggested me to move the question to Cross-Validated, and since in meantime the question had received 3 votes to close it and move it to Cross-Validated, I decided to delete the question and move it to CV &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/234149/17230&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. It was put on hold immediately, in less time than it would take to me to read a question that long, without a specific comment  indicating what precisely I could modify in order to improve the question. I see that it is not the first time &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4256/issues-with-trigger-happy-moderation&quot;&gt;this happens&lt;/a&gt;. So what should I do now? I frankly cannot believe the question doesn't belong anywhere on Stack Exchange. Can I get some useful comment helping me to improve it? If I have to move it again to Stack Overflow, what can I do to avoid getting new requests to move it here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T20:23:53.957" Title="Question migrated from StackOverflow put on hold after 1 second with no comments?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|closing-questions|migration|software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4316" CreationDate="2016-09-09T20:23:53.957" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you consider the universe of questions which are daily closed or reopened it will not be the first nor the last time to happen. It just happens. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you spend some time in this community you'll see how our experienced users are engaged to provide feedback and help reversing situations like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remembering that letting a comment after putting a question on hold is not mandatory (despite a comment can always help), because when a question is put on hold there is already a notice message explaining why. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's go to your questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, what should I do now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First thing, edit the question to address the notice message (and comments, if any). In your case, edit the question and explain why it is about statistics and not solely about programming. The question will automatically go to the Reopen queue. There is a chance reviewers might decide to reopen it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it does not (and OP still believes he/she has a case), asking for help on Meta (or chat) is always an option (like you did).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I get some useful comment helping me to improve it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes you can, but you need to take advantage of the hints you receive. In my humble opinion, you could have explored more Scortchi's advice. So, I am suggesting another edit to your question. See if you like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I have to move it again to Stack Overflow, what can I do to avoid getting new requests to move it here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say edit it to emphasize it is a pure programming question, rather than involving statistics knowledge to get it solved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T20:23:53.957" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4305" CreationDate="2016-09-10T04:14:34.863" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oh boy, hard to help sometimes. This same thing is now on the main &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/234280/is-tikhonov-regularization-the-same-as-ridge-regression/234281#234281&quot;&gt;site&lt;/a&gt;. As the two things are different, ridge regression and Tikhonov regularization I would be in favor of creating a separate tag for Tikhonov regularization. I note that on Wikipedia, ridge regression redirects to Tikhonov regularization and one cannot find much on ridge regression by itself. That is the 'purist' approach. How anyone can get so upset about this as to try to erase the difference between these two things is anybody's guess. We should really have both tags if we want to appeal to people looking for answers. And, I do not think that revisionism or recalcitrance are substitutes for being helpful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that for a known matrix $A$ and vector $b$, we wish to find a vector $\mathbf{x}$ such that &#xA;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$A\mathbf{x}=\mathbf{b}$.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard approach is ordinary least squares linear regression. However, if no $x$ satisfies the equation or more than one $x$ does—that is the solution is not unique—the problem is said to be ill-posed. Ordinary least squares seeks to minimize the sum of squared residuals, which can be compactly written as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$\|A\mathbf{x}-\mathbf{b}\|^2 $&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where $\left \| \cdot \right \|$ is the Euclidean norm. In matrix notation the solution is, denoted by $\hat{x}$, is given by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$\hat{x} = (A^{T}A)^{-1}A^{T}\mathbf{b}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tikhonov regularization&lt;/strong&gt; minimizes &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$\|A\mathbf{x}-\mathbf{b}\|^2+ \|\Gamma \mathbf{x}\|^2$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for some suitably chosen Tikhonov matrix, $\Gamma $. An explicit matrix form solution, denoted by $\hat{x}$, is given by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$\hat{x} = (A^{T}A+ \Gamma^{T} \Gamma )^{-1}A^{T}{b}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The effect of regularization may be varied via the scale of matrix $\Gamma$.  For $\Gamma = 0$ this reduces to the unregularized least squares solution provided that (A&lt;sup&gt;T&lt;/sup&gt;A)&lt;sup&gt;−1&lt;/sup&gt; exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typically for &lt;strong&gt;ridge regression&lt;/strong&gt;, two departures from Tikhonov regularization are described. First, the Tikhonov matrix is replaced by a multiple of the identity matrix &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$\Gamma= \alpha I $, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;giving preference to solutions with smaller norm, i.e., the $L_2$ norm. Then  $\Gamma^{T} \Gamma$ becomes $\alpha^2 I$ leading to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$\hat{x} = (A^{T}A+ \alpha^2 I )^{-1}A^{T}{b}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, for ridge regression, it is typically assumed that $A$ variables are scaled so that $X^{T}X$ has the form of a correlation matrix. and $X^{T}b$ is the correlation vector between the $x$ variables and $b$, leading to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$\hat{x} = (X^{T}X+ \alpha^2 I )^{-1}X^{T}{b}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note in this form the Lagrange multiplier $\alpha^2$ is usually replaced by $k$, $\lambda$, or some other symbol but retains the property $\lambda\geq0$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-09-10T04:59:26.990" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4300" CreationDate="2016-09-12T07:03:27.973" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a feeling that this kind of question would make a good Wiki post if the question is posed to the effect of: &quot;based on the frequency of keywords in peer-reviewed ML journals, conference proceedings, respected magazine articles, etc., what are the most popular topics?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a list could be constantly updated as topics of interest evolve and, IMO, would certainly be a service to the community since they can help inform about the state-of-the-art. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: incidentally, I just ran into a very interesting blog post from the folks at Mathworks that is close to what I was envisioning when I wrote this yesterday. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://blogs.mathworks.com/loren/2016/08/08/text-mining-machine-learning-research-papers-with-matlab/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109667" LastEditorUserId="109667" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T05:51:06.623" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T05:51:06.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4305" CreationDate="2016-09-14T04:14:44.437" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are 38 threads with Tikhonov regularization in their content somewhere. If we recreate the tag and edit those posts to include it, would that be worthy? Please indicate your preference by voting here for reinstate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/208648/generalized-tikhonov-regularization-in-glmnet&quot;&gt;Generalized Tikhonov regularization in glmnet?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/205891/tikhonov-regularization-in-the-context-of-deconvolution&quot;&gt;Tikhonov regularization in the context of deconvolution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/234280/is-tikhonov-regularization-the-same-as-ridge-regression&quot;&gt;Is Tikhonov regularization the same as Ridge Regression?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/64038/why-does-regularization-of-coefficient-magnitude-improve-the-generalization-of-l&quot;&gt;Why does regularization of coefficient magnitude improve the generalization of linear regression?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one is interesting in that there is no ridge-regression tag, just regularization--&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/18762/when-is-there-a-representer-theorem&quot;&gt;When is there a representer theorem?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/47438/non-negative-least-squares-with-minimal-colinearity&quot;&gt;Non negative least squares with minimal colinearity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T19:22:33.440" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4322" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4323" CreationDate="2016-09-14T09:40:19.180" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been reading on cross validation and wanted to experiment with Apache Spark's Mllib. I tried to read the provided material (&lt;a href=&quot;https://spark.apache.org/docs/1.2.1/ml-guide.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;) but it is still very unintuitive and unclear to me how it works when using &lt;code&gt;LogisticRegressionWithLBFGS&lt;/code&gt; classifier. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say I have a conceptual understanding of the cross validation topic and would need a little more help in understanding. I was wondering where the correct space is to ask. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130174" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T12:03:46.170" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T13:58:39.783" Title="Are questions concerning Apache Spark Mllib approach to cross validation acceptable on CV?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4322" CreationDate="2016-09-14T13:58:39.783" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about how Apache Spark Mllib works, what code / functions / packages to use, error messages, etc. would almost certainly be off topic here. Questions about how cross validation, logistic regression, etc. would almost certainly be on topic here. It depends on what you want to know. Note that the former might be on topic on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; if they are coding questions &amp;amp; include a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve&quot;&gt;reproducible example&lt;/a&gt; for people to work with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T13:58:39.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4278" CreationDate="2016-09-14T22:59:14.800" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is not uncommon to encounter a new question that is technically a duplicate of an older question, which however is for some reason unsatisfactory.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe there are no answers at all; maybe there are some answers but they are all not good; maybe there is a decent answer there but the accepted answer is bad and OP left the forum so this will never change; maybe a correct answer is only in the comments; maybe the question itself is badly formulated, e.g. too detailed or too cumbersome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;All such cases should be considered individually, but one general rule is that one should not feel compelled to respect the older thread just because it is older.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes you may want to post a new answer in the old thread and close the new one as a duplicate. Sometimes you may want to post an answer in the new thread and close &lt;em&gt;the old one&lt;/em&gt; as a duplicate of the new one. This should be decided based on what question is better formulated and/or has more chances to be more prominently seen. Sometimes you may want to ask and answer your own exemplary question and then to close both the new and the old questions as duplicates of your own one. Etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case two good answers have by now been posted in the new question and one of them  is accepted; the question itself received several upvotes. Very well - so perhaps it would now make sense to close both older questions as duplicates. You can vote to close the oldest one. Once it gets closed you can flag the one that is already closed for moderator attention and explain there that it would be better to change the duplication target (to prevent &quot;a duplicate of a duplicate&quot; situation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-09-15T00:33:49.030" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T00:33:49.030" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4325" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-15T07:16:46.653" Score="2" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cross-validated is a good site to sharpen one's skills in statistics. Lots of teachers and learners switching roles constantly, almost like taking a seminar. Today, someone said he is just a newbie and he is glad to get my help and attention, and yesterday a guru told me (I'm paraphrasing), &quot;Well when I was a newbie (like you), I had people throw rocks at me too.&quot; So, it seems there are layers of newbieness. So maybe this is a question for the &quot;great ones&quot; on the site, &quot;When did it occur to you that you weren't a newbie anymore, and how did you know that?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T01:56:37.487" Title="When does a newbie become an expert?" Tags="|discussion|new-users|users|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4326" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4327" CreationDate="2016-09-15T09:36:23.037" Score="8" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;For various reasons, I've never wanted to review questions up to now. However, out of curiosity, and also because I felt it would be giving back to the community, I decided to give it a try. A couple reviews went fine, but I'm not sure if I skipped &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; accepted (I mean, clicked on &quot;I'm done&quot;) this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/235100/58675&quot;&gt;What statistical tests to understand the sensitivity of model output&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Luckily, the question is good enough to be accepted, IMO. It could use a couple good comments, which I'm going to write, but overall it seems fine to me. My concern is that, if I clicked on &quot;I'm done&quot;, I guess I removed it not only from my review queue, but from the general queue. In other words, no one can review it anymore. Is that so? Is there something I can do to undo this? Or should I not care, since anyway it's still possible for users who have a different opinion from mine, to flag it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T11:03:00.637" Title="Not sure if I skipped a review or accepted the question: what happens to the review queue?" Tags="|discussion|support|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4326" CreationDate="2016-09-15T10:01:22.900" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looks like its still in the queue to me. (It's probably out of &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; version of the queue though)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But don't worry, most reviews take more than one vote and even if you muck up the occasional review, the worst things that will happen are totally recoverable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example that was a First Post review. If you accidentally okayed a bad post from there, and let's imagine it had ended up out of the queue; it would still be on the front page and many eyes would still see it. It would probably get closed anyway (a lot of my votes to close are done outside the review queues -- I try to skim the new posts every day). Someone might well wonder how it got through First post review, but unless you're doing it often that won't be an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, let's say you vote to close when it shouldn't close. It would then go into a close review and it takes 5 such votes to close it. A bunch of people would have to make the same error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, go review and don't worry so much. Allow yourself to make a few errors - especially when you start out - the system is set up to tolerate them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are in a situation where you think something has happened that needs fixing, flag the post  (there's always flag/other where you can explain the issue if it doesn't fit anything else)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2016-09-15T10:07:59.520" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T10:07:59.520" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4328" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4330" CreationDate="2016-09-15T13:33:05.983" Score="8" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I approached a question the wrong way and I would like to ask it again from a different point of view, but it already has an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked this question: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/234791/estimating-quantiles-with-linear-regression&quot;&gt;Estimating quantiles with linear regression?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one answer I received made me realize that I don't have a clear idea of prediction intervals. I should not have mentioned them in the question. However, the answer doesn't answer my question, i.e., how (if at all possible) to estimate quantiles from linear regression. The answer also mentions quantile regression and/or Bayesian inference. This helped me realize that for various reasons I would benefit from an answer within the boundaries of linear regression and frequentist inference, or at least that showed me why it doesn't make any sense to try to estimate quantiles within these boundaries. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, I would delete the question and write a new, clearer one, adding all these details and removing mentions of prediction intervals. However:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I cannot delete it since it has an answer (well, I &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; delete it, but I understand it's not good practice).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Removing all the part on prediction intervals will make the only answer look meaningless, and this also is not nice towards to the answerer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any suggestions? Maybe write a new question and flag my same old question for duplicate? Would this preserve the reputation of the answerer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T16:35:54.587" Title="Can I ask a question again, but with a different point of view?" Tags="|discussion|questions|exact-duplicates|deleted-questions|self-delete|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4325" CreationDate="2016-09-15T15:24:35.963" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are no longer a newbie when you get insider jokes without having them explained to you. However, you never feel like you are not a newbie because the very next question will intimidate you enough that you will begin to doubt your own abilities. A negative vote for humor? Gee, and I was being frank too-Thanks-that does put some perspective to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="99274" LastEditDate="2016-09-20T01:56:37.487" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T01:56:37.487" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4328" CreationDate="2016-09-15T16:35:54.587" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It doesn't really sound like you are [would be] asking a duplicate question.  I think a &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt; way to define a duplicate question isn't a question that uses some of the same terms, backstory, etc., but a question that would be answered by the answer in an existing thread.  If that isn't the case, the new question shouldn't be considered a duplicate, in my opinion.  Consider the boilerplate text I sometimes add as a comment when I vote to close a question as a duplicate (taken from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2468/7290&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think you will find the information you need in the linked thread. Please read it. If it isn't what you want / you still have a question afterwards, come back here &amp;amp; edit your question to state what you learned &amp;amp; what you still need to know. Then we can provide the information you need without just duplicating material elsewhere that already didn't help you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the information at the other thread is different from what you need, then it shouldn't be considered a duplicate.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, what you need to do is just make that sufficiently clear.  For example, what you have written in your first three paragraphs makes what new / distinct information you want to know pretty clear to me.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T16:35:54.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4325" CreationDate="2016-09-15T17:50:44.823" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interpreting your question to mean &quot;statistical newbie&quot; rather than &quot;Stack Exchange newbie&quot; or &quot;Cross Validated newbie&quot;. (If you're asking about the latter two, you advance pretty quickly. Just seeing what other say, comments, closed questions, etc, brings you up to speed fairly fast in most conventions of this site. Most...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like I've moved beyond statistics newbie, but that's due to lots of reading, lots of Cross Validated, and three years of on-the-job working, above and beyond my schooling. Beyond &quot;not still a newbie&quot;, however, I still look at answers by gung, Macro, whuber, to list a few off the top of my head (but missing many great people -- sorry!) and feel inadequate. How do those guys know all of that stuff so seemingly intuitively? I'm not a newbie, I think I'm beyond a novice, but I'm a long ways from that expert level. What's the in-between? Journeyman?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can still answer questions. (Especially those with a more Computer Science/AI flavor, where by background is. And yes, I'll admit I'm a bad person who will answer R-specific questions whereas technically an R-specific question is off-topic. Maybe it's because I feel stronger in that area, so can give a better answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1764" LastEditorUserId="1764" LastEditDate="2016-09-15T18:02:09.950" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T18:02:09.950" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4332" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4333" CreationDate="2016-09-15T19:13:42.610" Score="7" ViewCount="300" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question -- &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/235177&quot;&gt;SVD for PCA: Why would one standardize the data matrix?&lt;/a&gt; -- was closed as a duplicate at 16:59:24 (nine minutes after having been posted). I can swear I saw it closed and without answers (that is when I wrote my comment). But then at 17:00:02 an answer was posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers cannot be posted to closed questions. So this is clearly due to some glitch or a loophole that allowed posting an answer within very short time after the question closure. I remember discussing a similar case in chat some time ago and one of the mods said that indeed it can happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am curious what exactly the glitch/loophole is, and whether it is a bug or by design.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Is it that if somebody opened the question page before the Q is closed and so can access the answer form, then they will be able to post an answer? So the SE software does not check if the Q is closed when receiving an A? Or it does check, but intentionally allows some leeway? Or is this leeway an unintentional consequence of some database updates taking time to propagate? Etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T20:43:36.293" Title="An answer posted 30 seconds after the question was closed; how is it possible?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|answers|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4332" CreationDate="2016-09-15T20:37:54.457" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/91922/how-was-this-answer-posted-after-this-question-was-closed&quot;&gt;grace period&lt;/a&gt; after closure where an answer can still be accepted (however the &lt;code&gt;Post Your Answer&lt;/code&gt; button becomes disabled, so you have to be clever enough to find a way around that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case the posting of the answer came so close in time after closure that the button was probably still working at that moment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T20:37:54.457" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4335" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-17T13:30:59.810" Score="10" ViewCount="406" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/234809/22228&quot;&gt;R/mgcv: Why do te() and ti() tensor products produce different surfaces?&lt;/a&gt; has had a very interesting history. It was asked by a new user who may not be quite so aware of where we draw the (controversial!) on-topic/off-topic line on questions with substantial coding content. The question itself is about generalized additive models, but included substantial R code using the &lt;code&gt;mgcv&lt;/code&gt; package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I find particularly interesting about this question is that it was answered in some detail (not a lengthy answer but one in which significant thought had clearly been invested) by a highly experienced user, who felt the question touched on underlying statistical questions and was on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Five other users, also very experienced, voted to close as off-topic, presumably unhappy with how much the question turned on R code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answerer argued that the question should be reopened, arguing the level of implementation details in &lt;code&gt;mgcv&lt;/code&gt; was unsurprising since he was &quot;unaware of &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; other off-the-shelf software for GAMs that allows this ANOVA-like decomposition of bivariate smooths&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question ultimately gathered four reopen votes before its time in the review queue was ended by a &quot;leave-closed&quot; vote from a moderator. Of course this doesn't preclude the question being reopened (a &quot;leave-closed&quot; vote from a moderator on a reopen review doesn't have the same finality as a &quot;close&quot; vote on a close review, since any earlier &quot;reopen&quot; votes are not wiped out) but falling off the review queue does make accruing sufficient reopen votes less likely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not here to protest the decision (I was one of the reopen-voters, but don't know nearly enough about GAMs to argue the technical points in anything resembling an authoritative way) but the fact that many experienced, high-reputation users were so split on this suggests this is worthy of further discussion. It reminds me to some extent of questions on &lt;code&gt;lme4&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;nlme&lt;/code&gt; which we're generally fairly tolerant of because there tends to be an underlying model specification issue, or questions on coding in JAGS/Stan - the sheer fact you are coding in JAGS or Stan indicates there must be something statistical lurking in the background! But even these are not &lt;em&gt;cartes blanches&lt;/em&gt; and such questions can and do get closed, if the &quot;underlying issue&quot; is ultimately deemed to be non-statistical in nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody have any thoughts on which side of our dividing line this question should fall, or whether we should take special care with our treatment of &lt;code&gt;mgcv&lt;/code&gt; questions in general?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; the question was reopened as a result of the attention brought to it by this Meta question, but the issue of how to review questions with substantial code content is still relevant and it would be good to see what we can learn from the episode. Clearly a difficulty here is that not all reviewers on the Review Queue felt comfortable with the rather &quot;niche&quot; statistical material involved &amp;mdash; it's not a topic many of us know much about, and even fewer could answer, which can make it hard to judge the borderline between a &quot;primarily code&quot; and &quot;primarily statistical&quot; question. Since there aren't that many active reviewers, this is bound to be a recurring problem here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-10-04T23:05:58.233" Title="Closed, later reopened, question on mgcv: how to review &quot;niche&quot; questions with substantial code content" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|closing-questions|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4335" CreationDate="2016-09-18T00:38:19.637" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know nothing about GAMs, but to me this Q looks clearly on-topic; I am surprised to see that there is so much controversy about it. The question did not simply ask about the meaning of &lt;code&gt;te()&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;ti()&lt;/code&gt;; OP wrote that they are aware of the difference but expect them to coincide in this particular case for this particular reason; however they observe slight discrepancy. To me, this practically screams &quot;on-topic&quot;: the models must be different but presumably in a tricky way, and it must require quite a bit of statistical knowledge to tell them apart. This is not at all a programming question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, this must have become even more clear after @Gavin posted his insightful answer which is, frankly, quite obviously statistical and not programming-ish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have lots of open, popular, well-upvoted and highly insightful threads starting with questions about why some two functions in some statistical environment(s) produce different results. Like e.g. why an &lt;code&gt;anova&lt;/code&gt; call produces different p-values from an &lt;code&gt;lm&lt;/code&gt; call in R, or why &lt;code&gt;lme4&lt;/code&gt; in R does something different from &lt;code&gt;PROC MIXED&lt;/code&gt; in SAS, or why &lt;code&gt;eig&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;svd&lt;/code&gt; yield different signs in Matlab, or whatnot. I strongly believe that all of that should be on topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;Gavin's answer was posted on the 13th. It was accepted on the 13th too, indicating that this indeed resolved OP's issue. The post then got closed on the 14th meaning that some of the people voting to close must have already been able to see Gavin's answer. But okay -- after the closure on the 14th, Gavin posted a comment explaining why this should be on-topic and started the reopen voting. And &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt;, after four reopen votes the thread was kicked out of the queue by Peter's leave-closed vote.&lt;/strike&gt; Update: @gung made some fair comments about how the review queue works and I am now &quot;striking&quot; part of my original answer that was about specifics of how this particular Q got closed. This is not the most important here anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-10-04T23:05:58.233" LastActivityDate="2016-10-04T23:05:58.233" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4338" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-20T13:25:20.360" Score="8" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically I was looking around the queue and found this suggested edit: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/117203&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/117203&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It became obvious to me the user was having difficulties with the account(s), so he posted an update with another account as an edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suggested edit was approved (not by me, I skipped it). But I can see reasons to actually reject it. The user should be asked to merge the accounts first. We should treat the edit as if it was another user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? Because it becomes too simple to vandalize posts doing this. I've never seen it, but it became obvious to me after seeing people posting updates with multiple accounts how easy it would be to pretend you're another person and suggest an update, and how it would easily pass in the queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen it reported in meta before, so I'm posting this thread as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/discussion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;discussion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt;: should these edits be accepted before accounts are merged?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know it so I can act accordingly in the review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/236439/develop-prior-from-previous-studies-using-bayesian-updating-poisson-gamma-examp&quot;&gt;Develop Prior from Previous Studies using Bayesian Updating: Poisson-Gamma Example&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60613" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-09-23T13:38:08.790" Title="Should an OP's edit of their own question be accepted before their accounts are merged?" Tags="|discussion|editing|review|suggested-edits|merge-accounts|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4339" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4362" CreationDate="2016-09-20T14:58:46.887" Score="7" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;So we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sample-variance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sample-variance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sample-variance&lt;/a&gt;, with 6 questions tagged. Three also have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/variance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;variance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;variance&lt;/a&gt; tagged, and all the questions were posted this year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simple question, is it desirable? There's also tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/estimation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;estimation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;estimation&lt;/a&gt; for example. If there's a consensus for it I'll try to improve the tag (and retag questions that deserve it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can see arguments for it, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sample-mean&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sample-mean&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sample-mean&lt;/a&gt; exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60613" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-09-21T13:27:09.123" LastActivityDate="2016-09-26T10:56:08.677" Title="Is the tag [sample-variance] needed?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-deletion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4340" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4341" CreationDate="2016-09-20T15:08:09.033" Score="6" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;My reply to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/235808/machine-learning-with-small-set-of-positive-outcomes/235810#comment447736_235810&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; got deleted. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP commented:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So to summarize the link: there results on which method is better are inconclusive, and it is easier to use the under/over-sampling. Right? – LazyCat 20 hours ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to which I simply replied that he was correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T15:36:17.563" Title="Why did my comment get deleted?" Tags="|discussion|comment|moderation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4340" CreationDate="2016-09-20T15:21:08.027" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;help page on comments&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When &lt;em&gt;shouldn't&lt;/em&gt; I comment?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are not recommended for any of the following: ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Compliments which do not add new information (&amp;quot;+1, great answer!&amp;quot;); instead, up-vote it and pay it forward; ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your comment did &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; say &amp;quot;he was correct.&amp;quot;  The record shows it said (in full)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@LazyCat right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is ambiguous.  I interpreted it as not adding new information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T15:21:08.027" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4338" CreationDate="2016-09-20T17:05:56.223" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with @amoeba: it's important that authors have the ability to update or improve their question as quickly as possible. Otherwise it may be closed as unclear, or answers that do get posted will fail to address the author's main concern. We have many ugly, hard-to-follow threads that are a nightmare for future readers, resulting from substantial updates or clarifications appearing after some answers have already been given. It is certainly worth trying to prevent this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I frequently approve such edits. But I also post a note saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please register &amp;amp; merge your accounts (you can find information on how to do this in the &lt;strong&gt;My Account&lt;/strong&gt; section of our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;). Then you will be able to edit &amp;amp; comment on your own question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copy-and-pastable text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    Please register &amp;amp;/or merge your accounts (you can find information on how to do &#xA;    this in the **My Account** section of our [help]). Then you will be able to &#xA;    edit &amp;amp; comment on your own question.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clues that this is what is going on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question is recent,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both the original account and the editing account are new (or the edit is anonymous, which indicates the author has logged out - I would post a slightly different comment in that case, suggesting that the author should log in),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The edit contains a clarification, or adds some information that only the original author would be expected to have.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It strikes me as remarkably unlikely that a new question with fewer than a dozen views not only will be stumbled on by a random visitor, but also that they should have mistakenly attempted to edit and improve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I ever get a confused comment from a surprised poster wondering why somebody else has edited their question and reslanted it with their own additional information, then I will know I've made a wrong call, but it hasn't happened to me yet!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.497" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T18:07:30.717" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4343" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4354" CreationDate="2016-09-21T09:04:25.203" Score="13" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently there are approximately 13 mentioning &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=birthday+paradox+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;birthday paradox&lt;/a&gt; and another 22 mentioning &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=birthday%20problem%20is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;birthday problem&lt;/a&gt; (I guess there could be more). In most cases it is the main topic of the questions. Should we have separate tag for it? It is pretty important topic in probability so it may be worth having a tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-09-23T12:58:52.200" Title="Should we have [birthday-paradox] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4344" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-21T09:13:46.500" Score="3" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a meta-meta question: should we use&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;single aggregate thread&lt;/strong&gt; with one answer per tag (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1200/current-tag-synonym-candidates&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), where whole discussion happens in &lt;strong&gt;comments&lt;/strong&gt;, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;one question per tag&lt;/strong&gt; where the discussion happens in &lt;strong&gt;comments and answers&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a feeling that one-thread-per-tag strategy works better (faster, provokes more discussion) than single-aggregate-thread strategy, but I may be wrong. The bad thing about using one-thread-per-tag strategy is that it produces lots of questions - but is this really a problem with the amount of traffic on Meta?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T12:44:20.703" Title="Separate questions for tag proposal/change/removal or using single threads?" Tags="|discussion|tags|questions|meta|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2016-09-21T11:36:44.307" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4338" CreationDate="2016-09-21T12:04:20.013" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Take this as personal opinion speaking as an ordinary user)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's an edit you'd accept if it was from a different user -  an improvement without changing the intent too much - you could accept it whether or not you were sure it was the original poster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if it actually is the original poster suggesting an edit from a second account, I regard the merging of accounts as generally more important to fix first -- this is so we're not running around after the same person doing it again 20 minutes later and again an hour after that. If we do what they want (accept the edit) but rely on them to go to the trouble of merging when they can get things done by making us run around instead, why would they? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Sure there are well-intentioned users who will do their best, but many people are lazier if they can be.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'd suggest using some judgement -- while it's good to get questions improved quickly, it's also important avoid the OP continuing to suggest a number of further edits from the second account (or a third...) instead of merging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T12:04:20.013" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4347" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-09-21T13:26:47.137" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-09-21T13:26:47.137" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T13:26:47.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4348" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-09-21T13:26:47.137" Score="0" Body="Discussions about whether creating a new tag would make sense." OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-09-21T13:26:47.137" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T13:26:47.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4349" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-09-21T13:33:06.230" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Guidelines for creating new tags&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Taken from &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stats.stackexchange.com/a/3101&quot;&gt;http://meta.stats.stackexchange.com/a/3101&lt;/a&gt; by @gung)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;When you create the tag, be sure to create a tag wiki excerpt that states what it stands for, and provides some guidance on how to use the tag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You may want to create a full tag wiki with more in-depth information as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Don't add the tag to all the relevant threads at once. Do a few at a time and let some hours (or a day) pass in between.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You may want to add the tag to existing answers during slow periods.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;When adding the tag to an existing thread, be sure to do whatever other edits might be merited at the same time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the above only applies after the proposal has been discussed and approved on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-02-21T12:58:08.040" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T12:58:08.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4350" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-09-21T13:33:06.230" Score="0" Body="For proposing and discussing new tags." OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-09-21T13:33:06.230" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T13:33:06.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3210" CreationDate="2016-09-21T15:43:31.773" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following @gung's comment above, I pinged @Kjetil and asked to provide a wiki excerpt. He kindly agreed, and so here is the new excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A kind of moments based on linear functions of order statistics. Their interpretation is similar to usual moments, but they can often be more stably estimated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and wiki:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L-moments are a kind of moments based on linear functions of order statistics. Their interpretation is similar to usual moments, but they can often be more stably estimated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their use was pioneered in hydrology, as a help in studying the form of probability distributions. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-moment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-moment&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T15:43:31.773" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4352" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4353" CreationDate="2016-09-21T18:39:45.553" Score="9" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;A new user (including me) may want more reputation from not so good question and answers. A way to make the post popular is making it to the top page. The trick I discovered is repeatedly doing minor edits. &lt;code&gt;whuber&lt;/code&gt; discovered that and asked me not to do so.... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The frequent occurrence of tiny edits suggests you are no longer improving the post, but only attempting to draw attention to it. Your attention to detail and dedication to getting it right are admirable, but there is a cost: the entire thread keeps popping up in the queue. People will tire of reviewing it. Please limit edits to important changes that are clear improvements--such as fixing errors or clarifying the post. A better way to bring attention to a well-crafted answer is to post comments (or substantial answers) in related threads and provide links back here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, is there any way to automatically detect / prevent user repeatedly performing minor edits to bring the post into top pages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113777" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-09-23T12:40:54.060" LastActivityDate="2016-09-23T12:40:54.060" Title="Is there any way to detect / prevent user repeatedly performing minor edits to bring the post into top pages?" Tags="|discussion|editing|moderation|reputation|new-users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4352" CreationDate="2016-09-21T23:35:47.637" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;(To make sure this gets an answer)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As whuber mentions, there's an automatic mechanism to detect large numbers of edits and flag the moderators (the community bot is a source of a variety of flags of unusual/noteworthy behavior ... including this issue). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can then take a look and see if the behaviour is a problem or not. For example, someone may tend to post lengthy posts and come back later and edit in diagrams, links and references in a sequence edits -- it's possible to trigger the warning to mods while making largely substantive edits -- but the mods will be able to see that. (Even then it's best to try to make more changes per edit and fewer edits; but I know as well as anyone that if you're not very careful it's easy to go over with long posts. Even when I try to compose them off-line, I still think of a series of improvements after the fact, and then followup issues/questions in comments will lead to more edits and then I'll remember a similar answer with a useful insight that I want to link to or use an image from, and so on ... and then after I think it's finally finished, I'll see a stray sentence-fragment I somehow missed, and think &quot;Oh, I have to fix that&quot;. Next thing you know you have triggered the bot.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Personally I would like to be able to turn off the bumping if I make an edit on my own post within say an hour of the last bump - and if it has already bumped a few times I think for people with full edit privileges on their own posts it should stop bumping up the queue altogether)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Edit: Silverfish explains in comments why the last part is too general. I may modify it later to take account of the objection raised.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2016-09-22T00:40:56.420" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T00:40:56.420" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4343" CreationDate="2016-09-22T09:13:34.007" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since there is no answers and not much comments, while the question and pro-tag comments received several up-votes I would consider creating the tag. Let's wait for few more days if anyone disagrees (please comment and/or down-vote this answer if you do). If there would be no disagreement about it I'll create the tag and add it to the already existing questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I started re-tagging from the highest up-votes questions. Check &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/birthday-paradox&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;birthday-paradox&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;birthday-paradox&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="35989" LastEditDate="2016-09-23T12:58:52.200" LastActivityDate="2016-09-23T12:58:52.200" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4355" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-22T10:54:05.307" Score="9" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there an option to follow a question asked by another user? I would like to get a notification every time a new comment or answer is posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34645" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-09-23T09:28:04.033" LastActivityDate="2016-09-23T09:28:04.033" Title="How to follow a question?" Tags="|support|feature-request|notifications|bookmarks|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4355" CreationDate="2016-09-22T11:03:58.767" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The closest thing to this we &lt;em&gt;currently&lt;/em&gt; offer is an RSS feed for every question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ium8P.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ium8P.png&quot; alt=&quot;location of question rss feed&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can follow the feed from there, and get notifications with whichever feed reader you have. It should be updated with edits and answers, but not comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that, you can also favorite a question, and it'll be highlighted on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/current?tab=favorites&quot;&gt;your favorite posts tab&lt;/a&gt; anytime there are updates to it (again, comments will not count as updates).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72321" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T11:03:58.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4357" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-23T14:52:44.463" Score="8" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked this question a couple of weeks ago: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/233471/defining-the-normal-distribution&quot;&gt;Defining the normal distribution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It hasn't received much attention and I've just become aware that there's a 'Math Educators' Beta SE where it would probably be better placed, but I don't have the rep to &lt;code&gt;vote-to-migrate&lt;/code&gt;. Should I close it and repost it there, or can I request/volunteer for migration somehow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109004" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2016-09-23T16:32:29.277" Title="Best way to migrate a question?" Tags="|support|questions|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4357" CreationDate="2016-09-23T15:30:11.020" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would suggest first consulting &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/no-one-answers&quot;&gt;What should I do if nobody answers my question?&lt;/a&gt; in the help pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Failing that, simply flag your post for moderator attention.  Explain you would like it migrated (and suggest the destination).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2016-09-23T15:30:11.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4359" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4360" CreationDate="2016-09-23T20:25:52.347" Score="4" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would seen that Cross Validated's time zone is somewhere east of Saskatchewan as the dates change on the site sooner than they do for me. Would be nice to know what time zone is being used for logging scores etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2016-09-24T00:11:58.650" LastActivityDate="2016-09-24T00:11:58.650" Title="What time-zone is Cross Validated located in" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4359" CreationDate="2016-09-23T23:01:10.110" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;UTC: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KQMNE.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KQMNE.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2016-09-23T23:01:10.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4266" CreationDate="2016-09-25T20:39:10.987" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This tag is now empty, and if I understand correctly will auto-delete. there remain a few with the tag linear-combination which as @amoeba pointed out could apply to most posts here so unless anyone objects in comments here I will deal with them in a few days unless anyone else like to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: I have removed the [linear-combination] tag from all 8 which had it and in one case added [contrasts]. I think [combining-models] could be replaced with [model-averaging] without loss of information and perhaps some of [combining-estimates] and [combining-predictions] could be similarly re-tagged. The one which stumps me is [combinatorial]. I think it means something different from [combinatorics] but I do not really understand the area well. If nobody objects here I will do the re-tagging I suggest and hope someone else will pick up the [combinatorial] issue, perhaps by writing a wiki excerpt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Final, I hope, update: I have now removed all of [combining-predictions] and [combining-estimates] so when the tag fairy sprinkles her magic dust on them the last one will disappear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastEditorUserId="101426" LastEditDate="2016-11-08T10:07:25.303" LastActivityDate="2016-11-08T10:07:25.303" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4339" CreationDate="2016-09-26T10:56:08.677" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following the discussion in the comments, I have removed &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sample-variance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sample-variance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sample-variance&lt;/a&gt; from all threads. The tag will be automatically deleted within 24h.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note that the wiki excerpt for our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/variance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;variance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;variance&lt;/a&gt; tag explicitly says that it should be used for sample variances:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The expected squared deviation of a random variable from its mean; or, the average squared deviation of data about their mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2016-09-26T10:56:08.677" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4365" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-28T14:18:14.943" Score="0" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/545887/tags-popularity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Simple query&lt;/a&gt; shows that we have &lt;strong&gt;lots&lt;/strong&gt; of tags that were used only once, twice, or just a few times. Such tags are easy to burinate and re-tagging should not flood the main page if it would not be done at once. Maybe it's a good idea..?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T15:12:19.287" Title="Should we get rid of all the tags that were used only just a few times?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4365" CreationDate="2016-09-28T15:12:19.287" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with @whuber that the fact, &lt;em&gt;in isolation&lt;/em&gt;, that a tag has only ever been used a few times is not necessarily an indication of any problems.  It does seem reasonable to me that rarely-ever-used-ness correlates with other properties of tags that may indicate some issues that should be addressed.  What I take from these facts is that each tag that might be a candidate for being made a synonym or for burnination should be investigated.  If a reason other than low frequency is discovered, that tag could be nominated and the case for action could be made.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, be aware that tags that are only on a single thread are silently discarded by the SE system after a period of time.  (I think it's 6 months, but I'd have to look it up.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T15:12:19.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4369" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4370" CreationDate="2016-09-29T20:47:42.367" Score="5" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;The criterion for 'curious' badge is to post 5 'well received' questions. Although the answer to this is probably quite simple, still, I do know what well-received means in practice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2016-09-29T22:05:51.543" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T22:05:51.543" Title="What is a well received question?" Tags="|support|questions|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4369" CreationDate="2016-09-29T22:03:54.030" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Qualifying for the curious/inquisitive/socratic badges requires accumulating &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/234966/does-a-closed-question-cancel-out-that-days-valid-questions&quot;&gt;good asking days&lt;/a&gt;. One good asking day means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;asking at least one positively-scored question (aka &quot;well received question&quot;) without having another question negatively-scored, closed or deleted on that day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For curious one needs 5 good asking days; inquisitive 30 and socratic 100. Also, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/234259/asking-days-badges&quot;&gt;question record&lt;/a&gt; needs to be positive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T22:03:54.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4372" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-03T23:00:40.260" Score="4" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, there's this chain of comments in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/238226/any-example-of-roughly-independent-variables-that-are-dependent-at-extreme-val&quot;&gt;Any example of (roughly) independent variables that are dependent at extreme values?&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2F8Hg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2F8Hg.png&quot; alt=&quot;A comment chain&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the edits the whole exchange became obsolete, and will only confuse future readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I flagged it and explained in the comment the whole chain was obsolete and had already been addressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is completely in line with SE policy, see for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/182684/flagging-obsolete-comment-conversations&quot;&gt;Flagging obsolete comment conversations&lt;/a&gt; (meta.SE)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2055/obsolete-comments-to-flag-or-not-to-flag&quot;&gt;Obsolete comments: To flag, or not to flag?&lt;/a&gt; (meta.stats.SE)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2701/why-were-the-flags-as-obsolete-on-these-comments-marked-as-declined?rq=1&quot;&gt;Why were the flags (as obsolete) on these comments marked as declined?&lt;/a&gt; (meta.stats.SE)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why was it declined? Or isn't it appropriate anymore?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60613" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-11-05T13:05:38.763" Title="Aren't we supposed to flag obsolete comments?" Tags="|discussion|support|policy|comment|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4373" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4375" CreationDate="2016-10-04T13:09:03.200" Score="-2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the way to add a tag in an answer, possibly regarding a tool, approach, or such, but something the original asker did not envision, without editing the asked question?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm presuming the answer to the other question about &quot;should&quot; is &quot;yes&quot; for the following reasons:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There can be multiple valuable and relevant answers to the same&#xA;question that approach via different paths where the different&#xA;approach would have a different flag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The asker can't and usually won't know all the relevant tags for the&#xA;relevant approaches unless they already know the answer to the&#xA;question they are asking, or edit the question after the fact.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Part of the value proposition of CV and SE in general is not the&#xA;separation of questions and answers, but their interactions.  It is&#xA;often not about one question and one answer. There are great&#xA;questions and answers where there are 10 highly useful (and highly&#xA;voted) answers to the same question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Google already goes to the answer that is relevant, so they are&#xA;getting a value out of the relationship between question, answer, and&#xA;keywords.  Why not build a system that does not require an off-site&#xA;google search to find something internal.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22452" LastEditorUserId="22452" LastEditDate="2016-10-04T14:55:36.877" LastActivityDate="2016-10-04T15:57:24.990" Title="Why can't I put a tag on my answer that is different than the tag in the question?" Tags="|discussion|tags|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2016-10-04T16:31:44.990" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4374" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4377" CreationDate="2016-10-04T13:25:17.407" Score="8" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;CV gives practically unfettered access to renowned experts in the field in a democratic setting that would have been unthinkable in the not so distant past. Incredibly, in many cases, this is even achieved anonymously, using avatars and pen names. Personally, I try to show appreciation for this incredible gift.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, and in the frenzy to learn and participate, it is easy to lose perspective of who is who in the real world, where texting each other would be a preposterous thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, I wonder if it is OK to ping any user at any time within Ten Fold (as the most commonly used chat room), or if the fact that it is a chat room makes it more personal than the &quot;open forum&quot;, and considerations such as time of the day, personal rapport with the person based on prior interactions, or status of the user being pinged in the profession should be more strongly weighted than for a regular comment at the bottom of a post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67822" LastEditorUserId="67822" LastEditDate="2016-10-12T01:19:45.220" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T01:19:45.220" Title="What is the protocol or etiquette for pinging users in Ten Fold?" Tags="|discussion|etiquette|chat|users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4373" CreationDate="2016-10-04T15:57:24.990" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's impossible right now, but you can at least mention a tag in an answer: &lt;code&gt;[tag:X]&lt;/code&gt; (becomes &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/x&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;x&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;x&lt;/a&gt;). I think this cover the points you raised, but has no bearing on the engine inner workings, i.e. it won't show in the tag page itself, it's only a embellished link as far as I know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's useful in meta, but in the main not so much, because tags are volatile, and except the most popular ones, are highly susceptible to edits and even deletions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60613" LastActivityDate="2016-10-04T15:57:24.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4374" CreationDate="2016-10-04T21:59:51.590" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may be worrying more than you need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's within the rules of the site to ping absolutely anyone -- but not everyone would see the ping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However what's within the rules is not always the same as what people might see as reasonable. I think it would generally be reasonable to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) ping a user that you have a specific reason to contact (like an issue with a question or answer you want to raise with them beyond what would be suitable for comments -- such as extended discussion). Given your judgement of what the question was about, your ping should arguably fall under this category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) ping a user you have interacted with regularly, for any reasonable purpose consistent with your personal relationship and the (fairly lax) chat rules (this is really a personal judgement about individual interactions so it's hard to say much ... and this is what I think you're asking about. We can't really establish a policy on individual judgement about the social suitability of a ping)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) ping any user who is a regular in chat, for any purpose reasonably related to what the site is for, unless they have indicated otherwise. (If you're a chat regular I think it's reasonable to expect to be pinged there)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2016-10-05T21:56:05.090" LastActivityDate="2016-10-05T21:56:05.090" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4378" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-05T18:06:51.547" Score="12" ViewCount="323" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our self-study tag is defined as: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A routine question from a textbook, course, or test used for a class or self-study. This community's policy is to &quot;provide helpful hints&quot; for self-study questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The confusion comes from what self-study actually is, versus what the tag says. For example, I have failed through self-study to understand where actual self-study ends and the tag description begins. It is fairly clear from the longer description what the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/self-study/info&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; tag is supposed to be and how to use it, but I must confess that I didn't look it up until just now, and, that the semantically confusing tag name is unhelpfully a &lt;em&gt;tromp l'oeil&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe we should consider having a different label for this? For example, &quot;textbook questions&quot;, &quot;student questions&quot; or something slightly less confusing? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T14:35:23.027" Title="What is the exact meaning of the [self-study] tag? Should we consider renaming it?" Tags="|discussion|tags|homework|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4378" CreationDate="2016-10-05T23:57:07.727" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Keep current tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;self-study&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastActivityDate="2016-10-05T23:57:07.727" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4378" CreationDate="2016-10-05T23:58:43.270" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;New tag&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;textbook-style-problem&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastActivityDate="2016-10-05T23:58:43.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4372" CreationDate="2016-10-06T12:28:26.603" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Aren't we supposed to flag obsolete comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, we are; but how the flag will be evaluated is subjective and it depends on many things, one of them is the Stack Exchange community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, here I have flagged 32 comments and have collected 13 declines (which is pretty high ratio; 40%), while in Stack Overflow I have flagged 54 comments with just one rejection). On the other hand, when it comes to flagging posts, I am not so bad on both sites: 39 declines out of 572 (7%) in CV and 21/1285 (2%) in SO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deleting comments is a tough action, because it demands time reading the whole context, it is not a priority (except for offensive comments), and there is always the risk someone will complain and demand more time from mods explaining their actions here in Meta, chat, etc. Some mods are more conservative deleting comments than others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the best thing to make is to feel how flagging comments goes in the community you are, and take your chances of flagging according with it. I used to flag more comments; now I only do in very obvious cases (this is not a complaint).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastActivityDate="2016-10-06T12:28:26.603" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4378" CreationDate="2016-10-06T14:45:57.123" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Keep current tag, but, create synonym tag&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;textbook-problem&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastActivityDate="2016-10-06T14:45:57.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4383" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-07T19:28:22.900" Score="6" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a corpus of &quot;bad questions&quot; with justification.  Have we considered making a spam-filter-like pre-filter that can test the question for it's badness and suggest to the question writer &quot;this question is likely a bad question for reason 'x' so please re-read the requirements and try again&quot;.  Homework questions come to mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22452" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-10-07T22:55:59.793" LastActivityDate="2016-10-28T18:16:57.020" Title="An automatic filter that would detect bad questions when they are written and suggest ways to improve them" Tags="|feature-request|homework|spam|low-quality-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4384" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4417" CreationDate="2016-10-08T09:55:13.413" Score="8" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dirac delta is pretty basic concept and we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=dirac%20delta&quot;&gt;multiple questions&lt;/a&gt; mentioning it. It also causes many confusion, so it is likely to provoke new questions among those who first encounter it. Maybe we should create a tag for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2016-11-01T08:02:46.707" Title="Is Dirac delta worth its own tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4386" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4388" CreationDate="2016-10-10T08:43:27.553" Score="7" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have you ever wondered what &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/population-average&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;population-average&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;population-average&lt;/a&gt; is about..? If not, check its info page&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Population average model assesses the association between X and Y&#xA;  based on averaging over the random effects, rather than the one for an&#xA;  individual subject (subject specific model).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somehow it does not surprise me that it is not used for such questions... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2016-10-10T11:05:26.613" LastActivityDate="2016-10-23T22:23:02.847" Title="VERY ambiguous [population-average] tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4386" CreationDate="2016-10-10T12:01:46.410" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would suggest to rethink its existence or use with respect to the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ensemble&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ensemble&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ensemble&lt;/a&gt; (which seems undescribed) and a novel tag, like  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ensemble-average&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ensemble-average&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ensemble-average&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ensemble-method&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ensemble-method&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ensemble-method&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83945" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T12:01:46.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4386" CreationDate="2016-10-10T16:15:56.753" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;That sounds to me like a reference to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalized_estimating_equation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GEE&lt;/a&gt;, although it is ambiguous.  (Some of the threads it's used on support this interpretation.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this tag's name will inevitably cause it to be used incorrectly by the many statistical novices who ask questions here.  I don't immediately see how that can be addressed effectively.  For example, it has an excerpt, but many people don't read them anyway.  Thus, I don't think making it a synonym of something else is the right option.  (We'll just end up finding some other tag commonly misapplied.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the best we can do is probably just to remove the tag from threads and let the SE system purge it after 24 hours.  An alternative would be to replace it with a new tag that has a different name that won't be misunderstood by novices.  I'm not sure what the appropriate name would be, though, and existing tags, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gee&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gee&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gee&lt;/a&gt;, might be enough already.  The tag may have been created by @JiebiaoWang; it would be worth seeing what he has to say.  I attempted to leave him a comment alerting him to this thread.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Update:&lt;/em&gt;  It seems &lt;code&gt;[marginal-model]&lt;/code&gt; might be a good name for a new tag to put in place of the old one (h/t @JakeWestfall).  I propose that we work through the threads currently tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/population-average&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;population-average&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;population-average&lt;/a&gt; and, where appropriate, replace it with the new tag.  Where the tag had been misapplied, it can just be removed.  Once it doesn't exist on any threads, the SE system will automatically purge it in 24 hours.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Update 2:&lt;/em&gt;  Given the response to this, I will go through the threads tagged with &lt;code&gt;[population-average]&lt;/code&gt; and remove the tag.  I may replace it with &lt;code&gt;[marginal-model]&lt;/code&gt; and/or &lt;code&gt;[gee]&lt;/code&gt; (or something else) as seems most appropriate.  I have now done the first such thread (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/12743/7290&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Update 3:&lt;/em&gt;  I have now removed or replaced the tag on all threads.  The tag should disappear after a day or so.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2016-10-23T22:23:02.847" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4389" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4390" CreationDate="2016-10-10T16:38:28.183" Score="3" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I read the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/69874/how-to-correct-outliers-once-detected-for-time-series-data-forecasting&quot;&gt;How to correct outliers once detected for time series data forecasting?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the answers are in an unexpected order, based on how the answers appear in StackOverflow. Specifically, the answers are not ordered in descending order by vote count. Instead the votes (in order are):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-1, 3, 0, 5, 0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly for the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/238726/how-do-r-and-python-complement-each-other-in-data-science&quot;&gt;How do R and Python complement each other in data science?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this by design, or just a bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11284" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T18:19:55.070" Title="Answers appear sorted by date and not by the vote count" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|answers|user-interface|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4389" CreationDate="2016-10-10T16:57:10.553" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's by design.&lt;/strong&gt;  You control the order by clicking one of the three options at the right in a banner preceding the answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eMHCw.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eMHCw.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T16:57:10.553" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4391" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-11T12:47:56.020" Score="5" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to discuss the following three tags:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixed-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixed-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixed-model&lt;/a&gt; (2000+), &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/random-effects-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;random-effects-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;random-effects-model&lt;/a&gt; (580) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fixed-effects-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fixed-effects-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fixed-effects-model&lt;/a&gt; (400).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a well-known terminological ambiguity between econometrics and other statistics with regards to the &quot;random effects&quot; and &quot;fixed effects&quot;. &lt;strong&gt;I feel that our tags &lt;em&gt;add&lt;/em&gt; to this ambiguity, instead of clearing it up.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mixed models are linear models that include random effects and fixed effects, i.e. random factors and fixed factors (or, rarely, only random factors). &lt;strike&gt;The terms &quot;random/fixed effects model&quot; are never (?) used to refer to mixed models.&lt;/strike&gt; Update: Mixed models are also sometimes called &quot;random effects models&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In econometrics, a &quot;fixed effects model&quot; is a way to treat panel data which is equivalent to a standard linear model with only fixed effects. In contrast, a &quot;random effects model&quot; is a way to treat panel data which is formally equivalent to a mixed model with a random intercept but which is estimated via FGLS and not via MLE (as mixed models are). (Evidence: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1369&quot;&gt;@StasK's 2012 Meta answer&lt;/a&gt; and my recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/238214&quot;&gt;question on the main site&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So conceptually &lt;code&gt;[fixed-effects-model]&lt;/code&gt; tag should only be applied to questions about econometrics; in practice people often use it on questions about mixed models to refer to fixed effects. &lt;strong&gt;This is confusing.&lt;/strong&gt; And  &lt;code&gt;[random-effects-model]&lt;/code&gt; tag can be, and is being used to refer to both, mixed models and random effects models in the econometrics sense. &lt;strong&gt;So the mixed models questions get split between these two tags, which is very unfortunate.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What could be the ideal arrangement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say: rename these two tags such that they unambiguously refer to econometrics. For example: &lt;code&gt;[panel-random-effects]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[panel-fixed-effects]&lt;/code&gt; (the word &quot;econometrics&quot; is too long to include in a tag name). And sort out the mixed models questions into &lt;code&gt;[mixed-model]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-05-24T13:43:47.353" LastActivityDate="2017-05-24T13:43:53.413" Title="Can we do something about the confusing/ambiguous [random-effects-model] and [fixed-effects-model] tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-reorganization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4378" CreationDate="2016-10-11T14:35:23.027" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;exercise&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;synonym that leads to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;self-study&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T14:35:23.027" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4393" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-11T19:34:14.423" Score="9" ViewCount="443" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question was asked earlier today &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/239640/simulation-problem-in-r#comment455733_239640&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/239640/simulation-problem-in-r#comment455733_239640&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text is copy-pasted from an Exercise from &lt;strong&gt;Introduction to Probability&lt;/strong&gt; (Joseph K. Blitzstein, Jessica Hwang) (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.br/books?id=EvoYCwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA135&amp;amp;lpg=PA135&amp;amp;dq=%22A%20copy%20machine%20is%20used%20to%20make%20n%20pages%20of%20copies%20per%20day%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=AySoPLSFlS&amp;amp;sig=MeFX_TrClWGWq5cGB-FFbDIHDM8&amp;amp;hl=pt-BR&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiv6aThttPPAhUDFZAKHVRvDk8Q6AEIHjAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22A%20copy%20machine%20is%20used%20to%20make%20n%20pages%20of%20copies%20per%20day%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;see here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Exercise 47.b&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I added the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; without asking the author, kinda like the consensus achieved in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1172/should-we-tag-questions-that-smell-like-homework?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;Should we tag questions that smell like homework?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag was removed pointing towards other threads in meta debating this kind of tagging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, should (or shouldn't) I tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; such blatantly self study questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60613" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T23:52:50.953" Title="Should I add the self-study tag to a question that is copy-pasted from a book?" Tags="|discussion|tags|editing|policy|homework|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4394" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4397" CreationDate="2016-10-11T22:02:29.910" Score="5" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has been this feature request on Meta.SE since 2012: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/123274/&quot;&gt;Add syntax highlighting for the MATLAB language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In May 2016 it was marked as [status-completed] and the following answer was posted by an SE admin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Matlab syntax support is rolling in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is basic syntax support without keywords, as these add a lot to the size of the highlighter and do not gzip well at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still - comments should be comments and basic highlighting should work as expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is great. I verified some time ago that it also works on our site: Matlab code gets highlighted correctly if I preface it with &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;!-- language: lang-matlab --&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However, it does not work automatically when a thread carries a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/matlab&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;matlab&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;matlab&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/strong&gt; I noticed it now &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/239075&quot;&gt;in this question&lt;/a&gt;. It seems that it &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; work on StackOverflow though, or at least that's how I interpret the following comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;\o/ It's so working! All my posts suddenly became gorgeous! – Adriaan May 20 at 15:59&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it might be that the automatic highlighting for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/matlab&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;matlab&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;matlab&lt;/a&gt; has not been rolled in specifically on CrossValidated. Hence I post it as a bug.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T22:36:44.807" Title="Matlab syntax highlighting now works on CrossValidated but does not turn on automatically" Tags="|bug|status-completed|syntax-highlighting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4395" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-10-11T22:03:24.233" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-10-11T22:03:24.233" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T22:03:24.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4396" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-10-11T22:03:24.233" Score="0" Body="For questions about syntax highlighting through Google Prettify service." OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-10-11T22:03:24.233" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T22:03:24.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4394" CreationDate="2016-10-11T22:36:02.360" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The community needs to identify such tags, because there is no guarantee that the system could correctly infer the desired highlighting syntax from the tag name.  Moderators can indicate which language goes with which tag.  I have done so with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/matlab&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;matlab&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;matlab&lt;/a&gt;, so it should be working now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T22:36:02.360" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3175" CreationDate="2016-10-12T19:48:34.113" Score="23" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It begins &amp;quot;How do I use SPSS to...&amp;quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was advised to do [procedure X] in SPSS.  Here's a dump of the output.  How do I interpret it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I am singling out SPSS because it is prominently associated with bad questions.  Of course there are thoughtful SPSS users out there, newbies and students included.  Please formulate your question in a way that reflects that!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T19:48:34.113" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4393" CreationDate="2016-10-13T15:23:05.943" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for me, the whole idea about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; is that people are working on some exercise and are looking for some &lt;em&gt;hints&lt;/em&gt; since they are stuck. Copying-and-pasting a textbook exercise produces &lt;strong&gt;off-topic&lt;/strong&gt; rather then self-study questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, any new user who and pastes a homework question should be encouraged to show some effort in solving it, or at least to point out where they got stuck and what kind of hints are asked for. Applying the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; does not make a copy-and-pasted question a self-study question... In such cases I'd rather vote to close it, rather than re-tagging. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2016-10-14T11:07:56.013" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T11:07:56.013" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4393" CreationDate="2016-10-14T12:50:35.073" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I think tags should describe the contents of the question and nothing else.&lt;/strong&gt; If our policy is that we treat textbook exercises differently (i.e. only provide &amp;quot;helpful hints&amp;quot;), then it makes sense to have a tag that is applied to questions posting textbook exercises. I think that's essentially that. If I see a question about PCA that does not have a [pca] tag, I add it. If I see a question that is &lt;em&gt;obviously&lt;/em&gt; (!) a textbook exercise, why not adding the [self-study] tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this thread @Glen_b and @gung (and @Tim?) argue otherwise. For the sake of discussion, I will now quote earlier statements that argue in favour of adding the [self-study] tag in obvious cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We had this discussion in 2012: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1172&quot;&gt;Should we tag questions that smell like homework?&lt;/a&gt; There @whuber wrote in an answer that has 17 upvotes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's fine to retag (without comment) as long as it is perfectly clear that the problem is homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We then had this discussion in 2014: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1904&quot;&gt;Is it okay to add the [self-study] tag through an edit instead of asking OP to do it?&lt;/a&gt; There are no answers, but most upvoted (9 and 8) are two @gung's comments (note that @gung wrote has changed his opinion since then, see his answer &amp;amp; comments):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have a problem w/ people editing questions to add the [self-study] tag, &amp;amp; I do it myself. This is especially true when, as here, someone just copies &amp;amp; pastes a question from their homework. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the issue of politeness, you raise a good point. When I edit to add the tag, I always also leave a comment (which I just copy &amp;amp; paste &amp;amp; change the name). [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@NickCox agreed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Always asking first would be polite, but I don't think it is especially practical. Often these questions come from new or inexperienced users not familiar with tagging, or much else; indeed they often back off and disappear when people don't do as they ask. Removing a mistaken tag is easy and painless when needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T14:32:44.087" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4403" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-15T11:06:30.320" Score="0" ViewCount="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to understand the bounty mechanics better. I know the bounty rep is immediately subtracted to the OP rep, irrespective of whether the question gets an answer or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose the question gets multiple answers, but the OP doesn't select any. Once the bounty period expires, what happens? Does the question with more votes get the bounty? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now consider a different scenario: the bounty period expires before the question gets any answers. Now, if someone writes an answer, she/he won't get the reward, irrespective of whether the OP selects the answer or not. Right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-10-15T13:22:41.510" LastActivityDate="2016-10-15T13:22:41.510" Title="Clarification on bounties" Tags="|support|bounty|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-10-15T16:45:58.550" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4393" CreationDate="2016-10-15T23:55:41.353" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Tim's position that &quot;Applying the self-study tag does not make a copy-and-pasted question a self-study question&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I suppose there are some nuances in my position which I will elaborate as briefly as I can manage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sometimes the question is part copy-and-paste from a book, and partly explanation of where the OP is stuck. I appreciate this type of question may not be what this Meta thread is mostly talking about, but it's common enough, and there is often no clear demarcation between where the C&amp;amp;P ends and the OP's thoughts on the question begin, nor any indication of the source of the material. In this case, the question generally meets our self-study guidelines, is on-topic, and therefore merits the self-study tag. There's no harm asking the OP to read the self-study wiki so they have appropriate expectations of the kind of &quot;getting unstuck but not giving it away on a plate&quot; answers they'll receive. But in this situation a brief edit and tidy up (putting the source question in quote formatting, adding a reference to the source material if e.g. the OP has mentioned it in the comments or it turns up on a quick internet search) seems appropriate. It's often the case that doing this stuff for the OP takes less time than writing instructions for the OP on what I'd like them to do, the OP can still see our expectations of future questions from the way the question looks after editing, and I don't need to remember to check back in a couple of days' time to see if anything has been done. As far as I can tell, there's no harm including the self-study tag as part of this sprucing up.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sometimes the question is pure copy-and-paste from a book and the question doesn't meet our self-study guidelines. I will leave a comment to the OP alerting them to our expectations, and vote to close as off-topic. If the OP fixes things up in short order, then hopefully the question will be saved from closure (or if it's too late for that, reopened) by other users on the review queue. Again, there is no need for me to check back. Adding the self-study tag doesn't seem to help much, so that might as well be left on the to-do list for the OP.* &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the question has been around for a long time, is blatantly self-study, and especially if the OP is no longer active, then I don't see any harm adding the self-study tag myself. This even applies to those questions which arguably should have been closed in the past, but have been around for so long, and have had good answers posted to them, that I can't see any point voting to close them. If it were a fresh question I might have voted to close, but in this case I might just edit and add the self-study tag (plus any other tidying up that needs to be done, and there's usually &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; beneficial to do other than add the tag) then otherwise leave it be. Once again, there is no need for me to check back - once 'tis done, 'tis done.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$(*)$ There is one counter-argument to this that I consider quite strong based on my previous experience: when presented with a list of changes we expect the OP to make, lots of them just add the self-study tag and think they are now done! So perhaps if we added the self-study tag for them and then said &quot;now check you comply with its conditions&quot;, it might prompt them to focus on the substance of our self-study guidelines rather than the superficial addition of the tag. If I change my mind about this issue in the future, this is probably going to be what tips my mental scales.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastActivityDate="2016-10-15T23:55:41.353" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4405" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4406" CreationDate="2016-10-17T20:31:07.847" Score="6" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;After the discussion in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4393/should-i-add-the-self-study-tag-to-a-question-that-is-copy-pasted-from-a-book&quot;&gt;Should I add the self-study tag to a question that is copy-pasted from a book?&lt;/a&gt; it seems the &lt;em&gt;status quo&lt;/em&gt; is to not add the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; tag without the author consent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm facing an edit like that right now. If I were to deny it (I won't, I'm skipping, that would be leakage on my part), what reason should I present?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;spam or vandalism&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no improvement whatsoever &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;clearly conflicts with author's intent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;attempt to reply &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;causes harm &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60613" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2016-10-17T22:38:10.180" Title="If rejecting an edit that adds the [self-study] tag, what reason should be given?" Tags="|support|homework|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4405" CreationDate="2016-10-17T21:23:02.143" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I usually type a custom message for the editor telling them to leave a comment for the OP.  Here is some example text:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is best not to add the tag, but to ask the OP to do it so that they will be familiar w/ our policies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2016-10-17T21:23:02.143" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4393" CreationDate="2016-10-17T23:19:38.470" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been asked by @Firebug during &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/240780/binomial-distribution-and-mean-variance-standard-deviation&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/240780/binomial-distribution-and-mean-variance-standard-deviation&lt;/a&gt; to contribute to this meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I did most recently is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) put the &lt;code&gt;self-study&lt;/code&gt; tag in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Hint that the newbie (invariably) should validate that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2a) it is &lt;code&gt;self-study&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2b) that he should let us know what he attempted to do to solve the problem already, and that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) We will give hints after a college try to solve the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) Asked the newbie to read up on the &lt;code&gt;self-study&lt;/code&gt; tag information because it is as clear as mud to a newbie even if it is crystal clear for us. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result of my effort, the question was put on hold. As off topic by @whuber after the newbie responded truthfully that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;My book has literally 0 information on how to do this problem. I have emailed my professor for assistance on how to start it (more than a week ago) and he, as usual, did not respond unfortunately. The book only covers finding P when given the number, so in this case it would cover something along the lines of find the probability that at least 5 people were American-born.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it is obvious what one sentence hint the newbie needs to see. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The clear as mud problem I brought up before with the prediction that this issue would be ongoing &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4378/what-is-the-exact-meaning-of-the-self-study-tag-should-we-consider-renaming-i/4379#4379&quot;&gt;What is the exact meaning of the [self-study] tag? Should we consider renaming it?&lt;/a&gt; the most common solution accepted for this is to make a &lt;code&gt;textbook-style-problem&lt;/code&gt;. There were more votes for the status quo, however, that is also not a solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2016-10-17T23:19:38.470" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4393" CreationDate="2016-10-18T00:12:27.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Homework problems have a special status here.  One aspect of this is that we want them marked with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; tag.  However, I think the tag needs to be added almost exclusively &lt;em&gt;by the OP&lt;/em&gt;.  I leave a comment, of varying levels of severity (there are examples listed &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2486/7290&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), for the OP to add the tag and read its wiki.  There are several reasons for this:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the OP adds the tag, they are more likely to have read the wiki and be familiar with our policies.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adding the tag is a positive action on the OP's part that communicates some buy-in; i.e., that they will abide by our polices.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the OP does not add the tag, that is a concrete signal that the thread should be closed.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding the tag for the OP obscures all three.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another issue is that adding the tag to a thread that was closed for not meeting our standards bumps the thread into the reopen queue.  Reopen is one of our slowest and least reviewed queues (in part because it takes the highest reputation to access).  So these threads often just sit there for a long time, only to eventually be marked to be left closed (since, again, the OP has not taken any action to meet our standards).  Moreover, if the OP does edit their question to meet our criteria afterwards, their question &lt;em&gt;will not&lt;/em&gt; necessarily be bumped back into the reopen queue, since it was reviewed already.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a hard time seeing under what circumstances it would be better to add the tag for the OP, rather than them adding it for themselves.  @Silverfish's scenario in which &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the question has been around for a long time, is blatantly self-study, and especially if the OP is no longer active... and have had good answers posted to them... in this case I might just edit and add the self-study tag  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;seems eminently reasonable, but that strikes me as an infrequent occurrence.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T00:12:27.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4393" CreationDate="2016-10-18T13:32:30.680" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be much easier if we just ended the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; meta tag, because it is difficult to be consistent using it. Many questions are not about homework; yet they are self-study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose treating self-study questions like the other ones: voting according to their content, close when they are broad, unclear, opinion-based, duplicate, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clear &lt;strong&gt;homework&lt;/strong&gt; questions (like the ones which are copy-paste) can be closed as too broad, or using the specific closing reason we have designed for it; but without needing the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Self-study questions&lt;/strong&gt; (including textbook exercises, old exam papers, and homework) that seek to understand the concepts are welcome, but those that demand a solution need to indicate clearly at what step help or advice are needed. For help writing a good self-study question, please visit &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12/how-should-we-deal-with-obvious-homework-questions&quot;&gt;the meta pages&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 'self-study' close reason has a link which redirects the OP to a CV meta post that has guidance about what to do next. That is it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers which only provide hints to OP about solving the question would still be ok, but complete answers either. It might happen the user who is providing a full answer thinks it will genuinely help future readers, rather than just OP's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-11-20T16:31:49.370" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T16:31:49.370" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4412" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4413" CreationDate="2016-10-24T14:09:14.053" Score="16" ViewCount="282" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm in the process of learning about neural networks. I'm the kind of person who wants to pull them apart and glue them back together to really get a solid idea of how all the pieces work. I'm doing this on my own (e.g., Not at a university / school) and I have no point of contact to ask for help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now I have 8 questions written down that have come to me while reading but I don't want to spam the site. Should I include them all in one question or post one per week or something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="135943" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2016-10-25T16:12:11.427" LastActivityDate="2016-10-25T16:12:11.427" Title="How many questions are too many?" Tags="|discussion|questions|participation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4412" CreationDate="2016-10-24T14:35:00.140" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure there is a 'too many' in a general sense.  Let me make a couple suggestions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Try to keep your threads consistent and manageable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's OK to put more than one question into the same thread, when the questions are closely related, or are variations on a theme.  When there are many questions that aren't closely related, the thread is at risk of being 'too broad'.  Remember also that the longer a question statement is, the fewer people will actually read all the way through it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is often appropriate to post a set of threads in a series over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There can be a logical ordering of questions such that answering one provides some information about the next, etc.  I would think about asking questions one thread at a time as you learn more.  You don't necessarily need to wait a week in between questions, but I probably wouldn't post more than a couple at a time, even if they are wholly unrelated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2016-10-24T14:35:00.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4412" CreationDate="2016-10-24T22:03:55.310" Score="12" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You should generally ask questions separately unless they're very closely connected (in a way that it's natural to answer them together). Posting laundry-list questions will get your question closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You should be okay posting a several questions a day, but the people best placed to give good answers may only have time to look at one or two, so the more you post at once the more likely that you'll miss an opportunity for a good answer (i.e. if you post 8 in a day, that may work out less than optimally).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest keeping yourself to about 2-3 a day and I'd suggest spacing them out by a reasonable interval (half an hour to an hour, say), to get a good chance of an answer or two on each.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2016-10-24T22:03:55.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4415" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4419" CreationDate="2016-10-24T22:55:30.363" Score="6" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why aren't the reviewer or steward badges shown or selectable as &quot;next badge&quot; on the user activity page? They are shown among the help-center badges. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="99274" LastEditDate="2016-10-27T22:53:45.250" LastActivityDate="2016-10-28T13:12:09.320" Title="&quot;Reviewer&quot; badge cannot be selected as the &quot;Next Badge&quot;" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|badges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4415" CreationDate="2016-10-25T00:01:24.317" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quite a few badges aren't in the tracking list. (There are about 15 badges I don't have but only 4 show up that I can choose between for tracking)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of those at least will probably be for reasons of overhead (it would be too hard to keep doing the calculation every time you load your profile).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some will be absent because you don't really &quot;progress&quot; toward them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some will be absent because they're already shown elsewhere. The reviewer progress is shown in information under the &quot;review&quot; menu item / review queues (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/close/stats&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/close/stats&lt;/a&gt; shows close-reviewer badge progress, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/stats&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/stats&lt;/a&gt; shows suggested-edit reviewer badge progress and so on) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I expect that they don't show up because you're already getting a display that's &quot;tracking&quot; them elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2016-10-25T00:05:22.543" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4384" CreationDate="2016-10-25T12:34:09.507" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I am providing an answer so to bump the question and close it with some conclusion.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I'd considered &lt;code&gt;[dirac-delta]&lt;/code&gt; tag useful. The question already got eight upvotes and one negative (?) comment by &lt;em&gt;Carl&lt;/em&gt;. I'd say that the response to this idea is positive, so I'd consider creating it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to close this issue: is there anyone who does not agree with this idea? Are there any more arguments against it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there is not much interest in the thread &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; it got rather positive response, I created the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dirac-delta&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dirac-delta&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dirac-delta&lt;/a&gt; tag and started re-tagging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="35989" LastEditDate="2016-11-01T08:02:46.707" LastActivityDate="2016-11-01T08:02:46.707" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4415" CreationDate="2016-10-27T22:54:20.777" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note also, as suggested, I asked this question on SE meta, and the answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/286269/reviewer-steward-and-other-badges-not-selectable&quot;&gt;there&lt;/a&gt; was &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These badges are intentionally not available in the badge progress selector because they would require additional UI to select which queue you wanted to track which is simply not worth implementing at this time given that you can easily track these in each queue respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2016-10-28T13:12:09.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4383" CreationDate="2016-10-28T18:16:57.020" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;On some sites, the &quot;ask question&quot; pages will pop up just-in-time help when users seem to be getting ready to ask about certain topics. Of course, the specific topics and exact help text vary from community to community, but one example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/300741/&quot;&gt;regexes on SO&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hJoP7.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of SO &amp;quot;ask question&amp;quot; page help pop-up, with links to regex resources&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not a particularly smart system, though. It's really just half a step up from keyword matching. Creating a full-blown machine learning system, on the other hand? Could be an interesting challenge, but there's no immediate urgent need for it, it would take a lot of effort and add a lot of complexity, and the amount of marginal benefit it would provide (over keyword matching or some other simpler system) is unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So depending on what you're asking for, the answer might be anywhere from &quot;post a more specific request&quot; to &quot;sure is a nifty idea, but not practical for the near future.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29551" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T09:34:21.123" LastActivityDate="2016-10-28T18:16:57.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4421" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-01T16:03:13.243" Score="10" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently I am trying to guide a user get to the answer of her/his question by asking successive questions. I believe this technique in general can be a good way to help someone learn, as opposed to giving a quick answer. However should this happen in the comments or in chat?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PRO: it shows a step by step guide to the answer  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CON: the discovery process is mainly useful for the original OP  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside: this is assuming the final answer will be posted by one of us as the accepted answer, so people from search engines can quickly get the definitive answer if they want to.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit: forgot the link to the question that sparked this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/243521/maximum-likelihood-estimation-of-winning-points&quot;&gt;Maximum Likelihood Estimation of winning points&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="135069" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2016-11-03T23:02:48.223" Title="Should the comments be used to guide someone to the answer?" Tags="|discussion|answers|comment|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4421" CreationDate="2016-11-01T16:23:58.523" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this question &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt;, or at any rate the OP can benefit from its being treated as such; &amp;amp; it's preferable that this back-&amp;amp;-forth is clearly visible to anyone else reading it. &lt;strike&gt;The comments can always be tidied up into an answer when you're done&amp;mdash;perhaps picking &amp;amp; choosing which parts of the discovery process may be of most general interest.&lt;/strike&gt; It'll help deter people from rushing in with a full answer, &amp;amp; later on provide an good example of how to treat questions like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2016-11-01T16:50:45.460" LastActivityDate="2016-11-01T16:50:45.460" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4423" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4429" CreationDate="2016-11-01T21:18:14.430" Score="23" ViewCount="583" Body="&lt;p&gt;And a related question, &quot;Who owns the text of an answer I write on StackExchange?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hypothetically, If I take the text of an answer I wrote on StackExchange and include it word for word, verbatim, in an article or book I write, would I be running afoul of copyright law?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this specific question, does anyone know the terms and conditions of this site in detail? What did I agree to when I clicked yes/join? :P&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97925" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-02-20T18:05:28.347" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T18:05:28.347" Title="If I use my own StackExchange answers elsewhere, am I violating copyright law?" Tags="|discussion|support|policy|references|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4423" CreationDate="2016-11-01T22:54:00.890" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal&quot;&gt;http://stackexchange.com/legal&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth,&lt;sup&gt;&amp;dagger;&lt;/sup&gt; my understanding of all that is that you're perfectly free to reproduce anything you've written here elsewhere; but you can't stop someone else reproducing it provided they properly attribute it to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;dagger; I'm not giving legal advice, &amp;amp; don't represent Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2016-11-01T22:54:00.890" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4425" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4431" CreationDate="2016-11-02T15:11:13.307" Score="8" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to promote a question to my Twitter followers, and I thought I might find a Twitter stream of CV questions that would have something I could retweet. I only found &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/statsqa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;@statsqa&lt;/a&gt; which tweets some messages, but not the one I was looking for (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/243697/how-to-distinguish-22-variables-in-a-stacked-bar-graph&quot;&gt;How to Distinguish 22 Variables in a Stacked Bar Graph?&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the function of @statsqa Twitter account? Is/should there be a stream of all questions? Or maybe those with some vote threshold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If some rule already exists, it would good to explain it in the Twitter account's bio.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1191" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2016-11-04T23:02:12.070" Title="How is Cross Validated represented on Twitter?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4426" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-03T08:33:32.727" Score="-5" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just noticed this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/243679/how-can-i-make-seaborn-plot-the-null-values&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/243679/how-can-i-make-seaborn-plot-the-null-values&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question have 9 views, and it is already voted to be closed by 5 users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means, that the OP + me + 5 &quot;close voters&quot; = 7, basically the question had only 2 silent users actually viewed the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would advice to reopen the question, and give it a chance, since it is not off-topic, and there is enough info in it to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67447" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-11-03T23:00:39.603" Title="Question on plotting in Python closed very quickly" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|closing-questions|software|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4426" CreationDate="2016-11-03T12:49:11.923" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Contrary to your &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4426/question-closed-very-quickly#comment11266_4426&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt;, questions that are &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; about how to use &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; (e.g., &lt;code&gt;ggplot2&lt;/code&gt;) are off topic here, whether for visualization or analysis or other purposes, and are regularly closed as such.  The same is true for questions that are only about how to use &lt;code&gt;Python&lt;/code&gt; (e.g., &lt;code&gt;seaborn&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;matplotlib&lt;/code&gt;, etc.), &lt;code&gt;Stata&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Minitab&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;SAS&lt;/code&gt;, etc.  A question such as, 'should I use barplots or boxplots for these data' is about &lt;em&gt;data visualization&lt;/em&gt;, and is on topic here.  A question like 'how to I make a barplot in seaborn' is not about data visualization, it is about &lt;em&gt;how to use seaborn&lt;/em&gt;.  Such questions can be on topic on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; and regularly get good answers there.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this policy is applied consistently across software.  Examine the questions listed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ggplot2&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ggplot2&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ggplot2&lt;/a&gt; tag.  When viewed in the &lt;strong&gt;newest&lt;/strong&gt; tab, you will see that all of the most recent 8 questions have been closed.  But what about a question like: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/235367/7290&quot;&gt;Visualizing highly dimensional data with response that can take only 3 values?&lt;/a&gt;, which is tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ggplot2&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ggplot2&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ggplot2&lt;/a&gt; and wasn't closed?  If you look at the thread, you will see the question reads, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I fail to think of a good way to visualize these data. I would like to visualize the space formed by the explanatory variables a,b,c,e,f and see which combinations is causing the the y variable to take one value or another.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is a question about how to visualize data; &lt;code&gt;ggplot2&lt;/code&gt; is simply the OP's preferred software.  But the OP may not get an answer to that part, and it is part of the social contract here that that is OK.  (In fact, neither of the two answers include &lt;code&gt;ggplot2&lt;/code&gt; code; the one that has plots were made with &lt;code&gt;JMP&lt;/code&gt;.)  This example provides another way to think about this issue:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a question could be well answered using other software, it is probably on topic here.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the answer doesn't matter, but only the code demonstrating the plot does, and it must use the same software, then the question is about the software, not the plot or the data.  It is off topic on CV, but may well be on topic elsewhere (like SO).  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a technical detail, almost certainly the close votes were applied from the review queue.  The views of the thread in the review queue do not count towards the views enumerated on the thread.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2016-11-03T16:44:18.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4423" CreationDate="2016-11-04T13:04:56.420" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your content is &lt;em&gt;yours&lt;/em&gt;: you own it, and can use it howsoever you wish. You may also license it to other people to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By posting something here, you grant Stack Exchange a license to host and reproduce your content. Of course you do: otherwise they couldn’t legally do so. The license is &lt;em&gt;non-exclusive&lt;/em&gt;, meaning that you can also license your content to other people (i.e., post it elsewhere). It’s still your content, and you are still the copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be specific, the licence is &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 3.0&lt;/a&gt;, as specified in the footer of every page. The full license text is, of course, written in legalese, but it’s fairly straightforward. However, Creative Commons themselves provide &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a neat human-readable summary&lt;/a&gt;, as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note, this is addressed to the &lt;em&gt;consumer&lt;/em&gt; of the content, so the &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; here is the person &lt;em&gt;reading&lt;/em&gt; and potentially reproducing the text. You yourself are “the licensor” — by posting your content to a Stack Exchange site, you are granting this license.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are free to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Share&lt;/strong&gt; — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Adapt&lt;/strong&gt; — remix, transform, and build upon the material&#xA;  for any purpose, even commercially.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Under the following terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Attribution&lt;/strong&gt; — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ShareAlike&lt;/strong&gt; — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No additional restrictions&lt;/strong&gt; — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13966" LastEditorUserId="13966" LastEditDate="2017-02-20T15:19:23.860" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T15:19:23.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4430" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4432" CreationDate="2016-11-04T18:40:57.180" Score="1" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a response (answer) is flagged as answering an OPs question (&quot;accepted&quot;) and that decision is subsequently reversed, how does this happen? Who has the authority to reverse an answer? What are the typical reasons for these reversals? How often does this occur? Is a record of this change kept somewhere? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78229" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-11-06T20:06:20.630" LastActivityDate="2016-11-06T20:06:20.630" Title="When an answer is marked as &quot;accepted&quot; and later reversed, how and why can it happen?" Tags="|discussion|answers|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4425" CreationDate="2016-11-04T23:02:12.070" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To expand on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4425/how-is-cross-validated-represented-on-twitter?cb=1#comment11252_4425&quot;&gt;Glen_b's comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think this is relevant &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/183407/how-does-the-twitter-bot-work&quot;&gt;meta.stackexchange.com/questions/183407/...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The official Twitter account for this stack is &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/StackStats&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;@StackStats&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see this if you go to &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites#science-oldest&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; and click on the Twitter link below our site name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89026" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2016-11-04T23:02:12.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4430" CreationDate="2016-11-05T17:19:57.013" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect this is a confusion.  Here are some screenshots:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is what I see on a question from someone other than me who hasn't accepted the answer:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tWJW6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tWJW6.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here is what it looks like when there are two answers to a question from someone other than me, when the OP has accepted one:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ehoXm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ehoXm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;These two are what I see when I am the author of the question, and I have accepted an answer:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GRLpe.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GRLpe.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0VfcA.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0VfcA.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the point here is that when you are the OP, you will always see the check mark, whether you have accepted that answer or not, or even if you have accepted another answer.  Only the OP can accept an answer / click the check mark.  (The SE developers &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; of course, but no one else can&amp;mdash;including the moderators.)  Moreover, the OP can always switch to accepting a different answer, by clicking the check mark for a different answer, or can simply un-accept an answer by clicking the check mark again.  The only thing you can see differently (when you are the OP), is the color of the check mark, which may not be very salient.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess is that you missaw or misremember the check mark as having been green before, even though it wasn't.  Another possibility is that there was a weird and isolated bug that caused only that question to be displayed incorrectly for just you.  I have no way of ruling that out, but from a Bayesian perspective, my prior is very low.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2016-11-05T17:19:57.013" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4433" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4438" CreationDate="2016-11-05T20:14:21.753" Score="10" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the usage is distinct, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/244425/how-to-handle-0-inflated-data-set&quot;&gt;this question's usage&lt;/a&gt; suggests the distinction is opaque. But to my understanding, the only difference is morphological inflection and not statistical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-11-07T18:18:07.827" Title="We have both [zero-inflated] and [zero-inflation] tags. Do we need both?" Tags="|discussion|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4436" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4437" CreationDate="2016-11-07T14:41:06.170" Score="10" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I look to the close review queue I sometimes find that other voters have given a different reason to close from the one I has eventually decided on. Sometimes though I was only 60:40 in favour of my decision over theirs. I see from the documentation that it is just the overall count of 5 which matters but would it be more helpful to questioners if I went with the majority? I am not proposing to vote for something I definitely disagree obviously, that would be unhelpful and dubious behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2016-11-07T20:50:21.733" LastActivityDate="2016-11-07T22:19:03.040" Title="Does unanimity of reasons to close matter?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|votes|review|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4436" CreationDate="2016-11-07T15:21:07.927" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that this is common. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't find it especially troubling on the whole. If a question is unacceptable on any ground, it doesn't belong. If you throw something out, it is secondary why you do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, &lt;strong&gt;good (concise, precise, informative) feedback will tell the OP what was wrong (and help them to do it less often in the future)&lt;/strong&gt;. In addition, that feedback &lt;strong&gt;may remind others of the boundaries we have (and, more optimistically, of where they tend to be drawn)&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the mix of reasons can imply some inconsistency. Whether the inconsistency is problematic is a deeper question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example 1: a question is, according to different voters, too broad &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; unclear. This can often happen with poor questions. Anything close to How should I analyse my data? can be a poor question on both grounds: it is too general without more specifics on the problem and it can be unclear what kind of answer is expected. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example 2: a question is, according to different voters, too much focused on code in some software &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; deserves migration to Stack Overflow. This is a common clash. Sometimes a visceral &quot;No! this is really a programming question&quot; can disagree with a recommendation to migrate. The need here is to look closely to see if at the heart of the question there is a reproducible code example that would be acceptable on Stack Overflow. That's a tough call unless you have some familiarity with what does and does not go down well there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastActivityDate="2016-11-07T15:21:07.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4433" CreationDate="2016-11-07T18:18:07.827" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whuber's comment addresses this: the two are now synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastActivityDate="2016-11-07T18:18:07.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4436" CreationDate="2016-11-07T22:19:03.040" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, just vote the way you think; (weighted) majority rules as to what reason it closes under. If you think that a post could be closed under several different close reasons, post a comment explaining the problems for the benefit of the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2016-11-07T22:19:03.040" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4440" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-08T05:27:54.563" Score="-6" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;I confess that I made a new tag: &lt;code&gt;identity&lt;/code&gt;. A search of 'identity' on the main site yielded 1110 questions, and being able to label something as an identity and search for it is a good thing. Identities are extremely important when writing new statistical density functions, and can disguise two expressions that are equal, but not recognizably so. When I develop new pdf's, CDF's, expected values, and the like, I keep a separate list of useful identities that makes it possible for me to work through those statistical formulas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Identities are important to note explicitly because if you do not know them by heart, or at least recognize that they might exist for a function, you will be stuck completely doing integration (e.g., CDF finding), simplification, expectation, proofs, and other mathematical steps. Almost any class of functions has numerous identities the existence of which should be known to do novel statistical development work. For example, hyperbolic functions have &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_function#Identities&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;numerous identities&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, question is, what do you think about &lt;code&gt;identity&lt;/code&gt; as a new tag? See &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/195460/understanding-an-estimator-identity&quot;&gt;Understanding an Estimator Identity&lt;/a&gt; as an example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-11-19T12:13:14.053" Title="What do you think of the new tag: identity" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4423" CreationDate="2016-11-08T12:53:17.580" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;An important other note, aside more licensing issues, is the issue of self-plagiarism. Copying your own work without citation can be considered a form of plagiarism. Now I mainly hear about this in cases where parts of one published article is reused in another, but it might also play a role here. So if you want to be on the safe side: make sure to cite the page you wrote it first, especially if you copy verbatim. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="135069" LastActivityDate="2016-11-08T12:53:17.580" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4442" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4443" CreationDate="2016-11-08T13:25:42.153" Score="6" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am often asking myself &quot;how do I do ...&quot; with formatting, but what I am trying to do is (afaict) not in the formatting help.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where do I go with questions that are formatting related and not stats related?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did you find that destination?  Is there a link that I missed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22452" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2016-11-08T14:57:48.367" LastActivityDate="2016-11-08T15:40:05.063" Title="Is there a place where I can ask &quot;how do I ...&quot; for formatting questions" Tags="|support|questions|formatting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4442" CreationDate="2016-11-08T14:56:56.797" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the question is about formatting posts/content on Cross Validated Stack Exchange, then as responded by amoeba in comments, ask here on Meta. Some related tags on this subject are &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/formatting&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;formatting&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;formatting&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/math-display&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;math-display&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;math-display&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;design&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, take a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/editing-help&quot;&gt;markdown help&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2016-11-08T14:56:56.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4442" CreationDate="2016-11-08T15:40:05.063" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether asking or answering a question, you will be typing into a textbox with a menu bar at its head.  At the very right of that menu bar is a &quot;?&quot; icon which when clicked produces this interface:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dCAO8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dCAO8.png&quot; alt=&quot;Figure 1&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use the icons, the menus, or the &quot;advanced help&quot; to get more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When &lt;em&gt;asking&lt;/em&gt; a question, you will see more information in a panel appearing to the right:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/InAfxm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/InAfxm.png&quot; alt=&quot;Figure 2&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One trick I use, especially for formatting comments, is to &lt;em&gt;start asking a question&lt;/em&gt; (follow the &quot;Ask Question&quot; link at the upper right of any page) so I can avail myself of these features as well as the WYSIWIG rendering of the text.  I then copy the text and &lt;em&gt;abandon the page without posting the question&lt;/em&gt; (this is important!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2016-11-08T15:40:05.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4445" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-10T03:10:32.820" Score="5" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed when editing &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/230415/is-there-any-mathematical-basis-for-the-bayesian-vs-frequentist-debate&quot;&gt;Is there any *mathematical* basis for the Bayesian vs frequentist debate?&lt;/a&gt; that entering italicized text in the title field is problematic. The markup &lt;code&gt;*asterisks*&lt;/code&gt; = &lt;em&gt;asterisks&lt;/em&gt; doesn't have the desired effect&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the correct way to italicize text in the titles? Do we prefer &lt;code&gt;$math$&lt;/code&gt; = $math$ or &lt;code&gt;*asterisks*&lt;/code&gt; = *asterisks*? Is there something better? Should we avoid markup in titles altogether? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we edit question titles with markup to conform to our chosen style?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="103407" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T09:19:57.480" Title="Italics in question titles: $math$ or *asterisks*?" Tags="|discussion|status-declined|formatting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2794" CreationDate="2016-11-10T09:25:23.523" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sites which have a computer vision tag might be interesting. The number of quesions asked there is an indicator for how relevant this might be. However, you should also consider that some sites (like StackOverflow) are much bigger than others (like datascience, which might be a good fit for you).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/computer-vision&quot;&gt;StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt;: 5665 questions (I guess mainly about implementation; rather not about the algorithms themselves)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/computer-vision&quot;&gt;DSP&lt;/a&gt;: 498 questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/computer-vision&quot;&gt;CS&lt;/a&gt;: 114 questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/computer-vision&quot;&gt;Stats&lt;/a&gt;: 104&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://robotics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/computer-vision&quot;&gt;Robotics&lt;/a&gt;: 98 questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scicomp.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/computer-vision&quot;&gt;SciComp&lt;/a&gt;: 31 questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/computer-vision&quot;&gt;Datascience&lt;/a&gt;: 14 questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25741" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2016-11-10T09:25:23.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2794" CreationDate="2016-11-10T13:53:03.080" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to the other options listed here, I would think computer vision falls within the purview of artificial intelligence.  There is now an &lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;AI SE site&lt;/a&gt;, and I notice that it has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/computer-vision&quot;&gt;computer-vision&lt;/a&gt; tag.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:53:09.823" LastActivityDate="2016-11-10T13:53:03.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4448" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-11T02:13:07.243" Score="14" ViewCount="378" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange recently started a collaboration project with the University of Melbourne, in an attempt to improve the automatic detection of duplicate questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More information on the project and a call for help from the community can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/286329/project-reduplication-of-deduplication-has-begun&quot;&gt;Project Reduplication of Deduplication Has Begun!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In it, Tim Post mentions that Doris Hoogeveen (me) will post a message on the different meta sites to let you know that we're ready for help. This is it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a brief summary, the project is about finding ways to automatically determine if two questions are duplicates, and also to detect the opposite: falsely tagged duplicates. To validate our methods, we need manual judgements from people who really know the data. This is where we need your help. It is impossible to manually annotate all the data from Stack Exchange, and so we have applied several filters to make sure we only show you questions pairs with a high likelihood of being duplicates. This does not mean that most of the pairs will be duplicates. Instead, it means that the percentage of duplicates in there will be much higher than in a random sample, and it means that the pairs will be informative for our model, even if they are labelled as non-duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Participation is completely optional, and there's no minimum time requirement. There's a reputation requirement however: only people who have duplicate question tagging rights on the site can participate. That is people with at least 3000 reputation points, or a gold badge. This is to ensure the annotations are compatible with StackExchange's quality standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in participating in the project, please head over to the annotation interface, which can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://hum.csse.unimelb.edu.au/se-annotate/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://hum.csse.unimelb.edu.au/se-annotate/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can log in with your Stack Exchange account, so no sign up is required. The site also contains some more information on the project, which might answer some questions you may have. And I'm also happy to answer them here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="136419" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2019-03-21T08:46:32.860" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T08:46:32.860" Title="Project Reduplication of Deduplication - Cross Validated" Tags="|discussion|support|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="31" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4448" CreationDate="2016-11-11T04:31:46.793" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/212581/unbiasedness-of-the-ols-estimators&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; has MathJax $\beta$'s in it. They're rendering as $?$'s for me. ($\hat{?}$ amuses me in particular -- it tickles my funny bone for some reason):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2xLp8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2xLp8.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the rest of the MathJax is fine there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2016-11-11T18:39:49.563" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4448" CreationDate="2016-11-11T06:21:42.030" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Possible problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When presenting this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/123262/how-to-find-set-of-directions-in-stahel-donoho-outlyingness-measure&quot;&gt;How to find set of directions in Stahel-Donoho outlyingness measure?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it screws up over the &quot;link&quot; to the paper listed at the bottom, though this is probably the fault of the poster. Anyway, I thought I'd give it a mention:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Original:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YlDcu.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YlDcu.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As presented:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SFCfU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SFCfU.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Another issue:) It seems to have a fixation on &quot;&lt;em&gt;What is the meaning of p values and t values in statistical tests?&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, which it has paired with ... I don't know, maybe 5-7 different posts so far. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least one of your algorithms seems to be &lt;em&gt;infatuated&lt;/em&gt; with this post. They should get a room. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that's what's supposed to happen then fine. But if not, I figured you would probably want to know. Two other posts have come up several times each. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2016-11-11T06:35:28.860" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4448" CreationDate="2016-11-11T22:32:35.287" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This reminds me a bit of the issues with the review queues.  The interface is not as nice as the regular site, and it doesn't present the information the way I'm used to looking at it.  It would be good to have links to the threads so I can view them on the normal site.  Right now I'm spending some time searching for them.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2016-11-11T22:32:35.287" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4452" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-13T13:53:15.017" Score="7" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, tag scoring (used as a counter towards a &lt;code&gt;tag badge&lt;/code&gt;) measures score based on how many upvotes all answers under a certain tag have gathered. It does not count &lt;code&gt;accepted answers&lt;/code&gt; however. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering why is this the case, and whether this can/should be changed. Presumably, one would like to avoid having an OP generate two scores with an upvote + accepted. However, oftentimes new users have no upvoting privileges and thus can only accept an answer. Even when they do upvote and accept, it can be said that it deserves two scores.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132971" LastEditorUserId="4454" LastEditDate="2017-04-26T04:02:30.947" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T04:02:30.947" Title="Counting accepted answers towards tag badges" Tags="|feature-request|status-declined|tags|badges|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="67" CreationDate="2016-11-13T20:00:13.230" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with &lt;em&gt;Larry Wang&lt;/em&gt; and I want to add my two cents. As Larry noticed, to search something you need to know its name. You need to have access to the appropriate sources (e.g. textbooks). Yes, there is Wikipedia, but since almost everything nowadays is already covered to some extent on Wikipedia does it make literally any question invalid and too obvious? Sometimes Wikipedia articles are not clear or low quality. Sometimes even if you find relevant resources on the web you may need them to be explained to you in different words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't need to upvote such questions (you may downvote if you really consider them too obvious) and you don't have to answer them. However if something is unclear for someone and there is a person willing to answer, then it seems that this site was created for exactly such a case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, even if we closed such questions this would not lead to OPs learning the answers (unless provided as comments, but then why not post as answers?). If we close such questions, then new questions will appear (I strongly believe that the probability of basic questions appearing again is greater than in case of hard questions), so we would close them over and over again rather than posting a single answer that can be searched. Or in the worst case, we can close those questions as duplicates, so to make searching easier in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2016-11-14T12:55:10.650" LastActivityDate="2016-11-14T12:55:10.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4445" CreationDate="2016-11-15T09:12:12.380" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Briefly summarizing the discussion in the comments above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Using LaTeX markup to write in italic in titles is a dirty hack that should really be avoided:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It does not look good because of the wrong font and wrong kerning: e.g. &lt;code&gt;$effect$&lt;/code&gt; renders as $effect$ instead of &lt;em&gt;effect&lt;/em&gt;. Kerning can be fixed by writing &lt;code&gt;$\textit{effect}$&lt;/code&gt;: $\textit{effect}$, but the font remains serif.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It will only be rendered on our own site. In Google searches this will appear as plain text leaving many people wondering what the heck these dollar signs are supposed to mean.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It ruins the logic of the markup which is (i) bad in itself, and (ii) can produce all sorts of weird effects on non-standard devices such as e.g. for blind people.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Standard markdown markup (asterisks or underscores) will not work in titles. Avoid it too.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Writing &lt;code&gt;*effect*&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;_effect_&lt;/code&gt; in the title will leave it unrendered and this is not going to change, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/237125&quot;&gt;Can we get markdown support in Question&amp;#39;s `title` field?&lt;/a&gt;. So it is a bit pointless.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One could argue, as @Scortchi notes, that unrendered &lt;code&gt;*effect*&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;_effect_&lt;/code&gt; is nevertheless following a common convention for showing emphasis in plain text. So if appearing in Google search, it will not be very confusing. Therefore I'd say one &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; use it but only in exceptional circumstances when emphasis is really crucially important.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, as @Scortchi also notes, even in print there seems to be a widespread aversion to using italics in titles.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;so should asterisks/dollars for italics be removed in titles? Should we edit qs and delete the asterisks/dollars that were intended for emphasis/italics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think dollars should be removed, yes. Asterisks are to be avoided but can stay if they make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T09:19:57.480" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4455" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-15T18:05:15.987" Score="5" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am curious about the use of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/econometrics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;econometrics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;econometrics&lt;/a&gt; tag. Its Wiki says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a field of statistics dealing with applications to economics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes some sense, but I tend to think of the distinction between econometrics and the rest of statistics more in terms of &lt;em&gt;models and techniques&lt;/em&gt; (such as structural models based on economic theory and instrumental variables estimation) rather than just the &lt;em&gt;applications&lt;/em&gt;. Because on one hand one can do a &quot;purely statistical&quot; modelling of an applied economics problem, but on the other hand one can do something &quot;typically econometric&quot; (distinct from a typical statistical application). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would rather have an &lt;code&gt;economics&lt;/code&gt; tag for application in economics. Now we do have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/macroeconomics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;macroeconomics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;macroeconomics&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/finance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;finance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;finance&lt;/a&gt; tags for questions that have macroeconomics or finance as their applications. (Macroeconomics is clearly a subfield of economics, and finance can also be considered a subfield of economics, although this is less clear cut; so probably an &lt;code&gt;economics&lt;/code&gt; tag would be too broad, I am not sure.) And that is just fine, it helps people interested in macroeconomic or financial applications track the relevant questions. Meanwhile, I would see a different role for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/econometrics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;econometrics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;econometrics&lt;/a&gt; tag based on what I articulated above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any opinions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T18:05:15.987" Title="Use of [tag:econometrics] tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4456" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-15T22:37:57.730" Score="7" ViewCount="267" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is first a question within this question, and, that is &quot;Where should I be posing the question?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are certainly people on this site with marvelous minds. The second question, the primary one, relates to the fact that it's nice to have a reputation on Cross Validated, and, many of us, especially those in the &quot;leagues&quot; with 200+ reputations have considerable knowledge of things statistical. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there then some measure of reputation, e.g. quarterly ranking, on Cross Validated that is well correlated to some measure of ability to use statistics, e.g., educational level in statistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the examples (the e.g.'s) I used are somewhat arbitrary, and in the extreme I am asking something along the lines of determining what a &quot;pseudo-PhD&quot; in Cross-Validation might be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T16:05:35.217" Title="What is the relationship between some measure of reputation on our site and statistical prowess?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="48" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4457" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4458" CreationDate="2016-11-16T14:01:55.163" Score="11" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that one question I asked recently (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/246234/105234&quot;&gt;Showing a correlation and its p-value as a color&lt;/a&gt;) got incorrectly in hold. The reason is because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because EITHER it is not about statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, or data visualization, OR it focuses on programming, debugging, or performing routine operations within a statistical computing platform. If the latter, you could try the support links we maintain&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is how to transform some data for a heatmap visualization. Maybe it was closed because it &quot;focuses on programming, debugging, or performing routine operations within a statistical computing platform&quot; and I could rewrite somehow to focus more on the statistics behind. But I doubt it, because I didn't mention any program, or any error or it was closed due to being routine operation of a statistical computing platform. However, AFAIK, it is not common to &quot;join&quot; correlation and p-values in a single number. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I improve the question to be reopened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105234" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-11-16T19:11:02.423" Title="My question about visualization got on hold" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|closing-questions|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4457" CreationDate="2016-11-16T17:28:22.730" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it was perhaps a mistake to close it in the first place&amp;mdash;in any case I re-opened it after your edit &amp;amp; before I saw this. Sorry for any inconvenience&amp;mdash;fortunately it was only closed a for couple of hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2016-11-16T17:28:22.730" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="67" CreationDate="2016-11-16T17:38:42.670" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think no general rule can be applied here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As some people already mentioned especially in statistics it is often hard to google since you do not know the exact term to search for yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some users the question will seem stupid, while for other it is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;easily answered by Wikipedia or Google&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is is highly user specific. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92235" LastActivityDate="2016-11-16T17:38:42.670" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4280" CreationDate="2016-11-17T18:21:05.833" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are now just over 200 &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/permutation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;permutation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;permutation&lt;/a&gt; left which I think could all without loss of information be re-tagged [permutation-test]. Some of the others were [combinatorics], some had little to do with permutation or permutation tests, and one seemed more about entropy so I re-tagged it [information-theory]. Just to clarify as suggested by amoeba in a comment all the rest are permutation test related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not know how to merge the tag with [permutation-test] and I do not have the right magic powers anyway so if a moderator would like to do that it would eliminate the tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update by @amoeba, Feb 21:&lt;/strong&gt; I have looked through all the remaining [permutation] threads and re-tagged those that I thought were not about permutation tests. There are currently 166 threads left in [permutation] and they are all about permutation tests. I believe we can now go ahead with moving them all to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/permutation-test&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;permutation-test&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;permutation-test&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update, Feb 22:&lt;/strong&gt; Done by @Scortchi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-02-22T14:02:38.153" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T14:02:38.153" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="67" CreationDate="2016-11-18T18:06:49.217" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interesting example you gave. Look at the unresolved issues with AIC on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Akaike_information_criterion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia talk page&lt;/a&gt;. The quality of posts on CV for AIC is distinctly better, e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/577/is-there-any-reason-to-prefer-the-aic-or-bic-over-the-other&quot;&gt;Is there any reason to prefer the AIC or BIC over the other?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is not the same quality democratic structure on Wikipedia as there is on CV, and a good deal of bullying on Wikipedia that we do not permit here. Wikipedia has self-appointed authorities, which can result in some really heavily biased opinions. On CV who has authority is much more refined, obvious and commonly understood. This issue is important once it is understood what the strengths and weaknesses of democracy are. Democracy is good for identifying points of agreement, but democratic discard of ideas tends to be highly flawed as it cannot easily identify common misconception due to the logistics of discrediting &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;confirmation bias&lt;/a&gt;. For discard of bias, a good structure for recognizing earned authoritarian status is needed, as a &quot;leader&quot; in a democracy has a better chance of identifying when common opinion is incorrect than a simple vote would allow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summarizing, I trust CV but not Wikipedia, and I take Wikipedia with a grain of salt. Google is all inclusive, and does not differentiate between quality of opinion, or for that matter, quality of scientific journal opinions, which, BTW, has deteriorated with the inclusion of predatory publisher's listings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having democratic features on a site is good when a consensus can be achieved, that is, majority opinion is good at finding true positives. However, expertise weighted opinion is better than majority opinion at identifying false negatives. Read this article for &lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0134269&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;specifics&lt;/a&gt;. I mean it---read it! We sort of know this, as downvoting costs us 2 reputation points, and only penalizes at 2/5$^{ths}$ to 2/10$^{ths}$ of the rate of positive voting. Moreover, voting to close or open a question requires a reputation of 3k+, downvoting requires a reputation of 125+ whereas upvoting only 15+. I would argue that voting to open a question should require less reputation than voting to close one. PS @NickCox RE: &quot;interested in seeing that evidence&quot;, as above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our current policy is 'already answered by CV.' I would suggest that we continue that. When we give an answer that refers to another source, that source has been screened by the person answering, and if there are problems associated with that source, we have a democratic procedure for disagreeing with that screener's opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2017-01-03T23:45:52.807" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4440" CreationDate="2016-11-19T12:13:14.053" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are multiple good reasons mentioned in the comments, but let me add my five cents, especially as you &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4384/is-dirac-delta-worth-its-own-tag/4417?noredirect=1#comment11493_4417&quot;&gt;pinged me&lt;/a&gt; on my own question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, we promote the identity function for convolution to tag status,&#xA;  but not the identity meta.stats.stackexchange.com/questions/4440/….&#xA;  So, we name individual leaves, and ignore their tree. What, I muse,&#xA;  would we do with a whole forest? LOL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess that you mention &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; reason why your proposal was downvoted. Such tag would be &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; to be helpful. Using your own example, &lt;code&gt;[forest]&lt;/code&gt; tag is not helpful if you are looking precisely for &lt;code&gt;[blueberries]&lt;/code&gt;, or &lt;code&gt;[mushrooms]&lt;/code&gt;, and if you are looking for mushrooms in the forest, then since they are a subset of items in the forest, it is enough to search for them directly. I guess that if you are looking for information involving identity, then you are not interested in going through all the possible identities in probability theory, but an identity that is connected to some specific problem of your interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover if we had &lt;code&gt;[identity]&lt;/code&gt; tag, then maybe we also should create other tags as: &lt;code&gt;[equality]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[ineqality]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[integral]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[axiom]&lt;/code&gt; etc. What if you asked a question that involved using some axioms, identities, inequalities and calculating integrals? Would using all those tags be &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; needed in here? How would you decide which of those tags are more important then others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could check also &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3031/tag-candidates-for-removal#&quot;&gt;Tag-candidates for removal&lt;/a&gt; thread or go through &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tags&quot;&gt;other discussions about tags&lt;/a&gt; to see why we deleted or considered deleting other tags. In general, &lt;em&gt;too specific&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; tags are often considered not very useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2016-11-19T12:13:14.053" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4464" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-21T10:12:51.347" Score="14" ViewCount="287" Body="&lt;p&gt;On StackExchange.com we have puzzles-dedicated site &lt;a href=&quot;https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; for coding puzzles, math puzzles &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/puzzle&quot;&gt;appear on math.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; and have their own tag there. We &lt;em&gt;also have&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/puzzle&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;puzzle&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;puzzle&lt;/a&gt; but is was used only ten times... There are nice probability-related puzzles (&lt;a href=&quot;http://xianblog.wordpress.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Xi'an often solves them on his blog&lt;/a&gt;), and one can easily produce multiple other such puzzles. They can be fun and they may become a nice feature of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are such puzzles on-topic on our site? They could be fun, but on another hand there are several risks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site can get flooded with puzzles,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;homework &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; questions may be posted as &quot;puzzles&quot; by lazy students who want the answer right away.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:50:55.277" LastActivityDate="2016-11-26T20:46:52.113" Title="Are puzzles on-topic on CV?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4464" CreationDate="2016-11-21T14:16:15.843" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember a long time ago, organizing and disambiguating tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/puzzle&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;puzzle&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;puzzle&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/games&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;games&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;games&lt;/a&gt; with help of @whuber. Since then, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/puzzle&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;puzzle&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;puzzle&lt;/a&gt; tag was not used that much, like you mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I'd say the risks which were listed do not apply for this specific tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/games&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;games&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;games&lt;/a&gt; tag seems to have received more questions since then. So, maybe it is worth revising it, to see if it has been used correctly; and if not, to evaluate what to do next (for example, making &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/puzzle&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;puzzle&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;puzzle&lt;/a&gt; a synonym of it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastActivityDate="2016-11-21T14:16:15.843" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3175" CreationDate="2016-11-24T03:42:14.363" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;[We often don't close these - but I increasingly tend to think we should put them on hold until clarified]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What test should I run?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but which contain no indication of any question of interest whatever, instead focusing entirely on a description of the data (and that usually omitting important information), as if the form of the data were the only relevant factor in deciding what tests are suitable. [The use of the word &quot;run&quot; rather than some other verb often acts as a hint that the asker is using SPSS.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I blame the way stats is often taught and especially the tendency to focus on following a recipe. In particular I think these questions tend to follow from --&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;an uncritical focus on Stevens' typology (nominal/ordinal/interval/ratio) as if that were the only factor of relevance (or indeed the only way of categorizing variables).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;prescribing some kinds of analysis and proscribing others with reference only to that typology rather than to the substantive questions of interest and to the properties of the inferential procedures considered. Many times an analysis that would be proscribed in this way (or simply not considered at all) turns out to be a perfectly sensible as a way addressing the questions of interest, while the prescribed analysis may sometimes be considerably less useful (or even misleading).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;over-reliance on a &quot;cheat sheet&quot; or &quot;summary table&quot; or other recipe that lists an analysis to go with a form of data, which often blocks people from searching for anything better. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions are also associated with a common tendency to think that parametric procedures are limited to normal-theory procedures and nonparametric procedures are what you use when you reject a test of normality; often there's some perceived issue with normality that prompts the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, the publishing house &lt;em&gt;O$\hspace 0.2mm$RLY$\hspace{0.1mm} ^?$&lt;/em&gt; has &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8eHQh.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an entire volume dedicated to the subject&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8eHQh.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8eHQhm.png&quot; alt=&quot;Image of the front cover of a book in the style of an O&amp;#39;Reilly book, which has the title &amp;quot;What Test Should I run?&amp;quot; with subtitle &amp;quot;A vaguely definitive guide&amp;quot;. There&amp;#39;s a large black and white drawing of a bat in a very old style. The author is Noah deCernibal-Hypothesis and there&amp;#39;s a small line right at the top that says &amp;quot;Asking the unanswerable question&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(click the link or the picture for a larger image)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2017-09-18T20:17:54.180" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T20:17:54.180" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4468" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4469" CreationDate="2016-11-24T10:21:46.363" Score="15" ViewCount="307" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/206518/reputation-histogram-log-log-scale#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reputation graphs&lt;/a&gt; of stats.stackexchange in a log-log scale:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tBrpX.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tBrpX.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to mean that very few users answer most of the questions, at least compared to &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/206518/reputation-histogram-log-log-scale#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stackoverflow&lt;/a&gt;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/avWFp.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/avWFp.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See this other query of &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/106250/average-quality-of-answers-by-users&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quality of answers&lt;/a&gt;, you can see that there are a few users with more than 1200 answers, and one with more than 3k answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any other data confirming that few users answer most of the questions, or am I completely wrong?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/583703/answers-by-user-on-the-last-year?MinAnswers=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;look&lt;/a&gt; at the data of the last year answers per user and reputation. 4492 users answered questions, many just 1 or 2 and 1 up to 700 answers!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2BYWA.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2BYWA.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105234" LastEditorUserId="105234" LastEditDate="2016-11-25T14:03:32.990" LastActivityDate="2016-11-28T16:11:59.900" Title="Do a few users answer lots of questions?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4468" CreationDate="2016-11-24T11:11:37.393" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;One problem with looking at the total number of answers to look at whether a few users answer most questions is it doesn't tell you whether someone is answering questions &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt;. Someone may have a thousand answers but not have answered a question in years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Yes, this may mean that the &quot;few users&quot; issue is even fewer than you suppose)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'd look at something like answers in the last year, perhaps. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But yes, a lot of answers on site are concentrated in just a few hundred users, and somewhat more concentrated than on stackoverflow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[However, that doesn't indicate that the users who answer most here are heavier answerers than on stackoverflow. I answer a fair few questions here, but it's still only an average of about 14 a week, or about two a day -- more on the weekend, somewhat fewer during the week -- but heavy answerers on SO answer more in a day than I do in a week (don't ask me how, though average answer length may be a factor).]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think at least part of the reason for that is it takes considerably less learning time to get to the point of giving reasonable answers to typical SO questions than it does here; the entry barrier is lower there. As a result, while there's something like a hundred times as many questions posted per day, there's quite a lot more than a hundred times as many regular answerers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I'd very much like to expand our base of users who answer questions regularly, but I'm really not sure of a good way to do that.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2016-11-24T16:39:01.543" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T16:39:01.543" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4468" CreationDate="2016-11-26T15:27:32.173" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've generated graphs that more directly answer your question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2086/1036&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8ek3H.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That was over two years ago, but you &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/203684/the-long-tail-of-answers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;could update with newer data if you want&lt;/a&gt;. Two years ago we were in the middle of the pack. The Math and Mathematica site were more dominated by a smaller number of users, and theoretical computer science is the most even.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also see this question about generating &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2986/1036&quot;&gt;Gini scores for sites&lt;/a&gt;. For that metric the cut-off you use to count users matters a lot. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2016-11-28T16:11:59.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4464" CreationDate="2016-11-26T20:46:52.113" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's two closely related topics here that need to be disambiguated. That is, there's a difference between &lt;em&gt;asking about&lt;/em&gt; puzzles and &lt;em&gt;posing&lt;/em&gt; puzzles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Puzzling and Code Golf StackExchanges are about &lt;em&gt;posing&lt;/em&gt; puzzles. That is, the questioner makes up a puzzle and then puts it out to the community to solve. The questioner isn't interested in finding out the answer - in many cases, they already know what it is. Instead, the point of posting the question is to see if the &lt;em&gt;answerers&lt;/em&gt; can figure out the puzzle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's very different from &lt;em&gt;asking about&lt;/em&gt; puzzles. In that situation, a puzzle is indeed part of the question, but it's the &lt;em&gt;questioner&lt;/em&gt; who is interested in figuring out the puzzle. The goal of the answerers is not solve the puzzle (though they will likely need to do so), instead their goal is to show the questioner how the questioner could have solved the puzzle themselves. (Or understand why the correct answer is the correct answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the Math Stack Exchange site link you give is very clear that it's for &lt;em&gt;asking about&lt;/em&gt; puzzles, not &lt;em&gt;posing&lt;/em&gt; them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag is meant for questions about the mathematical principles behind games, riddles, or their possible solutions. If the answer is known to you please do not use this tag to &quot;riddle&quot; other users, but rather to ask about the correctness of a possible solution or ways to extend and improve an existing solution. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CV puzzle tag description is a bit more ambiguous:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use this tag for statistical puzzles that challenge the ingenuity of the solver.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, looking at the 10 questions currently tagged &quot;puzzle&quot;, they're pretty much all of the &lt;em&gt;asking about&lt;/em&gt; variety (that is, the questioner is asking about a puzzle to understand it better), and there's only one that may (or may not be - it's a bit unclear) of the &lt;em&gt;posing&lt;/em&gt; variety (that is, the questioner is asking the question to see who is clever enough to find an answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These numbers confirm my general impression that - except for the Stack Exchanges which are dedicated to it - posing puzzles is not something that's generally done on Stack Exchange websites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69382" LastActivityDate="2016-11-26T20:46:52.113" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4473" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-28T16:22:59.820" Score="4" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/245120/for-gaussian-distribution-matrix-x-find-efx-and-sigmax-s-t-f-sum&quot;&gt;For Gaussian distribution matrix $X$, find $E(F(X))$ and $\sigma(X)$ s.t. $F=\sum f(x_i)P_i,$ given $E(f_i(x_i)),\sigma(f_i(x_i)) \forall i$&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While jbowman answers my question, I am unsatisfied. I must know why his answer is true, and the clues he gave me in the edit have not been enough. Can I repost this question to the mathematics stack? Is there some etiquette to go through before I cross post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83526" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T17:36:50.583" Title="Can I cross-post a question which answer I'm not satisfied with?" Tags="|discussion|support|questions|policy|cross-posting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4474" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4475" CreationDate="2016-11-29T14:45:06.277" Score="5" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at the review section on Cross Validated I realised that two OPs, each with reputation 1, reviewed Suggested Edit. How is that possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm attaching a picture taken today h. 10:21 a.m. (CET). In the red circled section I thought you can see participating only people with &gt; 2k reputation points. But the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/140470/user125535&quot;&gt;last&lt;/a&gt; OP in the queue (counting from left to right) has 106 reputation points. So, does this mean that he appears there because he did a Suggested Edit to its own post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rnWTU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rnWTU.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56940" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T14:08:42.447" Title="Is it possible for an OP with less than 2k reputation points to approve, reject or improve edits?" Tags="|support|review|suggested-edits|privileges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4474" CreationDate="2016-11-29T15:58:09.513" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anyone can review, and approve or deny, edits to their own posts.  That is the case whether the post at issue is a question or an answer.  Moreover, their review is final:  That is, if they are the first reviewer, there is no need for a second, and if they are the second reviewer, but their review disagrees with the first, their choice is used.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When your reputation is &gt;10k(?), you can see more of what's going on in the review queues.  It appears that was &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/140470/user125535&quot;&gt;user125535&lt;/a&gt;.  They approved an edit to their own post.  Here are some screenshots:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/b4N24.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/b4N24.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EEvGR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EEvGR.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that it is unlikely they went straight to the review queue and found this suggested edit.  They would have been notified through their inbox and followed a link to the suggested edit to approve or reject.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T14:08:42.447" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4476" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-30T07:58:57.487" Score="6" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I posted two questions about Crowdsourcing on CV. The first &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/248129/general-reference-for-crowdsourcing&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt; asking for a general reference got upvoted, while the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/247648/references-for-good-practice-in-crowdsourcing&quot;&gt;second&lt;/a&gt; specifically asking for a more specific reference concerning different experimental design decisions got closed as off-topic. However, quite a few commented that it appears to be on topic to them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me this is quite frustrating. Is crowdsourcing on topic or not? I am pretty sure it should be, because it becomes more and more important for ML, on ML conferences there are numerous papers on the topic, and the &quot;experiment-design&quot; tag on CV has about 800 questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you disagree, please give solid reasons. If not, please consider re-opening my second thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="107468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2016-12-04T11:45:45.287" Title="Are methodological questions concerning Crowdsourcing within the scope of CV?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|reopen-closed|references|machine-learning|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4477" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4478" CreationDate="2016-11-30T10:13:19.773" Score="21" ViewCount="485" Body="&lt;p&gt;All but one of my questions since September have gone unanswered. I am not complaining, of course: there's no reason why my questions should be answered. It's just that it seems to me that the style and type of questions hasn't strongly changed with respect to older questions. Thus I wonder, is there a general trend on CV, where the ratio of unanswered to answered questions is growing? Or am I wrong and my newer questions are less interesting and/or well written than the older ones? Can I do something to improve the likelihood of an answer? Other than putting bounties on each question, of course :) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2016-11-30T12:02:12.040" LastActivityDate="2016-12-09T15:03:32.843" Title="My questions don't get an answer - is it a general trend, or am I doing something wrong?" Tags="|discussion|editing|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4477" CreationDate="2016-11-30T10:49:00.140" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;The proportion of unanswered questions is indeed slowly growing because (among other things):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the number of people answering questions is growing more slowly than the number of people &lt;em&gt;asking&lt;/em&gt; questions. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the proportion of &lt;em&gt;very poor&lt;/em&gt; questions is increasing rapidly, sapping the time-resources of the very people who tend to answer questions into dealing with clarifying or closing questions. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt this relatively slow process is the cause of a sudden drop in answers for you, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of it may be a matter of luck but you can certainly improve your chances of an answer by working on your questions. Several questions already on site here deal with such issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at your recent questions, at least some of your questions seem unlikely to be of broad interest (for all they are sure to be useful to you personally); that will reduce interest in answering them; it's fine to ask but they won't necessarily be priorities. You can consider ways to make some of those questions more generally useful, which may help make them interesting to answerers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also make it easier for people to answer some of your questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the most recent one asking about references on probability links to three references &lt;em&gt;but mentions neither the authors nor the year of publication&lt;/em&gt;. Since many books on probability have similar or even identical titles, the titles alone don't really identify them. So when I see a question like that, I have to ponder whether I have time to start loading page after page on Amazon just to find out what books you're even talking about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm kind of busy (and then when I am here there's a lot of tasks to take care of besides answering questions) and even without that, there's more questions a day than I can even read, let alone give a worthwhile answer to, so if my connection is slow enough to make it take a few seconds each page, it's likely to be &quot;&lt;em&gt;Sorry, next question&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. I imagine at least some other answerers may be in a similar position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clicking through now, I only know one of those books. So even if I did decide I have time to click through to find the books, I would disqualify myself from offering a choice; again it would be a case of &quot;Sorry, next question&quot;. [A rephrase of the question may make it more likely to draw at least partial answers.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, a number of of your questions are outside my area of knowledge, or are just about within it but so specific I doubt I have enough specialized knowledge to give a useful answer. This, too, may be the case for several other potential answerers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2016-11-30T12:01:42.790" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T12:01:42.790" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4473" CreationDate="2016-11-30T17:33:03.627" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic&lt;/a&gt; help center page (which Glen_b pointed out):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please note,...,that cross-posting is not encouraged on SE sites. Choose one best location to post your question. Later, if it proves better suited on another site, it can be migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The implied word &quot;discouraged&quot; means it is not acceptable to post the same question in two different SE sites right off the bat; which apparently was not your case. Moreover, in this case, migration is not anymore an option because that question already received an on-topic answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If placing a bounty to collect better answers, or making slight edits/updates into the question to request for further clarification (as long as such edits do not mischaracterize the question and current existing answer) are not options to you, then I suggest the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ask a following up question (hence, a &lt;strong&gt;different&lt;/strong&gt; question) in the Mathematics site (if you think it will be best answered/suited there) highlighting which part of your previous question (or about the received answer) you quite did not understand and why. Make sure to write the question in a focused Q/A format. Remembering there is always the risk people will not sympathise with the new question and history for many reasons (like people considering it a dupe or a cross post, a lack of research effort, etc). It is up to you to weigh the costs and benefits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last, I found confusing you accepted an answer you were not fully satisfied with. In such cases, it is best to upvote the answer if it was helpful somehow, but not accepting it. Instead, leave a comment under the answer explaining which part you did not understand and ask for clarifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T17:33:03.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3024" CreationDate="2016-12-01T17:03:32.317" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, originally when this queue was created it was only a queue for questions that received reopen votes. It only ever had the &quot;Question&quot; tab which already displays a banner which lists the reason it was closed. We didn't put this information into the top information box because all it would be doing is duplicating information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that revisions bump questions into this queue and you most often do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; end up on a screen which displays this information, we've gone ahead and added it into the top as well so that it is easy to access. Note that it will only display the top-level reason for the closure. It does not display all the reasons that were selected by various close votes and does not display off-topic sub-reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72322" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T17:03:32.317" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3175" CreationDate="2016-12-02T17:16:02.607" Score="26" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&quot;I am working on my dissertation...&quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this a negative point? It may seem entirely natural as a lead-in, but it's a bad start. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We think statistically (what else did you expect?). A large fraction of questions starting like that turn out to be poor questions. Your question isn't doomed by such a start, but you should want to create a good  first impression. You won't want to lose readers because they have previously found such questions unappealing and back off immediately. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is it bad? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We don't need to know that.&lt;/strong&gt; It is not important information. The important information is the statistical question you want to ask. Whether that question arises in coursework, in preparing a dissertation or thesis, or in working towards a report or research paper is not crucial at all. Such context is a distraction on a par with whether it's Tuesday or the weather is good where you are. Tell us about your question: what you understand and what you need to know. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Whether you are a student doesn't make a difference.&lt;/strong&gt; Often it creates the expectation that you are going to plead -- or at least to imply -- that you're a student in special need of support. But the forum doesn't care who you are. There isn't a queue you can jump by being needier than anyone else. We have no way of judging who needs an answer most. We just care about whether you have a good question. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These may seem small points, even petty, but your question is jostling for attention with many others, so you should want it to look good. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are ways to make this kind of question even less attractive, so we will pile on with those too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't imply that you don't respect statistics.&lt;/strong&gt; Never give the impression that you regard the statistical part of what you're doing as boring and unnecessary technical stuff, a hurdle you're obliged to jump before you can finish your degree. You may think that quietly to yourself, but special pleading that you're not really that statistically-minded won't make your question more attractive or easier to answer. You can and should be honest about your technical level, but should feel no need to apologize for it. Perhaps you never took the right courses or they were not taught in a way that helped you. Just don't convey a lack of respect for statistics. If you don't respect what we do, don't expect copious and willing help. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't try emotional blackmail: it backfires.&lt;/strong&gt; Never plead urgency, desperation, or your earnest need to finish. Don't claim a deadline tomorrow or that you've spent hours watching videos and Googling without any result except getting more frustrated and more confused. All this may be completely true, but it doesn't make a question a better question if you add layers of pleading or attempts at tweaking our heartstrings.   We've been there ourselves. We know that there are bad reasons too for being in a mess,  which we should not need to spell out. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should seem obvious: &lt;strong&gt;Just ask the statistical question clearly, concisely, and concretely.&lt;/strong&gt; No need for personal history, special pleading, and least of all for thinly veiled emotional blackmail. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastActivityDate="2016-12-02T17:16:02.607" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4476" CreationDate="2016-12-04T11:44:11.453" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Methodological questions concerning crowdsourcing and machine learning are on-topic on Cross Validated SE, but they can't be: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;duplicate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;unclear. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;too broad.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;primarily opinion-based.   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions which ask for references are not off-topic, but depending on how it is asked some users can consider it 'too broad'. So, always try to be the most specific as possible about the request. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following CV meta post has additional hints: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2428/question-about-recommended-readings/2429#2429&quot;&gt;Question about recommended readings&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.420" LastActivityDate="2016-12-04T11:44:11.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4477" CreationDate="2016-12-07T13:23:38.490" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I now have some experience with CV and other SE venues. I think CV is more challenging than others because questions are more technical and scientific, and also because subspecialization is the rule in statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My recommendations to improve your likelihood of getting a correct answer are the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;try to put your question in a comprehensible fashion, avoiding&#xA;acronyms and jargon;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;use correct tags (and as many as appropriate) as this is likely to&#xA;boost interest to those subscribing for particular topics;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;expand your question so that it reads as an intelligent and&#xA;provocative piece on this topic;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;try to put the question into context, for instance by providing a sample database and code for a popular package (e.g. R); this will attract those more interested in specific packages and also help them give you a practical solution;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;provide references;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;return often to improve it by editing and boosting its content;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if you find a solution yourself, then post an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is more a trick than an advice, but I feel that submitting a question when most users are online (e.g. when it is afternoon in North America) will increase your visibility. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, I think as a community we need to upvote more the answers than the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="107799" LastEditorUserId="107799" LastEditDate="2016-12-09T15:03:32.843" LastActivityDate="2016-12-09T15:03:32.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4456" CreationDate="2016-12-08T16:05:35.217" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/leagues/19/year/stats/2016-01-01?sort=reputationchange&amp;amp;page=1&quot;&gt;the 2016 reputation league page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When your fellow users vote up your questions and answers on a Stack&#xA;  Exchange site, you generate reputation. Reputation is a rough measure&#xA;  of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;how much the community trusts you&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;your communication skills&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;the quality and relevancy of your questions and answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These friendly reputation leagues are an informal way of tracking your&#xA;  reputation within the community on a particular Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Reputation is capped at 200 per day, but remember that bounty awards&#xA;  and accepted answers are immune to this daily reputation cap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I concur with that. As I pointed in the comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Simply going by the fact answering a popular question is much more&#xA;  worthy than answering an actually challenging question goes miles&#xA;  towards understanding what reputation reflects. It's a sign that a&#xA;  person can answer questions that helps the community most. In&#xA;  StackOverflow this is more blatant, often the highest ranked answers&#xA;  on a programming language are utterly basic, but that's where the&#xA;  community concentrates, and these are the questions that help the most&#xA;  members&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tag badges sound more like measures of prowess in a specific subject to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60613" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T16:05:35.217" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4485" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4486" CreationDate="2016-12-08T16:48:30.017" Score="15" ViewCount="294" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the use of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/education&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;education&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;education&lt;/a&gt; tag, given that we have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;learning&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/teaching&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;teaching&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;teaching&lt;/a&gt; tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-12-19T21:04:53.307" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T10:35:20.780" Title="Understanding the use of the [education] tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-reorganization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4485" CreationDate="2016-12-09T13:22:18.677" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[learning] - &lt;strong&gt;done&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;[education] - &lt;strong&gt;done&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some users consider these to be meta tags, therefore, not to so great tags. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking into account comments from @amoeba's and @gung's, the revised proposal is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;learning&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/education&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;education&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;education&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;remove tags; take advantage of edits to perform full revisions (set tags properly, typos, readability, title, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/teaching&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;teaching&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;teaching&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;leave it as it is.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-02-20T10:35:20.780" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T10:35:20.780" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4448" CreationDate="2016-12-10T02:13:34.263" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am really concerned that this will prevent people from asking questions or getting help on stack exchange.  Here are my reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sythesis Questions:&lt;/strong&gt; On rare occassions, I have re-asked a question to get a sythesis or concluding answer. I do this because the question has no definitive (well-defined) answer either because of the following reasons below:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The answer changed over the years over the multiple times it has been asked&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It has been asked with so many different variations and these variations have completely different answers &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It has been answered in a non-direct means often with extra-enous information&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Potential for Overfitting&lt;/strong&gt; It will take a long time for accuracy and precision to be good enough to avoid overfitting and be able to release it into the wild.  How do I know there will be overfitting? Well, I personally have noticed that suggested answers for coding on stack overflow do not match up well usually with the questions I am asking while I am typing it. Considering how this question matching algorithm performs on stack exchange, I think this shows that the unstructured data from stack exchange posts is prone to overfitting and we have to be careful of that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Skewed toward/against the questions of new users&lt;/strong&gt;: Depending on how you code it the algorithm is going to be skewed toward or against news users in a signficant way.  Right now my guess is toward new users; however, I want to show both because we have to be aware of it.  I think you need to closely monitor growth new users on stack exchange to make sure there is not a significant drop in activity as you more you automate this process.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[Reason for the skew against] Basically new users are prone toward producing missing values this text mined dataset then older users because reputation system promotes such behavior. Consider for a minute on what @Glen_b pointed out with the [0] and the misspelled name.  Do you think that these syntax errors are random human error? No, they are intentional and have non-random reasons much like the missing values or  you might find in a database. The major reason the person probably misspelled it the way he did was because of stack exchange limits both the content and type of questions new users can ask especially well documented questions.  Personally, I cannot tell you the number of times I have had misspell or format a question/answers in an odd way just so I can keep my references while getting around the reference limit from the subjective filter, link limit, spam filter (Not the actual question text but the actual references themselves). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[Reason for the Skew Toward] On the other hand, new users are less familiar with the site are more prone not to be familar with how to navigate stack exchange and thus will ask duplicated questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;StackOverflow will be an outlier in performance&lt;/strong&gt;:  In terms of behavior of the algorithm I think we can predicted that stack overflow will be an outlier for two major reasons: 1) There is a lack of good syntax thesaurus between the top 5 most popular languages.  So to ask how to code something in one language means there are at least 5 valid duplicates of how to code that in a different language.  2) The dependency on tags as classifier, cluster, or filter of question @IanRingrose mentioned.  So it either going to perform really well for stackoverflow or really poorly for stackoverflow.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The duplicate questions tag does not automatically delete questions, so Synthesis Questions, Overfitting, and Outliers are currently dealt with because people can object to having a closed thread or duplicate tag.  I am worried that this safe guard from duplicate questions tag will be removed when one releases Project Reduplication of Deduplication into the full wild of stack overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Also I just posted an example of reason 1.2 (Synthesis Question) in Cross Validated&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="140504" LastEditorUserId="140504" LastEditDate="2016-12-10T02:28:12.207" LastActivityDate="2016-12-10T02:28:12.207" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4489" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4490" CreationDate="2016-12-14T21:45:42.007" Score="9" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it ever appropriate to share one's thoughts on a topic as a way to garner constructive feedback and opinions from the community instead of asking a direct question, or is there another place for this? Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The following is my understanding of the merits of logistic regression vs SVM for classification. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Point 1 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Point 2 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Point 3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can anyone correct or add to my understanding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I know that this is technically a question, but the spirit of it is somehow different than traditional forum posts which are seeking to solve a specific thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73527" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2016-12-15T19:58:56.487" LastActivityDate="2016-12-15T19:58:56.487" Title="Soliciting feedback vs asking a question" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|too-broad|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4489" CreationDate="2016-12-15T00:49:36.967" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general specific questions are better than very broad open-ended questions (even when they're not too broad to stay open). &quot;Add to my understanding&quot; is not usually a good question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular it's better to try to make a question that would be useful to the next person as well as yourself, even if a good answer ends up repeating some things you already know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, there's the problem that you might make your question nigh-unanswerable (&quot;Yes, that's pretty much it&quot; isn't really a suitable answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main exception to this advice would be the special treatment we give to self-study questions (where describing what you already understand about the topic may be relevant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2016-12-15T00:49:36.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4491" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-12-15T19:59:14.440" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-12-15T19:59:14.440" LastActivityDate="2016-12-15T19:59:14.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4492" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-12-15T19:59:14.440" Score="0" Body="This tag refers to the &quot;too broad&quot; close reason, concerning questions with either too many possible answers, where answers would be too long, or where a question's focus needs to be narrowed." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2016-12-19T18:11:01.543" LastActivityDate="2016-12-19T18:11:01.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4493" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4496" CreationDate="2016-12-17T15:17:11.430" Score="6" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;See this question, which according to OP was posted in october 2016:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/207354/systematic-component-of-variation?noredirect=1#comment479849_207354&quot;&gt;Systematic Component of Variation&lt;/a&gt;, and its comment thread:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I put the question in October 2016. There is something wrong in the time setting of SO&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but is dated as asked Apr 14 at 16:54 and presented as asked 8 months ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So something is certainly wrong!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:57.410" LastActivityDate="2016-12-19T17:48:03.897" Title="Possible timestamp error of posted question?" Tags="|support|questions|timestamps|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4494" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4560" CreationDate="2016-12-17T16:54:26.890" Score="7" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bias-node&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bias-node&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bias-node&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/intercept&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;intercept&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;intercept&lt;/a&gt; seems to me to be synonymous. [bias-node] is only used 6 times. Should we declare those as synonyms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2016-12-18T18:38:35.547" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T22:00:43.747" Title="Synonymous tags: bias-node and intercept?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4495" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-19T00:26:06.327" Score="2" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/251700/when-are-ols-linear-regression-parameters-inaccurate&quot;&gt;When are OLS linear regression parameters inaccurate?&lt;/a&gt; has been rewritten 10 times at least. There should be no reason to have it [on hold]. How do I get it off [on hold]? Mind you, there seem to be 2 close votes and 4 reopen votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Put a bounty on it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Copy it over to a new question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) Bribe a moderator with flattery until they relent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) Change something in the question yet again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideas, please. I'm stumped. Also, even though it says that I can start a bounty in the help section to get myself out of this situation, and the question was posed 72 hours ago, there is no bounty option. So, unless someone else votes to reopen soon, all I can do is copy the question over as a separate question, wait 48 hours, then assign a bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriously &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/no-one-answers&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/no-one-answers&lt;/a&gt; says in part &quot;If, despite your best efforts, you feel questions aren’t getting good answers, you can help by offering a bounty on any question more than two days old.&quot; but that option did not exist for me when the question was on hold, even when I unaccepted @Tim answer, which is another reason why bounty options can disappear, it's not there if you accept an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many thanks to the good colleagues who reopened the question. For those who feel that I did not play fair, let me point out that the question was headed for oblivion, and for penance I am now wearing the &quot;I am your father&quot; hat, to show everyone how evil I have become working on the dark side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2016-12-19T10:00:51.933" Title="How do I get the OLS linear regression parameter inaccuracy question off of on hold?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4493" CreationDate="2016-12-19T17:41:50.117" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As stated by whuber the OP in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/207354/systematic-component-of-variation?noredirect=1#comment479849_207354&quot;&gt;Systematic Component of Variation&lt;/a&gt; probably mis-remembered the date of posting, as he admit in one comment under the same question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Maybe I was wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is ok to ask a question based on an OP's impression, but usually a bug would be something reproducible, able to collect evidence (e.g.: steps to reproduce the problem, screenshots, different users reporting same problem on different SE sites, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2016-12-19T17:41:50.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4497" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-12-19T18:15:49.353" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-12-19T18:15:49.353" LastActivityDate="2016-12-19T18:15:49.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4498" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-12-19T18:15:49.353" Score="0" Body="For questions about timestamps of questions, answers, comments, or other activities" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2016-12-20T22:32:02.610" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T22:32:02.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4499" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4518" CreationDate="2016-12-19T21:53:53.713" Score="22" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since this site frequently deals with larger statistical concepts, I frequently find that my explanations to users cover a lot of the same ground.  For example, when I am answering a question on cross-validation, the beginning of my answer is always unique to the particular question, but at the end when I try to tie the particular example  to the larger concept, I find myself saying similar things.  I tell them the key to designing cross-validation is about thinking about how your new data you want to use the model on are different than your training data, and so you should try to split of your data for cross-validation so the cross-validation folds will mirror those novel aspects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like it might be more efficient to take the time to write out a few sentences illustrating this concept as eloquently as possible, and then copy and paste them at the end of the unique part of the answers.  This would avoid rewriting it each time and have the quality of the explanation vary depending on other factors such as how much time I has to read over my answer.  However, while the larger &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/85470/reposting-an-identical-answer-on-a-different-question&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange community seems ok with copy and paste answers&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1867/what-should-be-our-policy-on-duplicate-answers&quot;&gt;Cross-Validated seems to frown on it&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So where would these partial copy and pastes fall on that scale?  Are they ok because most of the answer is unique, or not because we only want unique content?  I might consider linking to a previous answer with the repeated part, but usually the part I want to reference is just a few sentences at the end of an otherwise unrelated answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127913" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2017-01-02T13:02:46.520" Title="Is partial duplication of answers acceptable?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4500" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4503" CreationDate="2016-12-20T21:48:22.807" Score="8" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the following tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/replicability&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;replicability&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;replicability&lt;/a&gt; (4): &quot;the extent to which subsequent studies of the same phenomenon reproduce the results obtained in the original study&quot; (excerpt)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/replication&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;replication&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;replication&lt;/a&gt; (49) - no excerpt&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/replicate&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;replicate&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;replicate&lt;/a&gt; (7) - no excerpt&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter two tags are sometimes used to refer to replication of experiments and sometimes to &quot;replicates&quot; or &quot;replication&quot; in an ANOVA experimental design (when each ANOVA cell contains several values; e.g. see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.real-statistics.com/two-way-anova/two-factor-anova-with-replication/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.real-statistics.com/two-way-anova/two-factor-anova-with-replication/&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is confusing and I thought of tidying up these tags. My suggestion is to move all questions about replication of experiments to &lt;code&gt;[replicability]&lt;/code&gt; and get rid of the other two tags altogether. I don't think we necessarily need a tag for &quot;replicates&quot;/&quot;replication&quot; in ANOVA, apart from &lt;code&gt;[anova]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[sample-size]&lt;/code&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2016-12-27T20:26:39.747" Title="Tidying up [replic*] tags" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-reorganization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4501" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4502" CreationDate="2016-12-27T01:35:12.140" Score="8" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are times when the answer is provided in the comments. Either implicitly, or sometimes, after several back and forth, it becomes explicit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it becomes obvious that the OP's question is answered, does it still make sense for the commenter to provide a separate answer? Or only if the OP asks for it? Or is this per the commenters discretion? What is the policy on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73527" LastActivityDate="2016-12-27T03:43:45.857" Title="When to post a separate answer even when answered in comments" Tags="|discussion|answers|comment|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-12-27T13:41:57.667" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4501" CreationDate="2016-12-27T03:15:59.300" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Network policy is to answer in answers rather than in comments. You're not supposed to actually answer the question with a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do tend to tolerate partial answers in comments on CV, especially when they're intended as hints/guidance -- somewhat more so than many other SE sites and likely a good deal more so than originally intended. [Some SE sites are very strict on this, straight out deleting any comment that remotely looks like even a partial answer.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though we're a little more tolerant than the average of comments that would be partial answers here (and sometimes with good reason, I think), if a full answer (or a nearly-complete one) appears in comments, it should instead be posted as an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have enough problems with unanswered questions as it is. Speaking for myself, I think we should encourage the turning of comment-answers into proper answers by any available means. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[math.SE is a bit nearer to us in tolerating part-answer/hinty comments, though there's a tendency there to encourage conversion to an answer when it comes close to an answer... and they don't have as much of an issue with low answer rates as we do.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the poster of an answer-as-a-comment does not make it an answer within a pretty short time (a couple of hours seems plenty to me), I would encourage anyone who sees it to simply do so themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Appropriate credit should be given if you post an answer that relies on a comment in any substantive way, though it's possible that two people would give very similar responses without the poster of an answer even having read the comment-answer (so we should try not be overly critical if credit were  occasionally seemingly omitted; comment-posters can hardly complain when that happens).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you do post such an answer, responsibility for its content is then yours, not that of the commenter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't want the responsibility and/or the reward (as meagre as it usually is), there's always the possibility to make the answer community wiki (if you have the privilege, you can simply click in the box under the bottom right of the edit window before you click &quot;post answer&quot; -- and if you don't have the privilege you can always flag and ask a moderator to do it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2016-12-27T03:43:45.857" LastActivityDate="2016-12-27T03:43:45.857" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4500" CreationDate="2016-12-27T20:26:39.747" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Done. I removed &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/replication&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;replication&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;replication&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/replicate&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;replicate&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;replicate&lt;/a&gt; from all threads. (See my comment above about &quot;pseudoreplication&quot;; I mention it in the answer body for future searches.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/replicability&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;replicability&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;replicability&lt;/a&gt; currently has 11 threads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2016-12-27T20:26:39.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4504" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4506" CreationDate="2016-12-27T23:44:02.650" Score="15" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently on CrossValidated I have found that new members may not have studied all the rules prior to asking their first question.  I find that moderators and other users will quickly vote to close either because they think it is a duplicate or statement of the question is not clear or the question is off topic.  Such decisions are a matter of judgment.  I have seen cases where these new members become very frustrated.  I understand why the rules must be followed.  However I think in such cases a comment to the new member suggesting what is wrong with the question should be done first. They should wait a reasonable amount of time for a an edit to the question or a comment from the new member before taking action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On two occasions I did things that I thought were reasonable but got moderators upset with me.&#xA;Situation 1: A new user asked his first question that I told him was not complete and looked like a self study question.  He commented that he couldn't edit the question because he thought he was limited in the question length.  So I agreed to edit it.  The question was put on hold.  I don't remember whether it was before or after I made the comment.  So I edited the question adding the information he gave me in comments.  I also added the self help tag.  I then found a second question with similar problems so I edited that one too. Two moderators criticized me for this for different reasons. On the second question I was told that I should have given the OP the chance to edit the question himself (not knowing the discussion that went on with the first question). The other moderator didn't think I should have edited a question that was already put on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Situation 2: A new user asked a simple question.  I had a satisfactory answer but I also knew that there were many situations (possible for different modeling methods) where this problem came up. The user was worried that she did something wrong.  I thought that it would be best for me to give the answer and point the OP to a search method that using the key words &quot;negative R square&quot; would yield many hits. I thought it would be a difficult task to see if I could consider any of them an exact duplicate.  I thought that the OP should look through a few of them to see how commonly the question comes up with a variety of models. The OP and others liked my question and I got 2 up votes for it.  A moderator suggested that I should not have answered the question but rather should have searched for a duplicate and recommend it for close/hold.  He assumed that there would be an exact duplicate and that I was cluttering the site with repeat questions and an answer that was short (not canonical) and not as informative as a longer supposed duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I wrong in either situation and if you think so could you explain why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastEditorUserId="11032" LastEditDate="2016-12-28T14:26:27.717" LastActivityDate="2016-12-28T23:27:21.073" Title="Should new users be allowed to provide questions similar to others?" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|closing-questions|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4504" CreationDate="2016-12-28T12:16:23.217" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Leaving aside the specific incidents you mention (though gave some of my reasoning on one of those in comments), I want to address the title question about whether new users should be able to ask duplicate questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The policy against duplicates is there for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/01/the-wikipedia-of-long-tail-programming-questions/&quot;&gt;good reason&lt;/a&gt;. Indeed, it's one of the major attractions of the site for me. That linked article, by one of the Stackoverflow founders, Joel Spolsky, points out something that he and Jeff Atwood (the other one) had noticed about forums like Usenet (which I also answered questions on back in the day):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;newbies would frequently ask the same beginner questions&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;old timers got tired of it&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been answering stats questions online in various fora since at least 1992 (before even the Mosaic browser existed), and CrossValidated is the first forum I've been a regular on that made it really easy to find previous versions of the same question, and which tried to solve the problem by making it easy to get new versions of questions pointing to old ones which already had good answers. $^\dagger$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Joel pointed out, the problem with forums that don't do this is that you end up answering the same &quot;standard&quot; questions over and over -- and the more nearly beginner-level the questions are, the more of them you get (because there will always be more beginners than experts). So as a site grows, you spend more time answering questions you've already answered before. The answers tend to become perfunctory, since there's no benefit in putting effort into really good answers -- the effort will disappear into history under the flood of new questions and in a matter of days or weeks is forgotten. Effort is only briefly recognized, and we'd only be helping one person at a time -- one question, one answer, one person helped. After writing a few thousand answers on the internet, it starts to get annoying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With CrossValidated, by contrast, it's worth writing a good answer, because your good answers remain easy to find even when they're old, and new questions on the same topic will tend to point to older (and hopefully more canonical) versions of the same question. If you want to contribute an answer to the site, it is best done at the same place as other answers, so that the best answers are all in the same place (instead of spread all over). That way, once you find any good answers, all the other good answers are there, and can be compared (and, hopefully, the best ones have the most votes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, some of my answers are seen by thousands of people. [And while I was typing this answer yesterday, I got an upvote on an answer that was almost a thousand days old... that sort of thing almost never happens elsewhere.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[In addition, similar questions that are not exact duplicates can be linked (both via links mentioned in comments and in the &quot;Related&quot; column in the sidebar) to help users find additional useful information related to their problem.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, it's actually important to avoid answering duplicate questions, so that good answers are not all over the place but concentrated into as few locations as they reasonably can be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This different way of organizing a site requires a different kind of effort -- in place of answering every question, we end up spending time in so-called &lt;em&gt;curation&lt;/em&gt; -- closing duplicates, improving old questions and answers, finding previously missed duplicates and closing them/linking them to answered versions of the same question, and so on. But the end result is far better -- new users, instead of waiting to get a question answered, can find their question &lt;em&gt;already answered&lt;/em&gt; and typically in better fashion than they'd have got if the site allowed duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This benefit happens even if they have never heard of StackExchange, because good answers here show up very high on search engines like Google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed I have noticed more and more over the last four years or so that searches for something stats-related that I type into Google have links to answers here -- and often they're quite useful. That doesn't happen with my old answers on other forums (at least hardly ever) -- even when I type a search specifically designed to locate an old answer I'm looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But let's imagine that we could marshal some argument for only allowing users with low reputation / recently-created accounts to ask duplicate questions (which are still otherwise deliberately not allowed, following network policy), in spite of the fact that new users will be the main source of duplicates. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we did that, then &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; user who desired to get around the policy could post duplicate questions by simply creating another account, so duplicates would proliferate even more. We might as well toss out the entire SE model .... and in that case, I'd be saying my goodbyes. I don't need to participate in still more forums that encourage us to ignore previous good answers. I've done that already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$^\dagger$ why do we keep old duplicates around long after the person that posted them has moved on? Because they ask their questions-with-the-same-answers in somewhat different ways, and so different versions of such questions are found by searches. They widen the net of searches that can be pointed to the same good answers -- they do the job of funneling people to where they can get their questions answered without anyone writing a new answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2016-12-28T23:27:21.073" LastActivityDate="2016-12-28T23:27:21.073" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4504" CreationDate="2016-12-28T13:22:09.110" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should new users be allowed to provide questions similar to others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depends on what you mean with &quot;allowed&quot; and &quot;similar&quot;. A new user can post similar questions, but if it is similar to the point some users consider it a duplicate (aka, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10841/how-should-duplicate-questions-be-handled/10844#10844&quot;&gt;borderline duplicate&lt;/a&gt;) it should be closed. Duplicate questions are ok to ask (as long it is not recurrent from the same user which is not doing any previous search within the site before posting; remembering if a user post too many questions that get closed he/she will receive a temporary question ban, etc; that is why it is not ok asking too many duplicates in a row), because there are many ways asking the same question, but it is important that answers don't be split across the site. So pointing to the canonical post (which not always is the older one) will help users finding the best answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what if &quot;similar&quot; means it is not a duplicate, and it is closed anyway? No problem, the &quot;On hold&quot; notice/message will tell the OP to edit his/her question and explain why it is not a duplicate. Edits to questions with &quot;On hold&quot; status will be sent right away to the Reopen queue, where it can be voted to reopen. Moreover, a user with more than 3k reputation can also vote to reopen a question without any need of an edit being made, and the question will also be sent to the Reopen queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Recently on CrossValidated I have found that new members may not have studied all the rules prior to asking their first question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, nowadays this is a big problem, but not exclusive to SE. Are you helping moderating the community leaving comments to such OP's to visit the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt; page and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;, for example?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, I think the actual problem is that many new users don't study &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; of the rules at all (not even the tour).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I find that moderators and other users will quickly vote to close either because they think it is a duplicate or statement of the question is not clear or the question is off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really? I find it is still a slow process here in CrossValidated, with experienced users refraining to rapidly closing questions to the point they will collect poor answers and OP will not be satisfied. You probably know that a question with a positive score answer is considered answered, so the community bot will not bump this question to the active page; it will be buried with that poor answer. On the other hand, if a question is quickly and correctly put &quot;On hold&quot; the OP will have a chance to edit the question to make it more accurate and chances of receiving a better answer will increase. At the same time, we keep our site the most clean as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we could try keeping improving, is to give a chance for a new user to improve his/her question before doing any downvote; and if possible, leaving comments with specific feedback, beyond what the closing messages already say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Such decisions are a matter of judgment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that is why closing, reopening, approving edits are mostly processes which are submitted to peer review (I say mostly, because mods and users with gold badges have the hammer vote; but I am confident to say in most cases this is not a problem. In this respect, I think we have a minor problem with obsolete comments, but this is another &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4372/arent-we-supposed-to-flag-obsolete-comments&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have seen cases where these new members become very frustrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No comments to this sentence, because you did not bring any example. It is difficult to say something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...I think in such cases a comment to the new member suggesting what is wrong with the question should be done first. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it &lt;strong&gt;could&lt;/strong&gt; be done &lt;strong&gt;at the same time&lt;/strong&gt;. That will help. In fact, we have carried some important efforts to incentivize users leaving comments. See the work of Silverfish and gung here in meta: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2468/how-best-to-use-the-review-queue/2486#2486&quot;&gt;How best to use the review queue?&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They should wait a reasonable amount of time for a an edit to the question or a comment from the new member before taking action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, I think they shouldn't if they don't want to. We are all volunteers here and time can be limited. We are already curating the site and answering questions. OPs need to make their part, i.e., helping users to help them. Reading the rules in the help center and taking the tour is one thing they can do. Another action they can take is to post the question and be ready to quickly provide replies in comments and edit their question. After all, it is in the OP's best interest to improve their own question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On two occasions I did things that I thought were reasonable but got moderators upset with me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, difficult to comment without real examples. I will make some general comments though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Situation 1: A new user asked his first question that I told him was not complete and looked like a self study question. He commented that he couldn't edit the question because he thought he was limited in the question length. So I agreed to edit it. The question was put on hold. I don't remember whether it was before or after I made the comment. So I edited the question adding the information he gave me in comments. I also added the self help tag. I then found a second question with similar problems so I edited that one too. Two moderators criticized me for this for different reasons. On the second question I was told that I should have given the OP the chance to edit the question himself (not knowing the discussion that went on with the first question). The other moderator didn't think I should have edited a question that was already put on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a very specific agreed internal policy for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; tag. Did you follow it? I don't agree having this tag on our site (despite I agree the specific closing reason and its respective guidelines to OPs is very helpful; but tag and closing reason are different things), but the majority of users agree with such policy, therefore it should be respected. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest you to narrow down your question (with examples) to emphasize better what points you don't agree with the feedback received and how they are different from what the policy says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Situation 2: A new user asked a simple question. I had a satisfactory answer but I also knew that there were many situations (possible for different modeling methods) where this problem came up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be considered a &quot;Too broad&quot; question; hence, putting it &quot;On hold&quot; and asking the OP to narrow it down to which &quot;situation&quot;. But if you felt it was not the best option, then, keep your opinion (like you said, it can be a subjective decision).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The user was worried that she did something wrong. I thought that it would be best for me to give the answer and point the OP to a search method that using the keywords &quot;negative R square&quot; would yield many hits. I thought it would be a difficult task to see if I could consider any of them an exact duplicate. I thought that the OP should look through a few of them to see how commonly the question comes up with a variety of models. The OP and others liked my question and I got 2 up votes for it. A moderator suggested that I should not have answered the question but rather should have searched for a duplicate and recommend it for close/hold. He assumed that there would be an exact duplicate and that I was cluttering the site with repeat questions and an answer that was short (not canonical) and not as informative as a longer supposed duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should always give a deep thought to what moderators say. They are experienced users when it comes to moderation, they curate the site, they know better than most users the overall content we have within the site, because they need to read a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that being said, users have the right to disagree. If you think the best option was to answer that question, go ahead. Perhaps, you did some previous search and did not find a duplicate question. Always try to use your best judgement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2016-12-28T21:58:02.033" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4448" CreationDate="2016-12-29T09:45:30.790" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately in my 164th review I misclicked as duplicate two posts that were very clearly not duplicates. There doesn't seem to be any way to go back and fix it. [The site sort of loads the page and then seems to &quot;shift&quot; the pages as it finishes putting everything on it/redraws it - my browser was being slow to load after review 163 and I quickly saw the next was not a duplicate, but the screen for review 164 &quot;re-drew&quot; just as I was about to click, changing which button was under the cursor.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This (not being able to fix the resulting error from a misplaced click, however generated) is a major problem -- as far as I recall I have only marked one previous pair as duplicate so (if I remembered that right), there's now a &lt;em&gt;50% error rate&lt;/em&gt; in my marking as duplicate. With duplicates so rare in your current data set, that's likely to screw up what data you're likely to end up with pretty badly (certainly the part of it that's from me, anyway)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is likely to be a more widespread problem than just me, since the chance of such a misclick goes up the more other people review too -- and not everyone will notice. If only one in several hundred posts is a duplicate the chance that a substantial fraction of the marked duplicates is nothing of the kind will become quite high (e.g. imagine people make a mistake about one time in 50, marking a duplicate as not or vice-versa ... and also that about one pair of posts in 200 is really a duplicate... then the majority of posts marked as duplicates won't be duplicates!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not providing a way to way to review and fix that is likely to leave the resulting data set with greatly decreased value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-01-06T23:54:33.063" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T23:54:33.063" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4508" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4509" CreationDate="2016-12-31T02:12:01.677" Score="5" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Officially the Community is saying that this is being done to reevaluate for questions they recently activated (reactivated) the answers as to which are good or bad.  But how are new comments, upvotes and downvotes going to be used to decide good from bad.  If answers get classified as good, neutral or bad how is that to be used?  I have noticed that I have been a beneficiary of this because some of my answers from 2012 are being reviewed that otherwise would not be and I have been getting additional upvotes.  Is this something that has been done periodically to try to clean-up answers?  I am trying to decide whether I think this is good or bad for the users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-01-01T12:48:11.370" LastActivityDate="2017-01-01T12:48:11.370" Title="Why is the community moving CV questions to the homepage today?" Tags="|support|answers|unanswered-questions|community-user|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4508" CreationDate="2016-12-31T06:43:54.403" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many find it discouraging to post answers and get absolutely no response, positive or negative. The campaign of Community-bot is to remedy it; the notice it places under a post is to invite readers to evaluate the answers that have been neglected so far. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But how are new comments, upvotes and downvotes going to be used to decide good from bad. If answers get classified as good, neutral or bad how is that to be used? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no classification other than normal votes, up or down. The hope is that useful answers will have a positive score while useless or wrong answers will have negative score. We know it doesn't always work that way, but that's the ideal, and the bot is trying to get the site closer to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user56674" LastActivityDate="2016-12-31T06:43:54.403" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4510" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5274" CreationDate="2016-12-31T18:31:48.240" Score="5" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently, many questions related to artificial neural networks and deep learning are hosted in the CrossValidated site. However, it seems to me that both the quality and quantity of answers to these questions are far inferior (currently) to the ones related to statistics or general machine learning questions. IMHO, the reason for this could be that we are dealing with two different crowds: statiticians deal with statistics and general machine learning and engineers (and sometimes computer scientists and mathematicians) deal with neural networks and deep learning. Of course, nowadays, we all do everything as labor is (very) finite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it not be the time to create a specific &quot;Neural Network&quot; site on StachExchange? How would one go about doing that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16144" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-01-02T13:29:02.873" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T22:24:25.753" Title="Should a &quot;Neural Network&quot; Stackexchange site be created?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|migration|machine-learning|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4510" CreationDate="2017-01-01T10:05:28.560" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;Besides the questions on our site, there's already &lt;a href=&quot;https://cs.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Computer science&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Artificial Intelligence&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Data Science&lt;/a&gt; (all of which have questions on neural networks - and that's not even counting the neural networks questions on StackOverflow and on Theoretical Computer Science ...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure that adding a &lt;em&gt;fifth&lt;/em&gt; (or seventh ...) site fielding questions on the topic will necessarily be viable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Though I am not particularly knowledgeable about neural nets myself, I think it's important to - at least as far as feasible - keep statistics and machine learning (including neural-net) topics together. While emphasis and terminology differ, we're often solving a lot of the same problems. There's benefit in being exposed to what each group is doing (and has done in the past) and how we each think about problems.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:53:09.823" LastActivityDate="2017-01-02T02:49:28.167" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4512" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-01T12:52:08.427" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Community ♦ user is an automated user agent that helps maintain Stack Exchange sites through various automated processes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information, see the question &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19738/who-is-the-community-user&quot;&gt;Who is the Community user?&lt;/a&gt; in the main Meta Stack Exchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported excerpt and wiki from the main &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/community-user/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-01-02T15:38:02.673" LastActivityDate="2017-01-02T15:38:02.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4513" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-01T12:52:08.427" Score="0" Body="For questions about the user named Community ♦ present on Cross Validated SE site." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-01-02T15:37:50.000" LastActivityDate="2017-01-02T15:37:50.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4514" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4516" CreationDate="2017-01-01T19:48:02.070" Score="5" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking at possible badges I could earn on CV. I think there was one where you could earn the badge by voting for a specified number of comments. I have seen numbers to the left of some comments. Do they represent votes? I have no idea what to do to vote for comments if it is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-01-01T20:32:20.393" LastActivityDate="2017-01-01T22:30:41.313" Title="Is there a way to upvote comments?" Tags="|support|comment|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4515" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-01T19:59:39.080" Score="13" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made a New Year's resolution of making more reviews  as a way of giving back to the community. As per object, is it possible to make reviews from the mobile app? I haven't been able to access the review queue from the app. If not, would it be possible to add this feature in a future release?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS Happy New Year !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="58675" LastEditDate="2017-01-01T20:15:41.770" LastActivityDate="2017-01-01T20:15:41.770" Title="Is it possible to access the review queue from the mobile app?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4514" CreationDate="2017-01-01T20:31:19.727" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is. Hover over the left side of a comment and click in the up arrow to vote (try it in the sample comment I left under the question). Comments can't be downvoted. You will also see a flag beneath the up arrow; that is for flagging comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges&quot;&gt;Badges&lt;/a&gt; related to commenting are 'Commentator' (bronze) and 'Pundit' (silver). The latter is the one related to voting. One needs to write 10 comments and each of them receive at least 5 upvotes (yes, numbers on the left represent the amount of votes a comment received). I think the intent of  the Pundit badge is reward users who write useful comments. Likewise voting on regular posts, a user can't vote for his/her own comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no badges for upvoting comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2017-01-01T22:30:41.313" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4510" CreationDate="2017-01-02T12:39:20.163" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Neural networks is simply one method. It is statistic in a sense that the neural network can be thought as a complicated function that is trained to fit the data in a best possible way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such it is not that academic approach as an engineering thing; things that work are used and people build intuition with experience on the matter. Thus it is hard to say anything about problem X, in case Y, if you have no experience. There is this thing called playing with data, that is supposed to give some intuition on the methods that could be applied&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NN is the ultimate on that sense, that it is almost impossible to say anything too concrete about them because the number of layers / neurons per layer / NN-architecture all vary case by case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of that, the NN gives an illusion that it would be something completely different, but it is not. It just happens to be so versatile that it has many applications. But in the end, it is just a method for regression. I recommend this article about common misconceptions: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.turingfinance.com/misconceptions-about-neural-networks/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.turingfinance.com/misconceptions-about-neural-networks/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="133268" LastActivityDate="2017-01-02T12:39:20.163" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4499" CreationDate="2017-01-02T13:02:46.520" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it is really two sentences within a longer answer, it should be OK. No need to paraphrase yourself every time for what is actually a citation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But having known similar situation on other sites, I would suggest a different approach instead: self-answered canonical questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are really useful when there is a confusing concept which novices often get wrong. For example, let's say that somebody comes with a very concrete problem about a t-test, and you help him straighten his calculation, but also notice that he has no good reason to assume equal variances. So at the end of the answer, you also advise to choose a different test instead, and remember that this is a situation which crops up every now and then. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can of course reuse some nice explanation you have written as a part of another concrete problem. But you can also write a question, &quot;How do I know if I can use a t-test&quot; and write up an answer which gives a good background about why you shouldn't use a t-test when the variances are unequal, when is it OK to assume equal variances, and what to do if you cannot assume them. Then link from your concrete answer to this well-packaged bit of basic knowledge whenever you need. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This strategy has its drawbacks of course, and is not the one to be used in all cases. Sometimes copy-pasting the couple of sentences &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the better thing to do. But keep in mind this alternative too, it can be very fruitful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6867" LastActivityDate="2017-01-02T13:02:46.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4519" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-03T17:25:49.307" Score="11" ViewCount="316" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you provide an answer, and someone comments on it with another piece of evidence in favor of your answer, but different, is it appropriate to include that comment in your answer and recognize the commenter with @username?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find this topic while searching, so feel free to link me to past discussions or threads if relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73527" LastActivityDate="2021-04-06T17:11:47.407" Title="Include someone's comment to your answer, in your answer" Tags="|discussion|answers|comment|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4520" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4522" CreationDate="2017-01-03T22:58:50.237" Score="6" ViewCount="294" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that as I look at a newly posted question on CV that it may already have say in one case 2 or 3 upvotes or in another 1 or 2 downvotes.  The question is completely new and has only been up for a few minutes.  There are no edits, no comments and no answers.  In that situation I would never vote on the question even if after reading &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(1) I think it is a good question:&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(2) I think it is a bad question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case 1 I may be inclined to upvote but no one has commented and I may be overlooking something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case 2 I may be inclined to downvote but maybe I am just not familiar with terminology that the OP uses but a commentator may clarify later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that users are free to vote when a question is brand new and this can be a judgment call.  But in my case I am not so confident to believe that I know enough to vote when the question is brand new. I think upvotes and downvotes deserve a little time to consider and the decision is not urgent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you agree with my position or do you see a reason why a very early vote (up or down on the question) could be justified?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T06:40:34.817" Title="Is it ever too early to upvote or downvote a question?" Tags="|discussion|votes|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4520" CreationDate="2017-01-03T23:34:11.820" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do not agree with the position that very early voting is unjustifiable. It can be a reasonable voting pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many cases some questions show genuine research effort and/or tackle an very interesting problem. Heck, some of them I am curious about myself! I will obviously upvote that as soon as I finish reading it and understand the basic issue. If that happens just 2-3' after the question is posted so be it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly they are some (very few to be fair) questions that show complete lack of research effort or any effort at all... Sure, I will downvote that even if the question could be somewhat helpful. Ignoring &quot;silly&quot; questions just invites trouble for the quality of the whole site and does not help the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11852" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2017-01-04T13:29:53.867" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T13:29:53.867" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4520" CreationDate="2017-01-04T00:14:45.227" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/314&quot;&gt;Vote early and often.&lt;/a&gt;  Deploy your daily votes &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1819&quot;&gt;constructively&lt;/a&gt; to help people use our site effectively and well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure people have different systems for reading posts and voting on them. Please bear in mind the &lt;em&gt;constructive&lt;/em&gt; role played by voting, which I think is the concern being expressed here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Upvotes, when they are merited,&lt;/strong&gt; encourage people to participate and reward good contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Upvotes that are not merited&lt;/strong&gt; can be confusing and potentially elevate poor posts to undue prominence.  We have to trust that this occurs relatively little and will usually be corrected by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Downvotes are inherently negative.&lt;/strong&gt;  They create bad feelings.  Use them when they can have the &lt;em&gt;constructive&lt;/em&gt; effect of encouraging a poster to improve a particular post.  This implies that most downvotes are wasted if they are not accompanied by an effective, actionable comment.  (There are exceptions: some posts are so obviously poor that little needs to be said.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Downvotes that are unmerited are even more negative and provocative.&lt;/strong&gt;  They can reflect badly on the downvoter, too.  For this reason, it's wise to hesitate before applying any downvote--to make sure you have a good reason for it and are not just reacting emotionally--and then to pause again after applying it, to reflect on what you just did.  You have a few minutes to change your mind.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, too, that upvotes are the driver of our &quot;reputation economy&quot;: virtually all reputation arises from the five or ten points each upvote creates in the system.  The more votes you supply, the more reputation there will be to go around, the more things people will be able to do on the site, and the happier they will feel in continuing their participation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please: before you leave any page you have been reading, get in the habit of pausing for a second and asking whether you have voted yet.  You will usually be glad you did vote.  If you wait and tell yourself you will come back, maybe you will--but likely you won't.  Use every opportunity to make a positive impact on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T18:10:10.990" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4520" CreationDate="2017-01-04T01:35:33.333" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Voting is an important signal, but for many askers only acts as a signal at all when given before they get an answer they like (because they then don't log in until they have another question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a user asks a good question, there's no loss in upvoting it immediately. Why wait? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a user asks a badly formed/somewhat mangled question, there's some argument for giving them a few minutes (say the usual time window in which it counts as part of the original submission) before a downvote. If you see a problem but don't downvote, at least comment on the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if you do give downvotes (early or not) they should almost always be accompanied by a comment explaining the problem (spam and trolling are among obvious exceptions -- you don't usually need to do more than just downvote and flag). Downvotes with constructive suggestions don't bother me but downvotes where I can't figure out what they're for are a frustration. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;failing&lt;/em&gt; to downvote a sufficiently bad question reasonably early (and where reasonable, voting to close) simply leaves us with more bad questions and makes the site as a whole less friendly and useful for people who could otherwise find their answers via searching. The people who get their answers via searching outnumber actual posters of questions by (typically) dozens- or hundreds-to-one (i.e. it's the searchers, not the askers, who are primarily being served by the site, even though you don't see them). If they're trying to look through a load of terrible questions we're not helping the largest swathe of people we'd otherwise be serving. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;not getting answers is also discouraging to posters, but better questions have better chances to get answers. Careful use of downvotes is one way toward improving the average standard of questions (and hence the user experience of the people trying to provide answers), so even if you care for neither the searchers nor the answerers, you can still help askers on average by using downvotes well (if a new person about to ask a question sees lots of carefully written questions, it's much more of an encouragement to do likewise than if the new questions list is littered with a barely readable mess -- and then they're more likely to get answers; so it's actually also a service to the &lt;em&gt;next&lt;/em&gt; $n$ askers if you reduce the frequency of poor questions)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, an important thing to keep in mind is that downvotes should be reversed when the question improves (even if it's not the original poster who improves the question); as soon as a question is edited, you are able to change your vote. Changing a downvote to an upvote because of an improved question is helping people write questions more likely to attract good answers... and that helps everyone (askers, answerers and readers). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I try to use comments for minor problems and try to keep downvotes to a small proportion of my total votes (arguably I should downvote more than I do) but used with care, they  can be a big help to making the site work as it was meant to. Here at CrossValidated we use downvotes a good deal less than at StackOverflow (and even than math.SE if I recall correctly). I don't think we are nearly as discouraging (in this particular sense) as the typical SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-01-04T09:17:34.693" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T09:17:34.693" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4525" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4540" CreationDate="2017-01-04T16:06:49.263" Score="13" ViewCount="268" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have no less than 13 tags containing &quot;learning&quot;. Some of these are certainly fine, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/deep-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;deep-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;deep-learning&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/unsupervised-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;unsupervised-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;unsupervised-learning&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/supervised-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;supervised-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;supervised-learning&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reinforcement-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reinforcement-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reinforcement-learning&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/manifold-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;manifold-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;manifold-learning&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/active-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;active-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;active-learning&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/multitask-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;multitask-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;multitask-learning&lt;/a&gt;. My issues are with the following one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;learning&lt;/a&gt; looks completely vacuous to me. Sometimes another of the *learning tags would be far better, and sometimes it seems to be used as a synonym for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/references&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;references&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;references&lt;/a&gt;. We currently have 63 questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;learning&lt;/a&gt;. I'm afraid that if we simply remove the tag, it will pop up again. Should it be burninated?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/statistical-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;statistical-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;statistical-learning&lt;/a&gt;: the wiki excerpt says that &quot;SL refers to the statistical perspective on machine learning.&quot; To be honest, I am less than convinced. Shouldn't &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; questions on CrossValidated that carry the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt; tag have at least some &quot;statistical perspective&quot;? Then again, the posters of 133 questions seem to disagree with me. Thoughts, anyone?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/q-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;q-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;q-learning&lt;/a&gt; (25 questions), &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/transfer-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;transfer-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;transfer-learning&lt;/a&gt; (3 questions), &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/representation-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;representation-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;representation-learning&lt;/a&gt; (3 questions): all these have no tag wiki. Can someone create one?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T12:07:31.937" Title="The *learning tags" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4520" CreationDate="2017-01-04T22:48:06.043" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I upvote immediately when I'm very curious about the answer.  Why not?  I've already benefited from the question since it piqued my interest, and I'd like to increase its visibility so that someone else can answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also upvote questions when I think it's a good question and I am about to provide an answer.  This is because I am about to benefit from the question by its having given me the opportunity to answer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="858" LastEditorUserId="858" LastEditDate="2017-01-06T06:40:34.817" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T06:40:34.817" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4519" CreationDate="2017-01-05T02:56:25.323" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd have to say that I don't understand why people don't answer questions using the answer section instead of the comments sections.  Your post is a good example.  Ha!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should remove comments that answer questions, and ask users to enter these answers in the answer section, where they belong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check this out:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/253335/plsa-model-confusion&quot;&gt;Bounty Question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;@conjugateprior, could you help to add a reply, so that it could  &#xA; benefit other people. I will mark it as answer and grant bounty  &#xA; points. :) – Lin Ma 17 hours ago&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78846" LastEditorUserId="11887" LastEditDate="2021-04-06T17:11:47.407" LastActivityDate="2021-04-06T17:11:47.407" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4528" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4529" CreationDate="2017-01-05T03:57:46.687" Score="15" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I see off topic questions which have a very simple answer. Here's an example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/254623/confidence-interval-for-anova-in-spss&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/254623/confidence-interval-for-anova-in-spss&lt;/a&gt;. It's clearly off topic, and I voted to close. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I answered it in a comment. I don't think it was worth putting that as an answer, as it was so brief, and I suspect the question will be closed. Is that the right thing to do (make the user happy) or the wrong thing to do (encourage them to come back with more off topic questions)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17072" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T10:53:56.933" Title="Answering off-topic questions. Appropriate?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|answers|comment|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4528" CreationDate="2017-01-05T13:18:38.303" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I sometimes answer questions and vote to close them at the same time.  I don't see any problem with that.  What I would do is leave a comment to the OP explaining that the question is off topic and why.  I may point them towards another resource (stack overflow, the r-help listserv, our meta thread with software links, etc.) as well.  I don't necessarily expect many upvotes for answers like that, and I typically get few, but people don't downvote either.  In a sense, our 'real' purpose here is to build up a permanent repository of high-quality information about statistics and machine learning, but helping people out is a close second.  In the big scheme of things, it doesn't hurt to serve the second goal exclusively once in a while.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2017-01-05T13:18:38.303" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4530" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4531" CreationDate="2017-01-06T08:49:14.520" Score="11" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was going to answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/254534/58675&quot;&gt;a question about books for time series&lt;/a&gt;. However, in comments Andre Silva pointed out &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/20514/books-for-self-studying-time-series-analysis&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; (which is also a Community Wiki) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/9667/learning-material-about-time-series&quot;&gt;this other answer&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the latest question is slightly different because the user specifically asks for (at least) two books, the first one very theoretical and not specifically related to forecasting, and a more applied second one, targeted at forecasting. Thus, in principle, the user might not be satisfied by Andre Silva's links. However, to avoid duplicating (or nearly duplicating) questions, I was thinking of adding my answer to the Community Wiki question, and let the user know with a comment. I think that's fine, what do you say?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T14:46:09.457" Title="Should I answer this question or should I add an answer to these other &quot;similar&quot; questions?" Tags="|discussion|answers|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4530" CreationDate="2017-01-06T11:42:22.297" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Absolutely fine&amp;mdash;in my opinion the best thing to do. Several threads have already been merged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/20514/17230&quot;&gt;Books for self-studying time series analysis?&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; doubtless more will be. Questions asking for textbook recommendations are often differentiated only by rather specific, personal requirements that are barely reflected in the answers: it's best to aim for a single well-curated thread with a set of answers describing each book well, providing readers with the information to make their own decisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T14:46:09.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4532" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4533" CreationDate="2017-01-08T03:09:30.133" Score="10" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that this has happened to me before and I know it happens to everyone from time to time. I don't understand why we still lose all our reputation points from a user just because he is removed from CV. I lost 40 reputation points today. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand the reasoning. They don't do it if a high rep person is removed. Just because the person may have done something wrong doesn't mean that their votes weren't valid. Theoretically, a user can gain points if the deleted user/account downvoted you a lot. But that must be very rare. I appreciate hearing your thought and hope that we can change this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-01-08T13:23:33.303" LastActivityDate="2017-01-10T09:38:48.233" Title="Why do we still lose points when a user is removed from the system?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|deleted-accounts|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4532" CreationDate="2017-01-08T13:51:35.557" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 'why' is mainly addressed in the post Glen_b linked under your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/125740/dont-throw-away-all-votes-when-a-user-is-deleted&quot;&gt;Don&amp;#39;t throw away all votes when a user is deleted&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main causes are 'vote fraud' and 'sock puppeting accounts' (creating a fake account for voting own posts, which is a type of vote fraud). Discarding votes from deleted-accounts used to be a major problem in the system; that meta post was heavily upvoted and remained that way for a while; but it was updated in 2015. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SE staff lowered and diversified thresholds for automatically discarding votes from deleted-accounts. I myself have &lt;a href=&quot;https://gis.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3582/change-vote-dropping-criteria-when-a-user-account-is-deleted&quot;&gt;complained&lt;/a&gt; about it once, but now with the recent change, I believe it is no longer a big concern. Also, it is not likely to be changed soon. See Shog9's answer (emphasis is mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm not gonna call this completed; as you and everyone else reading this know, we do still throw away some votes for some user-deletions... &lt;strong&gt;and probably always will for the reasons you noted in your proposal&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you think it is still worthwhile changing it, I suggest you raise a related discussion in the main Meta Stack Exchange site, since this feature would affect the entire system (i.e., all the other communities) and there would be much more participation. Just make sure the question is not a duplicate and it is well posed; otherwise, it can be quickly put 'on hold', and then, closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a final opinion on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Just because the person may have done something wrong doesn't mean that their votes weren't valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it doesn't mean they were valid either. I think it would be cumbersome to manually check all deleted-accounts and still prevent fraudulent activity; that is why the votes will be automatically discarded if that user had a low number of votes or just few users affected from their activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2017-01-10T09:38:48.233" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4534" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-08T13:52:10.367" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-08T13:52:10.367" LastActivityDate="2017-01-08T13:52:10.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4535" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-08T13:52:10.367" Score="0" Body="For questions about user accounts that have been deleted or the process of that deletion." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-01-08T16:57:11.393" LastActivityDate="2017-01-08T16:57:11.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4532" CreationDate="2017-01-08T16:58:40.637" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that unless some vote fraud happened, it makes no sense  to remove the votes. One of the main issues I have with that   current rule is that losing votes on one question may result in the question being &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwarerecs.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2459/903&quot;&gt;silently deleted by the automated question deletion bot a.k.a. roomba&lt;/a&gt;. And when a user is removed, one cannot see on which posts the votes we lost had been  cast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:52:39.553" LastActivityDate="2017-01-08T17:09:12.333" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="333" CreationDate="2017-01-11T11:18:44.513" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Agreed - so much agreed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have put a question about a problem that is taking me one year to solve it. I tried many times to do it by myself, because I don't like to shove it on others, so I did a lot of my own research, even posting partial questions here. Then someone just downvoted it without leaving any notice. So much for my own story, that brought me here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As someone wrote -  I don't care about points but I do care about bad etiquette. Points don't get me much to my self-esteem, I can't cook them, I can't sell them. But what I care about is that they carry the reputation. The down-or-up points serve as a shortcut for others who look at the long-list of question and consider which question is worth to read. And as I can observe is there are two sets of questions - od great interest with a lot of answers and neglected ones a lot of no-answers. CV is changing over time. I think a few years ago it was easier for intermediates like me to get an answer or even answers. All this was new, the members were few, and there was not so dynamic changing pile of posts every hour. Maybe in 2010 it was easy to catch the attention of the reader. Now I'm all happy when I get a useful comment. Downvoting without any comment is just diminishing my chance that someone will take a look at the question, let alone answer it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, in 2017 I am 100% for the idea to make explaining why-downvote mandatory. We cannot rely on courtesy of a downvoter and his/her willingness to kindly explain why he/she pressed the downvote button. Let's prevent the downvote button become the Like-button.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48279" LastActivityDate="2017-01-11T11:18:44.513" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="333" CreationDate="2017-01-11T20:49:46.693" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes. Encourage we should and encourage we do.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, StackExchange encourages it automatically: see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135&quot;&gt;Encouraging people to explain downvotes&lt;/a&gt; Meta.SE post from 2009 that was status-completed in 2015. Users with rep below 2k get &lt;code&gt;Please consider adding a comment if you think this post can be improved&lt;/code&gt; popup when downvoting - but apparently only once, whenever they downvote for the first time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a broad consensus among our high-rep users that leaving a comment when downvoting is a good thing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Needless to say, like everyone else I would urge people to leave a comment when down-voting, almost always (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333/should-we-encourage-downvoters-to-leave-a-comment-for-their-downvote/4538?noredirect=1#comment11847_4537&quot;&gt;@Scortchi&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can say that you always comment if and when you downvote, then I admire that [...] (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333/should-we-encourage-downvoters-to-leave-a-comment-for-their-downvote/4538?noredirect=1#comment11844_333&quot;&gt;@NickCox&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes are inherently negative. They create bad feelings. Use them when they can have the constructive effect of encouraging a poster to improve a particular post. This implies that most downvotes are wasted if they are not accompanied by an effective, actionable comment. (There are exceptions: some posts are so obviously poor that little needs to be said.) (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4522/17230&quot;&gt;@whuber&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no way we can technically &lt;em&gt;force&lt;/em&gt; people to leave a comment, and there are compelling arguments that this would be a bad thing anyway. Sometimes posts are just too bad and life is too short to leave a comment. But one should aim at leaving a comment whenever there is any hope that the post might get improved, or whenever there is hope that the comment might at least be useful for future readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T19:40:37.597" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4448" CreationDate="2017-01-11T22:34:02.113" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The project is drawing to a close, and I am planning to take down the annotation interface this weekend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much to everyone who helped out, and thank you for all the valuable feedback and suggestions. Hopefully the collected annotations will lead to the development of better duplicate question detection systems, especially for StackExchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="136419" LastActivityDate="2017-01-11T22:34:02.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4525" CreationDate="2017-01-12T21:34:33.057" Score="11" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;learning&lt;/a&gt; tag is in the process of being removed, see the answer in  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4485&quot;&gt;Understanding the use of the [education] tag&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I wrote wiki excerpts to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/q-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;q-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;q-learning&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/transfer-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;transfer-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;transfer-learning&lt;/a&gt;. The former is IMHO a valid &amp;amp; useful tag, about the latter I am not sure as it only has 5 threads, but the concept seems clear enough so I'd say let it be.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I removed &lt;code&gt;[representation-learning]&lt;/code&gt; from all threads as too vague and unspecific.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/statistical-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;statistical-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;statistical-learning&lt;/a&gt; should become a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt;, see also the discussion in the comments above where everybody agrees with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; The synonym has been created, thanks to @Scortchi.&#xA;Case closed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T10:10:46.017" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4541" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4542" CreationDate="2017-01-13T05:12:15.977" Score="1" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today on CV I saw an OP with a reputation of 6 points offer a 100 point bounty.  The problem wasn't even difficult. It was a self study question and one person gave an answer of useful hints.  By giving a 100 point bounty, it seems like the OP is trying to force a complete answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since he put up the bounty it will draw more answers but the way the bounty system works is that if nobody gets the bounty within 7 days it goes unclaimed.  The OP could post the bounty with no intention to award it.  Yet he gets the benefit of activity and possibly the complete answer that he is not entitled to under the rules of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens if the OP chooses to pay the bounty?  Does he wind up with negative reputation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastActivityDate="2017-01-13T11:18:33.330" Title="Why can members with low reputation post bounties worth more than their total reputation?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4541" CreationDate="2017-01-13T06:56:22.903" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bounties operate as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You cannot start a bounty if you have less than 75 reputation. You cannot make them for more reputation than you have (you can't start a 100 point bounty with 90 reputation but you can start a 50 point bounty)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Reputation cost for bounties is paid immediately, as soon as you start them. Presumably the user had 106 reputation and then created a bounty for 100 (all legitimate so far) at which point their reputation immediately dropped to 6, which was what you saw after they had already paid the cost.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The reputation is lost whether or not you award the bounty (you don't get it back either way). If you don't award it the reputation goes to waste. However, if you don't award it but you have upvoted an answer during the bounty period, that answer will be &quot;auto-awarded&quot; half the bounty value. The other half is wasted (there's a bit more to this situation but you can read about that on meta.SE if you care to)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, most of what you ask about is based on a mistaken premise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Details about how bounties work are in the help, in the section on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/reputation&quot;&gt;Reputation and moderation&lt;/a&gt;, there's a subsection on bounties: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;What is a bounty? How can I start one?&lt;/a&gt; (Edit: now that I've added the link, I see that Nick posted the same link in comments earlier) &#xA;with possibly more than you care to know about &lt;strike&gt;penguins&lt;/strike&gt; bounties to be found in the relevant section of the network FAQ: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16065/how-does-the-bounty-system-work&quot;&gt;How does the bounty system work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing that I see in your question that could be an issue is that someone might be induced to answer a self-study question &quot;in full&quot; in order to get the bounty (who might otherwise follow the guidelines).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given it has not really been much of an issue so far (both bounties and the special treatment of self-study type questions have been around for many years), I don't expect it's going to substantially impact the site any time soon, so I don't think it's necessary to pre-empt anything -- if someone answers more fully than seems appropriate, the usual approach of a polite comment is usually sufficient, and I expect it will continue to be for the near future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, I don't see anything we need to do here, at least not yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2017-01-13T11:18:33.330" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4525" CreationDate="2017-01-13T13:22:24.873" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;EDIT BELOW (August 25th, 2017)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;I concur with what @amoeba proposed, except point 4.&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/statistical-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;statistical-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;statistical-learning&lt;/a&gt; should be merged into &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt;, see also the discussion in the comments above where everybody agrees with that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@amoeba changed point 4, so now we are in agreement&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/statistical-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;statistical-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;statistical-learning&lt;/a&gt; should become a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt;, see also the discussion in the comments above where everybody agrees with that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@gung had already said in the comments&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making &lt;code&gt;[statistical-learning]&lt;/code&gt; a synonym of &lt;code&gt;[machine-learning]&lt;/code&gt; seems like a good idea. I think in principle SL could be a valid tag, but it's very unlikely to work out--it'll just create more fragmentation instead. – gung Jan 5 at 13:22&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For now I'm against the merging and in favor of proposing as synonym. But I can't still pinpoint if SL and ML warrant two tags. As @gung commented in this answer perhaps this warrants a separate question as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below, I collected some evidence SL &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; not be simply ML.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alright, found a somewhat (blurry) contrast between &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/statistical-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;statistical-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;statistical-learning&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt;. While I was searching for it in &lt;em&gt;Elements&lt;/em&gt;, it was actually in &lt;em&gt;An Introduction&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right at &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Chapter 1 - Introduction&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;sup&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;emphasis&lt;/strong&gt; mine)&lt;/sup&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Statistical learning refers to a set of tools for &lt;strong&gt;modeling and&#xA;understanding&lt;/strong&gt; complex datasets. It is a recently developed area in&#xA;statistics and blends with parallel developments in computer science&#xA;and, in particular, &lt;strong&gt;machine learning&lt;/strong&gt;. The field encompasses many&#xA;methods such as the lasso and sparse regression, classification and&#xA;regression trees, and boosting and support vector machines.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;A Brief History of Statistical Learning&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; (sorry, long quote)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;By the end of the 1970s, many more techniques for learning from data&#xA;were available. However, they were almost exclusively linear methods,&#xA;be-cause fitting non-linear relationships was computationally&#xA;infeasible at the time. By the 1980s, computing technology had finally&#xA;improved sufficiently that non-linear methods were no longer&#xA;computationally prohibitive. In mid 1980s Breiman, Friedman, Olshen&#xA;and Stone introduced classification and regression trees, and were&#xA;among the first to demonstrate the power of a detailed practical&#xA;implementation of a method, including cross-validation for model&#xA;selection. Hastie and Tibshirani coined the term generalized additive&#xA;models in 1986 for a class of non-linear extensions to generalized&#xA;linear models, and also provided a practical software implementation.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Since that time, inspired by the advent of machine learning and other&#xA;disciplines, statistical learning has emerged as a new subfield in&#xA;statistics, focused on supervised and unsupervised modeling and&#xA;prediction. In recent years, progress in statistical learning has been&#xA;marked by the increasing availability of powerful and relatively&#xA;user-friendly software, such as the popular and freely available R&#xA;system. This has the potential to continue the transformation of the&#xA;field from a set of techniques used and developed by statisticians and&#xA;computer scientists to an essential toolkit for a much broader&#xA;community.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Chapter 2 - Statistical Learning&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; there's also some definition of the term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following the next chapters, you also have staples in Machine Learning: Linear Regression, Classification (LR, LDA, QDA, KNN), Resampling, Linear model selection and Regularization (subset selection, shrinkage, PCR, PLS), Non-linear regression (regression splines, GAM), Trees (CART, Random Forest), Support Vector Machines (SVC, SVR), Unsupervised Learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sadly, nowhere SL and ML are directly compared one against the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to foment some discussion on the term, because it's not sure in what does it deviate from machine learning, if in anything at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*&lt;em&gt;Now I'm under the impression it's a synonym (i.e. the ML framework under the statistics culture and jargon), but why not use the more vendible term then?&lt;/em&gt; Though in the scientific literature SL is a really popular term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perphaps the difference is simply cultural, like many discussions in the main site pointed. Consider Stanford, where two courses are taught: &lt;a href=&quot;http://statweb.stanford.edu/%7Etibs/stat315a.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stats 315a&lt;/a&gt;/&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.stanford.edu/class/stats315b/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;315b&lt;/a&gt; - Statistical Learning and &lt;a href=&quot;http://cs229.stanford.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CS 229&lt;/a&gt; - Machine Learning. Apart from being named different and being in different concentrations areas, they also attract different students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://statweb.stanford.edu/%7Etibs/stat315a/CS229vsStat315a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tibshirani even shares his views in his page&lt;/a&gt; comparing both courses and then both terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Machine learning research focusses more  on low noise situations, eg&#xA;engineering applications like robotics and physical sciences&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Statistical learning focusses  more on high noise, observational data&#xA;like medicine and genomics, and problems where interpretation of the&#xA;fitted model is important&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But more and more overlap in application areas!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've come to the conclusion Statistical Learning is the application of Learning algorithms to classical statistical problems (I think the small phrase at the Machine Learning article in Wiki and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-bcf.usc.edu/%7Egareth/ISL/book.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ISLR book description corroborate this notion&lt;/a&gt;). The distinction to Machine Learning is better shown with examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Machine Learning is concerned with optimizing generalized predictive power. So the focus is mostly on loss functions. Eg.: Studies trying to predict if a person has Alzheimer from neuroimaging, thus producing biomarkers of Alzheimer, but not focused on the biological meaning on the features, just on performance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Statistical Learning on the other hand wants to make inference over this scenario. Eg.: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;How do learning algorithms trained to predict the biological aging from neuroimages of healthy people perform on the presence of Alzheimer? Why?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possible scenario for Statistical Learning is predicting states, such as task paradigms, from neuroimaging using linear models with shrinkage, such as SVMs, producing interpretable weight maps. Yet another scenario is in the introduction of a new imaging technique, where Statistical Learning can help the scientific community to uncover if said technique improves the diagnosis of a disorder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I'm mostly talking about neuroimaging because that's my area of expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Said all that, I'm of the opinion the tag would be mostly useless here on CV, and wouldn't be used for it's true meaning.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www-bcf.usc.edu/%7Egareth/ISL/ISLR%20Sixth%20Printing.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;James, G., Witten, D., Hastie, T., &amp;amp; Tibshirani, R. (2013). An introduction to statistical learning (Vol. 6). New York: Springer.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60613" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T12:07:31.937" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4544" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4545" CreationDate="2017-01-14T15:32:10.627" Score="4" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that members with high reputations can get involve in moderator activities.  For example, I have recently started to review and vote on posts that have been put into the review queue. I have seen that questions that get votes to close seem to require a certain number of votes before being put on hold and entering the review queue.  It appears that a moderator can put a post on hold without any other votes.  Am I right about this? Can members with high reputation who are not moderators do this also?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another observation I have about the review queue is that any edit of a post can kick it back into the review queue for voting to reopen.  To reduce the burden on the moderators and others who vote in the review queue shouldn't there be some restriction so that the edit has to have some new content to be put back into the review queue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T10:03:45.600" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T10:03:45.600" Title="Can moderators close questions without having the required number of votes?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|moderation|reopen-closed|privileges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4544" CreationDate="2017-01-14T17:09:01.340" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;A single vote by a moderator is sufficient for &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; action: closing, reopening, deletion, undeletion. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/75189&quot;&gt;Who are the diamond moderators, and what is their role?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;High reputation does not confer this ability. However, having a gold tag badge grants the user a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/231212&quot;&gt;binding closing vote&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;em&gt;duplicate&lt;/em&gt; on questions having that tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding reopening, from &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/36415&quot;&gt;How do you reopen a closed question?&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Editing the body of a question within five days of closure will add it to the Reopen Review queue, where people with the the ability to cast reopen votes will assess it. A question can only be added to the Reopen Review queue once per closure via editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the edit must change the post body (not just title or tags). The system is unable to judge whether the edit was significant. In my experience, an edit that does nothing but &lt;em&gt;remove&lt;/em&gt;  content (distracting off-topic parts, or broken markup that makes the text unreadable) can make a question worth reopening. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user56674" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T17:09:01.340" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4546" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4548" CreationDate="2017-01-15T21:12:34.217" Score="12" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the use of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science&lt;/a&gt; tag, given that one might expect most questions on this website to be related to science?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T10:58:35.760" Title="Understanding the use of the [science] tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-reorganization|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4546" CreationDate="2017-01-15T23:12:16.430" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I don't have figures to support this impression, personally I wouldn't expect most questions to relate specifically to science; a large fraction, certainly. (However, I think that's not really the issue here, aside from suggesting that the tag is overly broad, which may be the case even if it isn't anywhere near to a majority.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's potential value in a &lt;code&gt;science&lt;/code&gt; tag if the tag is used to indicate a set of characteristics of the work being asked about that are common in science but (almost) absent elsewhere. These might include things like known functional forms, and measurement errors of given size on some variables. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, such common characteristics of science-related questions may be better handled by more specific tags that relate to those characteristics; I suppose there's some tension if that leaves too few tag-slots to describe the features of the question itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be worth going through and seeing how it's actually used -- is there something about the way in which it's being used that makes it worth keeping? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2017-01-15T23:12:16.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4546" CreationDate="2017-01-16T18:41:40.100" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are only 14 threads tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/science&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;science&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;science&lt;/a&gt;. I looked through them and I don't see anything in common among these threads. It appears to me that this tag (that, by the way, exists since 2010) is being applied without any coherent system and hence does not serve any useful purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest getting rid of this tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update (Jan 23):&lt;/strong&gt; I have eliminated the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T10:58:35.760" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T10:58:35.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4549" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4553" CreationDate="2017-01-17T16:12:41.840" Score="8" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two upvoted answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/202433/are-bootstrap-distributions-always-gaussian/202437#202437&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;* (mine and someone else's). While the user appears to have been removed and the question has a -3 score, it seems that these answers are productive and address a question which someone might like to have answered in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that it was automatically deleted by Community, but it's not clear why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My recollection** is that this user posted a number of relatively poor questions, some of which people endeavored to answer, many of which rapidly accumulated downvotes. If it's the case that this user's posts are being purged by the Community bot, it seems like we should make an effort to curate the questions which have high-quality answers even if the question itself is poor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*If you're not able to view this question, it could be because you do not have sufficient reputation to view deleted posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;**Since the user is removed, we can't see the historical aliases, but I think I know who the user was based on context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T11:44:43.320" Title="Why was this on-topic question deleted?" Tags="|support|moderation|deleted-questions|deleted-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3175" CreationDate="2017-01-18T16:07:50.750" Score="15" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Can anybody help me?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The kind of question here often starts &quot;I am an X working on Y&quot; with perhaps a little more detail, and then ends with an open request for help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this a bad question? Isn't the point of CV to offer help to those who ask? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What's usually bad about this is that it confuses the site with a helpline.&lt;/strong&gt; A helpline I'll define in the following way. It's someone's job on a helpline to be available, perhaps in a designated room, or at the end of a phone, or at an email address. If you ask for help, it's then their job to listen, very likely to ask further questions and get information from you, and provide what help they can. It's also their duty to be respectful, even deferential. Their role is always to try to help to the maximum extent (subject to various simple rules such as your being a customer or more generally entitled to help). This applies whether the person asking is (say) a customer, a student or an employee. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The helpline analogy really doesn't apply to Cross-Validated. &lt;strong&gt;It's no-one's job to answer your question, or even to signal their willingness to do so. That follows from the principle that no one need answer any questions at all.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way the site works is more like this. &lt;strong&gt;It's your job to work hard at a good specific question.&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;I am working on Y&quot; doesn't qualify. What do you want to know, concretely and precisely?  Then if you did that well, it's likely that someone will want to answer. So the answer to &quot;Can anybody help me?&quot; is in essence that someone is likely to try, but only if you ask a good question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T16:15:56.200" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T16:15:56.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2613" CreationDate="2017-01-18T18:59:15.140" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are currently 123 threads tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/confidence&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;confidence&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;confidence&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the next several days I plan to look through &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=%5bconfidence%5d%20-%5bconfidence-interval%5d%20-%5binterval%5d%20-%22confidence%20interval%22%20-%22confidence%20intervals%22%20-%22confidence%20level%22%20-%2295%25%22%20is%3aquestion&quot;&gt;all 30-40 that are not explicitly about CIs&lt;/a&gt; via search&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[confidence] -[confidence-interval] -[interval] -&quot;confidence interval&quot;&#xA;-&quot;confidence intervals&quot; -&quot;confidence level&quot; -&quot;95%&quot; is:question&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will retag those that are not about confidence intervals. For the ones that are about &quot;confidence&quot; in an output of a classifier I am/will be using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/uncertainty&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;uncertainty&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;uncertainty&lt;/a&gt; tag, as suggested in the @AdamO's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: the above search yields zero results. All the remaining [confidence] threads are about CIs. &lt;strong&gt;Hence, we can now make a synonym &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/confidence&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;confidence&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;confidence&lt;/a&gt;$\to$&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/confidence-interval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;confidence-interval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;confidence-interval&lt;/a&gt; and merge it straight away.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please vote for this synonym here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/confidence-interval/synonyms&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/confidence-interval/synonyms&lt;/a&gt; if you have &gt;=2.5k rep and &gt;=5 rep in the [confidence-interval] tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE2 (Jan 26): Synonym implemented via voting without mod intervention.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T09:37:38.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4552" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4559" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:27:03.317" Score="7" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/interval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;interval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;interval&lt;/a&gt; tag is awful. It has 94 threads and the following excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Statistical intervals, such as confidence, credible, prediction or tolerance intervals. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but in fact we have separate well-established tags for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/confidence-interval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;confidence-interval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;confidence-interval&lt;/a&gt; (2k), &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/credible-interval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;credible-interval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;credible-interval&lt;/a&gt; (60), &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/prediction-interval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;prediction-interval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;prediction-interval&lt;/a&gt; (200), and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tolerance-interval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tolerance-interval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tolerance-interval&lt;/a&gt; (30). I would say it makes sense to replace &lt;code&gt;[interval]&lt;/code&gt; with more specific tags everywhere where applicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is worse, is that &lt;code&gt;[interval]&lt;/code&gt; tag is often used to refer to &quot;interval data&quot; -- a term that has &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt; to do with any of the mentioned statistical intervals. See. e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/interval+ordinal&quot;&gt;24 questions tagged with [interval] and [ordinal]&lt;/a&gt;. This usage is directly against the wiki excerpt. I would say that we do not need any tag for interval data because all data are interval unless stated otherwise. Alternatively, we can retag those with [interval-data]. What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T09:31:19.693" Title="Ambiguous [interval] tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-reorganization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4549" CreationDate="2017-01-19T11:44:43.320" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a user account is deleted their negatively voted questions are automatically deleted&amp;mdash;even if they've got upvoted answers. There's a (currently open) feature request to change this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/199860/a-question-should-not-be-deleted-by-the-user-deletion-algorithm-if-it-has-upvote&quot;&gt;A question should not be deleted by the user deletion algorithm if it has upvoted answers&lt;/a&gt;. But it's just an ordinary deletion: if you can see the deleted question (you need the 'Access to Moderator Tools' privilege), then you can vote to undelete it. For now, at least, it's best to alert a diamond moderator, who'll be able to quickly find &amp;amp; undelete all the questions with upvoted answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T11:44:43.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3175" CreationDate="2017-01-22T10:28:19.973" Score="16" Body="&lt;h2&gt;How do I interpret this output?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This kind of question consists of copying and pasting some output from your software and then asking us how to interpret the output. (In really bad cases, the output isn't even formatted to respect line breaks or use of fixed width fonts and thus to echo the layout in your software, so it's essentially unreadable too.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this often a bad question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does &quot;interpret&quot; mean, any way?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it: Tell me what the results mean?&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;Sometimes people want a &lt;em&gt;substantive&lt;/em&gt; interpretation and are asking that someone writes a story for them using subject-matter knowledge, factual and theoretical. That is, it's economic data, and you want to know what a (student or beginning) economist should write to satisfy other economists. Or it's psychological or biological data or whatever; only the peer group differs, but it's the same expectation. That's usually a tough call even if experts in your field recognise the variables and could do it, but almost no-one on CV wants to help to write your term paper or project report or to draft your submission to a learned journal. We're happy to advise on specific, concrete statistical points. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it: I'm new to this technique and I want you to go through the output and tell me how to think about it?&lt;/strong&gt; That's usually far too much to ask. Are we to assume that you know nothing and need everything explained? That's like asking us to write a lengthy personal tutorial, but those already exist. That's the lecture you should have had or the textbook chapter you should have read (or even the Wikipedia article that is, surprisingly, quite good). By all means, &lt;strong&gt;ask specific technical points, while showing that you have made some effort to understand what you are doing&lt;/strong&gt;, but don't expect that how do I interpret this output? is a switch that will set an expert going on a detailed interpretation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2018-06-23T06:42:13.133" LastActivityDate="2018-06-23T06:42:13.133" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2612" CreationDate="2017-01-23T14:13:31.287" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;analysis&lt;/a&gt; tag and was going to write a Meta post suggesting deleting this tag on the grounds that it is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;meta tag&lt;/a&gt; (the only meta tag that we are tolerating here on CV is [self-study]) that moreover is inconsistently used and does not seem to serve any useful purpose. One could in principle put [analysis] tag, as it is defined in its wiki excerpt (see below), on at least half of the posts on CV. It's way too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before writing this post I searched Meta for &quot;analysis&quot; and found this question. It left me puzzled. The tag was suggested by @AdamO in July 2015. The post got only one comment and it was rather critical. There were no answers. The post did get three upvotes and no downvotes, but three upvotes seem to me to be only a meagre support.  However, @AdamO went on to create the tag, wrote a detailed wiki, re-tagged a whole bunch of older questions, and by now there are 171 threads in this tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was there perhaps some discussion elsewhere that I cannot find?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wiki excerpt says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions dealing with the applied analysis of a specific dataset or design of experiment. Posts tagged analysis are requesting statistical consulting assistance from the network. Questions tagged analysis need to be phrased appropriately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have tens of thousands of questions &quot;requesting statistical consulting assistance&quot;, not 171. The tag is an obvious meta tag, and I don't see any benefit from it. People use this tag whenever they are writing a question about any &quot;analysis&quot;, be it principal component &quot;analysis&quot;, partial least squares &quot;analysis&quot;, regression &quot;analysis&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I downvoted the question and suggest to burninate this tag.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T14:13:31.287" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4263" CreationDate="2017-01-24T20:42:25.347" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;ARCH was made synonym of GARCH by voting on the synonym proposal.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(This way was preferred over mapping both to &lt;code&gt;arch-garch&lt;/code&gt; as nobody was able to vote for or even suggest the latter synonyms because nobody has the necessary &gt;=5 rep points in the non-existing &lt;code&gt;arch-garch&lt;/code&gt; tag. - thanks to @amoeba for the note)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The change took place on January 24, 2017.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The case is closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastEditorUserId="53690" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T05:38:58.890" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T05:38:58.890" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4552" CreationDate="2017-01-26T14:39:40.133" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for the discussion. I replaced the wiki excerpt for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/interval&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;interval&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;interval&lt;/a&gt; with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;PLEASE DO NOT USE THIS TAG. It's slowly being deleted. Use [confidence-interval], [credible-interval], [prediction-interval], [tolerance-interval], [interval-censoring], or [ordinal] if you want to ask about ordinal-vs-interval data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and will probably start slowly retagging existing threads. If anybody wants to help with this, please do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update (Feb 12):&lt;/strong&gt; The tag is eliminated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T09:31:19.693" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T09:31:19.693" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4494" CreationDate="2017-01-26T14:47:05.023" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please upvote two synonym suggestions here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/intercept/synonyms&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/intercept/synonyms&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and also consider upvoting (or downvoting, as you see fit) as many pending synonym suggestions as you can:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One needs to have &gt;=5 rep in a master tag to vote. In order to vote, click on a master tag (left column) and vote via up/down arrows on the next page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; Implemented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T22:00:43.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4563" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4564" CreationDate="2017-01-29T19:01:07.983" Score="6" ViewCount="575" Body="&lt;p&gt;This applies to many of us who have been members of this site for many years.  Some of my old questions and answers get reviewed periodically.  This is fine.  Members have a right to upvote or downvote as they see fit.  The problem is that I am finding some old and often popular questions and answers are getting downvotes even though they were perfectly reasonable questions and answers at the time.  In my case for example an answer given in 2012 is now being downvoted in 2017. The problem is that I answered about SAS software at the time and it is being judged today when changes have been made to other software (especially R) that make it more acceptable in FDA studies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what should be done but I feel that such questions and answers should not be judged badly in view of current software developments.  I would like to know what others think could be a reasonable solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T00:24:21.667" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T21:22:53.930" Title="Why do people downvote old questions and answers?" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|votes|old-posts|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4563" CreationDate="2017-01-29T19:50:17.587" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Votes on this site are highly noisy and so over-analyzing one-offs like this is a waste of energy in my opinion (especially because the criteria for what deserves an up/downvote are completely individual specific). I don't hear you complaining about upvotes on ancient posts that may or may not still be relevant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just from my own posts, I can see that sometimes &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/218198/are-there-ways-in-which-perfect-correlation-i-e-textcovx-y-1-can-st/218455#218455&quot;&gt;off-the-cuff&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/222120/why-is-the-empirical-cumulative-distribution-of-11000-a-straight-line/222123#222123&quot;&gt;incomplete&lt;/a&gt; answers I've posted have gotten upvotes, while &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/258704/covariance-equal-to-zero-implies-independence/258731#258731&quot;&gt;correct answers&lt;/a&gt; have been downvoted in retaliation to me criticizing someone else's answer (and, yes, the poster was online at the time, the downvote occurred miliseconds after my critical comment, and I did see the person's rep decrease by 1 at that moment, so...not exactly rocket science). Or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/258788/normally-distributed-estimated-parameters-in-logistic-regression/258790#258790&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; -- it's the right answer. So, what's the reason for downvoting it? Who knows. Or cares. Yes, having the &quot;-1&quot; stuck to the answer probably damages its credibility to a future reader, but a discerning user can read it themselves and make their own judgment.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I've said this to you before, but you'll drive yourself nuts overanalyzing downvotes and worrying about reputation points. Rep points on this site are a currency that's not worth anything. After you have the ability to express yourself on the site (i.e. post answers, comments, and vote), which happens after 125 points I think, I don't see what the big draw is. In any case you certainly have enough rep to do whatever you want (isn't the last privilege granted at 25k?). So, my answer to &quot;what do others think could a reasonable solution&quot; -- this is a not an important issue, so do nothing.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109178" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2018-01-15T09:54:26.807" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T09:54:26.807" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4565" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-29T20:22:43.203" Score="10" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a question A is a duplicate of a combination of two questions, what should I do? Should I flag it as duplicate of one of the two questions, and leave a comment? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue I have with comments is that that aren't meant to be kept forever: they may be deleted anytime, and users don't have access to their deleted comments. Even the source of non-deleted comments cannot be obtained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example 1: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/258811/12359&quot;&gt;Neural networks: Differences between standard backpropagation, momentum and weight decay&lt;/a&gt; is a duplicate of the combination of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/29130/12359&quot;&gt;Difference between neural net weight decay and learning rate&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/246896/12359&quot;&gt;What is the intuition of momentum term in the neural network back propagation?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example 2: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/260219/12359&quot;&gt;fine-tuned end-to-end meaning&lt;/a&gt; = &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/255364/12359&quot;&gt;Fine Tuning vs Joint Training vs Feature Extraction&lt;/a&gt;  + &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/224118/12359&quot;&gt;What does end to end mean in deep learning methods?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T03:25:40.310" Title="Question A is a duplicate of question B + question C: what to do?" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4565" CreationDate="2017-01-29T21:21:52.540" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the new question is distinct enough that you need to combine two old questions to made it a pseudo-duplicate, then it's not a duplicate. Leave it open and, if you want, use the information from the other two posts to create an answer to the combined question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109178" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T21:21:52.540" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4567" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4574" CreationDate="2017-01-29T21:27:47.737" Score="3" ViewCount="1814" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note the approximately equal opinions +16/-13 on this question.&lt;/strong&gt; Clearly, this question divides our site members into approximately equal groups of opinions for downvoting. To those who would prefer a different tenor for the text of the question, please note that democracy is supposed to bring up issues worth discussing, which is not the same as having everyone agree about everything. Surely there are users who do not feel that downvoting is broken. Those users surely would not object to tweaking downvoting with clearly better alternatives to better serve those of us who do feel it is broken. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been my experience on multiple answers and even on closure votes on questions that unreasonable downvoting occurs like a flock of geese landing on a pond, more of a follow-the-leader activity, as contrasted to independent, original, individual thought. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, on our site, this crowd behavior occurs because of a word that means one thing to a statistician and something else to many other specialists. Sometimes this occurs because a minor error is committed, and even when it is corrected, the downvotes remain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When something that is just too original a thought is being developed, and the readers are guiding the development of that thought, progress is being made. This is usually downvoted, it generates interest, draws readers to that question, and usually rewards some other answer of a more conventional, boring, and incomplete type that &quot;fits&quot; within the scope of the average reader's training.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is hardly the first time this phenomenon has been noted (e.g.: see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/206777/word-for-the-sentiment-or-behaviour-of-extra-people-putting-the-boot-in-once-a-m/206783&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/144557/bandwagon-effect-in-close-votes&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What can we do to discourage the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/206780/327343&quot;&gt;bandwagon effect&lt;/a&gt; in CV SE?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should we limit the number of downvotes to one per day until the user reputation is greater than 1000?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should we increase the +125 reputation needed for first downvoting?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should we add a decision tree for downvoting like we have for flagging or close voting?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should we modify close voting to shift some down votes to close votes?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your thoughts, as usual are welcome. Here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/261194/99274&quot;&gt;another example&lt;/a&gt;, view it soon as these things change when attention is called to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can we do something about this problem to make downvoting more useful?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some new suggestions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We might require commenting for downvoting but include the option for making that comment anonymous. The motive for this would be to prevent the fear of retaliation to the downvoter, while enabling the downvoter to contribute. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We might allow the downvoter to be notified when the answer is changed, so that the downvoter has the option of regaining his(her) +2 when the perceived problem (real problems or or even a misunderstanding of the downvoter) has been addressed by changing the content of the post. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the final analysis, downvoting fulfills a role, the question here is whether we can improve that role for everyone's sake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is another example of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/320218/99274&quot;&gt;downvoting that makes no sense&lt;/a&gt;, that is off topic and is reminiscent of bower-birds collecting shiny objects as part of their &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.viralforest.com/bower-bird/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mating ritual&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet another example of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/339114/99274&quot;&gt;nasty negative reactions&lt;/a&gt;. The users spent all of their time and reputation points criticizing both the question, which is now on hold, and which was naive but not ridiculous. Lots of comments on how ridiculous the question is, but no downvotes. There was even a comment about the comments that no one bothered to answer the question. Enter moi into this regurgitation of furballs, and whatever I wrote got more downvotes. Meritorious? @gung didn't think so. What is a new user to think of this nonsense? The only person who bothered to try to help rather than spew negativity got clobbered for his efforts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT on 2018-10-21&lt;/strong&gt; Yet another suggestion, bear with me on this. Let's make a point with some quick and dirty pseudo-science... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YpnHx.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YpnHx.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The graph on the left is from users with mostly very high reputations. It shows two fairly obvious clusters. The left-hand group has a wider range of percentages of question votes versus total votes, and a low percentage (&amp;lt;9%) of downvotes. Let's call this group 'softies.' The right hand group in this left sided figure are the 'tough-guys' they tend to downvote much more frequently (&gt;18%). Without being totally scientific about it, the fact that there is a clear distinction between these groups (with no values between 9% and 18%) suggests to us that we users, even the highest reputation rollers we have, have inconsistent approaches to downvoting. Next, let us look search for why this is. The figure to the right shows a crude 'information content' analysis. Don't fret, I am not trying for plu-perfect stats here. It shows that there is a significant correlation between log-downvotes per reputation point and log-percentage downvotes. Sure, this correlation is not very explanatory, but note that the clustering has disappeared. I think, and do correct me if I am wrong, that this suggests that those who more readily express negative information content (opinions) do so as a relatively increased percentage of their opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, what does this mean? For one thing, from the viewpoint of recipients of these votes, inconsistent, i.e., erratic, downvoting is problematic. That is, it more depends on who is reviewing what than what is being reviewed. If you get a softie rather than a tough-guy as a first voter, you are in luck. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the new suggestion. We could make participation badges for &lt;code&gt;kind-hearted&lt;/code&gt; behaviour. For example, less than 10% downvotes for 400 votes (bronze), 1000 votes (silver) and 4,000 votes (gold). This might give users a motive for not being hypercritical and help balance out the perception of arbitrarily hypercritical reactions to posts. I noted unscientifically while doing this 'pseudo-analysis' that the user self-descriptions that were the most 'in your face' belonged to the most negative reviewers, and that the emotionally mature reviewers and those who said squat about themselves, tended to be &lt;code&gt;kind-hearted&lt;/code&gt;. Some useful advice: If you have to take an oral examination, and you have a choice between having a new, unsure of themselves, assistant professor and an aging professor who has 'seen it all' examine you, take the old fart, you are more likely to be treated fairly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit 2018-11-01&lt;/strong&gt; Just to be clear, I am trying to be helpful. There are problems with downvoting and I am trying to be helpful. Example, this post of mine was finally deleted: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/316262/can-we-figure-out-a-way-to-pay-moderators&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/316262/can-we-figure-out-a-way-to-pay-moderators&lt;/a&gt;. That occurred following -20 votes from what appear to be accolades of the status quo. Next, is an example of unexplained downvoting for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/331973/99274&quot;&gt;reasonable question&lt;/a&gt;. The answer to that question appears to be that current notation is elliptical enough that a &quot;+&quot; sign between random variables does not indicate whether those are paired outcomes or single outcomes, i.e., whether in the first case, convolution is invoked or in the second case, single outcomes, arithmetic addition is invoked. Regardless, the question continues to receive downvotes (now +16/-5). Would someone care to explain what the root of the -5 votes can be attributed to? (BTW, this is a &lt;code&gt;Famous Question&lt;/code&gt;, i.e., 10,000+ visits. But, I finally managed to figure out why someone might down vote it; the question language was informal. I then posited the question more exactly, (only) one downvote disappeared, and several up votes were added in a sort time. So it can matter how one asks a question more than what the question actually is.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is occurring in society at large, e.g., political correctness amounting to slander and politically motivated violence, has an effect on our site. For example, this has impacted our site with the institution of politically correct (PC) commenting lest someone be offended, which PC answers are generally twice as long as the more curt versions. Weaponized downvoting is currently poorly controlled, and may become increasingly problematic with time. In searching my own behaviour, I cannot see an altruistic motive for downvoting; something else negative always predominates whether that be strategic downvoting on competitive and incorrect answers, or whatever. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I for one am swearing off of downvoting, take that pledge with me.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="99274" LastEditDate="2019-01-06T03:31:32.490" LastActivityDate="2019-01-06T03:31:32.490" Title="How can we discourage downvoting when inappropriate?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|votes|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="112" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4563" CreationDate="2017-01-30T00:09:24.743" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a person in 2017 is looking at an answer that may have been written in 2010 (say), it's not &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; person's responsibility to try to figure out if the answer might have been correct at some time many years previously. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either the answer is correct right now or it isn't. The correct actions when faced with an incorrect answer are already laid out by StackExchange -- comments and downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately StackExchange is meant to be a source of help to people who are &lt;em&gt;searching&lt;/em&gt; for answers. The overwhelming number of people helped by StackExchange are not those who come to have their questions answered -- it's those whose questions &lt;em&gt;already have good answers&lt;/em&gt; and so they never even need to ask. [StackExchange is not primarily intended for just answering the question people have at the time they ask -- that's merely the source of the questions for the larger purpose.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This emphasis on people being able to find correct answers via search engines has been explicit in the design since the earliest days - since before any of us were writing answers for CrossValidated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, old answers that are no longer correct cannot stand &quot;as is&quot;; if the old answer isn't modified when the answer changes, we need a way for &lt;em&gt;currently&lt;/em&gt; correct answers to get higher reputation so that when people search for and find an answer, they can identify which one the users on site think is the best one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wrong answers accruing downvotes is StackExchange working as intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been  answering questions since August 7, 2010 (though my earliest answer is currently deleted). A lot of my answers are pretty old. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I gave an answer that was correct at the time of posting that had accrued upvotes, but facts had changed since the answer had been written, then I would &lt;em&gt;sincerely hope&lt;/em&gt; that my answer that contained incorrect information would not simply be left alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally any outdated answer should be fixed by its author (or at the very least edited with a very clear note that it was correct at the time of writing but facts have since altered), but of course if you have several hundred answers it can be impossible to simply notice and remember. So authors will need a nudge -- something to draw their attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I mentioned, there are two main mechanisms within the stackexchange software for doing so, comments and downvotes. So the person that finds an old answer of mine that's now wrong should choose at least one of those mechanisms to try to redress the problem (that new people searching will see an incorrect answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which mechanism to use? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are good because they might prompt the author to fix their answer. A correct answer is better than a wrong one. They also - at least temporarily (since comments might not stick around forever) - give some indication of what the problem is, but I know from experience* that readers often ignore the comments, especially with longer comment threads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvotes are good because they change the ordering of answers (when sorting by votes at least), and make it easier for users to choose between competing answers.  They also work when the author isn't currently active (which is true for the authors of many of our old answers). Sometimes a downvote will come with a comment (after all, if it's wrong, it's wrong), but it's not required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So both mechanisms are useful but downvotes have the advantage of not forcing the person choosing between the two actions to simply rely on the original author being able and willing to act.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a third alternative for people with sufficient privilege, which is to edit old answers, particularly if the original authors appear to be inactive. While we should avoid altering someone's answer substantively in general, it would often be reasonable to add line that the answer may have been correct at the time of writing but which may now be outdated. Such a note would help people avoid relying on presently incorrect answers; additional detail could be added in comments if you're really unwilling to fix the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* specifically I have more than once (twice, perhaps three times) answered questions on other forums which relied on well-upvoted but actually incorrect answers from CrossValidated where the mistake was noted in comments (posted long after). In both cases that I clearly recall at present, the poster of the new question that was relying on a wrong answer didn't read all the comments under the answer (and fair enough, posts are meant to stand on their own and the comment threads were long) or had seen them but concluded they must be wrong (the answer was heavily upvoted after all, a couple of voices to the contrary wouldn't convince someone who didn't understand the explanation of why the answer is wrong). In both cases the author of the wrong answer had not responded to the comments explaining the problem, presumably due to inactivity. In that case the responsible thing to do is &lt;em&gt;downvote&lt;/em&gt; the incorrect answer (and it may need a lot of downvotes not to be among the top answers so that people stop relying on it) and if possible, also post a new, better answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2018-01-15T21:22:53.930" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T21:22:53.930" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4567" CreationDate="2017-01-30T02:29:30.597" Score="-9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently, and do correct me if I am wrong, it costs (-1) to downvote, and the downvote creates a (-2) reputation for the recipient. One alternative is increasing the penalty to the downvoter to at least (-2) to make it more altruistic. Right now, the small penalty encourages trolling (It hurts my target more than me; HaHaHa!), ganging up in a bloodfest as in monkey see monkey do, grudge holding, and other very discouraging behaviors that negatively impact people who are are honestly attemptng to help others. Another alternative for better altruism would be to make it (-1) for the recipient and (-2) for the downvoter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T02:29:30.597" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4570" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-30T09:38:17.140" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T09:38:17.140" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T09:38:17.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4571" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-30T09:38:17.140" Score="0" Body="Questions and answers posted more than a couple of years ago." OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T09:38:17.140" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T09:38:17.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4567" CreationDate="2017-01-30T09:43:47.633" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Here is a summary added also in reaction to various comments (some now deleted). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Downvoting is not constructive (and not intended to be). It should, mostly, express a view that a post is not useful, although whatever other reasons or motives people may hide remain indiscernible. Downvoting is not informative unless people explain why they downvote. Downvoting is part of the SE system and anyone is free to dislike it, not to use it, to use it very sparingly, or to express opinions on it, or on how it is used. How downvoting is used on CV is clearly germane for this Meta, but trying to argue against or change the system is a SE-wide matter. I don't see evidence that downvoting is out of control here on CV. I see plenty of evidence that some individuals get very upset at being downvoted, and I have some sympathy with that personally, but it is, given human nature, an inevitable side-effect of SE.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be worried about &quot;trolling&quot;, &quot;ganging up&quot;, &quot;mob behaviour&quot; and &quot;unreasonable downvoting&quot; if ever I saw evidence of them, but I don't think we need any new mechanisms for dealing with bad practices. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I find it disconcerting that some in this thread are so ready to infer people's state of mind, personally or collectively, from the fact of downvoting.&lt;/strong&gt; Occasionally people do leave angry or nasty comments when they downvote. Then their attitude is plain, but that is out of order and should be handled by reminding people of the need for civility and by flagging bad cases for moderator attention. (Naturally, there is scope for disagreement about precisely what is angry or nasty. I think of myself as often candid but not nasty on purpose; who does?) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But often people do not add comments. When that happens, why they're downvoting is no more than a matter for surmise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can tell you my typical state of mind when I downvote a question or an answer after someone else has. It's that I agree with the previous downvoting. The question or answer is just wrong, or too poor to be acceptable. And I am not surprised when other people agree in turn. &lt;strong&gt;The polite, parsimonious, default assumption about downvoting is that people are exercising their privilege in good faith and with good reason. Only when you see explicit evidence to the contrary is action needed.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from lack of research effort as grounds for downvoting a question, the main reason for downvoting anything is that it is not useful. To me, that certainly includes being unclear; if something is unclear, it can hardly be useful. It's clearly true that downvoting by itself is not constructive, but often when a post is unclear, it will be true that a downvoter will not be in a position to suggest any specific improvements. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not to deny that, like almost anybody else, I do get irritated or annoyed to myself at certain posts or even at certain people. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I won't discuss @Carl's detailed proposals here. They seem to range from the serious to the facetious and it's a small imposition on Meta to be expected to work out which is which. (I don't want people to leave their sense of humour behind when they enter Meta, but proposals for change have to be serious to be taken seriously.) The more crucial point, already made by @amoeba, is that new badges or changed limits on anything are system-wide matters and need to be floated on SE meta. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have looked at some of the threads @Carl linked to and cannot see anything untoward there. Frankly, @Carl, the pattern I see in these and some of your other posts is this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, several of your questions are rather long-winded and come from a very individual perspective. You're proud to be a maverick! No problem there, but even statistical experts can find it hard to see what the question is and the comments can be as or more extensive as the answers. The biggest difficulty there is likely to be your frustration at not getting the kind of discussion you want. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, you do write vigorously and colourfully, but seem prone to exaggerated language and occasionally snap and snarl a little. Sometimes that is very entertaining; occasionally it is not constructive. A pugnacious style is sometimes a spur: people don't always back off, but give as good as they get. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can't see evidence that people are downvoting you unreasonably. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A recent thread was closed and the OP protested, although not in these words, &quot;The question is clear to me. Why is it being closed as unclear?&quot; The point, naturally, is that a question has to be clear to others to be any use or interest. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a forum, people will disagree and can and should express their disagreement in various ways. This happens through downvoting, which is not the tool of first preference but exists to be used when appropriate. It's designed by the system and needs to be practised to maintain a healthy archive, weeding out or limiting less fruitful questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I don't like being downvoted either: who does?) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT As at 10 November 2018 the question starts &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note the approximately equal opinions +13/-12 on this question.&#xA;  Clearly, this question divides our site members into approximately&#xA;  equal groups of opinions for downvoting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This comment on the current Meta thread reflects the entire issue under discussion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No; it doesn't show anything except that up and downvotes for the question are about equal. My answer pushes what I see as a key negative principle: Unless people explain a downvote, you can't reliably infer what lies behind it. And people aren't always candid even then. (In the case of one person no longer active and an answer of mine, they gave generally positive comments but then promptly downvoted it. I could tell this because there were no other downvotes and that person received a badge for their first downvote on the same day. This was a person who often ranted against being downvoted without explanation, but themselves gave many more downvotes than were ever explained. But that's rare.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, I can readily imagine all sorts of different reasons for up and down votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bang on! &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We should be discussing this, even if there really isn't a problem. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I found this provocative. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I found this entertaining. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There isn't a problem. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There may be a problem, but this doesn't help. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't like the style of this. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't agree with the specific proposals here. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so on. All those reasons are pure speculation (but to my mind can't be ruled out either, given various answers, comments, etc. and what is evident generally from members' attitudes and behaviour).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then again, @Carl writes &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Surely there are users who do not feel that downvoting is broken.&#xA;  Those users surely would not object to tweaking downvoting to better&#xA;  serve those of us who do feel it is broken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No &quot;surely&quot; about the second even granting the first, so far as I am concerned. (Surely those in favour of peace wouldn't mind a small war, given those who want one?   Surely those in favour of letting people decide what they do on X wouldn't mind banning this and that aspects of X given people who disagree?) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If downvoting is not broken, there is no reason to fix it or even tweak it. In total abstraction, I can readily agree that some downvotes are not deserved,   or given for reasons that aren't admirable, or given for the wrong reasons, but who is to say which they are? Almost all I know about are my own downvotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This thread is saved from ill-will and rancour because @Carl comes over as a well meaning and thoughtful person, perhaps despite his colourful and combative style, but  we have to agree that there is evidence of inappropriate behaviour before we can decide what best to do about it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2018-11-14T07:31:42.667" LastActivityDate="2018-11-14T07:31:42.667" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4565" CreationDate="2017-01-30T11:17:47.683" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question can be closed as a duplicate of two others if different users voting to close pick different duplicates (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/258820&quot;&gt;a recent example&lt;/a&gt;), but a single user can't pick more than one. Leaving a comment linking to a second duplicate is good enough&amp;mdash;it &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be deleted, but won't be. Links to both will appear 'Linked' list on the right of the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, especially when &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; isn't asked as &quot;&lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt;? and &lt;em&gt;C&lt;/em&gt;?&quot;, a &quot;stub&quot; answer may be a good idea: one that disentangles the issues &amp;amp; explains how the linked duplicates address them. In others there may be some mileage in a &quot;compare &amp;amp; contrast&quot;-type answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T10:06:46.763" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4567" CreationDate="2017-01-30T12:49:08.767" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have only a little to add to @NickCox's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Down-votes do tend to be sticky, which is a pity when the down-voted poster makes the effort to improve their post. I don't see any reason to suppose this is due to anything more than people's disinclination to keep on returning to a post they've down-voted to see whether it's been improved. There are some feature requests on Meta SE that you might be interested in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/1751/225179&quot;&gt;Allow an edit to notify downvoters: “I think I've fixed the issue&#xA;now - please check”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/165962/225179&quot;&gt;Allow me to get notifications on specific down-voted&#xA;questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/247608/225179&quot;&gt;Option to be notified when a post I downvoted is&#xA;edited&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to see something of the sort implemented. On the other hand I have the impression that for &quot;controversial&quot; posts with several down-votes &amp;amp; several up-votes it's often the case that the up-votes came after an improvement, &amp;amp; after the down-votes&amp;mdash;that people are trying to rectify a now-undeservedly low score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T12:49:08.767" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4576" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4577" CreationDate="2017-02-01T18:35:15.390" Score="28" ViewCount="590" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a thread on the main site someone said very elementary questions are off topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LxB0n.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LxB0n.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like someone upvoted his comment so maybe he's right. Around that same time @gung told me to be cautious answering the question so I asked him/her about this matter and the response was&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c0wvn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c0wvn.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So apparently there's some disagreement on this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are very elementary questions off topic and, if so, what is the definition of very elementary? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: Here is a follow-up comment from Dr. Michael Chernick in response to what I said above: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6Jbyt.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6Jbyt.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117710" LastEditorUserId="117710" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T18:54:21.333" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T00:42:08.027" Title="Are very elementary questions off topic on CrossValidated?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4576" CreationDate="2017-02-01T18:54:19.110" Score="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my mind, &lt;em&gt;elementary&lt;/em&gt; is too slippery a criterion for closing.  I don't doubt there are many questions that are elementary for @MichaelChernick that would be over my head, and I don't necessarily think they should be closed.  Below the pictured comment, he replies, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Elementary questions are likely to have been answered many times in possible duplicates.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That seems true, but in my opinion it is incumbent on him to find those duplicates and close the question in that more specific, and more specifically relevant, manner.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sympathetic that duplicates can be hard to find.  I often suspect there should be a duplicate, but can't find one and don't end up voting to close, or even post another answer that may cover material already covered elsewhere.  It is hard to say that that strategy is always better.  Nonetheless, I don't think 'too elementary' is a justifiable close reason.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T18:54:19.110" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2981" CreationDate="2017-02-01T21:46:36.643" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is my specific plan about what to do  with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pearson&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pearson&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pearson&lt;/a&gt; tag, based on the above discussion with @Scortchi a year ago:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create tags and tag synonyms &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pearson-chi-squared&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pearson-chi-squared&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pearson-chi-squared&lt;/a&gt;$\to$&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/chi-squared&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;chi-squared&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;chi-squared&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pearson-goodness-of-fit&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pearson-goodness-of-fit&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pearson-goodness-of-fit&lt;/a&gt;$\to$&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/chi-squared&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;chi-squared&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;chi-squared&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Update: DONE.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Go through all [pearson] threads and retag those about chi-squared into &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/chi-squared&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;chi-squared&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;chi-squared&lt;/a&gt;. This will be a minority of [pearson] threads, so not very difficult. &lt;strong&gt;Update: DONE.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, I looked at all questions that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;had &quot;chi&quot; in them; or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;had &quot;goodness&quot; in them; or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;had &quot;residual&quot; or &quot;residuals&quot; in them; or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;did &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; have &quot;correlation&quot; in them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I retagged a couple of dozens, the remaining 263 must  be all about Pearson's $r$.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Rename &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pearson&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pearson&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pearson&lt;/a&gt; into &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pearson-r&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pearson-r&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pearson-r&lt;/a&gt; via a mod merge hammer: make a synonym, merge, delete the synonym mapping. (This is needed to remove the ambiguity of the &lt;code&gt;[pearson]&lt;/code&gt; tag name). &lt;strong&gt;Update: DONE by @Scortchi.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Profit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-02-22T12:59:12.087" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T12:59:12.087" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4576" CreationDate="2017-02-02T00:37:49.453" Score="20" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Elementary questions are &lt;em&gt;on topic&lt;/em&gt;, and in no way form a basis for closure. It doesn't matter how elementary a question might seem, as long as it fulfills our other criteria for being on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Elementary questions are somewhat more likely to fail some of those other criteria - for example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;they're more likely to be duplicates&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;they're more likely to have not been adequately researched (many basic questions are easily answered via Wikipedia, internet search engines and so on).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;they're perhaps slightly more likely to be asked in an unclear or overly broad way&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Such questions &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; fail those criteria by actually failing those criteria directly, not by implication. Which is to repeat, being elementary is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a criterion for closure, or even for discouraging a question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Numerous discussions here on meta, in chat and in comments under elementary questions clearly establish that the general mood is to &lt;em&gt;encourage&lt;/em&gt; well-asked elementary questions, not discourage them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, gung is quite right in the original discussion. CrossValidated welcomes and has always welcomed supposedly elementary questions (while some people do have objections to elementary questions on various grounds, that has not been the general opinion any time I've seen it discussed). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes answering a good elementary question is a way that's both reasonably accurate and helps readers likely to wonder about an elementary but perhaps fundamental question can be extremely difficult. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one reason why I have frequently objected to labelling or characterizing questions as basic - whether by the OP or someone else in the body of the question, in the title, via tags or in some other way: the question might seem simple but that doesn't imply that a suitable answer is. Many deep and subtle questions are much easier to ask - so seem &quot;simple&quot; - than they are to answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I won't define what's elementary or very elementary, largely because I don't think it's useful to do so. We don't need to draw the distinction except in so far as it informs the style of our answers (we want to reach our audience). That distinction can be entirely internal as one writes an answer (&quot;I should answer this question in a basic way, and offer some intuitive motivation for it&quot; -- if you want to see examples of that, I particularly recommend some of whuber's answers to basic questions). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some users won't like dealing with very elementary questions, and that's absolutely fine. The easy option is to ignore them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that even answering the elementary questions which have fairly elementary answers can be good practice -- finding better ways to explain the basic ideas is something that's an important part of our discipline, because statistical thinking doesn't come very naturally to humans (it's not something we have good intuition about). We need to do a lot better than many elementary texts do on this -- they frequently either fail to be correct* or they fail to provide any suitable intuition/motivation for a correct discussion (few beginner students gain much motivation from a purely algebraic argument for example). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't always choose to answer elementary questions, but I certainly don't see answering elementary questions as a waste of time (as long as they're not duplicates and so on). The overwhelming majority of the people who read the site -- including many who never post -- will not have much statistical background and so answers to the most elementary questions will have a much wider audience. My most popular answers are almost all to relatively simple questions (though usually with enough meat underlying them to require a fairly detailed answer). It's surprising how often I learn something in answering one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-02-03T00:42:08.027" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T00:42:08.027" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4580" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-02T14:02:45.663" Score="6" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a bit late into this new year, being that we're already in the second month, but we are now cycling the Community Promotion Ads for 2017!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's twitter account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels, or double that if high DPI.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/4580&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5645" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:44:09.327" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T07:34:38.797" Title="Community Promotion Ads - 2017" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4580" CreationDate="2017-02-02T14:02:45.663" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/StackStats&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rzwq1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Help this community grow -- follow us on twitter!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5645" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T14:02:45.663" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3175" CreationDate="2017-02-02T22:19:14.480" Score="22" Body="&lt;h2&gt;A post that shows no concern for its readers does not deserve answers.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Teh speling en gramar r 2 terse and so ful of misstakes that we can scarsely reed the queston.  Its ovbious teh poster hasnt even red it theyselfs!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should be sensitive to people who are not native writers of English and work to accommodate them.  Even so, there's a fairly clear line between struggling with the language and being completely careless.  When the language in a post is more mangled than even a free Web translator will produce, expect people to vote to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T22:19:14.480" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4583" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-03T12:17:13.130" Score="43" ViewCount="1145" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a rich get richer phenomenon on CV and can we do something about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a feeling that we, as a community (including myself), have a bias in up-voting, so that high-reputation users are more prone to get up-voted then low-reputation users. It would be interesting to see that empirically using our data, but I don't have any good idea for testing it right now (maybe you have?). Nonetheless, it seems for me that the bias exists. For example, if there are two identical answers, then the one by high-reputation user tends to get more up-votes. The same with questions (recall e.g. short questions by high-reputation users, or long and complicated ones -- those are the kinds that are often ignored if posted by newcomers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we do something to diversify our voting and encourage the new users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-02-03T12:33:19.427" LastActivityDate="2017-04-06T15:07:07.827" Title="Rich get richer phenomenon on CV" Tags="|discussion|votes|reputation|participation|new-users|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4584" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-03T12:51:01.150" Score="3" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have posted the following question(s) in the following thread:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/259362/technical-theoretical-help-prediction-of-continuous-variable-modeling-proble&quot;&gt;Prediction of continuous variable - CV, Overfitting, Choosing K principal components&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it got only 17 views, when about half of them is me, refreshing the page :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm new in this specific stackexchange community, thus i don't enough reputation to offer a bounty, for example, in order to draw more attention to the question, as i'm used to in stackoverflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any other way to get the post more attention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the &quot;looks&quot; side - Maybe it's not enough elaborated? Maybe something in my formatting is missing or incorrect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the &quot;tools&quot; side - Is it allowed to post a comment for bumping the post? (I'm guessing not, and don't want to break any community rules by doing so)&#xA;Is there any other option available to get more attention to my post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="147210" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T21:46:55.630" Title="How to get more attention to a post without bounty option?" Tags="|discussion|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2017-02-04T23:06:29.390" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4585" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-03T12:56:27.227" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I try to never ask R-related questions on Cross Validated. However, I asked the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42022917/advanced-mcmc-samplers-in-r-for-calibration-of-a-computer-model&quot;&gt;Advanced MCMC samplers in R for calibration of a computer model&lt;/a&gt; on SO and apparently it wasn't well-received (it's true that little time has passed, though). Do you think it would be better suited to CV? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T21:45:32.610" Title="Do you think the question &quot;Advanced MCMC samplers in R for calibration of a computer model&quot; belong on SO, CV or nowhere on SE?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|r|software|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2017-02-05T18:06:48.377" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4586" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4590" CreationDate="2017-02-03T13:16:40.873" Score="19" ViewCount="304" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about R packages are off-topic on SO, and since programming questions are off-topic on CV, &lt;em&gt;a fortiori&lt;/em&gt; packages questions, which are about programming (in R) are off-topic on CV. That's why I always ask questions on algorithms (on SO), even if I often would much rather be pointed to a package. However, learning about packages is an integral part of doing statistics with R. Is there somewhere on Stack Exchange where I can ask question about which R package to use for a specific statistical inference problem? If not, as you guys are statistical experts, and many of you use/have used R, where do you go when you need advice about packages? Other than the R-help mailing list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-02-04T21:27:22.140" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T21:58:26.613" Title="Where to learn about R packages?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|r|software|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4583" CreationDate="2017-02-03T17:51:31.053" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is asking about rich-get-richer at the level of users (high rep users getting undeserved attention as they get higher rep). I'll address that first, but I'll then discuss a slightly different issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The effect may exist, but if it did, I'd presume that my upvotes per post would be higher now than it was say three or so years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it has gone up at all in that time. (It did go up for a while when I first started answering questions regularly, but the average quality of my answers was improving; once that more-or-less plateaued, I don't think anything changed much since). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anything, even without a rich-get-richer phenomenon, that average should have gone up simply because a larger proportion of my answers are old - and they still accumulate some votes over time, so unless my new answers are getting less attention than they used to, upvotes per answer should tend to increase a little anyway, and I think they've actually gone down a bit). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess the decrease may partly be having spent a bit on bounties, but that's not &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; that much -- it might explain the small decrease, and maybe even just a tad more than that -- which even if that adjustment resulted in an underlying  small increase, it would be so small as to be easily consistent with the increasing age of my average post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for me at least I don't know that there's any indication of rich-get-richer, but if there is one in my case it must be &lt;em&gt;really tiny&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe others have seen more of an effect. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;However, amoeba (in comments below) raises the problem at the level of questions and there I think there is perhaps more of an issue. Some of my answers get more attention than they seem to deserve while other (clearly better in several senses) answers languish; and numerous other people have recognized a problem at that level. So while we might be ending up about right on average (if the informal analysis under point 1. of my average points per answer as my reputation rose is not atypical), that doesn't mean the best posts are always well recognized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that I can suggest a few things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;where you can, look at all the answers, not just the top few &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;try varying the sort order for answers using the choices at the top of the set of answers (e.g. to look at &quot;active&quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tqcpv.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tqcpv.png&quot; alt=&quot;Image showing the answer-list sort order links&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;keep your eye open for low-voted answers that are gems and upvote them&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;give bounties to especially noteworthy answers&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-02-04T00:59:58.350" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T00:59:58.350" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4586" CreationDate="2017-02-04T20:12:41.047" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is, of course, &quot;it depends&quot;, but I think you're asking about something different from what you think you're asking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe we can all agree that a question like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there an R package for fitting Random Forests?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;not only is off-topic but also shows a lack of research effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And likewise we can all agree that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;randomForest::randomForest(...)&lt;/code&gt; gives me an error. How can I fix it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is also off-topic, and at best belongs on StackOverflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now consider a question like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do the &lt;code&gt;rpart&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;party&lt;/code&gt; packages differ? Which one is preferred off-the-shelf for classification?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say this question is a &lt;strong&gt;good question for CV&lt;/strong&gt;, because while, yes, its focus is restricted to R packages, it is actually a question about statistical computing. It is not about programming as such (i.e. it doesn't belong on StackOverflow), and while it is asking for a software recommendation I would say it's still topical enough to not kick it over to SoftwareRecs, where I imagine there is much less domain expertise floating around anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There might be a gray area here with a question like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the difference between &lt;code&gt;caret&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;mlr&lt;/code&gt;? How do they compare to &lt;code&gt;scikit-learn&lt;/code&gt; in Python? What are the strengths and weaknesses of each?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;because it's not really about statistical computing. But I (as an opinionated poster without moderator privileges) would still say it's on-topic, because it's about statistics-specific methods and workflows. &lt;em&gt;(Note that this question would also probably be closed as &quot;too broad&quot;, but I still think it gets the right idea across.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, on to a question that I hope captures the spirit of the one you linked to in the comments (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/42022917/2954547&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/q/42022917/2954547&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What R package should I use for outlier detection?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As stated, this question would rightfully be closed as either &quot;opinion-based&quot; or &quot;too broad&quot;. But what is the question really trying to ask? I would argue that the question could have been phrased as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are the current popular outlier detection techniques, and which of them are readily available in R?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and that &lt;strong&gt;this would be on-topic here&lt;/strong&gt;. The question isn't really about R, it's about statistical modeling, with an added requirement that the model have an R implementation. This, I think, is what you are asking in your question on StackOverflow:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of the MCMC samplers available in R, which one should I use for this problem and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which has more or less the same flavor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36229" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:33.213" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T09:28:59.250" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4583" CreationDate="2017-02-05T18:58:05.370" Score="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Let's look at the data.&lt;/strong&gt;  First up is a plot of acceptance rates &lt;em&gt;versus&lt;/em&gt; the number of answers, with a weighted GAM smooth superimposed (courtesy &lt;code&gt;ggplot2&lt;/code&gt;).  It shows $11,609$ users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jQFto.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jQFto.png&quot; alt=&quot;Figure 1&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The strongest signal is a strong &quot;learning effect&quot; for those with $25$ or fewer answers.  (There are many possible explanations: it's not necessarily due to learning to write high-quality answers, but could be a matter of self selection.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The data are from a query at &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/edit/623920#resultSets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/edit/623920#resultSets&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next is a Pareto curve showing Total reputation &lt;em&gt;versus&lt;/em&gt; rank for the top 2000 users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hdvcu.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hdvcu.png&quot; alt=&quot;Figure 2&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The points show a strikingly linear relationship for ranks 51 - 2000 (the blue line is a linear fit to those points), but is sublinear for ranks 1-50.  The top five reputations are only one-third to one-tenth what would be predicted by the extrapolated line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The data are from  &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/578093/elite-users-those-who-hold-x-of-all-reputation#resultSets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/578093/elite-users-those-who-hold-x-of-all-reputation#resultSets&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, look at reputation per post.  I have limited this to people with at least 10 posts: 1725 users in all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wIJHH.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wIJHH.png&quot; alt=&quot;Figure 3&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A correct interpretation would require incorporating the amount of time each post has been viewable on the site: posts, especially upvoted ones, tend to continue accumulating votes (growing by 10-20% per year).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(These data were obtained from &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/106236/users-with-highest-reputation-per-post&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/106236/users-with-highest-reputation-per-post&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will let you ponder these plots (and hope you might make some for yourself), so I will refrain from much commentary.  Let me just summarize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any adequate analysis would have to take time into account.  However, these raw data can be explained well by supposing that people who are good at solving statistical problems and communicating those solutions well have tended to be active on this site and that their high reputations partially reflect those skills.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because plenty of the most active users (say, those with more than 100 answers) have relatively low acceptance rates and reputation per post, there is plenty of evidence that a &quot;rich get richer&quot; phenomenon, if it exists at all, explains only a small part of the reputation and is not universal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T18:58:05.370" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4565" CreationDate="2017-02-06T20:41:49.287" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/122417/178179&quot;&gt;What if a question is an exact duplicate of the conjunction of two other questions&lt;/a&gt;  proposes another solution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Moderator &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3077/should-this-question-be-closed-consider-reopening/3078#comment7836_3078&quot; title=&quot;reference to recommendation&quot;&gt;at Programmers meta recommended&lt;/a&gt; the way to handle&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;conjunction cases&lt;/em&gt; in questions closed as duplicates as follows (bold font in quote is mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;while the duplicate link is auto generated it is actually inserted into the question body so can be edited. It should always remain, but&#xA;    there's nothing to stop you (or anyone else) &lt;strong&gt;editing extra links&#xA;    into the list or indeed replacing the current one with a more&#xA;    appropriate one&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;that's how a diff may look like for added extra links:  &#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oHwlk.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oHwlk.jpg&quot; title=&quot;example diff screen shot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T20:41:49.287" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4594" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-07T19:56:37.263" Score="6" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moneyball was a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1210166/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;movie&lt;/a&gt;, a &lt;a href=&quot;http://a.co/cYZrnWh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;book&lt;/a&gt;, and a statistical revolution in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabermetrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sabermetrics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I wanted to ask a question like the following, which forum is best for it? Would it be on topic on CV?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background:&lt;/strong&gt;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I heard a manager refer to an employee as a &quot;utility player&quot; in the pre-moneyball sense.  That means that the employee &quot;[has] a wide breadth of skills and can work across many org's and disciplines&quot;, so it is quite a compliment.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moneyball discarded the notion of a &quot;utility player&quot;, and has much more strongly mathematically/statistically defined nomenclatures such as &quot;slugging percentage&quot; and &quot;on-base percentage&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://thesportjournal.org/article/an-examination-of-the-moneyball-theory-a-baseball-statistical-analysis/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ref&lt;/a&gt;).    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions:&lt;/strong&gt;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is the post-moneyball meaning of or analog to a &quot;utility player&quot;?  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If there is meaning, then how is a player identified as the new utility?  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are there post-moneyball SBR-metric metaphors that are viable for abstraction to team composition outside of baseball?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;asked in Sports meta, they say try it.  Asked in Sports.  Will let you know how it goes.  Thank you for direction&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22452" LastEditorUserId="22452" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T15:52:50.047" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T15:52:50.047" Title="Appropriate forum for moneyball-related questions" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4583" CreationDate="2017-02-08T09:50:30.697" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;One example where rich definitely do get richer &lt;em&gt;causally&lt;/em&gt; (i.e. after controlling for quality), is questions, in particular newly posted questions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The more upvotes a newly posted question gets, the more likely it is to be noticed by somebody scrolling down the front page, and hence to be opened, and hence to be upvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a newly posted question gets sufficient number of upvotes, it gets into the week/month hot questions list and is more likely to be noticed/opened/upvoted after it disappears from the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a newly posted question gets huge enough number of upvotes (and possibly a couple of answers too), it can get into the Hot Network Questions list which usually makes the number of views/upvotes &lt;em&gt;explode&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T09:50:30.697" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4594" CreationDate="2017-02-08T17:25:50.307" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Note that I have relatively little interest in sports, and so may be unaware of things that are assumed in the discussion of the analysis of baseball, or may misinterpret aspects without realizing it.  I did see the movie a few years back.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I largely don't understand the questions listed.  I can recognize that aspects of them are &lt;em&gt;related&lt;/em&gt; to statistics, but the questions don't seem to be &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; statistics per se.  Moreover, it isn't clear to me that what needs to be explained to answer the question is some statistical / machine learning topic.  As such, I think these questions would be off topic on the main site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relative to the further question, 'what other SE site might they belong on', I don't really know.  I have little expertise concerning the boundaries and conventions of other SE sites.  To be explicit, deciding what would be on topic on other sites isn't part of our purview.  You could ask on some other site's meta.  It's also worth recognizing that the answer might be &lt;em&gt;nowhere&lt;/em&gt; (or nowhere yet)&amp;mdash;there is no implied guarantee that there will be an SE site available to answer any given question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T17:25:50.307" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4583" CreationDate="2017-02-09T15:40:53.787" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Supposedly rich get richer in economy (and life). Those who claim this to be a fact, usually, state that the reason is because the income from labor (wages) grows slower than return on capital. So capitalists accumulate wealth faster than workers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you'd like to claim that it's happening on CV, then you'd have to map CV's domain to capital and labor. You say that upvotes are capital (wealth), and labor is answering questions. If that's the case then by simply owning (managing) capital you must be getting upvotes. I don't think that's the case here. You can't simply do nothing and get upvotes on a new question. You have to answer it at the very least. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your hypothesis is that people with many upvotes get new upvotes faster. However, that's more like getting higher wage based on length of service and prior achievements in real life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I'm not saying that rich are not getting richer here at CV. Yet, I'm saying that if that's the case it's a completely different phenomenon from the economy. The mechanism would be very different. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE&#xA;To answer @amoeba comment. I thought about this too. This scenario is not what OP was talking about. He's not talking about getting upvotes on the questions that you answered long ago, I think. Of course if you have a lot of reputation it means that you answered a lot of questions, and those questions got a lot upvotes. People who come here to ask the same question, will be likely to upvote you. So, it's a different kind of phenomenon still&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE 2:&#xA;Let's look at a few top performers in Year 2017. I pulled this data CV, ranked down by number of reputation points this year:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;156,068  4,446  whuber       0.028487582&#xA; 10,009  1,775  mathew gunn  0.177340394&#xA; 33,083  1,256  amoeba       0.037965118&#xA;  2,129    690  studentt     0.32409582&#xA;    907    644  morganball   0.710033076&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The guy with least amount of total reputation has the highest return on the reputation, i.e., ratio of reputation points in 2017 vs. total is 0.71. Otherwise, there doesn't seem to be clear pattern here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update 3:&#xA;Here's the chart with OP's reputation growth. If OP's claim were true, then he should have seen the exponential growth in reputation: while his reputation grows, his upvote collection should accelerate. However, this chart shows linear growth in reputation. My chart looks very similar too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ECncr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ECncr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36041" LastEditorUserId="36041" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T22:03:49.840" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T22:03:49.840" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4599" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4601" CreationDate="2017-02-11T15:33:58.463" Score="7" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today, I accidentally up voted an answer, while intending to up vote &lt;em&gt;another&lt;/em&gt; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To undo this, I hit the down vote button, but after that, I had down voted the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I up voted it again, because I felt sorry for the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: is there no way to &lt;em&gt;undo&lt;/em&gt; a down or up vote on an answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109818" LastEditorUserId="109818" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T16:03:30.630" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T13:27:43.890" Title="How to undo a vote?" Tags="|support|votes|undo|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4600" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4629" CreationDate="2017-02-11T15:52:18.183" Score="7" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 1 &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/261119/intuitively-understand-why-the-poisson-distribution-is-the-limiting-case-of-the&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; I asked 2 questions. I asked them together, since they occurred together for me, even though in hindsight I could've asked them separately. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, now I have an answer that answers my first question very well, and &lt;em&gt;another&lt;/em&gt; answer that answers the second question very well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I (one or more apply):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;accept one of both?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;have posted 2 questions in 2 posts?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;answer the question myself, borrowing from, and mentioning, the other authors?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ask the authors of both answers to include their answer to the other question also?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;do nothing?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wait for someone to answer both questions in a single answer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;do something else?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109818" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T00:53:08.503" Title="I asked 2 questions in 1 post, now I have 2 answers, each one answers another question, which one to accept?" Tags="|support|answers|accepted-answer|self-answer|too-broad|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4599" CreationDate="2017-02-12T01:46:43.360" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you realize your mistake immediately you should be able to undo an upvote by clicking upvote a second time (at least it works for me); similarly for a downvote. (Try it on my answer here -- click upvote, say &quot;oops, didn't mean that&quot;, then click &lt;em&gt;up&lt;/em&gt; a second time and the vote should come back off again. Then click upvote a third time because &lt;em&gt;my answer is just the greatest, we have the best answers, everyone thinks so&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may seem a little counterintuitive at first but once you get used to it, it will seem fairly natural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't realize you want to change your vote fairly quickly (more precisely, within &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5212/what-are-the-limits-on-how-i-can-cast-change-and-retract-votes/5213#5213&quot;&gt;five minutes&lt;/a&gt;), you'll be outside the window in which you can change your mind, in which case your vote will not be changeable until the post is edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T13:27:43.890" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4603" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4608" CreationDate="2017-02-12T18:13:10.210" Score="2" ViewCount="432" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have written some answers that are short, concise and accurate. But I get a message that indicates that my answer is of poor quality. I would appreciate hearing some thoughts on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-02-13T12:18:52.167" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T15:22:03.650" Title="Why are short answers considered to be poor quality for this site?" Tags="|discussion|answers|low-quality-posts|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4604" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-12T22:07:05.863" Score="5" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Cross Validated post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/261519/the-formula-of-a-coefficient-from-a-regression-with-3-independent-variables-not&quot;&gt;The formula of a coefficient from a regression with 3 independent variables (not in matrix form)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I posted the original question today and immediatelly it got marked as duplicate. The warning about it being a duplicate states: &quot;This question was marked &lt;strong&gt;as an exact duplicate of an existing question&lt;/strong&gt;. If this question is different, please edit it to explain how it is different&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As anyone can clearly see, the question is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a duplicate. To the point that the moderator who marked it as duplicate, justified in the comments why he did so despite of the fact that he/she &lt;strong&gt;knows&lt;/strong&gt; it is not an exact duplicate - on the contrary to what the warning of &quot;marked as duplicate&quot; says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would go even as far as saying that the question is not only not a duplicate, but it is exactly &lt;strong&gt;building on&lt;/strong&gt; the one that it was accused as being a duplicate from. The whole point in my question was exactly to understand how to generalize the problem to more than 2 variables because I got confused with the generalization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If needed, I could easily ask the question in terms of &quot;how to generalize it to the case of &lt;code&gt;n&lt;/code&gt; variables&quot;. So, my first question here in the meta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) would that make it an acceptable question if re-ask it terms of generalizing to &lt;code&gt;X_n&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) or, what if I re-ask and show what I got for the 3-variable case and ask what is wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I am interested in the generalization case up to $X_n$ and only asked a question about 3 variables to simplify. Also note that I am specifically interested in not using the matrix form, for learning purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, because I think that in this case the moderator abused the meaning of &quot;duplicate&quot; just to block a question he/she thought didn't need an answer, the last bit to ask here is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) aren't there any limits for the extent to which the rules can be strecthed? If one finds answering a question to be non-sensical, that's fine. Don't answer. But this alone does not qualify a question as duplicate according to the very rules of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user148934" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T00:17:06.067" Title="My question was marked as duplicate - despite actually building on the subject it was accused of duplicating" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4604" CreationDate="2017-02-13T00:17:06.067" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am happy to debate this, and would not be offended to be found on the wrong side of the debate.  But let's get the facts into the open.  For the record, here are the explanations I provided for why the question was closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize the duplicate is only for three predictors. [I meant to write &amp;quot;two&amp;quot;, btw.] However, there has to be an end somewhere, lest we accumulate a growing list of versions of this question where &amp;quot;two&amp;quot; becomes &amp;quot;three&amp;quot; becomes &amp;quot;four&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;ad infinitum&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ad nauseam.&lt;/em&gt; At some point--and I sincerely think it has occurred by the time there are two independent variables (which, with a constant, actually make three)--it becomes clear that these questions are asking for painful elaboration of the complicated formulas lurking behind the matrix equations, and as such they have no interest for statistics or computation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generalization is incredibly obvious: use matrices. If you really want to unfold the formulas for matrix inversion into sums and products, then go ahead. But I stand by my opinion that this is of no interest or use in statistics or machine learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might find it informative, as well as useful, to know that as soon as you have a formula for even one independent variable, you can leverage it into an algorithm for any number of independent variables. I have explained this in answers at stats.stackexchange.com/questions/46185 and stats.stackexchange.com/questions/17336, &lt;em&gt;inter alia.&lt;/em&gt; I'm not saying there's anything the matter with your question or that it's somehow stupid--it's not. It's just that it makes no sense--and would even be counterproductive--to attempt an answer in light of the facts I have brought forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My concern is a simple one:&lt;/strong&gt; if we do not allow &lt;em&gt;trivial&lt;/em&gt; duplications of this sort to count as duplicates, then we risk encumbering the site with redundant answers.  How should we respond to the hypothetical person who says their question about how to apply a t-test differs from one exactly like it (involving a sample size of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$98$&lt;/span&gt;) because they have a dataset of size &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$99$&lt;/span&gt; instead of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$98$&lt;/span&gt;?  I appeal to your reason and common sense: &lt;em&gt;if anyone capable of understanding the question as asked could reasonably be expected to recognize that a purported duplicate is purely and obviously a mathematical variation of the same question, then the purported duplicate counts as an &amp;quot;exact&amp;quot; duplicate.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The present case goes beyond this fundamental concern insofar as I see no interest for statistics or machine learning in writing out the formulas separately for matrix products and inverses for two, three, four, ... dimensions.  Anyone can look those up and apply them as they see fit.  But that's not the basic, original reason for voting to close this question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Another twist in this case&lt;/strong&gt; is the artificiality of demanding that answers not use matrix notation.  I view such questions as being similar to others that ask for some algorithm or procedure &lt;em&gt;that has already been given elsewhere on the site,&lt;/em&gt; but the OP demands an answer in some other language. We close those questions, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please note that I am not trying to preclude related questions.&lt;/strong&gt;  This one could be made on topic in numerous ways, such as by asking what are efficient methods to compute OLS estimates; why do people not use formulas like Cramer's Rule to compute those estimates; or even why do all explicit formulas use matrix notation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T00:17:06.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4606" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-13T10:00:51.073" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;About two or three hours ago I read a question on &quot;why Hamiltonian Monte Carlo works, in plain english&quot; or something like that. I had an idea for an answer and a couple references, but I can't find it anymore. It must have been closed or deleted. Is there any way to find out? I understand that if the question had been closed a day or a week ago, it would probably be impossible, but since the event is relatively recent, maybe it's not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T10:00:51.073" Title="Question posted by someone 2-3 hours ago on Hamiltonian Monte Carlo" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4583" CreationDate="2017-02-13T10:47:36.873" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;My own experience is that I've posted a lot of answer recently and get very little rep for them. This is fine if the answers aren't top quality, but I have no indication either way (no up-votes, no down-votes, no comments).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My observation is that the site isn't really doing &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt;. For example, see all the questions with bounties raised due to lack of attention. So, when a small number of super-users do post answers, they are either the only answers on the site, or people just read the rep and up-vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user64106" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T10:47:36.873" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4603" CreationDate="2017-02-13T12:40:21.000" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;As someone who knows little about statistics I try to contribute here on Meta to repay what I learn on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking only on your &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/261468/how-to-deal-with-outliers-in-dependent-variables/261503#261503&quot;&gt;newest answer&lt;/a&gt;: I did not learn much from it. It is just pointing towards external references, failing to be a self-contained answer. You mention a paper of yours, but do not provide a reference; how should anyone know which paper you are talking about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have written some answers that are short, concise and accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me that answer is not concise, because it leaves a gap between the question and what the answer might be. Therefore, some users will understand that type of answer as 'very-low-quality' and will flag it for peer-review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how the process of hanging notices work, but I guess if the answer is peer reviewed as low quality, it is that (notice) or deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, on a more subjective ground; because you are a high reputation user, and have shown yourself to know statistics, the expectations on your participation are high as a matter of quality and didactics, to me, at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T12:56:46.393" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4609" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-13T13:02:33.603" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-13T13:02:33.603" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T13:02:33.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4610" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-13T13:02:33.603" Score="0" Body="Anything related to posts of low quality, such as flagging posts for &quot;very low quality&quot;, or the low quality posts review queue." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2017-02-13T17:00:02.557" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T17:00:02.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4611" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4612" CreationDate="2017-02-13T14:26:08.900" Score="4" ViewCount="866" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to draw a neural network. How can I do this in Cross Validated? Do I have to upload a picture or include a link? Or is there a more elegant way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same problem appears to other networks such as Bayesian Networks and Markov Networks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128677" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-02-13T14:33:24.333" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T17:05:50.303" Title="How can I draw a neural network in my question?" Tags="|support|math-display|images|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4611" CreationDate="2017-02-13T17:05:50.303" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unless there is some way to write HTML code to generate an image (which would seem like too much trouble to me anyway), you need to make a figure and upload it.  Any software tool that will let you create a figure and output it to a supported file type, e.g., .png, can be used.  For what it's worth, I find using the tools in PowerPoint convenient for that sort of thing.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T17:05:50.303" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4614" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4645" CreationDate="2017-02-13T18:14:53.450" Score="7" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;The current &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/randomization&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;randomization&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;randomization&lt;/a&gt; tag has no wiki or excerpt and its 130 questions cover a wide variety of topics. I propose the following&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;many of the entries are about random allocation in the context of clinical trials. I propose to create a new tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/random-allocation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;random-allocation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;random-allocation&lt;/a&gt; and re-tag them assuming I have enough reputation to create a tag. I know many people prefer the phrase random assignment but allocation is the term used in the CONSORT guidelines for reporting clinical trials&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;There are other questions which are about some other aspect of clinical trials like analysis, sample size determination, which have probably been tagged [randomization] since they are about randomized clinical trials. Since we have a tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/clinical-trials&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;clinical-trials&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;clinical-trials&lt;/a&gt; I propose to re-tag them where they do not already have that tag&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;Some are about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sampling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sampling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sampling&lt;/a&gt; and I propose to re-tag them with that tag&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;Some are about random generation, properties of random number generators and we have a tag for that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/random-generation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;random-generation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;random-generation&lt;/a&gt; so I would re-tag them with that&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;Some will probably be dealt with as @Amoeba cleans up permutation&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming this meets with approval I will do all of this and then re-post with suggestions for the residue of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-02-13T20:39:23.157" LastActivityDate="2017-02-26T13:54:58.680" Title="Ambiguous [randomization] tag and friends" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-reorganization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4603" CreationDate="2017-02-14T15:22:03.650" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that answers should &lt;em&gt;explain&lt;/em&gt; why they're correct; they should give the arguments in any references not simply offer a link or reference (even when a question is a request for a reference, it should explain the reason for the recommendation). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very short answers often fail to explain anything and quite a few amount to little more than pointing elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite brief answers are on occasion acceptable, but if they're very short they need to be as complete as possible (that is, there's really nothing more that could be said). Since often very short answers are not suitable answers by Stack Exchange's criteria, they are automatically flagged by the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T15:22:03.650" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4616" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4618" CreationDate="2017-02-14T18:37:10.617" Score="6" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had an &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/261603/is-there-a-non-parametric-equivalent-of-factorial-manova-at-least-2x2/261612#261612&quot;&gt;upvote of a comment&lt;/a&gt; but I did not see it, neither in my Inbox nor in reputation. Is it normal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reputation is less important, compared to not seeing this activity in my Inbox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145491" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T08:03:23.313" Title="Why am I not notified and my reputation is not increasing when my comment is upvoted?" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|comment|reputation|notifications|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4616" CreationDate="2017-02-14T18:57:47.147" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You ask about earning reputation for posting comments.  Because comments are &quot;second-class citizens&quot; on SE, they do not accrue reputation and you are not notified of votes on them.  The only thing they can actually do for you is earn you the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges&quot;&gt;Commentator Badge&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/56/pundit&quot;&gt;Pundit Badge&lt;/a&gt;. By virtue of their absence, they can indirectly help others earn the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/40/tumbleweed&quot;&gt;Tumbleweed badge&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T22:55:47.090" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4619" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4633" CreationDate="2017-02-15T07:26:38.827" Score="2" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/261790/r-regression-with-percentage-response-variable&quot;&gt;Regression with percentage response variable (ratio of two counts but the counts themselves are not available) in R&lt;/a&gt; is very close to a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/103731/percentage-outcomes-in-linear-regressions&quot;&gt;What are the issues with using percentage outcome in linear regression?&lt;/a&gt;. However, IMO the best (hint to an) answer are @Glen_b comments to the second question. Glen_b also answers the second question, but he doesn't go into some gory details I would be interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, I understand  that a logistic GLM is the best choice, but the denominator is not the same among all data points (because students answered to different tests having different total numbers of questions). The suggestion is to condition on the denominator, which would mean making the total numbers of questions an additional predictor, right? How does one deal with a predictor which is not continuous, but it's &quot;more than ordinal&quot;? 20 questions are not only more than 10, they are twice as much, and 3+10 questions is a meaningful operation, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel this question is different enough to be asked as a new question. Or should I just wait to see if Glen_b (or someone else) would like to answer the current question? Apologies if this sounds too personalised, but if that's the case, then it's our of esteem and not because I want to pester someone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T12:27:34.537" Title="Should I ask a new question or will it be marked as duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4622" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-15T09:23:34.820" Score="15" ViewCount="869" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have the impression that many new answers to old questions often do not get the number of upvotes they deserve. What can we do so that these answers are also upvoted? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Old question&quot; in this context does not necessarily have to be several years old. Sometimes already after several days or weeks new answers are not upvoted anymore. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128677" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2017-02-15T20:18:01.513" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T20:18:01.513" Title="How to encourage people to upvote new answers to old questions?" Tags="|discussion|answers|votes|old-posts|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4625" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-17T18:49:13.283" Score="9" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is our stance on questions “Where can I find an implementation of statistical algorithm X from scratch so that I can learn it”?  Are they on-topic or off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone give me a simple SVM implementation in python?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am learning SVM classification. But I'm unable to understand how to implement SVM classification. It would be really helpful if anyone could give an very easy example of an SVM implementation in python.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/261728/12359&quot;&gt;Implementation of CNN&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am new to the field of vision. To get a good understanding of the concepts, I wanted to look at source code of some CNN.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anybody suggest some place where I can find implementation of simple CNN like LeNet 5(preferred as I'm following it's tutorial) from starch in Matlab or python not using any library like tensorflow&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T19:02:13.637" Title="What is our stance on questions “Where can I find an implementation of statistical algorithm X from scratch so that I can learn it”?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4625" CreationDate="2017-02-17T18:56:58.087" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;An implementation of a statistical algorithm is a way to describe the statistical algorithm, and is therefore on-topic on this Stack Exchange website. It is distinct from a pure programming question as the goal is to learn the algorithm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T18:56:58.087" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4627" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-17T21:05:48.193" Score="15" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/262470/libraries-for-siamese-networks?noredirect=1#comment502425_262470&quot;&gt;Libraries for Siamese networks&lt;/a&gt; put on hold as off-topic because, as gung claims, &quot;questions asking for software, libraries, or code are off topic here&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no sentence &quot;questions asking for software, libraries, or code are off topic here&quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my question is off-topic, the following question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/41771/r-libraries-for-deep-learning&quot;&gt;R libraries for deep learning&lt;/a&gt; also should be off-topic.  Both ask for libraries which do a specific task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31264" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T22:41:26.977" Title="My question (on R/C/C++ libraries for a specific task) wrongfully put as off-topic" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|software|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4600" CreationDate="2017-02-19T09:46:16.647" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The current situation is rather unfortunate, but it is how it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What to do in this situation seems to me rather straightforward:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you should not &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;accept an incomplete answer or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;modify your question so as to make 1 answer fit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you have to leave the question open until someone answers it completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109818" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T09:46:16.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4600" CreationDate="2017-02-19T12:27:34.280" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Waiting for someone else step in and provide a complete answer there, when such answers already exist, but in different posts seems unlikely, besides a little bit counterproductive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alternatively&lt;/strong&gt;, you can accept the answer to your main question, i.e., the question number 1, which is more closely tied with the question's title and; simultaneously edit that accepted answer (or leave a comment beneath it) to include a final sentence in it along the lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Edit from @Ytsen de Boer (OP): question number 2 is [satisfactorily] answered at @xxx user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way, you can accept one answer and promote upvotes on both answers. Everybody wins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Accept one of both? &lt;strong&gt;A: Yes, but make sure to be clear the other answer, answered the second part of the question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Have posted 2 questions in 2 posts? &lt;strong&gt;A: Yes, if you had not posted it yet.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Answer the question myself, borrowing from, and mentioning, the other authors? &lt;strong&gt;A: This is not productive to me; it would compete with the original answers, removing attention/credit/votes from them. If such answers were posted as comments, then, yes.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Ask the authors of both answers to include their answer to the other question also? &lt;strong&gt;A: No, if they did not answer the other part of the question, it is because they did not want to. Not that asking would hurt, but why ignoring the complementary existing answers?.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Do nothing? &lt;strong&gt;A: Given the amount of answers received, doing nothing would be quite frustrating.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Wait for someone to answer both questions in a single answer? &lt;strong&gt;A: Not productive.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Do something else? &lt;strong&gt;A: Not necessary, option 1 is fine.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-02-19T12:43:48.990" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T12:43:48.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4630" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-19T16:29:23.383" Score="9" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a terminology question asks about a subjective term, is it preferable to close it as primarily opinion-based or to write an answer explaining why it is  primarily opinion-based?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/262753/12359&quot;&gt;What is the difference between artificial intelligence and machine intelligence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have read the term &quot;machine intelligence&quot; in a few places, e.g.&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20170219022131/https://research.google.com/pubs/MachineIntelligence.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://web.archive.org/web/20170219022131/https://research.google.com/pubs/MachineIntelligence.html&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Research at Google is at the forefront of innovation in Machine Intelligence, with active research exploring virtually all aspects of&#xA;    machine learning, including deep learning and more classical&#xA;    algorithms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the difference between artificial intelligence and machine&#xA;  intelligence? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if machine intelligence is a rebranding of artificial&#xA;  intelligence, machine learning, or if it means something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T16:29:23.383" Title="Closing a terminology question as primarily opinion-based vs. writing an answer explaining why it is primarily opinion-based?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4632" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4635" CreationDate="2017-02-20T10:05:38.837" Score="7" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=cook%27s%20distance&quot;&gt;tens of questions mentioning Cook's distance&lt;/a&gt;. Should we have a tag for them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123561" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T11:14:27.813" Title="Should we have a Cook's distance tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4619" CreationDate="2017-02-20T12:27:34.537" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Upon suggestion by amoeba, I self-answer my question: it was based on a misunderstanding which has been clarified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T12:27:34.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4600" CreationDate="2017-02-21T00:53:08.503" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;What I would do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Accept the answer to your first question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Move your second question as a new question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flag the answer to your second question asking to migrate the answer to your new question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is the best course of action to keep the website organized. Additionally people get their reputation if they care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T00:53:08.503" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4632" CreationDate="2017-02-21T13:48:25.050" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the moment we have a number of possibly relevant tags&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/leverage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;leverage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;leverage&lt;/a&gt; which has 27 entries but no wiki excerpt&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/diagnostic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;diagnostic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;diagnostic&lt;/a&gt; which has 162 entries a wiki excerpt but no extended wiki&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/regression-diagnostic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;regression-diagnostic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;regression-diagnostic&lt;/a&gt; which is a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/diagnostic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;diagnostic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;diagnostic&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/schoenfeld-residuals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;schoenfeld-residuals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;schoenfeld-residuals&lt;/a&gt; which has 10 entries and no wiki excerpt&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @Pere remarks we have no tag for Cook's distance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are well used tags for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/residuals&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;residuals&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;residuals&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/residual-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;residual-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;residual-analysis&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simplest solution would be to create the tag for Cook's distance, write wikis for it and leverage and in them suggest the possibility of using &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/diagnostic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;diagnostic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;diagnostic&lt;/a&gt; if more than one diagnostic is being considered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT added 1 March 2017&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We now have a tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cooks-distance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cooks-distance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cooks-distance&lt;/a&gt; with wiki and excerpt and also wiki and excerpt for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/leverage&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;leverage&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;leverage&lt;/a&gt;. I will tag the ones picked up in the search noted in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further edit 6 March&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have now gone through all the ones thrown up by @Amoeba's search mentioned in comments and tagged most of them. Some, about one quarter, were not really about Cook, they just mentioned it so I have left them un-tagged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastEditorUserId="101426" LastEditDate="2017-03-06T11:14:27.813" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T11:14:27.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4636" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4650" CreationDate="2017-02-22T08:28:47.417" Score="9" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/discriminant&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;discriminant&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;discriminant&lt;/a&gt; with 35 Qs, no wiki excerpt, and unclear scope, that nevertheless has a synonym: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/discrimination&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;discrimination&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;discrimination&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least half of the threads should be re-tagged to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/discriminant-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;discriminant-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;discriminant-analysis&lt;/a&gt;. The other half seems to be about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/classification&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;classification&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;classification&lt;/a&gt; in general and does not require a separate tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T14:54:14.027" Title="Pointless [discriminant] tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-reorganization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4639" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4673" CreationDate="2017-02-22T23:01:37.740" Score="15" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have 15 questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/latex&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;latex&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;latex&lt;/a&gt;, several already closed and few others being, in my opinion, candidates to being closed. This tag and most of the questions are off-topic. Maybe we should delete the bluntly off-topic questions and re-tag the rest to get rid of the questions? Notice that to delete the questions we would need to cast multiple votes (I already casted mine) or moderator intervention would be needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T20:41:29.877" Title="Do we really need [latex] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-deletion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4641" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-24T16:42:41.890" Score="14" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kjetil and I have had a disagreement about whether &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/263836/probability-for-class-in-xgboost&quot;&gt;my answer here&lt;/a&gt; should be a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP's question is essentially one of reading/finding documentation for how xgboost works.* &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full and complete answer to OP's question is that the user's guess is correct: the function works in the way that the user expected. I didn't write more because there's not anything more to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kjetil's contention is that short answers should be comments &lt;strong&gt;even if it completely answers the question&lt;/strong&gt;, citing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4603/why-are-short-answers-considered-to-be-poor-quality-for-this-site&quot;&gt;Michael Chernick&lt;/a&gt; thread. (This is not a straw man argument - it's the content of the comment thread.) I do not believe that contents the Michael Chernick thread apply -- the core contention there is short answers tend to also be incomplete, unhelpful or confusing answers, which are frowned upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, my answer in this thread fully answers the user's question. It took a little digging, but I eventually found a source for the claim (which I knew to be true) that I make in my answer (a fact which may or may not change Kjetil's contention, since it occurred after the comment exchange, but it took a moment to find the relevant doc; regardless, the answer is true even without the doc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an example of a short answer which completely answers a question, and was modestly up-voted, see my answer at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/146373/closed-form-for-mathbbe-ln-1-p-for-p-sim-beta-alpha-beta/146376#146376&quot;&gt;Closed form for $\mathbb{E}[\ln (1-p)]$, for $p \sim Beta(\alpha, \beta)$&lt;/a&gt; which received no negative feedback, presumably because it completely answers the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* Whether that's on-topic is a different matter altogether, but I know from experience that finding xgboost documentation, and even more, documentation for a particular xgboost version, is a bit of a struggle, so I think it's worth providing an answer here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T23:43:44.563" Title="If a complete answer is short, should it be a comment?" Tags="|discussion|answers|comment|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4642" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-24T21:56:22.317" Score="2" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/263516/how-to-calculate-confidence-intervals-for-ratios&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about how to analyze the results of my experiments. In order to illustrate my problem I made the mistake to give another example that apparently made several people think my experiment actually works exactly as my example, which is not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made an edit and added some more context, but in my opinion the question is now unnecessarily complex to understand and has developed more into a discussion about why my experiment is different from my example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are multiple good answers that would be great &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; my experiments would behave like a repeated Bernoulli experiment, but they do not answer my question, because the experiments actually don't behave like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what now? I see several options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cleaning up the question and removing the misleading example. That would however make it difficult to understand the existing answers and comments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just leave it like that. Maybe someone comes along and has a great answer anyway.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Playing Jeopardy and reformulating the question so that it exactly matches the answers and accept one. Then posting a new similar question without the misleading example, but with more context about my approach.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other ideas?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150029" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T21:56:22.317" Title="Provided a misleading example. What now?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2010" CreationDate="2017-02-25T22:00:26.720" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The problem was due to an invisible character in the end of the link URL.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the revision history of this answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/91181/revisions&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/91181/revisions&lt;/a&gt;. Scroll down to the Revision #1. At the moment I do see the link rendered (so, strictly speaking, I cannot reproduce the problem as reported), but it's broken: clicking on the link yields 404 error. Look at the URL of this 404 error:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/priors11.pdf%E2%80%8E&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are weird characters &lt;code&gt;%E2%80%8E&lt;/code&gt; in the end. Erasing these characters opens the paper. What is interesting, however, is that if we look at the source code of this Revision #1 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/revisions/d51c2570-ea25-4bfa-afa5-98065623956a/view-source&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/revisions/d51c2570-ea25-4bfa-afa5-98065623956a/view-source&lt;/a&gt;), we see this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[1]: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/priors11.pdf‎&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This link appears to be fine, so one can wonder where did the weird characters come from. But in fact they are right there, just invisible. If you copy this URL from the source code (you can copy it directly from the above quote in this answer of mine) and paste it into the browser, you'll get to the 404 error and the same broken URL. That's because the invisible character gets copied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is this invisible character? It is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-to-right_mark&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-to-right_mark&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The left-to-right mark (LRM) is a control character (an invisible formatting character) used in computerized typesetting (including word processing in a program like Microsoft Word) of text that contains a mixture of left-to-right text (such as English or Russian) and right-to-left text (such as Arabic, Persian or Hebrew). It is used to set the way adjacent characters are grouped with respect to text direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia says that its UTF-8 code is &lt;code&gt;E2 80 8E&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did it get into your link? You must have copy-pasted it from somewhere, possibly from a text editor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T22:00:26.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4641" CreationDate="2017-02-25T22:59:42.813" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like Richard Hardy (above), I think that &lt;strong&gt;attempts to answer the question should be done as &quot;answers&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;, not comments. This lets people up- (or down-)vote the proposed solution, provides a place for comments on the proposed solution (vs. the question), and makes the &quot;Unanswered&quot; tab work correctly. Putting answers, even short ones, as comments breaks all of the answer-related infrastructure on the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If it answers the question in a self-contained way, I don't think an answer's length particularly matters.&lt;/strong&gt; For very short answers, it would be nice if the answerer provided a bit of &quot;bonus&quot; information (background, support for their answer, etc), but I think this extra effort should be more of a social norm than a hard and fast rule. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sycorax's answer here seems like a bad test-case for several reasons: borderline off-topic question, the link isn't the greatest (it's essentially another question and answer). However, there are a number of other short answers that seem fairly non-controversial and, judging by the votes, useful and these should be encouraged. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7250" LastEditorUserId="7250" LastEditDate="2017-02-25T23:43:44.563" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T23:43:44.563" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4614" CreationDate="2017-02-26T13:54:58.680" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have now dealt with most of these. Just to report what happened: about half were re-tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/random-allocation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;random-allocation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;random-allocation&lt;/a&gt;, a handful each were re-tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/clinical-trials&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;clinical-trials&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;clinical-trials&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/experiment-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;experiment-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;experiment-design&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/permutation-test&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;permutation-test&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;permutation-test&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/random-generation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;random-generation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;random-generation&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sampling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sampling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sampling&lt;/a&gt; (in alphabetical order). In response to comments I also went through the much shorter list tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/randomized&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;randomized&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;randomized&lt;/a&gt; where most were about randomised clinical trials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Loose ends: there are six which I have not done and one in randomized. It would be enormously helpful if someone looked at them and gave an opinion as I cannot see what to do with them. There are two about randomised black designs which could be dealt with together but the others are distinct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also the suggestion that we have synonyms for some of the tags but I am not sure quite how to do this and I do not have much reputation in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/random-allocation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;random-allocation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;random-allocation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastActivityDate="2017-02-26T13:54:58.680" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4646" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4647" CreationDate="2017-02-28T19:49:28.270" Score="7" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;Colleagues and moderators, please think over what to do with a tag for Latent Dirichlet Allocation. We've got &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lda&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lda&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lda&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/latent-dirichlet-alloc&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;latent-dirichlet-alloc&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;latent-dirichlet-alloc&lt;/a&gt; currently. One (which? or maybe a new better one?) should be set recommended and the other set synonymic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;code&gt;lda&lt;/code&gt; could be confused with (linear) discriminant analysis for which we have a separate tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/discriminant-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;discriminant-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;discriminant-analysis&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your thoughts/decision?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3277" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T21:40:45.903" Title="LDA (latent dirichlet allocation) tag issue" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4646" CreationDate="2017-02-28T20:26:34.750" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lda&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lda&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lda&lt;/a&gt; tag was created relatively recently (several months ago) by @FranckDernoncourt for Latent Dirichlet Allocation. A couple of days ago I realized that people are using this tag to refer to both, Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Linear Discriminant Analysis, which is very confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I asked @Franck to re-consider and to remove this tag, re-tagging all existing (around 10) questions into either &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/discriminant-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;discriminant-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;discriminant-analysis&lt;/a&gt; or a &lt;code&gt;[latent-dirichlet]&lt;/code&gt;. Franck agreed and suggested &lt;code&gt;[latent-dirichlet-alloc]&lt;/code&gt; as a name. Then he did the retagging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See comments to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/226113/&quot;&gt;Course for Latent Dirichlet Allocation&lt;/a&gt; for this conversation between him and me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.763" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T21:40:45.903" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2676" CreationDate="2017-03-01T13:32:56.707" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GIS SE site welcomes Remote Sensing questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://gis.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4018/should-gis-se-be-widened-to-be-geomatics-se/4022#4022&quot;&gt;since a long time ago&lt;/a&gt;, and it has been explicitly made official in past years. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://gis.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center page&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Geographic Information Systems is a question and answer site for people interested in GIS, &lt;strong&gt;Remote Sensing&lt;/strong&gt;, Photogrammetry, Geodesy and Surveying, as well as Programming/Databases specific to the aforementioned. It is built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&amp;amp;A sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You mentioned in your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that there are concepts in remote sensing that cannot be covered just in Cross Validated + GIS and I have given some reasons here, here and here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://gis.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4018/should-gis-se-be-widened-to-be-geomatics-se/4019#comment7039_4019&quot;&gt;Devdatta Tengshe's comment&lt;/a&gt; that all examples provided in your first link have on topic issues in GIS SE. Some of that questions would require a more focused approach or have their title rewritten, though. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of too broad questions which would need more focus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1- What is the most accurate algorithm to apply with use of hyperspectral data to predict soil organic matter&amp;gt;carbon prediction and soil moisture?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;10- How can I calibrate (or correct) my LiDAR intensity images and/or intensity values of point cloud? What should be process steps for that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples in which the title would need to be rewritten so to avoid answers like: &amp;quot;Yes, I do&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;No, we can't&amp;quot;, and so on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3- Do you know what type of surface indicates Bowen Ratio=0.34?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;6- Can we draw the spectral curve for a single pixel from a satellite image (for each band)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In CV SE we have at least one related tag to RS which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spatial&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spatial&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spatial&lt;/a&gt; (x 475). As long as the RS questions relates to our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on topic list&lt;/a&gt; they can be asked here too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So are you interested in having a new site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry, I am not. It is already hard to keep CV SE and GIS SE organized and making them a useful repository, that more splitting of content would only bring more work to less people, without necessarily adding more quality to existing repositories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if something is not working the way it should in one of the existing SE sites, I'd rather concentrate efforts trying to improve what is not working.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T13:32:56.707" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1551" CreationDate="2017-03-01T13:59:22.083" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/53585/how-do-favorite-questions-work/53580#53580&quot;&gt;How do favorite questions work?&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The favorites tab on your profile has a counter indicating how many of your favorite questions have changed since you last viewed that tab. When you click on the tab, recently changed questions will be highlighted. &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Changed&quot; includes comments on or edits to the question and new or edited answers&lt;/strong&gt;. This is a way to get updates on questions that you yourself didn't ask.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is we can't quickly know exactly what has changed; so there are some proposals going on. The following Meta SE post has more about it: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/83292/detail-recent-favorite-changes&quot;&gt;Detail Recent Favorite changes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T13:59:22.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4636" CreationDate="2017-03-01T14:54:14.027" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have eliminated the tag.$\;\;\;$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T14:54:14.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4653" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-01T21:27:15.600" Score="7" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know it isn't stats, but it is academia.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which forum is most appropriate for stats-centric grad-school related questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a masters program that I am very interested in attending (remotely) and they want letters of recommendation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Previously I had asked former professors, and they did most of the structural work in the letter, but when I asked peers, managers, and coworkers in industry they are asking me to provide a draft.  It is really hard for me to &quot;toot my own horn&quot; - that is one of my biggest challenges in the annual review process, or in making a resume.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What resources are available for guiding an appropriate letter of recommendation that isn't plagiarism, that evokes the words and perspectives of the recommender?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22452" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-03-03T13:37:02.737" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T13:37:02.737" Title="Right forum for stats grad school questions?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4654" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-01T22:46:15.593" Score="9" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;This post was migrated to mathematics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2166949/deriving-a-1-alpha100-confidence-interval-for-theta-pivotal-quantity&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2166949/deriving-a-1-alpha100-confidence-interval-for-theta-pivotal-quantity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Its revision history on CV can be seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/264637/revisions&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At present I cannot identify any plausible reason why this one is off topic on our site. We have many hundreds, maybe even thousands of questions of precisely this kind; while it uses mathematics (&lt;em&gt;solve an equation&lt;/em&gt;), it's directly answering a stats question (&lt;em&gt;how do I find a confidence interval in this case?&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For consistency's sake, I'd like a clear explanation (preferably from each of the people who voted to migrate) of how we can determine that this question is off topic on our site -- what criteria can applied that would put this question over the line? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Getting the policy right here is a serious issue for us -- if we don't identify some criterion that leaves lots of apparently similar questions on topic while this one is not, then many, many questions will need to be closed or migrated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks to me like some of us are in for a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; large amount of extra work here (unless we're just going to choose to be deliberately inconsistent, I suppose), and I want to have some clear guidelines to use when doing all that extra work. Right now I have no idea &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; to conclude this one is off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[If it is in fact in error, I think that those involved should be the ones doing the legwork in redressing the issue -- getting it migrated back. Right or wrong, there's work to be done here.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've sought similar criteria before here (and elsewhere) on a number of other (to me) questionable migrations -- it's not like closure where a mistake can be undone with a couple of clicks, we need to be clear about why we're doing it. An example of such an earlier question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1855/was-it-right-to-move-this-post-what-are-the-criteria-did-that-happen-too-fas&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I don't recall having been offered clear criteria on those occasions, though I recall one where at least one or two people offered a level of justification, which overall suggests that there's a problem with some of the voting on migration. Since a migration is hard to undo, we should be prepared to justify why it's off topic.] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit (to address an issue in a couple of comments): If a question is on-topic at the source site, the clearly established principle (on many meta.SE threads as well as advice in parts of the help or other documentation relating to migration) is that it shouldn't be migrated; the exception would be where the OP requests it and it's on topic at the destination (in effect, if a question is on topic, askers get to decide where they want their question). As far as I see it, in deciding whether migration is appropriate, that leaves only the question of whether it's on topic here. To me it clearly is, but there's clearly thought to be room for argument (as in the comments).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T11:16:39.030" Title="What are the criteria applied to conclude this migrated Q was off topic? How do we draw the line?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|policy|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4656" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-02T21:50:17.013" Score="5" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;In reviewing first posts, I often comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Welcome to [stats.se]!  Please take a moment to view our [tour].&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this comment, I am able to make use of the &quot;magic link&quot; for the main site and site tour (see here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/242306&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/242306&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to improve our standard phrases, I would like to improve the ability to link to the tag wiki in the same manner we can reference a tag.  Currently, we can comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please add the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; tag &amp;amp; read its &#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/self-study/info&quot;&gt;wiki&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;written as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Please add the [tag:self-study] tag &amp;amp; read its &#xA;[wiki](https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/self-study/info). &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I would like to have a set of &quot;magic links&quot; that would allow to write the same thing as follows:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Please add the [tag:self-study] tag &amp;amp; read its [info:self-study]. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137032" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T01:51:19.287" Title="Magic links for tag wikis" Tags="|feature-request|tags|hyperlinks|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4656" CreationDate="2017-03-03T01:43:13.737" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One possible alternative for quickly setting up stock comments for common issues is discussed in the comments under the accepted answer here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2468/how-best-to-use-the-review-queue&quot;&gt;How best to use the review queue?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(where you can see many &quot;standard&quot; comments discussed)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This refers to the stackapps script described here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/questions/2116/autoreviewcomments-pro-forma-comments-for-se&quot;&gt;https://stackapps.com/questions/2116/autoreviewcomments-pro-forma-comments-for-se&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I simply use the Firefox add-on there (I also use Chrome as a browser but I tend to do most of my CrossValidated work in Firefox so I only have it set up there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can set up several comments (including links) for each of questions and answers (and several other things but I ignore the rest). I have changed almost all the default question and answer comment slots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I rarely use what I set up unchanged though; I paste in one that's close to what I want and edit the result (beware - the pasted autocomment obliterates anything you typed before it so paste first, add later)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy to set up, and easy to use (see the link to the stackapps page which describes how to use it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be a way of getting some of what you want to do more easily that would work if your feature request doesn't succeed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing in particular to note is that it &lt;em&gt;automatically&lt;/em&gt; figures out if you're talking to a new user and auto-inserts a welcome message before the pro-forma comment (which Welcome you can also customize, as far as I recall).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That should make it possible for you to set up a good approximation of what you want for the self-study comment and your usual welcome, each in their own slot, in such a way that if you were talking to a new user posting a self-study question, both parts would be put in together, by choosing your &quot;self-study&quot; comment from the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also add that (since you make a lot of them and they're not of lasting value) you should consider deleting old comments of this kind (after a few days, say). See the discussion of this in comments by chl and whuber under the question here: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2913/are-plain-welcome-to-our-site-comments-too-chatty&quot;&gt;Are plain &amp;quot;Welcome to our site&amp;quot; comments too chatty?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I've deleted some of yours that were at least a week old, but so far only ones where they contained only a welcome and a link to the tour)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:25:45.643" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T01:51:19.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="67" CreationDate="2017-03-03T10:03:13.990" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it can be answered with a web page, then simply put the link in an answer with a minimal comment on what is to be found there. This is like putting a signpost where at least one person got lost, which in an immaterial realm is welcome and not problematic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9534" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T10:03:13.990" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4659" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4660" CreationDate="2017-03-03T12:12:20.677" Score="8" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are the questions of the type «Does anyone have access to this paper?» valid at CV?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40252" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-03-03T13:19:47.337" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T13:19:47.337" Title="Is «Does anyone have access to this paper?» a valid question?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|references|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4659" CreationDate="2017-03-03T13:17:45.193" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is off-topic because it isn't about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;statistics, machine learning, etc&lt;/a&gt;; but having access to a given reference. It would also be kind of a private question which is of low interest to the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Glen_b provides more advice within a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'd regard it as off-topic; it's not a question on statistics / machine learning but on access to papers. If you were to ask on chat that might be okay (e.g. if you wanted to know if someone could check some detail in a paper for you; asking to be supplied with a paper you didn't have legitimate access to would not be okay there either).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T13:17:45.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4653" CreationDate="2017-03-03T13:31:27.303" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this type of question is a mixture of &quot;too broad&quot; with &quot;opinion-based&quot;; therefore not on-topic in CV SE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Which forum is most appropriate for stats-centric grad-school related questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Academia SE&lt;/a&gt;. Their &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic help page&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ....&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If you have a question about...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ....&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;- Transitioning from undergraduate to graduate researcher.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ....&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  .. then you're in the right place!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, they have tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/recommendation-letter&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;recommendation-letter&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;recommendation-letter&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/statistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;statistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;statistics&lt;/a&gt;. A combination of both yielded no results. A search on &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=%5brecommendation-letter%5d%20statistics%20is%3aquestion&quot;&gt;[tag:recommendation-letter] + statistics&lt;/a&gt; resulted in five questions, but none seemed to be a dupe. Of course, it was just a quick search, which you need to recheck and look deeper. Good luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:49:58.060" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T13:31:27.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4662" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4664" CreationDate="2017-03-03T21:50:32.323" Score="8" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know much about statistics, and I don't know enough to know e.g. terms to search for in a web search. However, I have a specific data set, and a list of goals I'd like to achieve in an analysis. If I describe my intentions and what I am trying to achieve, as well as list the specific pieces of information I'm trying to derive, can I ask for a recommended technique to do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42807" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-03-03T22:57:47.870" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T23:27:37.050" Title="Can I ask for a recommended analysis technique?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4662" CreationDate="2017-03-03T22:18:07.897" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;http://stats.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; is a fine place for you to do that, especially if you have first taken our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt;.  It should help you refine what already sounds like a pretty well-thought-out question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2669" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T22:18:07.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4662" CreationDate="2017-03-03T23:14:43.897" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's okay to ask questions about suitable analysis (indeed it's the first thing in our list of what things it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;okay to ask about&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;), but you have to be careful - with that sort of question it's easy to ask a question that's too broad, unclear or off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To ask a good question of this kind you should be very clear about what you wanted to find out. You mentioned &quot;goals&quot; and &quot;what you're trying to achieve&quot; and that's certainly the right kind of thing to focus on, but you need to be as specific as you can about what things you want to know (some degree of development of that is possible in answering your question, but then you need to do more to help set up the framework of what the range of choices might be). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if at all possible, avoid jargon words and avoid anticipating the answer (in particular, avoid words like &quot;significant&quot; in describing what you're after, and avoid assuming that the right way to answer the underlying question is with a hypothesis test, say). Try to phrase your goals in plain English (as if you were explaining it to someone without any statistical knowledge at all). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should describe your variables (e.g. are they measurements like lengths? times? are they counts? etc) and anything you've done to modify the original data (e.g. if you calculated ratios of things, it might be important to understand things about - and even to base the analysis you want on - the original values rather than their ratio)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be relevant to mention the audience - who will this information your be going to? Analysis suitable for publishing in a newspaper would be different (at least in emphasis) from analysis suitable for a thesis for example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That seems like a lot, but by the same token, try to be reasonably brief, or if it must be long, try to organize the basic, core information into an opening summary paragraph and to structure the rest of it into sections so it's easier to find information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should be prepared for people to ask questions! It may require several edits to your question over a few hours or days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T23:27:37.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4565" CreationDate="2017-03-04T03:25:40.310" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/291824/178179&quot;&gt;Gold-badge holders and moderators can now edit duplicate links&lt;/a&gt; (2017-03-03):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As of a few minutes ago, if you have a gold tag-badge for a tag&#xA;  associated with a question that's been closed as a duplicate, you can&#xA;  edit the duplicate links to replace, add, remove or re-arrange them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xqelw.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xqelw.png&quot; alt=&quot;edit link in duplicate banner&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nHY0y.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nHY0y.png&quot; alt=&quot;link editor&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rpwvl.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rpwvl.png&quot; alt=&quot;revision list&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These changes are tracked in PostHistory to allow anyone to detect&#xA;  abuse, while the results update the PostLinks table so that existing&#xA;  logic continues to work (I mention this because some of you may wish&#xA;  to lean on &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SEDE&lt;/a&gt; for observing how&#xA;  this works out, once it gets updated).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:19.753" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T03:25:40.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4666" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4667" CreationDate="2017-03-04T09:18:07.393" Score="7" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have what I feel is a very good answer for question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/265256/summary-of-manyglm-model-objects-running-too-slowly-in-r-can-i-speed-them-up&quot;&gt;Summary of manyglm model objects running too slowly in R; can I speed them up?&lt;/a&gt;. However, this does look like a question for Stack Overflow, more than for Cross Validated. What should I do? Should I flag the question as off-topic and then answer once it has been moved to Stack Overflow? Or should I answer it here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T21:18:19.337" Title="Should I answer a question that seems off-topic here?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|answers|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4666" CreationDate="2017-03-04T11:18:22.960" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is often a delicate decision. Without purporting to survey all the possibilities, I note a continuum of situations here, in terms of merit of question (how far is it a &lt;strong&gt;good question answerable&lt;/strong&gt; somewhere?) and appropriateness of questions (how far is it &lt;strong&gt;on-topic anywhere&lt;/strong&gt;, on Stack Exchange or in other forums?). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Even if there are votes to close or to migrate, the process may be slow and/or not converge to a decision (and those votes may not be visible or noticed). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Even if a question is doomed as not being on-topic anywhere (e.g. by being too software-specific for CV, but also lacking a reproducible example, or asking for function or package recommendations, so predictably off-topic on Stack Overflow) writing an answer may still seem helpful. The hope is that the OP will learn something, even if it is mostly that their question needs more work. My decision on whether to answer often hinges on how a question seems really lazy, meaning appearing to be totally lacking in research effort. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A question that is likely to be migrated will be migrated with answers, so the effort is not wasted. This is the most positive of these categories, as people can answer here in the hope that their answer will be a contribution elsewhere. This is often the case with software-based questions. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, a question that is re-posted outside Stack Exchange or deleted here could lose any existing answer, or even a link to them. The effort of answering may then be wasted long term. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A related issue is cross-posting both on Stack Exchange and on non-Stack Exchange forums, because dubiously appropriate questions often get cross-posted. I've seen the same question on three forums simultaneously. The defence is that posters are unsure about where best to post, but many people are careless of the waste of others' time often caused by cross-posting. The latter has been discussed on SE Meta but almost daily I write advice to be explicit about cross-posting anywhere. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2017-03-05T12:25:51.370" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T12:25:51.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4668" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5001" CreationDate="2017-03-04T13:36:19.893" Score="8" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;Colleagues/moderators, let me bring you attention to the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/indicator-variables&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;indicator-variables&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indicator-variables&lt;/a&gt;. Questions labeled with it show multiple understandings of the term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the understandings are really special at all (such as indicators as &quot;items loaded in a factor analysis&quot;), but two-three most frequent (seen not only locally but in &quot;literature&quot; at wide) are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Indicator variable is any &lt;em&gt;binary&lt;/em&gt; variable (1 = &quot;present&quot; or &quot;this&#xA;category&quot;; 0 = &quot;absent&quot; or &quot;not this category&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A narrower definition, indicator variable is just a &lt;em&gt;dummy&lt;/em&gt; (aka one-hot)&#xA;variable, i.e. one of the binary variables constituting the binary&#xA;set corresponding to a single nominal variable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Indicator variable is a term wider than for binary coding scheme and is a synonym of &lt;em&gt;contrast&lt;/em&gt; variable (i.e. deviation or Helmert codings are also &quot;indicator&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/125608/3277&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and some other threads. My own vote oscillates between definitions (1) and (2), but not with (3). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is your understanding? What should we do with tag &lt;code&gt;indicator-variables&lt;/code&gt; in general? Should it be kept?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3277" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:58.340" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T18:37:21.670" Title="Definition of [indicator-variables] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-excerpt|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4669" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4857" CreationDate="2017-03-06T11:11:15.540" Score="10" ViewCount="639" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Return back to the issue, June 30, 2017&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to bring your attention once again to this tag question about categorical data encoding. It has not been resolved satisfactory so far, to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) I claim that we &lt;strong&gt;do need&lt;/strong&gt; one special tag for (various types) of categorical data encoding/representation in analyses (types are: dummy or one-hot coding, deviation or effect coding, Helmert, repeated, etc. etc.). One omnibus tag for them. Just imagine it: we have endemic tag &lt;code&gt;[many-categories]&lt;/code&gt; but we don't have a tag for ubiquitous theme of how to represent categorical variables in this or that analysis or situation. We have currently only tag &lt;code&gt;[categorical-data]&lt;/code&gt; which covers it but is &lt;em&gt;much more broad&lt;/em&gt; and general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I recommend to create the tag. Wording candidates: &lt;code&gt;[contrast-variables]&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;[categ-data-encoding]&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;[categ-coding-scheme]&lt;/code&gt; or suggest your variant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) &lt;strong&gt;Dummy&lt;/strong&gt; (aka one-hot) binary variables are the most well-known type of the categorical encoding / contrast variables. As currently, the tag &lt;code&gt;[dummy-variables]&lt;/code&gt; is a slave synonym to &lt;code&gt;[categorical-data]&lt;/code&gt;. Please recover it back as the tag on its own. Next thing: we yet keep currently separate tag &lt;code&gt;[indicator-variables]&lt;/code&gt; however. This is strange because it is conceptually the same thing as dummy variables (just less known term).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, either map &lt;code&gt;[indicator-variables]&lt;/code&gt; to the restored &lt;code&gt;[dummy-variables]&lt;/code&gt; as its junior synonym; or, if you prefer &lt;code&gt;[indicator-variables]&lt;/code&gt;, keep it, but then map &lt;code&gt;[dummy-variables]&lt;/code&gt; to it (not to &lt;code&gt;[categorical-data]&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Original post Mar 6, 2017:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please, consider these opportunities. Agree, disagree, your suggestions...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Moderators&lt;/strong&gt;, please remove &lt;code&gt;[dummy-variables]&lt;/code&gt; tag from being a synonym to &lt;code&gt;[categorical-data]&lt;/code&gt;. These are definitely not synonyms. Categorical data can be represented as dummy variables, sure. That doesn't make the two concepts same at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[dummy-variables]&lt;/code&gt; should be kept a separate tag, and &lt;code&gt;[indicator-variables]&lt;/code&gt; be made its junior synonym. In a recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4668/3277&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;/comment I've expressed my tendency to see indicators as a synonym of dummy. &quot;Dummy&quot;, in turn, is just the binary type of &quot;contrast variables&quot;, not any contrast variables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore tag &lt;code&gt;[contrast-variables]&lt;/code&gt; should be created. It is elementary variables to which categorical data (factors) are recoded, explicitly or implicitly, in ANOVA-like procedures. Contrast variables correspond, but not synonymic, to &lt;code&gt;[contrasts]&lt;/code&gt; (comparing combinations of coefficients, we do have this tag already). Contrast variables include types &quot;dummy&quot;, &quot;deviation / effect&quot;, &quot;Helmert&quot;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people agree and moderators recover &lt;code&gt;[dummy-variables]&lt;/code&gt; I could then proceed and fix the tagging of questions according to the above thesaurus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far I can see these three alternatives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;define &lt;code&gt;[dummy-variables]&lt;/code&gt; (or &lt;code&gt;[dummy-set]&lt;/code&gt;) as binary indicator variables obtained out of a categorical variable. &amp;amp; create &lt;code&gt;[contrast-variables]&lt;/code&gt; (or &lt;code&gt;[contrast-set]&lt;/code&gt;) as more general - not necessarily binary - such variables (I vote for this variant)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;define &lt;code&gt;[indicator-variables]&lt;/code&gt; (or &lt;code&gt;[indicator-set]&lt;/code&gt;) to be what &quot;dummy variables&quot; was defined just above. &amp;amp; define &lt;code&gt;[dummy-variables]&lt;/code&gt; (or &lt;code&gt;[dummy-set]&lt;/code&gt;) to be what &quot;contrast variables&quot; was defined just above.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both variants require &lt;code&gt;[dummy-variables]&lt;/code&gt; to be restored as a proper tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Third solution: don't restore/define anyhow old &lt;code&gt;[dummy-variables]&lt;/code&gt; tag, however create tag &lt;code&gt;[contrast-variables]&lt;/code&gt; which, if you like, we may give another name, say &lt;code&gt;[categ-coding-scheme]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3277" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-07-25T20:28:58.070" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T16:01:39.393" Title="Tags around categorical data coding / representation" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|tag-reorganization|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4671" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-06T15:18:11.087" Score="10" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cannot see any reason for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pandas&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pandas&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pandas&lt;/a&gt; tag to exist on CV. It would seem this is very specifically about code, and not directly statistical/ML code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I've never used pandas. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;EDIT:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One point I did not make clear enough in the original post is that, as far as I know, &lt;code&gt;pandas&lt;/code&gt; is not a package containing any implementation of  statistical methodology (or machine learning); it's just a commonly used tool for storing and organizing data. It is my understanding that a question about, say, &lt;code&gt;scikit-learn&lt;/code&gt; could easily be on topic, especially if the question focused on the statistical methodology behind the tools in the package. But it seems like a question about SQL is almost surely off topic. For me, a tag like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pandas&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pandas&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pandas&lt;/a&gt; is much closer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sql&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sql&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sql&lt;/a&gt; than it is to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/scikit-learn&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;scikit-learn&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;scikit-learn&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But maybe &lt;code&gt;pandas&lt;/code&gt; does more than I recognize? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76981" LastEditorUserId="76981" LastEditDate="2017-03-07T00:51:46.547" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T12:52:02.553" Title="The [pandas] tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|software|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4671" CreationDate="2017-03-06T17:09:20.227" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tags serve several purposes.  Software tags inform us that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the original proposer is interested in explanations or solutions that are, or can readily be expressed in, certain software platforms;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;any code offered within the question or answer should be pretty-printed according to the specified syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, in any thread with an &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;r&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;r&lt;/a&gt; tag, the default formatting for code blocks will assume it's &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt;.  (I don't know what happens when multiple software platforms are tagged.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, because this is a site about methods and concepts rather than software &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;, we welcome answers that are independent of any specific platform and we accept answers that might be expressed in a language other than specified in the tags.  We do require that questions and answers can be understood by people who are not conversant with any particular programming language.  In particular, a question or an answer that consists entirely of code--even when it's in a tagged language--almost surely will be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T17:09:20.227" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4639" CreationDate="2017-03-08T16:32:04.210" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some questions were closed &amp;amp; got deleted, and the current situation is as follows. There are 7 questions left in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/latex&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;latex&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;latex&lt;/a&gt;, 5 of which are closed as off-topic. The 2 remaining ones are arguably on-topic and are about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/project-management&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;project-management&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;project-management&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a closely related &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sweave&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sweave&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sweave&lt;/a&gt; tag. Together, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/latex&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;latex&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;latex&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sweave&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sweave&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sweave&lt;/a&gt; have 10 threads, with 6 closed and 4 remaining open in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/project-management&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;project-management&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;project-management&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have edited tag wiki excerpts for both tags to warn about possible off-topic-ness:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A typesetting system often used for scientific documents. Questions about LaTeX are off-topic unless they have statistical content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A tool that allows to embed R code into LaTeX documents to create dynamic reports. Questions about Sweave are off-topic unless they have statistical content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have a strong opinion on whether we should now eliminate these tags or let them be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please vote in the comments and/or comment to provide arguments.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-03-13T20:41:29.877" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T20:41:29.877" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4674" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-08T21:28:32.170" Score="13" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;My interest in statistics is less on the math side but more on the use and misuse of objectively-valid statistics for political and economic purposes. Are non-math questions that involve issues of how to define data definitions, identify the appropriate number of demographic categories to use, or identity appropriate and meaningful boundaries among them in-scope at Cross Validated? For example, such questions might include, &quot;Is it correct to include people who left high school early to complete a university degree in the definition of 'High School Dropout' for my research on literacy attainment?&quot; or &quot;If a person was previously incarcerated in a totalitarian country for purely political offenses such as criticizing the government and has now been convicted of their first crime in a 'Free' country, should I classify them in my statistical model of crime risk factors as first time offenders or recidivists?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess is that neither of these questions would be in scope here and would be more suited for sites on Education and Criminology, respectively, or even a graduate classroom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the consensus? Are these kind of questions welcome here or is the scope more or less limited to the math aspects of statistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other potential questions along these lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am trying to determine whether there is any correlation between the age at which a child completes toilet training and their likelihood to be injured by an electrical shock as an adult. If someone experiences a shock that is too weak to cause any physical damage but that causes the person to develop Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, do I count that as an injury?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am developing a model to find trends between the schools that a person has attended and the likelihood that they will be convicted of a crime involving misuse of computer technology. Does using an XBox as a doorstop during a residential burglary count as misuse of computer technology?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of my research subjects says that he is a Mexican Chicano but adamantly denies being &quot;Hispanic&quot;. Do I need to create a new &quot;Non-Hispanic Chicano or Mexican&quot; category for my model plotting ethnic background versus educational attainment or do Best Practices in demographic modeling allow me to define all Mexicans as &lt;em&gt;ipso facto&lt;/em&gt; Hispanic?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="136742" LastEditorUserId="136742" LastEditDate="2017-03-09T00:18:23.730" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T05:53:10.853" Title="Are questions about data definitions and research demographics in scope?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4674" CreationDate="2017-03-09T00:09:10.923" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can easily see that many of our questions are not mathematical and include questions about things like how to define variables (&lt;em&gt;how many categories should I use?&lt;/em&gt; is a reasonably commonly asked question). Some of these questions - if appropriately framed - will probably be within the scope of our topic coverage, but for a number of those questions the chances of an answer that will be anything but vague may not be high -- in particular questions similar to &quot;how many categories should I use&quot; may be answered with anything from &quot;don't split into categories&quot; to &quot;we can't answer that on the basis of this information&quot; (which means some may eventually be closed as too broad or unclear without a lot more details), depending on whether it makes more sense to split at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The solution to that second kind of issue (how to categorize things given that you must do so) -- once you've identified the details enough to make it answerable at all -- will then probably already be about as obvious to you as to anyone else. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more information you can give about your aims, specific questions of interest, preferences, intended audience, specific subject-area knowledge about the variables -- and so on (though preferably expressed succinctly) the more likely someone may be able to say something helpful. We generally can't just say &quot;oh, use &lt;em&gt;four&lt;/em&gt; categories&quot;. However, for many things, few categories will often be worse than many, unless other constraints force fewer on you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So broadly, yes you can ask such questions, but answers that are simultaneously quick and useful may not be typical&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a specific example &quot;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Is it correct to include people who left high school early to complete a university degree in the definition of 'High School Dropout'&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, &quot;correctness&quot; of your choice of what's included in a category is not a statistical issue, so that would need to be reframed to be on topic. (We &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; often answer questions about potential consequences of mixing two apparently quite distinct groups on your inferences, for example.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outside of such directly statistical considerations, whether it makes sense to include it or to do any of several other things really depends on what questions you want to answer, the way in which you want to answer them, the tolerance of your intended audience for doing so, and so on. This is not information we can give you (we don't tell you what you want to study and we're not typically experts in your application area), but instead you would need to supply any such information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T00:09:10.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4674" CreationDate="2017-03-09T02:28:05.420" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, I think such questions are on topic. But my concern is that you may not get high quality answers at this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, political scientists may have totally different categorical definitions than economists, and statisticians can be completely ignorant of the fact that there's any difference between the fields. As such, I think that while these questions about can be on topic here, I think you'll have better quality answers about economic variables from an economic focussed forum. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To illustrate, I think this would be the right site for something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'One of my research subjects says that he is a Mexican Chicano but adamantly denies being &quot;Hispanic&quot;. &lt;strong&gt;What are the statistical ramifications for creating a new subpopulation with extremely few subjects?&lt;/strong&gt;'. The question in bold is a definitive question about statistical implications. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original question posed, &quot;Do I need to create a new &quot;Non-Hispanic Chicano or Mexican&quot; category for my model plotting ethnic background versus educational attainment or do Best Practices in demographic modeling allow me to define all Mexicans as ipso facto Hispanic?&quot;, is likely to get a much better answer on a forum that focusses on demographic modeling specifically, especially in regards to what demographic best practices are. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76981" LastEditorUserId="76981" LastEditDate="2017-03-09T05:53:10.853" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T05:53:10.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4671" CreationDate="2017-03-09T12:52:02.553" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider some existing tags for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/python&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;python&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;python&lt;/a&gt; (1233) libraries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/scikit-learn&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;scikit-learn&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;scikit-learn&lt;/a&gt; (543)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pandas&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pandas&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pandas&lt;/a&gt; (30)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/numpy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;numpy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;numpy&lt;/a&gt; (42)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/scipy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;scipy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;scipy&lt;/a&gt; (112)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/matplotlib&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;matplotlib&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;matplotlib&lt;/a&gt; (23)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pymc&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pymc&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pymc&lt;/a&gt; (156)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/statsmodels&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;statsmodels&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;statsmodels&lt;/a&gt; (73)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/theano&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;theano&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;theano&lt;/a&gt; (44)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tensorflow&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tensorflow&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tensorflow&lt;/a&gt; (112)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several possible things we can do with them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do nothing: leave all these tags alone.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make all these tags synonyms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/python&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;python&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;python&lt;/a&gt;. This is pretty radical, some of these tags are widely used.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Keep the tags about statistical libraries, but get rid of the tags about non-statistical libraries; that is what you are suggesting in your edit. However, I find it difficult to draw a line here. [scikit-learn] is clearly statistical. You say that [pandas] is not, but it is about data storage and manipulation which can be very pertinent to statistical analysis and on-topic; also, it includes some statistical processing routines. [matplotlib] appears entirely non-statistical, however it is about data visualization which is on-topic too.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Given these considerations, I am inclined to prefer approach #1.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing we could do to address your concern about off-topic questions, is to add a cautionary note into tag excerpts warning people that programming questions are off-topic. E.g. [pandas] wiki excerpt currently reads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Python library for data manipulation, implementing R-style data frames. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but we could add something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Python library for data manipulation, implementing R-style data frames. Programming questions about Pandas are off-topic unless they have statistical content. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T12:52:02.553" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4666" CreationDate="2017-03-10T21:49:14.290" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a question is easy to answer, answer it. In so doing the OP is helped. Now, if it gets moved, deleted, modified, closed or otherwise traumatized, that does not modify your contribution to the OP's sanity, you will still have done your good deed for the day. Will you garner respect from that? Eventually, for enough answers, you will. Indeed, sometimes a good answer helps to protect the question, or it gets moved by a moderator to a duplicate question as an answer there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being off-topic a little bit is usually tolerated. Outrageous stuff tends to last only a few minutes on CV before it is expunged. Stuff in the middle, moderately off topic is anyone's guess. Sometimes the off-topic nature is ignored, sometimes not, depends more on the stochastic nature of the review process than on actual content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="99274" LastEditDate="2017-03-12T21:18:19.337" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T21:18:19.337" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4654" CreationDate="2017-03-13T11:16:39.030" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key difference here is that the asker's intention was to get maths help. The asker knew how to compute a confidence interval. They were asking how to solve for $\theta$ in an equation. As you say, it's a lot of work to come up with general rules, but I can see a couple of guidelines that would help you here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, think about the type of person who is best suited to answering that question. On the one hand, it's possible that someone who uses statistics often might not know how to solve for $\theta$ in that problem. They might use a solver program instead. Lots of statisticians would be able to solve it, but there's no branch of statistics where that kind of manipulation is fundamental. On the other hand, solving an equation involving surds and powers of $\theta$ is an important skill in mathematics. There are areas of mathematics where an ability to solve a problem like that is a prerequisite. So one criterion might be that a question is only relevant on CrossValidated if the required technique for solving the problem is more important in statistics than in other branches of mathematics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, think about what the most likely answer is, and think about how you could generalise that answer. In this case, the asker is asking for an algorithm for solving an equation in one unknown involving surds. That could generalise to other equations involving surds, but it couldn't generalise, for example, to solving for parameters given a boundary of the confidence interval if the equation for that endpoint of the confidence interval doesn't involve surds. The answer is going to be more applicable to other algebra problems than it will be to other confidence interval problems. So again, it belongs with the other algebra questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a lot of information that's relevant to statistics in Glen_b's answer, but most of that information isn't actually answering the question. He's providing warnings about things the asker might have overlooked. This is useful information, but the asker's intention wasn't to get that information - if it was, the question would have had an explicit &quot;Is this a statistically valid method?&quot; part to it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54125" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T11:16:39.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2979" CreationDate="2017-03-13T13:26:13.593" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Signed-rank-test to Wilcoxon-signed-rank test&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[This answer was originally posted as a separate &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4680/3277&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; (you still can see comments there) and now transferred to here as an answer. It is my request about the &lt;em&gt;tags&lt;/em&gt; of two &amp;quot;Wilcoxon&amp;quot; tests, independent-sample and paired-sample.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators, please rename tag &lt;code&gt;signed-rank-test&lt;/code&gt; (Wilcoxon paired sample test) to &lt;code&gt;wilcoxon-signed-rank&lt;/code&gt;. We have curently such tag, but it is a junior synonym of &lt;code&gt;signed-rank-test&lt;/code&gt;. So, please appoint &lt;code&gt;wilcoxon-signed-rank&lt;/code&gt; to be the main tag and &lt;code&gt;signed-rank-test&lt;/code&gt; its junior synonym: revert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the unpaired Wilcoxon, we have nice tag &lt;code&gt;wilcoxon-mann-whitney&lt;/code&gt;. Thence it is logical to have &lt;code&gt;wilcoxon-signed-rank&lt;/code&gt; as its paired counterpart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;code&gt;signed-rank-test&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;isn't optimal&lt;/em&gt; because it doesn't mention &amp;quot;Wilcoxon&amp;quot;. It thus can be confused with the sign test. Besides, there exist other, less known, rank tests based on signs of the rank differences, which adds to the confusion. Finally, a number of software (SPSS for example) and books use name &amp;quot;Wilcoxon&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; with the paired signed-rank test and never with the unpaired test which they call &amp;quot;Mann-Whitney&amp;quot;; it might be an argument to state that &amp;quot;Wilcoxon&amp;quot; have stronger - at least not lesser - belonging to the paired test than to the unpaired and therefore should be included into the tag of the paired test.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternative name: create &lt;code&gt;wilcoxon-paired-test&lt;/code&gt; instead of &lt;code&gt;wilcoxon-signed-rank&lt;/code&gt;, if you would like it better. I like both variants of the tag name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3277" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T16:39:45.783" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4683" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4685" CreationDate="2017-03-15T02:31:26.937" Score="7" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please see my question and answer here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/267534/difference-between-variance-and-standard-deviation-is-this-popular-answer-wrong&quot;&gt;Difference between variance and standard deviation: Is this popular answer wrong?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I do? correct the code and statements? It needs many corrections, even include the code of calculating the likelihood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113777" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2017-03-15T09:42:52.630" Title="What should I do if I found a popular answer is wrong?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4683" CreationDate="2017-03-15T03:37:01.740" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a general principle, the first thing to do is consider the possibility that you're mistaken. If there's already comments there, check to see what the discussion says and what may already have been done about it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Try commenting about the issue first; perhaps the poster can be induced to fix it themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Consider also posting a correct answer where you refer to the mistaken one.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually correcting someone else's answer would normally be limited to minor fixes (downvotes and or comments are the usual way to indicate disagreement), but I can see the increased desire to deal with it when there's a popular but potentially misleading answer that novices might accept uncritically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-03-15T09:42:52.630" LastActivityDate="2017-03-15T09:42:52.630" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4688" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-17T23:22:15.917" Score="9" ViewCount="314" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a kaggle contest for duplicate question detection:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kaggle.com/c/quora-question-pairs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.kaggle.com/c/quora-question-pairs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;winner gets a few thousand dollars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a big deal for CV and SE.  The CV folks are likely kagglers, and could make some solid steps.  It is also a place for some decent visibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what ways is the cross-validated community going to engage this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;are there teams I should watch?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;will highest CV score be a thread here in meta?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;when the winners blogs on &quot;how I did it&quot; are made, are we going to look at them for use here?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22452" LastActivityDate="2017-04-06T23:48:27.890" Title="kaggle/quora duplicate question contest - CV/SE engagement" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4689" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4744" CreationDate="2017-03-19T15:45:50.367" Score="10" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a question is put on hold as unclear (for example), is there a way to propose that it is reopened? Like flagging? In particular, I think this question is clear enough to be answered and I would like to post an answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/268429/do-gaussian-processes-have-the-universal-approximation-property#268429&quot;&gt;Do Gaussian process (regression) have the universal approximation property?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T17:16:14.950" LastActivityDate="2017-04-13T17:16:14.950" Title="Is there a procedure to propose the reopening of a question?" Tags="|discussion|support|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4690" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-19T23:09:20.713" Score="2" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;In accordance with our policy: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2310/what-is-our-policy-on-merging-duplicate-questions&quot;&gt;What is our policy on merging duplicate questions?&lt;/a&gt;, that is, we are supposed to post meta suggestions for merges of questions/answers and take votes on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose to merge  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/267341&quot;&gt;Explain Cohen&amp;#39;s kappa in a simplest way?&lt;/a&gt; with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/82162&quot;&gt;Cohen&amp;#39;s kappa in plain English&lt;/a&gt;. It is closed as a duplicate question, but it would make sense to move existing answers as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vote for your choices below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; My own answer is moved by me, which brings up other questions, who should move what when and how does &lt;em&gt;our&lt;/em&gt; policy, which has wasted &lt;em&gt;our&lt;/em&gt; time contribute to this? However, there is still one more answer left there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T19:14:24.110" Title="Proposal to merge Cohen's kappa Q/A" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|merge-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4690" CreationDate="2017-03-19T23:10:39.063" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, merge both the questions and answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastActivityDate="2017-03-19T23:10:39.063" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4690" CreationDate="2017-03-19T23:12:09.967" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, do not merge the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T19:14:24.110" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T19:14:24.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4690" CreationDate="2017-03-20T19:00:04.533" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should modify our current policy &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2310/what-is-our-policy-on-merging-duplicate-questions&quot;&gt;What is our policy on merging duplicate questions?&lt;/a&gt; so that it does not wind up wasting time, like it did here and have the move done by other means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T19:00:04.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4567" CreationDate="2017-03-21T02:28:19.887" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was one of those @Carl mentions. When I see a downvoted answer, I assume it is a stupid answer. I downvoted @Carl's answer on simple linear regression in machine learning before I even read it. I did that simply because I saw &lt;strong&gt;-2&lt;/strong&gt; to his answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34623" LastEditorUserId="34623" LastEditDate="2017-03-21T15:43:43.520" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T15:43:43.520" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4695" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4696" CreationDate="2017-03-21T22:52:19.740" Score="5" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am very interested in a straightforward definition of the concept &quot;positive regression dependency on each one of a subset&quot; (with straightforward example a plus) as described by Benjamini and Yekutieli. Harvey Motulsky seems to share my interest: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/111756/the-meaning-of-positive-dependency-as-a-condition-to-use-the-usual-method-for&quot;&gt;The meaning of &amp;quot;positive dependency&amp;quot; as a condition to use the usual method for FDR control&lt;/a&gt;. There has even been a bounty placed and awarded on this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, none of the answers actually clarifies this this concept in plain language (although one answer with a single upvote does simply quote from Benjamini and Hochberg). The most voted on answer—which won a bounty for the question—&lt;strong&gt;does not actually answer the question…&lt;/strong&gt; a point made abundantly clear in the comments following the answer, and also by the answer's lack of acceptance by the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a feeling this kind of situation may not be unique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a way I can offer a bounty to encourage a solid answer, without it simply being awarded to a much up-voted yet poor answer?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;References&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Benjamini, Y. and Yekutieli, D. (2001). &lt;a href=&quot;https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aos/1013699998&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The control of the false discovery rate in multiple testing under dependency&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Annals of Statistics&lt;/em&gt;, 29(4):1165–1188.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44269" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-03-25T01:00:22.453" LastActivityDate="2017-03-25T01:00:22.453" Title="How to offer a bounty on a question with unsatisfactory answers?" Tags="|support|questions|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4695" CreationDate="2017-03-21T23:49:13.427" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The basics are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you place the bounty you can award it as you see fit. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If nobody posts an acceptable answer and so you don't choose to award the bounty, typically the bounty simply lapses unawarded (the reputation already having been lost). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Under particular circumstances, an unawarded bounty may be - fully or partly - awarded automatically. Detailed information here:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16065/how-does-the-bounty-system-work&quot;&gt;How does the bounty system work?&lt;/a&gt; (search for &quot;What is automatic awarding&quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the asker placed the bounty and accepted an answer that was posted during the bounty period but doesn't award the bounty, that accepted answer is automatically awarded the [full] bounty. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Failing that, half the bounty is awarded to the highest-scored answer out of those which were posted after the bounty was started, have a score of at least +2 and were not written by the bounty starter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If none of these conditions apply, the bounty is not awarded.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't stop the auto-award, unfortunately, so it's a risk that you take that the bounty may be automatically awarded to an answer that may have been interesting enough to be upvoted but doesn't fully answer the question in the desired fashion. About the best you can do is call for something like a &lt;em&gt;canonical&lt;/em&gt; answer in the bounty, downvote posts that really don't do what you seek and encourage others to do likewise -- but you can't make people vote the way you want, so a new answer could still end up with +2 net upvotes and get half the bounty anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-03-22T00:53:37.963" LastActivityDate="2017-03-22T00:53:37.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4697" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-22T11:36:02.753" Score="7" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sampling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sampling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sampling&lt;/a&gt; is ambiguous and even its excerpt says so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Creating samples from a well-specified population using a&#xA;  probabilistic method and/or producing random numbers from a specified&#xA;  distribution. As this tag is ambiguous, please consider&#xA;  &quot;survey-sampling&quot; for the former and &quot;monte-carlo&quot; or &quot;simulation&quot; for&#xA;  the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice it is used both for survey sampling and for random generation and simulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have alternative unambiguous &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/random-generation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;random-generation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;random-generation&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/monte-carlo&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;monte-carlo&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;monte-carlo&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/simulation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;simulation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;simulation&lt;/a&gt; tags. Maybe we should do something with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for now, each time I see a question tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sampling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sampling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sampling&lt;/a&gt; that relates to generating random values, I re-tag it to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/random-generation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;random-generation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;random-generation&lt;/a&gt;, but I guess I miss lots of such questions. Another problem is that there are already &gt;1500 questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sampling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sampling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sampling&lt;/a&gt;, so it would be very hard to manually change the tags and it would clutter the main page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2017-03-23T14:03:17.887" LastActivityDate="2017-03-23T14:03:17.887" Title="What should we do with ambiguous [sampling] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4698" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-22T11:58:37.117" Score="1" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/268914/summation-notation&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/268914/summation-notation&lt;/a&gt; still on hold in Cross Validated, after I had edited it by re-wording and providing more details?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="136766" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2017-03-22T16:57:21.923" Title="Question put 'on hold' was edited, but it was not reopened. Why?" Tags="|discussion|support|editing|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4699" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4700" CreationDate="2017-03-24T17:06:32.740" Score="7" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why does the &lt;code&gt;markov-chain&lt;/code&gt; tag get changed automatically to &lt;code&gt;markov-process&lt;/code&gt;? I had an answer addressing the difference between these two things &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/241506/what-is-the-difference-between-markov-chains-and-markov-processes/265427#265427&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8336" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T18:13:40.623" Title="Automatic tag changing" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4699" CreationDate="2017-03-24T18:13:40.623" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's called a &quot;synonym.&quot;  They are listed at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it's discovered that two tags mean the same thing, one (usually the less popular and less descriptive) is mapped to the other.  The mapping can cause the synonym to be replaced by its alias.  All synonyms are supposed to perform as alternative names for the same functional tag, which means it shouldn't have an effect on counting answers for tag badges, &lt;em&gt;etc&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People with sufficiently high reputation (either overall or in one of the tags) may propose synonyms and vote to approve them.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=synonym&quot;&gt;Many of these meta pages&lt;/a&gt; are also devoted to public discussion of possible synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T18:13:40.623" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4701" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-25T20:36:24.183" Score="0" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been a member for a long time (close to 5 years). I have a high reputation that is as high as some of the moderators.  Do the moderators vote for new moderators?  If so, is this only done when a moderator retires?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-03-27T08:47:57.513" LastActivityDate="2017-03-27T08:47:57.513" Title="How does a member become a site moderator?" Tags="|discussion|moderation|participation|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4702" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4705" CreationDate="2017-03-27T12:42:35.037" Score="7" ViewCount="859" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should try to keep some order when it comes to tags. Do we already have an order? If not which rules do you suggest? Can I just create a tag if I feel that an important tag is missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128677" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-03-28T19:23:27.657" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T23:06:31.717" Title="What is our policy on creating new tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|policy|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2790" CreationDate="2017-03-27T14:24:19.187" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we be merging our non-merged tag synonyms as a matter of course?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, we should.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is in your question, which reflects the Stack Exchange guideline towards merging synonyms (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/70710/what-are-tag-synonyms-and-merged-tags-how-do-they-work&quot;&gt;What are tag synonyms and merged tags? How do they work?&lt;/a&gt;): &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;All good tag synonyms should eventually be merged&amp;quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should we define when a synonym is &amp;quot;established&amp;quot; enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say, give two months to users realize a synonym was implemented, and one additional month, so any objections can be made. &lt;strong&gt;If nobody presents concerns about the synonyms in 3 months, then, merge tags.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for example, according to this proposal all tag synonyms in CV Meta should be merged right away, because the newest non merged synonym is from May/2015.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Advantages:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One advantage of carrying on such mergings is to help users progressing towards tag badges (while just synonymizing them won't) and this is good because users with gold tag badges gain the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254589/when-did-i-get-close-vote-superpowers/254590#254590&quot;&gt;close/reopen duplicate binding vote privilege&lt;/a&gt; [only] over questions with those tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See this post on Meta Stack Exchange and the answer from animuson's. He says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conduct the merge so there are no longer questions tagged with the synonym. Once all the questions have been retagged by the merge, your tag score will transfer to the new tag when the recalc runs and the old synonym tag will no longer be eligible for tag badges ... .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for example, @gung should have already been awarded a bronze tag badge for the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/on-topic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;on-topic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;on-topic&lt;/a&gt; tag in CV Meta, because he has &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/tags/on-topic/topusers&quot;&gt;+231 score in 23 answers&lt;/a&gt; and there are 101 questions 'tagged' &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/on-topic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;on-topic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;on-topic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, but actually it has two non-merged synonyms &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/scope&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;scope&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;scope&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/close-reasons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;close-reasons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;close-reasons&lt;/a&gt;, so making it officially not 101 Q, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms&quot;&gt;91 [on-topic], 4 [close-reasons] and 6 [scope]&lt;/a&gt;. A merge would solve this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'But how do we know if tags were merged or not?' According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/281174/why-is-a-merged-tag-which-is-made-a-synonym-of-another-one-shown-as-being-used/281175#281175&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; from @Wrzlprmft, we should see no tags in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms?filter=merge&amp;amp;tab=newest&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;A user eligible for a bronze tag badge should have at least score +100 in the tag, a minimum of 20 answers in the tag, and that tag needs to be used in at least 100 questions. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2790/should-all-our-non-merged-tag-synonyms-be-merged-or-removed/4703#comment13033_4703&quot;&gt;@Glen_b points out&lt;/a&gt; merging synonyms can also cause dropping of redundant badges. For example, four tags which are synonyms are merged, and a user had bronze tag badges in all of them (100 votes spread in 20 answers for each tag) before the merge. Then, after the merge the user will keep only one bronze tag badge (for the master tag), and will gain a silver tag badge (400 votes spread in 80 answers in the master tag).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T12:22:53.873" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4704" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4713" CreationDate="2017-03-27T15:03:16.183" Score="15" ViewCount="456" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems you can get upvoted for no apparent reason :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uBUcv.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uBUcv.png&quot; alt=&quot;Upvotes = quality&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(source &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/270116/35989&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/270116/35989&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:56.813" LastActivityDate="2017-04-07T14:20:25.370" Title="Why do gibberish answers get any upvotes?" Tags="|discussion|votes|reputation|low-quality-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4702" CreationDate="2017-03-28T00:52:42.767" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have the reputation to reach the correct level of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;privilege&lt;/a&gt; (which you do), then you can create tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, with a mature site like this one, you're encouraged to think carefully about creating new tags (almost any tag of lasting value will either already exist or there will be a similar one which will compete with a new tag). If there's any doubt about how a possible new tag fits into the current tags, for example, you can always discuss it on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T23:06:31.717" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4706" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4718" CreationDate="2017-03-29T15:36:23.753" Score="20" ViewCount="466" Body="&lt;p&gt;We currently have over 99,000 questions asked.  I think we should celebrate when we reach the 100,000 mark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastEditorUserId="11032" LastEditDate="2017-04-08T22:32:02.803" LastActivityDate="2017-04-08T22:32:02.803" Title="How should we celebrate reaching 100,000 questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|site-statistics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4707" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4708" CreationDate="2017-03-29T16:05:01.870" Score="6" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that some top users here on CV have a saved search which allow them to find the unanswered questions with some specific tags, without having to rewrite the search each time, or even some kind of &quot;alarm&quot;. I have this impression because it seems to me that, at least for the tags I can answer to, most of the questions are answered by specific users, irrespective of when the questions were asked. Since there is a continuous flood of questions, and I guess everyone else is as lazy as me :D (just joking), I don't think people are continuously scrolling down the list of unanswered questions to find those pertaining to certain tags, nor they are rewriting the same identical query (say, &lt;code&gt;answers:0 [nonlinear-regression]&lt;/code&gt;) multiple times a day. So I guess there's a way to save searches, or (even better) to get alerts from Cross Validated. If I'm right, how do I do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS if I want to search for &lt;code&gt;[tag1]&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;[tag2]&lt;/code&gt;, the search is simply &lt;code&gt;[tag1] or [tag2]&lt;/code&gt;, right? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-03-29T17:27:01.050" LastActivityDate="2017-03-30T00:45:44.080" Title="How can I save a search?" Tags="|support|unanswered-questions|search|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4707" CreationDate="2017-03-29T16:23:09.793" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't really know of a way to do that, although there may be one.  I personally don't do anything like what you are describing.  You might post a comment under an answer from someone who is successfully doing what you want and ask them to respond here, if no one does after a while.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, if I wanted to do something like that, I would perform the search I was interested in and bookmark the search return page.  That way, every time I opened that link, I would get that search.  Moreover, the page would have different results every time they changed.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2017-03-29T16:23:09.793" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4707" CreationDate="2017-03-30T00:30:35.883" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of any way to save a general search within the SE system. You can of course save a browser page and reload that, so that it has your favourite query. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, one thing you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; do is set your favourite tags. &#xA;Your favourite tags show up in the right hand sidebar under the &quot;hot meta posts&quot; section -- &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/piwQo.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/piwQo.png&quot; alt=&quot;image of sidebar section with favourite tags&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(those are ones I set a while ago but forgot about so they're still there. I don't really pay enough attention to that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- you can change them right there in that section by clicking the edit link, you don't have to do it from your profile each time. They will be highlighted on the page when you're looking at the list of questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gb1zf.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gb1zf.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot showing new question list with bluish background for questions including a favourite tag&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact form of highlighting varies from SE site to SE site. For us, there's a bluish background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If you click on a tag in your favourites list you'll get a search on that tag.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also exclude some tags in that same mechanism. Their posts don't disappear but they're greyed out and easy to ignore. (Unfortunately -- from my point of view -- the excluding overrides the favouriting; I'd usually like that to work the other way around)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use this facility on SO (to get questions related to R) and math.SE to get questions related to stats, probability and a few other topics (on CV I sometimes set favourites to highlight some tags for a while but I haven't ever excluded any except to see how it works)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think that some top users here on CV have a saved search which allow them to find the unanswered questions with some specific tags, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually if I want to find unanswered questions with a specific tag I just type something like &lt;code&gt;[tag-name] answers:0&lt;/code&gt; ... how long does it take, maybe two seconds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;most of the questions are answered by specific users, [...]&#xA;   I don't think people are continuously scrolling down the list of unanswered questions to find those pertaining to certain tags&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even without a search it doesn't take long to scan a page full of questions. If you just answer what you can and you know how to answer the questions that will fall under specific tags, your answers will naturally be under those tags even if you never search for a tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I usually don't go looking for old posts, but if an old post is bumped for some reason (e.g. someone edits or answers or Community bumps it because it doesn't have an upvoted or accepted answer) then it will show up on the front page ... and then people who load the front page shortly after that will see it and might answer it. Often I don't even realize it's an old question for some time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;PS if I want to search for [tag1] or [tag2], the search is simply [tag1] or [tag2], right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looks like it, yes. e.g. see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/108194/wildcard-and-or-in-search&quot;&gt;“Wildcard” and “or” in search&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(which also discusses wildcards) &#xA;and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/177739/possible-search-engine-bug-when-searching-for-multiple-tags-2&quot;&gt;Possible search engine bug when searching for multiple tags (&gt;2)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-03-30T00:45:44.080" LastActivityDate="2017-03-30T00:45:44.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2248" CreationDate="2017-03-30T09:06:03.907" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have manually retagged 2 Qs with &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/statistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;statistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;statistics&lt;/a&gt; tag and 1 additional Q with &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/probability&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;probability&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;probability&lt;/a&gt; into &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/on-topic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;on-topic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;on-topic&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The remaining 8 threads with &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/statistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;statistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;statistics&lt;/a&gt; are all about site statistics, so it can now be renamed into &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/site-statistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;site-statistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;site-statistics&lt;/a&gt; via moderator tools. I suggest you can do it now!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wiki excerpt says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about sizes and other quantities of Cross Validated Stack Exchange site. E.g. number of unanswered questions, response/question rate, GB/day transferred, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which looks fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-04-03T10:51:47.800" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T10:51:47.800" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4704" CreationDate="2017-03-30T12:44:38.450" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far, as I can verify, it was me who made the upvote. Out of fun and out of curiosity. I also thought it was inconsequential since the answer will get flagged and removed soon and since I would remove the upvote few minutes later anyway. I didn't care that the answer was just posted, nor did I know that there is a badge for upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't answer the general question, I would just suggest that there is a plethora of disconnected reasons why a gibberish answer may get a single upvote. In statistical terminology these would be considered measurement noise. To continue the analogy I suggest we avoid overfitting by closing this question :)   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30080" LastActivityDate="2017-03-30T12:44:38.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4706" CreationDate="2017-04-03T21:28:28.493" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can hold the local meetups with whiskey and cigars. Maybe folks with high reputation points cluster around a few places, so it shouldn't be very difficult to organize. We can set to T+1 date and agree on the local places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if there's any easy way to analyze geo clustering of users with high rep points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update. Given the contribution of Gosset to the field, maybe beer themed meetup would be appropriate too. I'm sure there's Guinness serving bar in any locality&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36041" LastEditorUserId="36041" LastEditDate="2017-04-03T22:09:51.320" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T22:09:51.320" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4706" CreationDate="2017-04-05T01:22:30.667" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What about Sydney, Australia. Do we have enough people to sit for a coffee gather up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34623" LastActivityDate="2017-04-05T01:22:30.667" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4306" CreationDate="2017-04-05T09:44:33.423" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My proposal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Re-tag usage #1 to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nested-data&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nested-data&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nested-data&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for nested random effects in mixed models and nested factors (or nested design) in ANOVA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Re-tag usage #2 to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nested-models&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nested-models&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nested-models&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One model is &amp;quot;nested&amp;quot; in another if it is a constrained version of it. Nested models can be compared with a likelihood-ratio test. Use this tag for questions about comparing non-nested models too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Remove usage #3. I don't like [nested-cross-validation] tag too much because it would be a proper subset of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cross-validation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cross-validation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cross-validation&lt;/a&gt;; also, most existing threads about nested CV are not using [nested] tag anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update (May 5):&lt;/strong&gt; [non-nested] is gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update (May 8):&lt;/strong&gt; I have moved all threads that are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; about [nested-data] out of [nested]. The remaining 172 questions can now be moved into [nested-data] via mod action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update (May 9):&lt;/strong&gt; This is done, see comments. Case closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2017-05-09T06:51:24.263" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4720" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-05T12:08:58.470" Score="12" ViewCount="369" Body="&lt;p&gt;A friend of mine who's a data analyst &lt;strong&gt;looks for a platform/site to create&lt;/strong&gt; his blog there. Options he expects to be available are posting text (+formatting, including for cyrillic), pics, maybe animated graphs, code boxes, formulas (in laTex or like), commenting or answering. Something approaching, maybe partly, the options of our site - only as personal journal, in this instance. Free, if possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you advise some? What are features there? If you have a blog, what are your pros and cons for it (mean, the platform features)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3277" LastEditorUserId="3277" LastEditDate="2017-04-05T12:16:17.737" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T22:59:20.017" Title="Personal blog for a data analyst - maybe in the style / options of CV?" Tags="|discussion|blog|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4721" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-05T14:03:07.547" Score="2" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am logging into the site everyday, for the &quot;Enthusiast&quot;, without fail. However today the login count was reset from 22 to 1 ! What should I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;While going through the activity log and votes log I found another bug where the number of votes is different in the same profile. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ENBBO.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ENBBO.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vote Count Error&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user12065" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2017-04-09T20:10:35.517" LastActivityDate="2017-04-09T20:10:35.517" Title="Unexpected reset of the daily login count (towards Enthusiast badge)" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|participation|badges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4721" CreationDate="2017-04-06T13:20:41.190" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably not a bug, but I hope this answer can help you narrowing down your issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, one needs to understand what is a 'day' in Stack Exchange and realize that badges like Enthusiast and Fanatic are awarded based on it. See:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/27199/what-is-an-se-day-when-does-each-day-start&quot;&gt;What is an SE &amp;quot;day&amp;quot;? When does each day start?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, a day starts at 0 hour from UTC time. Then, one can check which days the system counted as visited (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/21897/is-there-a-minimum-level-of-activity-required-to-get-the-enthusiast-badge/67546#67546&quot;&gt;remembering that just logging in does not count&lt;/a&gt;): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just go to the user tab &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/12065/sarvex?tab=profile&quot;&gt;profile&lt;/a&gt; and click on link &lt;code&gt;visited x days, y consecutive&lt;/code&gt; to see if any 'day' was missed. For example, I missed day 15th in March, here in CV Meta :(.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is the case you haven't missed any day, and this is indeed a bug, I suggest you to post a question in the main &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site. Link to this question there for providing some introduction.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VniIv.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VniIv.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2017-04-06T15:24:42.973" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4583" CreationDate="2017-04-06T15:07:07.827" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OP raises an interesting question. However, I feel &quot;Can we do something to diversify our voting and encourage the new users?&quot; may be an example of an XY Problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I'm not sure the &quot;rich getting richer&quot; phenomenon (if it exists) on SE is an issue. I've come to Stack Exchange off and on for several years now with statistics questions and found many helpful experts here. To be honest, I don't think having lots of points is terribly meaningful - more helpful is clicking on a respondent's profile to learn their background and expertise.  Surely there are qualified statisticians/data analysts who simply don't have the time to write responses in their field of expertise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13634" LastActivityDate="2017-04-06T15:07:07.827" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4725" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4727" CreationDate="2017-04-06T16:45:06.863" Score="5" ViewCount="355" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not sure why, but lately I've noticed that many questions are being downvoted, not because they are &quot;off-topic,&quot; but because the CV observers felt the question wasn't clear enough. Is this sort of knee-jerk, wholesale rejection good practice? Is it discouraging to potential participants who may not be well-enough informed to ask a statistically lucid question but are still quite willing to learn from more structured feedback? Is this shaping the demography of this forum away from basic questioners to the highly sophisticated user? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples where I felt the trigger is, perhaps, being pulled too fast:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/272296/perform-pca-on-data-having-more-dimensions-than-observatiions#comment520948_272296&quot;&gt;PCA on data having more dimensions than observations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/272217/compare-regression-lines-for-trend-recognition#comment520872_272217&quot;&gt;Compare Regression Lines for Trend recognition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/272123/how-did-nyt-do-uber-driver-simulation#comment520567_272123&quot;&gt;How did NYT do Uber driver simulation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of them are undeniably vague, unstructured and confusing. However, why should all questioners be expected to cogently articulate a &quot;dissertation-worthy&quot; question? Is it the role of more experienced CV participants to act as &quot;stats police? Or is it better to act more &quot;Socratically,&quot; in helping naive participants elicit and better articulate their concerns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue that the latter role is more rewarding for both the questioner as well as the participant as both can learn from each other's ignorance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78229" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2017-04-06T23:44:09.910" Title="Are CV participants too harsh on naive questioners?" Tags="|discussion|votes|new-users|etiquette|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2017-04-07T02:31:00.443" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4725" CreationDate="2017-04-06T17:35:38.500" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interesting and important question. I don't want to add specifically to what I and more crucially many others have said on voting here. There are many such threads. We're not long out of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4567/ganging-up-with-downvotes-how-can-we-discourage-mob-behaviour&quot;&gt;Ganging up with downvotes. How can we discourage mob behaviour?&lt;/a&gt; I hope it is fair to say that almost none of the participants in that thread are likely to feel that it went well or pushed anything forward. A minority of those posting feel very unhappy at some aspects of voting on CV. Even the rest should not be happy that those members are unhappy, regardless of not sharing in the gloom. But: to restate what is not a personal opinion, but a fact of SE: there are grounds for downvoting and anyone with enough reputation is at liberty to exercise downvotes. That's not to say that all downvotes are appropriate, but who decides and how do they know? Political allusions are tempting here, but anyone reading this will be smart and well-informed enough to think of their own. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your general case doesn't stand or fall on your examples, but that's your specific evidence, so I will add some comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time of viewing each question I see this. Clearly each thread may change, not least because of the Meta effect of being mentioned here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PCA&lt;/strong&gt; 1 vote up, 1 vote down. 2 answers, reasoned comments. What's to remark on? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Regression for trend&lt;/strong&gt; 1 vote up, 1 vote down. Reasoned comments in response; the OP has yet to improve their question. The question is not obviously doomed, but could go either way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Uber question&lt;/strong&gt; 1 vote up, 1 vote down. Put on hold. @DJohnson was among those voting to put on hold. I didn't participate, but I have to agree with the decision, although I am puzzled by the stated grounds. The question is in my view off-topic and/or too broad. But it is often true that a question that won't work well here gets close votes on several different grounds. The OP did receive some reasoned comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harsh, like rude or sarcastic, is what the other guy is said to be, and virtually always &lt;em&gt;unnecessarily so&lt;/em&gt;. Everyone knows irregular verbs of the form: I make fair comments; you are sometimes contentious; he and she are often downright obnoxious. But I have no axe to grind as defending any votes, comments or answers on the stated threads. I can't see anything here there that is harsh, or uncivil, or inappropriate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The downside of CV is the downside of any technical forum I know, a long tail of questions that don't seem especially clear or interesting or answerable to many of those active in answering questions. Old story this, but no one is paying us to do this or obliging us to give our time this way, or to answer what we don't want to. Moreover, there is not much value for the forum in a large fraction of threads that do not or will not get anywhere far for the benefit of others. I don't disparage sympathy for those who might be discouraged by zero or negative responses, but a forum like this is not a help line. No one is entitled to an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Socratic dialogue worked really well in the Socratic dialogues. It doesn't usually work well here. CV is in a mature phase where it's actually quite hard to ask a good new and specific question. It's also vulnerable to the postings of those who will not read or do not understand the generic advice displayed (e.g. on software-specific questions). I wish it weren't so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2017-04-06T17:48:56.987" LastActivityDate="2017-04-06T17:48:56.987" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4725" CreationDate="2017-04-06T19:35:35.040" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for commenting. It's always nice to see @nickcox stepping up to field and adjudicate queries on behalf of other senior participants with his usual considered and, for the most part, fair points. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To his point about &quot;irregular verbs,&quot; I would only add that the syllogism, &quot;I make fair comments, you are sometimes contentious,&quot; is an illocutionary statement representing a ubiquitous human failing: to wit, &lt;em&gt;everybody&lt;/em&gt; thinks they are correct, right, even-handed, objective, fair, whatever -- everybody. This is true even for the most vicious and psychotic trolls that inhabit the universe of online social media. The obvious, implicit assumption here is that one is speaking from an authoritative position -- a highly dubious assumption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to the point about &quot;the long tail of questions,&quot; a moderator once noted that as much as 30% of questions posted to CV go unresponded to and/or unanswered. There are many reasons for this but that's not my concern. In my view, the real &quot;long tail&quot; here revolves around nursing and rehearsing hoary grudges, the revelatory descent into which does little or nothing to ameliorate fraught relationships. Just so, baiting and/or goading participants into arguments serving no purpose other than scoring passive-aggressive points may be &quot;what the other guy is said to be,&quot; but such comments absolve their speaker from any personal responsibility or involvement in perpetuating undesireable communications. While a few participants get sanctioned, &quot;tarred and feathered&quot; or run out on a rail for extreme behaviors along these lines, this is little more than scapegoating -- a true &quot;bandwagon&quot; effect. Not to mention that it's well known (i.e., readily observable) that more than a few senior CV participants stoop to openly, even frequently, venting their impatience and irritability with other, less senior participants without sanction. As noted, such are the downside hazards of any forum, technical or otherwise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming back to the main point, the concern expressed in my query has to do with knee-jerk votes for closure simply due to the fact that a question may not be up to some participant's high standards of communication wrt statistical issues. The examples provided were an effort at illustrating the ubiquity of this phenomenon. The &lt;em&gt;Uber&lt;/em&gt; simulation question may be one of the best examples as the back-and-forth in the range and diversity of opinions for closure is quite explicit. @Tim does the best job of articulating a view in favor of retention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My (probably unrealistic) hope is that, by shedding light on such ill-considered behaviors, some blunting of their momentum may take place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78229" LastActivityDate="2017-04-06T19:35:35.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4688" CreationDate="2017-04-06T23:48:27.890" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there is a team from Cross Validated participating, it would be interesting to get a report as an answer to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, there might be an application for Stack Exchange depending on how the algorithm makes a match. We are very interested in catching duplicate questions for our network too. Our reasons are almost identical to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kaggle.com/c/quora-question-pairs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quora's&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Quora values canonical questions because they provide a better experience to active seekers and writers, and offer more value to both of these groups in the long term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, duplicate questions muddy the waters when it comes to search. We'd prefer people to find one question with great answers when querying Google than several questions. It's better for the site, better for people searching for answers and even (in the long run) better for the company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, you might be interested in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/286329/project-reduplication-of-deduplication-has-begun&quot;&gt;deduplication project&lt;/a&gt; from the University Of Melbourne.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27774" LastActivityDate="2017-04-06T23:48:27.890" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="498" CreationDate="2017-04-07T10:58:53.510" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ok to vote down newbies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes: when they don't show any research effort, are unclear, or not useful. Evidencing confusion about concepts&lt;sup&gt;&amp;dagger;&lt;/sup&gt; or making incorrect assertions shouldn't in themselves be considered reasons for down-voting a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's wise to presume that new users are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;unfamilar with site norms,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;inexperienced in asking statistical questions,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;amp; unaware that they can edit their question;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;amp; therefore to explain in a comment how they can improve their question, if someone else hasn't already done so (that goes not only, of course, but especially, for new users). Those with the close-vote privilege will often prefer to vote to close a question when appropriate rather than down-voting it&amp;mdash;an edit will automatically place a closed question in the queue for re-opening, whereas an edit to a down-voted question may well be overlooked (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4574/17230&quot;&gt;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4574/17230&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you think this discourages new posters if they have their questions voted down? (Even if perhaps they received answers that are voted up?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd hope they're only discouraged from asking further poor questions. Constructive, polite, criticism should go a long way to mitigate any disappointment at a first attempt at a question's not being well received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] is there some approximate metric, duration of account in days, or minimum rep before you believe a question should be voted down?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No: most poor questions are asked by new users. Down-voting can flag the post for the attention of other users who may help (e.g. users with over 10k rep. can see a list of recent posts with a negative score at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tools&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tools&lt;/a&gt;), &amp;amp; I'd like to think it discourages premature attempts&amp;mdash;perhaps also by new users&amp;mdash;at answers. And it can make the difference between a question's being automatically deleted after thirty days, or hanging around for a year, or even indefinitely (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/5221/225179&quot;&gt;How does deleting work? What can cause a post to be deleted, and what does that actually mean? What are the criteria for deletion?&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;dagger; If this muddles the question to the point of making it unanswerable, it's sometimes good advice for the OP to take a step back &amp;amp; explain the problem at hand without recourse to statistical concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:44:59.080" LastActivityDate="2017-04-07T10:58:53.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2979" CreationDate="2017-04-09T13:04:28.457" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/wilcoxon&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;wilcoxon&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;wilcoxon&lt;/a&gt; tag now only contains tags which can be mapped to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/wilcoxon-signed-rank&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;wilcoxon-signed-rank&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;wilcoxon-signed-rank&lt;/a&gt; so if any moderator is reading this can they please carry out the merge operation mentioned by Amoeba in the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Longer version&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were a few which did not map oonto [wilcoxon-mann-whitney] which I have re-tagged appropriately. One remaining issue is that there was one about the Wilcoxon-Gehan method. I have temporarily created the obvious tag for it. We have a handful of other questions which could be re-tagged to that tag. Shall I do that and provide a wiki for it or is there some other existing tag which could be used? I have an unmet training need for time-to-event analysis so would welcome second opinions here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The remaining issue, as far as I can tell, is the [ranking] and [ranks] tags. My personal view is that there are too many of these to make a thorough examination of each one a viable proposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-04-09T19:15:40.297" LastActivityDate="2017-04-09T19:15:40.297" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4720" CreationDate="2017-04-09T13:54:18.077" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.blogoverflow.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stats blog was built on wordpress&lt;/a&gt;. I also have a personal &lt;em&gt;free&lt;/em&gt; wordpress blog that fits all your needs (and I am happy with).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pictures (both svg and raster) can be embedded&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you can write formulas in Latex and have code blocks, very similar to this site (via a similar type of markdown or edit the html directly). Personally I write posts in markdown, then use Pandoc to covert to html, then just upload the html to the online site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;animated graphs are more tricky - GIFs can be embedded same as images. You can also embed stuff via iframes (self promotion examples, &lt;a href=&quot;https://andrewpwheeler.wordpress.com/2017/03/02/scraping-meth-labs-with-python/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CartoDB animated map&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://andrewpwheeler.wordpress.com/2017/02/09/much-ado-about-nothing-overinterpreting-volatility-in-homicide-rates/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Han's Rosling moving bubble type graph&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;comments, with pretty good spam filtering in my experience&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've described mine as a personal nerd journal as well. If I end up doing something a few times I will write a blog post (and it helps me find code/examples faster than searching through old files). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing I did not cover was cyrillic. I'm personally ignorant of this aspect, as well as more general UTF support. It is likely some other platforms meet these same needs. I'm happy with my free wordpress site, it is low maintenance and has the functionality I want. I can't say much about other competitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2017-04-09T13:54:18.077" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4733" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-09T15:22:42.157" Score="5" ViewCount="559" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a senior CV participant comments, “CV is a statistical blog,” what does this mean for the community? How is this to be interpreted? A literal interpretation might suggest that only those questions with an unambiguously theoretical statistical stance are appropriate. Obviously, this isn’t true as there are many queries being accepted with concerns that are applied or business related, with a minimal theoretical component. Not only that, given the apparent level of many OPs' statistical literacy, a purely theoretical response might provide an answer but would it be appropriate if it weren’t understood?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the face of it, it would appear that many CV participants have a clear idea of the kinds of questions and issues CV should handle. For instance, questions that are mostly concerned with programming and/or specific software packages are usually relegated, e.g., to Stack Overflow -- but by no means all. Many, many questions get through that are mostly about statistical software, its implementation and idiosyncrasies. Responses, too, will include programming tips. Similarly, questions that may have a quantitative component but are more heavily content weighted towards specific academic silos such as economics or finance have a higher probability of getting reposted to one of those SE groups. By the same token, inadequately phrased and/or naive questions have a much greater likelihood of being put on hold regardless of their statistical content or value. And so on. The point is that, while there is an appearance of community clarity in terms of the questions that are accepted (or not),  the fact is that there can be considerable ambiguity and leeway in these community decisions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, would questions concerned with the history of statistics be appropriate? For instance, what about questions taken from a book like Crosby’s &lt;em&gt;The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society 1250-1600&lt;/em&gt;? Is there a clear line between statistics, machine learning, AI or information theory? Are wider controversies such as ongoing debates about the “scientific method” appropriate? How about questions concerned with the overlap and triangulation of qualitative (idiothetic) and quantitative (nomothetic) methodologies? What about issues crossing the blurred line between philosophy and statistics? Deborah Mayo’s blog &lt;a href=&quot;https://errorstatistics.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://errorstatistics.com/&lt;/a&gt; is an example of this. Would cultural anthropological issues as embodied in a book like Chrisomalis’ &lt;em&gt;Numerical Notation&lt;/em&gt;, which reviews the earliest cultural origins and evolution of numeracy, be appropriate? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just wondering if there is any clarity in the community on these things as they're not clear to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78229" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-04-11T11:36:48.667" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T11:36:48.667" Title="&quot;CV is a statistical blog&quot; - is it true and if so, what does it mean? What is on-topic here?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4733" CreationDate="2017-04-09T16:49:32.593" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've never seen anyone put &quot;CV is a statistical blog&quot; exactly, although I may have missed it.  I often put something like &quot;CV is a Q&amp;amp;A site for questions about statistics (machine learning, etc)&quot; in a comment to a thread that is about something like 'how to convert data from wide to long in R', which is about software / coding rather than statistics.  I may sometimes shorten that to &quot;... about statistics&quot; (without the parenthetical expansion) when the context suggests to me that it may be acceptable shorthand.  I certainly &lt;em&gt;do not&lt;/em&gt; mean that machine learning, data mining, or data visualization are off topic here; I simply take them to be assumed or that it is unnecessary to state them in those cases.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding what is on topic here, that is an issue that has been discussed extensively several times on meta.CV (you can read through some of the threads tagged under &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic&lt;/a&gt;, e.g.).  For what it's worth, my own criterion has always been straightforward: &lt;em&gt;What does the OP need explained?&lt;/em&gt;  If it is a statistical (machine learning, etc.) concept, it belongs here, if not, it belongs elsewhere.  A statistical concept need not be theoretical (depending on how strictly one wants to define that term).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest issue concerns questions about software use, particularly coding.  That is already on topic on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;, where questions get good answers very fast.  From the point of view of the SE system, it isn't best to have questions equally on topic on multiple sites.  That leads to cross-posting, among other problems, and is analogous to the problem with duplicate threads (cf., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4728/7290&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).  To some extent, that will always exist, as the sites are living things, but where it can be avoided, it probably should.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as your other topics, the history of statistics has long been considered on topic here, and philosophy questions are often fine.  It is certainly true that what is on topic or not will never be perfectly consistently enforced because the system is managed by the collective efforts of many different people.  It is also true that in the past the boundaries were less clear and somewhat in flux.  On occasion, old threads that should be off topic are closed, or sometimes are 'locked' to preserve their historical value.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2017-04-10T12:15:20.863" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T12:15:20.863" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4733" CreationDate="2017-04-10T09:56:20.430" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've had statistical questions concerning applications from Astrology to Zoology&amp;mdash;these kind of &quot;practical, answerable questions based on actual problems&quot; are our site's bread &amp;amp; butter (to my mind &quot;questions with an unambiguously theoretical statistical stance&quot; are a garnish). It's not usually difficult to apply @gung's criterion&amp;mdash;&quot;What does the OP need explained?&quot;&amp;mdash;to decide if a question's really &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; the economics or whatever rather than about the statistics, &amp;amp; we migrate relatively few questions on these grounds. Some examples follow:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://economics.stackexchange.com/q/14917&quot;&gt;https://economics.stackexchange.com/q/14917&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/314969&quot;&gt;https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/314969&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://quant.stackexchange.com/q/31899&quot;&gt;https://quant.stackexchange.com/q/31899&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think most users will agree that the facts and concepts needed to answer these belong to Economics, Physics, &amp;amp; Finance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;History, philosophy, &amp;amp; cultural anthropology of statistics are on-topic, as is the role of statistical analysis in the scientific method. That is, questions in these areas have been treated as on-topic, though there's not been much explicit discussion. I'd certainly not want to rule them out, but I would remind askers of the SE dictum that &quot;real questions have answers&quot;: CV isn't a blog; nor is it a discussion forum. (I'd also note that some of the examples of topics you give seem to fall into more general philosophy &amp;amp;c. of Science or Mathematics rather than specifically of Statistics, but if you swapped e.g. Crosby’s &lt;em&gt;The Measure of Reality&lt;/em&gt; for Hacking's &lt;em&gt;The Emergence of Probability&lt;/em&gt; I'd answer &quot;on-topic&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most migrated (not &quot;relegated&quot;!) questions go to Stack Overflow, &amp;amp; many closed questions are closed because they &quot;focus on programming, debugging, or performing routine operations within a statistical computing platform&quot;.&#xA;A tricky issue here is whether a latent statistical question can be discerned in a post that prima facie doesn't ask one. More inconsistency than we'd like in their treatment seems inevitable; but a hard-line policy of insisting on statistical questions asked in English (together with mathematical notation) would put CV's help beyond the reach of people having great need of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:51:38.237" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T11:06:05.340" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4720" CreationDate="2017-04-10T22:59:20.017" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for the same thing and have been considering Github pages/Jekyll. &lt;a href=&quot;http://jmcglone.com/guides/github-pages/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a guide to how to do it. Drawback: it does look like harder work than Wordpress, Blogger etc. to set up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13818" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T22:59:20.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4737" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4766" CreationDate="2017-04-11T11:50:45.967" Score="7" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4706/how-should-we-celebrate-reaching-100-000-questions&quot;&gt;How should we celebrate reaching 100,000 questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure this'd even work... But let's see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I nominate &lt;strong&gt;22nd April Saturday, 3pm&lt;/strong&gt; gather for coffee breaks in Sydney CBD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's me briefly describe myself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My background is in computing, finance and mathematics. I'm currently a bioinformatician, specalized in genomic analysis. I use statistics to develop models for our DNA genome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used to work as a quantitative analyst in finance, where I helped developing option pricing models. But I find statistics more interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd argue myself an expert in chess programming. I write my own chess engines and sell them for profits on mobile platform (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.smallchess.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.smallchess.com&lt;/a&gt;). I'm currently the leader in chess engine on &lt;a href=&quot;http://chess.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;chess.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; by a wide margin (2x the second leader):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chess.stackexchange.com/tags/engines/topusers&quot;&gt;https://chess.stackexchange.com/tags/engines/topusers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm applying statistics and machine learning in chess. I don't just use save statistics R-code somewhere on Github. I'd actually translate the code into C++, and &lt;strong&gt;sell it&lt;/strong&gt; on the App Store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's run through two example I'm still working on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q1: What's the piece value for a given chess position?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chess players use their experience to say which chess pieces are &quot;good&quot;, and which chess pieces are &quot;bad&quot;. Imagine there is a mobile app that you can download from the App Store, where you give it a chess position and it tells you statistical value for each piece? What about the Monte Carlo tree search? Maybe we can use logistic regression?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fAaSg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fAaSg.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q2: How to derive similarity measure for two different chess positions?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is actually an insane problem. The positions must have similar evaluation to be considered similar. Unfortunately, there is no known way to do it without running a chess engine. Running a chess engine is very slow, we would like to do it statically. Imagine there is a reliable similarity measure, we'd be able to apply machine learning on a given position, and compare it to a set of pre-trained models.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can talk about anything interesting related to data analytics and chess!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT (we have two):&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have got a taker. So we have two (including myself). More!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bump up the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34623" LastEditorUserId="34623" LastEditDate="2017-04-19T03:37:23.587" LastActivityDate="2017-04-22T12:29:33.157" Title="Celebrate 100,000 questions in Sydney, Australia?" Tags="|discussion|questions|site-statistics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4738" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-11T12:33:14.117" Score="0" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;I frequently see questions that to which I do not know the answer but that I would like to know how to answer. On many websites there is a follow button next to where the &quot;share&quot;, &quot;edit&quot;, and &quot;flag&quot; buttons appear. There are other ways of doing this, as I am sure others will point out, but I think this button would see a lot of use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit - here is an example of a professional forum having such a button: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biostars.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.biostars.org&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit 2 - as other users have indicated the ability to favorite a question is substantively different than the ability to follow a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86388" LastEditorUserId="86388" LastEditDate="2017-04-11T18:04:26.143" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T18:04:26.143" Title="Why is there no way to follow a question?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-04-11T12:38:27.993" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4740" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4741" CreationDate="2017-04-12T13:42:09.563" Score="0" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are four correlation coefficients (cc) which currently lack tags. The point-biserial cc is that between a continuous variable and a binary variable. It is just the Pearson cc between them. There is also the less used rank-biserial cc which is between a ranked variable and a binary. By contrast the biserial cc assumes that the binary variable is the realisation of a latent normal and is an estimate of the correlation of the underlying bivariate normal. The polyserial cc generalises the biserial with an ordered categorical replacing the binary. We currently have 9 question with the word polyserial in them and 39 with the word biserial, most of which seem to be about the point-biserial. Although this is something of a niche area it would seem appropriate to have tags here. I think there are three main options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;Create four tags, one for each cc. This strikes me as overkill&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;Create a tag [biserial] and a tag [polyserial] and tag all the variants of biserial with [biserial]. This seems to me a good option as it does not rely on questionners knowing exactly which biserial they want&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;Create [biserial] and tag all four cc with it. This does not seem quite right to me as the polyserial is not a special case of biserial but rather the other way around&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this meets with general approval I will re-tag them and write the appropriate wiki(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T14:49:40.353" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T15:09:42.873" Title="Suggestion of tags for the biserial correlation family" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4740" CreationDate="2017-04-12T15:09:42.873" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;My initial hunch is that we may be OK with the tags we already have.  I would think we would do best to tag the threads you describe with something like one of the following:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/binary-data&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;binary-data&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;binary-data&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/correlation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;correlation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;correlation&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;rather than &lt;code&gt;[biserial]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[correlation]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ordinal&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ordinal&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ordinal&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/correlation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;correlation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;correlation&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;rather than &lt;code&gt;[polyserial]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[correlation]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/categorical-data&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;categorical-data&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;categorical-data&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/correlation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;correlation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;correlation&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't want to have special tags for these (e.g., &lt;code&gt;[point-biserial-correlation]&lt;/code&gt;), because I think it would be best to still have such treads categorized under the existing &lt;code&gt;[correlation]&lt;/code&gt; tag, and using both of those would strike me as weird and redundant.  That does leave the option of just, say, &lt;code&gt;[biserial]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[correlation]&lt;/code&gt;, but if we are going to add two tags to a thread, we already have tags that strike me as natural.  Creating new tags that will sometimes be used and sometimes the existing tags will be used seems to me likely to lead to the information on the site being less well organized rather than better.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T15:09:42.873" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4742" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4811" CreationDate="2017-04-12T22:59:38.290" Score="8" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Additive_smoothing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Laplace smoothing&lt;/a&gt; (also known as additive smoothing) is a very particular smoothing technique concerning &lt;em&gt;categorical&lt;/em&gt; data. Laplace smoothing is almost always associated with a probability regularisation task and thus it does not immediately relate to &quot;standard&quot; smoothing techniques (eg. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_smoother&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;kernel smoothing&lt;/a&gt;,   &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoothing_spline&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;smoothing spline&lt;/a&gt;, etc.) concerned with variations along a (usually linear) continuum. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it will be beneficial to have a separate &lt;code&gt;[laplace-smoothing]&lt;/code&gt; tag. At first instance it seems that 25 to 30 questions might warrant the tag. I think it will make it easier for ML practitioners to recognise/filter relevant questions. Some questions that would affected are the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/238822&quot;&gt;Understanding Add-1/Laplace smoothing with bigrams&lt;/a&gt;    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/83203&quot;&gt;Laplace smoothing and Dirichlet prior&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/272826&quot;&gt;Laplace smoothing and naive bayes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/246952&quot;&gt;Laplace smoothing understanding implementation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/60257&quot;&gt;Markov chain getting stuck due to insufficient data samples&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/28665&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s a good approach to estimate the probability of word frequencies?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/108618&quot;&gt;How to handle unseen features in a Naive Bayes classifier?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/108797&quot;&gt;In Naive Bayes, why bother with Laplacian smoothing when we have unknown words in the test set?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Unsurprisingly, NLP applications seems to generally concerned with this type of regularisation...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11852" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T23:05:56.667" LastActivityDate="2017-05-11T21:01:46.517" Title="Create a tag for Laplace smoothing" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4743" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4778" CreationDate="2017-04-13T12:48:24.467" Score="11" ViewCount="357" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the following tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ordinal&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ordinal&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ordinal&lt;/a&gt; (678)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ordinal-logit&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ordinal-logit&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ordinal-logit&lt;/a&gt; (3)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ordinal-probit&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ordinal-probit&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ordinal-probit&lt;/a&gt; (1)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ordered-logit&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ordered-logit&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ordered-logit&lt;/a&gt; (62)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ordered-probit&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ordered-probit&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ordered-probit&lt;/a&gt; (13)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/proportional-odds&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;proportional-odds&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;proportional-odds&lt;/a&gt; (2)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ordinal-logit, ordered-logit, and proportional-odds are 100% synonyms and refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordered_logit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordered_logit&lt;/a&gt;. The ordinal-probit and ordered-probit are also synonyms and refer to the much less used &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordered_probit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordered_probit&lt;/a&gt;. Wikipedia puts these two terms together as instances of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_regression&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_regression&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest problem, however, is that [ordinal] contains lots of threads about this topic too, and even mentions it in the wiki excerpt (&quot;Special kinds of analysis exist for such data, bearing adjective &quot;ordinal&quot;, for example ordinal logistic regression&quot;). My estimate is that there are close to 200 Qs there about ordered logit (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ordinal+logistic&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;[ordinal] [logistic]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; yields 101, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bordinal%5D+-%5Blogistic%5D+logistic+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;[ordinal] -[logistic] logistic is:question&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; yields another 61, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bordinal%5D+-%5Blogistic%5D+is%3Aquestion+-logistic+logit&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;[ordinal] -[logistic] is:question -logistic logit&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; another 37) and around 50 Qs about ordered probit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current situation is unacceptable. I can see three possible solutions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Map everything to [ordinal]. Ordered logit regression should be [ordered]+[logistic], ordered probit should be [ordinal]+[probit], and no special tags.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use [ordered-logit] and [ordered-probit] as our main tags for ordered regressions. Move relevant threads from [ordinal] in there. Rename [ordinal] into [ordinal-data] (similar to our tags [categorical-data], [binary-data], etc.). This would require a lot of retagging, but in fact we don't &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to retag all ~200+50 threads, it might be enough to retag some most prominent ones (e.g. with 5+ upvotes) and leave the rest as is.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Create new tag [ordinal-regression] for both ordered logit and ordered probit, map other tags there, and proceed further as in solution #2.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't like #1. I don't have a strong preference between #2 and #3, perhaps a slight tendency towards #2. Note that [ordered-logit] is a relatively well-established tag, with 60+ threads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2017-05-16T05:02:57.213" Title="The [ordinal] tag and ordered logistic regression" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-reorganization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4689" CreationDate="2017-04-13T17:14:09.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can think of in 4 options, which #1 and #2 are the best ones. They are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the question was not already edited after it was put 'on hold'; edit it for clarification (if you are positive you know how), so it can be automatically sent to the reopen queue for peer review. However, a caveat is that in many occasions only OP will be able to edit the question to address the close reason (don't edit in this case; wait for OP to step in).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Reach 3k reputation and earn &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;cast close/reopen vote privilege&lt;/a&gt;, so to cast a reopen vote and send the question to the reopen queue for peer review. Leaving a comment explaining why you think the question should be reopened, might increase chances of it being reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Flag it for moderator attention and explain your reasons, tell you want to post an answer; but unless it is very good reason &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4689/is-there-a-procedure-to-propose-the-reopening-of-a-question#comment12834_4689&quot;&gt;it won't work&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ask for help in CV Meta (kind of what you did with this post).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion #4 competes with #3. However, #1 or #2 should always be tried first, and in case of negative results, see if any new piece of information was added (e.g.: edits to question or new comments from peers), then evaluate if #3 or #4 are worthy a shot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastActivityDate="2017-04-13T17:14:09.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4746" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4747" CreationDate="2017-04-14T02:14:58.990" Score="6" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;Between yesterday and today MathJax (and edit previews) have ceased working. I have not updated my browser in that time, nor have I changed my browser settings. Is there a troubleshooting page to understand how to fix this this? The site is unpleasant to read without MathJax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44269" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-04-14T07:18:21.307" LastActivityDate="2017-04-14T23:04:30.880" Title="MathJax has ceased rendering on my system" Tags="|support|math-display|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4746" CreationDate="2017-04-14T22:51:42.300" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's one possible cause of the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MathJax.org have paid to host a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;content delivery network&lt;/a&gt; (CDN) to make it easier for people to host MathJax pages (at cdn.mathjax.org). However, cloudflare have increased the cost of doing this to them and MathJax have decided to focus their resources on development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, as recommended by MathJax and as described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/26166/should-math-se-support-mathjax-on-its-own-server&quot;&gt;this math.SE meta post&lt;/a&gt;, the hosting of math.SE's MathJax libraries have moved &#xA;to cdnjs.cloudflare.com (which cdnjs pay cloudflare for)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If for any reason you're blocking cdnjs.cloudflare.com (or likely cloudflare.com more broadly) then MathJax might stop working for you on math or here on CV (along with &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/216606/which-stack-exchange-sites-use-mathjax&quot;&gt;other SE sites&lt;/a&gt; that use MathJax). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're using NoScript (for example), blocking cloudflare.com would be the default action. There's some advice in the comments at the linked math.SE page about how to enable MathJax without whitelisting the whole of cdnjs.cloudflare.com :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For NoScript, I find that one can whitelist &lt;a href=&quot;https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com&lt;/a&gt; and add an ABE rule Site &lt;a href=&quot;https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/mathjax/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/mathjax/&lt;/a&gt;* Anonymize Site cdnjs.cloudflare.com Deny (with line breaks before uppercase letters)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also advice for users of UBlock Origin and other discussion you may care to read there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are using NoScript you could check if this is the issue by &lt;em&gt;temporarily enabling&lt;/em&gt; cloudflare.com (it should show up in the list if you check the NoScript menu while reading this page - hover over the NoScript icon in your browser, which is a bold S with a small red circle and diagonal line) and seeing if the mathematics renders (you can then disable again the same way, and try to implement the safer-in-the-long-term advice in the comments at the math.SE post).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-04-14T23:04:30.880" LastActivityDate="2017-04-14T23:04:30.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4748" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4756" CreationDate="2017-04-16T11:15:01.450" Score="5" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/references&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;references&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;references&lt;/a&gt; on Cross Validated doesn't seem to have any usage guidelines included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An analogous tag &quot;reference-request&quot; on Math.StackExchange has the guideline that it should not be a standalone tag, i.e. the only tag used for a question. There are also explicit guidelines for other meta-tags: &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2498/the-meta-tags&quot;&gt;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2498/the-meta-tags&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it make sense to have similar guidelines for Cross Validated? Or do such guidelines already exist (and I couldn't find them) but they are not written in the tag info for &quot;references&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was looking for tags without any tag info or usage guidelines to edit and &quot;references&quot; came to mind as one thing to consider. Changes without consulting Meta usually are not approved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113090" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-04-18T17:09:32.100" LastActivityDate="2017-04-18T19:02:05.727" Title="Should we have usage guidelines for the meta-tag &quot;references&quot; (and other meta-tags)?" Tags="|discussion|references|tag-excerpt|meta-tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4749" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4755" CreationDate="2017-04-16T11:32:55.427" Score="7" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/data-generating-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;data-generating-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;data-generating-process&lt;/a&gt; tag with 20 Qs, no wiki excerpt, and a synonym &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dgp&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dgp&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dgp&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia mentions at least three different interpretations of the term: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_generating_process&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_generating_process&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to have a specific meaning in econometrics, from which the acronym DGP appears to be derived, see for example &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rimini.unibo.it/fanelli/econometric_models2_2012.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/7836/in-regression-analysis-whats-the-difference-between-data-generation-process-and&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, or even more generally in the context of regression, &lt;a href=&quot;http://fedc.wiwi.hu-berlin.de/xplore/tutorials/xegbohtmlnode5.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;where the population regression function PRF is a feature of the DGP&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, vaguer usage of the term, similar to the first definition give in Wikipedia (&quot;the data-collection process&quot;) also seems to be used elsewhere, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.coursera.org/learn/leadership-marketing/lecture/At3ej/the-data-generating-process&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what sense is it supposed to be used on CrossValidated? I.e., what should be its usage guidelines?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113090" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-04-18T11:18:43.020" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T19:04:18.843" Title="What is the meaning and scope of our [data-generating-process] (synonym [dgp]) tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-deletion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4750" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-04-16T20:14:42.970" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-04-16T20:14:42.970" LastActivityDate="2017-04-16T20:14:42.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4751" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-04-16T20:14:42.970" Score="0" Body="The scope of reference requests (tag [references]) on Cross-Validated and guidelines for making them." OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-04-16T20:26:26.323" LastActivityDate="2017-04-16T20:26:26.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4752" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-17T15:16:27.460" Score="7" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;The about for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/basic-concepts/info&quot;&gt;'basic-concepts'&lt;/a&gt; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THIS TAG IS MEANINGLESS, please don't use it. Pick something more specific and descriptive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, the tag wiki is empty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, the about sections and the tag wikis of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/accuracy/info&quot;&gt;'accuracy'&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/methodology/info&quot;&gt;'methodology'&lt;/a&gt; are empty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of them have a decent number of uses (+150), so I'm not certain that they &lt;em&gt;aren't&lt;/em&gt; valuable to CV. But on the other hand, it's not clear to me either that they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a thread somewhere which has a list of tags like this to suggest/nominate to bring to other people's attention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113090" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-04-17T18:07:31.190" LastActivityDate="2017-04-17T18:07:31.190" Title="Is there a list of vague/meaningless tags with little to no usage guidance?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4752" CreationDate="2017-04-17T16:20:23.943" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/basic-concepts&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;basic-concepts&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;basic-concepts&lt;/a&gt; is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/08/07/the-death-of-meta-tags/&quot;&gt;meta tag&lt;/a&gt;.  The tag for &lt;code&gt;[meta-tags]&lt;/code&gt; on meta.SE defines them as &quot;Meta tags are tags which describe something other than the question's content--such as the author's skill level, motivation, or current take on it&quot;.  The official SE policy is that they are not supposed to be allowed.  As such, &lt;code&gt;[basic-concepts]&lt;/code&gt; probably should be (have been) burninated (see, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2854/7290&quot;&gt;Do we need [basic-concepts] tag?&lt;/a&gt;), but we don't seem to make much progress on that sort of thing (cf., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3031/7290&quot;&gt;Tag-candidates for removal&lt;/a&gt;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think having excerpts / usage guides is more important than having wikis.  (Wikis are nice, but I'm not sure how many people ever even know they exist; in addition, there are probably tags that just don't really need any full wiki, but should still have an excerpt.)  Moreover, the more common a tag is, the more important it presumably is for it to have an excerpt, all else held equal.  From these points, a simple way to look for tags that need excerpts is to go to our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;tags&lt;/a&gt; page, sort by &lt;code&gt;popular&lt;/code&gt; (if not already), and then scan through page after page until you see one without an excerpt.  The first such tag I notice is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/accuracy&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;accuracy&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;accuracy&lt;/a&gt; on page 6.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want a more formal method, you can use an existing data query (or make your own) at the Stack Exchange &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt; site.  Navigate to the site, click on Cross Validated, and search using relevant terms.  People like making lots of 'forks' of these queries, which I often find less useful, so I sort by &lt;code&gt;popular&lt;/code&gt;.  Here is a search for &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/queries?order_by=popular&amp;amp;q=tag%20wiki&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.  The top two hits are &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/8201/what-tag-wikis-can-i-edit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What tag wikis can I edit?&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/445925/most-common-tags-with-short-long-or-missing-excerpt-or-wiki&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Most common tags with short, long, or missing excerpt or wiki&lt;/a&gt;.  Both might have potential for you.  The only thing to bear in mind is that the data site is only updated on Sunday mornings at around 3:00 UTC, so the information returned by a query may be somewhat out of date when you use it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, none of these strategies picks out &quot;vague&quot; or &quot;meaningless&quot; tags.  That would be a heavy lift for a SQL query (it reminds me of &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/1425/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2017-04-17T16:31:20.890" LastActivityDate="2017-04-17T16:31:20.890" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4754" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-17T19:53:40.107" Score="16" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/logistic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;logistic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;logistic&lt;/a&gt; (3858) is one of our most popular tags; its wiki excerpt says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Refers generally to statistical procedures that utilize the logistic function, most commonly various forms of logistic regression&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has a merged tag synonym &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/logistic-regression&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;logistic-regression&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;logistic-regression&lt;/a&gt;. I looked at the questions in this tag (both newest questions and most upvoted questions), and it seems that overwhelming majority is about logistic regression as opposed to logistic function as such. I would therefore suggest to make &lt;code&gt;[logistic-regression]&lt;/code&gt; the master tag. I don't like the current tag name because &quot;logistic&quot; is an adjective, and it's not completely clear from the tag name if it refers to the logistic regression or possibly to something else. I think it makes more sense if tag names are nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;More importantly,&lt;/strong&gt; we have a separate &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/logit&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;logit&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;logit&lt;/a&gt; (432) tag. I feel that most of the questions in this tag are &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; about logistic regression. Wikipedia starts the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_regression&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_regression&lt;/a&gt; article with &quot;In statistics, logistic regression, or logit regression, or logit model...&quot; We have a [probit] tag too, so anybody asking about probit vs logit is likely to use [logit] tag, but their question is really about logistic regression. Again, some small fraction of the questions might be about logit function as such, but most of the threads &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; about logistic regression (I checked), and separation of this topic into two tags (logistic and logit) is very unhelpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My suggestion is to map both [logistic] and [logit] to [logistic-regression].&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T11:59:37.947" Title="Our tags for logistic regression: [logistic] and [logit]" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4749" CreationDate="2017-04-18T11:19:19.097" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I looked into it and it seems that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/data-generation-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;data-generation-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;data-generation-process&lt;/a&gt; is a pretty useless tag that should be eliminated. In most cases people seem to be using it instead of our well-established &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/random-generation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;random-generation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;random-generation&lt;/a&gt; tag, which only creates confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With only 20 Qs, eliminating this tag is an easy task that can be done in around 3 sittings (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4285&quot;&gt;When re-tagging old threads, how many should one do at once?&lt;/a&gt;). You now have 2k rep and so are able to edit questions; if nobody protests here in a day or two, it would be great if you could do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; Done by @Chill2Macht, thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-04-26T19:04:18.843" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T19:04:18.843" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4748" CreationDate="2017-04-18T17:08:22.037" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;About &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/references&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;references&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;references&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I included a link to the most upvoted answer in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1593/should-all-book-recommendation-questions-be-classified-as-community-wiki/1595#1595&quot;&gt;Should all &amp;quot;book recommendation&amp;quot; questions be classified as community wiki?&lt;/a&gt; in the tag wiki as additional guidance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@amoeba edited the tag excerpt to also advise using specific tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions seeking external references (books, papers, etc.) about a particular subject. Always use a more specific tag in addition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the general question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should we have usage guidelines for meta-tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, meta tags should be avoided, but sometimes the community decides there can be exceptions, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt;. In such cases, it is always good to have guidance about using these tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-04-18T19:02:05.727" LastActivityDate="2017-04-18T19:02:05.727" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4757" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4760" CreationDate="2017-04-19T15:31:35.280" Score="4" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I assume that for an answer that I give to a question, the tags take equal shares of the points I have been voted, how do I make a ranked list of tags that gives tag name, tag rank, and sum of partial points owned by the tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm assuming there is a query for the data, but I am not sure how to do something like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22452" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-04-20T17:09:55.643" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T17:09:55.643" Title="How do I find what percent of my points come from which tags?" Tags="|support|tags|reputation|participation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1593" CreationDate="2017-04-20T09:38:32.213" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a third approach, which is at least worth presenting: such posts could be treated just like others&amp;mdash;recommendations of a statistical method, say&amp;mdash;, rather than like polls. A great answer might deal with several notable textbooks; discussing what they cover, &amp;amp; omit; their statistical prerequistes; their mathematical level; their strengths &amp;amp; weaknesses in exposition. A poor answer might just name-check a popular book&amp;mdash;and would be deleted if not improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T09:38:32.213" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4757" CreationDate="2017-04-20T12:31:04.803" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unless I'm reading your question wrong, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4757/how-do-i-find-what-percent-of-my-points-come-from-which-tags#comment13303_4757&quot;&gt;amoeba's comment&lt;/a&gt; pretty much answers it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Something like that? &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/22452/engrstudent?tab=tags&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/22452/engrstudent?tab=tags&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing left there would be actually converting that into percentages. &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/660948/percentage-of-users-total-rep-coming-from-each-tag?UserId=22452&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I wrote a query for that&lt;/a&gt;. Note that, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4757/how-do-i-find-what-percent-of-my-points-come-from-which-tags#comment13304_4757&quot;&gt;as Glen_b puts it&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each tag gets &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the points of any of your (non-wiki) answers it's in. The total points that accrue to your tags will exceed your total reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which means that percentages are gonna exceed 100%, and total rep is gonna exceed the actual rep (as explained in the query's description).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One final note: my SQL-fu is not at ninja level, so let me know if you spot something completely off in the query or numbers it generates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72321" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T12:31:04.803" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4761" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4767" CreationDate="2017-04-20T15:50:43.717" Score="13" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just read &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/274815/1352&quot;&gt;this very interesting question&lt;/a&gt; and wanted to add the &quot;obviously relevant but missing&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/misspecification&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;misspecification&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;misspecification&lt;/a&gt; tag - only to notice that we don't have it. Which I find surprising. We have quite a few questions on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=misspecification+is%3Aq&quot;&gt;&quot;misspecification&quot;&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=misspecify+is%3Aq&quot;&gt;&quot;misspecify&quot;&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=misspecified+is%3Aq&quot;&gt;&quot;misspecified&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, some of them pretty well upvoted - but no tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have strong feelings for or against adding the tag to these questions (a few questions at a time, in order not to bump-flood the landing page), or even have a tag wiki and/or excerpt proposal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-04-24T11:18:59.127" LastActivityDate="2017-04-24T15:04:54.010" Title="Should we have a &quot;misspecification&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4452" CreationDate="2017-04-20T17:14:47.210" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This kind of change is widely unpopular - not because people don't think a change should be made, but because this is a very &quot;meh&quot; kind of change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the current system is somewhat unfair to those users who never get upvotes but frequently get accepted answers. They essentially never make any progress like those users who do get upvotes on their answers and experience no problems. However, starting to count accepted answers into the equation doesn't solve the problem. All it does is shift the problem in the other direction. Now those users who only ever get accepted answers are making progress, but those users who &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; get upvotes are essentially doubling their progress for no apparent reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And therein lies a bigger problem. This change potentially makes it twice as easy to get the tag badges. If tag badges didn't mean anything like the others, we frankly wouldn't care, but gold tag badges give users heightened privileges on questions with that tag, and we have to be careful not to make it &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; easy for that privilege to be obtained. Allowing this change would likely mean we'd have to modify the criteria for the tag badges to make them more difficult to obtain based on the new system, so any progress you'd make by counting the accepted answers would likely be diminished by the increased criteria for the badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As said before, this kind of change doesn't solve the problem at hand. All it does is increase the benefit for a minority that have trouble getting upvotes on their accepted answers, when there is probably a much better solution out there somewhere that doesn't overcompensate another minority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72322" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T17:14:47.210" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4763" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4764" CreationDate="2017-04-20T18:37:04.700" Score="15" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I saw a lot of effort in an answer (e.g., assume that there are a lot of derivations, code, and plots), but I'm not sure that the math is correct, should I upvote to encourage the person answering it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113777" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-04-21T23:14:06.907" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T23:14:06.907" Title="Should I upvote an elaborated answer which I do not fully understand?" Tags="|discussion|answers|votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4763" CreationDate="2017-04-20T22:25:41.443" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some users on this site feel compelled to provide input on things they don't understand and this sounds like a more nuanced version of that...Obviously you can vote however you want but, since you asked...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are sincerely unsure about whether or not the answer is correct, I don't know why you'd upvote it: that adds noise to the system and could mislead future readers if the answer turns out to be wrong. I don't see the purpose in giving an &quot;A for effort&quot;. Let the people who do understand the answer be the ones who vote. Just because an answer looks complicated or sophisticated doesn't mean it's right. I'd venture to say that a view like the one I'm putting forward is the reason that complicated questions (and the resulting answers) don't get as much credit on this site as the repetitive questions and answers that a greater proportion of users can more easily relate to and understand. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Caveat: I'm talking about the scenario where the correctness of the math is a crucial part of the answer. If it is secondary, and the general approach to the problem has value regardless of whether the math is right, I could see a purpose in upvoting even if you're unable to evaluate the math.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109178" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2017-04-21T08:02:59.107" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T08:02:59.107" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4737" CreationDate="2017-04-21T01:18:10.420" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Coincidentally, it happens that March for Science is happening worldwide on this date. The Sydney event is finishes just prior to your coffee date :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://marchforscienceaustralia.org/sydney/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://marchforscienceaustralia.org/sydney/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22199" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T01:18:10.420" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4737" CreationDate="2017-04-22T12:29:33.157" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alex came. A prominent statistician who wished to remain anonymous also attended. We talked about statistics and many other things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks everybody!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34623" LastActivityDate="2017-04-22T12:29:33.157" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4761" CreationDate="2017-04-24T14:18:11.630" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I went ahead and made the tag (cf., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/misspecification&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;misspecification&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;misspecification&lt;/a&gt;).  I retagged some, many more are needed.  Have a look at my proposed &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/misspecification/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have any posts so far in the tag, so I cannot propose synonyms.  Please go ahead and propose synonyms, if you have enough upvoted posts in the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2017-04-24T15:04:54.010" LastActivityDate="2017-04-24T15:04:54.010" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4754" CreationDate="2017-04-27T08:25:13.757" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seems to be a wide support (currently 10 upvotes) in favour of my suggestion to map both [logistic] and [logit] to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/logistic-regression&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;logistic-regression&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;logistic-regression&lt;/a&gt;. This will be a big tag with ~4200 Qs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, @Glen_b raised the concern that there are some topics among [logistic] threads that are not about logistic regression, and we should perhaps make separate tags for them. After some discussion, I am thinking of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/logistic-distribution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;logistic-distribution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;logistic-distribution&lt;/a&gt; for questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_distribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_distribution&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; I put this tag on 11 Qs and think this is about it. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Blogistic%5D+%22logistic+distribution%22+-%5Blogistic-distribution%5D+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;[logistic] &quot;logistic distribution&quot; -[logistic-distribution] is:question&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; search still yields 4 results but  they do not need this new tag.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/logistic-curve&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;logistic-curve&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;logistic-curve&lt;/a&gt;$\leftarrow$&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sigmoid-curve&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sigmoid-curve&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sigmoid-curve&lt;/a&gt; for questions about e.g. fitting a logistic curve to some data via nonlinear least squares.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; I put this tag on 14 Qs and also believe that this is about it. The synonym suggested above should still be created.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@GeoMatt22 mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sigmoid&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sigmoid&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sigmoid&lt;/a&gt; tag with 17 Qs and no wiki excerpt; I went through these threads, re-tagged them as appropriate, and eliminated this tag. Most questions were about neural networks; I don't think we need a separate tag for &lt;code&gt;[logistic-activation-function]&lt;/code&gt; (e.g. we don't have a separate tag for ReLUs), and generic [neural-network] should do fine. I have also looked through all &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=[logistic]+[neural-networks]+-%22logistic+regression%22+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;[logistic] [neural-networks] -&quot;logistic regression&quot; is:question&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; threads (a couple of dozens), and now this search returns zero results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Status update (May 17): I would still like to scan for possible [logit] threads that are not about logistic regression. E.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=%5blogit%5d%20is%3aquestion%20-%22logistic%20regression%22%20-%22logit%20model%22%20-probit%20-%22logit-regression%22%20-glm%20-glmer%20-mlogit&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=%5blogit%5d%20is%3aquestion%20-%22logistic%20regression%22%20-%22logit%20model%22%20-probit%20-%22logit-regression%22%20-glm%20-glmer%20-mlogit&lt;/a&gt;. Will report later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-05-17T12:17:15.833" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T12:17:15.833" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4771" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4772" CreationDate="2017-04-27T09:34:49.697" Score="6" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I flag a question because I think it's more about programming than about statistics, does it make sense to leave a comment explaining why I think so? I usually don't do that (I don't flag and then comment), because I don't want to induce the OP to close his/her question and ask a new one on SO. Instead, flagging and then letting moderators decide if to move the question to SO is better, because then there's a record of the question having already been asked to CV. This prevents objectively annoying situations where the OP moves the question to SO, only to be (kindly or not) suggested to move it to CV. However, if the OP is completely new to StackExchange, I thought that leaving an explanatory comment, together with flagging the post, may make him/her feel more welcome and less disoriented, in case the post does get moved to SO. What do you think? The specific case is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/276198/i-want-to-compare-two-datasets-to-determine-which-variables-they-share&quot;&gt;I want to compare two datasets to determine which variables they share&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-04-27T17:34:58.220" LastActivityDate="2017-04-27T17:34:58.220" Title="Is it a good idea to leave an explanatory comment after flagging a question for migration to another SE site?" Tags="|discussion|comment|migration|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4771" CreationDate="2017-04-27T10:37:50.930" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;What about this possibility? You could leave a comment about the scope of topics on this site, mention your suggested destination and then &lt;em&gt;suggest that the OP flag it to migrate rather than repost&lt;/em&gt; (whether you also flag it yourself is up to you) .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it's a good idea before suggesting a post belongs on another SE site to make sure it fits with the on-topic page for that site (for example, if it's a post about an error message, it's actually off-topic on SO unless the post satisfies several conditions). Once you're familiar with the requirements for the destination site, you don't need to keep re-checking, but many flags to migrate don't go through because the post actually doesn't meet the requirements of the destination. (Sometimes the post can be edited to meet the requirements and then migrate.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2017-04-27T10:37:50.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4773" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4786" CreationDate="2017-04-27T17:16:36.987" Score="7" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have discovered that I can find out the fate of my flags by clicking on the relevant field in my profile where it tells me how many helpful flags I have raised. I understand what &quot;helpful&quot; means, but what is the difference between &quot;disputed&quot; and &quot;declined&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: this is not a complaint, false positives are almost inevitable in any realistic signal detection task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-04-27T17:35:27.387" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T12:16:39.877" Title="What is meaning of a flag being disputed or declined?" Tags="|support|moderation|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4774" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4775" CreationDate="2017-04-27T19:59:27.383" Score="6" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hotelling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hotelling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hotelling&lt;/a&gt; tag with 24 Qs, no excerpt, and unclear scope. We also have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hotelling-t2&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hotelling-t2&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hotelling-t2&lt;/a&gt; with only 8 Qs, but with an excerpt, and clear scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that we need to go through all [hotelling] threads and sort the ones about Hotelling T^2 distribution/test into [hotelling-t2], and remove the tag from everything else (e.g. questions about canonical correlations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's an easy job, but I still wanted to protocol it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2017-04-28T22:04:27.557" Title="Sort out [hotelling] into [hotelling-t2]" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-reorganization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4774" CreationDate="2017-04-28T22:04:27.557" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is done, &lt;code&gt;[hotelling]&lt;/code&gt; is no more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2017-04-28T22:04:27.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3031" CreationDate="2017-04-30T22:21:15.967" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/inequality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;inequality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;inequality&lt;/a&gt; with 22 Qs and no wiki excerpt should be eliminated, partially by being replaced with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/probability-inequalities&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;probability-inequalities&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;probability-inequalities&lt;/a&gt; (145), partially by simply being removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently people use it for questions like &quot;How is independent T-Test valid for unequal samples?&quot; or &quot;Is the following inequality correct? How to prove it?&quot; This does not make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2017-04-30T22:21:15.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4743" CreationDate="2017-05-01T14:12:43.973" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me make a concrete proposal here along the lines of @amoeba's option 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;Use [ordered-logit] and [ordered-probit] as our main tags for ordered regressions. Move relevant threads from [ordinal] in there.&#xA;Also retag [ordinal-logit] and [ordinal-probit].&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;Rename [ordinal] into [ordinal-data] (similar to our tags [categorical-data], [binary-data], etc.).&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Retagging (item 1) would involve ~200+50 threads so would take some time but is doable, some other recent retagging efforts have involved similar numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this goes ahead I will start on the retagging process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update on May 16&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have now re-tagged all the ones which straightforward searches found and were about ordered-logit or ordered-probit. I did not re-tag ones which were already closed, duplicate, and so on. If the OP had already used both [ordinal] and [ordered-logit] I decided to respect that decision. There are quite a few which turn out to be about ordered categorical variables on the right hand side in binary logistic regression but I cannot think of a good tag for them and the issue is not restricted to logistic regression so I have left them. As far as I can see [ordinal] could now be moved to [ordinal-data].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastEditorUserId="101426" LastEditDate="2017-05-16T05:02:57.213" LastActivityDate="2017-05-16T05:02:57.213" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4780" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4781" CreationDate="2017-05-02T16:17:14.007" Score="3" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can select unanswered questions with a particular tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I then select from those, the questions asked within the last 2 years, ordered by votes?  Is there a way to do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22452" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-05-02T21:29:00.710" LastActivityDate="2017-05-02T23:01:45.123" Title="How to find all unanswered questions in a particular tag asked within the last year?" Tags="|support|unanswered-questions|search|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4780" CreationDate="2017-05-02T17:09:56.633" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;(edited to incorporate amoeba's suggested improvement of my answer)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within CV you can pretty much get what you seek, for example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i. you can easily get all but one of the things you seek, for example if you type &lt;code&gt;[nonparametric] answers:0&lt;/code&gt; into the search box and click the &quot;recent&quot; tab you get &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=%5bnonparametric%5d%20answers%3a0&quot;&gt;this search&lt;/a&gt;, which is the most recent questions in the nonparametric tag with no answers. This uses only options you can see by clicking on &quot;Advanced Search tips&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ii. if instead you put in the search box &lt;code&gt;[nonparametric] answers:0 created:2y..&lt;/code&gt; (you need the two dots, see below*) and select the &quot;votes&quot; tab ... you get &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bnonparametric%5D+answers%3A0+created%3A2y..&quot;&gt;this search&lt;/a&gt; (you can find this option by scrolling to the bottom of the Advanced Search tips&quot; revealed in the first suggestion and clicking the link there, which lists even more options). [[This seems to be pretty much what you asked for.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outside of the usual CV pages, another way to get what you want (but which allows you to filter in ways you can't within the usual search interface) would be via a data.SE query&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/queries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/queries&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* If you omit the dots after &quot;2y&quot; you get questions which have no answers, posted in the calendar year 2015, sorted by votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-05-02T23:01:45.123" LastActivityDate="2017-05-02T23:01:45.123" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4782" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4783" CreationDate="2017-05-02T19:19:09.807" Score="14" ViewCount="367" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know how many questions are posted to this website per second. Some questions are repeated or even not clear. However, I experienced that some questions have already had a down vote and I see that these questions may be are interesting for other people  recently or in the future. However, anyone who have eligibility to vote can choose down vote just because this question is not under their interest or maybe not clear for them! Some people also, just flag the question directly even without comment if this question is clear or have other problems asking the author to edit their questions. So, is that right? Is that part of user right to do so? Is there a way that this website can figure out this problem? Is it right to leave this under the personal opinion of the user? I mean I can up vote or down vote as I like!! But I think that shouldn't be happened. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="159516" OwnerDisplayName="Alice" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T11:05:35.510" LastActivityDate="2017-05-10T22:27:40.267" Title="Do you have a right to downvote just because the question is not under your interest?" Tags="|discussion|votes|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4782" CreationDate="2017-05-02T23:26:25.703" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry for any new user who has been discouraged in genuine attempts to ask a question. I agree there's a problem with what appears to be an amount of fairly indiscriminate downvoting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're posting the best question you can - and try to act on any feedback you do get - I'd encourage you to avoid deleting  your questions (at least if they only get a couple of downvotes). At the same time, when composing a question, pay attention to some of the good questions on site and try to emulate their best features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To respond to the title question first:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question is not of interest to you, you certainly shouldn't downvote it only on that basis. That's not the purpose of downvotes. The purpose of voting is outlined here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/why-vote&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/why-vote&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which says in part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Voting up a question or answer signals [...] that a post is interesting, well-researched, and useful, while voting down a post signals the opposite&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the point of downvoting is to indicate questions that are useless, badly researched or of no interest to the community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people may have difficulty in judging the difference between &quot;not interesting to me&quot; and &quot;not interesting to the community&quot; -- our site has a very disparate collection of topics across a huge variety of application areas, each with their own terminologies and favourite tools. If we each downvote whatever is not of direct interest to us personally, every post -- including the ones we would most cherish -- will be dowvoted to oblivion (quite literally -- posts that get enough downvotes get shown as a pale grey, making them difficult to read).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many kinds of questions I don't like (the endless &lt;em&gt;post hoc&lt;/em&gt; probability questions, like &quot;my girlfriend's birthday is on the same day as my cousin, what are the odds!!&quot; for example, which seem endlessly popular), so I haven't tried to impose my low opinion of those questions without a clear indication from the community that we should treat them as duplicates. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we can't be sure what a person's motivation is for a downvote. Whether someone should downvote is different from whether they &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt;; some people will abuse the downvote and mostly all we can do is ask them to try to follow our community norms (which are mostly to try to encourage better questions via comments, edits etc., whether or not a downvote is applied), in order that newer users can actually learn what the expectations are rather than simply be fried under a torrent of unexplained downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have had an increase of downvoting in recent times, so this question represents a broader issue. I'd encourage those people who are downvoting a lot* to please - as a general rule - explain them**, especially to new users. They need guidance more than discouragement&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* (a few of you have given more downvotes in a short time than I've awarded in my entire time on site ... approaching 7 years)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;** there are exceptions; for example: 1) If it's already clear (from a closure message or another comment) what the problem is, then you don't need to repeat the explanation. 2) If the person you're downvoting regularly abuses people who point out problems, mistakes or the like (even if they turn out to be right!), they lose any expectation of having downvotes explained to them. 3) egregiously bad posts that fail on multiple grounds - ones beyond editing into shape - may merit a flat downvote, but even better is a vote to close (or a flag if you can't vote to close)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to address some other issues from the body of the post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I know how many questions are posted to this website per second. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To Stack Overflow, sure. Here on CV? No; we might see 200 questions on some days, and at peak times a new question on average once every minute or two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;anyone who have eligibility to vote can choose down vote just because this question is not under their interest or maybe not clear for them! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, they have that ability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some people also, just flag the question directly even without comment if this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think flagging is not so much a problem, since it would then be reviewed by a number of high reputation users or by a moderator (depending on the particular flag generated)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it right to leave this under the personal opinion of the user?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is to have some way to indicate better content. If users don't have the right to vote at all we may end up with a much worse problem than we currently have; it would certainly result in a very different kind of site. Similarly, a forced public vote encourages revenge voting from a particular subset of users -- generally the same ones I suggested don't deserve a comment above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need some way to control the increasingly heavy stream of very poor questions that hit the front page or the quality of the site degrades badly. Votes certainly form part of that management. At the same time we need to be able to teach people how to use the site ... and votes (certainly not in themselves) really don't work for that! They just don't -- a new user who hadn't yet found all the guidance on how to use the site properly - the stuff in the help and on meta and so forth - has no basis to even guess what the problem is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me add a personal anecdote. After I had been using this site actively for quite some time (months of active answering), I received a downvote for what I thought was a reasonable answer. I queried it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The person who downvoted (no longer active, more's the pity, since they were highly knowledgeable and a great explainer) was kind enough to come back and say what the problem was. The explanation was not exactly &lt;em&gt;gentle&lt;/em&gt; - the exasperation came through loud and clear - but it was nevertheless correct; I was (ignorantly) doing the wrong thing, perhaps well past the time when I should have known better. I was very appreciative of the explanation and made sure to say so; and - perhaps more importantly - I tried to act on it. The explanation made all the difference, and it contributed to an improvement in the average value of my answers. A bare downvote would have done nothing but continue to baffle me, possibly for many months to come, while I would have continued ignorantly doing exactly the same thing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How much harder then, for a user on their first day?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Criticism can be hard to take at times, but constructive, polite criticism should be valued. An explanatory comment can be helpful and constructive, but a bare vote can't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-05-10T22:27:40.267" LastActivityDate="2017-05-10T22:27:40.267" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4784" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-03T20:19:56.540" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I saw this answer:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/188371/negative-population-variable-importance&quot;&gt;Negative population variable importance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The top line says that the question is a duplicate of one on mathoverflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to close-vote it, because it is a duplicate of an answer, but that was not allowed.  It can only be a duplicate of an answer on CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thoughts:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The logical extreme of that is &quot;in all areas of topic overlap between SO communities there must be question replication&quot;.  That isn't lean, or efficient.  That sounds like overhead without value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;: What is the source of the policy, and why is it inflexible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22452" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T20:46:12.647" LastActivityDate="2017-05-03T20:46:12.647" Title="Why can't we close questions as duplicates if they are already answered on another Stack Exchange site?" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2017-05-03T23:53:56.597" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4785" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4790" CreationDate="2017-05-05T11:59:34.287" Score="3" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have two closely related tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/inverse-cdf&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;inverse-cdf&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;inverse-cdf&lt;/a&gt; (18) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quantiles&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quantiles&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quantiles&lt;/a&gt; (334). Maybe instead we should have something like &lt;code&gt;[quantile-function]&lt;/code&gt; synonym to &lt;code&gt;[inverse-cdf]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[quantiles-empirical]&lt;/code&gt; for all the other questions? Or maybe we should rather make the two tags synonyms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2017-05-11T07:41:22.697" Title="What should we do with [inverse-cdf] and [quantiles]?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4773" CreationDate="2017-05-05T12:16:39.877" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In case @glen_b does not have time to answer and close the thread I am posting here his links&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/95275/what-is-a-disputed-flag&quot;&gt;What is a disputed flag?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/141292/what-is-the-difference-between-disputed-and-declined-flags&quot;&gt;What is the difference between disputed and declined flags?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the hope that others may learn from my two mistakes :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First mistake was to forget that this was likely to be an SE-wdie issue so serching as I did just on Meta-CV was not going to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second mistake was not to think through what my area of ignorance really was. In fact reading the helpful linked posts it is clear that I did not really understand what happens to flags at all. I have subsequently re-read the description of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;Flag posts privilege&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;which  has helped clear up some of my confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T12:16:39.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2935" CreationDate="2017-05-05T15:55:42.507" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Antoni Parellada's answer in this question! &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/175246/why-is-anova-equivalent-to-linear-regression&quot;&gt;Why is ANOVA equivalent to linear regression?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With nice graphical demonstration and math!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Awarded 21 May 2017]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113777" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-05-21T08:14:22.880" LastActivityDate="2017-05-21T08:14:22.880" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2935" CreationDate="2017-05-05T17:41:47.703" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Glen,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much for your largess!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I constantly go back to some posts that have helped me understand certain concepts. A good number of them are yours...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right off the top of my head:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;@gung's post &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/92087/67822&quot;&gt;on the linearity of polynomial regression&lt;/a&gt; with absolutely self-explanatory plots is fabulous.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;@amoeba got a prior 50-pt bounty for one of the all-time classics on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/140579/67822&quot;&gt;understanding PCA&lt;/a&gt;, a post worthy of higher recognition.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Recently I found @ttnphns' post on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/119758/67822&quot;&gt;geometric interpretation of PCA loadings&lt;/a&gt; very useful.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, I am abstaining from recommending any of the many unbelievable posts by @whuber because of his condition as moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Bounty started on #1. Awarded 30th May 2017]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67822" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-06-06T11:30:50.833" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T11:30:50.833" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4785" CreationDate="2017-05-05T21:23:26.557" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To summarize the comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make [quantile-function] a synonym of [inverse-cdf]. You can ping @Xian and ask him to vote, but apart from that there are no eligible voters, so we would need a moderator to approve.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Check if some threads in [quantiles] need to be retagged into [quantile-function]. Going through &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=%5bquantiles%5d%20%22quantile%20function%22%20is%3aquestion&quot;&gt;this search with 22 results&lt;/a&gt; should probably be enough. I see some questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/18438&quot;&gt;Does a univariate random variable&amp;#39;s mean always equal the integral of its quantile function?&lt;/a&gt; - definitely a candidate for retagging. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; I retagged a couple.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-05-11T07:41:22.697" LastActivityDate="2017-05-11T07:41:22.697" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4791" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-05T22:15:25.597" Score="7" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please consider the following question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/5292/good-gui-for-r-suitable-for-a-beginner-wanting-to-learn-programming-in-r&quot;&gt;Good GUI for R suitable for a beginner wanting to learn  programming in R?&lt;/a&gt;. I just voted to close it as off-topic. Besides being off-topic it is also outdated since much has have changed since most of the questions were answered and/or updated. Do we really need such questions and answers? I'd say the questions like this have no value at all and should rather be closed and deleted than kept for &quot;historical&quot; reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-05-06T08:07:31.230" LastActivityDate="2023-12-12T17:50:52.003" Title="Should we close old, outdated and off-topic questions?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|closing-questions|old-posts|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4792" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-06T17:20:10.853" Score="10" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is our stance on questions “looking for exercises to learn statistical concept X with library Y”? Are they on-topic or off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/277957/12359&quot;&gt;Exercises to learn neural network with Tensorflow&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am a new user, fan of neural network. I took the course : &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.udemy.com/data-science-deep-learning-in-python/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.udemy.com/data-science-deep-learning-in-python/&lt;/a&gt;. For me, the best way to learn something is to make some exercises. So I would like to practice neural network. Furthermore, I would like to use Tensorflow to make those exercises. Could anyone be able to suggest some great, easy exercises in this domain? In fact, I am interested by great website or tutorial, but the only thing I want is to practice. I want clear questions and features provide to complete the exercises.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastActivityDate="2017-05-11T19:05:37.693" Title="What is our stance on questions “looking for exercises to learn statistical concept X with library Y”?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4791" CreationDate="2017-05-06T17:39:06.697" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would not delete such questions, as I don't enjoy broken links. I would not lock them either, as I don't enjoy incorrect content (locking prevents from editing). I would simply add some warnings that such questions are off-topic nowadays. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastActivityDate="2017-05-06T17:39:06.697" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1723" CreationDate="2017-05-06T18:21:06.097" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cross-website duplicates waste the efforts of the community.  I think the answer is: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/199989/178179&quot;&gt;Build and strengthen the Stack Exchange community with &quot;crossover questions&quot; between sites&lt;/a&gt;. That would be extremely useful in the CV vs. data science case since there is a huge overlap between these two websites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastActivityDate="2017-05-06T18:21:06.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4792" CreationDate="2017-05-07T16:20:49.197" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions asking for references to learn statistical concept X are on-topic (this has been decided sometime in the past). One efficient way to learn certain statistical concepts is to do exercises, sometimes coding exercises, potentially using some specific library or programming language. Therefore I believe questions looking for exercises to learn statistical concept X with library Y should be on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastActivityDate="2017-05-07T16:20:49.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4797" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-08T14:04:05.027" Score="7" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently voted on a couple of questions and answers on CrossValidated. As I have 1 rep, my votes are not scored. However, I expected that my votes would show up on my profile action history so I could find the questions and answers I found helpful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Joke alert:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;What is the probability that a &quot;voting history for low rep users&quot; feature will be implemented? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="103785" OwnerDisplayName="Alexander Li" LastEditorUserId="72321" LastEditDate="2017-05-09T16:50:39.857" LastActivityDate="2017-05-10T03:12:42.543" Title="Feature request for tracking votes for low rep users" Tags="|feature-request|votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4798" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4799" CreationDate="2017-05-08T15:09:41.150" Score="27" ViewCount="801" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I spend a lot of time to write an answer, and such posts become valuable to me. However, I am afraid that StackExchange may be down for some reason (although this is very unlikely) in the future (e.g., out of business, company acquisition, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I &quot;export&quot; some of my notes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, how can I do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113777" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-05-08T19:11:41.123" LastActivityDate="2018-07-29T03:32:51.403" Title="Is it safe to use Cross Validated as a note keeping software?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4798" CreationDate="2017-05-08T16:45:27.077" Score="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that metaoptimize disappeared overnight without any warning, and that - in my opinion - Stack Exchange doesn't care much about the perennity of user content, that's a fair question. We should all be worried about such an eventuality, and be prepared for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange provides &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/306316/178179&quot;&gt;back-ups&lt;/a&gt;, which are made infrequently, typically once every few months. These backups do not include images, which is a huge limitation. It would be nice if there were some initiative to create a dump of all images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you just care about your questions and answers, you can run this query:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/209317/178179&quot;&gt;What is the easiest way for me to download all my questions+answers across all Stack Exchange sites?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is very disappointing that Stack Exchange doesn't provide an easy way for users to export the entirety of their content. (but it's still better than Quora or Reddit, which don't even provide a dump)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FYI:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/279154/178179&quot;&gt;How can I download all images I have uploaded to Stack Exchange?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/267415/178179&quot;&gt;Why has the closed beta site &quot;Big Data&quot; no dump available?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/q/42188/903&quot;&gt;API or library to obtain a mirror of a link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/q/40045/903&quot;&gt;Google Chrome extension to archive a web page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/306316/178179&quot;&gt;Hosting all Stack Exchange data dumps on archive.org&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastEditorUserId="12359" LastEditDate="2018-07-29T03:32:51.403" LastActivityDate="2018-07-29T03:32:51.403" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10" CreationDate="2017-05-08T17:33:42.840" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;One advantage is that Stack Exchange is online, whereas metaoptimize is off-line (disappeared overnight without any warning).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T17:33:42.840" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4801" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4807" CreationDate="2017-05-09T16:15:59.440" Score="7" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the current Wiki of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lars&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lars&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lars&lt;/a&gt; tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;LARS is an extension of the LASSO, which constrains regression coefficients to no more than a possible absolute sum. The LARS algorithm can be understood as recalculating the regression model step by step while slowly relaxing the LASSO constraint. The result of this is analogous to a forward stepwise selection algorithm, but is valid, whereas forward stepwise selection is not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a minor quibble and a major issue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Recalculating&quot; the regression model -- is the verb appropriate here, or should we say &quot;reestimate&quot; or similar? (I don't know, but it looks suspicious.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The result of this is analogous to a forward stepwise selection algorithm, but is valid, whereas forward stepwise selection is not.&quot; How is that? In what sense is it analogous? In what sense is it valid? The statement seems to broad to be informative or useful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope someone who knows more about LARS will edit the Wiki accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-05-09T19:57:29.373" LastActivityDate="2017-05-11T13:01:25.377" Title="Wiki of the LARS tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4797" CreationDate="2017-05-10T03:12:42.543" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Low rep users can &quot;favorite&quot; questions in order to keep track of questions that they found useful. Favorite questions are listed separately from votes in the profile history and do not require reputation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers to a specific question cannot be marked as favorite, so revisiting an old question may take a minimal bit of effort to find the desired answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the &quot;favorite&quot; feature covers the desired use case (allow low rep users to keep track of useful questions and information), though not the exact technical request (track votes for low rep users), I'd guess the probability of implementing this feature request to be pretty low. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="103785" LastActivityDate="2017-05-10T03:12:42.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4798" CreationDate="2017-05-11T10:59:31.020" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use software or a browser extension to save your posts as &lt;strong&gt;.mht&lt;/strong&gt; files, while you are looking at a post in the browser. These files can then be viewed off-line by any program that can open them, keeping all the website formatting. Due to this they are a bit heavy, something like a few MB each.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, in my experience you can copy-paste from an &lt;strong&gt;.mht&lt;/strong&gt; file to, say, a word document, and the formatting of the mathematical notation will be preserved (but I think it won't be recognized as math symbols to be further worked with an equation editor). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28746" LastActivityDate="2017-05-11T10:59:31.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4804" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4805" CreationDate="2017-05-11T11:36:03.487" Score="4" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm coming from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/278930/1352&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, where the OP asks about how to simulate data following a certain pattern, for teaching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a closure reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about obtaining specific datasets are off-topic on Cross Validated. You are welcome to post this question to the Open Data site instead, thank you! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: should questions asking for how to &lt;em&gt;simulate&lt;/em&gt; data be on-topic? I'd say yes, so the closure reason above should not apply here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please vote for one of the two alternatives below. (Or post yet a third.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-05-13T20:30:31.563" LastActivityDate="2017-05-13T20:30:31.563" Title="Are questions on how to simulate data on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4804" CreationDate="2017-05-11T11:38:33.243" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions on how to simulate data should be on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2017-05-11T11:38:33.243" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4804" CreationDate="2017-05-11T11:39:39.753" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions on how to simulate data should be off-topic. The current closure reason redirecting to OpenData.SE should be used in such cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If this is chosen, then we might want to edit this closure reason.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2017-05-11T11:39:39.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4801" CreationDate="2017-05-11T13:01:25.377" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I edited the wiki for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lars&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lars&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lars&lt;/a&gt;.  It now reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least-angle_regression&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LARS&lt;/a&gt; is an extension of the LASSO, which constrains regression coefficients to no more than a possible absolute sum. The LARS algorithm can be understood as reestimating the regression model step by step while slowly relaxing the LASSO constraint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result of this is analogous to a forward selection selection algorithm in that the first variable included would be the one most strongly associated with the response, and as the constraint is relaxed, additional variables would be included in descending order of their strength of association.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I switched &amp;quot;reestimating&amp;quot; for &amp;quot;recalculating&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I added a link to the Wikipedia page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I added a paragraph break.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I changed &amp;quot;stepwise&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;selection&amp;quot; (which is more correct), and explained the way in which they are analogous.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And, I dropped the discussion of their relative validity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2017-05-11T13:01:25.377" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4808" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-11T13:02:30.653" Score="5" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question about Neural Networks in the Signal Processing site&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/40887/neural-networks-for-rotated-character-or-shape-recognition&quot;&gt;Question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However now, checking the different sites I wonder if this is more on topic in Cross Validated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And second, What is the proper procedure here? Post the duplicate or move the question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73999" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2018-11-06T07:58:52.510" LastActivityDate="2018-11-06T07:58:52.510" Title="Duplicates? Where should I put my question?" Tags="|support|migration|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4798" CreationDate="2017-05-11T14:46:18.237" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Along the lines of @Alecos Papadopoulos's answer, it is pretty easy to save webpages to your hard drive and view them offline, or if the site disappears.  These are only a couple hundred KB.  They can be viewed in a browser just as if they were live.  Note that, if the site disappeared, the links to other CV pages, for example, would not work.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possibility, should you not have saved a page and the site disappears, is to go to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/web/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;internet archive Wayback Machine&lt;/a&gt;.  From there, you can enter the address of the page you are interested in and go to an archived version of it.  Be aware that pages are only scanned every so often, so changes made between the last scan and when the site disappeared from the internet would not be recorded.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2017-05-11T14:46:18.237" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4792" CreationDate="2017-05-11T19:05:37.693" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that we should interpret this carefully and conservatively. The quoted snippet is typical of the &quot;developer&quot; mindset, focused entirely on a narrow praxis and largely ignorant of theory. Considering the many risks of naively and improperly applied mathematical practices to the field of statistics, it seems appropriate to make sure that people aren't just learning to operate a (possibly dangerous) machine, but also to understand why it does what it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question asks about theory or theory-aware practice, I think it's on topic. If someone has no interest in the difference between &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;lies, damned lies, and statistics&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and just wants to learn to write code, then I suppose it's off to Stack Overflow with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20307" LastActivityDate="2017-05-11T19:05:37.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4742" CreationDate="2017-05-11T21:01:46.517" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Label &lt;code&gt;[laplace-smoothing]&lt;/code&gt; created. Accompanying wiki-lemma created. Label added to ~20 questions. Instances of &lt;code&gt;[add-one-smoothing]&lt;/code&gt; relabelled with &lt;code&gt;[laplace-smoothing]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11852" LastActivityDate="2017-05-11T21:01:46.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4812" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-12T07:11:04.980" Score="4" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;Expecially when reviewing First Posts or answers which are flagged as Low Quality because they are too short, I need to rewrite more or less exactly the same comment &lt;em&gt;every time&lt;/em&gt;. Hi, welcome, read the Tour, etc. Is there a way to save template comments/answers on Cross Validated? I could of course put all of them in a text file, but if I have it on my laptop, I won't be able to use it when out of home. I can put the file on the cloud, but I think such a feature would be a nice addition here...at least, I find template emails a fantastic help in Gmail, and maybe someone else would feel the same about templates here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS just got a new position in Data Science, also thanks to all the things I learned while asking &amp;amp; answering here! I know this is not the right place to say it, but I wanted to let the Community know :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-05-12T17:53:58.433" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T17:53:58.433" Title="Create template comments/answers" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|comment|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2017-05-12T19:56:16.277" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4813" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4814" CreationDate="2017-05-12T14:51:17.573" Score="6" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;As per object. I tried to search among the questions on Meta, but I couldn't find anything (maybe it's also because of limitations  in the mobile site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-05-12T18:54:17.853" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T18:54:17.853" Title="How to search among my favorite questions" Tags="|support|search|bookmarks|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4813" CreationDate="2017-05-12T16:20:44.477" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you go to any search field on a Stack Exchange site, you would type &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;terms&amp;gt; infavorites:mine&lt;/code&gt; (or more generally, &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;terms&amp;gt; infavorites:&amp;lt;user number&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; for someone else's favorites).  For more on advanced options for searching SE sites, see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;help page on searching&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example searching for threads about the LASSO in your favorites:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=lasso+infavorites%3Auser58675&quot;&gt;lasso infavorites:user58675&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T16:20:44.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4815" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4816" CreationDate="2017-05-14T15:51:35.217" Score="4" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been trying to find statistics about how many people the average person interacts with in a single day. I'm doing this as part of my research on the spread of infectious diseases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, I wanted to ask &quot;&lt;em&gt;What percentage of the total population does the average person interact with in a single day?&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, but I wasn't sure if this was the right place to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it on-topic to ask questions about finding a statistic?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="161307" LastActivityDate="2017-05-14T16:09:45.340" Title="Would questions about finding a statistic be on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4815" CreationDate="2017-05-14T16:09:45.340" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe this would be regarded by many of our users as a question about &quot;obtaining a particular data set&quot;, about which our &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about obtaining particular datasets are off-topic (they are too specialized). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2017-05-14T16:09:45.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4817" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4818" CreationDate="2017-05-14T18:06:46.417" Score="4" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Note this previous, related discussion: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1369/7290&quot;&gt;Redundant tags: mixed effects and related models&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hierarchical&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hierarchical&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hierarchical&lt;/a&gt; tag is very ambiguous.  Unfortunately, this hasn't been addressed before and it now has 142 questions.  An excerpt was just suggested:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about hierarchical models, also called multi-level models.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it isn't at all clear that that's what the threads grouped under this tag are about.  (It isn't clear they are consistently about anything.)  For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bhierarchical%5D%20clustering%20is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;at least 33 are about clustering&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering what we should do about this.  It really seems to be a mess.  Some options might be: retagging, making synonyms and/or merging, or deleting.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-05-15T19:41:03.740" LastActivityDate="2017-11-01T00:19:56.397" Title="What should we do about the [hierarchical] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-reorganization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4817" CreationDate="2017-05-14T18:48:14.997" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have several well-established tags that start with &quot;hierarchical&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hierarchical-bayesian&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hierarchical-bayesian&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hierarchical-bayesian&lt;/a&gt; × 278&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hierarchical-clustering&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hierarchical-clustering&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hierarchical-clustering&lt;/a&gt; × 184&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hierarchical-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hierarchical-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hierarchical-analysis&lt;/a&gt; $\to$ &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/multilevel-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;multilevel-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;multilevel-analysis&lt;/a&gt; × 783&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this situation having a generic &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hierarchical&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hierarchical&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hierarchical&lt;/a&gt; tag is just plain confusing; everybody is supposed to be picking one of the more specific tags instead of using the obviously ambiguous generic one. So we should eliminate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would probably require going through all 142 questions and retagging as appropriate. As always, we can manually retag only questions that are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; about multilevel-analysis (based on the numbers above, this seems to be the most common usage). After this is done, the rest can be moved to &lt;code&gt;multilevel-analysis&lt;/code&gt; via mod action (to save some time &amp;amp; to minimize flooding the front page).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update (Nov 1, 2017): This has been finished, and the tag is gone.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-11-01T00:19:56.397" LastActivityDate="2017-11-01T00:19:56.397" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4819" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5238" CreationDate="2017-05-16T12:38:30.460" Score="6" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;Around a month ago, @gung suggested to make &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nominal&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nominal&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nominal&lt;/a&gt;×113 a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/categorical-data&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;categorical-data&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;categorical-data&lt;/a&gt;×1987 because they are &quot;literally synonyms&quot;. This has  initially gotten some support, until @ttnphns objected on the grounds that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ordinal-data&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ordinal-data&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ordinal-data&lt;/a&gt;×531 is also &quot;categorical&quot;: nominal and ordinal, he says, are two sub-types of categorical data, and therefore we should leave all three tags separate. The whole discussion is here in the comments: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4717/28666&quot;&gt;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4717/28666&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I feel that we need to arrive to some decision here.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Option #1 (@gung): map &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nominal&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nominal&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nominal&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/categorical-data&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;categorical-data&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;categorical-data&lt;/a&gt;. To be consistent, this would require looking through &lt;code&gt;categorical-data&lt;/code&gt; threads and moving the ones about ordinal data to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ordinal-data&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ordinal-data&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ordinal-data&lt;/a&gt;. A quick search &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=%5bcategorical-data%5d%20ordinal%20is%3aquestion&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;[categorical-data] ordinal is:question&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; yields 166 Qs, and not all of them would need to be retagged, so we are probably talking about minority of questions, perhaps ~100.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Option #2 (@ttnphns): do not make any synonyms. (But I'd suggest to rename &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nominal&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nominal&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nominal&lt;/a&gt; into &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nominal-data&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nominal-data&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nominal-data&lt;/a&gt; for consistency).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In either case we will need to edit the wikis and wiki excerpts to clarify the usage. At the moment some information there is conflicting, e.g. wiki for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/categorical-data&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;categorical-data&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;categorical-data&lt;/a&gt; says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;categorical values are considered as abstract entities without any mathematical structure such as an order or a topology [written by @whuber in 2012]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but its wiki excerpt says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some people consider ordinal scale categorical too [written by @ttnphns in 2013]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2018-04-20T15:43:47.083" Title="Our tags for nominal, ordinal, and categorical data" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4820" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-17T12:17:05.977" Score="12" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed several times that some questions are flagged by some as &quot;duplicate&quot; questions when the questions appear very different but have similar answers.  The questions are asking about very similar problems, but in such different language or in such a different context that few (if any) would think to search for one answer in the other question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure what to do about this, in terms of making the site as useful as possible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2017-05-17T12:56:33.077" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T16:32:40.303" Title="What to do about very different questions with very similar answers?" Tags="|discussion|questions|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4820" CreationDate="2017-05-17T12:55:58.123" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A posted question is a portal to information:&lt;/strong&gt; the words and phrases it contains; the tags applied to it; the contents of any answers; and even its net votes and status (CW, etc.) are &lt;em&gt;searchable.&lt;/em&gt;  Remember, a duplicate question doesn't disappear: it remains visible and serves as a way for people to find the information they seek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The network of pointers to duplicates enhances this &quot;syntactic&quot; web.&lt;/strong&gt;  By connecting apparently different questions to common answers we provide indications to the site, as well as to future users, about sometimes deep and surprising connections.  This is the beginning of a &lt;em&gt;semantic&lt;/em&gt; web.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only people--and experienced people, working creatively towards a common goal--can create these semantics.  These connections are things we should value, work to create, and curate carefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These considerations suggest to me that &lt;strong&gt;we should be spending more time identifying duplicates and building up this valuable information.  Creating a single pointer to a thread with a good existing answer is &lt;em&gt;far better&lt;/em&gt; than providing a new answer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is unfortunate that the SE system provides no rewards for this behavior (there are no badges or points for identifying duplicates, alas).  I therefore want to thank Peter Flom for raising this issue and especially to thank all those unrecognized members of our community who have been cleaning up the tags, identifying duplicates, editing posts, and doing the hard work of building the connections that make this site ever more valuable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T12:55:58.123" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4820" CreationDate="2017-05-17T16:32:40.303" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where the newer post has a more canonical question (one people would search for), and the answers on the older question will work well as answers for new one, it may sometimes be better to merge into the newer post, which will move the answers across.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases the best strategy may be to post a new more canonical version of the question (which has the advantage that you can tailor the question a little toward the more specific questions that already exist) and merge &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; existing questions into the new one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T16:32:40.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3011" CreationDate="2017-05-18T09:44:06.683" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was convinced by the discussion in the comments above that it is better not to do anything about these tags. It seems to be one of the cases of largely overlapping but nevertheless meaningfully distinct tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am posting this answer to close the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T09:44:06.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4824" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4831" CreationDate="2017-05-18T11:47:28.167" Score="4" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find the Wiki &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; its excerpt of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/prediction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;prediction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;prediction&lt;/a&gt; tag in need of improvement. I could have tried to edit it myself, but I thought I better share it here and perhaps attract contributions from some more knowledgeable user(s) .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The excerpt reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Prediction is concerned with assessing the probability of unknown values from known values and inferred relationships. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, this is too narrow (probabilities are not always used) and too vague (distinction from &lt;strong&gt;estimation&lt;/strong&gt; not clear enough; relation to &lt;strong&gt;forecasting&lt;/strong&gt; not mentioned). See more in the comments in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3077/&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the Wiki text extensively uses examples of &lt;strong&gt;forecasting&lt;/strong&gt; without noting that there is a separate &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/forecasting&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;forecasting&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;forecasting&lt;/a&gt; tag that is actually more popular than the prediction tag. E.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Prediction involving statistical models is used in many real-world situations as for instance in &lt;strong&gt;forecasting electricity demand stock prices, election or sports outcomes&lt;/strong&gt;, clinical trials, computer science, meteorology and more. Prediction isn't only about the future. Predictions can be made for unknown concurrent or past values on the basis of relevant information that is known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of prediction models are again forecasting models:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Examples of well known prediction models are &lt;strong&gt;vector autoregressive models or autoregressive moving averages&lt;/strong&gt;, but many statistical models (such as simple linear regression) can be used for predictions as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If forecasting is a subset of prediction, then the examples are fine, but they should be introduced appropriately (i.e. first tell that a prominent subset of prediction is forecasting, and only then list the examples).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further we have some formatting issues and a citation that focuses mostly on estimation (rather than prediction) where we estimate &lt;strong&gt;known&lt;/strong&gt; (???) parameters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Uncertainty in data, processes or parameters means that there will be uncertainty in conclusions. Statisticians call this drawing of conclusions in the presence of uncertainty, statistical inference (or just inference); in this book, inferences will be either estimation of fixed but &lt;strong&gt;known&lt;/strong&gt; parameters, or prediction of unknown random quantities. (Notice that &quot;forecasting,&quot; namely concluding something about the future, is a special case of &quot;prediction.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of the latter paragraph I think we should make a clearer distinction between prediction, forecasting (and potentially estimation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, the same problematic citation appears in the Wiki of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/forecasting&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;forecasting&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;forecasting&lt;/a&gt;. That one should also be fixed...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastEditorUserId="53690" LastEditDate="2017-05-18T11:56:56.047" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T12:17:13.503" Title="Wiki of the [prediction] tag" Tags="|discussion|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4825" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4830" CreationDate="2017-05-18T12:24:58.473" Score="11" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see we have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/csv-file&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;csv-file&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;csv-file&lt;/a&gt; tag with nine questions mostly quite old and at a brief reading either off-topic as about software operation or not really about the file type. We do not seem to have any other tag for file types. If this is up-voted I will get rid of the tags and vote to close any which seem to me off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-05-18T15:37:28.850" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T11:30:41.997" Title="Do we need a tag [csv-file]?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-deletion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4826" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4853" CreationDate="2017-05-18T12:34:46.197" Score="5" ViewCount="420" Body="&lt;p&gt;The community often brings old questions back up to the front page to allow for a fresh review by the membership of these questions.  Recently on Cross Validation I have seen members suggest that an old question is a duplicate of a more recent question.  If the two questions, call them A and B, are truly duplicates how can the older question A be called a duplicate of B?  If anything B is a duplicate of A.  I think this happens because the user is familiar B and is seeing A for the first time.  So he calls A a duplicate of B without noticing the dates of the origination of the question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that there have been many discussions here about duplicates but I don't think this issue has come up and I would be interested to here what other members think. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T15:46:01.460" Title="If question A came before question B how can A be a duplicate of B?" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4827" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-18T21:36:20.633" Score="10" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some topics that are now considered off-topic used to be tolerated in the early days of this site. Consequently, there exist old threads with lots of votes/views/answers that are off-topic under current standards. Our practice is to close such threads because keeping them open can send a wrong signal about what is currently on-topic. As @whuber wrote,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[this] has helped us respond to users who complain (sometimes very aggressively) that their off-topic questions should be left open because they are just like such-and-such a question from years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There are two ways to close such old posts.&lt;/strong&gt; One way is to close them as off-topic as usual. Another way is to &quot;lock&quot; them for &quot;historical significance&quot;. Apparently, locking is preferred to closing -- see @whuber's and @Glen_b's comments under &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4791/28666&quot;&gt;Should we close old, outdated and off-topic questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know understand why this is the preferred way. I can see a number of disadvantages of locking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It can only be done via flagging, i.e. community cannot take care of locking without mods.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Similarly, it can only be undone via flagging, i.e. community cannot reverse a wrong decision without mods.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When a thread is locked, it's not possible to edit any answers, post new comments, or even vote on them. I.e. if there is a mistake in one of the answers, it's there forever, and one cannot even comment to point it out. Note that sometimes we are talking about very visible threads with large number of views.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The displayed message says that the thread is locked &quot;for historical significance&quot;, but often there is no particular significance.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I see at least four disadvantages (#3 being pretty severe in my opinion), and not a single advantage. What am I missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2017-09-06T17:54:46.990" Title="When dealing with old off-topic questions, should we close or lock them, and why?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|closing-questions|policy|old-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4828" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4829" CreationDate="2017-05-19T15:34:29.467" Score="8" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;When creating or updating / improving a tag wiki excerpt, should a link (e.g., to Wikipedia) be appended to the end?  Note that I am not referring to the full wiki for a tag, I am only asking about the excerpt.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2017-05-19T15:40:39.157" LastActivityDate="2017-05-19T16:39:57.297" Title="Should links be added to tag wiki excerpts?" Tags="|discussion|tag-excerpt|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4828" CreationDate="2017-05-19T15:38:29.050" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that links are best not included in &lt;em&gt;excerpts&lt;/em&gt; (of course, they do make sense in a full wiki).  I think they should not be included for the following reasons:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Links don't work in excerpts.  For example, you cannot click on them to navigate to the indicated page.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are hard to read.  It would be cleaner to put, 'See the corresponding Wikipedia page' than (say) &lt;code&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution&lt;/code&gt;.  (I'm not necessarily arguing we &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; put 'See the corresponding Wikipedia page', only that it's easier to read.)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Our general policy for excerpts is to keep them as short as possible while still covering what needs to be covered (see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2848/7290&quot;&gt;What is the optimal length &amp;amp; level of detail of tag wiki excerpts?&lt;/a&gt;).  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2017-05-19T16:39:57.297" LastActivityDate="2017-05-19T16:39:57.297" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4825" CreationDate="2017-05-22T11:30:41.997" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag has now been emptied so this thread can be closed. I will accept my own answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T11:30:41.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4824" CreationDate="2017-05-22T12:17:13.503" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the definitions quoted in @Sycorax'es answer here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3078&quot;&gt;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3078&lt;/a&gt;. Can we adapt them for wiki excerpts? E.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;prediction&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;Prediction of unknown random quantities, using a statistical model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;forecasting&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;Prediction of the future events. It is a special case of [prediction], in the context of [time-series].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the wikis, I think after @gung fixed the typo, the [forecasting] wiki is fine, and in the [prediction] wiki we could simply delete the first three paragraphs (the quote IMHO provides enough context). Would this resolve the issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T12:17:13.503" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4391" CreationDate="2017-05-24T13:43:53.413" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question did not provoke much interest but I am still deeply annoyed by the current situation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Here is what seems to me would be a better arrangement:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/random-eff-econometrics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;random-eff-econometrics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;random-eff-econometrics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;For questions about &quot;random effects model&quot; in econometrics. This means a model with random intercepts which is estimated with FGLS.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fixed-eff-econometrics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fixed-eff-econometrics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fixed-eff-econometrics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;For questions about &quot;fixed effects model&quot; in econometrics. This actually means a simple linear model, but usually it is of a particular form and is estimated in a particular way.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/random-eff-in-mixed-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;random-eff-in-mixed-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;random-eff-in-mixed-model&lt;/a&gt;$\to$&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixed-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixed-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixed-model&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fixed-eff-in-mixed-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fixed-eff-in-mixed-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fixed-eff-in-mixed-model&lt;/a&gt;$\to$&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixed-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixed-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixed-model&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;For questions about random effects and fixed effects in mixed models. We don't need separate tags for that, so these should be synonyms of the existing &lt;code&gt;[mixed-model]&lt;/code&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this arrangement, anybody typing &quot;random-e...&quot; in the tag field will get two suggestions and will be able to choose an appropriate one. The current tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/random-effects-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;random-effects-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;random-effects-model&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fixed-effects-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fixed-effects-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fixed-effects-model&lt;/a&gt; should be sorted out and eliminated. I don't see any disadvantage of my suggested arrangement, but I see multiple advantages (e.g. all questions about mixed models will be under [mixed-model] instead of being divided between [mixed-model] and [random-effects-model]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@StasK &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1371/28666&quot;&gt;wrote back in 2012&lt;/a&gt; that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;May be there should be &lt;code&gt;random-effects-model-econometrics&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;fixed-effects-model-econometrics&lt;/code&gt; subtags&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is in line with what what I am suggesting here. The tag names have to be shorter though, due to the 25 chars limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This would require a substantial retagging effort but I would volunteer to do it.&lt;/strong&gt; I looked the last 50 questions in both tags, and here is how they are split between topics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                             econ      MM      both     neither      sum&#xA; fixed-effects-model:         37       8       -        5            50&#xA; random-effects-model:        15       35      -        -            50&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on that, I would take the mixed-model Qs out of fixed-effects-model, and the econometrics Qs out of random-effects model, and then we could do tag renames for the rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 1001 threads tagged with either of these tags. The fraction to be manually retagged is ~15/50. So it's 1000*15/50 = 300 threads. With 10/day it will take 1 month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2017-05-24T13:43:53.413" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4834" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4835" CreationDate="2017-05-25T14:34:03.210" Score="2" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question about combining equally-likely observed PDFs: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/281569/83526&quot;&gt;Combine three equally likely observed PDFs&lt;/a&gt;. I'm not sure how to combine them. I showed my best attempt so far. What more can I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Replying to the comment by @Glen_b over there: I do interpret densities to be the same as probabilities. I did explain how they arise—I spend individual observation sessions creating probability density functions of what I think the likelihood of $x$ being different values is and I consider each of these probability density observations to be equally likely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83526" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-05-25T19:02:40.990" LastActivityDate="2017-05-25T22:09:12.890" Title="Why was my question on combining probability distributions put on hold?" Tags="|support|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4834" CreationDate="2017-05-25T21:15:57.100" Score="7" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The general issue&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;strong&gt;Why questions that aren't really clear should be on hold&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that are not clear are supposed to be put on hold so that they can be made clear before people start posting answers that misunderstand the question, causing problems for the asker as well as later readers (who are the actual target of a good answer under the Stack Exchange model). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your feelings about how clear the question may be are not particularly relevant (except in so far as that makes it hard for you to see what to do). The central issue is how clear the average semi-knowledgeable reader is likely to find it. In the first place potential answerers need to clearly understand the question, but that alone isn't enough: by &lt;em&gt;semi-knowledgeable readers&lt;/em&gt; I mean people who could read and benefit from an answer -- which is a much lower degree of understanding of statistics than required to make a good answer. If I (as a regular answerer with a reasonable level of understanding) find your question unclear -- and I don't seem to be alone, so it isn't just some odd quirk on my part -- the question would fall short of being clear enough.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Specifics&lt;/strong&gt; of what is unclear: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I explained issues with the post in an extended comment under the post, but I think the main issues were:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the conflation of density with probability made it difficult to see what objects you were actually manipulating; it almost seems as if you were flipping between a set of probabilities and a density (specifying probabilities at values and then somehow making a density from that?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the process by which you obtained and possibly manipulated these quantities was not sufficiently clear, making it hard to see how a model for that process might be constructed. Your comments here to gung indicate to me that this and the previous issue are still not clear enough. If you're taking information and then smoothing it before combining, why is that the best approach -- why not combine the original information instead ... and then smooth the result? If we don't know enough to answer that, we don't have a clear question. Is the quantity you're specifying probability for really discrete? If it is, don't make it into a density. If it's not discrete, what do the probabilities represent (what are they probabilities &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt;?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the part about convolution I initially found confusing because I couldn't see how it had anything to do with the problem -- if the previous issues had been clearer I think I'd have understood this earlier: I believe that's simply a misunderstanding that is best addressed in an answer. In effect it looks like you decided to try to solve a problem a particular way and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-problem&quot;&gt;asked about the problems you encountered with your attempted solution&lt;/a&gt; instead of asking how to solve your original problem. If I understand the situation correctly your solution is mistaken but we can address that as long as we have correctly understood what you have and what you want to get. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As a result I think the question would be much clearer if you removed almost all your information about your solution (apart from saying that using convolution was how you were thinking of solving it).  I previously explained that I think all or almost almost all your code should be removed. Many of your plots (those about manipulating the convolution) add nothing to understanding your problem and I think they should be removed as well.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is definitely better than it was but some of my issues are not fully resolved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In spite of these remaining misgivings I reopened on amoeba's request. If amoeba thinks it's answerable now I don't want to get in the way of that answer. I'd like it to made be clearer but an answer may indeed help clarify the question. However if an answer leaves the question as unclear as I still find it, I'll likely close it again -- I think there's a danger that not only might you end up with an answer that doesn't address the actual problem you have but one that may in turn confuse later readers with similar-sounding problems. Closure would at least flag that it needs to be treated with caution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I suspect the nub of an answer may be as simple as &quot;Convolution is the wrong thing to do, you need to average the densities&quot; (or probability functions or whatever these objects are), but even if that's right, details of the best way to do that would depend on information that I'm not sure is there yet.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-05-25T22:09:12.890" LastActivityDate="2017-05-25T22:09:12.890" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1849" CreationDate="2017-05-25T21:35:10.760" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really think this tag needs to be edited. Dispersion, underdispersion, and overdispersion should be synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dispersion parameter $\phi$ was coined by Wedderburn in 79 in his paper on quasilikelihood and this has been a term that has continued to be used in the majority of literature and software. It refers specifically to parametric estimation and certain classes of models. Overdispersion is simply $\phi &amp;gt; 1$ and conversely for underdispersion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A separate tag called &quot;spread&quot; could be created for robust analogues of &quot;variance&quot; including median absolute deviation, or trimmed mean squared error, or the like. These should not be conflated. Despite that, I concede the current wikipedia page on &quot;statistical dispersion&quot; mostly addresses what I am calling &quot;spread&quot; here. Yet, it does not cite the Wedderburn paper, nor any relevant literature on dispersion, and the cited literature mostly refers to &quot;spread&quot; rather than &quot;dispersion&quot; for the concept of robust/alternative measures of variance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that questions addressing the epidemiologic concept should simply be tagged &quot;epidemiology&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastActivityDate="2017-05-25T21:35:10.760" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2935" CreationDate="2017-05-28T23:00:08.350" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/254124/why-does-logistic-regression-become-unstable-when-classes-are-well-separated/254205#254205&quot;&gt;kjetil b halvorsen answer&lt;/a&gt; on &quot;&lt;em&gt;Why does logistic regression become unstable when classes are well-separated?&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is very well-thought and addresses a common misconception/issue regarding logistic regression applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Bounty awarded 30th May 2017]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11852" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-06-06T11:33:02.963" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T11:33:02.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4839" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4841" CreationDate="2017-05-31T03:53:15.517" Score="7" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why are the hats in $\hat \beta$ off centered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76981" LastActivityDate="2017-08-08T15:25:35.637" Title="What's wrong with hats, i.e. $\hat \beta$?" Tags="|bug|math-display|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4839" CreationDate="2017-05-31T04:59:11.693" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looks okay to me...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nu97q.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nu97q.png&quot; alt=&quot;image of beta-hats in Q&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;maybe the MathJax rendering doesn't finish loading on your machine for some reason. Mine show as off-center for a brief moment before they look like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T04:59:11.693" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4839" CreationDate="2017-05-31T16:05:55.273" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As pointed by Peter and amoeba, there is an issue with Safari 10.1. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question has come up on other stackexchange sites, see&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/3207/mathjax-accents-in-safari-10-1#3207&quot;&gt;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/3207/mathjax-accents-in-safari-10-1#3207&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9780/mathjax-shifted-frames&quot;&gt;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9780/mathjax-shifted-frames&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update by @amoeba, Aug 8: This seems to be resolved, both github issues mentioned above appear to be resolved and are closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax/issues/1709&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax/issues/1709&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax/issues/1737&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax/issues/1737&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76981" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-08-08T15:25:35.637" LastActivityDate="2017-08-08T15:25:35.637" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4846" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4854" CreationDate="2017-06-08T15:48:13.587" Score="14" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions can be closed as off topic because they are not about statistics or &lt;em&gt;focus&lt;/em&gt; on programming. This is distinct from questions which are &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; programming and belong on StackOverflow. There is still the option to migrate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do we distinguish a question which  &lt;em&gt;focuses&lt;/em&gt; on programming versus a question which is &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; programming?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/284282/r-avoid-loops-using-builtin-functions&quot;&gt;R: avoid loops using builtin functions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-06-21T11:04:16.727" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T11:44:25.340" Title="When should programming questions be closed as off-topic, and when migrated to SO?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|migration|stackoverflow|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4847" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4849" CreationDate="2017-06-11T11:56:49.000" Score="5" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/regularity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;regularity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;regularity&lt;/a&gt;  with three uses, apparently with very different meanings, and no tag wiki/excerpt. What should we do about it? My inclination is to drop it completely. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-06-11T20:34:48.680" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T13:54:22.200" Title="Tag [regularity]: what is it for, is it needed?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-deletion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4847" CreationDate="2017-06-12T10:24:28.763" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;With only three questions with the tag, if we don't know what it's for, and it's not much used, there's no reason to keep it. Unless there's some argument otherwise I'm inclined to remove it from those three questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T10:24:28.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4847" CreationDate="2017-06-12T10:25:59.320" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seems to be agreement that such a tag without a tag wiki and used only thrice, without consistency, should be removed.  And that maybe that could have been done without raising the issue on meta. @amoeba wrote in comments that &quot; To be honest, when I come across a tag with only few uses that lacks a wiki excerpt and a clear scope, I just silently remove it myself without raising the issue on Meta. It does not happen very often, but I did a couple of times.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I just removed the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="11887" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T13:54:22.200" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T13:54:22.200" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4851" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4852" CreationDate="2017-06-14T08:09:46.307" Score="6" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I find (the old) excerpt/Wiki of a tag that is now a synonym of another tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. the excerpt and Wiki of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/arima&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;arima&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;arima&lt;/a&gt; tag builds on ARMA (does not discuss what ARMA is). But since &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/arma&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;arma&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;arma&lt;/a&gt; has been made a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/arima&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;arima&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;arima&lt;/a&gt;, the excerpt and Wiki of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/arima&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;arima&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;arima&lt;/a&gt; now would need an update to explain what ARMA is. I wanted to borrow these from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/arma&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;arma&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;arma&lt;/a&gt; tag, but I do not know how to access its (old) excerpt and Wiki now that the tag no longer exists independently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2017-06-14T15:00:14.790" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T15:00:14.790" Title="Can I find excerpt/Wiki of a tag that is now a synonym of another tag?" Tags="|support|tags|tag-synonyms|tag-excerpt|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4851" CreationDate="2017-06-14T09:58:00.467" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's tricky but doable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Go to &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;http://stats.stackexchange.com/tags&lt;/a&gt; and type &quot;arma&quot;. You will see the original &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/arma&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;arma&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;arma&lt;/a&gt; tag with its own question count and excerpt (this is because it was never &lt;em&gt;merged&lt;/em&gt; into &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/arima&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;arima&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;arima&lt;/a&gt;). There is an &quot;edit&quot; link there too, leading to &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/edit-tag-wiki/830&quot;&gt;http://stats.stackexchange.com/edit-tag-wiki/830&lt;/a&gt; -- and this gets you where you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T09:58:00.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4826" CreationDate="2017-06-17T15:46:01.460" Score="13" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Why can questions be closed as duplicates of older questions?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As others have mentioned in the comments, duplicates are not there to chastise users by yelling &amp;quot;someone else has already posted this!&amp;quot; They exist to direct users to where the information already exists on the site, which is why we discourage &lt;em&gt;deleting&lt;/em&gt; duplicates which provide alternate routes to that information by leaving them as sign posts. Now, if you're going to use duplicates to direct users elsewhere, you want to make sure they are ending up at the &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; information, not just the &lt;em&gt;earliest&lt;/em&gt; information, which is why we allow closing questions as duplicates of newer questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;So what about the case where the asking dates were just overlooked?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, we can't possibly know whether or not that happened, so it frankly isn't worth considering. The dates the questions were asked just really do not matter at all. The only question you should be asking yourself is: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Which question would I rather end up on if I was looking for this information on Google?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; Whichever one answers that for you is probably the one that should be the target. If that decision involves reversing the direction of the duplicate, you might bring it up on Meta so the community can evaluate whether or not the direction should be reversed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What if both questions contain great information?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evaluate whether or not the answers of both would make sense on one question. If the answers could easily be migrated either way with minimal effort, flag for moderator attention requesting they be merged to preserve the information of both questions. Merges &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; go in the direction of the oldest question, but only for the sake of sanity (keeping the answer dates &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the ask date - answer dates that occurred before the question was asked look weird). But that's also not always the case. Sometimes it makes sense to merge into the newer question. For example, if the newer one has 100,000 views versus the older's 100 it is obvious that the newer one is much more searchable and a better landing page for visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T15:46:01.460" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4846" CreationDate="2017-06-21T11:02:28.173" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a (lightly edited) composition of the comments left above by @Scortchi, @whuber, @Glen_b, and Roland (I am marking this answer as CW). I believe they fully answer this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no practical distinction between &amp;quot;focus on&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;about&amp;quot;. Migration occurs when the question is likely to be considered on topic at the destination site. Closure occurs otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice we often close questions just because they're not good enough to migrate to SO. Many such lack a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve&quot;&gt;minimal, complete, verifiable example&lt;/a&gt;. Not every programming-related question is on topic at StackOverflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the least be sure you're familiar with the requirements of their help/on-topic before trying to migrate there. If you don't feel qualified to judge if the question is of sufficient quality for the migration destination, then don't vote for migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T11:44:25.340" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-06-21T11:02:28.173" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4669" CreationDate="2017-07-01T22:56:34.607" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update (26 Oct 2017): Master tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/categorical-encoding&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;categorical-encoding&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;categorical-encoding&lt;/a&gt; has been created, and has the following three synonyms: &lt;code&gt;[dummy-variables]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[indicator-variables]&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;[one-hot]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I claim that we do need one special tag for (various types) of categorical data encoding/representation in analyses (types are: dummy or one-hot coding, deviation or effect coding, Helmert, repeated, etc. etc.). One omnibus tag for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This suggestion sounds sensible to me.&lt;/strong&gt; It got several upvotes (your question + some of the comments) and nobody has objected in the discussion above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be good to choose a name that includes &amp;quot;categorical&amp;quot; in it. But &lt;code&gt;[categ-data-encoding]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[categ-coding-scheme]&lt;/code&gt; sound too clumsy. Perhaps &lt;code&gt;[categorical-coding]&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from that, I am not a big fan of narrow tags, and I don't like subset tags. So I would be against maintaining further tags that are subsets of this main categorical-coding tag. Therefore:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dummy-variables&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dummy-variables&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dummy-variables&lt;/a&gt; should be uncoupled from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/categorical-data&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;categorical-data&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;categorical-data&lt;/a&gt; (I agree with you here), but then made a synonym of our new categorical-coding tag. I don't think we should have it as a separate tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/indicator-variables&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;indicator-variables&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indicator-variables&lt;/a&gt; (37, no excerpt) should be made synonym of the new categorical-coding tag too. [Note:  many questions currently having this tag are about &lt;em&gt;indicator function&lt;/em&gt; and are not at all related to encoding categorical variables for statistical analysis. Those have to be dealt with.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/indicator-function&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;indicator-function&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indicator-function&lt;/a&gt; was created for questions about indicator function. Along the way, &lt;code&gt;[indicator-variables]&lt;/code&gt; has been emptied, so if we want to make it a synonym of categorical-encoding, it has to be re-created first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We could create &lt;code&gt;[contrast-variables]&lt;/code&gt; as another synonym of the same categorical-coding tag if we think it makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The same goes for &lt;code&gt;[one-hot]&lt;/code&gt;: we could create it as another possible synonym of the same tag, it might be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way we don't need to decide (see discussion in the comments above) on the terminological details such as whether &amp;quot;dummy variables&amp;quot; can have values other than 0 and 1. We'll have one omnibus tag for all these topics. It will be a subset of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/categorical-data&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;categorical-data&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;categorical-data&lt;/a&gt;, but perhaps you are right that the topic is important enough to warrant that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to mention it here: if we go with the above proposal, some manual retagging will be necessary to put this new &amp;quot;coding&amp;quot; tag on the most important threads about encoding categorical variables. As always, we don't need to put it &lt;em&gt;everywhere&lt;/em&gt;; it's enough to put it on the most important threads. As far as I understand, @ttnphns volunteered to take care of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T16:01:39.393" CommentCount="37" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4858" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-02T14:43:49.960" Score="0" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to admit that I don't know much about the Community Wiki concept. I thought it would denote questions that were either particularly interesting, or which by their own nature would attract a lot of useful answers/references, as opposed to a single &quot;right&quot; answer. User whuber has made my recent post&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/288423/moocs-for-python-in-data-science&quot;&gt;MOOCs for Python in Data Science&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a Community Wiki post and put it on hold. I'm a little confused here - how can the same post be eligible for closure and at the same time be &quot;worth&quot; of the Community Wiki tag? Of course I asked directly whuber, but I wonder if my confusion underlines a fundamental misunderstanding on my part of the Community Wiki attribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-07-03T04:17:38.357" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T04:17:38.357" Title="How can the same post be closed as 'opinion-based' and marked as community wiki?" Tags="|discussion|support|on-topic|closing-questions|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ClosedDate="2017-07-02T15:36:59.167" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4859" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-06T17:27:43.053" Score="3" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curious about how CV handles abusive/rude users who continue to act inappropriately on the boards despite being directed to the CV posting guidelines and warned about their inappropriate postings?  See the discussion here with the user James Draper, who has been abusing the board guidelines and posting inappropriate comments:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/288998/need-to-know-the-correct-way-to-compute-p-values-for-a-two-way-anova-across-4-gr&quot;&gt;Need to know the correct way to compute p-values for a two-way ANOVA across 4 groups with unequal sample sizes?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been attempting to help this particular user who wasn't satisfied with the fact that I initially advocated closing/moving his post to Stack Overflow given that his initial question was better suited for programming.  I've tried to be very accommodating to this user, but he continues to use flippant language and make rude comments.  Several of his posts required deletion, so it may be hard to get a feel for what was actually said originally and why I felt this user went beyond in appropriate.  Is there any system in place for board moderators to either warn users or remove them from the site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7962" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-07-13T00:30:58.007" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T12:16:13.460" Title="Handling users who act inappropriately after warnings and after being directed to posting guidelines" Tags="|discussion|comment|policy|moderation|users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4860" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4861" CreationDate="2017-07-08T23:51:57.917" Score="20" ViewCount="499" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obviously probability is discussed often on CrossValidated, as it's a solid foundation of both frequentest and Bayesian statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when someone wants to ask a question concerned with more advanced probability theory, concerning filtrations/measures/stochastic calculus etc, should it be posted on math stackexchange instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At what point is a question concerning probability abstract enough that it is more appropriate on the math stackexchange instead of crossvalidated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129126" LastEditorUserId="36041" LastEditDate="2017-07-21T15:50:27.387" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T15:50:27.387" Title="Does advanced probability theory belong on stats or math stackexchange?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4860" CreationDate="2017-07-09T02:25:55.893" Score="25" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At what point is a question concerning probability abstract enough that it is more appropriate on the math stackexchange instead of crossvalidated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's necessarily a point at which this occurs. Probability is on topic and theoretical questions are on topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it will almost certainly be on topic at either, it's a matter of judgement which you choose - there's no universally correct answer, but your aim is to get an answer you can use. Some questions will get a better answer here, some there; some will get similar answers either way.  Indeed a number of users spend time on both sites, so they may well post identical answers to what they would have posted at the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you simply pick whichever site you think will get you the best answers for what you're seeking (and if you think you picked wrong after you post, flag and ask it to be migrated). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's getting up around research-level, you might also consider whether mathoverflow might be the best place (but pay attention to the somewhat different way their posts are tagged than the other two sites).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2017-07-09T02:25:55.893" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4859" CreationDate="2017-07-13T00:28:46.353" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm curious about how CV handles abusive/rude users who continue to act inappropriately on the boards despite being directed to the CV posting guidelines and warned about their inappropriate postings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Flag &lt;strong&gt;the post&lt;/strong&gt; having such comments for moderator attention and explain the best you can about the situation. Wait the result. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible outcomes are: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;you don't have a case. Try looking at the declined flag and see if any comment was left by the moderator explaining why he/she disagrees with you.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;you have a case. If so, moderators can edit such comments, delete them, talk to the targeted user to call his/her attention (ask what happened, etc), and in extreme cases, they can consider suggesting a temporary ban to such user.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If not satisfied, one option is to flag it again and explain even better. Probably, a second moderator will double check the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As a last resource write a report to SE managers hitting the 'contact us' link at the bottom of this page (choose subject 'Other'). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However&lt;/strong&gt;, from own experience be aware chances of having a real case after the first flag is reviewed, is very low; and after the second flag, almost zero. So think twice before re flagging a post, and think three times before engaging with the 'last resource'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-07-14T12:16:13.460" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T12:16:13.460" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4864" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-14T18:45:12.180" Score="4" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;StackOverflow launched its beta-Documentation &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/tour/documentation&quot;&gt;page&lt;/a&gt; about a year or two ago. The response there seems to be very positive. I am wondering if this site would benefit from something similar and what the structure would look like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think it'd benefit many new visitors to this site to have the option of seeing a reference manual for a type of statistical tool (e.g. linear regression, logistic regression, neural nets). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think it'd be great to consolidate some of the great answers provided in some of the site's posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Edit:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify what 'documentation' may look like to serve CV visitors, I am providing an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.idre.ucla.edu/r/dae/mixed-effects-logistic-regression/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIXED EFFECTS LOGISTIC REGRESSION (UCLA)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to see what feedback is on this type of documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82338" LastEditorUserId="27774" LastEditDate="2017-09-26T23:57:46.193" LastActivityDate="2017-09-26T23:57:46.193" Title="Would CV benefit from Documentation?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|status-declined|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4865" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4866" CreationDate="2017-07-15T22:51:18.380" Score="15" ViewCount="293" Body="&lt;p&gt;Who is using the &quot;bounty&quot; system? In principle, it seems a great tool but implementation looks overly complicated (there are many rules on when and how to use bounties). So, it would be good to know whether this feature is really effective, before spending time trying to figure out how it works. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there statistics on usage and how it impacts response rates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46789" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-07-19T22:45:41.070" LastActivityDate="2017-07-19T22:49:18.403" Title="Who is using the &quot;bounty&quot; system and how effective are bounties?" Tags="|discussion|bounty|site-statistics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4865" CreationDate="2017-07-16T00:00:19.183" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I'm certainly using it&amp;mdash;I've offered a bit over 150 bounties (&gt;90% of them on other people's questions). Other users have offered a substantial number of bounties as well. I'd say it's &lt;em&gt;somewhat&lt;/em&gt; effective, but better questions are more effective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, most of my bounties have been to reward good answers rather than to draw attention. A number of users have offered many bounties on their own questions (in several cases, almost all of their earned reputation has plowed back into bounties) -- those users clearly seem to see some value in doing so, whether it's to gain more / better answers or simply to reward the people who spend time on their questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I haven't examined the figures in any detail so these are just seat-of-the-pants impressions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the draw-attention kind, my rough guess would be that I had something under a 50% hit rate (drawing at least a somewhat helpful answer), and I'd say that if the question was a bit unclear before a bounty, it will remain so after a bounty is placed; the rate could be much lower on the questions that weren't really clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There also seems to be a good deal of variation in hit rate by topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, the best thing you can do to get attention for a post is make it as clear and engaging as you can. Only after that would I suggest you consider a bounty, but with a really good question you should still be prepared for the substantial possibility of getting no response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, offering bounties does seem to increase the upvotes a question gets, sometimes to the extent that it's worth a substantial fraction of the bounty, so if the question is a good one and you bounty it yourself, sometimes a good fraction of the bounty cost is made up for. If you bounty good questions it's not necessarily very expensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can get statistics from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/queries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange data explorer for our site&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; will let you choose a site)&amp;mdash;if there's no existing query that suits your needs, you may be able to write one; there's a tutorial on writing queries for it &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/tutorial&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a few existing queries that may help you some:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/74426/how-many-of-closed-bounties-have-been-awarded&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What percentage of closed bounties are awarded?&lt;/a&gt; (NB this includes &quot;reward existing answer&quot; type bounties so it's higher than the rate for &quot;attention&quot; bounties alone.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/510996/recent-bounties&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Recent bounties and their outcomes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/7666/bounties-awarded-by-month&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Number of bounties awarded by month&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/161292/bountifulii&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Who gives bounties to what&lt;/a&gt;. (Note that &quot;Promotions&quot;&amp;mdash;misspelled in the table there&amp;mdash;are bounties placed on other people's questions; it also lists bounties on your own questions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-07-19T22:49:18.403" LastActivityDate="2017-07-19T22:49:18.403" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4865" CreationDate="2017-07-16T16:30:15.570" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new here, but a long-time user of stack overflow and other exchange sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have used a bounty once, to see how it worked.  I have &lt;em&gt;wanted&lt;/em&gt; to use a bounty many, many times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a problem I see with bounties (that is, a problem that makes them &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; useful for the only purpose I want to use them):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I only ever want to put a bounty on something &lt;em&gt;because it's urgent&lt;/em&gt;.  I want to urge people to work on it by offering an incentive.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I cannot put a bounty on something for two days.  During that time, I just solve the problem on my own &lt;em&gt;because it's urgent&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until I read Glen_b's answer, I couldn't think of a use-case for them (because of the time restriction).  Also, looking at his 4th link (Who gives bounties to what), it appears that Glen_b does about half the bounties on this site (after a cursory glance... I didn't look closely).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="169018" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2017-07-16T18:19:11.640" LastActivityDate="2017-07-16T18:19:11.640" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4869" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-19T19:38:10.883" Score="5" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the &quot;review suggested edits&quot; page, even when you choose the &quot;rendered output&quot; view, it will still show the raw TeX of the formula you edited.  (Unedited formulas in the answer are rendered, though.) With a large formula, this makes it harder for the reviewer to tell if the edit is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(See this edit I made, for an example of this behavior: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/153225&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/153225&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is apparently because the MathJax rendering doesn't allow for the red/green highlights, as noted in the accepted answer for this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/232123/mathjax-half-broken-in-suggested-edit-diffs&quot;&gt;MathJax half-broken in suggested edit diffs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there doesn't seem to be a way to highlight within the rendered output, I would like to request a feature where the output is rendered, and the entire rendered equation is marked as a change.  (If the user wants to see which part changed, they could still do so on the source diff view, which would stay the same as what they have today on both views.)  [This suggestion echos Ilmari Karonen's answer to the bug linked above.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45576" LastEditorUserId="45576" LastEditDate="2018-03-08T03:15:56.593" LastActivityDate="2018-03-08T03:15:56.593" Title="Request for &quot;Review suggested edits&quot; page to render edited formulas" Tags="|feature-request|editing|math-display|review|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4870" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4950" CreationDate="2017-07-20T02:12:47.517" Score="13" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to cite a response by whuber to generate correlated binomials: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/284996/generating-correlated-binomial-random-variables&quot;&gt;Generating correlated binomial random variables&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On other sites in the SO family (math ones) you can generate a cite key for a bib file (latex). Is there no such equivalent link-or method to automatically generate a bibtex entry on cross validated? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150025" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-09-14T12:40:14.727" LastActivityDate="2017-09-14T12:40:14.727" Title="Is there no cite tag to generate a bibtex MISC entry for answers on Cross Validated?" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|user-interface|papers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4872" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-23T13:02:27.437" Score="-3" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding that both statsSE and mathSE are both stackexchange sites, and share a similar subject matter, often attended by the same or similar groups of people, I have noticed what I would describe as different 'cultural norms' between life on statsSE and life on mathSE, just as New York is different to Washington. I find this somewhat intriguing and I thought I might enquire if others have noticed the same?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Examples&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;New users&lt;/strong&gt;: The first issue that brought this difference of culture to light to me was the way questions from new users are handled. Over at mathSE, questions from new users are often treated with little respect or encouragement, and even if the question is novel or of research value, such questions are sometimes CLOSED DOWN (inappropriately in my view). By contrast, here at statsSE, my impression is that a new user is encouraged to make changes (if they are needed), that mods are familiar with the subject matter they are modding, and that experienced users try generally to be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Moderators&lt;/strong&gt;: over here on statsSE, one feels that if one has the need to call on moderators, they are there to protect the interest of users or the pursuit of knowledge, virtue and veritas. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example:  a few days ago, a new user posed a nice problem to mathSE, which reduced to the following after some clarification:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let $Z \sim N(0,1)$ and $X \sim N(\mu,\sigma^2)$ be independent random variables. Is it possible to find a closed-form solution for the pdf of $Y=Z X^2$ ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was closed down on mathSE. It might look easy, but it is actually a very difficult problem (I don't even know if a solution exists) and a great little question, even in a simpler form. I raised my concern over the treatment of the new user and the closing of the question ... see, for instance, this thread I posed yesterday: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/26657/poor-treatment-of-new-users-especially-those-asking-interesting-questions&quot;&gt;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/26657/poor-treatment-of-new-users-especially-those-asking-interesting-questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... and in return, instead of the question being opened up again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) the question got deleted (i.e. hide the evidence) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) the same mods then tried to close the meta question about the question! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This reminds me a little of a quip about the difference between calling in the police (i.e. moderators) in Canada vs the USA. In Canada, if you call the police, they come to keep the public safe. In the US, if you call the police, YOU risk getting shot. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And maybe this is the advantage of statsSE - of staying focused and small - avoiding the pitfalls of growing so large in the number and breadth of questions that the site become de-personalised, with moderators forced to deal with subject matter that they are not familiar with. By contrast, statsSE is like a cool little European town pub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Voting&lt;/strong&gt;:  statsSE users seem much more friendly and convivial in their warmth and friendliness, and willingness to up vote both questions and answers &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am curious if others have noted such differences, or indeed any other cultural norms / differences that have emerged between the sites?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24905" LastEditorUserId="24905" LastEditDate="2017-07-23T15:18:23.450" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T20:41:04.100" Title="'Cultural differences' between statsSE and mathSE" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|moderation|new-users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4872" CreationDate="2017-07-24T20:41:04.100" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OP's post does sound like an invitation to admire our CV-selves in the mirror -but it is totally boring to admire your self, it is preferable, say, to let others admire you. So I downvoted it, and I feel compelled to write an answer here so that people have the opportunity to downvote it -for balance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not difficult to conclude that the atmosphere over at math.se is much more combative than in CV.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My proposed explanation: consider the scientific world a statistician lives in, and the one that a mathematician lives in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The statistician &lt;em&gt;starts&lt;/em&gt; by acknowledging uncertainty, incomplete information, loose ends, you name it, as well as the imperfection and the inherent limits of the tools at his disposal in order to contain it, and therefore that, at the end of his efforts, they will ever remain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No such thing in the mathematician's world: at the conceptual end of the scientific endeavor, things are either correct and exact, or not (that bits and pieces of failed attempts may be useful and re-used is certain - I am talking about the symbolic final stage). This, psychologically, is close to a &quot;quest for the truth&quot; (an abstract truth perhaps, but truth nevertheless), and every dispassionate observer of history, society and everyday life knows how heated the situation can become when people are &quot;on a quest for the truth&quot; (perhaps rightfully so, but I don't care much for value judgements here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So philosophically, after all said and done mathematics is more of a binary &quot;yes/no&quot; situation, while statistics, no matter how rigorous and sophisticated mathematical machinery is used, is an &quot;almost/maybe/to a certain degree&quot; situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now compare war and peace: war is much closer to a &quot;yes/no&quot; situation while peace is much closer to an &quot;almost/maybe/to a certain degree&quot; situation. Hence CV is more peaceful, and math.se is more combative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28746" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T20:41:04.100" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4874" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4875" CreationDate="2017-07-25T06:41:15.967" Score="9" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I searched for an answer to this question before asking, but I couldn't find it (I admit I'm not very skilled in using the &quot;search&quot; function on the SE sites). I would like to move the comments for this question to chat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/292579/using-multiple-exposures-in-regression-model&quot;&gt;Using multiple exposures in regression model&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course I could just create a chat room, then post a new comment with the chat link. However, I was wondering if there was a more automatic way to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-07-25T09:50:45.603" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T13:11:53.963" Title="Can I move a conversation to chat before the 11 comments threshold?" Tags="|support|comment|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4874" CreationDate="2017-07-25T13:11:53.963" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Flag the post for Moderator attention, with a request to move the comments to chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T13:11:53.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4876" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4877" CreationDate="2017-07-26T10:12:09.953" Score="7" ViewCount="864" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to gather experience which statistical models are used in specific businesses/ sectors. For example I would like to know which statistical models are applied in E-Commerce or in Marketing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are questions suitable for Crossvalidated? Is it on-topic? Is it too broad?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128677" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-07-27T09:38:46.353" LastActivityDate="2017-07-27T09:38:46.353" Title="Is it on-topic to ask which statistical models are applied in E-Commerce?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4876" CreationDate="2017-07-26T10:27:41.290" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions asking for lists of applications in some field or other get closed as too broad&amp;mdash;I think rightly, as there's no gainsaying any answer. Look at the list of contents in a textbook on Statistics for Marketing or E-Commerce to get an idea of what techniques are commonly used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2017-07-26T10:27:41.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4878" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-26T12:00:30.750" Score="13" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I've seen several questions marked as &quot;unclear what you are asking&quot; when the question is both confusing and about software.  If we mark it &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot; then the OP may try to clarify it, but if it is still just about software, that edit is wasted.  So, I've been marking them as &quot;off-topic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a policy on these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-07-27T09:39:43.337" LastActivityDate="2017-07-27T15:14:22.413" Title="What to do if a question is both unclear and about software?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|closing-questions|software|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4879" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4883" CreationDate="2017-07-26T12:01:24.063" Score="12" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/293842/how-is-empirical-bayes-valid?newsletter=1&amp;amp;nlcode=630151%7c9223&quot;&gt;How is empirical bayes valid?&lt;/a&gt; I thought it needed an empirical-bayes tag and so I came across the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/empirical&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;empirical&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;empirical&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has 98 questions tagged in really diverse topics and no excerpt or wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I ask: what's the intended usage for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/empirical&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;empirical&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;empirical&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60613" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-07-27T09:39:24.423" LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T12:01:25.480" Title="What's the tag &quot;empirical&quot; meant to convey?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-reorganization|tag-excerpt|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4878" CreationDate="2017-07-26T12:19:25.830" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know of any official CV policy.  My policy, however, is to leave a comment for the OP stating that the question is unclear, typically with some description of the points that need clarifying, and also mention that questions about software are generally off topic here.  I then vote to close as &lt;em&gt;unclear&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the OP edits the question and clarifies it, but it really is just about software, I do not vote to reopen (I may flag for migration to SO, though).  I suppose you could say that the edit had been 'wasted' but that's ambiguous to me.  On the other hand, the edit may clarify that the question wasn't really about software, or the edit may change the nature of the question to a statistical question.  In that case, I vote to reopen.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2017-07-26T12:19:25.830" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4669" CreationDate="2017-07-26T16:43:37.880" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do we need a special tag [dummy-variables]?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since and thank to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4857/3277&quot;&gt;@amoeba's answer&lt;/a&gt; (which was well accepted, and I upvoted it too) we've acquired tag &lt;code&gt;[categorical-encoding]&lt;/code&gt; - a separate tag marking topics on the ways to recode/represent categorical data in numerical data analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the most well-known, ubiquitous way of &quot;categorical encoding&quot; is &lt;strong&gt;dummy variables&lt;/strong&gt; (aka &lt;em&gt;indicator&lt;/em&gt; variables, aka &lt;em&gt;one-hot&lt;/em&gt; variables) - a set of binary variables - each one corresponding to one category - where 1 stands for &quot;this category&quot; and 0 stands for &quot;not this category&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In their point 1 @amoeba thought we don't need a separate tag for dummy variables (&lt;code&gt;I don't think we should have it as a separate tag&lt;/code&gt;) as soon as we have &lt;code&gt;[categorical-encoding]&lt;/code&gt;. But I &lt;strong&gt;always believed we ought to have&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;[dummy-variables&lt;/code&gt;] along with &lt;code&gt;[categorical-encoding]&lt;/code&gt;. I don't think it is deadly critical, only that we'd rather have it than not, as it looks to me. It will be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons to have &lt;code&gt;[dummy-variables&lt;/code&gt;]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dummy-variables are most often used and well-known type of categorical coding. A person may even not be aware of different ways of categorical coding but he is likely to be familiar with &quot;dummy&quot; or &quot;one-hot&quot; terms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is used far beyond the domain of representing of a predictor (factor) in ANOVA-like analyses; i.e. far beyond the theme of &quot;contrasts&quot;. Almost every kind of data analysis which can manage categorical data will - internally or explicitly - encode it as the binary dummies. Thus, &lt;code&gt;[dummy-variables&lt;/code&gt;] makes interest in threads discussing many &lt;em&gt;algorithms&lt;/em&gt;, not just threads on categorical analysis.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &quot;contrast&quot; tasks (categorical predictor) we often consider k-1 set of dummy variables, not full k-variable set (k is the number of categories). It is an important (for parameter interpretation) issue which one is to drop in ANOVA context. But for analyses where we may use all k variables (clustering etc.) that question (&quot;k or k-1 and which to drop?&quot;) doesn't belong to. Some users who think of &lt;code&gt;[categorical-encoding]&lt;/code&gt; as contaminated with the question will be relieved to find tag &lt;code&gt;[dummy-variables&lt;/code&gt;] which isn't necessarily contaminated and may use it calmly, say, in the context of cluster analysis. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sometimes the input is already a set of dummy variables and the task or the text contains just no word &quot;categorical&quot; anywhere. Therefore the issue that the set of numeric variables potentially represent one nominal variable is not apparent or important at all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: if people decide that we create the tag, but they will oppress &quot;dummy variables&quot; (which term is OK for me), we could name that tag &lt;code&gt;[indicator-variables]&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;[one-hot]&lt;/code&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3277" LastEditorUserId="3277" LastEditDate="2017-07-27T07:01:43.160" LastActivityDate="2017-07-27T07:01:43.160" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4878" CreationDate="2017-07-26T23:24:39.373" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends. My thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If it's not clear whether &lt;em&gt;statistical expertise&lt;/em&gt; is needed to answer it (or might otherwise be &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on topic&lt;/a&gt;), we would typically need to clarify first because clarifying that to be the case would make it on topic. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If it's about software with no statistical expertise required but it's not a clear question, we can't migrate it. If it is clear, and is otherwise on-topic elsewhere (say at StackOverflow or SuperUser) then we can migrate, so that's a good reason to clarify first. It's better to migrate a question than have it closed here and reposted elsewhere, as long as it's not just going to close at the destination.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if it's about software with clearly no statistical expertise required but it's very unlikely to end up migratable, just close it as whichever you think is the biggest problem with the question (closure is intended to be a signal to the poster to improve the question; otherwise we'd just delete all the unsatisfactory questions).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not always obvious what's the best close option, but in many cases I'd prefer to clarify first if it's not pretty clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On occasion I have reopened questions I thought were at least reasonably likely to require statistical expertise, in order to seek clarification of that. Sometimes that turns out to be the case and sometimes it doesn't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[We should be careful -- I note that a few users have a tendency to vote to close a question that uses a language tag or contains any code at all. That's not how it's supposed to work. Let's all try to keep in mind that &lt;em&gt;requires statistical expertise to ask or answer&lt;/em&gt; is the test for software questions. If someone that knows SAS (say) but not stats couldn't give a full answer to a question relating to SAS because they didn't have the knowledge required, it's probably on topic. If all it would take is a quick check of the help, it's probably off topic.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In response to mdewey's comment about the reopen queue -- if a question closes as unclear and hits the reopen queue and is now clear but off topic, please reopen, and then vote to close (or better vote to reopen and then flag it). The point about closure is that it's a &lt;em&gt;signal to the poster&lt;/em&gt; (and indeed to other readers, including ones who don't have accounts) about how to write suitable questions. If it remains closed as unclear when it's NOT, that's a bad signal -- it doesn't help the poster write a better question next time; they'll be focused on the wrong issue. We need to try to get our questions closed for the &quot;right&quot; reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-07-27T15:14:22.413" LastActivityDate="2017-07-27T15:14:22.413" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4879" CreationDate="2017-07-27T11:47:51.680" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the ambiguity of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/empirical&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;empirical&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;empirical&lt;/a&gt;, I propose we get an &lt;code&gt;[empirical-bayes]&lt;/code&gt; tag, and then we can retag all those questions pertaining the subject (which I volunteer to do as well).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/empirical&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;empirical&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;empirical&lt;/a&gt; would have it removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT (4th August): We also have a tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ecdf&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ecdf&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ecdf&lt;/a&gt;. Some questions deserve this one, so let's try to keep it in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60613" LastEditorUserId="60613" LastEditDate="2017-08-04T12:01:25.480" LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T12:01:25.480" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4884" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4886" CreationDate="2017-07-28T21:30:06.283" Score="5" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;As per object: if a question which received some upvotes is moved to another SE site, what happens to the OP reputation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does her/his reputation on CV decreases, and the reputation on the other site increases? Or does the moved question start on the other site with 0 upvotes? In this case the OP rep on CV decreases, but her/his rep on the other site doesn't increase? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what about comments? Are they moved together with the question or do they simply get lost?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-07-29T04:42:08.217" LastActivityDate="2017-07-29T04:42:08.217" Title="What happens to reputation if an upvoted answer is moved to another SE site?" Tags="|support|questions|answers|migration|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4885" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-29T01:03:43.983" Score="22" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;To keep you informed - we (the moderators) recently requested an election for two new moderator positions for CrossValidated. It should begin soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our election pages are here (which currently link to our three previous elections):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election/&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The new election won't appear there until the election has been officially announced here on meta but you can look at past elections to get a sense for how they work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta posts announcing the start of the election and for the process of gathering &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2432/2015-moderator-election-qa-question-collection&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2460/2015-moderator-election-qa-questionnaire&quot;&gt;candidates to answer&lt;/a&gt; should appear in the near future.  (My links are to the corresponding pages for the 2015 elections, not to the upcoming one)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please consider whether you'd like to nominate for moderator in that upcoming election. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does a moderator do?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/site-moderators&quot;&gt;Who are the moderators and what is their role?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/75189/who-are-the-diamond-moderators-and-what-is-their-role&quot;&gt;More on moderators and their role from the FAQ&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A theory of moderation&lt;/a&gt; (Jeff Atwood's original 2009 post about moderation)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who can nominate?&lt;/strong&gt; See the coloured box in the sidebar for our previous election &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election/3&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; -- a similar sidebar should appear for our upcoming election.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who can vote?&lt;/strong&gt; See the coloured box in the sidebar on the &quot;tab=election&quot; page for our previous election &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election/3?tab=election&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; -- a similar sidebar should appear for our upcoming election. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Questions about what moderators do (hopefully not already covered by available resources) may be posted to meta any time. It may be best to wait until the official announcement to do so, but if you have general questions on the election process, feel free to ask them here on meta using the tag &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/election&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;election&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;election&lt;/a&gt;.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-07-30T13:50:44.747" LastActivityDate="2017-07-30T13:50:44.747" Title="2017 moderator election requested" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4884" CreationDate="2017-07-29T04:40:13.470" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What happens to reputation if an upvoted &lt;strong&gt;answer&lt;/strong&gt; is moved to another SE site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is deleted in the source site and the reputation is revoked. Votes are migrated to the target site with their respective posts, and if the answer's author has an account there, it will receive the associated reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If a &lt;strong&gt;question&lt;/strong&gt; which received some upvotes is moved to another SE site, what happens to the OP reputation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pretty much the same as above, except downvotes are cleared out, and that the question is left as a pathway for 30 days in the source site (reputation is only reversed after the question is deleted, i.e., after that 30 days).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does her/his reputation on CV decreases, and the reputation on the other site increases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, if questions do have upvotes (there can be exceptions like a heavily downvoted question, which would make reputation increase in the source site after deletion, but let's keep it simple). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or does the moved question start on the other site with 0 upvotes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It starts in the target site with the amount of upvotes it had in the source site when migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And what about comments? Are they moved together with the question or do they simply get lost?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, all comments on any post are moved/migrated together with their respective posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References in Stack Exchange Meta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10249/what-is-migration-and-how-does-it-work/10250#10250&quot;&gt;What is migration and how does it work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6378/do-migrated-questions-migrate-reputation-and-badges&quot;&gt;Do migrated questions migrate reputation and badges?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/168754/what-happens-to-rep-earned-on-posts-that-are-later-migrated&quot;&gt;What happens to rep earned on posts that are later migrated?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastActivityDate="2017-07-29T04:40:13.470" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4887" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-31T20:00:16.747" Score="16" ViewCount="345" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cross Validated, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4885/2017-moderator-election-requested&quot;&gt;as has been noted&lt;/a&gt;, is scheduled for an election &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election/4&quot;&gt;next week, August 7th&lt;/a&gt;.  In connection with that, we will be holding a Q&amp;amp;A with the candidates.  This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation.  Participation is completely voluntary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4901/2017-moderator-election-qa-questionnaire&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is similar to how we've done things in previous years here, except this time the question collection will happen &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; the nomination phase, allowing prospective candidates to review what they might have to answer ahead of time and then allowing answers to the Q&amp;amp;A show up at around the time they submit their nominations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how it'll work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Until the nomination phase, (so, until  at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 3:00 pm EST on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post &lt;em&gt;one question per answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The first two will be guaranteed to be included, the latter ones are if the community doesn't supply enough questions. This will be done in a single post, unlike the prior instruction.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If your question contains a link, please use the syntax of &lt;code&gt;[text](link)&lt;/code&gt;, as that will make it easier for transcribing for the finished questionnaire.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into at currently.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At the start of the nomination phase, the Community Team will select &lt;strong&gt;up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community&lt;/strong&gt; provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Once questions have been selected, a new question will be opened to host the actual questionnaire for the candidates, typically containing 10 questions in total.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&amp;amp;A.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any questions or feedback about this process, feel free to post as a comment here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5645" LastEditorUserId="5645" LastEditDate="2017-08-07T20:01:00.270" LastActivityDate="2017-08-07T20:01:00.270" Title="2017 moderator election Q&amp;A - question collection" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4887" CreationDate="2017-07-31T20:00:16.747" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a set of general questions, gathered as very common questions asked every election. As mentioned in the instructions, the first two questions are guaranteed to show up in the Q&amp;amp;A, while the others are if there aren't enough questions (or, if you like one enough, you may split it off as a separate answer for review within the community's 8). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In your opinion, what do moderators do? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5645" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T20:00:16.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4887" CreationDate="2017-07-31T20:22:35.547" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several tag-related tasks require moderator attention. How well do you feel our community deals with them presently? Would you be able &amp;amp; willing to improve the situation (if it is needed)? How?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag burnination.&lt;/strong&gt; Mods can ask SE admins to delete (aka burninate) a tag. We have a list of tags that should be deleted: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3031&quot;&gt;Tag-candidates for removal&lt;/a&gt;, but no action has ever taken place. See my unanswered question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3147&quot;&gt;Dear mods, what should be our protocol for tag burnination?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag synonym merging.&lt;/strong&gt; We have large number of tag synonyms that are not merged. There is a good case for merging all established tag synonyms as a matter of course (only mods can do that): &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2790&quot;&gt;Should all our non-merged tag synonyms be merged (or removed)?&lt;/a&gt; -- but it is not being done.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tag synonyms.&lt;/strong&gt; We maintain a list of suggested synonyms: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1200&quot;&gt;Current tag synonym candidates&lt;/a&gt;, and most good suggestions do eventually get implemented, but sometimes it takes ages to pull through and often requires substantial effort to organize enough votes, whereas mods could implement it easily.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T20:22:35.547" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4887" CreationDate="2017-07-31T20:44:22.960" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is some controversy surrounding our use of Community Wiki status, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2953/&quot;&gt;What is and what should be our policy on making questions community wiki?&lt;/a&gt;. Our current policy is not sufficiently clear, is not being consistently implemented, and is arguably suboptimal (though opinions might differ). What is your opinion on all that? Do you see any of that as a problem? What is your preferred policy? Would you be willing to work towards formulation of some consensus policy and enforcing its consistent implementation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-08-01T14:21:43.823" LastActivityDate="2017-08-01T14:21:43.823" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4891" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-01T15:40:41.563" Score="3" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;For background details see http&#xA;://www.fharrell.com/2017/08/integrating-audio-video-and-discussion.html&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interested in using &lt;code&gt;stats.stackexchange&lt;/code&gt; as a place to hold questions, answers, and discussion that are specific to subsections in my course notes.  An example subsection is cubic spline functions in regression (or it could be a smaller unit such as knot selection in same).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it appropriate to create such topics that would be hyperlinked from my course notes for easy finding by students?  Does anyone have a better idea?  I'm currently trying &lt;a href=&quot;http://slack.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://slack.com&lt;/a&gt; for this purpose but people have to be invited to join my &lt;code&gt;slack&lt;/code&gt; team, and linking to &lt;code&gt;slack&lt;/code&gt; discussions is not as straightforward as linking to a URL for a &lt;code&gt;stackexchange&lt;/code&gt; discussion.  &lt;code&gt;stackexchange&lt;/code&gt; also has the major advantage of profiting from a much wider user knowledge base.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could start the process by linking my notes to specific existing questions (and this will be optimal for many questions) but specific places for knowledge-base building will be needed too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T21:56:42.833" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T21:56:42.833" Title="Creation of &quot;Topics&quot; Instead of Questions, for Linking with Course Notes" Tags="|discussion|questions|too-broad|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4887" CreationDate="2017-08-01T23:20:19.620" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;What do you see as the biggest problem facing our site and what would you do to help address it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="74500" LastEditDate="2017-08-03T20:14:02.780" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T20:14:02.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4887" CreationDate="2017-08-02T12:44:29.737" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the issues which crops up frequently on this site is the dividing line between a statistical question and a computing question. At the moment custom and practice is that requests for code or package suggestions are seen as off-topic. Do you think we have the boundary in the right place? If you do not what is your suggestion for the new boundary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T12:44:29.737" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4887" CreationDate="2017-08-03T07:03:57.073" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;What do you propose to do about the host of unanswered questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="144089" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T07:03:57.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4887" CreationDate="2017-08-03T08:42:39.567" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you have any Meta posts that you're particularly proud of, or that you feel best demonstrate your moderation style?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Taken from &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/352386/452096&quot;&gt;the SO election Q&amp;amp;A thread&lt;/a&gt;, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4887/2017-moderator-election-qa-question-collection?cb=1#comment13937_4887&quot;&gt;Firebug very helpfully linked to&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T08:42:39.567" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4896" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-03T21:09:32.297" Score="9" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find it a bit puzzling, regarding site moderation, that questions are put on hold quickly (that's good) but in my experience it takes forever for them to be re-opened. In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/295847/how-to-derive-prediction-intervals-from-the-posterior-predictive-distribution-of?noredirect=1#comment563219_295847&quot;&gt;recent example&lt;/a&gt; from this morning (there have been others before) my question was put on hold within minutes, but although I timely revised it nobody (i.e., not enough people) seemed to bother to re-open it till now, although the original critic has already agreed to the revisions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I wonder:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does it take too long on CV for questions to be reopened?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are enough questions reopened?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should there be a better system for reopening questions? (Once a question is on hold fewer people tend to look at it, so questions might not get enough attention anymore although they have been revised.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24515" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2017-08-04T12:17:51.970" LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T12:17:51.970" Title="Does it take too long for questions &quot;on hold&quot; to be re-opened and are enough questions re-opened?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4887" CreationDate="2017-08-05T20:36:51.783" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do we close questions (for any reason) too much, or too little? Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2017-08-06T18:12:21.343" LastActivityDate="2017-08-06T18:12:21.343" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4898" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4899" CreationDate="2017-08-06T05:04:16.890" Score="6" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;It lies before the &quot;If...&quot; sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5xa8k.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5xa8k.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59765" LastEditorUserId="27505" LastEditDate="2017-08-07T07:46:34.757" LastActivityDate="2017-08-07T07:46:34.757" Title="A space is missing in the design of the opinion-based post notice" Tags="|bug|status-completed|design|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4898" CreationDate="2017-08-07T07:46:26.920" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for reporting. Fix for this is waiting in repo for next build. Should be live in couple hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27505" LastActivityDate="2017-08-07T07:46:26.920" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4887" CreationDate="2017-08-07T09:59:08.620" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there anything we can do with the high rate of unanswered questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastActivityDate="2017-08-07T09:59:08.620" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4901" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-07T20:00:28.777" Score="26" ViewCount="858" Body="&lt;p&gt;In connection with the moderator elections, we are holding a Q&amp;amp;A thread for the candidates. Questions collected &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4887/2017-moderator-election-qa-question-collection?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;from an earlier thread&lt;/a&gt; have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as the space for the candidates to provide their answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to the submission count, we have selected all provided questions as well as one of our back up questions for a total of 10 questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a candidate, your job is simple - post an answer to this question, citing each of the questions and then post your answer to each question given in that same answer. For your convenience, I will include all of the questions in quote format with a break in between each, suitable for you to insert your answers. Just &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/5e062357-5597-4196-bccf-05e8ac1bdee2/view-source&quot;&gt;copy the whole thing after the first set of three dashes&lt;/a&gt;.Please consider putting your name at the top of your post so that readers will know who you are before they finish reading everything you have written, and also including a link to your answer on your nomination post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once all the answers have been compiled, this will serve as a transcript for voters to view the thoughts of their candidates, and will be appropriately linked in the Election page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck to all of the candidates!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Oh, and when you've completed your answer, please provide a link to it after this blurb here, before that set of three dashes. Please leave the list of links in the order of submission.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To save scrolling here are links to the submissions from each candidate (in order of submission):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4903/1352&quot;&gt;Tim's answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4910/1352&quot;&gt;Gung's answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4915/35989&quot;&gt;Aksakal's answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4916/28666&quot;&gt;Amoeba's answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Several tag-related tasks require moderator attention. How well do you feel our community deals with them presently? Would you be able &amp;amp; willing to improve the situation (if it is needed)? How? Related links regarding tag burnination &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3031&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3147&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, tag synonym implementation &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1200&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, and tag synonym merging &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2790&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What do you see as the biggest problem facing our site and what would you do to help address it?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do you have any Meta posts that you're particularly proud of, or that you feel best demonstrate your moderation style?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One of the issues which crops up frequently on this site is the dividing line between a statistical question and a computing question. At the moment custom and practice is that requests for code or package suggestions are seen as off-topic. Do you think we have the boundary in the right place? If you do not what is your suggestion for the new boundary?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is some controversy surrounding our use of Community Wiki status, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2953/&quot;&gt;What is and what should be our policy on making questions community wiki?&lt;/a&gt;. Our current policy is not sufficiently clear, is not being consistently implemented, and is arguably suboptimal (though opinions might differ). What is your opinion on all that? Do you see any of that as a problem? What is your preferred policy? Would you be willing to work towards formulation of some consensus policy and enforcing its consistent implementation?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What do you propose to do about the host of unanswered questions?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do we close questions (for any reason) too much, or too little? Why?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5645" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-09-07T17:34:50.783" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T17:34:50.783" Title="2017 Moderator Election Q&amp;A - Questionnaire" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4902" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-07T20:24:28.083" Score="10" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 2017 Community Moderator Election is now underway!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community moderator elections have three phases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nomination phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Primary phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Election phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please visit the official election page at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for more detail, and to participate!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/election&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;election&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;election&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastActivityDate="2017-08-07T20:24:28.083" Title="2017 Community Moderator Election" Tags="|discussion|moderation|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-08-07T20:24:28.083" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4901" CreationDate="2017-08-08T13:38:14.313" Score="19" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Tim (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election/4#post-296709&quot;&gt;my nomination post&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Several tag-related tasks require moderator attention. How well do you feel our community deals with them presently? Would you be able &amp;amp; willing to improve the situation (if it is needed)? How? Related links regarding tag burnination &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3031&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3147&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, tag synonym implementation &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1200&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, and tag synonym merging &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2790&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree, that they require. I think that we are not dealing well with them at the present moment. In my opinion, the problem is that you have to have a reasonably high reputation gained for answering the question for some tag to be able to vote for its changes. In many cases moderators intervention is needed if we do not want the process to last forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you see as the biggest problem facing our site and what would you do to help address it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest problem is the growing number of unanswered questions, or questions with low-quality answers. Unfortunately, this is not the kind of thing that moderator can help. We need more people who would answer the questions and provide high-quality answers, we need to encourage people to answer the questions (e.g. by providing bounties &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2935/help-spread-the-wealth&quot;&gt;as Glen_b did&lt;/a&gt;!). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Do you have any Meta posts that you're particularly proud of, or that you feel best demonstrate your moderation style?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't believe so. I often visit Meta and I participated in multiple discussions on Meta, but it is always about solving or discussing some practical problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;One of the issues which crops up frequently on this site is the dividing line between a statistical question and a computing question. At the moment custom and practice is that requests for code or package suggestions are seen as off-topic. Do you think we have the boundary in the right place? If you do not what is your suggestion for the new boundary?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a black-and-white issue, there is no clear-cut boundary and never will be. I believe that there were multiple &quot;coding&quot; questions that could be answered as well on CV (e.g. asking about implementing some statistical method), but the boundary is always blurry. &lt;em&gt;For me&lt;/em&gt;, the boundary is that if coding question requires the statistical expertise to answer, then it is on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends... In general, I'd encourage him to stop the inappropriate behavior by comments and by deleting the inappropriate comments by him. If it doesn't help and the behavior is really disruptive, then I guess you need to use more direct moderation steps (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/04/06/a-day-in-the-penalty-box/&quot;&gt;penalties&lt;/a&gt;). High reputation should not give you immunity, rather the opposite, it should encourage you to serve as an example for others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless this is an &lt;em&gt;obvious&lt;/em&gt; error, I'll bring the issue on Meta to seek guidance from the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;There is some controversy surrounding our use of Community Wiki status, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2953/&quot;&gt;What is and what should be our policy on making questions community wiki?&lt;/a&gt;. Our current policy is not sufficiently clear, is not being consistently implemented, and is arguably suboptimal (though opinions might differ). What is your opinion on all that? Do you see any of that as a problem? What is your preferred policy? Would you be willing to work towards formulation of some consensus policy and enforcing its consistent implementation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, I don't think this is an issue and don't have any strong opinions on comunity wikis. I feel that they make sense just for the threads like the one with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1337/statistics-jokes&quot;&gt;statistical jokes&lt;/a&gt;, where upvotes, or downvotes are used just to promote the &quot;favorite&quot; answer. I don't think that in other cases they are really necessary and have no problem with people getting +1's for things like writing few sentences on their favorite book on some topic the the &quot;what is the best book on...&quot; kind of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you propose to do about the host of unanswered questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think moderator can do anything about it. I guess we could close more off-topic questions, but on another hand, I feel that sometimes we close too many questions. I believe that the core of this problem is that we have very small number of users who answer the questions. Our answerers are also pretty specialized and, I guess, we lack the answerers who specialize with some topics, e.g. machine learning (as compared to statistics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Do we close questions (for any reason) too much, or too little? Why?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is a question that I proposed.) In my opinion both. We close lots of questions that are slightly unclear, while many of them could be answered. I personally often answer the slightly unclear questions and in many cases I learn that my answer was helpful for the OP. On another hand, anyone can notice (e.g. when using search [that in many cases is unusable]) that we have a huge number of low-quality and off-topic threads. On yet another hand, I guess that putting questions on hold potentially discourages people from using this site instead of providing them with answers, so maybe we should try to be more empathetic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already reached 37k and I believe that the major problem is that in many cases our voting system is inefficient. For example, to approve changes in tags we need votes from users with high reputation &lt;em&gt;for those tags&lt;/em&gt; and sometimes it is hard to bring such issues to their attention. Moderators can solve simple problems quicker then community. But honestly, if you look &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/05/18/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;at the privileges moderators have&lt;/a&gt;, they do not really posses any superpowers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2017-08-08T13:38:14.313" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4904" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4905" CreationDate="2017-08-09T12:02:27.383" Score="17" ViewCount="873" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently we have 3 questions which are tagged with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dplyr&quot;&gt;&quot;dplyr&quot; tag&lt;/a&gt;. All three of them have zero votes. In my opinion questions related to this tag and this R library are about data wrangling in R. Therefore I think they are off-topic as they are primarily about coding and not about statistics or data visualisation itself. Can we delete the &quot;dplyr&quot; tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128677" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T00:11:50.890" Title="Can we delete the dplyr tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-deletion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4904" CreationDate="2017-08-09T12:08:38.147" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see why not. You make good points. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T12:08:38.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4904" CreationDate="2017-08-09T12:35:30.397" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two questions by tomclark seem to be on topic -- &quot;&lt;em&gt;What is the best way to test if the number of Males in group 1 is significantly greater than group 2, which is 0?&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is &lt;em&gt;clearly&lt;/em&gt; a statistical question (I am astonished to think that anyone would maintain that's off topic here. In need of clarification, perhaps, but definitely within our scope).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately they're duplicates of each other, so one should be deleted or the two should be merged. Unfortunately, one has been extensively edited -- so it has more information -- while the other has the longer answers; I'll have to think about how to tidy that up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I definitely disagree with deleting both of those, the other one does look off topic and should be closed (which I just did). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, the dplyr tag doesn't seem to be needed; it's not relevant to the statistical question being asked.  (whuber's suggestion of keeping the tag but warning that a question using it may be off topic is an interesting proposal, and defnitely worth considering)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-08-10T00:11:50.890" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T00:11:50.890" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4908" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-11T07:02:19.930" Score="13" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;How is that a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4885/2017-moderator-election-requested&quot;&gt;thread announcing moderator election&lt;/a&gt; got +21 and multiple comments, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4887/2017-moderator-election-qa-question-collection?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;thread on questions to moderators&lt;/a&gt; got +17 and multiple answers, yet, until now, I'm the only person who nominated himself..?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we need &quot;at least two more&quot; moderators, then I'm afraid, that it won't make much difference if we get only one moderator more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-08-11T13:42:58.617" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T13:42:58.617" Title="Small interest in 2017 moderator election..?" Tags="|discussion|moderation|election|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4908" CreationDate="2017-08-11T08:05:36.980" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I recall correctly, in the last two elections some nominations came in the last couple of days of the nomination period; that may be the case again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;At most&lt;/strike&gt; two moderators will be elected this election -- we only requested two slots even though I said on chat the other day that I felt we could use three (for reasons that may be becoming clear now).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-08-11T10:26:08.157" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T10:26:08.157" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4901" CreationDate="2017-08-13T00:47:34.493" Score="32" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Gung (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election/4#post-297636&quot;&gt;my nomination post&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Several tag-related tasks require moderator attention. How well do you feel our community deals with them presently? Would you be able &amp;amp; willing to improve the situation (if it is needed)? How? Related links regarding tag burnination &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3031&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3147&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, tag synonym implementation &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1200&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, and tag synonym merging &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2790&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, tags are one of the principle ways information is organized on the site.  Since building a permanent repository of high-quality statistical information is our mission here, that makes tags vital.  Improving the management of our tagging system (e.g., merging or eliminating tags) is one of the primary areas where we can enhance the site.  If elected, I will give this more attention than it's gotten.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you see as the biggest problem facing our site and what would you do to help address it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest problem facing the site is probably that we are getting an increasing number of questions without getting an increasing number of answerers.  To some extent this is unsolvable, but consider that a large proportion of the new questions seem to be lower quality (off topic, unclear, etc.).  For example, the close vote review queue is clogged with dozens of threads per day.  Many of these are unambiguous, and can be closed immediately (a smaller number seem unambiguously able to be left open).  I would guess that as many as 2/3 could be addressed immediately, presumably making it easier for the community to focus its attention on the remaining cases where judgment needs to be brought to bear.  A related issue is that we should probably be marking more questions as duplicates.  I've noticed that some users have been working on that, and I could assist with the process.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Do you have any Meta posts that you're particularly proud of, or that you feel best demonstrate your moderation style?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(This is cheating somewhat, because it is actually @Silverfish's post, but)&lt;/em&gt; I've contributed a lot to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2486/7290&quot;&gt;How best to use the review queue?&lt;/a&gt;, and I think it will illustrate my potential moderating style to voters.  Another germane meta.CV thread might be: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1391/7290&quot;&gt;How should questions be answered on Cross Validated?&lt;/a&gt;, in that it expresses a vision of how I think the site should function.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;One of the issues which crops up frequently on this site is the dividing line between a statistical question and a computing question. At the moment custom and practice is that requests for code or package suggestions are seen as off-topic. Do you think we have the boundary in the right place? If you do not what is your suggestion for the new boundary?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the line is largely in the right place, but that it may be ambiguous in practice to determine which side of the line a given question is on.  In general, I think the criterion is straightforward: &lt;em&gt;what does the OP need explained?&lt;/em&gt;  If the required information is statistical in nature (or about machine learning, data mining, or data visualization), then the question should be considered on topic here, even if it is asked in terms of some software.  If what is needed is about implementation in some software, it should be considered off topic here.  The potential source of ambiguity is that a user of one software may not be able to recognize the statistical content that exists in a question that is asked in terms of different software.  I don't see any perfect solution to that problem.  Lastly, I think that if a question has multiple aspects, some of which are about code, and some of which are statistical, it can remain open so that the latter can be addressed.  It may be helpful to leave a comment informing the OP that they may not get answers to the former aspects.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be a difficult situation; it would need to be addressed with patience and professionalism.  First, it is always important to recognize that it is easy to misconstrue comments or actions on the internet, because we don't have access to any of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paralanguage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paralanguage&lt;/a&gt; / non-verbal cues that we normally use to interpret statements when face to face.  Thus, the principle of charity should be applied.  I do think the existing moderator team has done a good job, so I could discuss the situation with senior moderators and defer to their judgment when necessary.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed / deleted / etc. a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me there are two different types of situations.  If another moderator has acted unilaterally, I can find a private way to discuss the issue with them to see if a resolution could be found.  At the other extreme, if the moderator had been the fifth close vote, there is nothing special about the moderator status with respect to the vote.  That would be the same as any other case where the community had made a decision using the mechanisms that exist for the community to manage the site.  I believe moderators should be cautious about reversing community actions, although they can if it seems appropriate.  This is mostly a judgment call, but it could also be discussed on meta.CV.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;There is some controversy surrounding our use of Community Wiki status, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2953/&quot;&gt;What is and what should be our policy on making questions community wiki?&lt;/a&gt;. Our current policy is not sufficiently clear, is not being consistently implemented, and is arguably suboptimal (though opinions might differ). What is your opinion on all that? Do you see any of that as a problem? What is your preferred policy? Would you be willing to work towards formulation of some consensus policy and enforcing its consistent implementation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me this has been discussed, and the nature of the situation has not changed.  In sum, the SE system has fairly strict criteria for the kind of questions that can be asked here.  Questions that don't meet those criteria are supposed to be closed and deleted (even if they are popular old threads with many answers and upvotes&amp;mdash;such threads have been deleted on SO).  Our use of CW constitutes a kind of fudge that attempts to save those threads we believe have a lot of value.  The options are to continue this policy, or to close and delete all such threads.  My personal preference is to maintain the status quo.  On the other hand, inconsistent implementation is clearly suboptimal.  When I notice a thread that should be either made CW or deleted, I could make it CW, and could do that when someone else notices such a thread and flags it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you propose to do about the host of unanswered questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(N.b., this is largely another take on #2 above.)&lt;/em&gt;  I'm hardly going to be able to answer them all myself, and I have little ability to recruit large numbers of new members to the site to answer them, so to a first approximation, there isn't anything I can do.  However, part of the problem is that there are a large number of unclear, low-quality questions that aren't well answerable, which contributes to the problem.  Those could be closed.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Do we close questions (for any reason) too much, or too little? Why?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a period not too long ago, when I thought we were getting a little too quick on the draw (cf., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3119/7290&quot;&gt;Are we closing questions too fast?&lt;/a&gt;).  Certainly, there will always be cases where I disagree with other's judgments one way or the other, but I think the balance is somewhat better now.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm already past 20k rep.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T00:47:34.493" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4912" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-14T13:59:30.227" Score="17" ViewCount="256" Body="&lt;p&gt;In about 6 hours, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election?cb=1&quot;&gt;the nomination phase of the moderator elections&lt;/a&gt; is scheduled to end. However, in order for the election to proceed, it is necessary to have at least one more candidate running than there are slots. This allows for there to be actual voting phases, so that the community can actually show that they support the candidates who are running. Should there not be enough candidates come 20:00 UTC when the phase change would occur, the nomination phase will instead be extended for another 7 days. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need leadership to come from within this community, the election can't move forward unless there's enough folks stepping up to take responsibility. Did you consider nominating but decided not to for some reason? Now would be a great time to reconsider! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5645" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-09-01T05:50:03.453" LastActivityDate="2017-09-01T05:50:03.453" Title="2017 Moderator Election - We need more candidates!" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4754" CreationDate="2017-08-14T14:46:49.583" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not an answer, but rather a suggestion (plus, bumping the thread).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, we should mark as synonyms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/logit&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;logit&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;logit&lt;/a&gt; (456) $\rightarrow$&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/logistic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;logistic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;logistic&lt;/a&gt; (4150)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While they are not the exact synonyms, a quick glance an the Q&amp;amp;A's reveals that they are &lt;em&gt;used&lt;/em&gt; as if they were synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the points made in comments and by &lt;em&gt;@amoeba&lt;/em&gt; are convincing, this merge should not be controversial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/logistic/synonyms&quot;&gt;I suggested it as synonym&lt;/a&gt;, please cast your votes if you agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="35989" LastEditDate="2017-08-16T11:59:37.947" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T11:59:37.947" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4914" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-16T17:23:14.843" Score="1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;The help center explains&lt;/a&gt; that the minimum offer for a bounty is 50 reputation. I have enough repuation to do so now, but I do not see a link to start a bounty under any question, no matter how old. Why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm somewhat desperate to receive an answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/298019/test-individual-categories-in-a-contingency-table-for-significance&quot;&gt;a question of mine&lt;/a&gt; and would like to offer a bounty once it is two days old to draw some attention to it, but I am confused that I appear not to have that option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user167929" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-08-16T19:31:29.593" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T19:31:29.593" Title="I have 50 rep. Why can I not start a bounty?" Tags="|support|reputation|bounty|privileges|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4901" CreationDate="2017-08-16T19:04:25.850" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aksakal answers your questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Several tag-related tasks require moderator attention. How well do you feel our community deals with them presently? Would you be able &amp;amp; willing to improve the situation (if it is needed)? How? Related links regarding tag burnination &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3031&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3147&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, tag synonym implementation &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1200&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, and tag synonym merging &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2790&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, I don't use tags because in my opinion they're the remnants of the old way to search for information. GMail's slogan used to be &quot;search don't sort,&quot; and tags belong to &quot;sort&quot; approach. We have the search engines and that's how people find the answers and end up asking questions on SE. Nobody's using tags anymore, so I wouldn't sweat about all tag issues, they're irrelevant for the utility of CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you see as the biggest problem facing our site and what would you do to help address it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After people ask all basic questions and get all the answers, the questions become more and more narrow specialized, then fewer and fewer people would be able to answer them. The generalists (dudes with high reputations) will not be able to answer anything and become bored and leave, the questioners don't get answers, the site traffic goes down and it dies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need to find a way to attract the specialists to answer specialized questions. Maybe have incentives to do so by throwing in &quot;house bounties&quot; on very interesting questions from narrow fields.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Do you have any Meta posts that you're particularly proud of, or that you feel best demonstrate your moderation style?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not really&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;One of the issues which crops up frequently on this site is the dividing line between a statistical question and a computing question. At the moment custom and practice is that requests for code or package suggestions are seen as off-topic. Do you think we have the boundary in the right place? If you do not what is your suggestion for the new boundary?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the current approach is right. No need to change. If someone's asking for SAS code to do a certain thing, they should go to SAS forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Warn him at first, then ban if behavior doesn't change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contact that mod, discuss. Usually reasonable people come to the same conclusion when given a chance to discuss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;There is some controversy surrounding our use of Community Wiki status, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2953/&quot;&gt;What is and what should be our policy on making questions community wiki?&lt;/a&gt;. Our current policy is not sufficiently clear, is not being consistently implemented, and is arguably suboptimal (though opinions might differ). What is your opinion on all that? Do you see any of that as a problem? What is your preferred policy? Would you be willing to work towards formulation of some consensus policy and enforcing its consistent implementation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have an opinion. I don't think these things are important for CV to be a valuable source of information. It's like a side business, and doesn't impact the bottom line&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you propose to do about the host of unanswered questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regularly review them, and bump them up from time to time or close/merge. There's no other way about it, someone has to look at them and process them one by one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Do we close questions (for any reason) too much, or too little? Why?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just right&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderation is an orthogonal dimension to answering questions. It's about keeping and order and making the market so to speak. I don't see this as an alternative to answering questions at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36041" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T19:04:25.850" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4901" CreationDate="2017-08-17T21:37:24.520" Score="23" Body="&lt;h1&gt;@amoeba (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election/4#post-297900&quot;&gt;my nomination post&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disclaimer: please do read my nomination post linked above; I am not a perfect candidate and I list some important reservations there.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Several tag-related tasks require moderator attention. How well do you feel our community deals with them presently? Would you be able &amp;amp; willing to improve the situation (if it is needed)? How? Related links regarding tag burnination &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3031&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3147&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, tag synonym implementation &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1200&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, and tag synonym merging &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2790&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: this was my own question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I consider tag management an important part of the moderator job, which has been a little neglected until now. If I become a mod, this is one issue where I am planning to make a difference. Apart from simply paying attention to the upcoming tag issues, I would like to work out some guiding principles/policies of tag moderation. In particular I hope we will be able (through discussions on Meta) to decide on how we are merging tag synonyms, how we are burninating bad tags, etc., and then I can use the diamond powers to implement these decisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you see as the biggest problem facing our site and what would you do to help address it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest problem is probably a large amount of poor questions that are not really answerable but are not closed either. A partial solution would be to close more, but we don't want to close hastily whereas often such questions are long and intricate and require substantial effort to triage. I am not sure much can be done about it. And frankly, I doubt I will be able to make a difference here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Do you have any Meta posts that you're particularly proud of, or that you feel best demonstrate your moderation style?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=user%3a28666&quot;&gt;relatively active&lt;/a&gt; on Meta. Not sure if there is anything to be &quot;proud of&quot;, but a cursory glance through the list of most upvoted posts should show what kind of meta-topics I have been interested in. Many are about tag-related issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;One of the issues which crops up frequently on this site is the dividing line between a statistical question and a computing question. At the moment custom and practice is that requests for code or package suggestions are seen as off-topic. Do you think we have the boundary in the right place? If you do not what is your suggestion for the new boundary?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that the boundary is in about the right place, at least in theory: if the question needs statistical expertise to answer then it is on-topic. In practice I sometimes see threads closed (or left open) inappropriately, but I guess some mistakes, as well as some grey zone, are inevitable. Several recent Meta threads when on-topic Qs were either closed or migrated away to SO come to mind; we have usually been able to resolve such cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I have no experience in disciplinary measures on this forum, I would discuss such a case with other mods. My impression is that such cases are quite rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ping that mod and discuss it with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;There is some controversy surrounding our use of Community Wiki status, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2953/&quot;&gt;What is and what should be our policy on making questions community wiki?&lt;/a&gt;. Our current policy is not sufficiently clear, is not being consistently implemented, and is arguably suboptimal (though opinions might differ). What is your opinion on all that? Do you see any of that as a problem? What is your preferred policy? Would you be willing to work towards formulation of some consensus policy and enforcing its consistent implementation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: that was my own question. Also, the linked Meta question was mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been annoyed by our use of CW and, personally, I might prefer to approach it differently, but it is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; my intention to push against the consensus. What I would perhaps like to do as a mod, is to get back to that Meta discussion and try to extract/formulate/discuss some consensus view. I'd like it to be written down, and then I can try to make sure that it's implemented (more) consistently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What do you propose to do about the host of unanswered questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See above. I don't think I will be able to do much about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Do we close questions (for any reason) too much, or too little? Why?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See above. I think on average about right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already am above 20k. Some tasks, e.g. tag-related tasks, require diamond powers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I endorse @gung who is IMHO an ideal mod candidate and should be everybody's first choice. I will be happy if @Tim wins the second place; as I said elsewhere he is much more active in both answering and moderation than I currently am. If they win, I will pester &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt; with all the tag issues :) Both of them demonstrated their interest in moderating tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2017-08-17T21:37:24.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4917" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4918" CreationDate="2017-08-18T01:39:00.970" Score="5" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/291324/2126&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; is a nearly verbatim copy of my answer to the duplicate question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/128742/mixed-logistic-model-with-complete-separation&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (I answered before I marked the question as a dupe: I'm not sure what happened, but I might have answered before I found the dupe).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to have been done in good faith (it links to my question), and I can imagine it was copied with the intent of giving it greater visibility to people who got to the first question, but it seems wrong somehow (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4499/is-partial-duplication-of-answers-acceptable&quot;&gt;this meta question&lt;/a&gt; suggests it is, anyway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the appropriate way to proceed here? Flag for deletion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2126" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-08-18T08:08:25.223" LastActivityDate="2017-08-18T08:08:25.223" Title="What to do about an answer copied verbatim by another user (in an attempt to be helpful)?" Tags="|discussion|answers|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4917" CreationDate="2017-08-18T02:41:21.160" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Speaking in general terms rather than to the specifics.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone copies &lt;em&gt;part&lt;/em&gt; of an answer but correctly references it (credits the original author) and quotes the part they took (typically using a blockquote), that's usually fine unless that's essentially the entire answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's several things to do if someone copies a whole answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;dealing with the copied answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;attempt to guide the poster (e.g. comment to let them know that this is not a suitable thing to do, and explain how to quote and reference what they need, or to flag as duplicate if the question is a duplicate), and&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;either edit to quote and credit (where suitable), or &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;vote to delete or flag to delete or flag to convert to a comment (e.g. if the copied answer is only somewhat relevant rather than a real answer)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a copied answer typically indicates a duplicated question; if that's the case&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;flag as duplicate, vote to close as duplicate, or mark as duplicate if you have a relevant gold tag badge if this is the case&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if the question is essentially an exact duplicate and has very good answers that would therefore answer the original that it's a duplicate of, you may want to ask for a merge; flagging to close as a duplicate (etc) as above is still the first thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="2126" LastEditDate="2017-08-18T03:15:00.870" LastActivityDate="2017-08-18T03:15:00.870" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4919" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4920" CreationDate="2017-08-18T09:52:22.013" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted a question over at math.stackexchange involving the probability of all &#xA;TRUE scenarios that fit the constraints I establish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A link is here (assuming I'm allowed to link to it here to provide context):&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2395394/solving-ptrue-of-finding-counterpart-pairs-in-2-sets-with-constraints-involvin&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2395394/solving-ptrue-of-finding-counterpart-pairs-in-2-sets-with-constraints-involvin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing as it's about probability...and I'm a bit confused about this...is it OK or acceptable to also post the question here?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get a feeling there are rules generally against such a thing, but I could not find them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28928" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2017-08-18T10:18:14.947" LastActivityDate="2017-08-18T10:18:14.947" Title="Reposting a Question from Math.stackexchange on Stats.stackexchange? Specifically one about probability?" Tags="|discussion|cross-posting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2017-08-18T10:22:06.267" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4919" CreationDate="2017-08-18T10:16:51.343" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's in the first page of the help -- &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt;, third-last paragraph says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please note, however, that cross-posting is not encouraged on SE sites. Choose one best location to post your question. Later, if it proves better suited on another site, it can be migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And broadly speaking, this is the position. However, it's mitigated somewhat by meta-posts here that suggest that if you expect different &lt;em&gt;kinds&lt;/em&gt; of answers (e.g. seeking legal aspects of a question vs interpersonal aspects would each be on topic in their respective SE sites); in that case the kinds of answers sought would be fundamentally different and we'd see that as reasonable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2017-08-18T10:16:51.343" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1187" CreationDate="2017-08-18T12:25:47.587" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As someone who is the owner of an online business which relies heavily on consultants of many different types and flavors - I'll summarize by saying &lt;strong&gt;ABSOLUTELY.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why?  Cross-validation.  Or, at the risk of being semantically reprimanded for using that word in a more general sense, they've done forms of &quot;work&quot; or &quot;their art&quot; in a raw form and it's peer-reviewed.  It's packaged into a points system and a useful profile I can view with links to other things questions/answers.  Pending there's enough data, I don't know what more I could ask for in terms of determining their specific expertise(s) &amp;amp; the level(s) of it/them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;True expertise isn't the end all be all, but it's much harder to find than the ideal general qualities of someone you want to work with such as judging their enthusiasm for what I need them for, consistency, follow through, availability, communication, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, I wish it was more &quot;acceptable&quot; to contact others in this way on StackExchange...but that gets delicate.  I don't want to dirty the spirit that drives the &lt;strong&gt;actual&lt;/strong&gt; experts here to contribute by mixing it with consulting or business opportunities.  I don't want to be that person violating the integrity of things.  In a way, the way StackExchange inherently has drawn the knowledge and expertise it has is because of people's passion for the topics discussed as well as perhaps a few other reasons (the psychological value &quot;points&quot; may have).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually have used and continually use consultants from several different fields of expertise with all sorts of skillsets for many different quoted prices, from different countries, with different backgrounds and reviews, and even age ranges (one time I found a genius 14 year old programmer who was one of the best people I had ever hired...a year later he got offered a 6 figure salary from some company, lol). I have a tremendous amount of experience in figuring out who the right person is for the task I need accomplished - quickly too.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But, do you believe me?  Should you believe me?  All I did was write that paragraph.&lt;/strong&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exactly.  Maybe you want to figure that out though.  How would you do it?   In the same way someone could have a Ph.D. in a field I need help with or &quot;worked for X/Y company&quot; with references...that's nice but what did they DO?  What have they done?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I care about watching them in action and seeing exactly what they've done.  I want to review it and also, especially, have it peer-reviewed.  And really, that's what makes the most sense.  Get the rawest form of data and cross-validate it.  Of course, I consider if someone has a Ph.D. or not, has experience at a company, etc. on their resume...but I don't believe it's anything like getting that &quot;raw&quot; work data.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been burned very badly by some consultants - to the point where...well to be honest...they could have broken my entire business.  For example, with regards to programming specifically, I actually now require viewing a potential consultant's GitHub account (don't have one?...that means something already) to &#xA;view projects they've coded.  Then, I review their work in addition to having a few independent consultants I've hired purely to review a candidate's work (other experts in the domain) as well as other competing candidates review that person's work (I never have people do work for me for free of any form though) - which, especially with the latter group, yields interesting &amp;amp; extremely practical information in terms of their motivations as well as other qualities I need to know.         &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In saying all of this and considering the culture of the site....that if the person's profile insinuates somehow that &quot;their door is open for business&quot; I will take advantage of that and see what happens.  I would do that MUCH, MUCH more than someone I met on Upwork, was referred to me, or I met in absolutely any other manner possible besides, perhaps, the authors of academic research...who tend to usually be busy with academia instead of consulting work.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28928" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2017-08-18T14:49:22.570" LastActivityDate="2017-08-18T14:49:22.570" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4923" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-21T16:44:53.290" Score="17" ViewCount="275" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to understand how blind people read this forum and what should we do to make it more friendly to them. Is there a simple guide or write up on this subject?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36041" OwnerDisplayName="Aksakal" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-08-27T19:07:25.987" LastActivityDate="2017-10-18T16:34:29.757" Title="How to make math/stats discussion friendly to blind people?" Tags="|discussion|design|participation|user-interface|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4924" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-21T19:15:20.363" Score="6" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a proposal for new a site covering complex network and analysis. I need your help. Please have a look through the example questions linked below. Do you see a preponderance of questions that cannot be asked on either Cross Validated or another Stack Exchange site? (You can ignore questions that would not be a good fit on &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; SE site)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proposal: &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/104390/complex-networks&quot;&gt;Complex Networks&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal of Area 51 is to propose &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; subjects&lt;/strong&gt; that cannot already be asked elsewhere on a live Stack Exchange site(s). The community already provide &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/a/26033/5&quot;&gt;a list of sites&lt;/a&gt; from to which to draw inspiration, but does this proposal constitute an inextricable cross-dicipline problem where the example don't belong on &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; site? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; generally split off subjects simply to give them their own space, so does this proposal define a &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T07:31:47.073" Title="Is Complex Networks and analysis a new site, or predominantly on topic here?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4925" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4926" CreationDate="2017-08-21T20:05:17.533" Score="7" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;The side box that appears on every page currently displays that our moderator election ends in just under a day:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cm1ZC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cm1ZC.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;the election page&lt;/a&gt; states that we have about 8 days left:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lOtfU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lOtfU.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess is that this is because the end date of the nomination phase got pushed back a week. Can we update the side box to accurately capture the end date of the election?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40036" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2017-08-21T20:48:35.660" LastActivityDate="2017-08-21T20:49:43.810" Title="&quot;Upcoming events&quot; side box lists the wrong election end date" Tags="|bug|status-completed|election|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4925" CreationDate="2017-08-21T20:49:43.810" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you for noticing.  I believe this was a problem only in the community announcement, because the election page still says it's over in eight days.  I have added seven days to the deadline in the announcement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2017-08-21T20:49:43.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4924" CreationDate="2017-08-21T21:26:08.857" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say there's definite overlap with our coverage but it's easy to argue that there's plenty outside statistics and machine learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that Data Science got up (with which our overlap is much more significant and with which there were substantial and strong objections raised here, on multiple occasions) I really can't see a major issue here -- if &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; was somehow okay, why would we concern ourselves very much about this less substantial overlap?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-08-22T07:31:47.073" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T07:31:47.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4923" CreationDate="2017-08-22T00:02:34.257" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not literally blind, but I'm legally blind, with corrected acuity on the order of 20/200. My condition could be more informatively described as &quot;low vision&quot;. So I'm just as dependent on my vision as a normally sighted person, but I can answer your question to some extent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most important rule is that text should be text. That is, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3176&quot;&gt;don't use images of text when you could use real text&lt;/a&gt;, or at least accompany the image with a transcript or alt-text. For mathematical notation, use MathJax. The advantage here for the visually impaired is that real text, unlike images, can be enlarged without loss of quality, reflowed (trying to read a paragraph that requires horizontal scrolling will drive sane men mad), and read with text-to-speech or a refreshable Braille display. Unrelatedly to accessibility, but perhaps more importantly, text is more useful for software: it can be searched, indexed, and translated; it can be transmitted more easily through media without image support; and it takes up less disk space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Images are still going to be important in data analysis because of data graphics, like plots. The text-should-be-text rule doesn't get you far here because tick labels etc. aren't very useful to somebody who can't see the image. But I can still make suggestions to help make images legible to the visually impaired. Aim for high contrast (e.g., use black text on white rather than gray text on white or colored text). Avoid color combinations that will run afoul of the most common types of color-blindness (ideally, plots should be legible in grayscale, for the sake of grayscale screens and printouts). Avoid unwanted moiré effects from tightly packed parallel stripes. Edward Tufte's &lt;em&gt;Visual Display of Quantitative Information&lt;/em&gt; advocates a sparse visual style that in general makes plots more accessible to the visually impaired, although it doesn't pursue accessibility deliberately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14076" LastEditorUserId="14076" LastEditDate="2017-10-18T16:34:29.757" LastActivityDate="2017-10-18T16:34:29.757" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4929" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4930" CreationDate="2017-08-22T09:34:44.463" Score="12" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just flagged: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/299139/r-solution-for-high-performance-and-large-datasets&quot;&gt;R solution for high performance and large datasets&lt;/a&gt; for closing since it's quite obviously off-topic (I can't really see as instructions for setting up a Spark server from R Studio could be considered a statistical question). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm not sure if this can be considered a programming question either (it doesn't concern a specific language, but more correctly specific programs/cloud platforms, and I'm not sure how one would go around providing a sample test case). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among the various options of the &lt;code&gt;close&lt;/code&gt; flag, one can propose a new site to which the question would be migrated. Currently, three sites are allowed, Math Overflow, Stack Overflow and Math Exchange. Of course it wouldn't make sense to include &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; possible SE sites, but what about adding just Data Science SE? Questions like the one I just flagged look to me exactly the kind of question which would be on-topic there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my new position I work on and/or collaborate with people which work on problems very similar to that described by the OP,  and they're quite correctly (IMO) considered to be Data Science in the private sector.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: I see that the same question has been flagged by other users. Regardless of where it will be migrated (or closed), I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who doesn't believe it's a valid CV question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT2&lt;/strong&gt;: in meantime, here is a question which has been (correctly, IMO) migrated to DS&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/22591/what-are-the-downsides-to-microsoft-azure-vs-scikit-learn-r&quot;&gt;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/22591/what-are-the-downsides-to-microsoft-azure-vs-scikit-learn-r&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wasn't involved in the migration, and surely a single case doesn't justify adding DS to the quick list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="58675" LastEditDate="2017-08-26T20:55:45.810" LastActivityDate="2017-09-12T14:10:17.097" Title="Would it make sense to add Data Science SE to the list of suggested sites for migration of a question?" Tags="|feature-request|migration|flagging|user-interface|datascience-stackexchange|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4929" CreationDate="2017-08-22T17:02:54.780" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The migration dialog provides a short list of target sites.  These are the sites all users may choose as likely targets.  Because it's important to get along with other sites, it is crucial that all our users with vote-to-migrate privileges well understand the on-topic criteria at those sites.  For years the only options have been SO, Math, and our own Meta site (the one you're on now).  But we can change that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until DS (Data Science) graduated from Beta status last month, it wasn't possible to include it on the target list: beta sites aren't allowed.  This discussion therefore is timely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This year we have migrated approximately 370 posts to other SE sites.  Of those, only three were to DS. We migrate (slightly) more frequently to Quantitative Finance and Open Data.  Other sites we migrate to (rarely) include Signal Processing, Physics, Academia, Economics, and Computer Science.  If DS is in the discussion, then so should these be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the best way to utilize those five default target options in the migration dialog would be periodically to review whither we migrate questions and put the top five targets into the default list.  (Roland, in a comment, makes an astute observation about &quot;confirmation bias.&quot;  The implication is it's likely that whatever five targets we first include will become a self-perpetuating set of top five targets because the ease of migrating to them will automatically make them the most popular.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2017-09-12T14:10:17.097" LastActivityDate="2017-09-12T14:10:17.097" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4929" CreationDate="2017-08-22T20:27:49.083" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The particular question that you refer to should belong to either R or to the databases. The reason why it's not a generic high performance question is because the capabilities to deal with large data sets are very different in different platforms. What may work for R will not necessarily work fro SAS. This depends on the platform architecture, availability of drivers, native vs. ODBC/JDBC etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there was not &quot;R&quot; in question then this would belong to databases or other IT domain, perhaps, SO. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36041" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T20:27:49.083" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4932" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4933" CreationDate="2017-08-25T11:07:10.483" Score="4" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;This must be somewhere in the help system, but I fail to find it with SE search which is not very good!  So, how do I see the edit history?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-08-25T15:06:08.447" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T15:06:08.447" Title="How can I access the edit history of a post?" Tags="|support|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4932" CreationDate="2017-08-25T12:37:48.157" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Click on the edit date shown, centered, immediately beneath the post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WT8Z2.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WT8Z2.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screen shot&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This works everywhere else on SE wherever you have edit privileges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T12:37:48.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4923" CreationDate="2017-08-28T03:12:41.990" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is mostly an addendum to @Kodiologist's enlightening answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest downloading and installing an app that simulates different types of color impairment, and then running your visualizations through it to make sure everyone can enjoy them.  This is obviously especially important if you are using color to communicate information in your picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm on a mac at home and work, and I use &lt;a href=&quot;http://colororacle.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Color Oracle&lt;/a&gt; which is simple and non-invasive.  If anyone else has recommendations, especially for other platforms, please leave them in the comments and I'll edit them into the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74500" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T03:12:41.990" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4937" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-29T20:01:23.353" Score="28" ViewCount="353" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cross Validated's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election/4&quot;&gt;fourth moderator election&lt;/a&gt; has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the 2 new moderators are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/7290&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/flair/7290.png&quot; alt=&quot;gung&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/35989&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/flair/35989.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tim&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They'll be joining &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;the existing crew&lt;/a&gt; shortly — please thank them for volunteering, and share your assistance and advice with them as they learn the ropes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For details on how the voting played out, you can download the election results &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election/4&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.opavote.com/results/5682754851176448/0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;view a summary report online&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27774" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-09-13T22:44:59.367" LastActivityDate="2017-09-13T22:44:59.367" Title="2017 Community Moderator Election Results" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4891" CreationDate="2017-08-31T16:57:43.100" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is pretty much answered in the comments (and complemented in the brief exchange in chat), but I'll compile all that here just to make sure the question isn't left unanswered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, we're not the best place for open-ended discussions. As &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;the tour&lt;/a&gt; points out, our model is best suited to &quot;[a]sk questions, get answers, no distractions&quot; and that you shouldn't ask &quot;[q]uestions with too many possible answers or that would require an extremely long answer.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply put, we're not a forum. Still, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;as Scortchi points out in a comment above&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;pertinent addenda, amplifications, caveats, corrections, criticisms, &amp;amp;c. arising from discussion in comments are eventually digested &amp;amp; assimilated into well-crafted answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That leads us to comments, then: the tour page also adds that &quot;This site is all about &lt;strong&gt;getting answers&lt;/strong&gt;. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The different communities in the network all use the same model, but have slight differences on how they handle discussion in the comment sections, and when to clean these up — but as the above quote says, the approach that best suits our model is to avoid extended discussion in comments, and these are considered ephemeral and disposable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4891/creation-of-topics-instead-of-questions-for-linking-with-course-notes#comment13967_4891&quot;&gt;as Scortchi points out in the same comment above&lt;/a&gt;, that doesn't mean the communities are fanatic (or sometime they're just not always extremely diligent) in enforcing these policies; especially if the discussion in question is actually a good and productive one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that being said, if you can find a way to frame your posts as actual questions that need actual answers, as opposed to posts that simply invite open-ended discussions, I believe this is a good place for you to do so. If the open-endedness is something you're striving for, though, maybe we're not the best place — &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.discourse.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Discourse&lt;/a&gt; might be a good alternative :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regards to how to tag these, should you come to the conclusion that you can find a way to make the discussions/questions fit in well with our model, I'll defer to you and the community — the community is really better suited to figure out how to categorize their content than I am. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72321" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T16:57:43.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4827" CreationDate="2017-09-06T17:54:46.990" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with using a historical lock for the case you've described. It's... kind of exactly the situation the historical lock was invented to handle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Terminology note: in this post, when I talk about locks, I'm referring to historical locks only. What I say may not apply to the other kinds of locks we have, like the temporary kind of lock used on posts where comment threads are devolving into unproductive personal attacks.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first glance, a lock might seem like a &quot;super-close&quot;, but locking and closing are different animals. A locked post is like a museum exhibit: frozen in time and unchangeable, something to just goggle at for a moment before moving on. A closed post is more &quot;alive&quot;; the only thing that can't be done there is adding new answers. More relevant to this situation, the close state carries the implicit message &quot;please improve this question so that it can be reopened.&quot; It doesn't send that &quot;this is permanently bad&quot; signal. And it's relatively easy for a few people to quietly reopen it. For more info, see the network meta's community-generated FAQs on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10582/what-is-a-closed-on-hold-or-duplicate-question&quot;&gt;closing&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/22228/what-is-a-locked-post&quot;&gt;general locking&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126587/what-is-a-historical-lock-and-what-is-it-used-for&quot;&gt;historical locking&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your concerns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It can only be done via flagging, i.e. community cannot take care of locking without mods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Locking is a pretty severe action. It should be used only rarely, and in exceptional cases. (I'm using the programmer's definition of &quot;exception&quot; there, meaning somewhere between unusual, non-standard, unexpected and slightly problematic.) We require a mod's intervention to make extra sure that locks are only applied to posts that deserve it. The actual process isn't hard or time-consuming, the mod's role there is really just oversight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Similarly, it can only be undone via flagging, i.e. community cannot reverse a wrong decision without mods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For something as disruptive as locking, we didn't want people to get into fights the way we've seen &quot;close/reopen wars&quot; in the past. And as rare as locking is intended to be, &lt;em&gt;un&lt;/em&gt;-locking should be a dang unicorn. This is because locking shouldn't have happened in the first place for a post that didn't deserve it or wasn't going to stay locked. So, again, we want mod oversight before a change in lock status is made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When a thread is locked, it's not possible to edit any answers, post new comments, or even vote on them. I.e. if there is a mistake in one of the answers, it's there forever, and one cannot even comment to point it out. Note that sometimes we are talking about very visible threads with large number of views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an annoying side effect, to be sure. When it comes up, it can be a sign of an error in process. Locking isn't supposed to be anyone's first choice of action when thinking about how to handle a post. In many cases, &lt;strong&gt;especially&lt;/strong&gt; in the case of incorrect information, it may be better to delete a post outright than put a historical lock on it. This is the sort of thing should be considered and discussed &lt;strong&gt;before&lt;/strong&gt; a decision is made to lock a given post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The displayed message says that the thread is locked &quot;for historical significance&quot;, but often there is no particular significance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well... don't do that, then. Lock those posts that actually have historical significance, and do something else (close, delete, ignore) with the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29551" LastActivityDate="2017-09-06T17:54:46.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4943" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4944" CreationDate="2017-09-07T19:59:34.663" Score="11" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would it accord with community norms to offer a bounty with the intention of stimulating new answers to a question, coming from certain perspectives that one regards as neglected on CV? For example, one perspective I would like to see more vigorously represented in answers here is one that maintains skepticism about purely mechanical modes of statistical inference (especially in the social and medical sciences), and urges making meaningful connections between statistical models and realistic theoretical mechanisms/constructs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because one objection I can anticipate is that offering such a bounty might seem like 'lobbying' unfairly for a certain POV, and (worse, perhaps) suppressing alternative POVs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Epilogue:&lt;/strong&gt; Thanks to guidance provided from all sides here, I've now offered the contemplated bounty on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/301744/41404&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, and am seeking a suitable way to cross-post to the Cognitive Sciences community. I gather that designing workable &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/199989/369966&quot;&gt;cross-posting on multiple SE communities&lt;/a&gt; remains something of an unsolved problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I took the plainest approach to cross-posting, &lt;a href=&quot;https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/q/18090/16960&quot;&gt;as seen here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41404" LastEditorUserId="41404" LastEditDate="2017-09-10T18:11:59.377" LastActivityDate="2017-09-10T18:11:59.377" Title="Is it WRONG to 'tip the scales' toward certain answer POVs with a bounty?" Tags="|discussion|bounty|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4943" CreationDate="2017-09-07T20:06:41.667" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's a good, if perhaps risky, use of your hard-earned reputation: it presumes the bounty will actually result in the kinds of answers you seek.  As alternatives (or supplements) to this strategy you might consider (a) posting your own answers; (b) rewarding existing answers of the type you wish to encourage; (c) promoting selected questions or answers in communities of people who might be inspired to post the answers you are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T20:06:41.667" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4945" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4954" CreationDate="2017-09-11T12:48:46.440" Score="1" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I used the chat to ask a question which is IMO clearly off-topic here, but looking at the chat history I realized that there is very little traffic, so I'm going to ask suggestions to make it on-topic here (of course, it may just not be  possible to make it on-topic: if so, I'll just not post the question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like hiking quite a lot, and I've recorded a fair amount of track records with an app on Android (&lt;strong&gt;I can provide the app name if needed&lt;/strong&gt;). I would like to compute summary statistics for my tracks (e.g., average length of a track, min, max, $q_{10}$, $q_{90}$, etc.). Is there a simple, preferably free way to do that?  I can export the tracks in various formats (CSV, GPX, KML, KMZ, etc.), so I could use R to postprocess them, but I don't know the format (for example, I don't know what units the app uses for speed, when using the CSV format), so I was wondering if there were pre-made solutions, or if I should just bite the bullet, study the format and write my own R script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-09-11T19:57:08.357" LastActivityDate="2017-09-16T14:04:20.467" Title="Any way to make this question on processing tracking data on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4948" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4949" CreationDate="2017-09-12T00:58:45.523" Score="12" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a moment of self-doubt, I googled a really simple question about how to compute standard deviations of a survey experiment.  I found plenty of answers, but none on sites which are as good quality as &lt;em&gt;Cross Validated&lt;/em&gt; (I saw lots of ads for flat bellies, and answers which are clearly spam).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I thought I'd ask the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/302653/how-to-compute-the-standard-error-of-a-simple-yes-no-survey&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  After an hour, all I got was comments linking to the definition of standard error, and how to ask appropriate questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this not a place for asking simple questions?  When I ask simple questions on stackoverflow, I usually get multiple answers and upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="155185" LastEditorUserId="155185" LastEditDate="2017-09-12T09:39:20.653" LastActivityDate="2017-09-12T09:39:20.653" Title="Is this the place for simple questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4948" CreationDate="2017-09-12T01:27:55.387" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is absolutely a place where you can ask simple questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it's important to understand how things work. In particular&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;homework-style questions are treated specially (as noted there under your question), and usually require a clear indication of some level of effort on the part of the asker&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;good questions (see here in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;help/how-to-ask&lt;/a&gt;) should have made a clear effort at &lt;em&gt;search and research&lt;/em&gt; (again, as noted there in comments under your question)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Links were provided for both issues, so I thought what was required from you to get to a suitable question (in the form of edits you should make) would be pretty clear. With very simple (and very simply answered) questions it's even more important to follow the guidelines (otherwise you risk giving the impression you expect the site to do the equivalent of finding what page of your textbook the information is on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there something at (the relevant parts of) those links that you think is ambiguous or not explained? We can perhaps clarify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-09-12T01:38:17.397" LastActivityDate="2017-09-12T01:38:17.397" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4870" CreationDate="2017-09-13T16:03:41.957" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&amp;amp;q=stats.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CV shows up in papers sometimes&lt;/a&gt;, so I turned on the citation option this morning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/R0YRy.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/R0YRy.png&quot; alt=&quot;New cite link&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This option should make it just a bit easier to reference the great work you all are doing here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27774" LastEditorUserId="27774" LastEditDate="2017-09-13T20:19:43.763" LastActivityDate="2017-09-13T20:19:43.763" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4952" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-14T13:31:57.463" Score="5" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/303130&quot;&gt;question about error analysis&lt;/a&gt; and included a follow up question which is strongly related to the first one. I'm unsure whether it would be best to post them as separate questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm new to this stack, and I worry that if I post them both, I might seem like I'm spamming, but on the other hand, my initial question is already pretty long, and so it might seem like I'm asking too much for 1 question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last thing, I didn't include the actual real-world problem that inspired this question because I felt the the question was long enough as it is, and I figured the general case would make a better, more interesting question than my specific problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="135361" LastEditorUserId="135361" LastEditDate="2017-09-16T21:21:57.010" LastActivityDate="2017-09-16T21:21:57.010" Title="Should my two part question be asked separately?" Tags="|discussion|questions|too-broad|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4953" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-14T16:31:03.920" Score="14" ViewCount="380" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Moving average&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;moving-average model&lt;/em&gt; are two quite different animals, but they seem to be conflated in the name and the description of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/moving-average&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;moving-average&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;moving-average&lt;/a&gt; tag. The excerpt implies &lt;em&gt;moving average&lt;/em&gt;, while the full Wiki considers &lt;em&gt;moving-average model&lt;/em&gt;, although the description is not quite correct. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The confusion has been experienced in practice with users misinterpreting the real object of the question and posting answers that address the wrong object. Hence, the problem is real, not just theoretical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can we do? I suggest creating two separate tags, because these two objects are quite different but easily confused, especially when hidden under the same tag. Tag names would be, naturally, &lt;code&gt;moving-average&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;moving-average-model&lt;/code&gt;. The Wiki excerpt of each tag would include a warning that there is another similar tag but with quite a different object under it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since one of the tags already exists, what remains to be done is to create the other tag and retag questions appropriately. There are 134 of them under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/moving-average&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;moving-average&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;moving-average&lt;/a&gt; tag; one can go over all of them one by one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that sound reasonable? Should we do something else? Or do nothing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; The differences between the two are the clearest in a forecasting context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &lt;em&gt;moving average&lt;/em&gt;, $\hat x_{t}=\alpha_1 x_{t-1}+\dots+\alpha_q x_{t-q}$ where $\alpha_1+\dots+\alpha_q=1$. Normally we take $\alpha_1=\dots\alpha_q=1/q$.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &lt;em&gt;moving-average model&lt;/em&gt;, $\hat x_{t}=\mu+\theta_1 \varepsilon_{t-1}+\dots+\theta_q \varepsilon_{t-q}$ where $\varepsilon_t$ is defined as $\varepsilon_t := x_t-\hat x_t$.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit 2:&lt;/strong&gt; As per @amoeba's request, I have checked the most recent 30 questions (out of 134 in total) tagged with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/moving-average&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;moving-average&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;moving-average&lt;/a&gt; tag, and here is what these questions are about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;7 are about &lt;em&gt;moving average&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;16 are about &lt;em&gt;moving-average model&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;4 are unclear (could be either &lt;em&gt;moving average&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;moving-average model&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 is neither about one nor the other (mis-tagged).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not have the energy to go through more questions this time. I even managed to lose two out of $30$ ($7+16+4+1=28=30-2$).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastEditorUserId="53690" LastEditDate="2017-09-21T19:50:06.613" LastActivityDate="2017-09-23T00:12:08.350" Title="Confusing [moving-average] tag: split into two?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-reorganization|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4945" CreationDate="2017-09-16T14:04:20.467" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds like a programming/software issue, so it would be off-topic. You need to (1) check the documentation/&quot;hack&quot; the app to obtain your data and then (2) transform it into R-readable format. For (1) you would need to ask someone who knows the app (stackoverflow, or user forums) and (2) is just a question about finding appropriate software to transform between data-types.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2017-09-16T14:04:20.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4953" CreationDate="2017-09-18T12:16:12.743" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us split &lt;code&gt;moving-average&lt;/code&gt; into &lt;code&gt;moving-average-filter&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;moving-average-model&lt;/code&gt; and make nice Wiki excerpts warning not to confuse one with the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pros: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One tag name is not an extension of the other, thus limiting the confusion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The notion of &lt;em&gt;moving-average filter&lt;/em&gt; may be unclear (although once the tag excerpt is read, it will hopefully be clear).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Moving-average model&lt;/em&gt; itself is a filter just like &lt;em&gt;moving average&lt;/em&gt;, although perhaps less known. Thus &lt;code&gt;moving-average filter&lt;/code&gt; retains the ambiguity of the current &lt;code&gt;moving-average&lt;/code&gt; tag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The old &lt;code&gt;moving-average&lt;/code&gt; tag can be reintroduced unless blacklisted, which is hard to achieve.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastEditorUserId="53690" LastEditDate="2017-09-18T13:45:43.450" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T13:45:43.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4953" CreationDate="2017-09-18T12:17:14.840" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us keep &lt;code&gt;moving-average&lt;/code&gt; for &lt;em&gt;moving average&lt;/em&gt; (and include a warning about its use in the Wiki excerpt) and retag questions about &lt;em&gt;moving-average model&lt;/em&gt; (MA(q) model) as &lt;code&gt;arima&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pros: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One tag name is not an extension of the other, thus limiting the confusion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No separate tag for &lt;em&gt;moving-average model&lt;/em&gt; (unlike &lt;em&gt;autoregression&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T12:17:14.840" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4953" CreationDate="2017-09-18T12:18:37.280" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us keep &lt;code&gt;moving-average&lt;/code&gt; for &lt;em&gt;moving average&lt;/em&gt; and retag questions about &lt;em&gt;moving-average model&lt;/em&gt; (MA(q) model) as &lt;code&gt;moving-average-model&lt;/code&gt;, and make nice Wiki excerpts warning not to confuse one with the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pros: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tag names reflect the underlying objects precisely.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One tag name is an extension of the other, thus adding some confusion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T12:18:37.280" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4958" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4960" CreationDate="2017-09-19T23:54:46.867" Score="7" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;The top bar has changed and I can't see the link to help any more. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where do I find the help pages now? Are they gone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Everyone should be seeing the change now.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-10-24T05:01:39.930" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T14:14:15.847" Title="Where did the link to the help go?" Tags="|support|design|user-interface|help-center|top-bar|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4958" CreationDate="2017-09-19T23:57:52.683" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Users with low reputation should still see a help link in the top bar, but users with (I think) more than some particular amount of reputation will see other tools in the same position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The help pages are still there. Indeed there's a link to them at the &lt;em&gt;bottom&lt;/em&gt; of each page, in the leftmost list of links&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-09-20T16:42:51.380" LastActivityDate="2017-09-20T16:42:51.380" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4958" CreationDate="2017-09-19T23:58:12.837" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note: the link to help can now be found under the SE 'hamburger' with chat.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some ways, I think the new top bar is better than the old one.  Not having a convenient link to the help or tour pages, etc., was a mistake, though, in my opinion.  You can still find links to those in the bottom left corner of every page under &quot;CROSS VALIDATED&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4BjYM.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4BjYM.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2017-09-22T12:50:47.243" LastActivityDate="2017-09-22T12:50:47.243" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3175" CreationDate="2017-09-20T19:36:10.357" Score="17" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Posting a question as an introductory foray into conversation&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hey guys!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well it seems to me like like your doing a lot of test anxiety around here. LOL Idont really understand this stuff, but i want to learn!&#xA;  Anyway I was just wondering if my &lt;strong&gt;[vague ideas about stats]&lt;/strong&gt;,or really big data/machine learning (haha jk) are even &lt;strong&gt;[possibly to meaningfully articulate]&lt;/strong&gt; here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;i dont know what do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thank you very much.&#xA;  Avery&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Treating stats.stackexchange (or any other SE) as simply an online forum for discussion should prompt immediate closure. A kind approach would be to direct the author's attention to other sites (e.g., reddit, etc.) in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44269" LastEditorUserId="44269" LastEditDate="2017-09-20T22:07:13.920" LastActivityDate="2017-09-20T22:07:13.920" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4953" CreationDate="2017-09-22T19:55:05.537" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This is a tweak / combination of two of @RichardHardy's answers &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4957/7290&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4956/7290&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let us keep &lt;code&gt;moving-average&lt;/code&gt; for &lt;em&gt;moving average&lt;/em&gt; (and include a warning about its use in the Wiki excerpt) and retag questions about &lt;em&gt;moving-average model&lt;/em&gt; (MA(q) model) as &lt;code&gt;arima&lt;/code&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, we can create a new tag, &lt;code&gt;[moving-average-model]&lt;/code&gt;, that will be made a synonym of &lt;code&gt;[arima]&lt;/code&gt;.  An appropriate excerpt will need to be written for this tag.  Once it is made a synonym, anyone who uses it will have it automatically replaced by &lt;code&gt;[arima]&lt;/code&gt;.  Note that there will have to be at least one question that remains tagged with &lt;code&gt;mam&lt;/code&gt; so that the tag and its excerpt continues to show up when people type tag suggestions on questions.  Moreover, &lt;code&gt;mam&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;arima&lt;/code&gt; would not be merged.  The point of leaving mapped tags unmerged is that the tag is more salient when someone searches on, say, &quot;&lt;code&gt;movi&lt;/code&gt;&quot;.  If the tags are merged, they will see &quot;&lt;code&gt;[moving-average]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;[arima]&lt;/code&gt;&quot; as their options, and unless they read very carefully, and understand that a moving-average &lt;em&gt;model&lt;/em&gt; is actually a special case of an ARIMA model, they would naturally choose &lt;code&gt;[moving-average]&lt;/code&gt; incorrectly.  However, if the tags are not merged, &lt;code&gt;[moving-average-model]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; show up with its distinctive excerpt.  To further clarify how what people will see can differ, consider these two screenshots searching for a merged tag or a tag that is only a synonym: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merged (&quot;residual-analysis&quot; is not very noticeable, and its excerpt is gone):   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4K9b6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4K9b6.png&quot; alt=&quot;merged&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Marked as synonym, but unmerged (&quot;&lt;code&gt;[dataframe]&lt;/code&gt;&quot; is very salient; its excerpt is prominent; but it will silently be replaced by &lt;code&gt;[r]&lt;/code&gt; if it is selected nonetheless):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fCkjH.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fCkjH.png&quot; alt=&quot;unmerged&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pros:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tag names reflect the underlying objects precisely.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One tag name is an extension of the other, thus adding some confusion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2017-09-23T00:12:08.350" LastActivityDate="2017-09-23T00:12:08.350" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4963" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4965" CreationDate="2017-09-25T03:45:20.183" Score="11" ViewCount="400" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand the need to make questions clear when asking them and agree telling the OP to make the question clearer, if it is not, is a good thing. But can't this be done without locking the ability to post potential answers? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say for example a question seemed unclear to the mod, but was understood by someone who potentially knew the answer: all that is being achieved by putting the question on hold is stopping the answer from being submitted. And if the question seemed unclear to the mod, and was unclear to someone who did know the answer, then no answer would be submitted anyway, and there would be no need to put the question on hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore as an extension to the first scenario where a potential answer is blocked if the OP did not edit his question or forgot to, then there would be no way of answering the question forever for the potential benefit of all others who might face the same problem, which in my opinion is a gross failure of the philosophy of this website and what it tries to do in helping people through knowledge sharing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, what advantage does putting unclear questions on hold actually achieve over just asking the OP to make the question clearer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176173" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-09-25T09:51:42.347" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T13:36:19.770" Title="What's the point of putting unclear questions on hold?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4963" CreationDate="2017-09-25T07:16:27.443" Score="17" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I understand the need to make questions clear when asking them and&#xA;  agree telling the OP to make the question clearer, if it is not, is a&#xA;  good thing. But can't this be done without locking the ability to post&#xA;  potential answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; the question is unclear, then it is rather unlikely to get a high-quality answer and we don't want this site to be a repository of low-quality questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On another hand, I agree with you that sometimes we, as a community, lock questions too quickly. I myself have answered a few questions that simultaneously got put on hold as &quot;unclear&quot;. I agree that the mechanism is not perfect. However, notice that every question can be re-opened, or even un-deleted: you just need enough community votes, or a moderator for that. So if you feel that some question should be re-opened, then you can always (a) put this in comments, if there is an active discussion under the question, (b) discuss it on chat (mods often visit chat), (c) discuss this on Meta, (d) flag the question for mods' attention asking to re-open it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Say for example question seemed unclear to the mod, but was understood&#xA;  by someone who potentially knew the answer, all that is being achieved&#xA;  by putting the question on hold is stopping the answer from being&#xA;  submitted. And if the question seemed unclear to the mod, and was&#xA;  unclear to someone who did know the answer, then no answer would be&#xA;  submitted anyway, and there would be no need to put the question on&#xA;  hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; only the mods who can put questions on hold. I'd argue that in most cases questions go on hold by gathering community votes. So in most cases you need at least three people to agree that some question is unclear. In most cases, if it is unclear for three people, then it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Furthermore as an extension to the first scenario where a potential&#xA;  answer is blocked if the OP did not edit his question or forgot to,&#xA;  then there would be no way of answering the question forever for the&#xA;  potential benefit of all others who might face the same problem, which&#xA;  in my opinion is a gross failure of the philosophy of this website and&#xA;  what it tries to do in helping people through knowledge sharing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If OPs didn't bother to edit their question that were unclear, i.e. do not care about their questions, should we have to care about that? The community does not benefit by collecting answers for unclear questions. Moreover, if an OP does not care about their question but &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; feel that behind it there is an interesting question to be answered, &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; can always ask the question, and potentially answer it yourself. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/222179/how-to-know-that-your-machine-learning-problem-is-hopeless&quot;&gt;Last time I did this&lt;/a&gt; I got +156 votes for the question; moreover as a result the OP has edited the original question and it got answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So my question is, what advantage does putting unclear questions on&#xA;  hold actually achieve over just asking the OP to make the question&#xA;  clearer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making the question clearer &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the advantage. Moreover, it is a mechanism that guards the site from being flooded by low-quality questions, which would lead the site to start looking like the &quot;SPAM&quot; folder in a mailbox and become useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2017-09-25T13:00:12.410" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T13:00:12.410" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4963" CreationDate="2017-09-25T08:23:51.947" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is misleading in so far as it implies that closing is always and only done by a moderator. On the contrary, &lt;strong&gt;closing as unclear is often done by non-moderators without any moderator intervening&lt;/strong&gt;. Then a consensus of five high-reputation users is needed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point otherwise is well taken: &lt;strong&gt;&quot;appears unclear to me&quot; does not mean &quot;is unclear to everyone&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;: it could be sufficient that one competent person understands it and can answer. And judgments are fallible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue, however, that present principles and practices are about right. If anything, we need to work harder at identifying unclear questions (more generally, questions that aren't good enough) and either getting them improved or closing them down. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, &lt;strong&gt;deciding that a question is unclear is often much easier than understanding what the question is&lt;/strong&gt;. Without trying to be exhaustive, here are some common examples. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question boils down to &quot;What should I do with my dataset?&quot; but that and the underlying problem are too vaguely described to allow good advice. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question is too brief and cryptic to be clear. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Presentation is just too messy to attract all but the most noble readers. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, &lt;strong&gt;the gentle model -- just leave it there; someone may understand -- is not nearly as kind as it seems&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is in the original poster's best interests to get prompt and decisive feedback on the question. They can then try to improve it. If they don't, and/or if they get a negative impression of CV, that's unfortunate in some senses, but keep reading. If they can, a much better question is much more likely to get a good answer. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is in nobody else's interests that CV is cluttered with questions that no one understands -- or wants to answer. Indeed, this is true already! The fallacy here is that CV is a helpline in which ideally every questioner and every question deserves an answer. Not so; the ideal is to build up a site with an archive of good, distinct, well-answered questions. Every question is a candidate for that status, but many questions fail. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, &lt;strong&gt;there are enough checks and balances to correct over-zealous voting to close&lt;/strong&gt;. Needing 5 non-moderator votes has already been mentioned.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The SE model does tend to mean that people with vote to close privilege have done enough around the site to have read lots of questions and answered many. That doesn't rule out puzzling votes to close, but no system is perfect. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Answering a question is the best way to show that someone understands it -- so long as they do understand it! Guessing wildly and guessing wrong won't help. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do your bit by editing a question, or proposing edits, that make it clearer. Sometimes just a little care and attention can tip the balance. It could be something as simple as a better title. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Comment in threads where you think voting to close is wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A vote to close brings a thread to the attention of high-reputation users who are happy to disagree with each other if some see merit in a question. In this sense a vote to close as unclear from a non-moderator is no more than &quot;this seems unclear to me; do others agree?&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2017-09-25T13:36:19.770" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T13:36:19.770" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4963" CreationDate="2017-09-25T10:35:21.640" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;A small point not covered in the excellent answers so far: a premature (though well intentioned) answer to a currently unclear question can do more harm than good. When a question bears more than one reading; makes false assumptions or relies on implicit, unexamined premises; lacks crucial context&amp;mdash;answering it can create much confusion, even mislead the OP &amp;amp; other readers. Better to first contribute to its clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2017-09-25T10:53:37.557" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T10:53:37.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4968" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4980" CreationDate="2017-10-01T16:32:03.177" Score="8" ViewCount="650" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/augmented-dickey-fuller&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;augmented-dickey-fuller&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;augmented-dickey-fuller&lt;/a&gt; tag with 148 questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=ADF&quot;&gt;407 questions&lt;/a&gt; I find when searching for ADF (Augmented Dickey Fuller).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=kpss&quot;&gt;174 questions&lt;/a&gt; I find when searching for KPSS (Kwiatkowski-Phillips-Schmidt-Shin).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both the ADF Test as well as the KPSS test are tests which test whether a time series is stationary.  The Null hypothesis of the ADF test is that there is a Unit root. The Null hypothesis of the KPSS Tests is that the time series is stationary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As KPSS test more or less the complement to the ADF test I propose to create a tag for the KPSS test as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally we could discuss the same issue for other tests, e.g. the Phillips-Perron Test.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128677" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-10-13T08:31:46.600" LastActivityDate="2017-10-13T08:31:46.600" Title="Should we create a [kpss-test] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="793" CreationDate="2017-10-02T10:26:02.580" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;TensorFlow&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tensorflow.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TensorFlow&lt;/a&gt; is an open-source library for machine learning that was developed by Google. It has &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tensorflow.org/get_started/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;detailed documentation&lt;/a&gt; on its web site. Bugs and feature requests can be posted and viewed on TensorFlow's &lt;a href=&quot;http://%20https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;github page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Introductory tutorials on TensorFlow can be found on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.udacity.com/course/deep-learning--ud730&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Udacity&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://deeplearning.ai/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coursera&lt;/a&gt; online courses on deep learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="35989" LastEditDate="2018-07-09T07:39:57.943" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T07:39:57.943" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-10-02T10:26:02.580" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4970" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-03T03:34:15.683" Score="22" ViewCount="456" Body="&lt;p&gt;It doesn't happen often, but I've occasionally seen questions that raise ethical concerns (but are on topic). A couple examples come to mind: 1) (on stackoverflow) Someone asked about designing a system to defeat CAPTCHAs. This could be used to set up many fake accounts, send spam, and (as has recently come to light) surreptitiously manipulate public opinion. 2) (here on stats) Someone asked for help with a machine learning system for making decisions in what sounds like an industrial/lab environment, where the consequences of a bad decision include &quot;things blowing up&quot;. This isn't a situation where someone should take (or need) random advice from the internet, and mistakes could change (or end) lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly such cases have to be handled on an individual basis, and it's complicated for many reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's not always clear what the situation is. In example 1, the poster could have been a security researcher (but didn't mention this). In example 2, the poster could have been framing things in a hypothetical or exaggerated way. Meanwhile, asking for clarification doesn't always lead to answers, and others may post answers in the meantime.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We also want the site to lead to good and not harm. But we don't want to have (or be) moral police.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Public discourse has great benefits and censorship has great costs. In some cases, the lines can be grey. For an extreme example, see the recent controversy about publishing work on the avian flu virus, which was artificially mutated to increase transmissibility.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think people will already make nefarious or dangerous choices on their own, but I don't want to help them down that path. I also want there to be freedom to discuss technical issues, even when serious consequences are at stake. If there's a concern, I think a good practice would be to ask for clarification, write comments to make clear what's at stake, and shut the question down if there's reasonable suspicion that specific harm may come to pass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to hear others' thoughts on these issues. Has anyone seen similar examples? On a lighter note, is this an appropriate use of the 'flag for moderator attention' button? And, is there a way to put a question on hold until it can be determined what's going on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="116440" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T23:26:13.697" Title="How to handle questions that raise ethical concerns" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4970" CreationDate="2017-10-04T16:08:43.537" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This turned out to be too long for a comment so it is an attempt now to answer the last two questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The examples which occur to me are ones where the OP has conducted a project where human subjects have been subjected to at best inconvenience and at worst the possibility of harm and the OP clearly has absolutely no idea of what to do with the data and so in my view should never have been allowed to start the project. If the results are published with defective analysis subsequent patients may be harmed too. Such studies in most jurisdictions should have had prior ethical approval of course but ethics committees often lack statistical expertise. In most of these cases I think the existing flags are sufficient (unclear, too broad, ...). I would not want to bother the moderators with an extra burden here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2017-10-05T10:14:28.993" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T10:14:28.993" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4972" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4973" CreationDate="2017-10-05T15:17:54.423" Score="6" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I visit the website, I am directed to a &quot;top questions&quot; page. I would like to know more about how these questions are presented to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What data is used to generate this ordering?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What algorithm/model is being used?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have there been any changes to these previous two things in the past? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any planned changes to these two things in the future? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8336" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2017-10-05T18:34:13.353" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T18:35:15.770" Title="The ranking of questions in my &quot;top questions&quot; page" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4972" CreationDate="2017-10-05T17:58:45.913" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;(This is SE-wide, not just here.  That is, the ideal place for this question would be meta.SE.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I think the list of questions on the main page is just the display of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIFO_(computing_and_electronics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FIFO data structure&lt;/a&gt; composed of the questions most recently asked, edited, or answered.  The most recently changed is pushed in to the top, and the 31st / 51st(?) is popped from the bottom.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far as I know, that has always been the way it worked, and I'm aware of no plans to change it in the future.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2017-10-05T18:35:15.770" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T18:35:15.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4970" CreationDate="2017-10-09T23:26:13.697" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see two components, one specific, the other general, both important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Specifically:&lt;/strong&gt; To look at how other fields have dealt with this problem, I would point to bio-ethics, which (as a commenter notes) is its own discipline. This is for a concrete, practical, reason -- the morality of some questions simply can't be addressed, unless you're also a technical expert. For example, it would totally be ethical to encourage the donation of both kidneys, to save somebody else's life -- IF, you could survive without kidneys! You can live after you lose one. Why not two? It is precisely because of a medical fact (you need at least one kidney) that makes it unethical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the reason that &quot;give it to the ethicists&quot; is not a general solution. I would be in favor of migrating those questions that do not require technical expertise to evaluate, but don't know how often such a question would arise here, and think statisticians might often be a bad judge of that requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More fundamentally, and when we can't off-shore it, statistics is simply full of ethical problems that only we can assess. What are the ethical problems with not cross-validating a model? How about ignoring outliers? Assuming correlation implies causation? Fudging correlation/causation arguably destroyed Greece's economy. But beyond that ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Generally:&lt;/strong&gt; What we do has consequences. As statisticians, and as people. This cannot be avoided. And what we do here is powerful. A few short months ago, Facebook said Targeting is Good! Rules are bad! Now, Facebook says Sorry we &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.npr.org/2017/09/15/551163392/facebook-enabled-ads-targeting-anti-semites&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;turned out the &quot;how to burn Jews&quot; vote!&lt;/a&gt; Maybe, some rules! This WILL happen, here. I'm not going to wait for a disaster to conclude that I should consider my actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean for the site? It means that I'm completely in favor of a flag. To me, Flag a Moderator simply means This is Important, and Difficult, and I'd Like Help. Doesn't mean you'll get it.  Doesn't mean the question is actually unethical. Doesn't mean anybody knows the answer. But at LEAST, it's something I want to be able to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I'm also cognizant of the vast amount of work moderators put in (often though, in areas like Culture, which is pretty ethical already), well, Case 1, there are a small number of questions, so it's manageable. Case 2, it turns out there are a ton of questionable questions -- well then it's a really good thing we started looking for them, no? And, to learn from the biologists, I would be completely in favor of having a Statistical Ethics Moderator, to accompany the Technical Moderators, and appropriately divided the specialized work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because it IS a lot of work, and it is hard -- so I want to give it the resources it deserves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52211" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T23:26:13.697" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4976" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4977" CreationDate="2017-10-11T20:23:54.760" Score="5" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does the new site design &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; need four steps to log out of CV?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Click the StackExchange image top left.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Click the StackExchange image top left, but this time featuring a down arrow/triangle.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Navigate the menu opened by clicking in step 2.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Click the Log Out button&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a more user-friendly way to log out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44269" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-10-12T14:24:05.913" LastActivityDate="2017-10-12T14:24:05.913" Title="Must logging out of CV really require 4 clicks?" Tags="|support|user-interface|login|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4976" CreationDate="2017-10-11T20:37:36.267" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you click the icon at the top right (the one that looks like a hamburger), a list drops down.  That list includes a link to log out.  That way will only take you two steps.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Spx5e.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Spx5e.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T20:37:36.267" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4978" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-12T14:25:21.223" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-12T14:25:21.223" LastActivityDate="2017-10-12T14:25:21.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4979" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-12T14:25:21.223" Score="0" Body="Questions or issues surrounding login (or logout) to this site." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-10-12T15:28:36.310" LastActivityDate="2017-10-12T15:28:36.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4968" CreationDate="2017-10-12T22:09:11.837" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I created the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kpss-test&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kpss-test&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kpss-test&lt;/a&gt; tag. All questions which I consider relevant for the tag are already retagged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128677" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-10-13T07:26:51.990" LastActivityDate="2017-10-13T07:26:51.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4981" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4993" CreationDate="2017-10-15T12:07:54.993" Score="15" ViewCount="389" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm seeing a steady worsening of statistical preparation on the part of those posing questions to the site.  If I wanted to start an engineering project, I think I would talk to an engineer before doing anything, or at least read an intro engineering book.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see people routinely asking statistical questions in a way that demonstrates that they want to use the site as a kind of Google quick-fix pill to address important statistical issues, without bothering to do any background statistical studying of any kind.  Everyone seems to feel they should understand statistics without studying, but I don't think that people feel the same way about engineering, chemistry, or neurosurgery. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can we do better to get people to at least pretend to do background study before posting questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2017-10-17T14:38:08.767" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T20:10:55.920" Title="Should we expect some effort to study statistical issues before posting questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4981" CreationDate="2017-10-15T12:21:39.963" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree with Frank on whether the level of question is declining. I haven't noticed such a change.  Indeed, compared to some other sites, I find a lot of the questions are quite high level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I agree with him about &quot;everyone feels they should understand statistics&quot; and &quot;if I wanted to start an engineering project ...&quot; but I'd go further: If I wanted to start an engineering project, I'd hire an engineer and not pretend to be one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that was the case, then most of the questions here would be either very high level questions from other statisticians or low level questions from people who are just curious about something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2017-10-17T00:34:53.307" LastActivityDate="2017-10-17T00:34:53.307" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4981" CreationDate="2017-10-15T12:39:35.753" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The help on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;How do I ask a good question?&lt;/a&gt; has a an opening section on &quot;Search and Research&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The page relating to questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/quality-standards-error&quot;&gt;autoclosed for &quot;not meeting quality standards&quot;&lt;/a&gt; also makes reference to showing your research. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Tim pointed out, votes (and comments) are a good way to make it clear that questions need work. Sometimes that's not sufficient and we have some other tools --&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can certainly close a question that doesn't display any research if the post fits one of the closure reasons (many will fit under &lt;em&gt;unclear&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt;) and extremely poor questions can be flagged as &quot;very low quality&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-10-15T20:13:19.893" LastActivityDate="2017-10-15T20:13:19.893" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4984" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-15T21:43:21.700" Score="10" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes when addressing decisions to reopen a question I find that the OP has addressed the reason why the question was closed but still violates a condition for being open.  As a common example a question was closed because it was unclear what was being asked.  The question also seems to be off topic.  But being unclear was the only reason given.  The OP clarified the question but it was still off topic.  In such a case I would vote to keep it closed.  But for the benefit of the OP I would like to give my reason.  I don't know of a mechanism to do this.  Is there one? Should I address this as a comment in the post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastActivityDate="2017-10-17T00:32:21.017" Title="Addressing reopening decisions in the review queue" Tags="|discussion|review|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4984" CreationDate="2017-10-16T01:32:33.277" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ideally the main issues should be addressed when it is first closed (I often comment when voting to close for one reason with a brief mention that a post would close for other reasons as well -- something like &quot;not only is this unclear, it appears to be overly broad...&quot; etc), so that the OP is aware of the main problems to address.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My preference as a moderator when one problem it was closed for is fixed but other issues may remain is to open the post and re-close under the new reason (preferably with a comment to make the reasoning clear).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not always practical without a moderator (since the reopen may not succeed and even if it does the new close may not); I think a comment is a reasonable way to let the OP know that the question either may need additional editing to be on topic for our site or (if they prefer) should be flagged to migrate to a more suitable location.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2017-10-17T00:32:21.017" LastActivityDate="2017-10-17T00:32:21.017" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4986" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4987" CreationDate="2017-10-16T10:22:59.853" Score="4" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know the SE protect users' privacy, so the lack of instruments to contact other users is a feature and not a bug. I respect that. However, recently two users (one is me) have shown interest in a stastical model which doesn't get a lot of love here, even asking similar questions, though I was careful to frame my questions in a way that wasn't strictly programming-related. To cut a long story short, the other user's question has been put on hold, and I think it will be closed soon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/307636/dynamic-bayesian-network-library-in-python&quot;&gt;Dynamic Bayesian Network library in Python&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that I cannot create a gallery chatroom from a question put on hold. I also don't like the solution of commenting her/his question proposing to join me in a chat, because this is against the site policies. Do you have any suggestions on how I could try to let the OP know I would be glad to get in touch? I know I'm asking something against the site etiquette, but given the specificity of the method, and the rather remarkable fact we started asking about it at the same time, I think we could both be interested in collaboration. It could even be possible we are working on the same project - it's a big international collaboration, and it's possible (though a bit weird) that individuals from two different teams in two different parts of the world are trying to work on the same part of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastActivityDate="2017-10-17T00:12:51.293" Title="Opening a chatroom for an [on-hold] question" Tags="|discussion|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4986" CreationDate="2017-10-17T00:12:51.293" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(I'm transferring my comment so that this doesn't remain 'unanswered'.)&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really don't see a problem with leaving a comment to the other user, perhaps under one of their questions, noting that you appear to have similar interests and would be willing to talk outside of the site about them.  You can have external contact information listed on your userpage that would allow them to reach you.  If you don't want personal information just sitting there, you can also wait until you have established that they want to communicate, and are currently logged on, and edit your page to provide your email address, and then edit again a couple minutes later to remove it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recognize it is true that the SE system is a bit ambivalent about comments.  Comments are &lt;em&gt;supposed&lt;/em&gt; to be transient and only used to prompt people for clarification, for example.  However, comments are quite regularly not used that way, not only here, but on many sites including meta.SE.  If comments that are not really relevant to a thread are flagged in the future, they would be deleted by the moderator team, but they can be undeleted if needed and it seems more likely that you would have deleted them yourself long before then.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2017-10-17T00:12:51.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4988" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4989" CreationDate="2017-10-19T14:50:38.283" Score="9" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are ~130 RD questions on the site (with some false positives) and it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_discontinuity_design&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a standard&lt;/a&gt; quasi-experimental inference method in economics and other fields. Does this volume merit its own tag? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7071" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-10-21T10:28:46.113" LastActivityDate="2017-10-24T13:19:45.737" Title="Should we create a [regression-discontinuity] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4988" CreationDate="2017-10-19T15:04:43.367" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see why not.  That is a perfectly valid topic.  We have other, similar tags for methods used to infer causality from observational data, including:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/causality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;causality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;causality&lt;/a&gt; (387 threads)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/granger-causality&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;granger-causality&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;granger-causality&lt;/a&gt; (137 threads)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/instrumental-variables&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;instrumental-variables&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;instrumental-variables&lt;/a&gt; (292 threads)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/propensity-scores&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;propensity-scores&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;propensity-scores&lt;/a&gt; (201 threads)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/difference-in-difference&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;difference-in-difference&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;difference-in-difference&lt;/a&gt; (187 threads)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fixed-effects-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fixed-effects-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fixed-effects-model&lt;/a&gt; (511 threads)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As always, if you do create the tag, please add a good excerpt to guide usage, and preferably a good full wiki as well.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems we already have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/discontinuity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;discontinuity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;discontinuity&lt;/a&gt; tag with 40 threads (ht, @amoeba).  Of those, 22 have both &lt;code&gt;[regression]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[discontinuity]&lt;/code&gt; and certainly more than half are really about RD.  There are also 17 threads with &lt;code&gt;[regression]&lt;/code&gt; and &quot;discontinuity&quot;, but without the tag.  I think it would be better to have an explicit &lt;code&gt;[r-d]&lt;/code&gt; tag specifically for RD.  The term / idea of &lt;em&gt;discontinuity&lt;/em&gt; is somewhat generic.  It could cover RD, but could also be used for something like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/changepoint&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;changepoint&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;changepoint&lt;/a&gt; or something else (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/292784/is-there-a-way-to-correct-for-continuity-for-the-shapiro-wilk-test&quot;&gt;Is there a way to correct for continuity for the Shapiro-Wilk test?&lt;/a&gt;).  If we did create a new tag for RD, the question then is what to do w/ &lt;code&gt;[d]&lt;/code&gt;.  My first thought would be to go through those 40 threads and properly retag them, leaving &lt;code&gt;[d]&lt;/code&gt; only on those threads like the one just linked that are about other senses of discontinuity and that can't be given a more specific tag.  Then we could edit the wiki excerpt to provide better usage guidance.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2017-10-24T13:19:45.737" LastActivityDate="2017-10-24T13:19:45.737" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4990" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4991" CreationDate="2017-10-20T18:51:52.297" Score="14" ViewCount="251" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen a few questions like this lately:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/309037/backpropagation-in-multi-layer-perceptron-mlp-doesnt-converge&quot;&gt;Backpropagation in multi-layer perceptron (MLP) doesn&amp;#39;t converge&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They don't seem programming questions to me: the code is syntactically correct, because it runs, but the result is not the desired one (semantic error). In this case the loss function doesn't decay with epochs or something like that...the OP wasn't completely clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, do we consider this to be a programming question or not? In my experience, a Neural Network may not converge either because of a bug in the code (off-topic!) or because of issues in the data set, in the weight initialization, hyperparameters setup, wrong regularization approach, etc. (I would say all this is on-topic). However, it's hard in advance to say what is what. In this case, if I had to guess I would say &quot;programming error&quot; because it seems the OP is trying to reproduce a simple case from a book. Anyway, do we consider the question on-topic or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-10-23T20:34:37.690" LastActivityDate="2017-10-23T20:34:37.690" Title="Are machine learning questions about an incorrectly working piece of code considered on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|machine-learning|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4990" CreationDate="2017-10-20T19:40:00.927" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a subtle issue, and I think you have it right, but it will always be tricky in practice.  My own guideline for what is on-topic is (conceptually) straightforward:  &lt;em&gt;What does the OP need explained?&lt;/em&gt;  If what they don't know / misunderstand is something about how the code works (e.g., in that language), then this is ultimately a programming question and should be considered off-topic here (but it is potentially on topic on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;).  On the other hand, if what they don't understand is a topic in machine learning (statistics, etc.), then the question is on-topic here.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few difficulties in practice, though.  One is that it can be hard for someone to read a thread and recognize that the real issue is a conceptual misunderstanding.  This will be true if your background is in, say, statistics and the question is about a machine learning topic with which you aren't very familiar (e.g., neural networks).  It will be even more true if the question is only / primarily stated in code you don't read.  I sometimes worry that we are liable to close threads that we should answer because the users in the close vote queue are unfamiliar with the topic / language.  For example, we seem to have better coverage of statistics than machine learning among our active users on CV.  Something you can do, if you come across such a case, is to leave a comment that this appears to be an on-topic machine learning issue, not actually about the code.  You might also prompt the OP to explain their question more clearly and in a software-neutral way.  Indeed, when I am faced with such a thread in the close vote queue, I look for a comment from a user who I know has expertise on the topic / language, and/or try to see if any have voted to close or leave open.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another issue is what to do if a question is based on several misunderstandings that constitute a mixture of conceptual and programming issues.  In this case, the thread should be considered on-topic due to the existence of issues we should address.  It is perfectly fine to not address the programming issues (or &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; do so) as answerers choose.  It would presumably be most helpful to the OP to point out that those topics should be asked on SO, though.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T19:40:00.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4990" CreationDate="2017-10-20T22:06:21.670" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not just an issue with ML code, it's an issue with any code that doesn't do what the OP wanted that's posted to the site at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; be a problem of understanding what the algorithm is (not really knowing the correct thing to code to achieve the aim) or it could be a problem of converting a correct algorithm into code (implementation). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first kind of problem would be on topic, but the second would usually be off topic. As whuber says, we're not a code review site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the kicker: It could also be &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; -- but even if it is only one or the other, disentangling the two kinds of issues in block of code is often very difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should as far as feasible focus on questions that are about the first thing -- not just because we're not a code review site but &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;that's where such questions have to begin; it's too hard to make progress on such problems if you're not clear what you're trying to do&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;because that's where the statistical issues mostly will be&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* We can't completely eliminate questions with code, however, for a variety of reasons, nor do I think we should. This is more about &quot;how should questions where there's an ambiguity of problem-category be structured?&quot; -- a question that doesn't do a good job of separating the two kinds of issues is generally a bad question -- it's a problem of premature coding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to work on a questions &quot;what should I be implementing?&quot; we should not in general be looking at a chunk of code. We should usually be talking about a problem expressed in words and algebra (or pictures or whatever other way of transmitting concepts works for this problem). That focuses them on the part of the problem they they should focus on first and allows us to focus on the part of the problem we can talk about here. It helps to disentangle the mire of &quot;what am I trying to do&quot; from &quot;did I do it right&quot; -- such disentangling should generally be the province of the question, not of an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once that &quot;what specific approach should I use to solve this&quot; kind of question is clear a suitable thing to code up may result -- which might be expressed in various ways -- often in words and algebra but perhaps in pseudocode or possibly even in code in some instances. So answers might occasionally give code but code should usually be avoided in those kinds of questions, for their own sake. (At the very least, code should be right at the end, after a proper description of the problem, not the problem description itself! I think &quot;is this code right? &quot;, where you must infer the issue from the code, should usually just be closed.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the OP is sure they have the algorithm/approach they need, the question &quot;does this chunk of code correctly implement this clearly stated algorithm&quot; would nearly always be off topic here, but set up properly could be a great question for another site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-10-20T22:25:12.013" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T22:25:12.013" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4981" CreationDate="2017-10-22T20:10:55.920" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Summary: The following does not excuse questions that do not show any effort of research and thinking: we certainly should request that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are reasons why I think we have to expect questions at a very low level and unless this site is relabeled as &quot;for statisticians&quot; I'd expect this to stay this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long version:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I wanted to start an engineering project, I'd hire an engineer and not pretend to be one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I'd have been very happy to have statisticians in the projects, my academic experience is that this is often not the case, and for a student it is not possible to get the statistician (unless statistical consulting was planned for in the project proposal). Impossible in the sense that the lack of proper statistical advise is caused by blind spots in project organization. (BTW: &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/17781/why-do-many-talented-scientists-write-horrible-software&quot;&gt;I do see a link here e.g. with widely lamented code quality issues&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've encountered a number of projects (in natural sciences) where during proposal writing and starting the project, noone thought of getting statisticians into the project, which at some point leads to PhD students doing/learning statistics in a swim-or-drown fashion. From what I know in my field, many such students can get little if any guidance in that respect from their supervisors (or, maybe even worse, are in a situation where some kind of statistical test is basically thrown at them with possibly the only justification being that someone heard of that test - I'm thinking of a very difficult discussion I had with a medical doctor who absolutely wanted me to calculate variable significance for a random forest [because they had seen such beautiful stars] in a situation where the data generation process meant that random forest variable importance may be very low for truly important variables. If I hadn't been a stubborn postdoc with 10+ years of experience in both the data generation and the data analysis meaningless numbers would have been calculated and most likely published).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Note that in this scenario, even very naive questions (from a statistical point of view) may be a sign of a very bright student: they found out that they need to ask a statistician. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I'm no statistician. I'm chemist, and my formal training included very little statistics, basically enough to realise that there is a whole field (chemometrics) that applies statistics to chemistry. After 15 years specializing in this in a mostly autodidactic way, I feel my statistics knowledge to be OK in what I do every day (chemometric analysis of spectroscopic data), but &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; sketchy in other respects. However, I'm also able to translate between statisticians and chemometricians and chemists - and I find I'm asked to do exactly this. And I still find that when consulting statisticians, I have much trouble due to the different language.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also personally encountered a number of statistics-related research questions where my gut feeling was that they are probably solved already but was not able to search effectively as my description of the problem did not lead to good search terms. (For some of them, I've since found the name they got in other fields - totally different from all I did think of.) But for the question at hand the conclusion certainly is that bad wording should be expected. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of questions here in the topics I follow where I fell the very same thing has already been asked twice this week (specially with the cross validation questions). But I also think that the usual terminology encourages some misconceptions, and the other questions I refer to typically share the same answer, but not necesarily similar sounding questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Everyone seems to feel they should understand statistics without studying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I certainly feel that everyone should understand enough statistics to realize that (when) a statistician should be consulted. But again, in this context that applies possibly more to supervisors than to the students we encounter here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'd suspect that one reason for this feeling is that e.g. a chemist or physicist developing some kind of measuring instrument typically knows how to calculate &quot;the result&quot;. They feel that they did actually study as they work in their very own field.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, they are often unaware of uncertainty issues (exception: analytical chemists and AFAIK also technical physicists learn about measurement uncertainty in their studies in a somewhat deeper manner than 1st semester labwork practica cover). And even worse, while that may be OK in pure physics or chemistry experiments (where they may have enough expert knowledge to make sure that uncertainty is not an issue in answering the question of the study), those disciplines move towards looking at biological systems now, and the &quot;expert feeling&quot; of their domain doesn't give any clue about the variability that biological systems typically have.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Which I think is also a cause of the organisational statistics disaster I discussed above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't think that people feel the same way about engineering, chemistry, or neurosurgery&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know whether this is any kind of consolation, but I don't think those unhappy attempts at statistics are worse than some attempts at working in a chemical lab I saw from (non-chemical) engineers and physicists... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4598" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T20:10:55.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4994" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-23T13:35:22.223" Score="1" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at the online courses, books, blogs on machine learning, many of them seem to focus on &quot;programming the algorithms&quot;, often in those resources you see more Python code then mathematical formulas. Scholars like &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/@andrewng/deeplearning-ai-announcing-new-deep-learning-courses-on-coursera-43af0a368116&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Andrew Ng&lt;/a&gt; seem to be telling us that anyone can be using machine learning and minimal math is required to do so. Does this mean we should adapt and be more open to programming-oriented machine learning questions (&quot;help me fix my TensorFlow code&quot; etc.)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-10-23T20:35:13.420" LastActivityDate="2017-10-23T20:35:13.420" Title="As machine learning gets more programming-oriented, should we get more programming oriented?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|machine-learning|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4995" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4999" CreationDate="2017-10-23T13:39:34.977" Score="13" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know much about boosting, but I accidentally noticed that we have the following boosting-related tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/boosting&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;boosting&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;boosting&lt;/a&gt; × 311&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gbm&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gbm&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gbm&lt;/a&gt; × 179&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gradient-boosted-trees&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gradient-boosted-trees&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gradient-boosted-trees&lt;/a&gt; × 28&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that boosting (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradient_boosting&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradient_boosting&lt;/a&gt;) is almost always used with decision trees, so [boosting] is almost exclusively about [gradient-boosted-trees]. Also, &quot;GBM&quot; stands for &quot;gradient boosted machine&quot; which was in the title of Friedman's &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.de/scholar?q=gradient+boosted+machine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;famous 1999 paper&lt;/a&gt;... where he introduced boosted trees! So it's all the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Therefore, I think [gradient-boosted-trees] and [gbm] should become synonyms of [boosting].&lt;/strong&gt; This combined tag would have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/boosting+or+gradient-boosted-trees+or+gbm&quot;&gt;486 threads&lt;/a&gt;. This seems to me to be a pretty clear-cut case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, we could consider merging the following tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xgboost&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xgboost&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;xgboost&lt;/a&gt; × 122&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/adaboost&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;adaboost&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;adaboost&lt;/a&gt; × 59&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gamboost&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gamboost&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gamboost&lt;/a&gt; × 5&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gmmboost&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gmmboost&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gmmboost&lt;/a&gt; × 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;into [boosting] as well. These tags are not that large, are clear subsets of [boosting], and whoever is using boosting in practice is most likely (?) using either &lt;code&gt;xgboost&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;adaboost&lt;/code&gt; anyway. If we merge all the above-listed tags into [boosting], then it would have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/boosting+or+xgboost+or+adaboost+or+gradient-boosted-trees+or+gamboost+or+gmmboost+or+gbm&quot;&gt;613 threads&lt;/a&gt;. I am making this second suggestion because I generally prefer larger tags, but I don't have much of an informed opinion here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2017-11-05T09:36:30.530" Title="Too many boosting tags" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4996" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4997" CreationDate="2017-10-23T15:58:14.473" Score="4" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just put a bounty on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/308872/calculating-linear-discriminant-analysis-coefficients&quot;&gt;Calculating Linear Discriminant Analysis Coefficients&lt;/a&gt; before seeing the ML discussions on Meta, so I apologize for not asking about this beforehand. I'll be sure to make a future note of what comes out of this discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question, in short, is asking about how to manually calculate the coefficients outputted by a machine learning algorithm using matrices. In addition, &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; code is a substantial part of this, and it looks like the algorithm itself involves a lot of advanced linear algebra which I am not familiar with (singular value decomposition). Therefore, I don't consider this question to be in the category described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4994/as-machine-learning-gets-more-programming-oriented-should-we-get-more-programmi&quot;&gt;As machine learning gets more programming-oriented, should we get more programming oriented?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any thoughts on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46427" LastActivityDate="2017-10-23T21:55:05.247" Title="Is this machine learning + matrix manipulation question on topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|r|machine-learning|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4996" CreationDate="2017-10-23T21:55:05.247" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just containing code doesn't make it off topic; the question seems to me to be firmly on-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, in relation to programming questions (which I don't think this one actually is), the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if it needs statistical expertise to understand or answer, ask it here &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So even if it were more of a programming-related question than it looks at first read, I think this phrase would mean it would be on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2017-10-23T21:55:05.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2760" CreationDate="2017-10-25T01:57:12.387" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that Data Science as a field is quickly sliding into obscurity in terms of applied statistics. It's becoming a hybrid of IT and business analytics. The data scientists are not able to answer AI and ML questions anymore, so they increasingly flow into CV. I see a steady stream of AI questions not only incoming, but also being properly answered. We should keep answering them so that statistical learning aspects of AI will be taken care of here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://hbr.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;HBR&lt;/a&gt; started the data science fad in the industry with the article &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://hbr.org/2012/10/data-scientist-the-sexiest-job-of-the-21st-century&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century&lt;/a&gt;.&quot; Interestingly, they bent the &lt;a href=&quot;https://flowingdata.com/2009/02/25/googles-chief-economist-hal-varian-on-statistics-and-data/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quote&lt;/a&gt; from Google Chief Economist Hal Varian that &quot;the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians.&quot; Now there was an article in January 2017 in Forbes &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/01/10/can-ai-make-the-sexiest-21st-century-job-obsolete/#1bcaae097c92&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Can AI Make The Sexiest 21st Century Job Obsolete?&lt;/a&gt;.&quot; So, the industry folks went full circle on data science thing :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36041" LastActivityDate="2017-10-25T01:57:12.387" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4995" CreationDate="2017-10-25T08:46:39.703" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;After some discussion in the comments above, the emerging consensus seems to be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Map &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gradient-boosted-trees&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gradient-boosted-trees&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gradient-boosted-trees&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gbm&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gbm&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gbm&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/boosting&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;boosting&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;boosting&lt;/a&gt; as synonyms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leave &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/adaboost&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;adaboost&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;adaboost&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xgboost&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xgboost&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;xgboost&lt;/a&gt; alone.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This plan looks good to me. Upvote if agree, downvote (and explain in the comments!) if disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update (Nov 5): This has been implemented.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-11-05T09:36:30.530" LastActivityDate="2017-11-05T09:36:30.530" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5000" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5004" CreationDate="2017-10-25T20:57:07.000" Score="23" ViewCount="1245" Body="&lt;p&gt;We sometimes get what I would describe as &quot;wrong&quot; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, a perennial favorite seems to be questions about binning continuous variables, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/309018/1352&quot;&gt;What is a best way of binning non-finite continuous variable?&lt;/a&gt;, which currently has zero votes, zero answers and a comment (by me) recommending not to bin the data at all - with seven upvotes. Or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/309932/1352&quot;&gt;discretization to create intervals for continuous variables&lt;/a&gt;, where I copy-pasted the exact same comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think these questions will get a lot of answers, and they kind of veer into &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;not even wrong&quot;&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_III_error&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;type III error&quot;&lt;/a&gt; territory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should we do about these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leave them open?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Find some reasonable existing question we could close these as duplicates of (for the two questions above, this could be &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/68834/1352&quot;&gt;What is the benefit of breaking up a continuous predictor variable?&lt;/a&gt;), even if it is not a duplicate in the strong sense?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Write an answer that essentially explains why the question itself is mistaken, even if such an answer does not &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; the question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Implement yet another closure reason (I believe that we are already at the limit of the number of closure reasons the UI will support)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-10-25T23:39:31.973" LastActivityDate="2018-07-22T05:54:19.460" Title="What to do about &quot;wrong&quot; questions?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4668" CreationDate="2017-10-26T18:37:21.670" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the meantime, this was extensively discussed in the answers and comments in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4669&quot;&gt;Tags around categorical data coding / representation&lt;/a&gt; and the outcome was as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Master tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/categorical-encoding&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;categorical-encoding&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;categorical-encoding&lt;/a&gt; has been created, and has the following three synonyms: &lt;code&gt;[dummy-variables]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[indicator-variables]&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;[one-hot]&lt;/code&gt;. It currently has 67 threads.  Wiki excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Representing categorical variables as sets of numerical variables. Necessary in many types of analysis for them to process categorical data. A common example is using a categorical predictor in regression/ANOVA via dummy coding, effect coding, Helmert coding, user-defined contrasts, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;New tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/indicator-function&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;indicator-function&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indicator-function&lt;/a&gt; was created for mathematical or notational questions about indicator function, that have nothing to do with encoding categorical variables. It currently has 16 threads. Wiki excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A function defined on a set indicating membership in a subset and taking values 0 and 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T18:37:21.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5002" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5013" CreationDate="2017-10-27T12:15:43.533" Score="5" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm seeing a tendency in this SE: the questions we land on the Hot Network Questions (HNQ) list tend to be closed (either as too broad or duplicates).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know from Meta some details about HNQs, see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/60756/how-do-the-arbitrary-hotness-points-work-on-the-new-stack-exchange-home-page/61343#61343&quot;&gt;How do the &amp;quot;arbitrary hotness points&amp;quot; work on the new Stack Exchange home page?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/219922/what-is-the-goal-of-hot-network-questions&quot;&gt;What is the Goal of &amp;quot;Hot Network Questions&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, catching questions are more likely to land in the HNQs list than technical or intricate questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the more a HNQ stay in the list, the more views it gathers (and this is a feedback mechanism, that's why some questions stay for days in the list). So it's a good mechanism to bring views (and new users) to a site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thing is, &lt;em&gt;closed questions are removed from the list&lt;/em&gt;. Therefore we are loosing a bit of exposure having these questions closed (and having a question from a site penalizes other questions from the same site incrementally).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there something we can do to take advantage of HNQs to help the site prosper? Or is this just one more detail that applies specifically to the CV community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60613" LastEditorUserId="60613" LastEditDate="2017-10-27T12:22:02.323" LastActivityDate="2017-11-04T06:24:42.243" Title="Our HNQ tend to be closed: what can we do about that?" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5000" CreationDate="2017-10-31T06:04:45.110" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a beginning user, I would like to give my opinion on this and why &lt;strong&gt;I strongly favour (3)&lt;/strong&gt; if it is possible to write such an answer clearly. An example where I learned a lot from reading a &quot;wrong&quot; question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/20836/176202&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; by @gung.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Write an answer that essentially explains why the question itself is mistaken, even if such an answer does not answer the question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: When posing a question about how to implement a method, the OP already assumes the method is valid. Of course there are also great questions of the form &lt;em&gt;&quot;Why is it bad to do X&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, but people who assume their method to be correct probably do not end up finding such questions if they already exist. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, stepwise model selection procedures is still taught in many statistics courses. Answers such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/20856/176202&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, on what is currently the top question sorted by 'frequent', shed light on topics that are very often misunderstood in statistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, binning continuous variables as you mention in the question is something that I think needs a good explanation why it is bad. This might result in more people wondering how to bin their continuous variable, searching or writing up a question and finding: &lt;em&gt;&quot;Ah, someone else already asked this, let's have a look.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an ideal world everyone would first search for questions related to their method to find out if they are doing the right thing at all, but I think the fact that such questions keep reappearing suggests that many don't. Hence I really appreciate answers such as gung's which not only address a frequent 'problem' on the site, but are also very informative for those searching something along the lines of &lt;em&gt;&quot;How to do stepwise&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, if there were a convenient way to find these &quot;wrong&quot; questions with great answers, I would enjoy reading them. They are also of great help when teaching students about common pitfalls and fallacies in statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if such a Q&amp;amp;A already exists, it can be marked duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176202" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2017-10-31T12:31:45.230" LastActivityDate="2017-10-31T12:31:45.230" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5005" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5010" CreationDate="2017-11-01T22:49:01.540" Score="6" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/failure&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;failure&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;failure&lt;/a&gt;×23 that has no wiki excerpt.  I can think of at least two meanings for &quot;failure&quot;: A possibly censored event to be modeled in survival analysis and  a success/failure in some kinds of experiment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-11-02T08:25:26.157" LastActivityDate="2017-11-02T19:11:31.277" Title="What to do about [failure] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5006" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5007" CreationDate="2017-11-01T23:05:23.957" Score="4" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;The wiki excerpt of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/algorithms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;algorithms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;algorithms&lt;/a&gt; tag reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An algorithm is a a set of one or more computations that will produce&#xA;  a calculated result. All statistics methods are algorithms. Algorithms&#xA;  can be simple, such as calculating a percentage, or can be very&#xA;  complex and require a computer for fast and accurate results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not an expert, but this strikes me as off.  To me an algorithm is a recipe - a set of instructions for doing something.  Usually it means a very precise set of instructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I think &quot;all statistics methods are algorithms&quot; is misleading. It's true that you can reduce any particular statistical technique to an algorithm (you have to do that for computers) but ... we do some things with our brains that aren't that!  Isn't deciding on which method to use a &quot;method&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-11-02T08:27:13.447" LastActivityDate="2017-11-02T12:51:15.487" Title="Wiki excerpt of the [algorithms] tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-excerpt|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5006" CreationDate="2017-11-02T09:29:27.167" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a bad wiki excerpt; it is imprecise and too lengthy (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2848&quot;&gt;What is the optimal length &amp;amp; level of detail of tag wiki excerpts?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia defines &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;algorithm&lt;/a&gt; as &quot;an unambiguous specification of how to solve a class of problems&quot;. This sounds good to me. I would replace the wiki excerpt by&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An unambiguous specification of how to solve a class of problems [Wikipedia]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's fine to copy a definition from elsewhere, in particular for the non-statistical terms. (For statistical terms, it often does make sense to write a wiki excerpt that is tailored for our site.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; Based on the discussion in the comments, here is my preferred version based on @Scortchi's wording:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An unambiguous list of computational steps involved in finding a solution to a class of problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-11-02T12:51:15.487" LastActivityDate="2017-11-02T12:51:15.487" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5008" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5009" CreationDate="2017-11-02T13:48:45.633" Score="6" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/order&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;order&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;order&lt;/a&gt;, without any tag wiki or excerpt, which sometimes are misused for tag order-statistics, but seems to have other uses, but not many at all.  What to do? Can anybody propose a wiki?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-11-02T14:08:32.547" LastActivityDate="2017-11-02T16:11:04.590" Title="What to do about [order] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5008" CreationDate="2017-11-02T16:11:04.590" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with @Tim that the tag is unclear and should be eliminated. There are only 21 threads, so I would suggest manually going over them and retagging as appropriate. We have several established alternative tags to choose from: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ordered-variables&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ordered-variables&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ordered-variables&lt;/a&gt;$\to$&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ordinal-data&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ordinal-data&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ordinal-data&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ordered-logit&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ordered-logit&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ordered-logit&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ordered-probit&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ordered-probit&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ordered-probit&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ordering&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ordering&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ordering&lt;/a&gt;$\to$&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ranking&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ranking&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ranking&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/order-statistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;order-statistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;order-statistics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2017-11-02T16:11:04.590" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5005" CreationDate="2017-11-02T19:11:31.277" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Copying my comment from above and slightly expanding:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't need a tag for success/failure in experiments (as we don't need tags like &lt;code&gt;[success]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[nobel-prize]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[failed-phd-and-left-academia]&lt;/code&gt;, etc.). Apart from that, even if sometimes &quot;failure&quot; has some statistical meaning, it is too ambiguous as a tag name, and such a tag will inevitably be misused. I would say we should simply eliminate it altogether. Threads about survival analysis should be retagged as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/survival&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;survival&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;survival&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are only 23 threads tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/failure&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;failure&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;failure&lt;/a&gt;, so it's easy to get rid of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2017-11-02T19:11:31.277" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5012" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5026" CreationDate="2017-11-03T14:56:04.890" Score="6" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have 700+ Q/A referring to basis functions, and a subset &lt;code&gt;radial-basis&lt;/code&gt; tag. There appears to be considerable head-scratching as to what a basis function is, so, I made a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/basis-function&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;basis-function&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;basis-function&lt;/a&gt; tag the following excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A basis function is an element of a set of functions that span a function space. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full wiki is:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basis_function&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Basis functions&lt;/a&gt; are spanning sets of functions. These include sums of sine waves to match any waveform, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radial_basis_function#Types&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;radial basis functions&lt;/a&gt; used for artificial neural networks, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basis_(linear_algebra)#Hamel_basis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;basis vectors&lt;/a&gt; of a linear algebra, and $\Sigma_0^{n-1} t^i$ to span a polynomial of degree $n-1$. For the latter, $\Sigma t^i$ is called a cardinal or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_basis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;standard basis&lt;/a&gt; because the coefficients of $t^i$ are all 1's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is needed now?&lt;/strong&gt; Do I need to put in 100 or so tags onto Q? What do I do about the synonym structure where &lt;code&gt;radial-basis&lt;/code&gt; is a subset of &lt;code&gt;basis-function&lt;/code&gt;, anything? There are pluses and minuses to doing that, request advice.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2017-11-03T16:23:43.597" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T12:39:19.270" Title="Made a [basis-function] tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5002" CreationDate="2017-11-04T06:24:42.243" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the fact that poor questions often end up on the Hot Network Questions list may be taken as a given. Indeed, I've had more than a few fairly ordinary answers become popular because they were on questions that hit the list, while (clearly) much better answers on other questions sometimes struggle to get any upvotes at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what to do about the fact that many of them close?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's some thoughts &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a question that should close should still close, so we shouldn't hesitate because it's HNQ. Similarly, less than stellar answers should get the usual actions -- comments, edits, and where necessary downvotes and so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;however, a closed question can often be improved (and may sometimes reopen as a result), so where we can salvage or improve a question we should do so.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could perhaps keep an eye out for the questions that may be more likely to hit HNQ (topical, superficially easy to answer, inviting opinion etc) and take action on them as quickly as possible; some may be forestalled but at least the ones that get there anyway have a better chance of being less terrible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2017-11-04T06:24:42.243" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2935" CreationDate="2017-11-05T02:28:09.700" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that amoeba's answer on &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/190148&quot;&gt;Building an autoencoder in Tensorflow to surpass PCA&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is extremely elegant and insightful; it provides an excellent and coherent example on how an auto-encoder compares to PCA. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To quote another user's comment: &quot;&lt;em&gt;Fantastical! Stupendousness!&lt;/em&gt;&quot; - I agree with that assessment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11852" LastActivityDate="2017-11-05T02:28:09.700" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5015" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5037" CreationDate="2017-11-05T11:09:39.370" Score="8" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have an ambiguous &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fisher&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fisher&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fisher&lt;/a&gt; tag that says right in the tag excerpt that it's ambiguous and should better be avoided. @gung moved most of the questions out of it &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2049/28666&quot;&gt;several years ago&lt;/a&gt;, but did not empty it completely so it got lots of new threads in the meantime (75 currently). I think this should still be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specific tags are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fishers-exact&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fishers-exact&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fishers-exact&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fisher-information&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fisher-information&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fisher-information&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fisher-transform&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fisher-transform&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fisher-transform&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fisher-scoring&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fisher-scoring&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fisher-scoring&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fishers-lsd&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fishers-lsd&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fishers-lsd&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ronald-fisher&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ronald-fisher&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ronald-fisher&lt;/a&gt; -- all fine tags with clear scopes and excerpts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; We now also have the following synonyms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fishers-method&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fishers-method&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fishers-method&lt;/a&gt;$\to$&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/combining-p-values&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;combining-p-values&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;combining-p-values&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fishers-discriminant-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fishers-discriminant-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fishers-discriminant-analysis&lt;/a&gt;$\to$&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/discriminant-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;discriminant-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;discriminant-analysis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am posting it here hoping that maybe somebody will want to do this task or join the effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2017-11-08T20:11:43.237" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T20:21:17.443" Title="Ambiguous [fisher] tag should be disambiguated" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-reorganization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5016" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5048" CreationDate="2017-11-05T17:50:59.340" Score="6" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/parameter-optimization&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;parameter-optimization&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;parameter-optimization&lt;/a&gt;×154, without tag wiki or excerpt. It seems to be used mainly for things like maximum likelihood, which has its own tag, further optimization used in estimation is covered by the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/optimization&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;optimization&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;optimization&lt;/a&gt;×1263.  Maybe we should declare &lt;code&gt;[parameter-optimization]&lt;/code&gt; as a synonym of &lt;code&gt;[optimization]&lt;/code&gt;? Otherwise it needs a wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-11-05T19:28:56.377" LastActivityDate="2017-11-12T01:44:06.487" Title="What to do about [parameter-optimization] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|tag-excerpt|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5017" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5047" CreationDate="2017-11-05T17:52:43.977" Score="7" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two tags, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/integral&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;integral&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;integral&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/integration&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;integration&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;integration&lt;/a&gt;, that seem to be used interchangeably, maybe one should be a synonym of the other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-11-05T19:30:11.787" LastActivityDate="2017-11-12T01:41:20.240" Title="Should tags [integral] and [integration] be synonyms?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5018" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5019" CreationDate="2017-11-05T18:26:23.187" Score="6" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sgd&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sgd&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sgd&lt;/a&gt; has no usage information. I do not know what it is for, anybody knows, and can provide a wiki?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-11-05T19:29:41.727" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T13:32:55.470" Title="What is the meaning of the [sgd] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-excerpt|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5018" CreationDate="2017-11-06T08:49:28.557" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote the following wiki excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a variant of gradient descent where only a small subset (&quot;mini-batch&quot;) of training examples is used to compute the gradient on each iteration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to improve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might make sense to create a synonym &lt;code&gt;[stochastic-gradient-descent]&lt;/code&gt;$\to$&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sgd&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sgd&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sgd&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update: done.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-11-06T13:32:55.470" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T13:32:55.470" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5021" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5025" CreationDate="2017-11-06T15:02:46.697" Score="6" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/311831/why-does-vgg16-double-number-of-features-after-each-maxpooling-layer&quot;&gt;Why does VGG16 double number of features after each maxpooling layer?&lt;/a&gt; was put on hold after I had already answered it. As such, I think the OP cannot accept my answer (correct?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In hindsight, I should have seen that coming, because I think that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4990/are-machine-learning-questions-about-an-incorrectly-working-piece-of-code-consid&quot;&gt;Machine Learning questions are more at risk of being off-topic than other questions&lt;/a&gt;. However, unlike the question I mentioned last time (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/309037/backpropagation-in-multi-layer-perceptron-mlp-doesnt-converge&quot;&gt;Backpropagation in multi-layer perceptron (MLP) doesn&amp;#39;t converge&lt;/a&gt;), which I voted to close, this time there's not a line of code in the OP's question: it's purely a question on a certain CNN architecture (VGG16). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I edit the question removing the reference to Jeremy Howard's fast.ai course, and I add a reference to the paper where VGG16 had been presented, do you think the question could be opened again? Is it acceptable if I edit the question, instead than the OP? I'm not begging for the question to be reopened, just exploring a possibility. If you think it has to be closed, I won't do anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-11-06T19:26:46.077" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T19:38:38.970" Title="Question put on hold after I already answered it: can I edit it?" Tags="|discussion|editing|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5022" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-06T15:26:06.503" Score="5" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have multiple synonyms for full-form names and their abbreviations like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/item-response-theory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;item-response-theory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;item-response-theory&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/irt&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;irt&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;irt&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/stochastic-gradient-descent&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;stochastic-gradient-descent&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;stochastic-gradient-descent&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sgd&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sgd&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sgd&lt;/a&gt;. What should be the basic form: full length or abbreviated? The labels can be easily swapped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T15:51:33.760" Title="Should the default tag synonyms be in the full form or abbreviated?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4586" CreationDate="2017-11-06T15:43:00.573" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not arguing that ssdecontrol has an excellent answer, but as someone who is very interested in R packages, I find that subscribing to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.r-bloggers.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;R-bloggers&lt;/a&gt; is really, really, useful. It will keep you in touch with what is new in the R package world as well as linking to blogs describing the use of various R packages.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39770" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2017-11-06T21:58:26.613" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T21:58:26.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5022" CreationDate="2017-11-06T15:51:33.760" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Let the users decide in each case.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When creating synonyms, I have always chosen as the &quot;target&quot; (which is the name that will be displayed) the one most commonly used on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The advantages of this procedure are evident: our tags reflect the values people naturally think of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The disadvantage would be an apparent inconsistency--sometimes a target would be longer than its synonyms, sometimes shorter.  But of what value would such a consistency be?  I cannot see any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T15:51:33.760" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5021" CreationDate="2017-11-06T19:38:38.970" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I think you are being too cautious here.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We close a lot of questions and some of the decisions are inevitably wrong or at least not optimal. If you see a question that was closed but you think it should be re-opened, then vote to re-open! To increase the chances of reopening, you can do two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post a comment explaining why you think this question should be re-opened.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit the question to make it as clear and as nicely/cleanly formatted as possible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then wait and see if it gets re-opened. Only if it doesn't, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; you can post on Meta drawing extra attention to the issue. But normally that should not be the first thing to do (at least given that you have enough rep to edit and to cast re-open votes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Question put on hold after I already answered it: can I edit it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T19:38:38.970" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5012" CreationDate="2017-11-06T19:53:25.303" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wait a couple of days to see if anybody protests against your new tag, and if nobody raises any concerns, then you can go ahead and put this tag on some older questions. I don't recommend hunting down &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; questions possibly related to this tag. Rather, I would suggest to find a dozen or two most prominent (most upvoted or otherwise most important) threads and tag those. This will be enough to &quot;establish&quot; the tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Related tags&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/radial-basis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;radial-basis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;radial-basis&lt;/a&gt;×39 tag too much. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Around half of its questions seem to be about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rbf-network&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rbf-network&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rbf-network&lt;/a&gt;×21, which has its own tag. Those clearly should be retagged. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Most of the remaining questions seem to be about RBF kernel in the context of kernel methods in machine learning. I suggest we create &lt;code&gt;[rbf-kernel]&lt;/code&gt; tag and map it as a synonym to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel-trick&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel-trick&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel-trick&lt;/a&gt;×434. I don't think it would be useful to keep it separate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;After questions about RBF networks and about RBF kernel are moved out of the [radial-basis] tag, there will be almost no threads left there. If anything remains, it can be retagged with your new &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/basis-function&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;basis-function&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;basis-function&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="53690" LastEditDate="2017-11-10T12:39:19.270" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T12:39:19.270" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="793" CreationDate="2017-11-07T09:41:29.583" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Vowpal Wabbit&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;VW is a command-line machine learning software that is designed to efficiently work with large amounts of data, that is not limited by RAM. It supports online learning. The software gained popularity as a tool used by multiple users on Kaggle competitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As described on its &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/JohnLangford/vowpal_wabbit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;github page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vowpal Wabbit is a machine learning system which pushes the frontier&#xA;of machine learning with techniques such as online, hashing,&#xA;allreduce, reductions, learning2search, active, and interactive&#xA;learning. &lt;a href=&quot;https://vowpalwabbit.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://vowpalwabbit.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pretty detailed documentation with code examples can be found on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/JohnLangford/vowpal_wabbit/wiki&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;github Wiki page&lt;/a&gt; of the project. Video lecutres by John Langford, creator of VW, giving introductory tutorials can be found on YouTube &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-x86zHUDaI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEob9cRkpDk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. There is also arXived paper &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.4198&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;A Reliable Effective Terascale Linear Learning System&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Agarwal et al describing theoretical basis of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-11-09T06:54:09.773" LastActivityDate="2023-11-09T06:54:09.773" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-11-07T09:41:29.583" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5028" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5030" CreationDate="2017-11-07T10:13:48.947" Score="6" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are questions asking about venues for publishing statistical or machine learning-related articles on-topic at CV? Here is an example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/312400/1352&quot;&gt;Where to publish reasonable article in Deep Reinforcement Learning?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just for reference: &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Suggestions or recommendations for a university, journal, or research topic (a &quot;shopping question&quot;) are explicitly off-topic at Academia.SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll provide answers, please upvote as you see fit, or add a new answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="1352" LastEditDate="2017-11-07T11:34:13.310" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T11:34:13.310" Title="&quot;Where to publish&quot; questions: on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5028" CreationDate="2017-11-07T10:13:48.947" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;, questions about venues for publishing statistical or ML articles are on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="1352" LastEditDate="2017-11-07T11:33:02.670" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T11:33:02.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5028" CreationDate="2017-11-07T10:14:52.853" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;, questions about venues for publishing statistical or ML articles are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="1352" LastEditDate="2017-11-07T11:32:53.857" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T11:32:53.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5031" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-07T11:24:43.720" Score="6" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/310913/magnitude-and-direction-of-relationship-between-predictors-and-dependent-in-regr&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/312398/define-the-number-of-components-for-plsr&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; which provide a lot of extra information and does not look good. If I were to Google a similar question and find the one on the CV, I would probably skip it due to its crowded look despite of how simple the actual question is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, should I warn the user with a comment or should I report it to a moderator or leave it as is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93663" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2017-11-08T13:42:54.703" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T13:42:54.703" Title="What to do with unnecessarily crowded-looking questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5031" CreationDate="2017-11-07T11:33:42.237" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/272351/allow-to-hide-sections-of-stack-snippets&quot;&gt;at StackOverflow.com you can use code snippets&lt;/a&gt; that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/270973/3986320&quot;&gt;can be hidden&lt;/a&gt;. Maybe we could use it as well for hidding things like data dumps? At this moment it does not seem to work on CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="35989" LastEditDate="2017-11-07T13:12:03.290" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T13:12:03.290" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="793" CreationDate="2017-11-07T19:30:47.950" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Keras&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Keras is a high-level neural networks API, written in Python and&#xA;  capable of running on top of TensorFlow, CNTK, or Theano. It was&#xA;  developed with a focus on enabling fast experimentation. &lt;em&gt;Being able&#xA;  to go from idea to result with the least possible delay is key to&#xA;  doing good research.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has detailed &lt;a href=&quot;https://keras.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;online documentation&lt;/a&gt;, users can seek help in &lt;a href=&quot;https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/keras-users&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Keras Google group&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://kerasteam.slack.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Slack channel&lt;/a&gt;. Moreover, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/keras&quot;&gt;StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/keras&quot;&gt;Data Science Exchange&lt;/a&gt; both have a tag for Keras.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="276652" LastEditDate="2020-04-22T23:02:47.583" LastActivityDate="2020-04-22T23:02:47.583" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-11-07T19:30:47.950" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5000" CreationDate="2017-11-07T20:40:23.427" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Frans: #3 is the only constructive way imo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm almost a newbie here and on both sides of the line: I sometimes ask, sometimes answer. I'm sometimes frustrated or puzzled at questions I feel as absurd. I sometimes feel angry at people considering my questions as &quot;wrong&quot; without a second look. If what I wanted to know was easy for me to find out by browsing the net, well usually, I would have found it somewhere else and wouldn't ask. Even if I am actually blinded by a common misunderstanding, don't know the keywords to use in Google, don't understand some articles I read, I am definitely in a situation where I can't clear it up by myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless the question is unclear, poorly formatted, unrelated to stats/ML, there is no wrong question. Saying that the point of view of the person who asks misses something is naive, a dead end or whatever IS definitely an answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like any answer it is worth explaining what we mean as clearly as possible, possibly providing references as usual. Also, we might be wrong, miss some knowledge or misunderstand what the person asks, or assume things that do not match the real situation where the question appears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing clear and thoughtful answers allows (nice) confrontation in the community. Answers can be commented, improved, clarified, voted up/down... efficiently while it's messy with comments. Also some comments can be felt as aggressive sometimes. When you take time to write an answer, this aggressiveness disappears: since it's not so easy to explain, I guess it's not easy to understand either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think if a person makes the effort to write, update, improve... a clear question, then taking time to answer is not a waste of time (generally speaking).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150611" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2017-11-08T08:34:33.420" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T08:34:33.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5036" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-08T01:59:45.383" Score="7" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;It occurred to me that creating a contest, where (1) a statistical challenge or problem was completely defined, (2) judging criteria were unambiguously defined in terms of the winning answer, and (3) contest rules like &quot;ending date,&quot; &quot;no clear winner,&quot; etc. were unambiguously articulated might be a Good Idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I felt that such a contest could be a fun way to publicly express different approaches to solving problems in statistics, with the added advantage of identifying promising &quot;best practices&quot;—at least within the constraints of the contest rules. Something along the lines of &lt;a href=&quot;https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Code Golf&lt;/a&gt;, but delimited by statistical interests and approaches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/114610/what-is-the-relationship-between-y-and-x-in-this-plot&quot;&gt;highly regarded questions and answers may present a statistical challenge&lt;/a&gt;, and wonder if we might add a &lt;code&gt;[contest]&lt;/code&gt; or some similar tag, along with appropriate desiderata for posing such a contest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that the &lt;code&gt;[puzzle]&lt;/code&gt; tag is getting at a different motivation, because it implies the OP knows the answer, whereas what I envision as the use for a &lt;code&gt;[contest]&lt;/code&gt; tag implies the OP as criteria for judging a best of acceptable answers within a time frame, but does not know the winning answer &lt;em&gt;a priori&lt;/em&gt;... indeed is hoping to see creative, possibly unorthodox, and certainly non-canonical answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44269" LastEditorUserId="44269" LastEditDate="2017-11-16T21:36:55.980" LastActivityDate="2017-11-16T21:36:55.980" Title="Are contest-type questions appropriate for CV?" Tags="|discussion|tags|on-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5015" CreationDate="2017-11-08T20:21:17.443" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Years ago I reorganized the &lt;code&gt;[fisher]&lt;/code&gt; tag.  I created several new tags (e.g., &lt;code&gt;[f-e]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[f-i]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[f-t]&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;[r-f]&lt;/code&gt;).  But I left the tag on ~25 threads that seemed to merit some connection to &quot;fisher&quot;, but where idiosyncratic.  I edited the excerpt to put a rather specific message that the tag should only rarely be used, and the other tags should be preferred.  I think now that that strategy is unworkable and was a mistake.  Not surprisingly, perhaps, many people over the intervening years ignored that usage guidance, necessitating this thread.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over the past couple days, @mdewey, @amoeba (thanks, guys), and I have cleaned up the remaining &lt;code&gt;[fisher]&lt;/code&gt; tagged threads.  In doing so, we have created &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fisher-scoring&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fisher-scoring&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fisher-scoring&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fishers-lsd&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fishers-lsd&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fishers-lsd&lt;/a&gt;.  I also created two synonyms (noted in the body of the question above).  After 24 hours, &lt;code&gt;[fisher]&lt;/code&gt; should disappear.  Let us hope it won't be recreated.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T20:21:17.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5038" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5049" CreationDate="2017-11-09T18:09:55.657" Score="7" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have an ambiguous &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/benchmark&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;benchmark&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;benchmark&lt;/a&gt; tag that has 23 questions but no usage guidance and seems to be being used for several quite different things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions are asking about benchmarks for statistical models to be compared against eg  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/257547/how-to-benchmark-an-acd-model&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. There was a failed &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/166174&quot;&gt;edit request&lt;/a&gt; suggesting that this should become the recommended usage for the tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Refers to a forecasting model which is used as a standard by which a more complected model (i.e VARs and VECM) must out preform. Usually the historical mean, median or some form of an ARIMA class of model is used as a the model which the more complected one must outperform to display the model's effectiveness in comparison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there seem to be rather more questions about benchmarking code runtimes etc eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/296723/how-to-best-report-code-benchmarking-results&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a feeling that the tag should be split into two cases and &quot;benchmark&quot; itself dropped for being potentially ambiguous. But I'm not an expert on either of these two areas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few threads that do not seem to fit within either of these categories, eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/250304/on-which-benchmark-datasets-decision-trees-do-not-perform-well&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (which might be better regarded as a request for a canonical exemplar data set) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/6538/mathematician-wants-the-equivalent-knowledge-to-a-quality-stats-degree&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (where &quot;benchmark&quot; seems to be referring to educational standards), but these usages seem too rare to require disambiguating and perhaps the tag should simply be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="22228" LastEditDate="2017-11-09T18:59:28.230" LastActivityDate="2017-11-12T20:14:55.980" Title="&quot;Benchmark&quot; tag is ambiguous" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-reorganization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5040" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5062" CreationDate="2017-11-10T11:40:56.833" Score="5" ViewCount="498" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/zero-inflation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;zero-inflation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;zero-inflation&lt;/a&gt;×254 tag but no tag for hurdle models. I have just created &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hurdle-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hurdle-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hurdle-model&lt;/a&gt;×1. Now I am wondering if it should better be made a synonym of &lt;code&gt;[zero-inflation]&lt;/code&gt; or left alone as a separate tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/81457&quot;&gt;What is the difference between zero-inflated and hurdle distributions (models)?&lt;/a&gt;, these two models are meaningfully distinct. However, most of the time they are supposed to deal with the same issue. It seems that the two models should better be assigned to a common &quot;umbrella&quot; tag. The question is: can &lt;code&gt;[zero-inflation]&lt;/code&gt; surve as such an umbrella tag DESPITE &quot;zero-inflated model&quot; and &quot;hurdle model&quot; being two different things? Can we perhaps view &quot;zero inflation&quot; as an umbrella name for the underlying issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current wiki excerpt for &lt;code&gt;[zero-inflation]&lt;/code&gt; reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Variables that are counts (non-negative integers) often have an excess of zeroes compared to a certain count distribution. Zero-inflated regression models (e.g. zero inflated Poisson, zero inflated negative binomial) are designed to deal with this. Less commonly, continuous data can have this issue, and there is zero-inflated normal regression to deal with that situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we make &lt;code&gt;[hurdle-model]&lt;/code&gt; a synonym, we could modify it e.g. like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Excess of zeroes in the data compared to a certain distribution that otherwise describes the data well. Regression approaches for count data include zero-inflated Poisson or negative binomial GLMs, and hurdle models.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Additional question:&lt;/strong&gt; there also is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/point-mass-at-zero&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;point-mass-at-zero&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;point-mass-at-zero&lt;/a&gt;×14 tag without an excerpt, that is probably supposed to be used for semi-continuous distributions with point mass at zero. I could write such an excerpt, but shouldn't we perhaps make it a synonym of &lt;code&gt;[zero-inflation]&lt;/code&gt; too? After all, a point mass at zero does yield &quot;an excess of zeros&quot; compared to any continuous distribution. And the current excerpt of &lt;code&gt;[zero-inflation]&lt;/code&gt; even mentions zero-inflated continuous models.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2017-11-17T00:47:51.520" Title="Tags for zero-inflated vs. hurdle vs. point-mass-at-zero models" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|tag-excerpt|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5041" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5057" CreationDate="2017-11-10T14:02:02.193" Score="12" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest to rename &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/poisson&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;poisson&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;poisson&lt;/a&gt; into &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/poisson-distribution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;poisson-distribution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;poisson-distribution&lt;/a&gt;, given that its wiki excerpt says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A discrete distribution defined on the non-negative integers that has the property that the mean is equal to the variance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; given that we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/poisson-regression&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;poisson-regression&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;poisson-regression&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/poisson-process&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;poisson-process&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;poisson-process&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/poisson-binomial&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;poisson-binomial&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;poisson-binomial&lt;/a&gt; tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2017-11-16T16:46:04.913" Title="Rename [poisson] in [poisson-distribution]" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-renaming|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5042" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-10T14:02:27.057" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-11-10T14:02:27.057" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T14:02:27.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5043" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-10T14:02:27.057" Score="0" Body="For issues related to tag renaming." OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-11-10T14:02:27.057" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T14:02:27.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5044" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-10T14:09:17.007" Score="0" ViewCount="666" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=cycle%20time-series&quot;&gt;Searching for cycle and time-series&lt;/a&gt; I receive 339 results. Cycles are an important pattern in time-series analysis and therefore I think that they should receive their proper tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: The difference between a cycle and a seasonality is that a seasonality always appears after the same time period. One example is that Christmas always appears once a year in December. Also every Sunday Christians celebrate Sunday. However a cycle appears in irregular time periods, e.g., business cycles where recession appears more or less twice a decade are an example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.otexts.org/fpp/6/1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Seasonal&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A seasonal pattern exists when a series is influenced by seasonal factors (e.g., the quarter of the year, the month, or day of the week). Seasonality is always of a fixed and known period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cyclic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A cyclic pattern exists when data exhibit rises and falls that are not of fixed period. The duration of these fluctuations is usually of at least 2 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@robjhyndman what do you think as an expert in this area?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128677" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2017-11-10T16:00:13.940" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T16:00:13.940" Title="Should we create a [cycle] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5040" CreationDate="2017-11-10T16:27:59.380" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is &amp;quot;zero-inflation&amp;quot; the &lt;em&gt;phenomenon&lt;/em&gt;, and there are zero-inflated-(Poisson / negative binomial / etc.) &lt;em&gt;models&lt;/em&gt; as one strategy to deal with that phenomenon (in addition to hurdle models and possibly other strategies).  I interpret the tag to be about the phenomenon.  The excerpt should be clarified to eliminate the conflation of phenomenon with one possible remedy.  Here is a possible edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Count variables often have excess zeroes compared to a specified count distribution. Less commonly, continuous data can have this issue, use [point-mass-at-zero] for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could further create tags for various existing approaches to dealing with the phenomenon, such as &lt;code&gt;[zero-inflated-poisson]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[zero-inflated-neg-bin]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[hurdle-model]&lt;/code&gt;.  I do wonder how well so many specific tags will fare in practice, though.  My guess is that a question could be tagged with &lt;code&gt;[zero-inflated]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[poisson-regression]&lt;/code&gt;, e.g., and do just fine.  That is somewhat inconsistent with having &lt;code&gt;[hurdle-model]&lt;/code&gt; as a stand-alone tag, but I think it may be a workable compromise until there are sufficient threads to merit revisiting the issue.  Or not, I'm about 50-50 on this...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possibility is to change the existing tag from &lt;code&gt;[zero-inflation]&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;[zero-inflated-data]&lt;/code&gt;, and then have a generic &lt;code&gt;[zero-inflated-model]&lt;/code&gt;.  That would be less open to error.  My basic suggestion here is to add / clarify the excerpts and otherwise leave it alone as much as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your specific questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't make &lt;code&gt;[hurdle-model]&lt;/code&gt; a synonym of &lt;code&gt;[zero-inflation]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we should clarify the excerpt for &lt;code&gt;[zero-inflation]&lt;/code&gt; as pertaining to the phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't make &lt;code&gt;[point-mass-at-zero]&lt;/code&gt; a synonym of &lt;code&gt;[zero-inflation]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we should create a good excerpt for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T19:26:42.133" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5040" CreationDate="2017-11-10T23:40:45.167" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I usually agree with @gung on tag issues, but this time I am not convinced by his answer. I want to make two points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see how we can meaningfully separate tags for zero-inflated count models, hurdle count models, and zero-inflated-aka-hurdle continuous models. Because: (A) Zero-inflated and hurdle count models are clearly distinct but &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; similar and &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; related. I think they should be grouped together in one tag. (B) For continuous models, there is no difference between zero-inflated and hurdle. I googled a bit, and I see that people talk about &quot;zero-inflated gamma&quot; and &quot;hurdle gamma&quot; models (and the same for lognormal). That's the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, my point #1: we need one tag for &lt;code&gt;[zero-inflated-and-hurdle-count-and-continous-models]&lt;/code&gt;. Let's say we call it &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/zero-inflated-and-hurdle-models&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;zero-inflated-and-hurdle-models&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;zero-inflated-and-hurdle-models&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Gung suggests to have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/zero-inflated-data&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;zero-inflated-data&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;zero-inflated-data&lt;/a&gt; separately from the model tag(s). I am not sure I see the benefit. 100% of questions in the former tag would fit to the latter tag, and I think that most (90%?) of the questions in the latter would fit to the former.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence my point #2: let's just use &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/zero-inflation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;zero-inflation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;zero-inflation&lt;/a&gt; for all of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are other models to deal with zero-inflated data. E.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tobit-regression&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tobit-regression&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tobit-regression&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tweedie-distribution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tweedie-distribution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tweedie-distribution&lt;/a&gt;. These tags should clearly stay separate. I admit that there is some conceptual blurriness here, but this currently seems to me to be the most reasonable approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(On reflection, I would get rid of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/point-mass-at-zero&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;point-mass-at-zero&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;point-mass-at-zero&lt;/a&gt; altogether because it seems to be used for other things as well, such as priors with point mass at zero.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T23:40:45.167" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5017" CreationDate="2017-11-12T01:41:20.240" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I notice that &lt;code&gt;[integral]&lt;/code&gt; has 122 threads, whereas &lt;code&gt;[integration]&lt;/code&gt; has 43, of which 6 have both. Both tags have excerpts, and neither really has a full wiki. That suggests to my mind that &lt;code&gt;[integral]&lt;/code&gt; is preferred.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have made &lt;code&gt;[integration]&lt;/code&gt; a synonym of &lt;code&gt;[integral]&lt;/code&gt;, and I merged them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2017-11-12T01:41:20.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5016" CreationDate="2017-11-12T01:44:06.487" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems really obvious.  I have made &lt;code&gt;[parameter-optimization]&lt;/code&gt; a synonym of &lt;code&gt;[optimization]&lt;/code&gt;, and I merged them.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2017-11-12T01:44:06.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5038" CreationDate="2017-11-12T20:14:55.980" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In forecasting, comparing a proposed new method against a benchmark is fundamental, for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/312784/1352&quot;&gt;the reasons I describe here&lt;/a&gt;. (My impression is that the analogue is not equally common in Machine Learning, but I may well be misinformed here.) So it's an &lt;em&gt;important&lt;/em&gt; point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't see it as a &lt;em&gt;big&lt;/em&gt; topic. There is really not all that more to it than what I wrote in the link above, plus &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/163164/1352&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt; (which ironically enough doesn't have the tag) and maybe a few threads on relative error measures like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mase&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mase&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mase&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/296723/how-to-best-report-code-benchmarking-results&quot;&gt;a question on how to report performance on software benchmarks&lt;/a&gt; should carry a &quot;benchmark&quot; tag - any more than a question on how to analyze apple yields should carry an &quot;apples&quot; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line: I'd suggest we remove the tag and possibly burninate it. It doesn't seem to be worth the housekeeping. If this answer gets upvoted enough and no mods weigh in, I'll start removing it in small batches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2017-11-12T20:14:55.980" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5040" CreationDate="2017-11-13T20:08:42.327" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the distribution is continuous you might add a 0 point mass but this is hard to model in a regression framework. One alternative is to use a Tweedie distribution with $1 \leq p \leq 2$ which is continuous and has a point mass at 0. If the tag is going to mention anything about continuous distributions I'd recommend mentioning the Tweedie as an option. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150025" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T20:08:42.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5052" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5053" CreationDate="2017-11-14T11:55:43.957" Score="6" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;10 days ago I asked a question here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/311668/what-is-the-difference-between-a-spine-register-and-index&quot;&gt;What is the difference between a Spine, Register, and Index?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the following day (Sunday) I added a bounty worth 50 reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That expired this Sunday gone, while an answer was posted on Friday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time of the answer being posted, and when the bounty ended, I was unfortunately unable to review the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, when I saw the answer yesterday (and asked for some minor follow up info which was provided), it was too late to award the bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer (even before I asked for the minor additions) IMO answered my question very well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to extend the bounty so the user who posted the answer can be justly rewarded?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148135" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-11-14T15:53:31.927" LastActivityDate="2017-11-14T15:53:31.927" Title="Can I reopen/extend the bounty on a question?" Tags="|support|bounty|timestamps|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5052" CreationDate="2017-11-14T12:01:26.130" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;answer is &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. You must assign the bounty during the bounty + grace period; otherwise it vanishes. If you don't award a bounty and there is an answer with the highest score (minimum 2 upvotes) gets half of the bounty. Bounties cannot be canceled, prolonged, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="35989" LastEditDate="2017-11-14T12:54:08.027" LastActivityDate="2017-11-14T12:54:08.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5054" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5055" CreationDate="2017-11-15T15:20:36.503" Score="5" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/smallareaestimation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;smallareaestimation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;smallareaestimation&lt;/a&gt; tag and I think it needs some hyphens, i.e. should it not be &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/small-area-estimation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;small-area-estimation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;small-area-estimation&lt;/a&gt; instead? I wanted to edit it manually as there were only five questions tagged with it. I though I would create a new tag with the hyphens, copy the tag info from the original tag to the new one, and retag all the five questions. However, the system did not allow me to create the new tag and suggested I post a question about it here. This is what I just did. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should there be hyphens in the tag name, and how do I (or someone else) put them there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-11-16T16:53:16.900" LastActivityDate="2017-11-16T16:53:16.900" Title="Tag [smallareaestimation] needs a couple of hyphens in its name" Tags="|support|tags|tag-renaming|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5054" CreationDate="2017-11-15T15:38:20.503" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, done. To do this you need to create synonym and then merge the tags, this can be done by few clicks by a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are not a moderator, then you should suggest a tag synonym and wait for approval from the community, or moderator. To suggest a synonym you need to have a sufficient reputation for answering questions within the tag of interest. Often this may be problematic, especially since we often want to &quot;do something&quot; with esoteric, uncommon tags, in such case you may (a) open a thread on wiki, or (b) contact the moderator on chat, or by flagging one of the threads for a moderators attention with asking for such actions. With minor problems, as in this case, the (b) option seems more reasonable since there is nothing to discuss on Meta, it is just a &quot;cosmetic&quot; change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="35989" LastEditDate="2017-11-16T08:54:31.560" LastActivityDate="2017-11-16T08:54:31.560" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5041" CreationDate="2017-11-16T16:46:04.913" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems like a no-brainer.  I created the tag (i.e., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/poisson-distribution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;poisson-distribution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;poisson-distribution&lt;/a&gt;), made them synonyms, merged them (so that all threads that used to have &lt;code&gt;[poisson]&lt;/code&gt; now have &lt;code&gt;[poisson-distribution]&lt;/code&gt; instead, without bumping &gt;1k threads to the main page), and deleted the old &lt;code&gt;[poisson]&lt;/code&gt; tag.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2017-11-16T16:46:04.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5058" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5059" CreationDate="2017-11-16T16:53:21.360" Score="12" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/314103/182174&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; and wanted to make sure that I am not violating this community's etiquette. My answer builds on two suggestions made by other users in the comments on the question. Those other users have not, or at least not yet, written their own answers. I think I am on the safe side since (i) I clearly acknowledge their input and (ii) I also significantly (in my view) expand on their comments and add thoughts of my own. However, I would be curious to hear your views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess this question applies generally but the &quot;stakes&quot; might be higher when a bounty is involved, such as in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Follow-up question: Would / should I be &quot;obliged&quot; to any particular behavior in case the authors of the comments decided to actually write their own answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="182174" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-11-16T19:46:41.843" LastActivityDate="2017-11-16T19:46:41.843" Title="Is it OK to use suggestions by other people to answer a question with a bounty?" Tags="|discussion|answers|comment|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5058" CreationDate="2017-11-16T17:12:08.523" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2641/17230&quot;&gt;Etiquette for answering old questions addressed in comments?&lt;/a&gt;. I don't think anything changes just because a bounty's at stake. (If someone's really keen to win that bounty they needn't give anything away in comments before they're ready to write an answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2017-11-16T17:12:08.523" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2935" CreationDate="2017-11-16T23:05:56.497" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alecos Papadopoulos wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/148290/182174&quot;&gt;this really nice answer to the question &quot;Testing for autocorrelation: Ljung-Box versus Breusch-Godfrey&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. It's one of the most solid posts I have seen so far on CV, providing a well-researched canonical answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="182174" LastActivityDate="2017-11-16T23:05:56.497" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5061" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5065" CreationDate="2017-11-16T23:25:03.560" Score="4" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I stumbled upon this question which, aside from being in need of some cleaning up, is not &quot;answerable&quot; as much as it's an open community wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/303269/common-statistical-tests-as-linear-models&quot;&gt;Common statistical tests as linear models&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do users convert questions to community wikis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2017-11-20T15:32:32.323" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T15:51:01.630" Title="How do questions actually convert to community wikis?" Tags="|support|questions|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5040" CreationDate="2017-11-17T00:47:51.520" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you for the good discussion so far, and thanks to @amoeba for pointing me to it! I agree with many points raised so far and just want to share a few personal experiences with this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;General scope:&lt;/strong&gt; I always interpreted the tag &lt;code&gt;[zero-inflation]&lt;/code&gt; as being about the &lt;em&gt;phenomenon&lt;/em&gt; along with various &lt;em&gt;models&lt;/em&gt; for it. Hence, I didn't expect only questions about so-called zero-inflated models but also so-called hurdle models. Due to the close connections between properties of the data and properties of the different models, I prefer a broad tag over several narrower tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Count vs. continuous:&lt;/strong&gt; While most questions are about count data with zero-inflation, I'm personally quite happy to also have questions about continuous data with zero inflation (point mass), e.g., the tobit model (censored normal) or the Cragg model (hurdle or two-part model: probit + truncated normal). Again, there are many parallels between these continuous and the discrete models, so that we could get useful spillover effects from discussing these topics under the same tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Jargon:&lt;/strong&gt; Distinguishing &quot;zero-inflation&quot; and &quot;hurdle&quot; into different tags, is not only difficult because the corresponding count regression models are so similar. It is also difficult because jargon is not unified. For example, large parts of the relevant literature talks about &quot;zero-inflated beta regression&quot;. However, this is not entirely consistent: The beta distribution does not have any zeros and hence these cannot be inflated. Instead calling it a &quot;two-part&quot; or &quot;zero hurdle&quot; beta regression model would be better. But this is not what the literature does. Hence, we would have difficulties cleanly separating it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Recommendation:&lt;/strong&gt; My &lt;em&gt;personal&lt;/em&gt; preference would be to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use an extended description of the &lt;code&gt;[zero-inflation]&lt;/code&gt; tag to say that it is chiefly about count data but also continuous data. And provide references to related tags such as &lt;code&gt;[tobit-regression]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Additionally create a tag &lt;code&gt;[count-regression]&lt;/code&gt; in addition to the existing &lt;code&gt;[count-data]&lt;/code&gt; tag. Or alternatively extend the description of the latter tag to include count regression models.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Either omit the &lt;code&gt;[hurdle-model]&lt;/code&gt; tag or improve it to explicitly include the term &quot;two-part model&quot; which is more popular for certain kinds of hurdle models.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But not all of these preferences are very strong. I could live very well with some of the other solutions posted previously!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60261" LastActivityDate="2017-11-17T00:47:51.520" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5063" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5091" CreationDate="2017-11-17T11:31:23.717" Score="5" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been reviewing our quasi-related threads, and have edited the wiki excerpt of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quasi-likelihood&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quasi-likelihood&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quasi-likelihood&lt;/a&gt; to read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In GLMs, quasi-likelihood estimation is a way to allow over- or under-dispersion by choosing an appropriate variance function. It's often used for count data, e.g. in quasi-binomial or quasi-Poisson models; there it does not correspond to any actual count distribution. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest to make &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quasi-binomial&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quasi-binomial&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quasi-binomial&lt;/a&gt;×13 and &lt;code&gt;[quasi-poisson]&lt;/code&gt; (currently not existing) synonyms of this more general &lt;code&gt;[quasi-likelihood]&lt;/code&gt; tag. I don't think we have enough threads to warrant splitting this into narrow sub-tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, I was going to manually retag all &lt;code&gt;[quasi-binomial]&lt;/code&gt; questions into &lt;code&gt;[quasi-likelihood]&lt;/code&gt;+&lt;code&gt;[binomial]&lt;/code&gt;, but @Glen_b suggested to raise it on Meta, and it's probably a good idea to have these synonym mappings anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T08:54:11.137" Title="Quasi-synonyms for quasi-tags" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|tag-excerpt|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5064" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5081" CreationDate="2017-11-19T20:30:13.043" Score="12" ViewCount="353" Body="&lt;p&gt;We get quite a number of self-study questions, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2486/1352&quot;&gt;one common comment&lt;/a&gt; says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We'll provide hints to help you get unstuck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... how &lt;em&gt;specifically&lt;/em&gt; should we provide these hints? Should we write comments to the question? If the OP answers in comments, we can comment again, and finally post a full answer as a summary. This has the advantage that the train of thought is there for later generations to follow. The disadvantage is that comments are ephemeral and may be deleted sooner or later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The other disadvantage is that someone may barge in with an answer in the middle of our pedagogical back-and-forth, but than can also happen with the alternative below.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or should we post hints as an answer, wait for the OP to comment, then update the answer and iterate? Or post hints as an answer, then do a socratic Q&amp;amp;A in comments, &lt;em&gt;finally&lt;/em&gt; update the answer? Or even only leave the original answer-hint and the comment conversation below, so later generations don't get an immediate answer as a spoiler?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts, anyone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T03:32:32.317" Title="How specifically should we &quot;provide hints&quot; to self-study questions?" Tags="|discussion|homework|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5061" CreationDate="2017-11-20T15:51:01.630" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regular users cannot convert &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; (whole threads in practice) to community wiki.  That was once possible, but hasn't been for several years.  You can convert your own answer to CW, but that won't make the question CW or the other answers.  If you believe a thread should be CW, you have to flag the question and ask the moderators to do it.  Just click on the light gray &quot;flag&quot; at the bottom left of the question body, and comment that the Q should be CW and why you think so.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T15:51:01.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4393" CreationDate="2017-11-21T15:28:18.727" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The various answers in this thread reveal that we, as a community, use &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; for multiple purposes, of which the major ones are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To signal a desire for conceptual help and hints rather than a full answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To acknowledge that the question comes from a textbook or exam.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To serve as a search term.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One discussion we could--and probably should have--concerns the merits of splitting &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; into categories along such lines.  However, I'm interested in something a little different:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As a moderator, what I care most about is having the ability quickly and firmly to close &lt;em&gt;peremptory&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;artificial&lt;/em&gt; questions.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;peremptory&lt;/em&gt; question is one that demands a particular answer: true/false, multiple choice, state a formula, etc.  IMHO, those are of no interest; they almost surely have answers on the site already; and allowing them to stand would rapidly litter this site with tens of thousands of threads that reduce its value. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An &lt;em&gt;artificial&lt;/em&gt; question is one with no context or background.  It is typically fabricated as a routine exercise of an elementary concept and often requires a near-mindless application of some mathematical procedure.  There is no possibility of exploring statistical issues concerning how the data were obtained, how they were measured, what decisions will be made from them, etc.  As such these questions are stripped of all intrinsic interest and are just math problems in disguise.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;These are intrinsic qualities of the questions:&lt;/strong&gt; my descriptions make no reference to who might be asking them or what their motivation might be.  (It sometimes takes a brief conversation &lt;em&gt;via&lt;/em&gt; comments to establish that a question truly is artificial.  The key is that the OP is unable to provide any clarifying information: &quot;this is what my teacher said&quot; or &quot;that's all the textbook has&quot; are the usual responses.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There are mitigating circumstances.&lt;/strong&gt;  Such a question that has been augmented by a description of approaches the OP has taken to solve it &lt;em&gt;by virtue of that unique, personal description&lt;/em&gt; can thereby become new, interesting, and on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The option we currently have to close questions as &quot;self-study&quot; has served well to explain the reasons for closing them. I think it is important that we continue to have some version of this reason for closure and that we continue to make it clear that such questions are unwelcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;One thing we need to be cautious about is unilateral tagging:&lt;/strong&gt; sometimes a genuine statistical question is originally phrased in a peremptory or overly abstract form.  (This is relatively rare but it happens.)  Our policy always has been to respect the OP and not apply the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; tag ourselves.  However, &lt;em&gt;whether or not that tag has been applied,&lt;/em&gt; if a question &lt;em&gt;clearly&lt;/em&gt; is peremptory or artificial, I do not hesitate to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Maybe, then--to answer the original question in this thread--we should not be too concerned about applying the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; tag, but should focus instead on how best to address the question itself, whether by answering, editing, commenting, or closing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T23:52:50.953" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T23:52:50.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5067" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5068" CreationDate="2017-11-21T19:53:28.407" Score="8" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see we have no tag for number needed to treat or number needed to harm.  Am I missing some tag synonym or should I create a new tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T20:04:21.453" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T00:01:44.930" Title="Tag for &quot;number needed to treat&quot; and &quot;number needed to harm&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5067" CreationDate="2017-11-21T22:35:39.560" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There &lt;s&gt;is&lt;/s&gt; &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; an existing tag named &lt;code&gt;[nnt]&lt;/code&gt; (used in two questions). I made it a synonym of new tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/number-needed-to-treat&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;number-needed-to-treat&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;number-needed-to-treat&lt;/a&gt; and merged them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also created an excerpt and a wiki for it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-11-22T00:01:44.930" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T00:01:44.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5069" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-22T09:24:46.383" Score="7" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;What should we do with &quot;how to learn statistics/machine learning&quot; questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/6538/1352&quot;&gt;Mathematician wants the equivalent knowledge to a quality stats degree&lt;/a&gt; is pretty highly upvoted, community wiki and carries the &quot;reference&quot; tag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/315046/1352&quot;&gt;Want to start with “Machine learning” and/or “Data Analysis”&lt;/a&gt; is new and currently voted -1. (I originally voted to close but retracted to ask here.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should we do with such questions? Close as off-topic? Add the &quot;references&quot; tag? Would the &quot;self-study&quot; tag be appropriate (I wouldn't think so)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just for reference: &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Suggestions or recommendations for a university, journal, or research topic (a &quot;shopping question&quot;) are explicitly off-topic at Academia.SE&lt;/a&gt;. Which I originally noted in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5028/1352&quot;&gt;“Where to publish” questions: on-topic?&lt;/a&gt;, which appears to be somewhat related and where the consensus is that &quot;where to publish&quot; questions are off-topic. Does that mean that &quot;what to learn&quot; is off-topic as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll link here from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1577/1352&quot;&gt;What is on topic on Cross Validated?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T09:24:46.383" Title="Course or what to study recommendation questions on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1577" CreationDate="2017-11-22T09:27:43.163" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Off-topic: &quot;where to publish&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions on where to publish academic statistical or Machine Learning manuscripts are off-topic, as voted &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5028/1352&quot;&gt;at this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T09:27:43.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5071" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-23T00:46:10.497" Score="-3" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just got clobbered for calling a PMF a PDF. In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pdf&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pdf&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pdf&lt;/a&gt; tag info it says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Probability density function (PDF) of a continuous random variable gives the&#xA;       relative probability for each of its possible values. Use this tag for &#xA;       discrete probability mass functions (PMFs) too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have just created the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pmf&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pmf&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pmf&lt;/a&gt; tag. I want this to be more clearly defined at the getgo so I am proposing to keep them separate. The critical difference is that  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case of continuous variables $X$, the PDF $\mathcal{P}_X(x)$ can be integrated over an interval $\mathcal{I}$ (or, more generally, any Borel set) to find the probability that the variable is in that interval:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$\Pr(X \in \mathcal{I}) = \int_\mathcal{I} \mathcal{P}_X(x) dx.$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However for the PMF, thinking of probability as mass helps to avoid mistakes since the physical mass is conserved as is the total probability for all hypothetical outcomes $x$:&#xA;$$\sum_{x\in A} f_X(x) = 1$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to change that currently &lt;code&gt;pmf&lt;/code&gt; maps to &lt;code&gt;pdf&lt;/code&gt; and these are not actually synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T08:27:32.490" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T10:01:23.020" Title="Let's create [pmf] tag and keep it distinct from [pdf]" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5071" CreationDate="2017-11-23T08:45:16.447" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For the record:&lt;/strong&gt; our tag description for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pdf&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pdf&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pdf&lt;/a&gt; has always said that one should use it for PMFs too. When you created &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pmf&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pmf&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pmf&lt;/a&gt; tag yesterday to replace &lt;code&gt;[pdf]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/240720&quot;&gt;on one of the questions&lt;/a&gt;, I rolled your edit back because I thought you are clearly going against our established usage. When you immediately replaced it &lt;em&gt;back&lt;/em&gt;, I got a bit annoyed and flagged the post for mod attention suggesting to make &lt;code&gt;pmf&lt;/code&gt; the synonym of &lt;code&gt;pdf&lt;/code&gt;. @Gung must have seen my flag and decided to act on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I agree with Tim that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I can't see any problem with making [pdf] and [pmf] synonyms. The idea of synonyms is not only about exact synonyms, but about groupping related concepts for easier searching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I think we &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; keep them separate if we wanted. For this we would need (1) to remove the synonym mapping, and (2) to retag all Qs about PMFs that are tagged [pdf]. It turns out it's not so many: I get only 24 Qs with these two searches: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bpdf%5D+is%3Aquestion+%22pmf%22&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bpdf%5D+is%3Aquestion+-%22pmf%22+%22probability+mass%22&quot;&gt;two&lt;/a&gt;. I expected to find many more, but 24 are easily doable in a couple of days. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have a strong opinion and am fine with it either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I don't see the difference between PDF and PMF particularly important because if one allows delta functions then these two concepts can be combined together. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_density_function#Link_between_discrete_and_continuous_distributions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_density_function#Link_between_discrete_and_continuous_distributions&lt;/a&gt;. As always with delta functions, a little extra care is needed to do it in a mathematically rigorous way (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/a/54249&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/a/54249&lt;/a&gt;), but in practice one does not need to bother because it behaves in an intuitively clear way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-11-24T10:01:23.020" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T10:01:23.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5073" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5075" CreationDate="2017-11-23T09:06:07.590" Score="10" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often comment questions asking the OPs to provide more details, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/301696/combining-multiple-series-of-experimental-data-to-calculate-confidence-intervals#comment598128_301696&quot;&gt;I also suggest to add those details in the original question&lt;/a&gt;. However, this is frequently ignored, and most of the details remain in the comments. I don't think this helps improving the quality of the question, which should be the real goal of commenting. Is there a reference on the help pages or in this Meta site I could cite, which encourages OP to include details provided in comments, into the main question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt; just to be sure I understood some of the comments below, if I don't want the question to be closed, but to be put on hold because it's unclear, I click on &lt;code&gt;flag&lt;/code&gt; and select this option, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qYzOw.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qYzOw.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="58675" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T13:11:25.790" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T22:51:39.320" Title="A reference to tell OPs to include in the original question the details added in comments" Tags="|discussion|help-center|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5073" CreationDate="2017-11-24T00:13:00.990" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a poster won't act on your comment alone, they likely won't act on anything else (less than closure). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does sometimes help to be specific when asking, to mention the word &lt;em&gt;edit&lt;/em&gt; specifically; some posters hang around for an hour or so and may fix their question if you catch them early.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they do clarify in comments, you can always edit to include the details if need be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In relation to whether to flag to close or whether to vote to close:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When you're able to take an appropriate action to deal with or partly deal with something yourself (like vote to close) you should take that action.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;flagging notifies moderators that you think there is something &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; should do (above what ordinary high-rep users like yourself can). When you don't have relevant voting privileges it makes sense to use the flag option for a closure. If you voted for closure but a good while has passed (many hours at least, perhaps more like a day, say) and you don't think it's going to close from lack of attention (but should still close), in that case flagging also makes some sense.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;in cases where it's important for a moderator to see it or something that's urgent, then you could both vote on it and flag it appropriately&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T22:51:39.320" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T22:51:39.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5076" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-24T13:00:26.520" Score="10" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that some people seem to find posts from years ago and moderate them, closing them as off-topic, duplicate or whatever.  This seems valuable, since people can search the whole database of questions and improving it is a good goal, but how do people find these questions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T13:19:37.737" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T13:19:37.737" Title="How do people find old posts to review, edit, or close them?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|editing|moderation|old-posts|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5076" CreationDate="2017-11-24T13:24:39.790" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I routinely review every active question.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old questions become active whenever they're touched by somebody.  The &quot;Community&quot; bot often touches old questions that might have some value (because they were upvoted or answered).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can no longer do this as thoroughly as I used to because there are about 200 new active questions every day.  That's why we have multiple moderators!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(There is one class of exceptions: some community members are in the habit of making tiny modifications to large numbers of questions all at once.  I recognize those people and the sequences of threads they have touched, and usually just skip over such posts.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T13:24:39.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5064" CreationDate="2017-11-24T18:51:02.720" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems the community has unnecessarily struggled with &quot;homework&quot; questions for a while, mainly due to a worry of having students getting easy answers around here. I see the good intentions of this policy, but it seems it should be clear by now this is something  out of our control and there's no reason to try to address it here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you take a careful look at the current questions on the &quot;self-study&quot; tag, many of them are not even homework questions with very good complete answers. The idea of hints would be completely inappropriate, leading to wrong/incomplete answers that would not be useful to anyone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This idea of giving hints also seems to bias many users to question the OP's intents, leading to unnecessary noise. Instead of asking for clarification or answering the question, the person takes the time to ask &quot;is this homework&quot; or &quot;this smells like homework&quot;, which serves no purpose. I have also seen very poor answers which should be comments, induced by this policy of &quot;giving hints&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum, I think we should assess a question just by its merits. If you think it deserves your time for a full answer, because it's an interesting question, or because it's a widespread misconception that needs to be addressed, just do it and answer it properly. If you think it's a so simple question that you don't even want to bother answering, post a hint in the comments. If it's a question with no effort at all, downvote it and ask the OP to make it better. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;PS: I'm aware my views in this topic might considerably differ from current practices, but I thought this question would be a good opportunity to put these ideas into debate.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39630" LastEditorUserId="39630" LastEditDate="2017-11-24T18:56:47.083" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T18:56:47.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5076" CreationDate="2017-11-24T20:36:41.773" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obviously I am not commenting as a moderator, but I have often contributed to old threads either becoming &quot;active&quot; or entering the review queue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially it happens when I find an old thread and do something &quot;stronger&quot; to it than merely upvoting or commenting on it - for example if I edit it, answer it, flag it or vote to close it. I am an active editor; if I see a typo, an incorrect tag or poorly typeset math, I am keen to edit. Since many threads that come to my attention contain editable issues, a fairly high percentage of inactive threads that I have browsed to will become active again. If see an old question that has serious issues, I will vote to close it, or if I see an answer with issues that go beyond downvoting, I will flag it; these threads will then enter the review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are four main ways that I come across such old threads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I searched (either site search or an external search engine) for something that led me to the thread. That might be because I was looking for something myself, but is often because I am looking for potential duplicate targets for a recently active thread. In many cases this procedure finds not only a potential target, but also unearths other potential duplicates, which triggers another set of votes-to-close being raised.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I followed a link in another thread to that target. Often these threads are suggested as &quot;see alsos&quot; and so there is a fairly percentage of duplicate candidates.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I was searching for a spelling error. In general, if I find a spelling error on one thread (e.g. &quot;nmoral distribution&quot;) then not only will I edit to correct it there, I will - if time allows - also perform a site search to identify other places this error has been made. This often brings up threads that have been inactive for years, but I still feel editing is worthwhile, particularly because a thread that I know contains one error generally contains several others! &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I was working through a bunch of threads with a common tag. Sometimes this is with the explicit intention of retagging, and such edits again result in the thread becoming active again.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So none of these four methods are the result of me systematically working through the site's old question starting at number one and working forwards ... but they all had some systematic element in deciding which threads got looked at and which didn't. I would be unlikely, for example, to trawl up an old thread with no inbound links, which used only a very common tag with thousands of entries (i.e. not a category I would likely work through thread-by-thread), which contained no common spelling errors, and which had a low ranking on search engines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="22228" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T12:44:37.030" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T12:44:37.030" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5076" CreationDate="2017-11-25T01:43:48.840" Score="6" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I look at the active list / the front page; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I look at posts that come up in searches (including ones I wasn't looking for); &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I look at posts other people link to; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I look at posts in the &quot;Related&quot; list of other posts&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(and so forth...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see a mix of old and new posts. If I see something that I think should be improved, I generally do something with it, unless I am in a big rush or if it seems like the present state of it should be &quot;grandfathered in&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T01:43:48.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5064" CreationDate="2017-11-25T09:42:01.107" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;The purpose of the tag&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me begin by explaining what I see as the primary value of the &lt;code&gt;self-study&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;tag&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us imagine that we were in an ideal world where OP's always read the help, and the tag wiki and used the tag as we would wish. Then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When first answering a question, the tag acts a signal to answerers that the question is actually asking &quot;Can you offer me guidance on how to approach a problem like this&quot; -- so the correct answer is one that helps guide OP's to answering such questions themselves. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this is not really the purpose of a tag; that aspect could be handled instead by asking OP's to signal at the start of their question is of this kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of a tag is for &lt;em&gt;later&lt;/em&gt; readers, searching for particular classes of answer. In this case the tag serves the &lt;em&gt;next&lt;/em&gt; honest OP who also has a self-study question and wants to get hints, not complete answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By adding the &lt;code&gt;self-study&lt;/code&gt; tag to a search, &lt;em&gt;they should not see any complete answers&lt;/em&gt; in their search, even if they exist on site. This means that the honest student gets what they want, assistance, without missing out on the value of solving their own problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is*, I think self-study posts should generally avoid giving fully-complete answers (except perhaps where posted by the OP) -- the answers serve best that give clear, solid guidance on how to approach them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*  (and my thoughts on this have progressed from when I first started answering them, as I came to understand the purpose of tags better)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The ongoing value of a self-study question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way, self-study questions have ongoing value beyond the immediate question, and are able to serve a series of more-or-less puzzled students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also suggests that stronger hints should appear later in the answer (so that a reader need only read as far as required to get over their hurdle)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, if you wish, you can add spoiler markup (start each line with &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;!&lt;/code&gt;) so that  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; readers must mouse over&lt;br&gt;&#xA; to see the strongest hints&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[If we do answer self-study questions fully we'll eventually end up with a repository of complete, detailed answers to almost any reasonable question that might be set for a statistics student. We'd have questions set by experts (mostly) and solved by experts (mostly), without any of the practice passing through the minds of the students the work was intended to benefit. &#xA;Imagine the state of music performance of students who -- instead of actually practicing playing -- could send in videos of &lt;em&gt;someone else&lt;/em&gt; performing the pieces they were supposed to learn!]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T21:28:28.843" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T21:28:28.843" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5082" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5084" CreationDate="2017-11-27T01:26:43.557" Score="12" ViewCount="1440" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have two tags that seem closely related:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hauck-donner-effect&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hauck-donner-effect&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hauck-donner-effect&lt;/a&gt; (69 threads) Excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also called &amp;quot;perfect separation&amp;quot;. In logistic regression, if all 1 &amp;amp; 0 outcomes lie on different sides of some value for a variable, the coefficient estimate for that variable will tend towards infinity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/separability&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;separability&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;separability&lt;/a&gt; (37 threads) Excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;separability is when two classes in the data can be completely separated, i.e. by some (hyper)plane, such that for instance a logistic regression, svm or discriminant analysis can give perfect predictions on the training data. See the wikipedia article on Separation (statistics)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 12 threads that have both tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if the distinction between them, and when one or the other should be used, can be made clearer.  Alternatively, should one be made a synonym of the other?  (Which?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T17:12:57.003" Title="Distinction between [hauck-donner-effect] &amp; [separability] tags" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3175" CreationDate="2017-11-27T15:28:43.520" Score="13" Body="&lt;h1&gt;I just invented a square wheel: is it a good idea?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We often have threads where someone claims to have just solved some basic problem (usually with an equally basic solution, like &quot;you just need to add 42 to the output&quot;). Those questions often get closed, but sometimes they get answered. The answer usually points out where the OP made a mistake that invalidated their brilliant solution. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problems with such questions are that (a) they usually do not ask any valid question and (b) they focus on the solution rather than the problem, so it is hard to grasp what problem they are inclined to solve. Moreover, in many cases they would fit better in a &lt;em&gt;discussion forum&lt;/em&gt; where they could be discussed, rather than a Q&amp;amp;A site where at best we can enumerate the reasons why the approach is right or wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such questions do not seem to fit a Q&amp;amp;A site unless the OP defines them in terms of a &lt;em&gt;problem to be solved&lt;/em&gt;, rather than presenting a solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T19:13:17.963" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T19:13:17.963" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5082" CreationDate="2017-11-27T18:15:00.093" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me make a concrete proposal so that people can comment and vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose that we re-tag all the [hauck-donner-effect] ones as [separability] and for at least a selected few of those not tagged with either but which are clearly about separation we tag them [separability] too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;======= edit 29 November 2017 ==========&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following discussion I now propose the new tag [separation] for both of these. For an excerpt I suggest the following, taken and adapted from Wikipedia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Separation occurs when some value(s) of a predictor (or linear combination of predictors) is associated with only one value of a categorical outcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have tried to make this as non-technical as possible but am happy for anyone to edit it (as they can later anyway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastEditorUserId="101426" LastEditDate="2017-11-29T17:26:20.053" LastActivityDate="2017-11-29T17:26:20.053" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2935" CreationDate="2017-11-27T20:00:24.743" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our soon-to-be-infamous question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/315502/1352&quot;&gt;At each step of a limiting infinite process, put 10 balls in a urn and remove one at random. How many balls are left?&lt;/a&gt; is spawning its share of &lt;em&gt;answers I wish I could show everyone&lt;/em&gt; (along with the, ahem, other kind). In particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/315670/1352&quot;&gt;amoeba's answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/315946/1352&quot;&gt;whuber's novel-length treatment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, neither one &lt;em&gt;needs&lt;/em&gt; bounty rep. But both answers definitely pass the first three bullet points test in this meta question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(bounty awarded to amoeba)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T07:05:23.437" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T07:05:23.437" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5082" CreationDate="2017-11-30T05:05:03.170" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag's definition of the Hauck-Donner effect appears to be different than the classical one. To my knowledge, Hauck-Donner effect refers to an erratic behaviour (non-monotonicity) of the power of the Wald test, which is unrelated to the separability issue. As the following four citations show:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A common interpretation of Hauck Donner effect is about power of Wald test&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;None of these papers (seems to) mention separability&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Three next references show the presence of the Hauck Donner effect in other settings than the logit (such as GLM or ANOVA).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Original paper: Hauck, Donner (1977) Wald's Test as Applied to Hypotheses in Logit Analysis, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 72, No. 360&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For tests of a single parameter in the binomial logit model, Wald's&#xA;  test is shown to behave in an aberrant manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Vaeth (1985) &lt;em&gt;On the Use of Wald's Test in Exponential Families:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hauck &amp;amp; Donner (1977) showed that Wald's test (the maximum likelihood&#xA;  test statistic) behaves in an aberrant manner when applied to&#xA;  hypotheses about a single parameter in a binomial logit model. [...] Finally, the use of Wald's test in the analysis of generalized linear models is discussed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mantel (1987) &lt;em&gt;Understanding Wald's Test for Exponential Families:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] demonstration by Hauck and Donner (1977) that in certain&#xA;  multiparameter situations in which interest focuses on one of several&#xA;  parameters, Wald's test statistic (the maximum likelihood test&#xA;  statistic) can decrease to 0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fears et al (1996) A Reminder of the Fallibility of the Wald Statistic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hauck and Donner and Vaeth have identified situations in which the&#xA;  Wald statistic has poor power. We consider another example that is not in the classes discussed by those authors. We present data from a balanced&#xA;  one-way random effects analysis of variance (ANOVA) that illustrate the poor power of the Wald statistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Venables and Ripley (2002, p. 198) &lt;em&gt;Modern Applied Stats with S&lt;/em&gt;, give a similar definition of Hauck and Donner. Interestingly, they mention Hauck Donner and separation together: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is one fairly common circumstance in which both convergence problems and the Hauck–Donner phenomenon can occur. This is when the fitted probabilities are extremely close to zero or one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now it needs to be shown that the tag's definition of Hauck Donner effect is also an accepted one? What are the references for that one? In absence of sources, a deeper cleaning of the tags might be required?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35398" LastEditorUserId="35398" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T17:12:57.003" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T17:12:57.003" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5087" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5089" CreationDate="2017-12-04T08:25:46.730" Score="12" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there ways to incorporate interactive &lt;code&gt;plotly&lt;/code&gt; graphics, or similar, into stats.stackexchange answers and questions? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If not, are there alternatives?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What questions/answers here show some good examples?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T13:04:30.227" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T15:39:57.987" Title="Is it possible to use interactive figures on CrossValidated?" Tags="|discussion|images|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2935" CreationDate="2017-12-04T11:06:31.153" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't seen any suggestions for a question so far (only answer), but I would like to break the ice with&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/316962/understanding-logistic-regression-p-values-for-random-predictors&quot;&gt;understanding logistic regression p-values for random predictors&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[minor edit]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem it addresses is very interesting. The post is not great (too much code and too many questions for a single post, I asked the OP to fix both) but the question behind the post is in my opinion intriguing. Also, the user seems to be fairly new but he's already asking an interesting question, so I think it would deserve a little encouragement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="58675" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T13:04:40.440" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T13:04:40.440" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5087" CreationDate="2017-12-04T12:34:45.780" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No; it is not possible. The only way this could be possible is via iframe HTML tag, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1777/what-html-tags-are-allowed-on-stack-exchange-sites&quot;&gt;stackexchange allows only a limited number of HTML tags&lt;/a&gt; and does not enable users to use any embedded content besides images. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; think that we would need plotly for anything on CrossValidated. If you need an interactive plot for your answer, then it is probably not self-explanatory and you should improve the answer, rather than the graphics. Notice that most of the answers on CV do not use graphics, or use very limited and simple graphics. Interactive (i.e. more than 2D) graphics are needed to visualize pretty complicated data structures, and CV is not the place to discuss such data (it would need a detailed analysis, rather than a short answer). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CV is a place to ask and receive answers on general problems, possibly illustrated with simple data examples. Moreover, you can always post code that users can run on their own machines to interactively check something about your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T15:39:57.987" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T15:39:57.987" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5087" CreationDate="2017-12-04T14:18:22.007" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @Tim says, the answer is no.  But I'm not so against interactive graphics. I can see their utility for some questions, e.g., illustrating things like paradoxes caused by endogeneity. Anytime there are issues pertaining to data in more than two dimensions, there is the possibility that interactive graphics could be helpful.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me suggest a possible alternative:  It is possible to create and post animations (gifs) to the site as images.  (You can view some examples in @amoeba's answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/140579/&quot;&gt;Making sense of principal component analysis, eigenvectors &amp;amp; eigenvalues thread&lt;/a&gt;.)  Thus, what I would suggest is that you produce a simple animation of interacting with a graphic in a particular way to illustrate some point.  Be sure to walk through that you're doing and what it shows in the text.  You won't have the ability to allow the user to interact freely on their own and truly explore the ideas for themself, but you should be able to cover most of what you need to show; you could always post a couple of different ones, if necessary.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T14:18:22.007" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5063" CreationDate="2017-12-05T08:54:11.137" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both synonyms were created by @gung some time ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T08:54:11.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5092" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-10T07:37:58.177" Score="10" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;I currently have a bounty active for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/316644/when-was-the-word-bias-coined-to-mean-mathbbe-hat-theta-theta&quot;&gt;When was the word &amp;quot;bias&amp;quot; coined to mean $\mathbb{E}[\hat{\theta}-\theta]$?&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is correct, except the article that is cited is wrong, as it can be seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/316972/46427&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The person who wrote the answer is an unregistered user, and it's been about a week; the user is not active. I originally tried editing it (which I know is definitely frowned upon), and my edit was rejected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does one do in this situation? This seems similar but not identical to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1956/what-to-do-if-an-accepted-answer-is-wrong-but-author-of-accepted-answer-and-op-a&quot;&gt;What to do if an accepted answer is wrong but author of accepted answer and OP are not active on CV any more?&lt;/a&gt; in my eyes - mainly in that there's a bounty also involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the options that I've thought of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In 17 hours, the bounty will end. If someone posts an answer with the correct article title (&lt;em&gt;hint hint&lt;/em&gt;?), I'll award it to them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answer the question myself with a corrected answer, bounty goes to no one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't feel comfortable awarding the existing answer the bounty or marking it as a &quot;best answer,&quot; as comments (i.e., my comment attached to it) can be much more easily deleted than answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46427" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2017-12-11T08:57:37.377" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T08:57:37.377" Title="What do I do if I have a bounty active, the answer is from an inactive user, but is mostly right minus a major edit?" Tags="|discussion|editing|bounty|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1277" CreationDate="2017-12-11T14:53:19.447" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the asker should be encouraged to select the answer that is correct for their original question and then ask another question. Part of participating in this forum is recognizing it as a resource for all users and not just personal consulting help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that devolve into back-and-forth conversation make it hard for other readers to glean the message, or for new answerers to provide alternative approaches. Searchs can then turn up many false negatives with tangential content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rules of this site encourage posts with a &quot;laser focus&quot; on a specific, statistical question, to provide only the salient details, and to upvote/select answers that address their question. If there is a lack of clarity, the readers and answerers will either ask for it or provide a case-by-case strategy. If the question is answerable and on-topic in its current form, it shouldn't be changed. Follow-up questions with segue from previous attempts will often hyperlink those questions to provide some context, but still ask a sufficiently detailed question in their own right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think of it this way: if the asker was aware of the full breadth of their problem, would it be justified to split into two questions at the outset? Often times I believe the answer is yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2017-12-11T17:12:26.710" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T17:12:26.710" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5094" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-11T15:05:29.967" Score="9" ViewCount="251" Body="&lt;p&gt;Roughly, there are many ways to &quot;answer&quot; a statistical question: with actual mathematics, with &quot;proofs by pictures&quot; or &quot;proofs by simulation&quot;, and with casual explanation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it ever the case that &lt;em&gt;none&lt;/em&gt; of those approaches can answer the OP's question satisfactorily? If so, how do you remedy the problem? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should a third party encourage the asker to select a particular answer as correct if it is a thorough and precise answer to the original question, should the asker be encouraged to retract their question, should the question be closed as &quot;too broad&quot; since the asker has too many missing details? Do you point the asker to the right background material and hope they select your answer (or any answer) two or three years into the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastActivityDate="2017-12-15T13:52:15.330" Title="What happens when the answer is beyond the asker's experience?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5094" CreationDate="2017-12-13T21:49:28.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe a well formulated question that falls within the guidelines will be able to be answered in a way that is tailored to the asker's experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the asker is able to genuinely understand and formulate their own question, they will be able to understand a hypothetically well thought-out answer.  If the answer is overly simplified, or otherwise not rigorous, that is OK as long as it helps the OP better understand the problem at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, theoretically an answer could be provided that isn't beyond the asker's ability to understand.  In practice, that answer may never be provided by the community, but the onus is on the OP to decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36381" LastEditorUserId="36381" LastEditDate="2017-12-15T13:52:15.330" LastActivityDate="2017-12-15T13:52:15.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5096" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-14T08:59:34.393" Score="5" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently asked this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/262233/sampling-distribution-from-two-independent-bernoulli-populations-current-answer&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;, and I have two answers. One is very incomplete, lacking the most important cases. The other one I think is completely incorrect, although 'apparently intuitive'. First, am I correct in this assessment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, if both answers stay there, most likely some potential 'answerers' will  not even try to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I ask the users to remove their answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40252" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2018-01-03T13:34:07.893" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T13:34:07.893" Title="What to do when existing answers to your question (with a bounty) are wrong or very incomplete?" Tags="|discussion|answers|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5097" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5122" CreationDate="2017-12-14T16:44:39.040" Score="6" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/control&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;control&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;control&lt;/a&gt; with 141 threads. It has no wiki excerpt and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/statistical-control&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;statistical-control&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;statistical-control&lt;/a&gt; is a synonym of it. The absence of a wiki excerpt is wise since the threads range from control groups, control variables, control assays, control charts (although we do have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quality-control&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quality-control&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quality-control&lt;/a&gt; for those too), and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the position could be simplified by removing the tag where another one would be more specific like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/clinical-trials&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;clinical-trials&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;clinical-trials&lt;/a&gt; or even &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/regression&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;regression&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;regression&lt;/a&gt; or one of its cousins. If that leaves a core with a common meaning the tag could then be defined but it may be possible to eliminate it altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T19:54:35.637" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T16:16:54.077" Title="What to do about the [control] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-reorganization|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5094" CreationDate="2017-12-14T17:21:24.917" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even though I am not an user with skills to answer beyond the asker's experience, I always try to provide the best answer I can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I try to directly answer the question while being the most didactic as possible, &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt; not only limiting the answer to OP's experience if I feel more is needed I am willing to complement it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, I believe contributing to the repository of statistical content comes first, helping OP second (like 'votes' being more important than an 'accept').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T17:21:24.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5097" CreationDate="2017-12-15T22:58:47.617" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think an ideal schism would be &quot;control-theory&quot; garnering its own tag, all other questions remaining as &quot;control&quot;. The Kalman-filter is essentially a statistical, data analysis tool, hence on-topic for the site, although very few questions deal with this method. The Kalman-filter uses control in the sense of controls on a dashboard, external inputs which can be manipulated in a dynamic system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While multivariate adjustment in observational studies and random allocation of control in experimental studies seem to have little relation, they are related. Both seek to reduce forms of variability and bias in analyses. It's unfortunate that &quot;control variables&quot; is still preferred terminology in a lot of experimental science. However, the implication is partially correct: you get efficient and unbiased inference by in some sense accounting for these variables, whether by stratification, adjustment, block-randomizing, weighting, or matching. If I had to give a Wiki about control, it would be something along the lines of,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Methods in experimental design and statistical analysis for reducing variability and eliminating bias. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastActivityDate="2017-12-15T22:58:47.617" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5100" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-21T14:49:59.840" Score="24" ViewCount="339" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have this hypothesis. Ceteris paribus the answers that have formulas (equations) in them get more votes than plain English answers. Do you agree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36041" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2017-12-29T15:17:09.003" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T15:17:09.003" Title="Do answers with equations and formulas in them get more votes?" Tags="|discussion|answers|votes|reputation|math-display|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5100" CreationDate="2017-12-22T13:43:40.787" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;In short: I think that the bottom-line is that in terms of correlations, there is not a clear effect. It differs per user, and if we would scale the number of equations by the size of the post then actually the post scores become lower for more equations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To see if there are causal effects one might still do some alternative experiments, but the experimental correlations below suggest that the patterns are small, with lot's of noise and confounding variables. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is easy to gather the data: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;-- Enter Query Title&#xA;-- Enter Query Description&#xA;&#xA;DECLARE @UserId int = ##UserId##&#xA;&#xA;SELECT&#xA;   Id as [Post Link],&#xA;   Score,&#xA;   Len(Body) As CharacterNum,&#xA;   round((Len(Body)-len(replace(Body, '$$', '')))/4,1) As center_FormulaNum,&#xA;   round((len(replace(Body, '$$', ''))-len(replace(Body, '$', '')))/2,1) As total_FormulaNum&#xA;FROM&#xA;   posts&#xA;WHERE &#xA;   OwnerUserId = @UserId&#xA;   and posttypeid = 2 &#xA;   group by Id, Score,  Len(Body),&#xA;   round((Len(Body)-len(replace(Body, '$$', '')))/4,1),&#xA;   round((len(replace(Body, '$$', ''))-len(replace(Body, '$', '')))/2,1)&#xA;ORDER BY Score desc;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it is difficult to make something out of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If the number of equations in a post is high&lt;/strong&gt; (counted by $$), then there is somewhat an increase of the scores of the posts. See the density function of the scores below. With four different selections, 0 equations, 1 equations, 2 equations, &gt;2 equations. (Figure 1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But more equations also correlate with more text, and &lt;strong&gt;if we scale the number of equations per post by the number of characters per post&lt;/strong&gt;, then there is much less difference or sometimes we see lower scores for posts with (relatively) more equations. (Figure 2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;These correlations are a lot different from user to user&lt;/strong&gt;. Maybe this may be a lead to think about causal relationships (although I suspect it is widely varying). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fig1 : score density functions categorized by number of equations per post&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hzcJ6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hzcJ6.png&quot; alt=&quot;score density functions&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fig2 : score density functions categorized by number of equations per post divided by characters per post&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hhN9Q.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hhN9Q.png&quot; alt=&quot;score density functions&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the above picture are small and noisy, I have created another, different view. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This time no split into 4 categories (making the numbers per category small, and instead a split into either functions with and without equations made by double $$). Also, the densities are not each &lt;em&gt;by themselves&lt;/em&gt; scaled to 1 but instead are &lt;em&gt;together&lt;/em&gt; scaled to 1. In this way also the relative difference can be seen how often a post has equations and how often not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Behold, the Whuber-Amoeba-Polarization-Effect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is interesting to see that the post with high scores are fifty-fifty with and without equations. But at lower scores Whuber makes relatively more posts with equations, and Amoeba makes relatively more posts without equations. Of course it is just guessing what could be the cause of this effect, but the correlation is certainly interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ablxR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ablxR.png&quot; alt=&quot;the whuber amoeba polarization&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another plot inspired by EngrStudent's comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think the difference between with/without after a score of 20 for Amoeba is interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above histogram/distribution for Whuber and Amoeba is now plotted for the nine members, and as a cumulative score on a log scale on the y-axis and an inverted square scale on the x-axis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The differences above 20 were not so well visible on the previous plot and it looked much the same. This new plot suggest some type of exponential distribution or some hyper-exponential distribution. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The differences between 'with' and 'without' equations seem to be in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the rate parameter(s) of the components (exponential terms) in these distributions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the relative ratio that a member writes answers with and without equations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While using these correlations still leaves us guessing for interpretations in terms of causal effects, I believe that it is very likely that the majority of the differences between answers with and without equations is due to the correlation with confounding variables and that it is more like the &lt;em&gt;topic&lt;/em&gt; of the answer/question is influencing the scores, instead of the 'fact that there is an equation in the post'. I believe that the widely varying distributions and answering styles of different users supports this, and we may rightfully wonder about the common adagio that 'adding an equation to a book/presentation is going to reduce the attention'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CnqMm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CnqMm.png&quot; alt=&quot;cumulative distribution&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;small note: given the variations in the slopes of these cumulative distributions, I guess that the age of the posts may be important, and improvements of these plots can be made when we also take the age of the post into account (maybe I get back to that some time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2017-12-29T11:21:45.603" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T11:21:45.603" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5102" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5103" CreationDate="2017-12-23T14:36:21.873" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if any of you was computing statistics about the site. Stuff like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;percentage of answered questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;questions rate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;trends with time (for example, I guess during this time of the year the activity will be lower!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt; I found this questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3178/statistics-on-cross-validated-usage&quot;&gt;Statistics on Cross Validated usage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and I started using SEDE to get some stats, but I was wondering if someone else already did this job, or was interested in collaborating on it. As a start, my hypothesis that Q &amp;amp; A drop down in December (with As dropping more, in percentage, than Qs) seems plausible:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dbcho.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dbcho.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="58675" LastEditDate="2017-12-23T15:29:03.863" LastActivityDate="2017-12-23T18:44:21.607" Title="Does anyone compute statistics about Cross Validated?" Tags="|discussion|site-statistics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2017-12-24T13:03:26.853" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5102" CreationDate="2017-12-23T18:44:21.607" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The SE team tracks a lot of statistics like these.  You can find some of these statistics on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/sites#science-questions&quot;&gt;SE sites page&lt;/a&gt;.  Specific pieces of information are also computable with specialized queries in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SE data explorer&lt;/a&gt;, although someone either needs to have already written the query or you need a bit of SQL sophistication to get them (they do have a quick &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/help&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tutorial&lt;/a&gt;).  As @whuber notes, there are some timeseries that are already prepared for convenience; they are available to moderators and to users with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/site-analytics&quot;&gt;privileges&lt;/a&gt; for reputation &gt;25k.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2017-12-23T18:44:21.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1611" CreationDate="2017-12-30T20:56:22.760" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;by image&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lIdzL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lIdzL.png&quot; alt=&quot;1000 words&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T20:56:22.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1611" CreationDate="2017-12-30T20:58:10.503" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lIdzL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;by link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T20:58:10.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5108" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-31T11:07:11.307" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm quite sure this question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/320873/a-better-estimator-than-average&quot;&gt;A better estimator than average?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(whose title is not very appropriate, btw) is a duplicate. I suggested closing it as a duplicate of this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/314915/two-measurement-devices-vs-1-device-multiple-measurements&quot;&gt;Two measurement devices vs 1 device multiple measurements&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which seems appropriate to me. However, this isn't the question I had in mind when I thought it was a duplicate. The question I'm looking for should be from this year, about two different measurements (maybe two different instruments) of a same unknown quantity, formulated in terms of random variables (if I remember correctly). I tried using CV search and Google, without success. Can you help me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt; I recall the question had an answer (or at least a long comment, but I think it was an answer) which said something like &quot;you need to make some assumptions or you can't say anything  about which is the more accurate instrument, because infinite combinations of different errors in the two instruments could give exactly the same measurements. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="58675" LastEditDate="2017-12-31T17:50:59.700" LastActivityDate="2017-12-31T17:50:59.700" Title="Help me find a question on multiple measurements of the same quantity" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5096" CreationDate="2018-01-03T10:58:17.550" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I then added a bounty and received a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40252" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T10:58:17.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5111" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-03T17:33:50.310" Score="8" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't been very active on the site lately.  In the past several days I've noticed that very old crusty answers of mine have been getting upvoted what seems like an atypical amount.  Is anybody else experiencing atypical reputation increases? Is there a way for me to determine if the upvotes are legitimate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2018-01-03T18:14:21.600" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T18:14:21.600" Title="Odd upvoting pattern?" Tags="|support|votes|etiquette|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2018-10-06T11:37:37.717" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5112" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-04T19:23:09.300" Score="12" ViewCount="559" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reviewing first post questions and came across one seeming totally off-topic tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/data-preprocessing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;data-preprocessing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;data-preprocessing&lt;/a&gt;. Curious, I found a lot of ML questions invoking this tag. My gut says &quot;data-preprocessing&quot; is fundamentally off-topic as it's not statistical. Statistics relies on data being already &quot;cleaned&quot;: free of typos, formatted correctly, etc. However, distributional properties of data aren't and shouldn't be modified to conform to models, rather it should be &lt;em&gt;vice versa&lt;/em&gt;. (Cue the very famous Tukey Quote): &quot;The exact answer to the approximate question is far less valuable than an approximate answer to the exact question.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2018-01-04T20:11:50.610" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T12:47:34.383" Title="Is &quot;data-preprocessing&quot; on topic for CV?" Tags="|discussion|tags|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5112" CreationDate="2018-01-05T12:47:34.383" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is on-topic. Because every comment so far could be an interesting answer to this question I am pasting them here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5112/is-data-preprocessing-on-topic-for-cv#comment15073_5112&quot;&gt;Nick Cox&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The tag or term data-preprocessing isn't universal across statistical science (minimally, it's not a term I meet around the place or in literature), but whether and how to deal with outliers, work on transformed scales, etc. seem utterly and completely on-topic. Let the tag be used by anyone to whom it's standard jargon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5112/is-data-preprocessing-on-topic-for-cv#comment15074_5112&quot;&gt;gung&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It seems to me that &quot;data-preprocessing&quot; sounds a lot like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/data-cleaning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;data-cleaning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;data-cleaning&lt;/a&gt;. I have argued that this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/104335/what-is-the-best-way-to-reshape-restructure-data/104338#comment201818_104335&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;within the scope of statistics writ large, and although I recognize good people can disagree, I think such questions can be on-topic&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. I would say the same here. It may be that the tags should be made synonyms, but I'd have to investigate their usages first to be sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5112/is-data-preprocessing-on-topic-for-cv#comment15075_5112&quot;&gt;whuber&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Only textbooks, and maybe the rare academician, can rely on data already being cleaned and perfectly processed. Many people report that most of their time working as statisticians consists of processing and cleaning data. I wouldn't like to exclude as off-topic the activities that most occupy people who practice statistics. Having said that, I admit to closing many posts that ask only about the details of executing a particular data processing step with specific software, such as how to combine columns in an R dataframe, etc. I have felt uncomfortable even about closing those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5112/is-data-preprocessing-on-topic-for-cv#comment15076_5112&quot;&gt;Glen_b&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Since data collection is on-topic it would seem odd for the step in between collection and analysis to be off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5112/is-data-preprocessing-on-topic-for-cv#comment15077_5112&quot;&gt;Peter Flom&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You wrote &quot;Statistics relies on data being already &quot;cleaned&quot;: free of typos, formatted correctly, etc&quot;. In my experience, this is incorrect. Indeed, cleaning data is a huge part of my job and is often highly statistical. I remember reading some famous statistician (it might have been Box) saying he had never had a data set entered correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And my two cents are: I have been working with databases specially treating and organizing data for map visualization, and it is always the most difficult step to eliminate inconsistencies from large datasets. One technique I use to visualize 'wrong' patterns is quickly plotting data in different types of charts, then deciding what to do to tackle the problem (sometimes I can see an inconsistency, but find difficult to know what to do with it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, &quot;pre-processing&quot; questions here would be judged the same as other types of questions, in a case by case. They need to be clear, not broad, not primarily opinion-based, having something to due with statistics (and not only how to manipulate data using software &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt;, as mentioned by whube), etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps an idea would be to collect some questions in this subject that are on topic, and some that are not, then post them as an answer here. Tag this question as &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; and include in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on topic help page&lt;/a&gt; 'data cleaning' (or 'data pre-processing').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T12:47:34.383" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4958" CreationDate="2018-01-08T14:14:15.847" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In case you missed it, the link to the help is back (next to other buttons on top-right menu).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ofkZL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ofkZL.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T14:14:15.847" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5115" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-10T17:34:45.587" Score="10" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/321878/fitting-a-distribution-to-survival-curve-in-r&quot;&gt;fitting a distribution to survival curve in R&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;has been posted as an exact duplicate on Stack Overflow &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48137772/fitting-a-distribution-to-survival-curve&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48137772/fitting-a-distribution-to-survival-curve&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case one sees a case of cross-posting, what’s the recommendation? Post a comment saying that cross-posting is against the rules? Or is there a “cross-posting” option in the “vote to close” menu?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I won’t vote to close this one though - I have to admit that cross-posting in this case was useful (I'm putting myself in a dangerous position here ;-P) Ben Bolker’s answer, using NLS, arrives at different results than me using log-transformations plus LS. This is to be expected, since the log weights the residuals for small values of &lt;code&gt;month&lt;/code&gt; more than the residual for larger &lt;code&gt;month&lt;/code&gt; values. However, I wouldn’t have expected the difference in the estimated curve to be so large.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="58675" LastEditDate="2018-01-10T17:45:04.683" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T10:17:57.683" Title="What to do if we see cross-posting" Tags="|discussion|questions|closing-questions|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5115" CreationDate="2018-01-11T10:17:57.683" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can't comment yet so I am answering....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had a question I put on stackoverflow and a user kindly told me that it would better in the crossvalidated forum explaining why. As a result I thanked the person, copied my question over and left a redirecting link on stackoverflow. I am planning on deleting it later, I just wanted to make sure the person saw what I did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This got me thinking about another question I had and for which I had no answer. Maybe it was in the wrong board. So I copied it over to crossvalidated and this time deleted it from stackoverflow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in my relative small experience giving a comment to explain that it is not the best place and why was very helfpul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="191128" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T10:17:57.683" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5118" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5121" CreationDate="2018-01-13T20:18:57.423" Score="8" ViewCount="5919" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to write this formula in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/322973/&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uTxoj.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uTxoj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/79434/double-perpendicular-symbol-for-independence&quot;&gt;instructions I found&lt;/a&gt; involved creating new command or extra packages, is there a list of available symbols supported by Exchange? I got stuck in this meta search where the result would be on Exchange about LaTex but not about LaTex on Exchange :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190938" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2018-01-14T10:26:45.463" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T16:38:25.667" Title="How to write the independence symbol?" Tags="|support|math-display|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5118" CreationDate="2018-01-13T21:15:44.363" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$&#xA;A \,\bot\, B \mid C&#xA;$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;using &lt;code&gt;A \,\bot\, B \mid C&lt;/code&gt;? I recommend &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mathematical_symbols&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; for the glossary of symbols + $\TeX$ symbols.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2018-01-13T21:15:44.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5118" CreationDate="2018-01-14T01:43:08.643" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is $A\perp\kern-5pt\perp B \mid C$ good enough for your purposes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a slight kludge (&lt;code&gt;A\perp\kern-5pt\perp B \mid C&lt;/code&gt;) but it looks okay to me; if you just need something for CV I'd think that would suffice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2018-01-14T01:43:08.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5118" CreationDate="2018-01-14T22:15:05.270" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing to keep in mind is that a hack to produce a visual version of the symbol may well be a problem for the visually challenged, who may be using screen readers or other assistive technology, or those with dyslexia whose screen readers read each symbol separately with background highlighting.  Hacks like superimposing two &lt;code&gt;\perp&lt;/code&gt; symbols will cause confusion in those situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternative would be to use &lt;code&gt;\mathrel{\unicode{x2AEB}}&lt;/code&gt; to obtain $A\mathrel{\unicode{x2AEB}}B$ by calling on the correct Unicode symbol.  Since this is not in the MathJax fonts, however, it relies on the reader's system fonts to provide the symbol, and not everyone will have a font that contains this one, so the results may vary from user to user.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9462" LastEditorUserId="9462" LastEditDate="2018-01-15T20:52:25.970" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T20:52:25.970" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5097" CreationDate="2018-01-16T15:12:53.417" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;So as to move this forward I propose the following course of action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I shall go through the (now) 144 questions and (1) re-tag any of them with a more appropriate existing tag, and (2) remove the control tag where it seems redundant given the other tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it then seems to me, having read them, that @AdamO's proposed wiki does fit all the ones which are left then I will edit the wiki unless he does it first. If on balance the earlier suggestion from comments on my question, controlling-for-a-variable, seems appropriate i shall come back here and edit this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;======== edit 24 January 2018 ===============&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have now gone through them, deleted redundant tags, re-tagged with more appropriate (mostly &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quality-control&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quality-control&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quality-control&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/control-chart&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;control-chart&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;control-chart&lt;/a&gt;) and there remain 95. Of these eight are, I think, about control theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/105201/estimating-a-first-order-plus-dead-time-model&quot;&gt;Estimating a first order plus dead time model&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/204333/gradient-descent-for-a-noisy-system&quot;&gt;Gradient descent for a noisy system&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/233783/using-dynamic-programming-with-n-step-ahead-predictors&quot;&gt;Using dynamic programming with n-step ahead predictors&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/233856/template-learning-in-neural-network-for-control-applicatication&quot;&gt;Template learning in Neural Network for control applicatication&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/237687/existence-of-%CE%B5-optimal-borel-measurable-policies-in-stochastic-control&quot;&gt;Existence of ε-optimal Borel measurable policies in stochastic control&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/246850/deriving-the-particle-filter-with-driving-force-inputs-control-signal&quot;&gt;Deriving the particle filter with driving-force/inputs/control-signal&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/271361/iot-sensor-fault-detection-and-isolation-techniques-using-fuzzy-model&quot;&gt;IoT - Sensor Fault Detection and Isolation Techniques using Fuzzy-Model&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/312717/why-assume-controls-are-independent-of-state-estimation-in-kalman-filter&quot;&gt;Why assume controls are independent of state estimation in Kalman Filter?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since control theory is a mystery to me would someone like to confirm that. If they are I propose to re-tag them &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/control-theory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;control-theory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;control-theory&lt;/a&gt;. It would then need a wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the remainder there are quite a few about control groups and the rest about control variables. I think these are sufficiently distinct in questioners' minds for us to have separate tags. If people agree i will re-tag the control group ones and write a wiki and the remainder can be renamed as a block by someone with the right powers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;============ edit 6 February 2018 ================&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has now been completed with re-tagging and a new tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/controlling-for-a-variable&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;controlling-for-a-variable&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;controlling-for-a-variable&lt;/a&gt; as discussed in comments on the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-02-06T16:16:54.077" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T16:16:54.077" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5118" CreationDate="2018-01-16T16:38:25.667" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wish to address the general question of fabricating unusual $\TeX$ symbols. $\newcommand{\ConditionallyIndependent}[3]{#1 \perp\kern-5pt \perp #2 \mid #3}$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The workaround&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lack of a $\TeX$ symbol for your preferred notation is a strong indication that your notation is not well known.  At a minimum, then, &lt;strong&gt;please define and explain your notation on or before its first use.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, given that such a definition is necessary,  why not adopt a more convenient notation instead?  Thus, you might write&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let $X \perp Y \mid Z$ mean that $X$ and $Y$ are conditionally independent given $Z.$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;instead of &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let $\ConditionallyIndependent{X}{Y}{Z}$ mean that $X$ and $Y$ are conditionally independent given $Z.$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first uses the standard $\TeX$ symbol &lt;code&gt;\perp&lt;/code&gt; while the second is more involved.  The rest of this answer describes the second solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;When you must&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only situation where such a solution would not be acceptable would be where you must emulate some other document.  If that &quot;document&quot; is a question you are answering or commenting on, and you wish to use its notation, then likely the solution already appears in the question itself: imitate that.  Otherwise, then either (a) the notation in the question is a mere image or (b) you wish to use notation from some authority or reference material.  In these cases several good options have been offered in other replies in this thread.  The principal objection is that most of them are unreadable in their raw form, creating problems for alternative rendering mechanisms (such as screen readers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Might I suggest the use of macros to solve this problem?&lt;/strong&gt;  As an example, in the first line of this post I defined the following macro using Glen_b's $\TeX$ solution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;\newcommand{\ConditionallyIndependent}[3]{#1 \perp\kern-5pt \perp #2 \mid #3}&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The syntax is briefly but adequately documented at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.math.uh.edu/~torok/math_6298/latex/macros.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.math.uh.edu/~torok/math_6298/latex/macros.html&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;inter alia&lt;/em&gt;, which you may read for more information.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This definition did not result in anything being rendered: it is invisible to the reader.  Now, although a screen reader might render it, its initial parts will make it apparent to the listener what is being done: &quot;he's defining a $\TeX$ macro called &lt;code&gt;ConditionallyIndependent&lt;/code&gt;; I probably don't need to know the details.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, whenever this symbol is needed, it will be rendered in &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; forms (raw or interpreted) in a meaningful way.  The screen reader, for instance, will display the following line&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$\ConditionallyIndependent{X}{Y}{Z}$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in its raw form as &lt;code&gt;\ConditionallyIndependent{X}{Y}{Z}&lt;/code&gt;.  Not a bad compromise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T16:38:25.667" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5124" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5141" CreationDate="2018-01-18T08:27:01.923" Score="8" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixed-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixed-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixed-design&lt;/a&gt;×63 tag that did not have any wiki excerpt. Many of the questions are about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-design_analysis_of_variance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-design_analysis_of_variance&lt;/a&gt;, i.e. ANOVA analysis with between-subject and within-subject factors. But a noticeable fraction of the questions is about mixed models, or about something else entirely. And indeed the term &quot;mixed design&quot; refers to experimental design and so in a way is very broad, encompassing large fraction of the mixed model questions. I don't think this is a productive tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion is to go through all [mixed-design] Qs, remove the ones that are not about mixed ANOVA, then rename the tag into [mixed-anova], and then make it a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/anova&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;anova&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;anova&lt;/a&gt;. The idea is that in the end we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/anova&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;anova&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;anova&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixed-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixed-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixed-model&lt;/a&gt;, and Qs about mixed ANOVA should go into [anova].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, we &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixed-anova&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixed-anova&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixed-anova&lt;/a&gt; as a separate tag, but currently there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Banova%5D+mixed+is%3Aquestion+-%5Bmixed-design%5D&quot;&gt;hundreds Qs&lt;/a&gt; about mixed ANOVA not tagged as such, so I'd say it's too late.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An additional complication is that we also have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/split-plot&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;split-plot&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;split-plot&lt;/a&gt;×53 tag which is basically the same thing, but is more of a niche terminology. My inclination would be to leave it as is. Current wiki excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An experimental design used in situations where one factor can be changed more easily than another one. It's also called &quot;mixed design&quot; because it involves between-subject (hard to change) and within-subject (aka repeated measures; easy to change) factors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. This is a continuation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1970&quot;&gt;Let us merge [mixed], [mixed-effect] and [mixed-model] tags&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T13:34:08.093" Title="Should we do something about [mixed-design] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|tag-reorganization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5125" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5128" CreationDate="2018-01-18T20:41:54.060" Score="5" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a question that I answered. That answer was accepted, and got a decent amount of points. It is also the only answer to that question. I later realized that my answer is wrong. But I now have a new answer which I believe is correct. However, giving this new answer essentially requires an overhaul, so it cannot be done in a minor edit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I do this overhaul in an edit (replacing the old with the new), I will essentially turn my answer into a completely different answer. I would keep the points and the &quot;accepted&quot; mark, but they are arguably undeserved, because those upvotes were essentially given to a different answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intuitively it feels like the right thing to do is to delete my current answer (taking the hit in points) and post my new answer. I'm worried, however, that this will confuse the people who already read my old answer and voted. They might wonder &quot;what happened to the old answer? It seemed good,&quot; without ever knowing what was wrong with it. It also might be considered valuable information for people to see why this answer is wrong, because it seems like an intuitive answer to the question that others might come up with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another solution is to edit the &quot;new&quot; answer as an amendment to the old answer, keeping both in the same post. However, this will make the answer very long and cumbersome, forcing every new person to have to trudge through a wrong explanation before they get to what I believe is the correct one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only other solution I can think of is to keep my old (wrong) answer, with a minor edit that informs people that it's wrong (and why), and then post the new answer as an entirely new post. However this feels like cheating, because I'm keeping the points for the old wrong answer and possibly getting more points for the new one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the best thing to do in this case? Also, suppose I was in the same position but I &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt; have a new answer that I believed was correct. What would be the best thing to do in that case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73531" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-01-19T09:22:28.870" LastActivityDate="2018-01-19T14:13:12.297" Title="What to do if your accepted answer is wrong and you believe you know the right answer?" Tags="|discussion|answers|editing|accepted-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5126" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5127" CreationDate="2018-01-18T21:06:45.053" Score="12" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/323369/basic-question-about-standard-error-in-predictive-model&quot;&gt;Basic question about standard error in predictive model&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is clearly a duplicate of either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/15423/how-to-compute-prediction-bands-for-non-linear-regression&quot;&gt;How to compute prediction bands for non-linear regression?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/85448/shape-of-confidence-and-prediction-intervals-for-nonlinear-regression/85452#85452&quot;&gt;Shape of confidence and prediction intervals for nonlinear regression&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(the latter would be probably more appropriate for the OP). However, the question cannot be closed because there's an open bounty. What is the correct procedure in this case? Surely not to duplicate the answer...comment linking to the other questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="58675" LastEditDate="2018-01-18T21:40:29.177" LastActivityDate="2018-01-18T21:40:29.177" Title="What to do when a question with an open bounty is a duplicate?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|exact-duplicates|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5126" CreationDate="2018-01-18T21:11:36.450" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Flag it.  Moderators can cancel bounties, refunding the reputation to the owner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2018-01-18T21:11:36.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5125" CreationDate="2018-01-18T21:55:30.280" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not possible to delete an answer that is accepted. So this is not an option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, I would argue that the priority should be not to confuse future readers. This means that the correct answer should be seen &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; and not after the wrong answer. This means that posting a new answer is a bad option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This leaves only one option: edit the existing answer.&lt;/strong&gt; I would suggest the following rules to alleviate potential shortcomings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Put a short disclaimer in the beginning, something along the lines of &#xA;&quot;This answer as originally posted was wrong. I have provided the correct solution in Jan 2018.&quot; (Maybe in bold or in italics).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Then post the NEW answer. Otherwise the readers will have &quot;to trudge through a wrong explanation before they get to the correct one&quot; which is exactly what you don't want.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Then, if space allows, you can put a horizontal bar, make a title &lt;code&gt;# The original (wrong!) answer&lt;/code&gt; and leave your original answer below. If space does not allow, cut it out. Anybody will be able to look in the edit history to see your original answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS., If the OP is still active, I would leave a comment under the question to notify them that the answer has substantially changed. Otherwise they might never notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2018-01-19T14:13:12.297" LastActivityDate="2018-01-19T14:13:12.297" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5130" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5131" CreationDate="2018-01-23T01:52:55.530" Score="20" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can someone suggest why this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/173228&quot;&gt;suggested edit&lt;/a&gt; was rejected?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was rejected by two reviewers with the same reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This edit does not make the post even a little bit easier to read, easier to find, more accurate or more accessible. Changes are either completely superfluous or actively harm readability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have occasionally had edits rejected by reviewers who seem to simply reject most of what they see.  But neither of these reviewers reject often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read through &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1284/handling-suggested-edits-to-posts&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; post, but failed to see how this edit failed those criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, that leaves me wondering, where I went wrong here, since the code in the post, as currently indented, is just wrong.  It will not function.  I see this particular formatting error often as Python is picky, and how to indent code in post the editor does not seem to be intuitive to many new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I have editing privileges on the sites I am most active on, I generally don't think twice about editing these sorts of things on fresh posts.  Should I revisit that on CV?  Is there something else specific to this site I am unaware of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="154402" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-01-23T08:09:00.543" LastActivityDate="2018-01-23T16:11:42.107" Title="Why was my edit fixing Python indentation rejected?" Tags="|discussion|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5130" CreationDate="2018-01-23T16:01:59.513" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some code formatting changes can appear to be purely stylistic in nature, and reviewers may well reject them for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the improvement is obvious (for example if code hadn't been correctly put into a code block) and the edit is likely to go through, but changes in indentation generally look stylistic and we tend to leave purely stylistic decisions to the original author's discretion - hence a rejection is likely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you can't expect that an edit to a piece of Python code will be read  by a Python expert. In fact, even though the most common language used on Cross Validated is R, several of our most regular reviewers are not R users - so in that case, I don't think there is a single language where it is safe to assume that code edits are going to be read by someone fluent in the language!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is somewhere I think it would pay to be more assertive in your edit comment. I always read the suggested edit in conjunction with the comment. You put:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Comment: indent code so shows correctly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;correctly&quot; is suggestive that the change is more than stylistic but I think you could have emphasised more the consequences of the code remaining in its current state. Note that some people hold strong views about indentation and style guidelines to the point at which they view other indentations as &quot;incorrect&quot;, which isn't the kind of conflict that edit reviewers want to get involved in. I think you need to make it clearer that the displayed indentation was affecting the code's functionality, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Comment: displayed indentation won't work in Python&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I invite other people to edit this suggested comment, or propose alternatives, to make the point more clearly.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="22228" LastEditDate="2018-01-23T16:11:42.107" LastActivityDate="2018-01-23T16:11:42.107" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5132" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5145" CreationDate="2018-01-24T13:08:27.757" Score="7" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meta-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meta-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meta-analysis&lt;/a&gt;×654 and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meta-regression&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meta-regression&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meta-regression&lt;/a&gt;×101 tags. Meta-regression is a particular approach to meta-analysis so it's a subset tag. 90 out of 101 Qs are &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; tagged with [meta-analysis], i.e. there are almost no questions tagged with [meta-regression] only. Given that, do we really need this tag, or should it perhaps be merged into [meta-analysis] (which will only increase the question count there by 11)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a related note, I have recently learned that there are fixed effects models, random effects models, and mixed effects models in meta-analysis (see brief but very clear Chapter 2 in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstatsoft.org/article/view/v036i03/v36i03.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.jstatsoft.org/article/view/v036i03/v36i03.pdf&lt;/a&gt;). Obviously, people use our [random-effect-model], [fixed-effect-model], and [mixed-model] tags in combination with [meta-analysis], but in fact these models in meta analysis are clearly distinct from mixed models (e.g. you cannot fit them with &lt;code&gt;lmer&lt;/code&gt;). Confusing! So I suggest to create tags like &lt;code&gt;[meta-analysis-fixed-effects]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[meta-analysis-random-effects]&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;[meta-analysis-mixed-effects]&lt;/code&gt; as synonyms of [meta-analysis].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@mdewey wrote me elsewhere that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I do not see any pressing need for meta-analysis tagged questions to also have a random effects tag (or fixed effects for that matter)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which I think is in line with what I suggest (?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, as far as I could understand &quot;meta-regression&quot; is another name for &quot;mixed effects model in meta-analysis&quot;. Which might be another reason to make it a synonym. If not, then alternatively &lt;code&gt;[meta-analysis-mixed-effects]&lt;/code&gt; could point to [meta-regression].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T17:47:26.217" Title="Meta-analysis of the meta-analysis tags" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|tag-reorganization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5133" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-24T18:37:24.110" Score="6" ViewCount="305" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know the response rate on this site is lower than most SE sites, but even taking that into account, the response rate to time series and forecasting related posts seems abysmal. Is there are reason for that? Can anything be done to improve on this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89649" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-01-25T15:46:36.437" LastActivityDate="2018-02-03T00:21:20.387" Title="Why do time series questions get such a low response rate?" Tags="|discussion|participation|unanswered-questions|site-statistics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5133" CreationDate="2018-01-25T15:08:53.887" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe the following analogy/viewpoint may help. Comparing with StackOverflow you could see questions as 'bug-reports'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On SO those bugs are specific and concrete. If some bug or other type of problem exists in a program or computer language then many other people have encountered the problem before and when they come across somebody else with the same problem then they can easily recognize the problem and also easily explain how to hack/solve it, and this effort (which is not so much) is very rewarding because many people will encounter the same problem and be helped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In statistics problems (bugs) are often much more vague&lt;/strong&gt; and, unlike&#xA;mathematics, definitions are not always precise (e.g imagine a&#xA;question of the type: what is the best optimization/estimate/technique/etc.). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There are many very specific questions&lt;/strong&gt; a computer bug can often be pinpointed to a clear cause. Problems in statistics are much more varied and solution strategies change depending the circumstances. This creates a lot of load, many different questions, that are basically the same. It is difficult to order the questions, and often questions (with little generality) are not so inspiring to answer. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There are many badly described/defined problems&lt;/strong&gt; (with little information or by people that lack the ability to express themselves properly). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There are many problems that are very broad.&lt;/strong&gt; Many questions are not like simple bugs. There are often questions that ask for a full consultation on an entire broad case/problem. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine that this is might be more expressed in questions on 'time series'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or at least, from my perspective, I find time series often cumbersome, vague, and also very specific. To solve a problem you can pick out one of many solutions and variations thereof and it seems more like an art than science. Still I like these kind of problems, but often the solution strategy requires a more in-depth look into the problem case, and it is not often inviting to answer them via this medium. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If I have time I will search for a statistic on the length of the questions. My hypothesis is that 'time-series' questions have much larger length in terms of words/letters, because they are so specific. also anything related to 'forecasting' may do worse. E.g. people dump a lot of data and images, which still doe not provide a good/sufficient picture of the problem, and ask for a solution)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2018-01-25T15:56:42.783" LastActivityDate="2018-01-25T15:56:42.783" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5135" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5136" CreationDate="2018-01-27T15:00:18.937" Score="4" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a new tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/coupla&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;coupla&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;coupla&lt;/a&gt; which is a clear typo of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/copula&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;copula&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;copula&lt;/a&gt;.  I corrected it in the one post it is used in, but how do I delete the tag itself which is here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/edit-tag-wiki/3788&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/edit-tag-wiki/3788&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-01-27T16:28:29.277" LastActivityDate="2018-01-27T19:01:29.723" Title="How to delete an empty tag?" Tags="|support|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5135" CreationDate="2018-01-27T18:46:34.523" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the best thing to do in your case is make the misspelled tag a synonym of the correct tag and merge them.  That way, the correct tag will be on the thread, but that misspelling will be automatically mapped to the correct tag in the future.  After all, if one person uses that misspelling, sooner or later someone else will, too.  This should fix the problem forever.  (Users without moderator powers should flag such threads and request this procedure when they come across the same situation.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your specific question, the SE system automatically culls tags after a while.  If there are no threads associated with a tag, it will be deleted after 24 hours&amp;mdash;you don't have to do anything.  If a tag is only on one thread, it will be deleted after 6 months.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2018-01-27T19:01:29.723" LastActivityDate="2018-01-27T19:01:29.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5137" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-28T22:58:28.760" Score="15" ViewCount="353" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm an admin on SE:AI.  We tend to get a lot of questions that are more properly SE:Data Science or SE:Cross Validated subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because it's difficult to stem the tide (Stack has a lot of hackers who don't read the instructions, and many seem to feel SE:AI is the place to ask these questions,) we're experimenting with accepting basic questions in these fields.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we want to (A) point OPs to the proper stacks for more advanced and follow-up questions, and (B) tag the SE:DS and SE:CV questions to facilitate contributors on these stacks willing to field basic questions on SE:AI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apologies if this question has already been asked, but:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How should I distinguish Cross Validated from Data Science?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking here because I want the SE:CV community's distinction.  This is not my field, so I need guidance in how to properly tag on AI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="156885" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-01-29T08:05:46.707" LastActivityDate="2018-01-30T13:34:17.863" Title="How do I properly make the distinction between DataScience and CrossValidated when migrating from AI?" Tags="|discussion|migration|datascience-stackexchange|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5138" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-29T05:10:15.820" Score="6" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's almost February in 2018, which isn't supposed to be the proper time to cycle these, but for this year it'll be once again, so we'll be refreshing the &lt;strong&gt;Community Promotion Ads&lt;/strong&gt; for this year now!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's twitter account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels, or double that if high DPI.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/5138&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5645" LastActivityDate="2018-05-25T15:11:33.923" Title="Community Promotion Ads - 2018" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2019-02-07T13:26:02.183" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5138" CreationDate="2018-01-29T05:10:15.820" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/StackStats&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rzwq1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Help this community grow -- follow us on twitter!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5645" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T05:10:15.820" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5124" CreationDate="2018-01-29T13:34:08.093" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have eliminated &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixed-design&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixed-design&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixed-design&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about mixed ANOVA I was retagging as newly created &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixed-anova&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixed-anova&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixed-anova&lt;/a&gt;; as a result this tag now has ~40 threads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I wrote in the question, given that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/anova&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;anova&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;anova&lt;/a&gt; already has &lt;em&gt;hundreds&lt;/em&gt; of questions about mixed ANOVA (any ANOVA analysis involving some within-subject and some between-subject effects) , I suggest we make &lt;code&gt;[mixed-anova]&lt;/code&gt; a synonym of &lt;code&gt;[anova]&lt;/code&gt; now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have suggested this synonym so upvote if you agree: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/anova/synonyms&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/anova/synonyms&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T13:34:08.093" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5138" CreationDate="2018-01-29T15:11:06.237" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://opendata.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wqiQIm.png&quot; alt=&quot;Open Data Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2018-01-29T22:25:05.423" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T22:25:05.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5137" CreationDate="2018-01-29T16:07:22.990" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;The official statement of what is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic&lt;/a&gt; on CV is that we address questions about: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;statistical analysis&lt;/strong&gt;, applied or theoretical&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      &lt;strong&gt;designing experiments&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      &lt;strong&gt;collecting data&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      &lt;strong&gt;data mining&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      &lt;strong&gt;machine learning&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      &lt;strong&gt;visualizing data&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      &lt;strong&gt;probability theory&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      &lt;strong&gt;mathematical statistics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      statistical and data-driven &lt;strong&gt;computing&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is OK if a question about these topics originated as a homework assignment (or is generally comparable to a homework assignment), but we do have a special &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/self-study/info&quot;&gt;protocol&lt;/a&gt; for such questions.  At any rate, you can feel free to migrate such questions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest trouble spot is questions about programming, or using statistical software.  Basically, I think about the issue by asking myself &lt;em&gt;what does the OP need explained?&lt;/em&gt;  If the explanation would be about statistics, designing experiments, etc., then it is on topic here, but if it is about how the software works, or how to use it, etc., then it is off topic on CV.  Such questions are sometimes intrinsically ambiguous; more often such questions aren't really ambiguous, but people assume that since software is required for most such work nowadays, we 'ought' to answer these questions anyway.  The issue is that the SE system already has a site for answering coding questions (i.e., Stack Overflow), so coding questions should be sent there, not here.  I think it would be fine if you migrated those questions here that were truly ambiguous; we can always close them or migrate them onward.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With respect to Data Science.SE's scope, you would do better to ask them than us (just as you are better off ask us about our scope rather than them).  Their scope is &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (although my impression is that they are much looser with their requirements than we are).  With respect to how to distinguish between the sites, note that they also have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.meta.stackexchange.com/q/13&quot;&gt;meta.DS thread&lt;/a&gt; dedicated to that issue.  The truth is that we rarely migrate questions to DS, and we rarely don't migrate but recommend someone check out DS instead of CV.  My (admittedly somewhat biased) opinion is that most questions are either (1) better asked here, (2) better asked on SO, or (3) poor questions that don't really belong anywhere on the SE system.  Many of the third type do seem to get a favorable reception on DS, because they seem to be looser with their standards&amp;mdash;whether that is good or bad in the long run, I don't know.  The best I could say is that in the answer to their thread distinguishing DS, there are three questions listed as appropriate for DS but not other sites:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Which Big Data technology stack is most suitable for processing tweets, extracting/expanding URLs and pushing (only) new links into 3rd party system?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Horizontally scaling a distributed database, what should I use for a simple key-value store? Cassandra, HBase or Riak? what are the pros and cons?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How important is data locality to Hadoop and Map/Reduce?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that these questions would be considered off topic on CV and SO.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T16:07:22.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5132" CreationDate="2018-01-31T09:57:58.860" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on the discussion in comments above, my current suggestions are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meta-regression&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meta-regression&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meta-regression&lt;/a&gt; stays as a distinct tag. Currently &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; questions with [meta-regression] are also tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meta-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meta-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meta-analysis&lt;/a&gt;, but it's still a useful subset tag to have.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We remove all instances of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fixed-effects-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fixed-effects-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fixed-effects-model&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/random-effects-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;random-effects-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;random-effects-model&lt;/a&gt; from [meta-analysis] threads. We also remove most instances of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixed-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixed-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixed-model&lt;/a&gt;, leaving only the ones that are really about &quot;standard&quot; mixed models &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; meta-analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We  create the following three tag synonyms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[meta-analysis-fixed-effects]&lt;/code&gt; $\to$ &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meta-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meta-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meta-analysis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[meta-analysis-random-effects]&lt;/code&gt; $\to$ &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meta-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meta-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meta-analysis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[meta-analysis-mixed-effects]&lt;/code&gt; $\to$ &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/meta-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;meta-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;meta-analysis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update: (2) done by @mdewey, (3) done by @gung.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-02-06T17:47:26.217" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T17:47:26.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5146" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5147" CreationDate="2018-02-01T21:39:34.030" Score="13" ViewCount="367" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came upon this question which I thought was an interesting probability question and a detailed answer so I upvoted both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/326346/what-are-the-mean-and-variance-of-a-0-censored-multivariate-normal&quot;&gt;What are the mean and variance of a 0-censored multivariate normal?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I was puzzled noting it was asked and answered by the same person literally within a minute. In fact, given the amount of code and algebra in the answer, I wager the answer was written before the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if it's just for reputation or influencing the content of the site; but is it technically a violation of site etiquette to post personal work, albeit interesting, this way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-02-01T22:03:26.047" LastActivityDate="2018-02-02T07:40:50.093" Title="How are people asking and answering their same question within minutes?" Tags="|discussion|etiquette|self-answer|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5146" CreationDate="2018-02-02T07:40:50.093" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is nothing wrong about it. It is perfectly ok to answer your own question, the system even allows it and changes the name of &quot;answer&quot; button to &quot;Answer your own question&quot;. This was done in the past by many users, even high-reputation users did start their own question and answered them, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/134282/relationship-between-svd-and-pca-how-to-use-svd-to-perform-pca&quot;&gt;@amoeba in here&lt;/a&gt;. Usually you ask a question if you want to learn something, but there is nothing wrong with starting your question if you want to share your knowledge or solution of some problem. As in @amoeba's case, creating and answering question by yourself may be also a good way to produce answer for a generic question that appears on the site over and over again, so we have an answer for the reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2018-02-02T07:40:50.093" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5133" CreationDate="2018-02-03T00:21:20.387" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like I'm one of the more active users in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/forecasting/topusers&quot;&gt;forecasting&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/time-series/topusers&quot;&gt;time-series&lt;/a&gt; tags. Here is my subjective take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I very much agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5133/why-do-time-series-questions-get-such-a-low-response-rate?cb=1#comment15167_5133&quot;&gt;Nick Cox' comment&lt;/a&gt;. Many, if not most of the questions especially in the forecasting tag seem to fall into one of two categories:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The OP has quite obviously not read anything on forecasting, such as the excellent free online forecasting textbook &lt;a href=&quot;http://otexts.org/fpp2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Forecasting: Principles and Practice&lt;/em&gt; by Hyndman &amp;amp; Athanasopoulos (2nd ed.)&lt;/a&gt;, which I keep recommending over and over. And over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With steadily decreasing enthusiasm, though. By now, anyone who looks through CV before posting, or who performs a simple search (the 1st edition of &lt;em&gt;FPP&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=forecasting+textbook&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the very first hit if you search for &quot;forecasting textbook&quot; at duckduckgo.com&lt;/a&gt; - your results on Google will depend on your personal search bubble) should find it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people obviously haven't found &lt;em&gt;FPP&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; found it or a similar forecasting textbook, but have decided to rather post a question than look through the textbook before posting, this seems to be a clear case for downvoting (&quot;shows no research effort&quot;), but considering that these questions often seem to come from new users, slapping them with a downvote on their first question seems to be overly harsh. So I'll often comment that they look at &lt;em&gt;FPP2&lt;/em&gt;, instead of writing a full answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question is a slight variation on one of the many, many questions we already have on forecasting. It's a hassle to find the closest match, and even if I do find one, it's often not obvious to the OP &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; this duplicate contains the answer to their question - if they knew enough about forecasting to understand the connection between the duplicate and their question, they wouldn't be asking in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So voting to close as a duplicate will often require some commentary. I'd love to have the time to provide this commentary; unfortunately, my hungry children rely on me to put food on the table, and my employer does not pay me for spending time on CV. So I often write a comment to point to a related question and leave it at that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case in point: I recently looked at a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/326193/1352&quot;&gt;where the OP essentially asked why the forecast was a flat line&lt;/a&gt;. I thought that there should have been tons of answers to this exact question, but I only found &lt;em&gt;similar&lt;/em&gt; questions, no duplicates or canonical answers, so this time, I went and wrote a short answer, essentially to have a duplicate to refer to later on, since this kind of question &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; appear again.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't help that forecasting seems to be a topic with a high share of drive-by posters. I have a mental image of someone with little to no statistical knowledge being saddled with the task of forecasting sales, because they didn't look busy when the boss came around, or because they are known to be &quot;good with figures&quot;. So off they go with little understanding and post a question along the lines of (1) and (2) above here. And even if they do get an answer, they don't accept or upvote. No, I'm not &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; here because rep tickles my already-inflated ego - but writing an answer and not getting &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; feedback doesn't encourage me to write more answers the next time a 1-rep user asks an un-upvoted not-very-good forecasting question. Sorry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, my mental image (I emphasize that I'm just conjecturing here, I don't have data) of someone who posts in the mixed-model or chi-squared tags is someone who has at least looked into a statistics textbook or taken a stats course at some point in time, maybe while studying psychology or medicine. Answering here is typically more gratifying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A related problem is that there is no clear point where a forecasting problem is &quot;answered&quot;. Here, I am thinking of the time &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; the question is asked at CV. Someone may have read about Exponential Smoothing or ARIMA and applied it to their data, but they may feel that forecasts could be better. And this is often the point where they come and post questions on more elaborate methods here. In forecasting, it's not clear when the search ends. (Compare many other tags here.) This is exacerbated by my point above, of forecasters typically not having a lot of statistical training, so disabusing them of the notion that adding more data or using more complex models will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; automatically improve forecast accuracy is an uphill battle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to answer your question of whether anything can be done to improve the answer rate on forecasting and time-series questions: unless questions improve in quality (unlikely), it seems like we may need to be less stringent in closing as duplicates, or we might want to tolerate (and write) more short answers. Of course, it would help if we got more people to answer in these tags, too, so I'm looking forward to upvoting many answers from you in the future ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2018-02-03T00:21:20.387" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5151" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5152" CreationDate="2018-02-07T04:23:16.513" Score="10" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/deep-rl&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;deep-rl&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;deep-rl&lt;/a&gt; but it has no wiki and I'm not really sure what it is. Can anyone shed light on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastActivityDate="2018-02-22T16:24:38.590" Title="What is deep-rl?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5151" CreationDate="2018-02-07T17:04:00.510" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Make &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/deep-rl&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;deep-rl&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;deep-rl&lt;/a&gt; a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reinforcement-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reinforcement-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reinforcement-learning&lt;/a&gt;. If users want to emphasize that their network is &quot;deep,&quot; they have the option to add &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/deep-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;deep-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;deep-learning&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2018-02-22T16:24:38.590" LastActivityDate="2018-02-22T16:24:38.590" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5153" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-08T22:57:00.317" Score="10" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to learn about non-response/dropout bias—and how to correct for it. I do not know this area well. Is it on-topic to ask for authoritative/canonical/highly-cited/classic references on this issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel as if this is not necessarily a matter of opinion, which would make it off-topic. For example, I would recommend Elements of Statistical Learning to someone who wants an introduction to machine learning. I would recommend Cohen, Cohen, West, &amp;amp; Aiken for someone interested in learning multiple regression. I know popular review papers on power, p-hacking, median splits, etc., to recommend if people are interested in those topics. These aren't necessarily opinion, as many of them are the &quot;classics&quot; that people always talk about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I ask for good references on a topic I am unfamiliar with?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130869" LastActivityDate="2018-02-13T19:08:38.613" Title="Is it on topic to ask a question looking for authoritative/canonical references to read on a topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5154" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-08T21:57:24.307" Score="4" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that several of the questions in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/unanswered&quot;&gt;&quot;unanswered questions&quot;&lt;/a&gt; section actually have reasonable answers in the comments.  Others have been there for many years without an answer, and it seems to be unlikely that any answer will be given.  This makes it annoying when you want to browse through popular unanswered questions, since the same ones come up the front every time and you have to scroll through many pages before seeing anything new.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose the first problem can be solved by someone going through the questions and adding answers that replicate the answers in the comments.  But this still leaves the problem of old questions clogging up the top results.  In view of this, does anyone here have any objection if an enterprising individual were to go through questions that are too old (e.g., older than say, three years) and add an &quot;answer&quot; that merely flags them as old questions so that they no longer appear in the unanswered questions section?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a good idea?  Terrible idea?  Heresy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; Some commentators have now pointed out some &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1409/should-the-standards-for-closing-questions-be-relaxed-somewhat-for-old-questions&quot;&gt;related discussion&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;tips for advanced searches&lt;/a&gt; that can be used to bypass this problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173082" OwnerDisplayName="Ben" LastEditorUserId="173082" LastEditDate="2018-02-09T21:30:52.663" LastActivityDate="2018-02-09T21:30:52.663" Title="Can we remove some of the old questions from the &quot;unanswered questions&quot; board?" Tags="|discussion|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5153" CreationDate="2018-02-09T02:55:51.790" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @whuber &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5153/is-it-on-topic-to-ask-a-question-looking-for-authoritative-canonical-references#comment15249_5153&quot;&gt;hints&lt;/a&gt;, there is no problem with this.  Note that we even have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/references&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;references&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;references&lt;/a&gt; tag.  One thing to bear in mind is that such questions often elicit a 'big list' of possible answers, and although you are right that there can be real canonical treatments, it can still be the case that there isn't a single response that is &lt;em&gt;the right&lt;/em&gt; response or &lt;em&gt;more right than all others&lt;/em&gt; by definition.  As a result, questions like that sometimes become CW.  If you were only after reputation, that would be a disincentive, but the information will be just as good, so I encourage you to ask away, if you have a good question and it hasn't been covered on the site before.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2018-02-09T02:55:51.790" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5154" CreationDate="2018-02-09T12:36:53.980" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;To see unanswered questions created last month, just use the search expression &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; created:1m answers:0&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you can add other search terms to  refine, for example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; created:1m answers:0 logistic&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(which for me now gives 68 hits). To read more about refining search, look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search&lt;/a&gt;  and click on &quot;Advanced Search Tips&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastActivityDate="2018-02-09T12:36:53.980" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5153" CreationDate="2018-02-13T16:32:23.863" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with this is that there is no such thing as &quot;canonical&quot; or &quot;authoritative&quot; references. What constitutes &quot;good&quot; is also subjective. Some articles are certainly written as (if they were) canonical or with authority. Top-level research like this can be nice because it is accessible. But some articles venture into domains of &quot;hand-wavy&quot; to flat-out wrong. Claims made in either type of article are targeted at a familiar audience and may elude someone who's coming up to speed with a subject. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, many users of our site still miss the fact that it is the &lt;em&gt;residuals&lt;/em&gt;, not the outcome, that must be normally distributed in a linear regression to justify the F-test; no doubt they encountered the concept in basic texts but still lack an understanding. &lt;em&gt;Didactic&lt;/em&gt; materials give more attention to developing concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a more on-topic request would be for &lt;em&gt;reviews&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;applied&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;didactic&lt;/em&gt; materials like research articles or texts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2018-02-13T19:08:38.613" LastActivityDate="2018-02-13T19:08:38.613" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5160" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-13T16:33:00.780" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;StackOverflow has multiple overlapping sites, i.e.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cross Validated&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mathematics (has 19k statistics questions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MathOverflow (described as being a &quot;Q&amp;amp;A for professional mathematicians&quot;, similar to Mathematics being a &quot;Q&amp;amp;A for people studying math at any level and professionals in related fields&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Data Science and BioInformatics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, &lt;strong&gt;what are the differences between these sites (specifically the 1st three)&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user64106" LastActivityDate="2018-02-13T16:33:00.780" Title="Why do we have so many overlapping sites?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5162" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-14T18:32:35.953" Score="7" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could sense when a big MOOC session starts by the nature and quality of questions incoming. They seem to be asking similar questions as the previous wave of students, and not knowing how to look for answers here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we do something about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36041" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T18:32:35.953" Title="Should we do something about cyclicality of questions related to MOOC sessions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5165" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-19T16:45:07.440" Score="4" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;In tags, there are options to see them by name or popularity or recency. For the first two, you can go through all the tags, but for recency, you can only see the most recent. It would be useful to be able to see all the tags sorted by recency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would also be useful to be able to see tags that need Wiki summaries or full Wikis, but this doesn't seem to be possible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-02-20T13:45:55.283" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T13:45:55.283" Title="How can one find tags with no wiki excerpts? How can one sort tags by recency?" Tags="|support|feature-request|tags|tag-excerpt|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5166" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5168" CreationDate="2018-02-19T18:13:35.697" Score="3" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering which answer would be awarded the bounty for this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/327592/convolutional-neural-network-scale-sensitivity&quot;&gt;Convolutional Neural Network Scale Sensitivity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand correctly the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;bounty&lt;/a&gt; mechanism, since no answer has been chosen by the OP, the bounty will go to the highest voted answer, written &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the bounty was started. In this case, I know that two answers were written after the bounty period start, thus I deduce that this answer will get the bounty:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/328554/58675&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/328554/58675&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, however, I noted that the start date of a bounty doesn't appear on the question page. So the only way to know which answers were written after the bounty start, is to consider that the bounty period is 7 days, and compare that against the &quot;answered [..]&quot; text at the bottom of the answer, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T22:04:48.820" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T22:04:48.820" Title="How to see when a bounty was started?" Tags="|support|bounty|timestamps|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5166" CreationDate="2018-02-19T19:29:24.033" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bounties last one week, so you can get a decent approximation by counting back from when it says it will expire.  If you need a more precise time, click the edit history link (at bottom center), and one of the noted events will be when the bounty was started and by whom.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wmbuv.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wmbuv.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T19:29:24.033" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5166" CreationDate="2018-02-19T21:25:56.983" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;A lot of exact timestamps on Stack Exchange can be revealed by mouseover:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oA9LN.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oA9LN.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T21:25:56.983" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5170" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-21T11:02:57.713" Score="10" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/329796/how-to-resolve-error-cannot-allocate-vector-of-size-1-1-gb-for-glmnet-in-r?noredirect=1&quot;&gt;How to resolve Error: cannot allocate vector of size 1.1 GB for glmnet in R&lt;/a&gt; on topic? On one hand, it asks about software, on another, this is about solving a practical data science problem and has general, software-agnostic, solutions (algorithms working in online mode etc.). Or maybe we should migrate it to datascience.stackexchange.com ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2018-02-23T09:11:45.723" Title="Are questions about solving practical data science problems (memory etc.) on topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|datascience-stackexchange|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5170" CreationDate="2018-02-21T15:08:05.487" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that question, as currently framed, should be considered off topic.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I think about this is really pretty simple: I ask myself what the OP needs explained.  If the answer is something about code / software, then it's off topic; if it's something about statistics / machine learning, then it's on topic, even if the question is asked in terms of some particular software (and may not even be askable without reference to software).  It is true that the latter condition can mean that a given question cannot be answered by people who don't use that software, and may not even be understandable by them, but because the answer is an explanation of a statistical concept, it is ultimately a statistical question, and thus on-topic.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's true that the specific thread at issue includes the line, &quot;Or if you can recommend another way to proceed with the variable selection that would also work for me?&quot;, which may have been intended in a software-neutral way, but this seems like an afterthought.  If the question were rephrased to ask about general computational strategies for large datasets, or about variable selection, then it would become on-topic, in my opinion.  It would be fine if the question still makes reference to software as part of providing informative context for their situation.  But the OP needs to show that they are clear that they are asking a statistical / software-neutral question, and that they will be happy with a sufficiently clear statistical answer, even if it were illustrated with, say, minitab.  If the OP would not be OK with that, then they are not asking a question that is appropriate for this site.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to migrating the thread to datascience.SE, I suppose that would be possible, but it probably isn't something that I would do.  It is true that DS handles questions concerning topics related to the domains of CV and SO, but which would be off-topic on those sites for various reasons.  In that light, the thread may be OK there, so I'm not necessarily opposed.  It just isn't something that would even occur to me, to be honest.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T15:08:05.487" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5170" CreationDate="2018-02-23T09:11:45.723" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have initially thought that I agree with @gung (and even upvoted his answer) but the discussion in the comments showed that I actually disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I think this question (after the clarifying edits) is on-topic.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Gung writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the question were rephrased to ask about general computational strategies for large datasets, or about variable selection, then it would become on-topic, in my opinion. It would be fine if the question still makes reference to software as part of providing informative context for their situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is what &lt;em&gt;already&lt;/em&gt; happened. The OP wants to run logistic regression with elastic net penalty -- a very clear &amp;amp; meaningful statistical setup. The dataset is too large and the standard tool (&lt;code&gt;glmnet&lt;/code&gt;) fails to work -- a very clear obstacle. This person comes to our forum and essentially asks: &quot;What can I do?&quot;. This &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Gung replies that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In this case, 'try package y in software z' is the kind of answer the OP seems to want&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and I agree but I do not think this makes it off-topic. Imagine there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a more efficient algorithm of fitting this model that does not require so much memory. An answer describing this algorithm without mentioning the software package is pretty much useless because &lt;em&gt;nobody&lt;/em&gt; wants to re-implement stuff like that from scratch. Everybody would want to have a working implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course an answer &quot;try package y in software z&quot; and nothing else would be a bad answer. But a possibility of bad answer does not make the question off-topic. A description of the methodology &lt;em&gt;plus&lt;/em&gt; a package recommendation would be a fine answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2018-02-23T09:11:45.723" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5173" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-23T15:40:33.787" Score="11" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding &quot;too broad&quot;. I think there are two sorts of ways a question could be too broad. One is the sort of question that amounts to summarizing an entire course or text book: &quot;Please tell me all about regression and how I can do it on my data. Go step by step.&quot; That seems clearly way too broad and an easy vote to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are other questions that ask for &quot;general recommendations&quot; that, I think, can be answered briefly in ways that are often helpful to the questioner. &quot;What are some ways I might analyze these data?&quot; and the answer might be &quot;try XXX which does XXXX, also try YYY and ZZZ&quot; or even a list of methods, without a whole lot of detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do others think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-02-23T21:31:17.747" LastActivityDate="2018-02-24T21:37:39.633" Title="On the &quot;too broad&quot; reason for closing" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|too-broad|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5173" CreationDate="2018-02-23T15:47:11.780" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is StackExchange.  However you might feel about it, it's a little different than an ask-anything-you-want site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;Our help&lt;/a&gt; is clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Focus on questions about an actual problem you have faced. Include details about what you have tried and exactly what you are trying to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When questions of a more diffuse or extensive nature appear, we request that they be narrowed, clarified, and/or re-focused.  In the meantime, to stave off the appearance of answers that may be confusing or even wrong once the question is improved, we close such questions.  The standard reasons are &quot;too broad&quot; or &quot;unclear what you're asking.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2018-02-23T15:47:11.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5175" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-23T15:47:34.500" Score="6" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thread&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5170/are-questions-about-solving-practical-data-science-problems-memory-etc-on-top&quot;&gt;Are questions about solving practical data science problems (memory etc.) on topic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;here on Meta is discussing the interesting problem of questions which lie at the boundary between on-topic and off-topic, because they ask for software, but they can be answered in a more general way, which intersperses the discussion of a statistical method, with some code showing a practical application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an instance of a more general problem: if we see a question where it looks like that the OP is principally interested in an answer which would be off-topic (for example, code only, but it could be off-topic for other reasons), but which can be answered in a way that the OP probably wouldn't like, but which can be very useful for generic users, what do we do? For me it's a difficult problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;giving the on-topic answer seems &quot;the right thing to do&quot;. However, the OP will probably complain and/or not accept it. This may lead to 1) an increase of off-topic questions and 2) an increase of unanswered questions, which I think is bad for what it concerns the site statistics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;just closing the question might be a bit of  missed opportunity for the whole community, which would have benefited from such an answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;write another, better question and answer it myself? Possible, but not completely satisfying.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastActivityDate="2018-02-23T15:47:34.500" Title="What to do when a question can be answered in a good, on-topic way, but the OP clearly seems to be interested in a off-topic answer?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5176" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-23T16:01:23.470" Score="2" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recall seeing an answer to some question about linear mixed models where the answer showed an elegant notation for the model. Something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$$p(y|x,\gamma)=\mathcal{N}(\beta x+\gamma z,\sigma^2I),\quad \gamma\sim \mathcal{N}(0,\sigma_{\gamma}^2I)$$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find it anymore, though. I saw it last year, but I can't remember whether it was from last year or earlier. I also thought it was @amoeba's, but it's not. I tried both Googling, and using the site search for [linear mixed model]. Can you help me find it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-02-23T21:30:11.707" LastActivityDate="2018-02-23T21:30:11.707" Title="Looking for the question with nice notation on linear mixed models" Tags="|discussion|search|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5173" CreationDate="2018-02-24T21:37:39.633" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like Peter I sometimes wish we had less generalized closure reasons because the description that comes with &quot;too broad&quot; seems very catch-all. However, that can sometimes be useful when dealing with questions which actually demonstrate several of the listed problems!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the remedy if the close-reason text seems (however ironically) unhelpfully broad for a closed question, is to post a comment explaining what the specific issues are, hopefully in a form that is actionable by the original poster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastActivityDate="2018-02-24T21:37:39.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5178" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-25T14:23:47.003" Score="3" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;The official rule on CrossValidated is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How to Ask&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Is your question about statistics?&#xA;We prefer questions that can be answered, not just discussed.&#xA;Provide details. Share your research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the best place (forum, board etc) to ask a question (related to data science, data mining, image/video recognition) that cannot be just answered but discussed instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the actual question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a non-commercial project in mind related to getting data from huge numbers of live-showing web-cameras and analyzing the records with ML (object and movement recognition).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need a person/persons who can write a code and build the pipeline that allows to record live video from a specific website and to place all records on hard-drive. For example, I have a link to the webpage with live translation and I provide this link to this application (that have to be developed) and this application starts to record the translation and store it somewhere. And this app should be scalable and be able to work with one link (one camera) and 10000 links (10000 cameras) and do recording during 24 hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I need a person/persons who can write a code that allows to analyze all the videos that have been recorded. By analyzing I mean counting a number of objects in the record, tracking object movement etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a non-commercial project. I cannot actually pay for this but I hope that I can encourage them to participate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there is a question I came with. Where can I find these kinds of persons? Is there any live data science community where I can register and ask if someone wants to participate in my project? As a data scientist at the beginner of his career, I am not aware of this kind of community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I took a lot of courses on Coursera and DataCamp. I have tried to reach the teachers who I believe can help me and give me kind of direction to move. But I realize that it is almost impossible to reach a person using emails, social networks etc. They just do not reply. So I am here and asking for your advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196648" OwnerDisplayName="Ildar Gabdrakhmanov" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2018-02-25T15:13:08.287" Title="What is the best online place (forum, board etc.) to *discuss* a statistical question?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5182" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5183" CreationDate="2018-03-01T16:48:09.887" Score="4" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a new tag, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/evaluation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;evaluation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;evaluation&lt;/a&gt;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions regarding the evaluation of experiments, including metrics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this something we should keep?  It seems to me that probably most of statistics could be construed to be about the evaluation of experiments.  I can't help but wonder if this will really help organize the information on the site, or if it is inevitable that it will be used inconsistently over time and lead to more confusion.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we shouldn't keep it, what should we do?  Should it be deleted, or made a synonym of something (what)?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2018-10-25T13:38:51.907" Title="Do we need an [evaluation] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-deletion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5182" CreationDate="2018-03-01T17:04:01.573" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yeah the description was made in a hurry sorry about that. Here was my thinking: I created a question about aggregating metrics, and the closest tag was &lt;code&gt;model-evaluation&lt;/code&gt;which is close but not exactly right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe a metrics tag would have been more appropriate, but that doesn't exist either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16052" LastEditorUserId="16052" LastEditDate="2018-10-25T13:38:51.907" LastActivityDate="2018-10-25T13:38:51.907" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5184" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5185" CreationDate="2018-03-02T16:39:10.330" Score="4" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've created tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixed-data&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixed-data&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixed-data&lt;/a&gt;. I mean a mixture of variables of different types or scales.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We long have tags &lt;code&gt;[continuous-data]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[categorical-data]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[binary-data]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[count-data]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[ordinal-data]&lt;/code&gt;. All of them are necessary and should exist, to me. (We also have tag &lt;code&gt;[nominal]&lt;/code&gt; and I wonder shouldn't it be kept, dismissed or merged to &lt;code&gt;[categorical-data]&lt;/code&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that we do need tag &lt;code&gt;[mixed-data]&lt;/code&gt;. In many analyses, mostly multivariate exploratory methods (cluster, factor, irt,...), but also in other as well, mixing variables of different types in one set represent a special problem to solve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want therefore to ask you some questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do we need that tag?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shall it be worded &lt;code&gt;[mixed-data]&lt;/code&gt; or&#xA;&lt;code&gt;[mixed-type-data]&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shall we narrow the definition - in the excerpt - so that we don't include the (very usual) case of using mixed type predictors (continuous+categorical) in regression-like modeling in the concept of &quot;mixed data&quot;, or include that case in the concept too - along with using mixed data in clustering, PCA, etc.?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other thoughts from you, please welcome.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3277" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-04-09T12:39:18.770" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T12:39:18.770" Title="A new tag for mixture of data types" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5184" CreationDate="2018-03-02T17:20:00.210" Score="3" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Maybe&lt;/em&gt;, I think it depends on whether it would successfully group enough threads to usefully contribute to the organization of the material on the site (see below).  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We have several &quot;mixed-&quot; tags already, which naturally creates the potential for confusion.  My preference would be for the name to be as distinct as possible, and the excerpt to delineate its usage clearly and up-front.  My suggestion for the best name might be &lt;code&gt;[mixed-data-types]&lt;/code&gt;, although something else might be better.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the tag is circumscribed to only apply to questions about mixed data types in clustering and PCA, e.g., I think it would be too narrow to prove useful over time (see #1, above).  If it would be applicable to questions about combining continuous and categorical data within regression models, e.g. (and you think those types of questions will emerge), then I think it may end up proving useful.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Hmmm, I'm a man of few thoughts, I'm afraid.  I would that it were otherwise...)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2018-03-02T17:20:00.210" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5186" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5228" CreationDate="2018-03-06T10:48:33.910" Score="8" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding was that when a tag B is made a synonym of tag A and merged with it, then if B had any tag wiki excerpt it would not be visible anywhere anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this apparently did not happen after &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixed-anova&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixed-anova&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixed-anova&lt;/a&gt; was made a merged synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/anova&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;anova&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;anova&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/86XzS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/86XzS.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The excerpt for &lt;code&gt;[mixed-anova]&lt;/code&gt; is visible, despite it being merged (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms&lt;/a&gt; to verify that it is merged i.e. has 0 threads in it ). Moreover, even though it is visible, there is no &lt;code&gt;edit&lt;/code&gt; link on mouseover, making it impossible to edit or delete it. It is a ghost excerpt!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For comparison, the screenshot shows the &lt;code&gt;edit&lt;/code&gt; link for &lt;code&gt;[meta-analysis-mixed-effects]&lt;/code&gt; which is a synonym but is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; merged; I was mouseover-ing it when I did the screenshot. Cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4851&quot;&gt;Can I find excerpt/Wiki of a tag that is now a synonym of another tag?&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it indeed a bug that the wiki excerpt is visible?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If not, then is it a bug that the &lt;code&gt;edit&lt;/code&gt; link is absent?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If not, then how can one edit or delete that wiki excerpt?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am guessing that if one knew the tag id, one could manually try to access the edit page like this one: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/edit-tag-wiki/3799&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/edit-tag-wiki/3799&lt;/a&gt;. But how to find out the tag id?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="4454" LastEditDate="2018-07-18T19:14:23.533" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T19:41:19.763" Title="A ghost wiki excerpt after tag merge" Tags="|bug|status-bydesign|tags|tag-synonyms|tag-wiki|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12" CreationDate="2018-03-10T18:46:43.883" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Obvious&quot; homework?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First, look at the questioner's SE network profile to see if the person is obviously a student or not.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the person is not obviously a student, consider assuming good faith (as is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;documented&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia (and yes, I understand this is not Wikipedia)).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Consider just asking in a comment, &quot;Is this for a course?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Consider just ignoring the question for a while, because one thing is generally certain about homework:  It has a due date.  And after ignoring it for a while (a week?), and if nobody else has provided an answer, simply comment and ask, &quot;Are you still looking for an answer?&quot;  If the questioner doesn't respond within a few days, then perhaps it was homework, or in any case, the questioner must not care that much about an answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="197682" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T18:46:43.883" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5189" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-12T18:21:07.753" Score="4" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an old joke sometimes attributed to Einstein: &quot;If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, I am frequently at a loss of how to rigorously define some informal concept.  This is because I do not know what I am doing.  But, if I knew what I was doing, it would not be called research, would it?  OTOH, there are an infinite number of ways to take an informal concept and cast it into a rigorous framework, so this is a very &quot;open-ended&quot; type of question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that some of the StackExchange sites are geared toward research-level questions.  For example, imho, MathOverflow is more researcher-oriented than Cross-Validated is more researcher-oriented than StackOverflow.  As such, I am wondering how a &quot;research-level&quot; question &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; involve some degree of open-endedness.  Perhaps it is the case that I am taking the phrase &quot;research-level&quot; too literally, and it does not mean &quot;at-a-level-so-high-that-nobody-currently-knows&quot;, but merely &quot;very-high-level&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this in mind, what does &quot;open-ended&quot; mean here on Cross-Validated, in the context of &quot;research-level&quot; questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143446" LastEditorUserId="143446" LastEditDate="2018-03-12T19:43:25.430" LastActivityDate="2018-03-13T11:25:18.993" Title="Defining &quot;open-ended&quot; for research-oriented StackExchange sites" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5190" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-12T20:16:37.213" Score="3" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Cross Validated post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/332950/appropriate-econometric-model-for-repeated-cross-sectionals&quot;&gt;Appropriate econometric model for repeated cross sectionals&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering if someone could please point to some online resource or provide some help below on how to best generate tables on Cross Validated? (I resorted to pasting the tables as pictures in my first question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115036" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T20:26:04.830" Title="Best practice for creating tables on Cross Validated?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-03-12T22:06:33.693" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5189" CreationDate="2018-03-13T11:25:18.993" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course we know what we are doing.&#xA;We may not know the answer beforehand but that is a different thing from not knowing what an answer should provide (a problem solution).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we make research questions then we want it to be &lt;em&gt;clearly defined&lt;/em&gt; in such a way that a clear answer is possible. Some definite answer is possible. Or at least the question provides (implicitly) conditions on what a satisfying answer would be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stackexchange is a &lt;strong&gt;question &amp;amp; answer&lt;/strong&gt; website, and not a website for discussion. Or at least not primarily and if there is discussion then it is meta discussion in order to get better questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open ended questions are vague about what a good answer would be. (e.g. consider this recent question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/revisions/332695/2&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/revisions/332695/2&lt;/a&gt; where it is unclear what is &lt;em&gt;required&lt;/em&gt; for an answer to be a good answer)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a question should be clearly defined such that a well formulated answer can be considered as a definite or at least sufficient answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do we express the diffusion coefficient, when we assume that it can be expresses by the random thermal motion of particles that behave like spherical particles in a viscous liquid? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can we write a tensor equation including a four dimensional space-time metric such that the postulates of general relativity are satisfied and the weak-gravity and low speed limit provide the classical field equations?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When observing the photoelectric effect, is there a relationship between the wavelength of the used light and the maximum of the energy of the ejected photons? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastActivityDate="2018-03-13T11:25:18.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5192" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5194" CreationDate="2018-03-15T12:17:56.023" Score="9" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/normal-distribution&quot;&gt;normal-distribution&lt;/a&gt; tag with 3158 questions, no tag wiki, and the following tag wiki excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The normal, or Gaussian, distribution has a density function that is a symmetrical bell-shaped curve. It is often used as a reference against which other distributions are compared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/normality&quot;&gt;normality&lt;/a&gt; tag with 530 questions, no tag wiki and the following tag wiki excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Refers to the normal distribution, the Gaussian continuous probability distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/normal-distribution+normality&quot;&gt;66 questions with both tags&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest, I don't see the difference between the two tags. I would have understood something like &amp;quot;normality-testing&amp;quot;, but not these two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any difference in the concepts at all? If so, maybe someone could make this clearer in the tag wiki excerpts, and ideally also indicate in each excerpt when the other tag should be used. However, I'm afraid that the two tags are so close to each other that people will continue to confuse them. Thus, I'd propose that &amp;quot;normality&amp;quot; simply be made a synonym of &amp;quot;normal-distribution&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts, anyone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T14:21:02.797" Title="How should we deal with the [normal-distribution] vs. [normality] tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|tag-excerpt|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5192" CreationDate="2018-03-15T12:21:56.557" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;That makes sense to me. Even if someone could up with some way to distinguish these, I think there would be a ton of confusion about which to use where and a lot of error in their use.  So I favor making one the synonym of the other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2018-03-15T12:21:56.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5192" CreationDate="2018-03-15T12:27:12.123" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I mentioned this once before, a long time ago, but can't find it now.  There is [supposed to be] a distinction between them.  &lt;code&gt;[normal-distribution]&lt;/code&gt; is about the distribution itself, whereas &lt;code&gt;[normality]&lt;/code&gt; is a property.  For example, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How is the chi-squared distribution related to the normal distribution?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;would be a question appropriate for the &lt;code&gt;[normal-distribution]&lt;/code&gt; tag.  On the other hand, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How important is the normality assumption for valid inference with a multiple regression model?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is a question appropriate for the &lt;code&gt;[normality]&lt;/code&gt; tag.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, while better excerpts might be helpful, these are probably just too close together to ever be consistently used correctly by a large number of different users, many of whom are not steeped in how the site works and/or these kinds of nuances.  I still think making them synonyms is a viable option.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another option is to change the name of &lt;code&gt;[normality]&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;[normality-assumption]&lt;/code&gt; and substantially rewrite the excerpts (and perhaps wikis).  That might make it sufficiently clear to be workable going forward.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2018-03-15T14:15:55.687" LastActivityDate="2018-03-15T14:15:55.687" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5195" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-18T18:48:34.627" Score="1" ViewCount="247" Body="&lt;p&gt;My &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/334010/190765&quot;&gt;very first question here&lt;/a&gt; has been closed as &quot;unclear what you're asking&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;How to Ask&quot; section says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is your question about statistics?&#xA;&lt;br&gt;As far as predictions belong to statistics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We prefer questions that can be answered, not just discussed.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;And so do I.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide details. Share your research.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;I posted everything I could. I could do more, but with little effect:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I could invent some ad doc data-clustering algorithm, which might fit the bill, but I'd prefer some more scientific approach - where I have nothing to say.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I could implement some machine learning, but that seems to be an overkill for this task.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The task at hand is really specified as I wrote: Do some prediction, it's clear that it can't be perfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I surely agree that my question could use some more details and I'll gladly add them. However, I disagree that it can't be answered.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Reply to comments by Glen_b&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think your question still seems pretty vague about what precisely is required&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is no research task with some error function to be minimized. There's a customer's wish to &quot;make some predictions&quot;, so I'm trying. I'm sure, I'm not the only one and actually, I'd expect this to be well-known problem. I'm well aware that given the tiny and irregular data sets, not much can be done. OTOH &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; can be done and the quality of the result can be evaluated on the current and future data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it talks about how something &quot;seems&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was deliberately using such phrases as I'm only describing how I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; the output for a given data set should look like. A different output is acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;guess how that might generalize for your feelings about how things seem&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't need to generalize my feelings, just provide &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; solution. Or multiple solutions. Imagine, I was asking about how the sequence &lt;code&gt;1, 2, 3&lt;/code&gt; continues. You could tell me, that it's impossible to tell, and it'd be correct. &lt;em&gt;Correct but useless.&lt;/em&gt; Or you could point me to the arithmetic progression and Fibonacci series and whatever and I could try it and verify the predictions using future data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;an answer would rely too heavily on opinion about how to interpret it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So don't be scared and give me &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; answer. It may fit and then we're done. Or it may not, and then I'll see what I've missed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there wasn't the problem with events around midnight, I'd simply determine the most common weekday (using some decay) and compute the average time and then look how good it works. I guess, this alone would allow to predict the next event with some 80% certainty and two hours tolerance in half the data sets (some data sets contain events happening bi-weekly, etc.) and even this could be an acceptable solution for now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Reply to the answer by Scortchi&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You seem to be part-way through developing a heuristic method for prediction&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, I still haven't really started besides extracting the input data and analyzing maybe six data sets manually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it's concerning that my knee-jerk prediction for the first example is quite different from yours&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yours is equally valid. In fact, it's something I haven't though about. And the data continues: 180320-Tue-2222. So you were right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the importance of providing context&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IIRC you're the first telling me about it. I simply left the context out, as I don't think it's important &lt;em&gt;for this question&lt;/em&gt; (though it surely is for many others). I may be right as you lacking context could make a better prediction than me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can you share the data?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess so, I'll ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(tons of question)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll answer them in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;leading to a mare's nest of conflicting answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really don't think, it'd be a problem. I may be wrong...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Summary&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'll reword the answer, provide the context and add lots of data. We'll see if it helps.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190765" LastEditorUserId="190765" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T03:02:54.723" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T15:49:09.187" Title="Why was my question on predicting weekly events closed as unclear?" Tags="|discussion|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5196" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5198" CreationDate="2018-03-19T12:27:27.343" Score="22" ViewCount="377" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the suggested edits queue, I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/180557&quot;&gt;a post&lt;/a&gt; referrencing a textbook, and its edit which added a download link to the mentioned textbook. Assuming the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The uploaded version of the textbook is not a legal copy (i.e. the author of the referrenced blog has no rights to publish the book on his website).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Neither the question author nor the edit author are anyhow connected to the blog page containing the download.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it okay to approve such edit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; Whether the assumptions hold in the incriminated case is a different story. To simplify the question, let's just assume they are true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163572" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-03-20T13:04:43.743" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T19:47:44.630" Title="Links to copyright material" Tags="|discussion|suggested-edits|hyperlinks|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5196" CreationDate="2018-03-19T13:10:03.177" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The site should not be a party to illegally hosting copyrighted content.  You should not allow such an edit.  When you see a post that does contain pirated content, you should edit it out (or flag it if it is in a comment or otherwise uneditable for you).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2018-03-19T17:30:42.823" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T17:30:42.823" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5196" CreationDate="2018-03-19T15:50:42.517" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;SE has &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/legal/terms-of-service&quot;&gt;a mechanism&lt;/a&gt; in place to ensure it meets its legal obligations with respect to copyright. Users&lt;sup&gt;&amp;dagger;&lt;/sup&gt; aren't expected or required to determine whether other users are infringing someone else's copyright, &amp;amp; in general we'll have neither the facts nor the legal knowledge to enable us to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I'm all right with us dealing with &lt;em&gt;flagrant&lt;/em&gt; cases in the way @gung suggests, if we think letting them alone might tarnish the reputation of the site; but we need to draw a line before we're trying to guess whether a journal publisher gave permission for an author to place a pre-print of their paper on a department's website. In past cases (only a few) I've drawn that line after links to PDFs of whole books that obviously weren't intended to be freely distributed, but that's according to my own judgment rather than an established consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;dagger; Including moderators. So if you're a copyright owner (or acting for the copyright owner) please don't confuse flagging content for moderator attention with formally notifying Stack Exchange of copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2018-03-22T12:57:50.440" LastActivityDate="2018-03-22T12:57:50.440" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5195" CreationDate="2018-03-21T13:24:12.973" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to be part-way through developing a heuristic method for prediction using implicit assumptions based on your knowledge of what the data represent &amp;amp; how they've been collected, &amp;amp; on patterns observed over the hundreds of data sets; &amp;amp; to be asking either how the method can be refined, or what other method might be appropriate. It sounds very interesting, but it's concerning that my knee-jerk prediction for the first example is quite different from yours&amp;mdash;I'd've said the first event of the week happened earlier than usual on Tuesday &amp;amp; we shouldn't expect another till Wednesday now, whereas you're still pretty confident that another event will occur on Tuesday evening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because you're very close to the problem it might appear that people are being wilfully obtuse when they say they don't understand your question. Try to step back from it a bit, &amp;amp; think about how to frame it for a new-comer.  See &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3134/17230&quot;&gt;How can we encourage askers to provide context?&lt;/a&gt; for the importance of providing context. What &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; the events? What do you know about them that could aid prediction? What have you learnt from looking at the data-sets? Can you share the data? What assumptions have you made &amp;amp; why? When are you making predictions? What are you going to do with them? How are you going to test different approaches? What do you expect from an answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question had been left open in its current state there'd be a real risk that fools rush in&amp;mdash;&amp;amp; any of us could be among those fools on different occasions&amp;mdash;with a different set of implicit assumptions, leading to a mare's nest of conflicting answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I said you seem to be part-way through developing a heuristic method for prediction because that's what I took the part of your question where you write &quot;I need to extract some information like [...]&quot; &amp;amp; then go on to describe aggregating events by day to be about. (It comes out of the blue: again, step back, spell things out for your readers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't make too much of my having got one thing right in one case. In fact I was making up a context when I thought about it&amp;mdash;withdrawing money from a cash machine. Think how much the context you have included helps: just the word &quot;users&quot; suggests that day of the week &amp;amp; time of the day might be relevant (&amp;amp; that the pattern of events might be different at weekends &amp;amp; holidays); but not phase of the moon (you didn't write &quot;anglers&quot; or &quot;werewolves&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several answers using different approaches to answer the same question would be a good thing; several answers using different approaches to answer different questions (i.e. different interpretations of yours) would be a bad thing. Trust us on this: it's happened often enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T15:49:09.187" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T15:49:09.187" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5201" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5202" CreationDate="2018-03-23T10:33:33.707" Score="9" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some datasets are perennial favorites. Would it make sense to have tags for questions about these? If I'm asking about a specific analysis I want to apply to a dataset, it might be helpful to see whether someone has done something similar to this specific dataset before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am thinking of tags identifying questions about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=iris+is%3Aq&quot;&gt;the Iris data&lt;/a&gt; (currently 284 questions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=titanic+is%3Aq&quot;&gt;the Titanic data&lt;/a&gt; (currently 64 questions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=Anscombe+is%3Aq&quot;&gt;Anscombe's quartet&lt;/a&gt; (currently 19 questions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought about including a bullet point about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=UCI+is%3Aq&quot;&gt;the UCI ML data repository&lt;/a&gt; (currently 58 questions), but this would probably not be specific enough - better to tag specific datasets from the repository (if we decide to use such tags, and if the dataset in question is &quot;notable enough&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="1352" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T10:44:08.043" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T18:26:30.297" Title="Should we have tags for specific datasets?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5201" CreationDate="2018-03-26T18:26:30.297" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, judging from the comments, this is not a popular idea. (I'll self-accept this answer so the thread is closed.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T18:26:30.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5196" CreationDate="2018-03-26T18:40:14.883" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Universities spend &lt;em&gt;billions&lt;/em&gt; each year to pay to access research papers (and that's mostly taxpayers' money). Paywalls slow down research. US Federal student loan debt is $1.5 trillion, and textbooks that cost over 100 USD don't help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think we should be so proactive to defend the academic publishing industry by trying to guess if a PDF cannot be made available online on a certain website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I think we should do nothing and let the publishers directly contact Stack Exchange if they wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For further information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/29923/452&quot;&gt;Reference for annual journal subscription costs paid per university&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/71970/452&quot;&gt;Are there any known Universities that refuse to pay for paywall access to academic journals?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/31605/452&quot;&gt;What are the profit margins of academic publishers?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Look at the Shocking Student Loan Debt Statistics for 2018&lt;/a&gt;  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20180326184632/https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mirror&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/63619/452&quot;&gt;How much revenue do academic authors make on their published books?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opendata.stackexchange.com/q/7084/1652&quot;&gt;Bulk download Sci-Hub papers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastEditorUserId="12359" LastEditDate="2018-03-28T19:47:44.630" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T19:47:44.630" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5196" CreationDate="2018-03-26T22:10:42.030" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Darn copyright on research and educational publications! Darn it to heck!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the extent that we are not threatened by legal sanctions by specific links, CV's policy should prefer links that undermine copyright on scientific publications where possible:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Copyright generally does not belong to the authors of peer-reviewed literature, but to rent-seeking parasites like Elsevier (perhaps the most egregious) who exploit almost entirely unremunerated author, reviewer, and assistant editor labor.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Rent-seeking parasites perpetuate the corrupting tendencies in academic science by exploiting &quot;publish or perish&quot; of structural economic precarity of academic labor which has resulted from decades of public divestment in education. Whereas predatory journals and publishers of low quality predate upon individual academics, the rent-seekers predate upon the academic institution.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a moral and ethical obligation to destroy rent-seeking publishers of scientific research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Viva Sci-Hub!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (Which, I grant, does not so much address textbooks, but still: we are frequently citing and linking to papers here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44269" LastEditorUserId="44269" LastEditDate="2018-03-27T19:02:43.770" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T19:02:43.770" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5206" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-27T13:03:17.283" Score="7" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to Cross Validated SE. I've asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/336994/probability-a-new-treatment-for-a-disease-is-being-tested-to-see-whether-it-is&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question and got 2 down votes. So, I'm asking if it was an off-topic question or if there is a better way to ask it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="201735" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2018-05-23T07:26:28.563" LastActivityDate="2018-05-24T12:41:04.677" Title="Does this question violate any of the community rules?" Tags="|support|on-topic|etiquette|new-users|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5206" CreationDate="2018-03-27T18:48:09.257" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure that your question deserves two downvotes.  Your question is from a course or textbook, so it qualifies as 'homework' for our purposes.  You should add the &lt;code&gt;[self-study]&lt;/code&gt; tag &amp;amp; read &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/self-study/info&quot;&gt;its wiki&lt;/a&gt;.  That said, you certainly don't hide that fact, and aren't just after the answer / someone to do your homework for you.  You do tell us what you understand thus far, what you've tried &amp;amp; where you're stuck, which is what we request.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One other possible issue is that you present an image of the question, rather than retyping the question as text.  You should do so instead of just posting a photograph (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3176/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also use a better title, as @mkt &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/336994/probability-a-new-treatment-for-a-disease-is-being-tested-to-see-whether-it-is#comment636942_336994&quot;&gt;suggested&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T18:48:09.257" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5208" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-28T11:18:03.163" Score="21" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;For instance, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/close/181831&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; asks about why R and SAS give different results in a multi-level model. I think this sort of question is more likely to get an answer here than elsewhere. R list users may not know SAS; SAS users may not know R; programmers may not know about multilevel models. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do others think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-03-28T14:39:02.087" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T10:57:45.090" Title="Should questions about comparing the output from different statistical software be on topic here?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|software|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5208" CreationDate="2018-03-28T12:57:43.750" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say that if it is about &lt;em&gt;understanding&lt;/em&gt; the output, as in the quoted example, it would be on-topic. On another hand, if the question asked&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;where can be the $p$-value of some test be found on multi-page SPSS report, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or, how to extract the statistic value from R object returned by some method, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then this would be about the software and reading the documentation, not about statistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T12:57:43.750" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5208" CreationDate="2018-03-28T14:12:30.733" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would lean towards allowing such questions.  For example, I answered such a question here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/162996/7290&quot;&gt;Difference in output between SAS's proc genmod and R's glm&lt;/a&gt;.  My general position is that whether a question should be viewed as off topic should be determined by what the OP needs explained: if the required explanation is statistical, it's best here, but if the required explanation is the code or about how the software works, it should be considered off-topic here.  This rule usually leads to an unambiguous decision (although it may be opaque if you aren't familiar with the software or the statistical concepts at issue).  There can be a gray area, though.  When statistical software is designed, default choices are made by the developers that are statistically important.  Often users will use the defaults without much thought or even being aware of them.  In some sense, the answer could be, 'read the documentation for the two systems and notice that they make some different default choices'.  But in another sense, to answer such questions well really does require &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;statistical expertise to understand or answer&lt;/a&gt;, and constitutes a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teachable_moment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;teachable moment&lt;/a&gt;.  So this is an area where I will typically leave such questions open if they aren't egregious.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2018-04-09T10:57:45.090" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T10:57:45.090" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5208" CreationDate="2018-03-28T19:46:20.337" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes such questions and their answers can be illuminating, as when someone asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/141856/what-is-the-difference-between-various-kruskal-wallis-post-hoc-tests/141872#141872&quot;&gt;What is the difference between various Kruskal-Wallis post-hoc tests?&lt;/a&gt;, and, since I am the author of one of the four packages mentioned, I was able to provide some insight as to the statistical differences underlying the different results the OP was finding in my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When might comparisons of output given by two or more pieces of software&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; be inappropriate? Do any of the following circumstances not fit our remit? What others might likewise not be a good fit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When the comparisons are shopping for software recommendations?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When the comparisons are about ease of use or implementation?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When the comparisons are not asking about &lt;em&gt;numerical&lt;/em&gt; differences, but instead layout and scope of output? (E.g., Stata's &lt;code&gt;regress&lt;/code&gt; presents sums of squares and degrees of freedom details that are not output by, for example a summary of R's &lt;code&gt;lm&lt;/code&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Why does software come in &quot;pieces?!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44269" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2018-03-28T20:00:02.437" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T20:00:02.437" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5208" CreationDate="2018-03-28T23:37:26.320" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;+1 to all the answers provided. I think that all of them make good points and follow a general consensus that such questions appear &quot;generally&quot; on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to add that from personal experience, I think that such questions are very educational. It is &quot;trivial&quot; for a learner to say for an LME model: &quot;&lt;em&gt;Yeah, obviously: $y \sim N(X\beta +Z\gamma, \sigma^2 I)$&lt;/em&gt;&quot; or for ridge regression &quot;&lt;em&gt;simple L.A. stuff: $\hat{\beta} = (X^TX+ \lambda I)^{-1}X^Ty$&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. Nevertheless when going ahead and comparing solutions from different software implementation, small subtle differences not only become apparent, but also become appreciated for the impact they might have. Even something trivial like why  Python's &lt;code&gt;numpy.std&lt;/code&gt; and R's &lt;code&gt;sd&lt;/code&gt; do not give the same result highlight differences that can be educational and meaningful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11852" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T23:37:26.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5208" CreationDate="2018-03-29T19:08:54.550" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Definitely yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If results can be reproduced across multiple platforms, we have a &lt;strong&gt;methodology&lt;/strong&gt;. If all platforms give different answers, we at best have &lt;em&gt;implementations&lt;/em&gt;... and we don't know which one is the right one, if any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@gung &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5210/5739&quot;&gt;suggested&lt;/a&gt; that the expertise required to answer questions like that needs to be statistical. Well... this is where statistics meets computation. A theoretical statistician would not be able to say why a logistic regression converges in &lt;code&gt;stats::glm()&lt;/code&gt; but &lt;code&gt;logit&lt;/code&gt; throws an error in Stata... &lt;strong&gt;hint&lt;/strong&gt;: the likelihood is the same, but the treatment of infinite slopes and quasi-separation/perfect prediction is different. I believe statisticians would generally benefit from a greater exposure to computing issues, and that would help them understand the &lt;em&gt;tools&lt;/em&gt; that they use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, near monopoly of R is all great for statisticians on this site to talk in common language. But hey, how many of us would be happy if your cell service were a monopoly??? I use R and Stata in my work, and SAS occasionally, and the crucial check for me that I am doing things right is when I can compare the results and see that they match.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T19:08:54.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5214" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-29T19:13:06.237" Score="7" ViewCount="1191" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am subscribed to SEMNET, a list on structural equation and latent variable modeling, and it is undergoing some sort of an existential crisis. The talk there is about moving to a forum/website -- it is, amazingly, still a majordomo-operated mailing list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to hear some ideas from this group -- see answers below and up/downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3204/5739&quot;&gt;Why do we have so few questions on SEM and latent variable modeling?&lt;/a&gt;... which is becoming relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-03-29T20:22:03.183" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T13:01:10.193" Title="Should the mailing list on structural equation modeling (SEMNET) consider moving to CV?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5214" CreationDate="2018-03-29T19:14:53.913" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;SEMNET should just consider posting questions on stats.stackexchange.com, tag them &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sem&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sem&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sem&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/latent-variable&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;latent-variable&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;latent-variable&lt;/a&gt; or whatever, and their experts should register and answer these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-03-29T21:17:32.903" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T21:17:32.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5214" CreationDate="2018-03-29T19:16:35.853" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;SEMNET should form Area 51 and see how that goes. There are good reasons we don't have very many questions on CV: the overlap of people who are interested in topics typical for CV, including machine learning stuff and mathematical statistics, vs. those interested in SEM, isn't that huge, so the SEM community would be better served by a separate website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="76981" LastEditDate="2018-03-30T06:12:15.630" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T06:12:15.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5214" CreationDate="2018-03-29T19:17:53.540" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;SEMNET should neither be here nor in Area 51... they won't make it anyway. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2018-03-30T13:01:10.193" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T13:01:10.193" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5221" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-04T12:45:23.997" Score="12" ViewCount="300" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/338452/76981&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; is put on hold as opinion based. The tldr version of the question is &quot;Why are some people saying Frequentist statistics is no good?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have partial sympathy with putting it on hold. One the one hand, I don't actually think it's an opinion based question. The OP is not asking &quot;Are Frequentist statistics no good?&quot;, but rather wants to really understand the reasoning behind that argument. I do admit that distinction is a grey line: someone might think a reasonable answer is &quot;because they don't understand math&quot;, which would help no one (also not my opinion). Also, I do have the fear that it will could turn into a highly-opinion based set of answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that said, one of the reasons I chose to answer it is that I think it's a very important topic worth discussing. I know there have been several somewhat similar questions (i.e. Bayesian vs Frequentist: pros and cons), but I do think this one is a bit more of a niche. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is CV the right place for such a question? Or is it better suited for something like a blog post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76981" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-04-04T17:50:26.410" LastActivityDate="2018-04-04T17:50:26.410" Title="Is this an opinion question?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|too-broad|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5221" CreationDate="2018-04-04T12:50:19.367" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is too opinion based for CV. A blog post would be more reasonable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76981" LastActivityDate="2018-04-04T12:50:19.367" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5221" CreationDate="2018-04-04T12:53:05.960" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, this is an important discussion topic. It belongs on CV. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76981" LastActivityDate="2018-04-04T12:53:05.960" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5221" CreationDate="2018-04-04T13:18:23.317" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is debatable whether this Q is &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot; (our closing reason) or not, but it seems to me that it is &lt;em&gt;clearly&lt;/em&gt; &quot;too broad&quot;. It asks about classical statistics vs machine learning, then about frequentist statistics vs Bayesian statistics, and then about book recommendations on &quot;good&quot; statistics. A poor question that should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had had a chance to vote, I would have voted to close as too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2018-04-04T13:18:23.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5226" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-04T22:14:53.073" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://pbfcomics.com/comics/skub/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://pbfcomics.com/comics/skub/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2018-04-04T22:14:53.073" LastActivityDate="2018-04-04T22:14:53.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5227" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-04T22:14:53.073" Score="0" Body="Skub is a fictitious substance that is an endless source of disagreement for reasons which are essentially unexplained." OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2018-04-04T22:14:53.073" LastActivityDate="2018-04-04T22:14:53.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5186" CreationDate="2018-04-09T10:14:55.270" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ghost wiki excerpt eventually disappeared, even though I am not sure if this happened on its own or was a result of something me or @gung did (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5124/should-we-do-something-about-mixed-design-tag?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1#comment15431_5141&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was not able to edit &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/324506/edit&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/324506/edit&lt;/a&gt; -- presumably such &quot;abandoned&quot; posts are locked which makes sense. The apparent bug was &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; that this abandoned post could be seen through the above link but that it was displayed as a wiki exceprt on the Tags page. Well, it is not anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I will mark this as accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T10:14:55.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5230" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-11T20:43:44.610" Score="3" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/338674/dimensional-analysis-for-a-qdf-quantile-function-corresponing-to-the-pdf-cdf-si&quot; title=&quot;here&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, marked as a duplicate. I have substantially rewritten the question to differentiate it from the question it supposedly duplicated, and I am fairly certain that no one reading that question and this edited one would identify them with one another. I state that I have rewritten the question in the editing notes.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything else I can do to urge that the duplicate status be reconsidered, or should I just be patient? My most recent edits were admittedly only yesterday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be considered bad behavior to resubmit my edited question as a new question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12923" LastActivityDate="2018-04-15T15:55:59.307" Title="Calling attention to an edited question previously marked as a duplicate" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="793" CreationDate="2018-04-14T16:45:59.237" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Mplus&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mplus is a latent variable modeling program. It offers a wide range of models, estimators, and algorithms to researchers. Its analysis capabilities include a variety of basic and advanced analyses, with a special focus on analyses that include the estimation and testing of latent variables (e.g., Structural equation modeling).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information, visit the Mplus &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.statmodel.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;website&lt;/a&gt; which provides tutorials, user guides, and other sources. Additionally, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.statmodel.com/cgi-bin/discus/discus.cgi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mplus Discussion&lt;/a&gt; provides a platform for users to share questions and comments about the program and modeling issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109647" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2018-04-15T16:00:09.843" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-04-14T16:45:59.237" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5206" CreationDate="2018-04-15T00:32:45.057" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Abdu, I was one of the original downvoters, because I believed that your question was posed poorly (and as I commented, the title not reflecting the question bothered me). I undid the downvote after the editing both by you and by @gung addressed this. Reflecting on this, I may have reacted too quickly by downvoting; giving you the chance to edit first would have been fairer to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="121522" LastEditDate="2018-05-24T12:41:04.677" LastActivityDate="2018-05-24T12:41:04.677" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5230" CreationDate="2018-04-15T15:55:59.307" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is jut not clear enough to me to be reopened, whether it is a duplicate or not.  Your edits bumped the question into the reopen queue, where users could vote to reopen it, but it wasn't reopened.  I didn't vote on it (my vote would be binding), but I would have voted to leave it closed.  This is the way the SE system is designed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, if you want to continue to pursue this, I would edit your question again.  Try to make it less discursive&amp;mdash;shorter and more to the point.  You will need to stay what you understand from the linked thread, and what you still need to know.  Clearly and concretely, what is it that you still don't understand about your situation after reading the linked thread.  You need both these elements, without them, your question is unlikely to be reopened.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2018-04-15T15:55:59.307" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5138" CreationDate="2018-04-18T21:48:57.733" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gogetfunding.com/justice-for-andreas-georgiou-former-head-of-greek-statistical-agency/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QjLPI.png&quot; alt=&quot;Help Andreas Georgiou&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2018-04-18T21:55:32.317" LastActivityDate="2018-04-18T21:55:32.317" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5235" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5236" CreationDate="2018-04-19T07:31:33.860" Score="8" ViewCount="257" Body="&lt;p&gt;I notice that the &lt;code&gt;Reversal&lt;/code&gt; badge has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/57/reversal&quot;&gt;awarded just a single time&lt;/a&gt;, to @Macallan in 2015. I was rather sad to see that for something this rare - an answer apparently that good to a question apparently  that terrible - that the question was subsequently deleted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2903/121522&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; from @Glen_b says &quot;It looks like OPs can only delete a question with an answer if there's only one answer and the answer isn't upvoted&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that the question was deleted by mods? Is it okay to ask what happened there? And what pearls of wisdom I missed out on because that answer of &gt;+20 was deleted? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-04-19T08:23:16.107" LastActivityDate="2018-04-19T08:23:16.107" Title="Why was the only thread with the Reversal badge deleted?" Tags="|discussion|badges|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5235" CreationDate="2018-04-19T07:51:42.367" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question you mention is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/55822/how-to-deal-with-a-fake-scientist/55824#55824&quot;&gt;How to deal with a fake scientist?&lt;/a&gt;, it got the -30 score and was deleted by the community, as voted by amoeba, kjetil b halvorsen, Xi'an on Nov 4 '17 at 13:25, neither of whom is or was a mod at that time. You gain the more &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;privileges&lt;/a&gt; on the site with reputation, so at some point users are able to cast delete votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please notice that the number of upvotes does not need to be a good measure of the quality of a question, or an answer. In this case, the answer is just a quote and a reference. I guess that it got so many upvotes because people upvoted it to say &quot;I agree that the question is wrong&quot;, rather then to reward it for an exceptional quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2018-04-19T08:00:24.743" LastActivityDate="2018-04-19T08:00:24.743" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5235" CreationDate="2018-04-19T07:55:32.067" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question was deleted because enough votes were cast to delete it (none by a diamond moderator, as it happens). It was a rant, written in response to a frustrating experience on our site, not a real question; &amp;amp; perhaps by now rather embarrassing to the user that posted it&amp;mdash;who will be, after all, four years older.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer took the question at face value: though it received many up-votes, it consisted of just a reference with a brief quotation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Davidian, M. and Louis, T. A. (2012), &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sciencemag.org/content/336/6077/12.summary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why Statistics?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;Science&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 336, no. 6077, p. 12.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2018-04-19T07:55:32.067" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4819" CreationDate="2018-04-20T15:43:47.083" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, @ttnphns has changed his opinion (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5184/a-new-tag-for-mixture-of-data-types?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1#comment15631_5184&quot;&gt;see here&lt;/a&gt;) and following that, @gung approved the pending synonym suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nominal&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nominal&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nominal&lt;/a&gt; became a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/categorical-data&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;categorical-data&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;categorical-data&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2018-04-20T15:43:47.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5242" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-30T19:10:34.937" Score="3" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;With this post &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/340468/partial-quantile-moments&quot;&gt;Partial quantile moments?&lt;/a&gt; there was introduced a new tag [partial-moments] (so far without tag wiki).  I think this (or some similar tag) could be useful, but my question is: What should its name be? What is this concept, as used in post such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/191492/how-does-saddlepoint-approximation-work/191781#191781&quot;&gt;How does saddlepoint approximation work?&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/137931/when-would-we-use-tantiles-and-the-medial-rather-than-quantiles-and-the-median/142384#142384&quot;&gt;When would we use tantiles and the medial, rather than quantiles and the median?&lt;/a&gt; (where I used the name &quot;cumulative expectation&quot;).  I's sure this tag could be useful on other posts as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this should be posted here or on the main site, since the questions: What should the tag name be? and what is the &quot;official name&quot; (and some references, please) ? belongs on each site respectively!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastActivityDate="2018-04-30T19:10:34.937" Title="Partial moment tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5243" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-03T07:42:17.090" Score="1" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;A new user asked this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/344110/58675&quot;&gt;Neural Network for Foreign Exchange Prediction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion it's quite good as a first question, but it's hard to answer. I'd like the help the OP improve it. However, I'm not sure how. The main problem IMO is that we can't say why her/his code doesn't obtain the same results as the book's code, because we don't have access to the book code. I was thinking to suggest two improvements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modify the question in &quot;did I make any errors in my implementation of this NN for Foreign Exchange prediction?&quot; and add code, interspersed with text so that the post doesn't become an unreadable wall of code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add a link to the data, and some plots&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, at this point it seems to me that the question will become more on-topic on Stack Overflow than here. So I thought to suggest splitting the question in two questions: one, on topic here, where the OP describes the model more in detail, plots the data, etc. and asks if s/he is making shuts mistakes in the model definition.&#xA;Another, on topic on SO, where the OP shows the actual implementation of the model. It's a lot of work for a beginner, but I don't have other ideas. Directly posting the code to SO doesn't seem right: I'm now due that talking about Hampel filters, AR coefficients, etc would make the question on topic there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T07:42:17.090" Title="How to improve the following question" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|editing|migration|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5244" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5247" CreationDate="2018-05-04T17:26:39.657" Score="9" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just asked the following question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/344508/what-are-attention-mechanism-exactly&quot;&gt;What are attention mechanism exactly?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that attention-related questions haven't received answers on this site. Is this the right site for these questions? After &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Data Science&lt;/a&gt;, I found another site which seems related to Deep Learning questions: &lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Artificial Intelligence&lt;/a&gt; (and I hope there isn't a third one). I believe Cross Validated is the most suitable site for this kind of questions, but I would like to have your confirmation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T14:41:07.560" Title="Is CV the right site for this question?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5245" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-07T03:23:30.673" Score="3" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;The current excerpt of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sensitivity-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sensitivity-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sensitivity-analysis&lt;/a&gt; is wrong; it's not necessarily about violations, just about variations in inputs, possibly unseen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sensitivity analysis refers to methods to see if violations of assumptions of a model make large differences to results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the right definition? For example, the definition on the Wikipedia page for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_analysis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sensitivity analysis&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sensitivity analysis is the study of how the uncertainty in the output of a mathematical model or system (numerical or otherwise) can be apportioned to different sources of uncertainty in its inputs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I was about to create the same tag at DataScience.SE and copy whatever definition we decide on.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7291" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2018-05-07T13:09:42.407" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T13:13:17.573" Title="Wiki excerpt for [sensitivity-analysis] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-excerpt|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5246" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5250" CreationDate="2018-05-07T04:03:53.893" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seemed like these tags might sometimes get confused, can the excerpts be improved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/d-prime&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;d-prime&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;d-prime&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_index&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;sensitivity index&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a measure used in signal detection theory to quantify how well a signal can be distinguished from noise; hit rate and false-alarm rate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sensitivity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sensitivity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sensitivity&lt;/a&gt; or recall = true positive rate(TPR) = TP/(TP+FN) = TP/P is a performance metric of a binary classifier. Similarly specificity = TN/N = TN/(TN+FP)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;and there is of course also &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sensitivity-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sensitivity-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sensitivity-analysis&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5245/definition-for-sensitivity-analysis-tag&quot;&gt;Wiki excerpt for [sensitivity-analysis] tag?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7291" LastEditorUserId="7291" LastEditDate="2018-05-14T21:32:11.137" LastActivityDate="2018-05-14T21:32:11.137" Title="Disambiguate tag excerpts for [d-prime], [sensitivity] and [sensitivity-analysis]" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|tag-excerpt|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5244" CreationDate="2018-05-07T14:41:07.560" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's on-topic here because it is about machine learning, and machine learning is squarely on-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T14:41:07.560" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5245" CreationDate="2018-05-07T17:21:48.730" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say sensitivity analysis is...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a set of non-primary statistical analyses intended to verify the accuracy and generalizability of estimates and inference derived from a primary analysis and to make corrections where appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T17:21:48.730" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5245" CreationDate="2018-05-07T20:15:52.023" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me start by grounding this.  In a scientific situation, people typically have theories about important relationships between variables.  These theories are, however, incomplete in some way, or are not universally accepted.  Thus, it is worthwhile to test specific hypotheses derived from those theories.  The point of designing a study is to create a context in which there will be sufficient data that are relevant to that question.  The point of building a regression model is to create a statistical context in which the hypothesis can be tested.  This is the kind of situation that I typically work with, and what I generally have in mind when answering questions on CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, let's say we've tested some treatment (intervention, exposure, etc.) effect and gotten a result.  The model constitutes making a whole host of assumptions (not just independence, homoscedasticity, and normality).  One might be concerned that the result we have is contingent on one or another assumption that makes our conclusion fragile.  In that case, one way to proceed is to rerun the analysis / fit a new model that is robust to that kind of violation.  It is common to call this a 'sensitivity analysis', although I don't know of this being an official definition anywhere.  Here are some example write ups that might come out of this process:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...  A concern is that our result could be driven by two high-leverage datapoints.  As a sensitivity analysis, we refit our model without those points.  The treatment remains significant and the mean difference is similar (-.51 vs. -.72).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...  A concern is that our result could be driven by two high-leverage datapoints.  As a sensitivity analysis, we fit a robust regression model using Tukey's bisquare as the loss function.  The treatment remains significant and the mean difference is similar (-.51 vs. -.72).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...  A concern is that the residuals may not be sufficiently normal to rely on normal theory to determine the p-values.  As a sensitivity analysis, we bootstrapped the residuals to compute the p-value without assuming normality.  The treatment remains significant (p=0.0031).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...  We treated the summed score from the questionnaire as sufficiently equal-interval to use standard linear regression methods, because the scores are not against the bounds of the scale and this facilitates easier interpretation.  However, one could argue that this is too cavalier for the statistical test of our primary hypothesis.  As a sensitivity analysis, we replicated this result with an ordinal logistic regression (proportional odds) model.  The intervention is significant in this model as well (p&amp;lt;0.02).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...  Complete case analysis is valid under the assumption that the missingness is MAR.  We have argued that this assumption is reasonable in our case.  However, as a sensitivity analysis, we used the largest change observed in our dataset and assigned it, in the 'incorrect' direction, to those follow up visits that were missed.  The question then is, how many do we have to add before the treatment effect becomes nonsignificant?  ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etc.  The above are the kind of thing that I think of when I see the phrase 'sensitivity analysis'.  Note that @mdewey's meta-analysis &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5245/wiki-excerpt-for-sensitivity-analysis-tag#comment15678_5245&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt; falls within this continuum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, no terms are all that well standardized.  The same terms are used different ways by different fields.  The Wikipedia definition sounds like error propagation in reverse.  You start with a certain amount of uncertainty in the model's output, and &amp;quot;apportion&amp;quot; that to uncertainty in different inputs.  (That is, '26% of the uncertainty is due to measurement error in X1', etc.)  That is perfectly reasonable when developing a simulation model of a complex system, but it really doesn't fall within the category of analyses illustrated by the examples above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T20:15:52.023" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5246" CreationDate="2018-05-08T12:34:16.267" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We create a new tag &lt;code&gt;[sensitivity-specificity]&lt;/code&gt;, as @amoeba suggested.  We make the existing tags, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sensitivity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sensitivity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sensitivity&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/specificity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;specificity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;specificity&lt;/a&gt; synonyms of this and merge them.  (We will first need to ensure that the threats tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sensitivity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sensitivity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sensitivity&lt;/a&gt; are correct, of course.)  Note that we have a tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/precision-recall&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;precision-recall&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;precision-recall&lt;/a&gt;, so combining has some precedent.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We create a tag for &lt;code&gt;[sensitivity-index]&lt;/code&gt;, and make it a synonym of &lt;code&gt;[d-prime]&lt;/code&gt;.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think the excerpt for &lt;code&gt;[sensitivity-analysis]&lt;/code&gt; is largely correct (cf., my answer here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5249/7290&quot;&gt;Wiki excerpt for [sensitivity-analysis] tag?&lt;/a&gt;), but the excerpt could possibly be clarified.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2018-05-08T12:34:16.267" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5251" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-09T12:14:42.770" Score="12" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed a lot of questions with  the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-statistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-statistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-statistics&lt;/a&gt; tag where it clearly doesn't belong. I think this happens because naive users think all statistics is mathematical statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current usage guidance (wiki exceprt) is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mathematical theory of statistics, concerned with formal definitions&#xA;  and general results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we add something to this such as &quot;do not use this tag for general questions about statistics&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or would that just not work? Do we know how many people look at the tag info before adding a tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-05-09T13:09:49.867" LastActivityDate="2018-05-09T13:09:49.867" Title="Improving [mathematical-statistics] tag excerpt" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-excerpt|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5245" CreationDate="2018-05-11T13:13:17.573" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to modify the current excerpt in the general direction outlined by @AdamO, but keeping it easy to grasp. My understanding of what &quot;sensitivity analysis&quot; is, follows @gung's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Auxiliary methods intended to check if the outcome of some statistical analysis strongly depends on the model assumptions, preprocessing steps, presence of outliers, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T13:13:17.573" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5253" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5254" CreationDate="2018-05-12T12:04:01.123" Score="0" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe this question should be closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/345656/test-accuracy-much-higher-than-training-accuracy&quot;&gt;Test accuracy much higher than training accuracy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's impossible to answer it without looking at the code, so the only reasonable suggestion I can give to the OP is to add code. However, once code is added, the question will become off-topic here and on-topic for Stack Overflow. Right now is not on-topic for SO, so I cannot propose it for migration. What reason for closure should I select?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS I believe this case is quite different from a preceding, superficially similar question I already asked here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5243/how-to-improve-the-following-question&quot;&gt;How to improve the following question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for the following reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;as Nick Cox noted, the other question is so complicated that even on SO it will probably be off-topic (modeling &amp;amp; coding issues are too intertwined). The current question, on the other hand, asks about a well-known, completely solved problem: handwritten digit classification from the MNIST data set.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the other user was a beginner at her/his first question, and the question was not bad for a first time. Here the user is not an expert for sure, but he's not at his first question either, and the question lacks a lot to be desired, so it should be closed IMO.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="58675" LastEditDate="2018-05-12T12:54:28.907" LastActivityDate="2018-05-13T11:10:54.660" Title="Which close option to choose for this question" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5253" CreationDate="2018-05-13T11:10:54.660" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answers in this Q&amp;amp;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4436/does-unanimity-of-reasons-to-close-matter&quot;&gt;Does unanimity of reasons to close matter?&lt;/a&gt; throw light on the related issue of whether the reasons for closure matter. The short answer is - they do not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the question at issue here it seems from the comments that it falls into a common group of questions where the OP has found something unexpected and seeks enlightenment. This could be a failure of statistical understanding which is clearly on-topic or a problem with data or code. In the latter case it might be on-topic if statistical knowledge is required to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastActivityDate="2018-05-13T11:10:54.660" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5255" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-14T11:56:37.997" Score="0" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recall seeing a question on VAEs last week, similar to this one but more verbose:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/324340/variational-autoencoder-vs-normal-autoencoder&quot;&gt;Variational Autoencoder VS Normal Autoencoder&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember the term &quot;understand the basic math behind [them/VAE]&quot; so I think it was a question from the same author. I can't find the question anymore and as I'm not a mod, I can't see if it has been deleted. Is there someone who can, and who would be willing to do it? :-) I don't think the question was closed, as I tried using &lt;code&gt;isclosed:yes&lt;/code&gt; in my searches without success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastActivityDate="2018-05-14T11:56:37.997" Title="Finding a question similar to this one" Tags="|discussion|questions|search|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5258" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-18T18:52:26.783" Score="20" ViewCount="248" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is simply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What is the preferred way for CV users to share data?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there isn't one, I think there should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, some users provide a link to an external data source. Others dump it in &lt;code&gt;code mode&lt;/code&gt;. Each has its pros and cons, but at least they are &lt;strong&gt;open&lt;/strong&gt; ways of sharing the data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing &lt;em&gt;&quot;[...] send me the data through email&quot;&lt;/em&gt; a couple of times on CV was the motivation for this question. I hope we – as a community – agree that such behavior should be discouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;See also: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pastebin.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://pastebin.com/&lt;/a&gt; (open code and data sharing tool)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sharecsv.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.sharecsv.com/&lt;/a&gt; (open csv sharing tool)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;place holder: some examples from around CV&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67042" LastEditorUserId="67042" LastEditDate="2018-06-08T16:21:21.110" LastActivityDate="2021-03-17T07:21:28.160" Title="What tools does CV recommend or provide for users to share their data?" Tags="|discussion|data|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5259" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-20T11:11:45.100" Score="5" ViewCount="299" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this question we encounter two problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/347009/differing-p-values-caranova-anova-post-hoc-in-logistic-regression&quot;&gt;Differing p-values car::Anova, anova &amp;amp; post hoc in logistic regression&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One problem is about differences between the &lt;em&gt;single&lt;/em&gt; p-value for an anova test in relation to the &lt;em&gt;multiple&lt;/em&gt; p-values for a Tukey's range test, for each single contrast. The single contrasts had much lower p-values (&lt;em&gt;regarded&lt;/em&gt; insignificant) than the p-value for the single anova test.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One other problem is about a &quot;bug&quot; (which is debatable just abuse of a non-supported feature) in the R-package &lt;code&gt;car::Anova&lt;/code&gt; regarding the implementation of the &lt;code&gt;method=brglmFit&lt;/code&gt; option (which it doesn't use for the reduced models). This problem seems to me sufficiently on-topic for this website. It is a bit much about bugs in software but in order to tackle it, it does help to have some statistics knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was initially written rather confusingly, but currently it is in a state that you can reproduce the problem(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the problem from the point of view of a person on stackexchange that wants to answer/solve/help this problem (these questions) is &lt;strong&gt;how to deal with the multiple issues in a single problem?&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;how to deal with complex problems?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand: answering such questions can be simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Which, for the specific example, I currently did in comments. But I&#xA;was left wondering how to make those comments in an answer or what to&#xA;do with the question.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But on the other hand: it may be important to correct such questions, cut it down into smaller portions, such that they also remain valuable in the future as part of an easy search-able database of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="8013" LastEditDate="2018-05-23T20:18:48.577" LastActivityDate="2018-05-24T06:23:31.293" Title="How to deal with this interesting but convoluted question" Tags="|discussion|answers|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5260" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5261" CreationDate="2018-05-22T16:08:00.383" Score="1" ViewCount="509" Body="&lt;p&gt;Boruta is a feature-selection algorithm based on randomForest. In my opinion we should have a tag for this algorithm. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aquestion%20boruta&quot;&gt;23 questions&lt;/a&gt; related to boruta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128677" LastActivityDate="2018-05-23T07:12:46.640" Title="Do we need a &quot;boruta-tag&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5260" CreationDate="2018-05-23T07:12:46.640" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just created the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/boruta/info&quot;&gt;boruta&lt;/a&gt; tag. Feel free to propose a more detailled wiki as I just have superficial knowledge of the algorithm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128677" LastActivityDate="2018-05-23T07:12:46.640" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5262" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-23T18:43:05.110" Score="11" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is, I feel, a problem user whose participation in this site is pretty appalling. They use the comments to lob out weak, critical remarks that aren't entirely rude/abusive nor off-topic, but show some disdain toward users on the basis of not being relevant to their interests. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that I and some other frequent users (esp. the site mods) occasionally drop comments like these when a question or answer is truly impenetrable. I make that assessment on the basis of my gut, but also on a lack of attention (low views, no answers, no comments). This user (unnamed) has no problem saying, e.g. &quot;This is a meandering nonsensical question/answer&quot; when there is clearly active, vibrant participation, upvotes, and so on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It draws out a concerning point that comments are a rather tall soapbox for people whose stupid opinions would otherwise be shouted down into the ether (via downvotes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this kind of behavior kosher or flag for moderation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the behavior is kosher, is it kosher to respond in kind and say [in effect] &quot;Just because you don't get it doesn't mean it's everyone else's problem.&quot; or such?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would a comment downvote button be a good way to encourage better discussion?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastActivityDate="2018-05-23T21:13:16.247" Title="How do we encourage better participation from problem users?" Tags="|discussion|etiquette|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5262" CreationDate="2018-05-23T19:03:16.747" Score="16" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes, you should flag such contributions.  You shouldn't necessarily flag them as &quot;rude / abusive&quot;, unless that's actually the case, but you can still flag.  For example, comments can be flagged as &quot;no longer needed&quot; (the fact that they may never have been relevant does not negate this).  You can also flag and leave a custom comment.  We get that sometimes and the additional context is helpful, at least speaking for myself.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(I don't think the behavior you describe is kosher, but from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;logical point of view&lt;/a&gt; that doesn't require the consequent to be false, so let me address this.)  &lt;em&gt;You should not &quot;respond in kind&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.  That will only lead the situation to degenerate further.  If you think someone's behavior is inappropriate in some way, the best thing to do is flag it and move on.  If you are confident you can address the behavior in a constructive manner that remains in keeping with SE's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;be nice policy&lt;/a&gt;, you may try to do so.  In general, however, this is a high-risk, low-reward strategy.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A comment downvote button would be a site-wide change requiring the SE developers to get involved.  You could ask there.  That said, (1) I personally doubt it would &quot;encourage better discussion&quot;, and (2) I believe it has already been discussed on meta.SE and rejected (see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/3615/187282&quot;&gt;Allow downvoting comments&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/140991/187282&quot;&gt;Reconsider comment downvoting to discourage rude comments&lt;/a&gt;).  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2018-05-23T19:03:16.747" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5262" CreationDate="2018-05-23T19:20:00.533" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;We're all of us obtuse from time, so assuming good faith &amp;amp; engaging in an honest attempt to find out what precisely the commenter thinks is the issue will almost always be the best option. If they don't want to elaborate, consider flagging their comment as &quot;no longer needed&quot;&amp;mdash;the flip-side to comments' not being down-votable is that the bar for deleting them isn't as high as for answers. But if this is repeated behaviour, &amp;amp; you think it's to the detriment of the site, do flag one of the comments &amp;amp; explain what's been going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2018-05-23T21:13:16.247" LastActivityDate="2018-05-23T21:13:16.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5259" CreationDate="2018-05-23T20:31:53.887" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can help the asker frame a succinct question. I will sometimes drop a comment like, &quot;Are you asking...&quot; for your example, I might ask, &quot;Are you asking whether the ANOVA and post-hoc tests actually disagree?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can encourage them to focus on a specific area of confusion and post follow-up questions if they still don't get it later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can ask them to set up a simpler example. For instance this person is clearly overwhelmed by both separation and multiple testing. You can jitter/permute the $Y$ or use example data from another problem to illustrate the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can point them to site etiquette. The SE forums value a &quot;laser-like focus&quot; on a specific problem in a way that anyone can understand. It is a good motto to encourage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2018-05-24T06:23:31.293" LastActivityDate="2018-05-24T06:23:31.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5138" CreationDate="2018-05-25T15:11:33.923" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.statlect.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nrmdD.png&quot; alt=&quot;A very comprehensible and accessible digital textbook on probability and statistics&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user82135" LastActivityDate="2018-05-25T15:11:33.923" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5268" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5269" CreationDate="2018-05-25T17:51:50.317" Score="3" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was trying to collate some tags about randomization and noted that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/random-allocation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;random-allocation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;random-allocation&lt;/a&gt; seemed to be the parent-tag of preference. As I searched tags for instances of &quot;random&quot; I noted some hits for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/randomized-experiment&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;randomized-experiment&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;randomized-experiment&lt;/a&gt;. I was about to propose the tag as a synonym, but noted that it was already merged into &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/random-allocation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;random-allocation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;random-allocation&lt;/a&gt;. When I navigate to the questions tagged as such, the excerpt, wiki, and related questions are all those of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/random-allocation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;random-allocation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;random-allocation&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it prompts the question: why do tag synonyms show up in a search?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastActivityDate="2018-05-27T14:35:32.377" Title="Why do tag-synonyms show up separately in search?" Tags="|support|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5268" CreationDate="2018-05-27T14:35:32.377" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-bydesign&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-bydesign&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-bydesign&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merged synonyms such as e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/randomized-experiment&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;randomized-experiment&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;randomized-experiment&lt;/a&gt; show up on &lt;a href=&quot;http://stats.stackexchange.com/tags&quot;&gt;http://stats.stackexchange.com/tags&lt;/a&gt; if one searches for them. They appear there without any wiki excerpt and without question count displayed. (Unless one does mouse-over; then one can see the question count and the wiki excerpt of the master tag, in this case &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/random-allocation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;random-allocation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;random-allocation&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;Unmerged&lt;/em&gt; synonyms, on the contrary, appear on that page with their own wiki excerpt and their own question count.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2018-05-27T14:35:32.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5270" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-28T21:48:57.403" Score="1" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven’t been on stats.SE very long, but I noticed that, compared to TeX.SE and SO, that I get less votes there on stats on answers and questions. So I started being conscious about the number of votes and it seems less in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly believe that upvoting encourages new members to become or stay active on the site. Maybe something for all of us to be conscious about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177526" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-05-29T06:35:15.920" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T06:35:15.920" Title="Too high standards for upvoting on the site?" Tags="|discussion|votes|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-05-28T23:25:59.157" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5271" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5284" CreationDate="2018-05-29T15:16:31.653" Score="7" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;The bias-variance tradeoff is a specific topic that isn't quite the same as bias or variance (although they obviously overlap).  It seems like questions about it are thus somewhat distinct.  I wonder if it would be better to have a specific tag to group these questions.  At present, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bias+variance&quot;&gt;124 threads&lt;/a&gt; with both tags and another 15 that have only one of the tags plus the word &quot;tradeoff&quot;.  This implies we may have something like 140 threads on this topic (compared to 634 threads with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bias&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bias&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bias&lt;/a&gt; and 2374 with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/variance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;variance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;variance&lt;/a&gt;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-06-27T14:23:09.873" LastActivityDate="2018-06-27T14:23:18.460" Title="Should we have a [bias-variance] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5258" CreationDate="2018-05-29T16:25:16.217" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm contributing this as an answer because it's rather hard to share an example in the comments field:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Data of 20 rows or fewer seem fine to share inline. One nice way to share R data (similar to &lt;code&gt;datalines&lt;/code&gt; in SAS) is using &lt;code&gt;textConnection&lt;/code&gt;. This blends the ease of copy-paste executable code and readable data formats. It also doesn't require any external links (many of which are blocked on more restricted computer networks like mine).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;mydf &amp;lt;- read.table(textConnection(&quot;&#xA; Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species&#xA;          5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2  setosa&#xA;          4.9         3.0          1.4         0.2  setosa&#xA;          4.7         3.2          1.3         0.2  setosa&#xA;          4.6         3.1          1.5         0.2  setosa&#xA;          5.0         3.6          1.4         0.2  setosa&#xA;          5.4         3.9          1.7         0.4  setosa&#xA;&quot;), header=T)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T16:25:16.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5273" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5302" CreationDate="2018-05-29T18:14:12.997" Score="34" ViewCount="8910" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've observed that we tend to get a number of questions in the vein of &amp;quot;I'm training a neural network and the model is not effective (for some definition of effective). Please help me fix it.&amp;quot; (I can provide examples of these types of questions, but I don't think it would be helpful to highlight the authors at this time.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions are not exactly programming questions, since OP has &lt;em&gt;syntactically-correct&lt;/em&gt; code; instead, OP's problem is that the model isn't very effective at whatever task they're working on. (But there could be &lt;em&gt;semantic&lt;/em&gt; errors, in which case the question is, in my view, a programming question -- but whether or not this is the case is not obvious without a detailed study of the code and what task OP is trying to accomplish with the model. Both are often unclear.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some sense, they are on-topic because they are about how to carry out modeling which is, essentially, a core component of modern machine learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, since all neural networks are bespoke and parameterized with a truly massive number of knobs (hyperparameters) to twiddle, these questions don't seem to generalize very well. And these threads tend to take on the form of a frustrating IT support dialogue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answerer: &amp;quot;Try adjusting the learning rate.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP: &amp;quot;That didn't work.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answerer: &amp;quot;Try using a smaller hidden layer.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP: &amp;quot;That didn't work.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answerer: &amp;quot;Try using a different activation function.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP: &amp;quot;That didn't work.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could undertake to write a comprehensive answer enumerating the various knobs to attempt improving the model, perhaps in the form of &amp;quot;symptom/diagnosis/treatment.&amp;quot; I don't know how effective this would be, since OP will often insist &amp;quot;but I tried that!&amp;quot; Moreover, it's usually true that many knobs will need to be turned &lt;em&gt;in combination&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By way of example, in working on a hobby neural network project, it took me more than 150 different model configurations to get a model that worked to my satisfaction, and this involved tuning a number of different model attributes &lt;em&gt;in combination&lt;/em&gt; (and many hours of computing time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way that we can give helpful answers to the rising tide of these rather under-specified questions? Tuning neural networks is important, and we have a large volume of questions about how to do it, but I have yet to see a good answer to any one question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2018-06-19T00:27:53.220" Title="What's the best way to answer &quot;my neural network doesn't work, please fix&quot; questions?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4510" CreationDate="2018-05-29T22:24:25.753" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should a “Neural Network” Stackexchange site be created?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question has been &lt;em&gt;answered&lt;/em&gt; by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=neural&quot;&gt;response on Area51&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/57719/artificial-intelligence&quot;&gt;Artificial Intelligence&lt;/a&gt; - closed after &lt;strong&gt;18&lt;/strong&gt; days in beta &lt;strong&gt;4&lt;/strong&gt; years ago&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6607/artificial-intelligence&quot;&gt;Artificial Intelligence&lt;/a&gt; - closed after &lt;strong&gt;12&lt;/strong&gt; days in beta &lt;strong&gt;7&lt;/strong&gt; years ago&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/93481/artificial-intelligence&quot;&gt;Artificial Intelligence&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;strong&gt;665 days in beta&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/third-time-s-the-a-charm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Third time's a charm&lt;/a&gt;) - Almost 650 &quot;&lt;em&gt;Neural&lt;/em&gt;&quot; tagged &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/41738/machine-learning&quot;&gt;Machine Learning&lt;/a&gt; - closed after &lt;strong&gt;19&lt;/strong&gt; days in beta &lt;strong&gt;4&lt;/strong&gt; years ago&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/26434/machine-learning&quot;&gt;Machine Learning&lt;/a&gt; - closed after &lt;strong&gt;15&lt;/strong&gt; days in beta &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt; years ago&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/33/statistical-analysis&quot;&gt;Statistical Analysis&lt;/a&gt; - Launched 7 years ago - (You are here)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/55053/data-science&quot;&gt;Data Science&lt;/a&gt; - Launched 10 months ago&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would it not be the time to create a specific &quot;Neural Network&quot; site on StachExchange? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are allowed to, but be prepared to explain how &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;succeed&lt;/strong&gt; where others have failed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;Should my idea be part of an existing site, or its own site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;In general, if a site makes sense as part of a bigger site, it's better to have one big site than a bunch of little niche sites. Site X should be subsumed by site Y if:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Almost all X questions are on-topic for site Y&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If Y already exists, it already has a tag for X, and nobody is complaining&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You're not creating such a big group that you don't have enough experts to answer all possible questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There's a high probability that users of site Y would enjoy seeing the occasional question about X&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would one go about doing that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/27938/changes-to-the-area-51-process-v3-0&quot;&gt;Changes to the Area 51 Process v3.0&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/faq&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="197829" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T22:24:25.753" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5273" CreationDate="2018-06-01T01:22:44.480" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it's common, and also on DataScience, AI, and Stackover itself. We are the &lt;strong&gt;nicest&lt;/strong&gt; community, questions like that would easily downvoted to -6 on Stackover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Try to spot any obvious mistake/inconsistency from the question. For example, not using softmax properly&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask for visualization clues&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we shouldn't:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Download their dataset, run the network ourself&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide IT-support like answers such as &quot;try a bigger network!&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see how we will be able to offer any useful advice on debugging. Anything could happen; very likely the code is just bugged. We don't have time for debugging a network implementation. Unfortunately, neural network programming is a skill set that require extensive training and understanding. OP would need to seek for paid consultant services. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should vote to close the questions until OP comes back with something more concrete to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34623" LastEditorUserId="34623" LastEditDate="2018-06-01T01:28:44.447" LastActivityDate="2018-06-01T01:28:44.447" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5277" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-03T06:30:28.127" Score="15" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have highly popular question, on extremely popular topic that has an outdated answers (most from 2010, newest ones from 2015): &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/181/how-to-choose-the-number-of-hidden-layers-and-nodes-in-a-feedforward-neural-netw&quot;&gt;How to choose the number of hidden layers and nodes in a feedforward neural network?&lt;/a&gt; The most upvoted answers suggests to choose single hidden layer, while the recent achievements in deep learning show something opposite: the best results are achieved by networks with multiple hidden layers. Moreover, for some problems like image recognition, simple dense networks with single hidden layer are very far from state of the art. Since I'm not an expert in deep learning, I don't feel that I could give a detailed answer on that. On another hand, nobody did recently give an update. I myself offered a bounty for the update answer, but there was no response. What should we do in such cases? I guess this that we don't want to be a repository of outdated knowledge...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="35989" LastEditDate="2018-06-05T11:34:38.650" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T12:11:33.490" Title="What should we do with outdated answers?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5277" CreationDate="2018-06-03T06:48:16.320" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the canonical &quot;StackExchange/StackOverflow&quot; approach seems to be to allow downvotes, edits and new answers and hope the new good ones eventually float to the top, I think that in practice the best thing to do is make a &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; question (if possible, worded to be in as canonical form as possible), and enure it gets at least one decent answer. Then close the old one as a duplicate of the new one, adding a note that the answers there are now outdated and better answers are at the new one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should get to a desirable outcome faster. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I agree with amoeba that the standard approach should still be used if there's a reasonable chance of that working. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2018-06-04T06:58:09.147" LastActivityDate="2018-06-04T06:58:09.147" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5277" CreationDate="2018-06-05T11:11:12.943" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this particular case, I would first talk to the most active and respected users in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/neural-networks&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;neural-networks&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;neural-networks&lt;/a&gt; tag (see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/neural-networks/topusers&quot;&gt;list of top users&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/badges/151/neural-networks&quot;&gt;list of those who've been awarded tag badges&lt;/a&gt;). Of course not everybody there is still very active. I noticed that @DeltaIV, @Sycorax, and @JanKukacka have been posting good answers &amp;amp; comments in the NN tag lately, but I am not following this tag very closely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps you could identify several such people and ping them to join this Meta discussion or a discussion in chat. If they agree that all current answers are suboptimal, encourage them to write a good (authoritative and comprehensive) answer. I can promise to put a large bounty on that thread once such an answer appears. Hopefully this would attract some upvotes too. Then we can reach out to @RobHyndman and encourage him to change the accepted answer. Profit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2018-06-05T12:11:33.490" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T12:11:33.490" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5273" CreationDate="2018-06-06T16:07:55.043" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically helping out with these neural networks is (often) like debugging and/or solving a complex unclear problem. It is like doing a (big) task rather than answering a clear (and abstract) question. So it should be deemed off-topic when a question does not involve the solution or clarification of specific principles and is not useful for the site other than helping out the single person who asked the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same issue exists when people ask for support with problems related to software. For these cases there is a reference &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/793/internet-support-for-statistics-software&quot;&gt;Internet Support for Statistics Software&lt;/a&gt; . That place provides resources for general help to solve software problems. This link is then used in place of many questions which can be closed with a reference to this general help and support FAQ about software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If many questions exist surrounding similar support issues related to neural networks, then a similar type of standard community support question could be created. That would provide resources for general support on neural networks and allow us to close most of the questions. Questions that still involve a novel and abstract component of general interest can still be answered, as they are useful for the database of questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2018-06-06T19:21:54.350" LastActivityDate="2018-06-06T19:21:54.350" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5271" CreationDate="2018-06-08T16:10:30.757" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;With no meaningful opposition to this, I'm going to go ahead and create a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bias-variance-tradeoff&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bias-variance-tradeoff&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bias-variance-tradeoff&lt;/a&gt; tag and begin the process of retagging.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-06-27T14:23:18.460" LastActivityDate="2018-06-27T14:23:18.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5285" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5289" CreationDate="2018-06-09T13:36:00.813" Score="1" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I go to some other user's profile and look at the &lt;code&gt;Activity&lt;/code&gt; tab, then &lt;code&gt;reputation&lt;/code&gt; tab, I can see the history of her/his reputation, including downvotes. Is this a privilege obtained at some reputation level? Or is it standard? I'm asking because I looked at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;help page for privileges&lt;/a&gt; but there doesn't seem to exist any privilege like that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2018-06-09T15:14:52.860" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T14:57:54.293" Title="How come I can see the reputation history of other users?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|privileges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5286" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-10T23:03:14.990" Score="15" ViewCount="290" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/350165/when-predicting-not-training-using-neural-networks-why-would-we-have-to-speci&quot;&gt;question was&lt;/a&gt; put on hold for being off topic with the following note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;This question appears to be off-topic because EITHER it is not about statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, or data visualization, OR it focuses on programming, debugging, or performing routine operations within a statistical computing platform.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, my post was about neural networks in general, I just posted the Tensorflow code to illustrate my point, in the same way that multiple posts on this SE include the R code to illustrate a point, so I don't agree that the question &quot;focuses on programming&quot; solely. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second if questions that dive into the details of the code are off topic, why do we have such tags as Tensorflow, R, Python, Scipy, etc...in the first place? Wouldn't any question with those tags be disqualified using the same criteria that my question was disqualified on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also can someone please migrate this question over to SO if it is indeed off topic? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89649" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T16:17:14.070" Title="Why do we have a tensorflow tag if questions about programming are off topic?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5286" CreationDate="2018-06-11T00:57:59.187" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The actual criterion is in our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt; (search for &lt;em&gt;programming&lt;/em&gt;). A question containing code or asking about code -- or even sometimes asking &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; code is not automatically off topic, but many are. Briefly, if the issue is one that takes our subject-matter knowledge to answer it belongs here. If it doesn't (such as &quot;what's wrong with this code?&quot;, which is nearly always about language issues*), then it's off topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I feel that sometimes a few of our voters can be a little overenthusiastic in closing questions that contain code, but the form of the responses in comments combined with the fact that several of the close voters are machine learning experts suggest that the issue may be primarily one of coding. In any case, I'd hesitate to try to unilaterally overturn a decision by 5 of our high reputation users unless there was a clear indication that the question should stay.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel your post should be seen as on topic under our guidelines, the best thing to do would be to edit it to emphasize those aspects of the question and de-emphasize the code-related aspects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want your post migrated, the right thing to do is flag it for migration. I'll leave it for now in case we get some consensus here that the question should be on topic after all, but you can choose to flag your post at any time; as long as it meets the criteria for being on topic at the destination and would not be likely to close as too broad, unclear, etc, then it will be migrated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*  and in any case, in that form rarely a good question for our site even when it is on topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2018-06-11T15:28:55.240" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T15:28:55.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5286" CreationDate="2018-06-11T16:17:14.070" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the time that I voted to close the question, I interpreted it as asking &quot;Why does this code do this thing?&quot; which is a programming question and hence off-topic.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After conferring with some of the moderators, I came around to the understanding that the core of the question is really whether or not an &quot;epoch&quot; is a concept that is relevant to obtaining predictions from a neural network that has already been trained, and the code snippet is more-or-less a curiosity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* I've done a bit of work with TensorFlow but am by no means an expert and haven't ever used this function. I think that understanding why that code is written in that particular way and to what purpose would require asking the authors or a programming forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T16:17:14.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5285" CreationDate="2018-06-12T14:57:54.293" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was trying to hack the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Data explorer&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could not find anything here. The following query is the closest thing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/847098/user-reputation-history&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/847098/user-reputation-history&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you can find:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Upvotes Question&#xA;Upvote Answer&#xA;Downvotes own Q And A&#xA;Accepted Answers&#xA;Suggested Edits&#xA;Bounties Started&#xA;Bounties Received.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but not down votes other Q&amp;amp;A&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Daily reputation status&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the closest that I could get. The daily reputation can not be viewed by data explorer but the little graph shows daily reputation. I went to a user from which I knew that he/she gave a recent down vote (expressed in a recent meta-post). And indeed if you count all the points that you can see in data explorer (or the activity overview) and compare with the graph then you can see a discrepancy of 1 for a particular day. So you would be able, with quite some effort, to deduce the day at which another user has given a down vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T14:57:54.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5290" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-13T10:00:46.880" Score="3" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, I posted this answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/350970/117812&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/350970/117812&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;which yielded 3 upvotes, no downvote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My &quot;latest achievements&quot; (goblet icon) says that I have achieved 10 reputation yesterday, i. e. 10 reputation on this answer. I think, it should have been 30.&#xA;The difference of 20 reputation is not important to me, nor do I think this particular answer was worth more then 10 reputation, but reporting a possible bug in the forum software might be important. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a bug and if so, do I need to report it anywhere else then here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117812" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2018-06-14T00:08:28.433" LastActivityDate="2018-06-14T00:08:28.433" Title="3 upvotes (on answer) yielded only 10 reputation. Why not 30?" Tags="|support|answers|reputation|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2018-06-14T11:17:43.093" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5291" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5293" CreationDate="2018-06-14T04:18:10.047" Score="13" ViewCount="639" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has been some discussion on CV Meta of how to deal with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12/how-should-we-deal-with-obvious-homework-questions&quot;&gt;homework questions&lt;/a&gt; and also &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3104/policy-on-questions-that-read-like-how-should-i-do-my-job&quot;&gt;job-related questions&lt;/a&gt;. Either can be unreasonable in certain cases, but the latter really annoy me, since they ask users of CV to do the work of the OP. These &quot;do my job for me&quot; questions seem to have two main variations, both of which are problematic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I am programming ML algorithm X.  Here is my code; it doesn't work.  What went wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I want to analyse data on Y.  Here is a broad description of the problem/data.  What do I do?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases, the question seems to invite CV users to essentially do the professional work of the OP for them. In the first case, there is very specific information given, but it is essentially a request for debugging of code. In the second case, the information given is usually very broad, and it is a request for formulation of a statistical model for an applied project. Unless the questions highlight some useful general principle that is helpful to other users, these kinds of questions do not appear to me to be valuable on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have sometimes seen the first type of question closed as &quot;off-topic (out-of-scope)&quot; and the second type of question closed as &quot;too broad&quot;. However, I wonder if a stronger response is warranted for these questions. Would it would be better to give a custom explanation for closure, along the lines of &quot;off topic (CV is not a site to do your modelling/debugging for you)&quot;. Is this overstepping/rude?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is best-practice for dealing with these questions?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173082" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2018-06-16T19:11:43.167" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T12:37:14.013" Title="Dealing with &quot;do my professional work for me&quot; questions?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|closing-questions|careers|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5291" CreationDate="2018-06-14T05:41:03.693" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that most professional people asking such questions are doing so because they have a routine job and are being asked to do something outside their comfort zone, rather than being lazy. Ultimately almost everyone on the site will be using knowledge gained to provide monetary gain for someone, so we shouldn't discriminate against commercial companies (conflict of interest alert as a freelancer). I feel they should be labelled self study, as they are seeking to learn new skills and gain new understanding. This would flag to answerers that they should not do the work for them but rather provide guidance. This would allow users to learn not what to do, but how to think for themselves, just as for students. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;EDIT&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comments are fair enough, it is indeed a stretch to ask the remit of self study to be extended to such situations. I guess I also didn't initially clarify that I would still expect any question to demonstrate extensive effort to understand the problems and potential solutions prior to posting, along with a very specific description of what their sticking point is so flagging posts that are trying to avoid all effort is a reasonable response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="195935" LastEditorUserId="195935" LastEditDate="2018-06-17T11:01:17.903" LastActivityDate="2018-06-17T11:01:17.903" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5291" CreationDate="2018-06-14T09:32:40.177" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a question asks about doing someone's homework and does not meet the requirements of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/self-study/info&quot;&gt;described in here&lt;/a&gt;, then what you should do is cast a close vote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Close -&amp;gt; off-topic because... -&amp;gt; Self-study questions [...]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question asks about debugging or reviewing someone's code (in many cases it will also be off-topic on &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;http://stackoverflow.com/&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://codereview.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://codereview.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; but you could consider voting to migrate if it is relevant), then it is also off-topic, so you should vote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Close -&amp;gt; off-topic because... -&amp;gt; This question appears to be off-topic&#xA;                                 because EITHER it is not about statistics,&#xA;                                 machine learning, data analysis, data&#xA;                                 mining, or data visualization, OR it&#xA;                                 focuses on programming [...]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many cases the descriptions in the off-topic notices are clear enough to show why the question was closed. If you feel that the question could be edited, so that it becomes on-topic, then you can always comment to encourage the OP to relevant edits. Sometimes I comment also when I have a feeling that an OP does not understand how does the site works, so some brief comment may be helpful. Then I usually give them some of the links: to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic&lt;/a&gt; help page, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;how to ask?&lt;/a&gt; guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2018-06-14T18:35:38.283" LastActivityDate="2018-06-14T18:35:38.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5291" CreationDate="2018-06-14T12:12:43.330" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to Tim's answer: according to how you've described it, your second example should be closed as too broad (cf &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3181/17230&quot;&gt;Top k List of Reasons to Close a Question Immediately&lt;/a&gt;). And it's not germane whether it's for work, study, or fun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These kind of questions differ from self-study ones (exercises, book-work) in that it's only for the latter that it's even possible to give a complete solution within the confines of a CV answer. So &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5292/17230&quot;&gt;@ReneBT's proposal&lt;/a&gt;, rather than imposing a restriction, would in fact be a mechanism for enabling the sort of broad, unfocused, forum-style question that we currently close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2018-06-14T13:33:41.180" LastActivityDate="2018-06-14T13:33:41.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5291" CreationDate="2018-06-14T12:51:15.177" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;I downvoted your question because the part about job-related questions doesn't make sense, and it's unrelated to the site policy: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;this is a Statistics Q&amp;amp;A - nowhere in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;list of questions one should avoid asking&lt;/a&gt; is it mentioned that questions related to the OP's job must not be asked. The only valid criterion to judge a question is whether &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;it is a good statistics problem&lt;/a&gt; or not: whether the OP gets paid to answer them doesn't matter at all - surely William Deming and Karl Pearson could have asked and answered excellent statistical questions, related to their work as consulting statisticians.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;such a criterion is also illogical: as a lecturer you're being paid from your university to do research and write papers, and your career depends on how many papers of high impact factor you publish, how many grants you get, etc. With this kind of reasoning, we shouldn't answer questions from academicians because we're making the work of reading papers, studying books and so on, for them. It doesn't make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Stephan Kolassa explains very well &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3105/58675&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, whether the OP is a doctor, an high school teacher, a researcher or a company employee is none of our business. In closing, downvoting, migrating, etc. questions we should stick to the on-topic/off-topic rules for this site, which don't mention the OP's source of income. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastActivityDate="2018-06-14T12:51:15.177" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5296" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-14T13:03:35.750" Score="8" ViewCount="315" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen several questions asking for references that someone (or more than one) has marked as too broad.  E.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/close/190889&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/close/190889&lt;/a&gt; asks for references about using machine learning to build a trading portfolio.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fully agree this would be too broad if the OP was asking for a &lt;em&gt;solution&lt;/em&gt; to the problem, but he/she is not; they just want a place to get started. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see how this is too broad, but perhaps I am missing something. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-06-27T14:22:36.337" LastActivityDate="2018-06-27T14:22:36.337" Title="How can requests for references be &quot;too broad&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|references|too-broad|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5291" CreationDate="2018-06-14T13:11:05.777" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's a problem with asking questions related to work, and I would go farther than others and say that this is not always because the OP has a &quot;routine&quot; job. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Statistics is a big field! No one person is expert in all of it. Now, if I (as a consultant) get a request for which I am simply unqualified (e.g. something with time series) then I will simply turn it down.  But there are lots of areas where I might have some knowledge but want confirmation, or have learned something years ago and be interested in anything new.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking to do an entire assignment could be closed as &quot;too broad&quot; but, otherwise, I don't see the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2018-06-14T13:11:05.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5296" CreationDate="2018-06-14T22:50:19.637" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;A reference request &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be too broad. For example, some reference requests would run into the &quot;too many possible answers&quot; criterion for being overly broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, askers of such requests should take care to do what they can to narrow the scope of their question (e.g. make it clear what they know and what they need, for example, so that a book of about the right level and scope may be suggested).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2018-06-14T22:50:19.637" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5291" CreationDate="2018-06-15T05:51:07.787" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;CV (and the field of statistics in general) seems to suffer from the problem that basic statistics knowledge is necessary in so many fields and required to solve so many problems, yet professional statisticians are few and far between. This I think is the main reason why there are so many new unanswered questions every day on this site. (As a corollary, I think this stackexchange can never be the 'small numbers of high quality curated answers' site that some people seem to think it should be.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking as a non-expert who nevertheless uses statistics quite a bit (a chemistry PhD who now does Data Science), I do occasionally depend on CV to fill in gaps in my self-taught stats knowledge. Some of my questions will be ill-formulated because I don't know what I don't know. Rejecting or discouraging amateurish questions related to peoples jobs &lt;em&gt;prima facie&lt;/em&gt; I think would be a mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I do think effort on the part of the asker needs to be put into making their question as general as possible. As ever, some proof-of-work or proof-of-googling needs to be apparent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the third hand, statistics is one of those fields where it may not be at all apparent how carefully you need to think through a problem and make allowances for subtle issues in the data. Many people may come asking for a technique recommendation not knowing that their problem lies elsewhere. The best response, as ever, is patience.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="172392" LastActivityDate="2018-06-15T05:51:07.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2242" CreationDate="2018-06-15T08:35:03.590" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ultimately, I think we need more people answering questions - many&#xA;  times more. While more experts would be great, I think we actually&#xA;  need more ... journeyman statisticians, and even in some cases&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;relative novices&lt;/strong&gt; -- and ways to encourage them to answer a few of the&#xA;  questions within their capabilities. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fit this description quite well as I have taken a sabbatical to study statistics and machine learning. I have undergraduate level in statistics and probability, and slowly building &lt;em&gt;some insights&lt;/em&gt; into more advanced topics. My feeling is that there are quite a few people around here doing the same as me.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result I would like to share my experience and provide some answers to your question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do we encourage greater participation from a lot more of them to answer questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Highlight &quot;accessible&quot; answers&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My view is that since the site has been around for a while now, a lot of the  &quot;easy&quot; questions have been asked, and a lot of the &quot;easy&quot; answers have been given. When I say &quot;easy&quot; I mean from the perspective of someone with undergraduate level statistics or a self-learner&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example, which is 4 years old:&#xA;- &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/68080/basic-question-about-fisher-information-matrix-and-relationship-to-hessian-and-s&quot;&gt;Basic question about Fisher Information matrix and relationship to Hessian and standard errors&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the other hand: I struggle to understand most of the new questions that are asked, let alone think of an answer. So I rarely go beyond the first page of the &lt;strong&gt;unanswered&lt;/strong&gt; questions feed. There must still be some easier questions out there but they are lost to me. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;An idea - create a tag / flag... for &quot;easy&quot; and &quot;good first answers&quot;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... and leave those to the relative novice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good example of this is the Sklearn Github issues page which has two dedicated tags: &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pOGnB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pOGnB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="192854" LastActivityDate="2018-06-15T08:35:03.590" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5291" CreationDate="2018-06-18T11:10:07.267" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally do not have problems with the 'do my professional work' question an sich. That means, to me the fact that people are getting paid for answers to questions that other people gave is not a problem (and you could extend this type of questions to more than people with real jobs, also researchers, teachers, other goverment employees and students can produce these type of questions). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However the 'do my professional work' type questions do often have a certain characteristic that makes them on the edge of being off-topic. Stackexchange is not a crowdsourcing website, like Kaggle or InnoCentive, where solutions are given to problems that have a much larger scale, but also much more specific. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The principle mentioned by GlenB&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;is this a question whose answer will help the next person with a similar issue?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is often missing in these questions. It is not always so much off-topic because, too broad, off-topic, or not about statistics, but because the problem is a very specific, esoteric, complex question dealing with a problem of the OP but very difficult to translate into a general issue that many people are gonna have (or at least somebody searching for a solution to a similar problem that depends on the same principle might not find or understand the question)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like Tim's answer states one way to close this question is using off-topic with the specification 'not about statistic...', or like the OP states also the 'too broad' classification can be used for such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess it is not so much problematic to describe how we currently can close these questions, and instead the main point is the question whether we should change this? Regarding this issue it is interesting to remark two current practices which are already in place related to other types of closing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is a special page to help people write self-study questions.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In the case of self-study questions we have a specific way to close the question&lt;/strong&gt; (as well as even a specific tag but that might be another discussion). I imagine the same is possible as well for professional work questions (I am stating it is possible, I am not sure we should do it). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we (some) &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; to some extend care about the intent of the questioner. Although again here not so many are against the good statistical questions involved in course work, and that closing option exists mostly because of the quality. For example: do not simply copy-paste your homework questions on this website, but at least make it into a decent and useful question (you modify this principle analogously as 'do not simply copy-paste your professional work questions on this website, but at least...').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Self-study questions (including textbook exercises, old exam papers,&#xA;  and homework) that seek to understand the concepts are welcome, but&#xA;  those that demand a solution need to indicate clearly at what step&#xA;  help or advice are needed. For help writing a good self-study&#xA;  question, please visit the meta pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the meta-pages it is written how to write a good self-study question (actually not so clearly since the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12/how-should-we-deal-with-obvious-homework-questions&quot;&gt;refered page&lt;/a&gt; is more like a discussion for the community, how should we deal with these questions, rather than brief clear information for a new user that is asking a question). We could have something equivalent for how to write a good professional (applied) question (although I am not very aware whether the issue is such problematic to do all this effort, yet at least some people, including me, are sometimes annoyed, to some extend, by the questions). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In the case of questions that are too broad we refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;'how to ask'&lt;/a&gt;. In the case of off-topic (not about statistics) we refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/793/internet-support-for-statistics-software&quot;&gt;'support links'&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt; For people that are asking the problematic questions, often new users of the website, it may not always be as easy to get to the right help to improve the question. The problems with a 'do my professional work for me' type of question may not always be so clearly defined in as a single case of the many options we have to close a question. Because of that some wider support might be useful. Some solution might be that the off-topic close option might also have the 'how to ask' link in it, for instance. What I did &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/323385/modeling-observed-data-using-simulated-datasets-of-different-quality&quot;&gt;before&lt;/a&gt; (in the few times I have voted to close) is also use the 'off-topic, other' closing option and specify more precisely what can be changed to improve the question. This would be nice in many more cases, a better explanation of down votes and close votes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2018-06-18T15:03:15.773" LastActivityDate="2018-06-18T15:03:15.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5273" CreationDate="2018-06-19T00:27:53.220" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have decided to make a single-destination thread for &quot;debugging&quot; neural network performance, with the goal that other questions which ask similar questions can be marked as a duplicate of this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/352036/my-neural-network-doesnt-learn/352037#352037&quot;&gt;My neural network doesn&amp;#39;t learn&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastActivityDate="2018-06-19T00:27:53.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5303" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5306" CreationDate="2018-06-19T12:21:20.070" Score="6" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;@gung recently created the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/acf-pcf&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;acf-pcf&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;acf-pcf&lt;/a&gt; tag which now has 9 questions: 2 old threads tagged by @gung and 7 new threads (plus 1 migrated to SO). I have two questions about the tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do we need it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;del&gt; If we need it, can we at least replace &lt;code&gt;pcf&lt;/code&gt; with &lt;code&gt;pacf&lt;/code&gt; in the tag name? &lt;/del&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; 2. Has been done already, only 1. remains relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding &lt;strong&gt;1.&lt;/strong&gt;, I think we were doing more or less OK without it. Most of the questions containing ACF and/or PACF I have encountered on CV would ask for &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;identifying an ARIMA structure from ACF/PACF where &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/autocorrelation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;autocorrelation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;autocorrelation&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/arima&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;arima&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;arima&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/model-selection&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;model-selection&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;model-selection&lt;/a&gt; tags are sufficient (IMHO) or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;diagnosing problems with a model when some autocorrelation is found in model residuals; there &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/autocorrelation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;autocorrelation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;autocorrelation&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/diagnostic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;diagnostic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;diagnostic&lt;/a&gt; are sufficient (IMHO).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we were to get rid of the tag, it could be &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;made a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/autocorrelation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;autocorrelation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;autocorrelation&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;just replaced by the above-mentioned tags in the few threads tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/acf-pcf&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;acf-pcf&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;acf-pcf&lt;/a&gt; but not the ones above, and deleted in other.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding &lt;strong&gt;2.&lt;/strong&gt;, PACF is the standard acronym of partial autocorrelation function in time series econometrics, while I cannot remember seeing PCF before (though I would not be surprised it exists). On Cross Validated, PACF can be encoutered 670 times while PCF only 17 times. I think having PCF in place of PACF in a tag name may be confusing and may spread the unwarranted use of the nonstandard acronym (so that instead of searching for PACF one will now have to search for both PACF and PCF to capture all the relevant posts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-06-19T19:36:33.057" LastActivityDate="2018-06-20T13:57:58.467" Title="Need for and name of [acf-pcf] tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5303" CreationDate="2018-06-20T13:57:58.467" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Turning my comments into an official answer.)&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I changed the name of the tag to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/acf-pacf&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;acf-pacf&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;acf-pacf&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am open to making it a synonym, but I'm also not convinced it should be a synonym of &lt;code&gt;[autocorrelation]&lt;/code&gt; per se.  I don't know enough about the topic to be confident of making any definitive statements, but it seems to me that someone might want to ask a question specifically about the plots themselves and that allowing the organization of such material by having the tag can be useful.  In particular, they aren't really &lt;em&gt;synonyms&lt;/em&gt;, in the literal sense.  That doesn't mean that they can't be made into tag synonyms, but does suggest we should think it through first.  For example, I could imagine someone asking, 'how to identify the MA parameter from this ACF plot?'.  I wouldn't want such a question to be silently retagged to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/autocorrelation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;autocorrelation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;autocorrelation&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, as @amoeba notes, the tag has been used by others even in the short time since I created it.  That implies there may be some demand for it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, while I remain open to making it a synonym of something, I lean towards leaving it alone for now.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2018-06-20T13:57:58.467" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5307" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5308" CreationDate="2018-06-21T08:23:55.620" Score="7" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/type-i-errors&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;type-i-errors&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;type-i-errors&lt;/a&gt; which covers Type 1 and Type 2 errors; that is very clear from the excerpt and the Wiki. There is also a tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/type-ii-errors&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;type-ii-errors&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;type-ii-errors&lt;/a&gt; which seems to deal with Type 2 error specifically (has no Wiki, just an excerpt). I think it is redundant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First, Type 2 errors are already covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/type-i-errors&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;type-i-errors&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;type-i-errors&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Second, if we wanted separate tags for separate types, than we should use &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/type-i-error&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;type-i-error&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;type-i-error&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/type-ii-error&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;type-ii-error&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;type-ii-error&lt;/a&gt; (singular) or probably &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/type-1-error&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;type-1-error&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;type-1-error&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/type-2-error&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;type-2-error&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;type-2-error&lt;/a&gt; (singular and with Arabic numerals). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So shall we get rid of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/type-ii-errors&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;type-ii-errors&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;type-ii-errors&lt;/a&gt; tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastActivityDate="2018-06-27T14:53:31.083" Title="Shall we get rid of the [type-ii-errors] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5307" CreationDate="2018-06-21T11:05:36.767" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems pretty reasonable.  I suggest either:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I just make &lt;code&gt;[type-ii-errors]&lt;/code&gt; a synonym of &lt;code&gt;[type-i-errors]&lt;/code&gt; and merge them, or  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make a new tag, &lt;code&gt;[type-i-&amp;amp;-ii-errors]&lt;/code&gt;, and make both a synonym of that.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upon reflection and discussion, I think #2 is best.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2018-06-27T14:53:31.083" LastActivityDate="2018-06-27T14:53:31.083" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5291" CreationDate="2018-06-22T12:37:14.013" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why should anyone ask a question in CV?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1) Homework&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2) Research or application in a professional capacity (PhD candidate, professor, researcher, analyst, consultant)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3) Self study, for whatever reason&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking for help in a Q &amp;amp; A forum, is always about &quot;do something that I say I can't&quot;. Be it homework, research related or work related, it is always about &quot;do &lt;em&gt;part&lt;/em&gt; of my job&quot; -with &quot;job&quot; being broadly defined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we regulate depending on the case, and on the extend to which help is asked -it is always a matter of degree, it's quantitative.We try to assess whether the cry for help is &quot;do my job&quot; to an &quot;inappropriate&quot; degree -and again, the criteria cannot be formalized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is about homework, we ask from the OP to show that they really &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt;, and not that they are lazy and attempt to leech. Asking to &quot;show effort&quot; is a way for the OP to convince us about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is something research related, or work-related, we expect that it will be some peripheral aspect of something more general. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;My code doesn't work-why?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; appears certainly to be an &quot;inappropriate&quot; degree of help asked - but I do not think that there exist a structural category of answers that could be dealt with some general guidance.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We were able to separate and regulate &quot;Homework&quot; because there exists an objective typical criterion related to the environment into which the OP operates. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But outside of that, we are talking about all the other questions in CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28746" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T12:37:14.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5310" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5311" CreationDate="2018-06-22T14:51:26.260" Score="8" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a tag for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/coding&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;coding&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;coding&lt;/a&gt;. But the description for the tag says it shouldn't be used and that it should be eliminated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that either we should actually eliminate the tag; or else we should agree that the tag is useful and give it a helpful description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-06-27T14:21:14.687" LastActivityDate="2018-06-27T14:21:14.687" Title="Why do we have the [tag:coding] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-reorganization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5310" CreationDate="2018-06-22T15:10:04.357" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/312194/revisions&quot;&gt;at one point&lt;/a&gt; it was supposed to be about the coding of categorical variables.  Note that we now have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/categorical-encoding&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;categorical-encoding&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;categorical-encoding&lt;/a&gt;.  This tag should just be burninated.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T15:10:04.357" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5312" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5313" CreationDate="2018-06-22T17:55:51.883" Score="2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a function from a statistical package whose printout I'm slightly confused about. Should I ask about it on SO or here? On the one hand, it doesn't have anything to do with coding/programming, but understanding what is printed out. On the other hand, it's not specifically a statistical question either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be specific, I'm talking about the prior_summary function of brms. I would like to know whether the lines without priors specified are the lines were an improper prior was used. The documentation seems to imply this, but I'm not completely sure. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129075" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-06-27T14:20:34.480" LastActivityDate="2018-06-27T14:20:34.480" Title="Should I ask questions about interpreting printouts from a statistical package here or on SO?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|software|stackoverflow|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5312" CreationDate="2018-06-22T18:22:07.277" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that interpreting the results of statistical analyses is unambiguously a statistical question.  It's true that such results are basically always the output of some function from some statistical package, but that doesn't really change anything except the superficial aspects of the results.  That is, the meaning of regression results in Stata output is the same as in R output, and the statistics presented will typically be very similar.  I suspect that coming to understand how to interpret SAS's output should be sufficient, or nearly so, to interpret Minitab's output.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note further that we have a number of open (and in some cases, highly upvoted) threads about interpreting statistical output:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/5135/interpretation-of-rs-lm-output&quot;&gt;Interpretation of R&amp;#39;s lm() output&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/90545/interpreting-principal-component-analysis-output?s=21|0.0000&quot;&gt;Interpreting Principal Component Analysis output&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/200905/how-can-one-interpret-the-stata-output-for-multiple-correspondence-analysis&quot;&gt;How can one interpret the Stata output for Multiple Correspondence Analysis?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/53167/im-not-sure-how-to-interpret-my-binary-logistic-regression-output-from-spss&quot;&gt;I&amp;#39;m not sure how to interpret my binary logistic regression output from SPSS&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/96966/interpreting-lasso-tables-in-sas&quot;&gt;Interpreting LASSO tables in SAS&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Therefore, I think questions about interpreting printouts from statistical packages are on-topic on CV.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit:&lt;/em&gt; The meaning of elements of statistical output that are specific to a package but not to the analysis is ambiguous. If the question is just a read-the-documentation issue, it might be off topic both here and on Stack Overflow. On the other hand, the boundaries for what is on topic listed in our help center includes a vague line about &quot;needing statistical expertise&quot;. Your question could be about reading the documentation, but where they aren't understandable without statistical expertise, and so on topic in that way.  (This would be analogous to questions like, 'I read such-and-such book, but I don't understand what they mean by this passage'.)  I am arguing here that questions about interpreting statistical output are on topic, &lt;em&gt;in general&lt;/em&gt;, but that doesn't guarantee that all questions about interpreting statistical output must be on topic.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2018-06-22T20:42:20.537" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T20:42:20.537" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5314" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-25T12:04:26.747" Score="14" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some questions are completely unclear and it's fairly obvious that they need to be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I've seen some votes to close as unclear that could really use an explanation - and sometimes the person voting to close does provide one, but sometimes not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be helpful to the OPs and also to fellow moderators to provide a short reason why something is unclear, when it isn't obvious. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-06-27T14:17:16.477" LastActivityDate="2018-06-29T08:20:25.093" Title="When we vote to close a question as &quot;unclear&quot; should we state why in a comment?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|comment|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3175" CreationDate="2018-06-25T12:09:02.423" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions that provide no information whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My favorite of these (which I think was on another list) is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I have some data. Can I do a t-test?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2018-06-25T12:09:02.423" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5314" CreationDate="2018-06-25T14:50:36.877" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree -- where feasible we should try to help the poster understand how to fix their post, including trying to explain what's unclear whenever we're able to do so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if someone else's comment covers the main issues, I think it's fine not to add anything when voting to close, though as amoeba points out it would be good to upvote the comment that explains the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2018-06-27T23:51:10.287" LastActivityDate="2018-06-27T23:51:10.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5314" CreationDate="2018-06-29T08:20:25.093" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an ideal world, yes, we would patiently sit down with each poster, discuss what in particular is unclear about their question and guide them to a clear question, which we would then proceed to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, it appears to me like the supply of unclarity is unlimited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest, we get questions that are so confused that I wouldn't even know where to start asking for clarifications. And my bitter experience is that sometimes when you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; ask, the &quot;clarifications&quot; confuse me even more. In addition, sometimes the OP seems to have way more time to write up obfuscating &quot;clarifications&quot; than I have to deal with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if I wrote the original request for clarification, I feel like I should deal with the follow-up discussion, which can take way more time than I have. Rarely do I request clarification, the OP provides it, and a &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; user answers the now-clarified question. (I may need to work on this notion of mine that commenting on a question confers some kind of &quot;ownership&quot; of it on me.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I personally will continue working CV as I have been doing: if the original question gives me hope that it &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be clarified reasonably quickly (as in: the OP obviously invested &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; effort to create a decent question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/353599/1352&quot;&gt;as, e.g., here&lt;/a&gt;), then yes, I will comment and ask for clarification. Questions where I fear a fruitless time sink I will continue to close-vote without explanations (no examples here, but yes, I could provide them). For time is limited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on a completely non-scientific survey of my close votes queue, it seems like others on this site proceed in the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is a classification problem, and Peter notes that some questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;are completely unclear and it's fairly obvious that they need to be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is a continuum here. A question may cross the subjective threshold to complete unclarity for one user, but not for another. If I come across a question that someone else has VTC as unclear without leaving a comment, nothing keeps me from providing that comment myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2018-06-29T08:20:25.093" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5319" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-02T19:02:02.307" Score="8" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;When deciding whether to close a question, one option is to skip - which is like abstaining.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How often do you do this? Why do you do so? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, as another question, what happens when people skip?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-07-02T20:18:53.807" LastActivityDate="2018-07-02T20:18:53.807" Title="How often do you &quot;skip&quot; on closing a question and why do you do so?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|review|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2242" CreationDate="2018-07-02T20:32:20.383" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;User @amoeba pointed out to me that data about stats.SE is queryable from a simple API.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to re-frame this question is &quot;Are more questions asked in a month than are answered?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This plot answers that question resoundingly: &quot;yes, answers are not keeping pace with questions.&quot; The difference between the yellow and blue lines reflects the number of unanswered questions in a month. &lt;strong&gt;For some recent years, that gap comprises more than a thousand questions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/869988/questions-and-answers-per-month#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;You can see that the number of questions in a month continues to increase, while the number of questions with 1 or more answers in a month remains basically level.&lt;/a&gt; (Only non-closed questions are reported here; see previous revisions of this post for other data.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Mlare.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Mlare.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For my part, I am taking an interest in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/neural-networks&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;neural-networks&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;neural-networks&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xgboost&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xgboost&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;xgboost&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/random-forest&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;random-forest&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;random-forest&lt;/a&gt; questions &amp;amp; attempting to write canonical answers which can be targets for duplicates. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2018-07-03T19:42:57.063" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T19:42:57.063" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5321" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5322" CreationDate="2018-07-03T17:15:04.427" Score="10" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I've seen a specific user comment on multiple threads that the target of a close-as-duplicate is not accepted, and therefore one cannot vote to close as a duplicate with the target thread as the duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this the case? My expectation is that if this were true, the interface would not permit one to vote to close-as-duplicate unless an answer in the target thread were accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, I've been active on this site for several years and have not encountered this explanation before. Does it have any merit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T03:18:27.983" Title="Does close-as-duplicate require an accepted answer on the target thread?" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5321" CreationDate="2018-07-03T19:59:12.020" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of such a policy, and I don't think it exists.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No upvoted answer (as @amoeba mentions) is a policy that at least would make sense for the SE team to have implemented:  Presumably the close voter could upvote an answer on the target thread if they thought it had sufficient merit.  If they don't think any of the answers are worth an upvote, why should the OP take them as good enough to use to resolve their issue?  If the close voter is the answerer on the target thread, but no one else has ever upvoted it, then it may be good enough, but we might not want to trust them, as they are hardly unbiased.  Etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, whether an answer is accepted is not something that most anyone has any control over (except the target thread's OP, of course).  We certainly see plenty of questions that are asked and the OP never shows up again, even when really good answers are provided.  Several times, I've seen a new OP post a thank you comment, but not accept, most likely due to unfamiliarity with how the SE system is designed to work.  Etc.  At any rate, the point is that it wouldn't make sense for the SE team to have implemented that rule.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl/dr:&lt;/strong&gt;  If you believe a question is well answered elsewhere (and you probably should have already upvoted the answer you think is that good), close away.  As @whuber suggests, if you are blocked from doing so for some reason, but are confident of your choice, flag it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T19:59:12.020" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5321" CreationDate="2018-07-05T06:31:37.053" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/165933/256777&quot;&gt;Here is the relevant Meta.SE thread&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The search results include only answered questions (per the usual SO definition of &quot;answered&quot;, where the question must have an accepted or up-voted answer). ... Moderators can override this last restriction if necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The rationale here is that it can be fairly hard to discern whether or not an unanswered question is actually a duplicate, and even when it is closing doesn't really accomplish very much. When searching for a &quot;canonical&quot; answer in particular, duplicates without answers (or with bad answers) are just noise in the results. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This decision has not been uncontroversial - the original post is now at -16, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/165928/256777&quot;&gt;here is a highly-upvoted thread advocating that questions without answers should be valid duplicates&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="1352" LastEditDate="2018-07-08T03:18:27.983" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T03:18:27.983" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5325" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-05T23:47:35.140" Score="44" ViewCount="3117" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cross-validated is a question-and-answer site. I think it's worthwhile to ask &amp;quot;How well does this website serve people who ask (on-topic, answerable) questions?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer this question in a quantifiable way, we can look at the gap between the number of (non-closed) questions asked in a month &lt;em&gt;in total&lt;/em&gt; and the number of (non-closed) questions &lt;em&gt;with answers&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/869988/questions-and-answers-per-month#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I have a query that does this&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Behold! The chasm between the number of questions asked in a month and the number of answered questions yawns!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/D3PlV.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/D3PlV.png&quot; alt=&quot;Behold the yawning gap!&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This plot clearly shows that, since 2016, the gulf between questions and answers is more than &lt;strong&gt;1000 unanswered questions per month&lt;/strong&gt;. For recent years, it appears that roughly half of questions are not answered. Moreover, the number of answers is on a gentle decline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/872868/questions-and-answers-per-month-not-nns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;If we amend my query to break out questions with the [tag:neural-networks] tag vs those without that tag&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;we can see that the answer gap does not solely arise from neural networks&lt;/strong&gt;. (It was easier to just do the post-processing in R.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/o1H5Y.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/o1H5Y.png&quot; alt=&quot;It's not neural networks&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Glen_b asked a related question several years ago, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2242/are-we-seeing-a-dramatic-drop-in-answers-per-question&quot;&gt;Are we seeing a dramatic drop in answers per question?&lt;/a&gt; But I think that this is not the best way to measure how we are doing. Instead, I think we should ask &amp;quot;If a user asks an on-topic, answerable question, will that user get an answer?&amp;quot; Additionally, I think we can decisively answer Glen_b's titular question in the affirmative (look at the plot!), since a bunch of smart statisticians have all made their own graphs and measured their own quantities of interest over the past several years. Now that we have evidence that there is a problem, I think we should start looking for solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2022-02-16T18:28:52.347" LastActivityDate="2022-02-24T11:22:20.173" Title="We have a very large &amp; widening gap between questions and answers. How do we fix it?" Tags="|discussion|participation|unanswered-questions|site-statistics|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="40" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5325" CreationDate="2018-07-05T23:47:35.140" Score="34" Body="&lt;h1&gt;We need more answers, and therefore answer-writers&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no escaping that more answers to on-topic questions are required to  close the gap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More active participation in closure queues is a partial solution to our increasing volume of questions. However, a particularly distressing trend in this plot is that the number of answered questions per month &lt;strong&gt;is flat&lt;/strong&gt;. Even if we more aggressively moderate poor questions and close duplicate questions, the plot in my post shows that the number of questions asked per month is linear in time, but the number of answers is basically the same. Moreover, even if we can identify more duplicates and close marginal and off-topic questions, that does nothing to address the fact that solid, on-topic questions often lack answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the major take-aways from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2242/are-we-seeing-a-dramatic-drop-in-answers-per-question&quot;&gt;Are we seeing a dramatic drop in answers per question?&lt;/a&gt; is that we need more &quot;journeyman statistician&quot; participation. I think this is a great idea, but I don't know how we get there!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At the broadest level, Stack-exchange is undertaking to make the entire suite of websites a more accessible and friendlier place (discussed here &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/312038/wed-like-your-feedback-on-our-new-code-of-conduct&quot;&gt;We&amp;#39;d like your feedback on our new Code of Conduct!&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Making SE more friendly seems like a good, long-term way to accumulate new users to answer questions to all sites. But is there anything that we, as statisticians and machine learners specifically, can do to gather more of our kind to answer questions?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;If someone answers a question in a comment, copy the comment in to an answer&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm as guilty of leaving answers-as-comments as the next person, but if a question is fully and completely answered by a comment, you might as well leave that same text as an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, if you see this happen, you can just copy-paste the comment to an answer, with attribution to the original commenter. I have a boilerplate explanation that I append whenever I do this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; I've copied @____'s comment as an answer because the comment is, more or less, an answer to this question. We have a dramatic gap between answers and questions. At least part of the problem is that some questions are answered in comments: if comments which answered the question were answers instead, we would have fewer unanswered questions.&#xA;&#xA;&#xA; - https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2242/are-we-seeing-a-dramatic-drop-in-answers-per-question/5320#5320&#xA;&#xA; - https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/832/comments-that-are-actually-answers&#xA;&#xA; - https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5325/we-have-a-very-large-widening-gap-between-questions-and-answers-how-do-we-fix&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't particularly care about the rep, you could make your answer community wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes we get a question which is completely answered with two or three &lt;em&gt;trite&lt;/em&gt; sentences. &quot;How do I know whether weight decay improves my neural network?&quot; is fully and completely answered by pointing out that the question is an &lt;em&gt;empirical&lt;/em&gt; one, and a good way to gather empirical information is by conducting an experiment. &lt;em&gt;I'd like to emphasize that the question &quot;How do I know whether weight decay improves my neural network?&quot; is wholly on-topic,&lt;/em&gt; (it's about a core topic in neural networks!), so closing it is not the right solution. &lt;strong&gt;Instead of closing the question, write the (short, clear, obvious) answer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another question asked how to label images for a neural network. The poster had taken photographs of objects of interest and had seen code examples of data loading functions which yield image data and image labels. The user didn't know that, at some point in time, a human had undertaken the tedious effort of telling a computer &quot;this image is a cat&quot; and &quot;this image is a car.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these are on-topic questions with obvious answers. Not all answers need to be, or can be, multi-paragraph efforts with figures, citations, graphs and equations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you can &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt; answer a question with a few clear sentences, do it!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;More aggressively close overly broad, unclear and marginal questions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that a large portion of the problem is that there are quite a few poor questions, or marginally useful questions, or questions for which there is no known answer, or questions which ask the answerer to outline an entire statistical analysis project. We could do more to aggressively close these kinds of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I specifically want to call out &quot;marginal&quot; as a genre of question. This is a question that asks a question that is, purely in the abstract, answerable. The dullest version of this question is &quot;what's the best model for my data?&quot; followed by a long explanation of how a database is configured, or how a website tracks user behavior. There surely &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; an answer -- but no one here is equipped to provide that answer without &lt;strong&gt;carrying out the actual analysis&lt;/strong&gt;. This genre of question is the machine learning cousin to &quot;What test should I run?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8eHQhm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8eHQhm.png&quot; alt=&quot;Orly&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, the strategy of writing a single, canonical answer to address a large audience of future readers is a losing proposition in the face of a rising tide of question for which the interest is entirely parochial. We need to close marginal questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, if anyone's looking for a quick way to get a lot of rep, we could use a canonical answer about back-propagation. &lt;strong&gt;I'm willing to award a princely bounty for such an answer (if I don't write one first).&lt;/strong&gt; (Or, if one exists, we need to use that existing answer as a canonical duplicate target.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This seems to be a good place to note that I think we do a good job of directing questions which are purely about programming, math or obtaining data to their respective host sites, so good job team!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;We have a &quot;moderator blind spot&quot; on modern machine learning; we need a specialist&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want this to sound like criticism or disparagement. We have an exceptionally knowledgable and experienced group of moderators. However, I think there is a &quot;blind spot&quot; among them with respect to modern machine learning topics such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xgboost&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;xgboost&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;xgboost&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/neural-networks&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;neural-networks&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;neural-networks&lt;/a&gt;. I've adopted these tags as pet projects of mine, but I do notice that VTC efforts often get stuck at 4 votes, rather than the required 5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that stats.SE would benefit from adding at least one moderator who specializes in these topics. (But machine learning is a large field! We might need more than one!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Duplicate Patrol&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, duplicate questions are a problem. It can be hard to passively identify and close duplicate questions without a near-omniscient knowledge of the thousands of question on CV. I often find that I can recall an answer to a question exists &lt;em&gt;somewhere&lt;/em&gt;, but struggle to find the relevant thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To solve this, I've developed a strategy which I (lamely) call &quot;duplicate patrol.&quot; It starts by looking at questions bearing some tag in which I am interested &amp;amp; feel that I am competent, and looking to identify &quot;veins&quot; of unanswered questions in need of an answer. If an answered version of that question can't be found, answering one of these question gives dupe targets for the others. When composing an answer, the goal is to identify common &quot;themes&quot; of questions, so as to address an issue which is of broad interest (and close several threads at once).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2018-07-28T16:02:34.310" LastActivityDate="2018-07-28T16:02:34.310" CommentCount="27" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5325" CreationDate="2018-07-06T08:20:11.777" Score="19" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Downvote&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the mouseover text on the downvote button:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd recommend we be more liberal with actually clicking on that button. If a question is &quot;not useful&quot;, downvote it! If someone else finds it &quot;useful&quot;, they can always upvote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/5222/256777&quot;&gt;This is why:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The system will automatically delete unlocked, unanswered questions that have negative score that are at least 30 days old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vegetation needs to be pruned so healthy growth can resume.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are concerned about the reputation loss from downvoting, remember that you get your rep back when the question is deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related from the same thread:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The system will automatically delete unlocked, unanswered questions on main (non-meta) sites with score of zero (or one, if the owner is deleted), fewer than 1.5 views per day on average, and fewer than two comments that are at least 365 days old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(So: if you find an unclear and un-upvoted question that already has one comment, e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5314/1352&quot;&gt;a request for clarification&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;think twice before adding another comment&lt;/em&gt;. (Or: just downvote per above.))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="1352" LastEditDate="2018-07-06T08:26:27.987" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T08:26:27.987" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5325" CreationDate="2018-07-07T08:35:19.627" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We need more answers, and therefore answer-writers There's no escaping&#xA;  that more answers to on-topic questions are required to close the gap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion this is the single most important point, and all other ideas, while very good, will only have a &lt;em&gt;marginal effect&lt;/em&gt; as they are not addressing the fundamental structural problem the site is facing. With that out of the way here are a few controversial ideas ranked from most impactful to least impactful in my opinion.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;1) A paid, targeted advertising campaign&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At statistical conferences, in events, awards&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In specialized journals, magazines, books&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On related websites, forums &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;2) A free advertising campaign&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Volunteer SE users giving access to university groups, forums, events&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Links with non profit and teaching organizations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Partnerships (e.g. with Khan academy, Datacamp or others) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;3) A banner on the homepage&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Zim8C.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Zim8C.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;why note, Jimmy Wales does it all the time&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;4) A banner on questions with zero answers&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;5) An email campaign to less active past users&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;6) An official guideline for word of mouth campaigning&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;7) Unofficial guerrilla campaign&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask the top 100 active users to promote an organized, unofficial guerrilla campaign on campus, at work, during conferences. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask professors and TA to discuss SE and its usefulness with their students in class&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;8) New bonuses, badges and recognition awards for new users&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You guys had it easy answering questions on the usefulness of $R^2$ back in 2011 and getting 250 votes for a 15 line answer ! Now days getting 1000 points is a battle. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since SE is an educational and most importantly &lt;strong&gt;very useful&lt;/strong&gt; website for students and professionals alike, I don't see why we shouldn't aim to attract new contributors in any way we can. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="192854" LastEditorUserId="121522" LastEditDate="2018-07-07T09:04:16.130" LastActivityDate="2018-07-07T09:04:16.130" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5325" CreationDate="2018-07-07T18:10:55.553" Score="13" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If a user asks an on-topic, answerable question, will that user get an answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most likely yes (currently ~60% of all questions are answered).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question graph is biased because the unanswered question series assumes these are 'on-topic and answerable questions' which they are not. There are thousands of questions among that total which are duplicate, unclear, off topic, too broad, etc (i.e. questions that should already be closed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there could be a rank of actions to be taken which consequently would make the next action in the rank easier to achieve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Quickly/immediately closing questions is fundamental.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's set up the asking quality bar at an average high level. Let's use the SE system to our favour, not have it as an obstacle. One of the greatest advantages of SE in comparison to other types of 'forums' is that we don't need to answer the same and same types of questions again and again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need more users with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;close vote privilege&lt;/a&gt;. Moreover, +3k rep users should not defer to immediately close questions which are duplicates, off-topic, unclear, broad, opinion-based. Even if the question is 'clear' to you, but someone requested clarifications in comments, if you judge the request is valid, then also vote to close it. Help the person who is seeking information to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let the following do their job:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;close reason notice messages;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;feedback in comments; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; pages; and &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the many &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; posts we have on Meta CV; &lt;br&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important we don't treat new users differently regarding this aspect. Everybody (who speaks English), if they want to, can improve their question with all the guidance currently available in the Stack Exchange network. A new [Ask Question Wizard] which will facilitate even more the task of asking is coming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't need to be impolite to (new) users to carry on closing questions firmly. We need to give &lt;strong&gt;priority&lt;/strong&gt; to build a high quality repository Q/A (which interests to coletivity) over the single user experience.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Vote.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aanswer+score%3A0&quot;&gt;~23k answers&lt;/a&gt; with zero score (most of them has zero votes). We don't need more specialists to vote on many of these. Let's vote for them!! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare how such types of answers increased from a previous related post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1940/criterion-for-unanswered-question-should-it-change/1941#1941&quot;&gt;Criterion for &amp;quot;Unanswered&amp;quot; question - should it change?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. Help attract new answerers.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alright, I would then agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5325/we-have-a-very-large-widening-gap-between-questions-and-answers-how-do-we-fix/5329#5329&quot;&gt;Xavier&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5325/we-have-a-very-large-widening-gap-between-questions-and-answers-how-do-we-fix/5326#5326&quot;&gt;Sycorax&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About advices (like the one below) to convert comments to answers and make them community wiki:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If someone answers a question in a comment, copy the comment in to a community wiki answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please, dO convert the comment into an answer, &lt;strong&gt;but do not make it community wiki&lt;/strong&gt;. Give the proper &lt;strong&gt;credit&lt;/strong&gt; to the commentator in the answer, but don't make it community wiki just because of that. Many reasons to do so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are already doing the community a favour by answering the question. &lt;strong&gt;Answers should always be provided as answers&lt;/strong&gt; (agree with this or not, it is how it works). If you take the time to expand an answer based on a comment (or even copy it from a comment), and that information is useful, you should share the credits for it. The community will benefit from more users having privileges which are based on reputation (voting, casting close/reopen privilege, accessing moderators tools, etc). Give the proper credit to the commentator in the answer, but do not make it CW.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you make it CW you are inviting anyone to edit/own that answer as well. Not always this is wanted, because it might happen someone will add content you don't agree, and by making it CW it is more difficult to make your own point to prevail.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That is not how community wiki is supposed to work. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/08/19/the-future-of-community-wiki/&quot;&gt;It is not a quick fix&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I won't blame users who answer in comments (despite I don't encourage this). I've read some people arguing sometimes they don't have the time to write a full answer, so they make comments to help OP (fair point). In other situations, the answer is simple and people don't want to have in their answer history a simple answer (so, they just comment to help OP).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because such users decided to comment, instead of posting an answer they don't have the right to complain if someone else decides later to convert their comment into answers and earn reputation from it. If someone gets upset with this, the solution is very easy, post the comment as an answer next time or just don't comment. I doubt most users would be upset about this, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that converting a comment to an answer is not a zero cost activity. You need to read everything, post and format the answer, and sometimes expand it. The casual reputation is deserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2019-05-28T01:45:06.897" LastActivityDate="2019-05-28T01:45:06.897" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5331" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5332" CreationDate="2018-07-09T10:18:02.093" Score="8" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is in a way a followup on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5325/we-have-a-very-large-widening-gap-between-questions-and-answers-how-do-we-fix&quot;&gt;We have a very large &amp;amp; widening gap between questions and answers. How do we fix it?&lt;/a&gt;. As a response to that, I am trying to downvote/close some old post we probably can do better without (mainly to reduce clutter, so it becomes easier to find the good stuff). But a few are locked (by community user) for no reason I can understand. Why? Such posts cannot be downvoted or deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/15691/nonextensive-statistics&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/15691/nonextensive-statistics&lt;/a&gt;  and  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/49969/questions-about-seqtreedisplay-and-graphviz&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/49969/questions-about-seqtreedisplay-and-graphviz&lt;/a&gt;. (&lt;em&gt;Note that both questions have been automatically deleted in the meantime. High-rep users can still see them. No, you are not missing much.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shall I just flag for unlocking?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="1352" LastEditDate="2018-07-10T06:18:56.883" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T06:18:56.883" Title="Why are some questions locked by the Community user?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|migration|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5331" CreationDate="2018-07-09T11:20:00.307" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the automatic locking by the Community user is somehow to do with migrations of a question from/to this site being rejected. The rules Community follows have changed over time&amp;mdash;see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/35744/225179&quot;&gt;Allow diamond moderators to reverse question migrations?&lt;/a&gt;. Anyway, please feel free to flag any such questions you think should be deleted &amp;amp; ask a moderator to delete them (I'm having trouble imagining situations where it'd be useful to unlock them just to allow down-voting).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T11:20:00.307" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5333" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-09T21:31:24.040" Score="0" ViewCount="493" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/423/what-is-your-favorite-data-analysis-cartoon&quot;&gt;What is your favorite &amp;quot;data analysis&amp;quot; cartoon?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should really be closed, as it's sending a negative signal about what is allowed on the site, per the comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to the tour, this question should be closed, since it is a question that has &quot;too many possible answers&quot; and since it is &quot;primarily opinion-based&quot;. I'm not complaining, just surprised it has stayed open for this long. – Flimm Dec 9 '14 at 10:29&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per the blog:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also a &lt;em&gt;direct&lt;/em&gt; analog with Stack Overflow, which used to have a &quot;funniest programmer cartoon&quot; question, as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2018-07-10T01:17:56.957" LastActivityDate="2021-04-28T13:54:18.340" Title="Favorite &quot;data analysis&quot; cartoon question should be closed" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5333" CreationDate="2018-07-10T00:22:26.267" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think leaving the cartoon and joke thread open serves a useful purpose: there is a certain inevitability to people posting that kind of content, but new posts about jokes/cartoons/etc. can be closed as a duplicate of the existing thread. People who want to add their own joke or cartoon can do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2021-04-28T13:54:18.340" LastActivityDate="2021-04-28T13:54:18.340" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5333" CreationDate="2018-07-10T00:59:26.430" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree. And remembering closing does not mean deleting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides sending a positive signal about what is on-topic here, with 77 existing answers I doubt many people (if any) are reading all of them at once (which means that even closed, we can keep revisiting the post, read the other answers, and still have some fun).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T00:59:26.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5325" CreationDate="2018-07-11T09:18:37.300" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;We do not have a problem with unanswered questions. We have a problem with low quality questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the below image from &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/872670/scores-for-questions-and-answers-compared-by-month#graphhttp://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/872670/scores-for-questions-and-answers-compared-by-month#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this sql script&lt;/a&gt; which gives for the monthly answers and questions the 10-log of the average score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rk5Ts.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rk5Ts.png&quot; alt=&quot;10-log average score for questions and answers&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The overall decline&lt;/em&gt; for both questions and answers makes somewhat sense, since it takes time to acquire votes. (It does make the voting system somewhat biased for older questions and answers, but I can not imagine that this is &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; problematic)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The relative decline&lt;/em&gt; shows that the questions are now being less valued (relatively) than the answers (this is true for other stackexchange sites as well). This may indicate that the questions are becoming, on average, less good/valuable (at least in comparison to the average quality of the answers)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I believe we should not try to work on getting more questions answered, but instead on getting a better fraction of good questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sidenote:&lt;/strong&gt; We see that answers are getting relatively higher scored than questions, but this is not necessarily due to 'a change in the questions' (although I believe it is a factor). It might also be caused by answers getting better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A possible mechanism is a selection effect. The users of stackexchange are being trained (by the voting system) not to give answers when they are likely not gonna attract votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People answering questions are more influenced by the voting system than people asking questions. The result of the voting system, aiming for bounties and hot questions, is that less attractive questions are also less likely gonna get an answer. That low score, less popular, questions are not getting answers is (nearly) an intentional part of the stackexchange formula.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Total/Unanswered votes for questions above some score:&lt;/strong&gt; It is interesting to check out &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/873168/questions-and-answers-per-month#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this SQL script&lt;/a&gt;, which looks at total questions vs unanswered questions considering questions with some minimal score. For questions with a score 2 or higher the gap starts to become smaller and questions with a score 5 or higher are nearly always answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zchxm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zchxm.png&quot; alt=&quot;gap disappearing for questions with higher scores&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;answer rates for questions above some score&lt;/strong&gt; The graph from &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/873181/questions-and-answers-per-month#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this script&lt;/a&gt; indicates an interesting drop in answer rate for questions with zero votes. Questions with &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\geq0$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\geq1$&lt;/span&gt; score have most of the time very similar answer rates except for a sudden shift in the last year where questions with &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\geq0$&lt;/span&gt; score have a particular low answer rate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This shift is not something due to a change in the behavior, but the questions with 0 score and 0 answers get removed by community after one year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eER9z.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eER9z.png&quot; alt=&quot;comparing answer ratios for questions with different scores&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions with score &amp;gt;1&lt;/strong&gt; Thus the drop in answer rate has always been there and is an effect of the community requiring time to answer questions or remove bad questions (and hence you will see that more recent questions have a worse answer rate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see these bumps in all of the graphs so these &amp;quot;trends&amp;quot; should not been seen as solely a change in behavior. Some better way of looking at it would be to &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/873201/questions-and-answers-per-month#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;select only the posts with score&amp;gt;0&lt;/a&gt;, in which case you still see a gap, but it is not increasing a lot in time (the absolute numbers might be even decreasing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1qeGN.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1qeGN.png&quot; alt=&quot;only looking at posts with score above 0&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Update&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we look again at the script that compares the answered fraction as a function of the number of votes for the question, then we see that for specific categories (questions with 2 or more votes), the rate has been going up slightly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Uk6XR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Uk6XR.png&quot; alt=&quot;new trend&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2022-02-24T11:22:20.173" LastActivityDate="2022-02-24T11:22:20.173" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5325" CreationDate="2018-07-11T10:21:20.357" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think the problem is solvable just by closing more questions or downvoting. I think all users start at a point where they just ask questions, then some of them become knowledgeable enough to start answering questions, and get hooked in the process, so the number of answers/time increases. Then, as in all human endeavours, they reach a point where they start losing interest and/or they have less time to spend in this activity, thus the rate of answers decreases (save for a few exceptions). Since new askers keep coming, but just a fraction of the askers become answerers, I think the only solution is to find a way to increase the number of answerers (maybe encourage short answers, by upvoting them) or to just accept that the gap will increase. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Nick Cox correctly noted when commenting on the OP, &quot;[..](downvoting, cleaning up, etc.) is as exciting as tidying up an untidy cupboard/closet when the alternative is watching one of your favourite movies or TV shows&quot;. Thus if we can't manage to increase the number of answerers, &lt;em&gt;a fortiori&lt;/em&gt; I don't think we can manage to increase the number of downvoters/closers/etc. It's true that the last two activities take less time than writing good answers, but it's also true that they're harder to pitch to users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possibility is that the gap is mostly due to an increase in low quality questions: Martijn Weterings' answer provides (now stronger) evidence in that sense. However, given that it takes little time to write crappy questions, and that there is a surge of interest for some topics related to Statistics &amp;amp; Machine Learning currently, I don't think the rate of crappy questions will go down easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;: with &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/872982/can-i-find-the-number-of-total-questions-and-unanswered-questions#resultSets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt; I retrieved the number of total &amp;amp; unanswered questions per month, for each of the 10 tags with more unanswered questions (today). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XimVu.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XimVu.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result suggests that &lt;code&gt;r&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;regression&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;machine-learning&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;time-series&lt;/code&gt; are the main drivers behind the growing chasm. Thus, concentrating the VTC &amp;amp; &quot;recruit new answerers&quot; efforts on questions with one or more of these tags should provide the most benefits. I remain skeptical of a sustained solution, i.e., I predict that answerers/closers will get bored of engaging in these endeavours soon before the question rate will drop. But let's see...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="58675" LastEditDate="2018-07-13T08:02:03.047" LastActivityDate="2018-07-13T08:02:03.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5338" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-12T05:25:19.823" Score="26" ViewCount="580" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been on this stackexchange long enough now to see there is quite a lot of questions along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Help, I'm a data science intern/amateur statistician and I've been given a load of data from my boss/professor and told to look for insights/trends, and I've spent half a day browsing wikipedia/stackexchange and now i'm really confused. What do I do?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;General features of these questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The asker is a first time user with 1 rep point.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The asker has been tasked with this by someone high up who has noticed the buzz surrounding Machine Learning and thinks this is definitely something their company ought to be doing, but doesn't know how to go about it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The asker is not a professional statistician and previously had no idea how many different techniques there were.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As &quot;Machine learning&quot; as a corporate buzzword continues to gain widespread use and as neural networks and other AI techniques continue to produce miraculous and highly visible results for big tech companies, we will continue to see an ever-increasing influx of these questions, no matter how punitively we downvote or close them.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;As such, I think there should be at least one example of a well-worded question of this nature that has a good answer that we can point to&lt;/em&gt;, involving some general rules of thumb about how to do data analysis - stuff about where to start, checking the data is clean, graphing it to get a sense of what's going on, a couple of basic pitfalls, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that, a series of links on specific topics, or where to go to get help. The trickiest part to answer is the dreaded &quot;what projects should I try with this data?&quot;. This part can probably be answered only anecdotally, with specific examples/links of worthwhile DS undertakings at other companies, along with general platitudes about trying to understand the company's needs and difficulties. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvoting and closing as &quot;too broad&quot; without giving any useful feedback to the asker will not curtail the influx of these sorts of questions. It merely discourages the new user from asking questions here in future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/355647/what-data-science-problems-can-be-solved-with-bookings-billings-and-backlog-data?noredirect=1#comment669848_355647&quot;&gt;is a specific question I have in mind&lt;/a&gt; that I want to have a go at answering, but I can't because it is put on hold. I am happy to have a look for a good &quot;What do I do?&quot; question and develop a generic answer that will hopefully be useful for future searchers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My general point is, these questions will be asked whether we want them to or not, so we ought to at least make some minimally helpful generic answer that we can use to point them in the right direction.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="172392" LastEditorUserId="35989" LastEditDate="2018-07-12T07:01:24.420" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T19:28:03.157" Title="&quot;Help I have some data and need to analyse it what do I dooo?&quot;" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5338" CreationDate="2018-07-12T07:28:42.547" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry, but I don't think this is a useful approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions you are referring to are essentially &quot;please teach me data science&quot;. There are just far too many possible flavors. If you set up a general question and answer that future questions of this type can be directed to, this &quot;generic&quot; Q&amp;amp;A will be either a full book-length treatment, or so vague as to be meaningless:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Plot your data&quot; - yes, but what should I plot if I have a credit scoring task? Or am trying to forecast a million time series? Or want to cluster stuff in 37 dimensions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Clean your data&quot; - how do I clean a time series? Categorical data with two levels? Categorical data with 42 levels? Should I remove? Impute?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Distinguish between statistical significance, importance and predictive power&quot; - what is this &quot;statistical significance&quot; thing I keep hearing about? Should I do stepwise variable selection? &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/312780/1352&quot;&gt;What quality KPI should I be using for my classification task?&lt;/a&gt; For my forecasts, should I use &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mape&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mape&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mape&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mae&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mae&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mae&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rmse&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rmse&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rmse&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a reason why Chemistry.SE does not have a &quot;generic&quot; Q&amp;amp;A on &quot;How do I do a chemical analysis?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And everything in-between &quot;a full 1000-page tome&quot; and &quot;so vague to be meaningless&quot; has been covered about 1e9 times in MOOCs, tutorials, blog post series and, yes, textbooks that are somewhat shorter than 1000 pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, sorry, I will continue to VTC such questions as &quot;too broad&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2018-07-12T16:54:40.870" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T16:54:40.870" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5338" CreationDate="2018-07-12T15:57:18.080" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;The endless variations on &quot;How do I analyze these data?&quot; are not answerable questions. Full stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I first started my career, I worked as a consultant specializing in data science. I didn't know much about math and machine learning, but I learned. (I was a &quot;unicorn&quot; that had some statistics background and some subject matter knowledge which made me qualified for a specialized role.) Even though I was picking up programming and math skills which were critical to my job, the absolutely most important lesson that I ever learned on that job was to ask this question, early and often:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What problem are we trying to solve?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to that question will provide immediate and obvious direction. The answer to that question is also why it's impossible to produce a catch-all thread to answer &quot;How do I analyze these data?&quot;-type questions. &quot;How do I analyze these data?&quot; is only a question in the strictly grammatical sense. It's not a statistical question, it's not a data science question, it's not a machine learning question. It's a category error masquerading as a technical issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But note also that &quot;What problem are you trying to solve?&quot; also isn't a statistics question. It's a business question, for a broad definition of business. We can't answer these questions, either. But consultants can! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2018-07-13T03:15:15.453" LastActivityDate="2018-07-13T03:15:15.453" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5333" CreationDate="2018-07-13T05:35:22.903" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a site that is essentially populist it seems odd to close a topic that has generated so much interest and votes.  It's also fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2018-07-13T05:35:22.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5338" CreationDate="2018-07-14T09:18:38.577" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is another possible approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still stand by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5339/1352&quot;&gt;my opinion&lt;/a&gt; that any answer to &quot;I have a dataset, please help me analyze it&quot; will either be so vague as to be meaningless, or require a book-length treatment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Happily, this does not need to be the end of the story. Because such book-length treatments exist! For instance, our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2468/1352&quot;&gt;How best to use the review queue?&lt;/a&gt; thread contains boilerplate that I added as something that should be helpful for many &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/forecasting&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;forecasting&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;forecasting&lt;/a&gt; questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This question is very broad, and I believe you would profit&#xA;from reading an introductory level textbook, e.g., the free online&#xA;[*Forecasting: Principles and Practice* by&#xA;Hyndman &amp;amp; Athanasopoulos](https://otexts.org/fpp2/).&#xA;If after reading this you still have more specific questions, then&#xA;please do ask them here. If you already *have* read such a textbook,&#xA;please edit your question to make it more specific. Thank you!&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: if anyone knows of a good textbook that would be helpful for this kind of question, we could direct people there. Actually, we could use the existing &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/170/1352&quot;&gt;Free statistical textbooks&lt;/a&gt; thread to collect (more) books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then close questions like this one not necessarily as &quot;too broad&quot;, but as duplicates of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/170/1352&quot;&gt;Free statistical textbooks&lt;/a&gt;. Or close them as &quot;too broad&quot; and insert a link to that thread, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This question is very broad, and I believe you would profit from &#xA;reading an introductory level textbook. [We have a helpful list of&#xA;free statistical&#xA;textbooks.](https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/170/1352) If&#xA;afterwards you still have more specific questions, then please do ask&#xA;them here. If you already *have* read such a textbook, please edit &#xA;your question to make it more specific. Thank you!&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the question is about neural networks, we can supply a more specific set of references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This question is very broad, and I believe you would profit from &#xA;reading an introductory level textbook. [We have a helpful list of &#xA;textbooks and courses about neural networks.] &#xA;(https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/226911/neural-network- &#xA;references-textbooks-online-courses-for-beginners) If&#xA;afterwards you still have more specific questions, then please do ask&#xA;them here. If you already *have* read such a textbook, please edit &#xA;your question to make it more specific. Thank you!&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2018-07-31T19:28:03.157" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T19:28:03.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5343" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5345" CreationDate="2018-07-14T16:44:52.707" Score="15" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noted the discussion recently about the high proportion of unanswered questions here on CV and decided to try to answer some.  So, I clicked on the &quot;Unanswered&quot; button but, rather than start at the top, I decided to start at the end. And, lo and behold, on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/unanswered/tagged/?page=997&amp;amp;tab=votes&quot;&gt;page 997 of the unanswered questions&lt;/a&gt;, we have a lot of questions with answers. For instance (just to pick one) there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/273044/how-to-calculate-algorithms-accuracy-in-cross-validation-and-repeat-cross-valid&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a bug or am I misunderstanding something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2018-07-15T15:19:54.560" LastActivityDate="2018-07-16T12:19:48.533" Title="What is considered an &quot;unanswered question&quot; in Stack Exchange?" Tags="|discussion|support|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5344" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5346" CreationDate="2018-07-14T17:58:56.110" Score="5" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few months ago, I read an interesting comment by user shimao to a question, which linked to a YouTube video where some lecturer (a mathematician, I think) showed how ReLU activations &lt;strong&gt;don't&lt;/strong&gt; solve the vanishing gradient problem (contrary to &quot;popular&quot; belief), but ResNets do, and went on to prove the second result for linear residual connection networks. I tried to find the question, but searching for things like &quot;ReLU solve vanishing gradient&quot; or even just &quot;vanishing gradient&quot; doesn't help. I think the question was not too old. Can you help me find it? As the link was in a comment, finding it is particularly hard.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2018-07-15T15:15:31.490" LastActivityDate="2018-07-15T15:15:31.490" Title="Finding question with an interesting comment about ReLU activation functions?" Tags="|discussion|support|questions|comment|search|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5343" CreationDate="2018-07-14T19:23:22.197" Score="17" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/18870/why-does-the-unanswered-questions-tab-show-questions-that-have-answers&quot;&gt;Why does the &amp;quot;Unanswered Questions&amp;quot; tab show questions that have answers?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: The Unanswered Questions tab shows questions that have no answers with a positive score nor an accepted answer. (That includes questions with no answers at all.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4NcCW.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4NcCW.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2018-07-16T12:19:48.533" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5344" CreationDate="2018-07-15T15:10:32.613" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe I found it: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/279209/vanishing-gradient-vs-dying-relu&quot;&gt;Vanishing gradient vs. dying ReLU?&lt;/a&gt; (youtube video &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1YxQ1Od1Y0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason you probably did not find the comment is because it was not &lt;code&gt;shimao&lt;/code&gt; who posted, but &lt;code&gt;Jan Kukacka&lt;/code&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/279209/vanishing-gradient-vs-dying-relu#comment608229_279209&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; I recommend watching this talk by Moritz Hardt (youtube.com/watch?v=l1YxQ1Od1Y0) where he explains that ReLU in fact does not solve the vanishing gradient problem. – Jan Kukacka Dec 25 '17 at 20:20 &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found the question putting the following in CV's search box: &lt;code&gt;vanishing gradient problem ReLU&lt;/code&gt; (it was the first/top Q in the 'relevance' tab).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastActivityDate="2018-07-15T15:10:32.613" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5347" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-17T09:33:53.630" Score="-7" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;This topic is motivated from this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/90902/why-is-leave-one-out-cross-validation-loocv-variance-about-the-mean-estimate-f&quot;&gt;Why is leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) variance about the mean estimate for error high?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The top answer starts with &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oct 2015. My original answer here was irrelevant, as pointed out in&#xA;  the comments below and in a couple of downvotes. I replace it with a&#xA;  new answer now (but save my original answer below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a complicated topic, and I must admit that I don't have a full&#xA;  understanding of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question has 11 up-votes, and it is arguably not a good answer. The user himself is saying that the original answer was irrelevant and that he &#xA;&lt;em&gt;&quot;does not have a full understanding of it&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the problem has to do with the question being very popular, or the problem being a difficult one. In fact, it has been asked several of times, see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/61783/variance-and-bias-in-cross-validation-why-does-leave-one-out-cv-have-higher-var?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/61546/optimal-number-of-folds-in-k-fold-cross-validation-is-leave-one-out-cv-always?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/27730/choice-of-k-in-k-fold-cross-validation?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am myself a newcomer, yet I still think answers should be up-voted by veterans, to avoid misleading answers. Or a mechanism for too popular &lt;strong&gt;questions' answers&lt;/strong&gt; to be &lt;em&gt;up-vote protected&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post was to warn about a problem I see: misleading up-voted answers, answers that might be up-voted by beginners because they like it or empathize with the answerer saying &quot;This is a complicated topic, and I must admit that I don't have a full understanding of it&quot;, or because they see an &lt;em&gt;easy&lt;/em&gt; to understand answer, or whatever reason. And I think the problem comes from the &lt;strong&gt;original question&lt;/strong&gt; being a hot topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I do not think that the answer provided should be deleted, I just find misleading that it has that amount of up-votes when, in my opinion, does not answer the question, which is exactly &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Is there a mathematical formula, visual, or intuitive way to understand why that average has a higher variance compared with the&#xA;  k-fold cross validation?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138788" LastEditorUserId="138788" LastEditDate="2018-07-17T11:55:09.263" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T07:58:04.967" Title="Shouldn't up-voting be much more limited, at least for answers in very hot topics?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|votes|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5347" CreationDate="2018-07-17T10:29:24.927" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site allows any user* to vote +/- on &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; question and &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; answer (unless some very specific circumstances), you can like it or not. The natural consequence is that the older Q&amp;amp;A's and the more popular ones, get more votes because they are more visible, they had more time to accumulate the votes. If you don't agree with some vote, you can give an opposite one. This is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; something that we can change, as this is a &lt;strong&gt;general feature&lt;/strong&gt; of the StackExchange network and we have no influence on it whatsoever. If you wish, you can post a feature request on &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;http://meta.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;, but I doubt that it would have any chances of succeeding, because this is how this network works from the beginning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&#xA;* - More precisely: any user with reputation at least 15 to vote up or with reputation 125 to vote down, as noted by Nick Cox.&#xA;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="35989" LastEditDate="2018-07-17T10:41:54.700" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T10:41:54.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5347" CreationDate="2018-07-17T11:29:37.307" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding your general feature request I agree with @Tim's answer: you can raise it on Meta.SE if you want but I think it  has zero chances of being implemented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding your specific example of my answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/90903&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/90903&lt;/a&gt; you are right to notice an important issue: the 1st version of my answer was entirely missing the point (it did not contain any false claims but it did not answer the question either). Nevertheless it got 12 upvotes. As I wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/90902/why-is-leave-one-out-cross-validation-loocv-variance-about-the-mean-estimate-f#comment308845_90903&quot;&gt;in the comment from 2015&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@Jake, you are right, my answer (from over a year ago) does not make a lot of sense; I have already noticed it myself but forgot to deal with it. Funny that it got 12 upvotes :-/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Too bad! Lesson to learn here: answers that are missing the point can get many upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice: if you spot such a case, leave a comment and maybe even mention it in chat or on Meta, and perhaps other people will agree with you and help downvoting the answer. The original answerer, if they are still around, can then either delete the answer or fix it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is exactly what happened in this case:&lt;/strong&gt; back in 2015, motivated by comments and downvotes, I have fixed my answer, and now it gives exactly the same reasoning (right in the 1st paragraph under the disclaimer) as your answer here &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/357404&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/357404&lt;/a&gt;. So I'm not quite sure what's your problem with my answer &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt; in 2018.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T11:29:37.307" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5347" CreationDate="2018-07-17T13:17:13.550" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with the answers by @Tim and @amoeba but a dimension in the discussion deserves more elaboration than comments make easy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question -- a little perversely, as at the moment of writing you have to read all the links or all the comments to discern that the OP is a party to the threads mentioned -- conflates several issues: various specific reactions to some related threads, on which I won't comment further, and some general questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll re-phrase the more general issue as two distinct questions. Clearly I am not writing on behalf of the OP. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If I see a question or answer that I regard as bad, or not good, what should I do if no-one has pointed that out?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you can and should do is react with comments explaining what's wrong and what's right or a new answer that explains more fully. (Asking a new and different question and even answering it too might also be a way to clarify a tangled discussion.) It's fine to cross-refer to other answers or questions. Downvoting is within the scope of dissent, although it's generally better to accompany a downvote with an explanation, unless someone has done that already (in which case you can add +1 to their explanatory comment(s)). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the community to do about questions or answers upvoted more than they deserve? Should there be different rules for voting to cope with this problem?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question fails at the first hurdle. There is no community (e.g. CV or SE-wide) view on, or meaning to, what are bad questions or answers other than what the community has collectively conveyed through voting, answering and commenting. A large number of upvotes can mean an excellent post or an over-rated post, but such judgments are personal opinion. The situation is no different from the last election in which you voted for a losing candidate: the stupid people won, but that's democracy, and unsurprisingly their view is different. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if there were an identifiable community view, a change in voting rules remains a Stack Exchange-wide matter.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2018-07-18T07:58:04.967" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T07:58:04.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5351" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-17T16:49:07.137" Score="6" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/7513/how-to-use-weights-in-function-lm-in-r&quot;&gt;This locked question&lt;/a&gt; &quot;exists because it has historical significance, but it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site, so please do not use it as evidence that you can ask similar questions here. This question and its answers are frozen and cannot be changed.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the question has +55,000 views, so it is understandable why it's not deleted. However, the answers are misleading, and thus dangerous for the audience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both answers stress that the R function &lt;code&gt;lm&lt;/code&gt; does accept weights. However, they fail to mention that what &lt;code&gt;lm&lt;/code&gt; understands by weights is a very precise, narrow definition of weights. As the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/stats/html/lm.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;help page&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... the values in weights being inversely proportional to the variances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is quite different from the two more common type of weights, namely frequency weights and sampling weights. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.r-bloggers.com/linear-models-with-weighted-observations/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This blog entry&lt;/a&gt; makes this difference too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, &lt;strong&gt;as it stands, the locked post is potentially misleading&lt;/strong&gt;. Sure, users should always read functions' help file, but still, I think this should be clarified in the locked question. I cannot add an edit or comment, but maybe someone else can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would I change to the post? I would add a comment to the question, or to the first answer, with something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Notice that, whereas &lt;code&gt;lm&lt;/code&gt; (and related commands like &lt;code&gt;plm&lt;/code&gt;) do accept weights, the definition of this weights in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/stats/html/lm.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;documentation&lt;/a&gt; is very precise: weights must be &quot;inversely proportional to the variances&quot;. These weights are not necessarily equivalent to that of frequency weights or sampling weights. For the latter, R has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/survey/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dedicated package&lt;/a&gt; called &lt;code&gt;survey&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100369" LastEditorUserId="100369" LastEditDate="2018-07-18T10:35:09.267" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T10:35:09.267" Title="Issue with locked question" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5186" CreationDate="2018-07-18T19:41:19.763" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When merging tags, the tag wiki (and excerpt) are transferred to the destination tag &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; if the destination tag does not already have a wiki. This behavior allows tags to be &lt;em&gt;renamed&lt;/em&gt; via merging while avoiding the danger of potentially destroying a useful wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After merging, the old tag still exists for a brief period - there are no questions in it, but the records are still around. After that's cleaned up, its wiki is considered &quot;orphaned&quot;; moderators have a handy list of these available in their toolbox, but if you're interested you can find them yourself &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/876067/orphaned-tag-wikis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in the Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4454" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T19:41:19.763" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5353" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-20T03:35:17.740" Score="0" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can someone advise on how to rephrase this question to be acceptable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/357700/how-to-tune-gamma-parameter-of-precomputed-rbf-kernel-in-python-using-gridsea&quot;&gt;How to tune `gamma` parameter of precomputed RBF kernel in Python using `gridsearchCV` and `pipeline`?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="169710" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-07-21T08:05:30.170" LastActivityDate="2018-07-21T08:05:30.170" Title="How to edit my question on RBF kernel in Python so that it gets reopened?" Tags="|discussion|questions|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5353" CreationDate="2018-07-20T08:07:58.637" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question you linked seems to be primarily about Coding and not about statistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You focus too much on the python/SVC code. If you want this question to be reopened you should make clear why your question relates primarily to the computation of the kernel and not to the python code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128677" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T08:07:58.637" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5000" CreationDate="2018-07-22T01:24:50.523" Score="5" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many times a question is based on a false premise, or indeed several of them (a common example is a question about transforming to normality something that is not ever assumed to be normal - like the predictor variables in a linear regression model). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case I think a perfectly reasonable response is to post an answer that corrects the erroneous idea on which the question is based -- but ideally one that offers some kind of path forward for the OP. This may require some steps of clarification of the issue the original poster is working with.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;These are often questions with what is sometimes called the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-problem&quot;&gt;XY problem&lt;/a&gt; (also see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This happens when a user asks about an issue with their attempted (but often naive) solution to their original, underlying problem (typically not even mentioned in the question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that reason it's often important to try to tease out what prompted the question, and either get the question edited in a way that relates to the real problem, or - where there's value in having an answer to the original question (e.g. because it's a common error that for some reason hasn't already been adequately dealt with on site) - to explain the mistaken premise but encourage the OP to ask a new question relating to the original problem.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2018-07-22T05:54:19.460" LastActivityDate="2018-07-22T05:54:19.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5064" CreationDate="2018-07-25T03:32:32.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/users/805/glen-b&quot;&gt;Glen_B&lt;/a&gt; regarding the optimal use of the &lt;code&gt;self-study&lt;/code&gt; tag is helpful to me, but I would like to offer another perspective involving some practical difficulties I have encountered when approaching these types of questions.  (I am not a very experienced user compared to some others, so maybe I am still finding my footing with these questions.)  Certain questions are easily identified as textbook questions, but sometimes it is hard to gauge how &quot;routine&quot; a question actually is.  There are also some other practical problems I encounter when I approach these questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Practical Problem 1:&lt;/strong&gt; The goal of the site is to give answers that are elucidating to a broad readership, and not just the specific questioner.  However, in the &lt;code&gt;self-study&lt;/code&gt; questions the analysis of the question is limited by asking the OP where he/she got stuck, and addressing a hint to assist progress with this part of the solution.  You could have different questioners all asking the same statistical question, but they are getting stuck on different parts.  This makes the answers very specific to the OP and not necessarily very useful for other readers who are also interested in how to solve that type of question.  Thus, there is a tension between giving an answer of broad interest to readers, versus giving a hint to a specific OP that is stuck on one specific part of a question.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Practical Problem 2:&lt;/strong&gt; Often the best kind of &quot;hint&quot; for a problem is to show how one or two missing mathematical steps can be done to get further in the problem.  Sometimes this can be alluded to by telling the OP to apply &quot;so-and-sos Law&quot;, but sometimes this is insufficient and you need to show how it is applied in context, which means you are actually doing one or two mathematical steps for them.  However, writing out mathematical steps properly requires preliminary context and definitions, which means you may have to write out all preliminary definitions and steps up to that point to make sense.  If the &quot;road-block&quot; in the question comes near this end, this is pretty close to giving a full answer already.  So in these cases you are trying to figure out how to show some steps (e.g., applying some law) without giving something that is pretty close to a full solution.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Practical Problem 3:&lt;/strong&gt; Questions with the &lt;code&gt;self-study&lt;/code&gt; tag vary enormously in their level of difficulty.  Some are routine undergraduate textbook questions and some are difficult theory questions.  One &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/355978/finding-a-function-minimizing-the-expected-value/358488#358488&quot;&gt;recent &lt;code&gt;self-study&lt;/code&gt; question&lt;/a&gt; was a functional optimisation problem that is at least at graduate level, and is even a whole new area of study for most graduate students.  (Arguably this was mistagged, since the problem is hardly routine.)  Such readers mostly have not seen functional optimisation &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt;, and the only way they will understand it is if you step them through the whole process.  It is useless to give a &quot;hint&quot; in this case, because the problem is at a high level and the OP does not know how to start, or how to do any of the later steps.  They don't even know how to &lt;em&gt;frame the question&lt;/em&gt; accurately.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Practical Problem 4:&lt;/strong&gt; Many questions with the &lt;code&gt;self-study&lt;/code&gt; tag are old enough that the OP has finished whatever course raised the question.  (Some are five years old; the OP has probably graduated and entered the workforce!)  There is a hint given, but the OP does not come back and show the solution obtained with the hint.  In this case a full answer does not advantage the OP, but it remains in the repository of answers that other students can look up.  As noted above, for the broader readership, they are interested in the overall question and its solution, and not necessarily the exact hint relevant to that OP.  So in this case there is no advantage to the OP in giving a full solution, which militates further in favour of an answer that is useful to a broad readership.  In this case, what is a reasonable &quot;hint&quot; for an OP who asked a question five years ago?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Practical Problem 5:&lt;/strong&gt; The OP is allowed to bypass the restriction on giving a full answer, but other users are not.  This seems quite arbitrary.  If full answers are a problem then they are a problem; why would they not be a problem if they come from the same user that posts the question?  (To my mind, this illustrates that the purpose of this tag is horribly confusing.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am still fairly new to answering these questions.  As with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/users/805/glen-b&quot;&gt;Glen_b&lt;/a&gt;, it is possible I will come to understand them better with experience, so I apologise in advance if any of what I am saying is silly.  Still, I find it a bit confusing deciding how to approach some of these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;An aside:&lt;/strong&gt; In regard to these questions, I also tend to agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/users/39630/carlos-cinelli&quot;&gt;Carlos&lt;/a&gt; that a repository like this would actually be really great, and it should not be the responsibility of CV users to enforce self-control on students.  I realise this issue has been discussed, so I will just leave this remark here as dissent from the majority view.  The practical difficulties above emerge regardless, but I don't actually agree that it is a problem if CV has a repository of solved textbook questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is certainly true that students can skip-out on learning problems by looking up answers on CV.SE, but universities have methods for testing student knowledge independently of this; if a student gets their answers from CV and does not learn the material then he/she will not be able to pass an exam.  Is it really up to us to enforce a barrier to knowledge to deal with a student who tries to avoid learning - &lt;em&gt;a fortiori&lt;/em&gt; when the student still needs to be able to pass examinations without access to CV experts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173082" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T03:32:32.317" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5333" CreationDate="2018-07-25T03:53:32.480" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I &lt;strong&gt;love&lt;/strong&gt; the posts on favourite quotes/cartoons/jokes.  They are some of my favourite posts to read on this site.  It would be a real shame if they were closed, since it is good to allow more answers from new users.  Closing the questions locks them up and it makes new users unable to share their own answers on the questions, which I think is a shame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this kind of question becomes a genuine problem with people complaining that these are out-of-scope (e.g., to argue that their question should be allowed in) then I would recommend adding a new category explicitly to keep these questions on the site, but make acceptance conditional on moderator discretion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Funny/Pithy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag is used for posts that solicit amusing or pithy material relating to statistical theory and practice (e.g., cartoons, jokes, quotations, stories, etc.).  This category is created to allow a &lt;strong&gt;limited&lt;/strong&gt; number of amusing posts beloved by the CV.SE community, that would otherwise by out-of-scope on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Warning:&lt;/strong&gt; Posts under this category will be closed by the moderators unless they are unique non-duplicated posts, and show immediate and lasting popularity on the site, as evidenced by high numbers of up-votes from CV.SE users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173082" LastEditorUserId="173082" LastEditDate="2021-04-19T22:53:59.183" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T22:53:59.183" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5360" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-25T04:02:37.130" Score="-3" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5333/favorite-data-analysis-cartoon-question-should-be-closed&quot;&gt;recent meta question&lt;/a&gt; suggested closing a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/423/what-is-your-favorite-data-analysis-cartoon&quot;&gt;popular question&lt;/a&gt; soliciting statistical cartoons as being out-of-scope on the site.  It is clear that this post does not fall into the written scope of the site, but it is a beloved post with a large number of up-votes.  The consensus in the answers seems to be that this kind of question is an aberration that is allowed despite formal breach of the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really do not want this site to lose questions like this.  Rather than just treating this question as an allowable &quot;aberration&quot;, another possible resolution is to create an explicit category for funny posts, allowing for a &lt;strong&gt;limited&lt;/strong&gt; number of these posts with strict moderator discretion.  This would mean adding a new tag for various funny questions that are popular on this site (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/726/famous-statistical-quotations&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1337/statistics-jokes&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/423/what-is-your-favorite-data-analysis-cartoon&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;) and making it clear that posts will only survive if they are popular.  Here is my tag suggestion (duplicated from my answer to the above meta question but with a better name):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Fun&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This tag is used for posts that solicit amusing or pithy material relating to statistical theory and practice (e.g., cartoons, jokes, quotations, stories, etc.). This category is created to allow a &lt;strong&gt;limited&lt;/strong&gt; number of amusing posts beloved by the CV.SE community, that would otherwise by out-of-scope on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Warning:&lt;/strong&gt; Posts under this category will be closed by the moderators unless they are unique non-duplicated posts, and show immediate and lasting popularity on the site, as evidenced by high numbers of up-votes from CV.SE users, and highly up-voted answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173082" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T14:48:20.917" Title="Tag proposal: Fun (explicit category for fun posts)" Tags="|discussion|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5360" CreationDate="2018-07-25T14:48:20.917" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag already exists: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/humor&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;humor&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;humor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T14:48:20.917" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5362" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5364" CreationDate="2018-07-25T15:10:03.857" Score="5" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=stratified+sampling&quot;&gt;We currently have 279 questions containing &quot;stratified sampling&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22stratified+sampling%22&quot;&gt;84 questions containing &quot;&quot;stratified sampling&quot;&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (the phrase, including quotation marks). Would it make sense to start tagging these with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/stratified-sampling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;stratified-sampling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;stratified-sampling&lt;/a&gt; tag? I don't really feel overly qualified to do so myself...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="1352" LastEditDate="2018-07-27T06:19:35.227" LastActivityDate="2018-07-27T06:19:35.227" Title="Should we have a &quot;stratified-sampling&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5362" CreationDate="2018-07-26T08:03:24.873" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5362/should-we-have-a-stratified-sampling-tag?noredirect=1#comment16326_5362&quot;&gt;mdewey&lt;/a&gt; points to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/stratification&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;stratification&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;stratification&lt;/a&gt; tag, which is all we need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T08:03:24.873" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5365" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-28T13:26:21.290" Score="-6" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our active statistican &lt;code&gt;kjetil b halvorsen&lt;/code&gt; is consistently modifying old questions by adding/removing tags. This &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/253853/joint-correlation-in-r&quot;&gt;closed&lt;/a&gt; question is an example. The bumped questions is making me harder to navigate the recent problems. Consequently, it's contributing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5325/we-have-a-very-large-widening-gap-between-questions-and-answers-how-do-we-fix&quot;&gt;widen gap between questions and answers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May I ask the point of bumping the old and closed question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34623" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-07-28T15:39:23.840" LastActivityDate="2018-07-30T05:47:08.903" Title="Why is &quot;kjetil b halvorsen&quot; bumping up old and closed questions?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|editing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5365" CreationDate="2018-07-29T03:25:02.403" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;kjetil b halvorsen is not bumping up old posts. They are improving questions, which in turn bump the questions because that is how Stack Exchange works. kjetil b halvorsen has edited 3,291 posts whereas you have edited 24 posts so far  on CV, so you may not noticed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange users have repeatedly asked on main meta to have an option to edit the question without having it bumped to the front page, but to no avail. Feel free to try your luck there if you agree that this is a missing feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2018-07-30T05:47:08.903" LastActivityDate="2018-07-30T05:47:08.903" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5368" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-03T00:52:44.143" Score="16" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/360283/is-it-wise-to-use-predicted-values-to-model-predicted-values-further-down-the-li/360296#360296&quot;&gt;this answer of mine&lt;/a&gt; there is a disagreement with another user over the validity of my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In response to the user's comment, I edited my answer to provide an explanation of why they were wrong along with an empirical example to demonstrate my point. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point in discussion is whether a Seasonal ARIMA model can somehow go out of phase over time or not (by definition it can't since the seasonality is built into the model - but the other user doesn't seem to understand that). The user also seems to be making the outlandish suggestion that forecasting a monthly time series 17 years into the future &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; constitute a long forecast horizon.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user kept coming back to the point and arguing for his point of view. I've given up trying to debate the issue with him. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now he's taken it a step further and edited my answer, adding a disclaimer that it is disputed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to get into an edit/counter edit battle with this guy (especially since he has a much higher reputation score than me). At the same time I'm certain about my assertion with regards to Seasonal ARIMA models and don't want other users to be misled by the edits and comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the policy on this? How should I proceed? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89649" LastEditorUserId="89649" LastEditDate="2018-08-03T01:19:28.000" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T03:14:36.873" Title="Are you allowed to edit an answer that you disagree with?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5368" CreationDate="2018-08-03T01:14:03.433" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;FWIW, I deliberately have not read the thread in question and therefore have no views here on who is more nearly right, and so forth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is more general inter-personal etiquette than site policy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's OK in my view in most cases to correct small presentation errors in anyone's posts. That is especially easy if you feel you know the other party well in CV terms and there's good mutual regard. (If you're in doubt about that, it doesn't apply.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I would not go there if I was strongly disagreeing with someone technically and/or there was also a history of the person taking criticism badly or otherwise behaving poorly (e.g. a known record of suspensions, angry or bitter exchanges, downvoting etc.). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Any reputation-based right to make edits doesn't over-rule a need to maintain courtesy and sensitivity.&lt;/strong&gt; Even minor corrections can be misread as pointed signals (and you can't even spell, punctuate, choose notation carefully, understand basic probability, ...). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way to disagree, as others are pointing out, is through comments and your own answer (which can cross-refer to other answers you disagree with). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta-meta: I edited your question for a minor typo. That was nothing to do with your question or argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2018-08-03T11:43:24.837" LastActivityDate="2018-08-03T11:43:24.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5370" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-03T01:35:36.787" Score="7" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following up on this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5325/we-have-a-very-large-widening-gap-between-questions-and-answers-how-do-we-fix&quot;&gt;We have a very large &amp;amp; widening gap between questions and answers. How do we fix it?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where one of the suggestions was: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We need more answers, and therefore answer-writers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree, and I'm wondering whether the datascience stack exchange  is causing CV to miss out on some good answer writers and moderators? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although some overlap between SE sites is unavoidable (CV/Math/Theoretical CS/Signal Processing) - in the case of CV and DS, the overlap is so significant as to be harmfully redundant. Just about any theoretical machine learning or neural network question is completely on topic in either site. Since people can only spend so much time on an SE, it means time devoted to answering and moderating questions by competent people is being split between both sites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89649" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-08-09T10:16:14.353" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T13:51:00.423" Title="Is the datascience SE harming CV's answer rate?" Tags="|discussion|participation|datascience-stackexchange|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5368" CreationDate="2018-08-03T01:59:42.553" Score="24" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Substantive content should not be changed in someone else's answer.  Nor should editorial content be added.  People who disagree should leave comments, downvote, and/or post their own answer.  In their own answer, they can call out the other answer and explain what they disagree with and why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At all times all parties should abide by SE's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice&quot;&gt;be nice&lt;/a&gt; policy.  If you believe that is violated, or that someone is editing inappropriately, flag it for moderator attention.  Don't get involved in a flame war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T03:14:36.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5368" CreationDate="2018-08-03T06:47:54.487" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt; Reasons for editing are described &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit&quot;&gt;in here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When should I edit posts?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Any time you feel you can make the post better, and are inclined to do&#xA;  so. Editing is encouraged!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some common reasons to edit are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;to fix grammatical or spelling mistakes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;to clarify the meaning of a post without changing it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;to correct minor mistakes or add addendums / updates as the post ages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;to add related resources or hyperlinks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tiny, trivial edits are discouraged&lt;/strong&gt; - try to make the post significantly better when you edit, correcting all problems that you&#xA;  observe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's neither full, nor definite explanation, but it describes the general idea about editing: it is about &lt;em&gt;minor&lt;/em&gt; improvements in &lt;em&gt;form&lt;/em&gt;, not the &lt;em&gt;content, or meaning&lt;/em&gt; of the question or answer that is edited. The description mentions correcting &quot;mistakes&quot;, but in such cases it is usually better just to comment pointing the mistake and suggesting edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On another hand, there are cases where you could probably edit the question to correct the mistake (e.g. correct a minor arithmetic error in the calculation, if you're 100% sure and carefully checked your own calculation!), but in such cases you should always additionally &lt;em&gt;comment&lt;/em&gt; the answer and describe what and why did you edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only case where we are allowed to edit the content is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11740/what-are-community-wiki-posts&quot;&gt;community Wiki&lt;/a&gt; threads, where anyone can make edits in answers, since they are maintained by the community, not the particular users:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Community Wiki posts work by partly transferring ownership of the post&#xA;  from the original author to the community. They make the post easier&#xA;  to edit and maintain by a wider group of users, but they do not&#xA;  contribute to any user's reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you disagree with the answer, you can always downvote and/or comment it, it it is inappropriate for the site ($\ne$ incorrect), just flag it for moderator attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="35989" LastEditDate="2018-08-03T06:53:53.867" LastActivityDate="2018-08-03T06:53:53.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5368" CreationDate="2018-08-03T08:29:17.140" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your main point is well answered already. I will just address what you could do about the technical argument leading to disagreement: Can a seasonal ARIMA model mimic a periodic model? Can you please add that as a question (with links back to your answer leading to this disagreement), so it can be addressed and discussed properly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2018-08-03T08:30:31.337" LastActivityDate="2018-08-03T08:30:31.337" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5374" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5378" CreationDate="2018-08-05T09:04:29.733" Score="11" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to find a post showing an interaction between me and another user, probably under the form of me (or him) asking a question, and he (or me) providing an answer, which would be the &lt;em&gt;easy&lt;/em&gt; case: however, the exchange may also be under the form of me writing a question/answer and him commenting (or vice versa) which of course will be much harder to track (the SE search doesn't track comments). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already tried the Google query &lt;code&gt;site:stats.stackechange.com ben deltaiv&lt;/code&gt;, returning 0 links. It's possible of course that I misremember (I interact with so many people here), so answers returning 0 hits are also ok. I mainly want to learn how to do this for myself, I want to repeat it in the future for other cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastActivityDate="2022-05-31T17:00:20.477" Title="How can I find questions where I and another user interacted?" Tags="|discussion|support|search|users|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5375" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5376" CreationDate="2018-08-06T20:39:22.850" Score="6" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/360625/36423&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was edited while being on hold by me. This should have pushed it to the reopen queue.  However, this does not seem to be the case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A reopen review task does not appear in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/360625/timeline&quot;&gt;its timeline&lt;/a&gt; – which it would after the review was completed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No reviewer who reviewed in the reopen queue today reviewed this post. Of course, all of them could have skipped this particular review, but I consider that unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I right and this question is not in the reopen queue as of this writing? (Anybody with 3 k reputation should be able to answer this.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If not, why?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note that this is not about discussing whether this question should be reopened or not; it’s just about the mechanics of pushing something to the reopen queue.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36423" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2018-08-07T00:11:40.023" LastActivityDate="2018-08-07T01:27:27.053" Title="Is this question in the reopen queue and if not, why not?" Tags="|support|closing-questions|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5375" CreationDate="2018-08-07T01:27:27.053" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;See:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/196074/lots-of-questions-in-the-reopen-queue/196078#196078&quot;&gt;Lots of questions in the reopen queue&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;, this means that a closed question will automatically be added to the reopen queue when it is...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...Edited (body edits only) within 5 days of closure by the author. Or,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...Edited (body edits only) within 5 days of closure by a 3rd-party, provided the editor has not also flagged the question or voted to close it. Or,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...Sufficiently popular, where popularity is calculated based on question score, top answer score, or views per month. We're still tweaking the exact thresholds for these.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As always, a reopen vote will add a question to the reopen queue if it isn't already in the queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that's all still current, your edit wasn't soon enough to automatically add it to the review queue, although also see the &amp;quot;provided that&amp;quot; clauses there as well. You can still click &amp;quot;reopen&amp;quot; under the post to  vote to reopen it which I think should add it. Or presumably you can flag it if you don't have the reputation to vote but are confident it is now ready to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2018-08-07T01:27:27.053" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5377" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5379" CreationDate="2018-08-08T00:14:47.057" Score="7" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/361065/when-is-the-aic-a-good-model-selection-criterion-for-forecasting-and-when-is-it?noredirect=1#comment678581_361065&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; has gotten 4 close votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the question is pretty clear, about the nature of AIC as model selection criteria for time series. A commenter requested that I include the code, and I did. But it's still getting close votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I improve it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89649" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-08-09T14:52:48.340" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T14:52:48.340" Title="Question is getting close votes, even after I added the requested clarification" Tags="|discussion|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5374" CreationDate="2018-08-08T08:43:08.123" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6393/28789&quot;&gt;my own answer on WorldBuilding.SE to the question &lt;em&gt;Is there a way to see my interactions with another user?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no easy ways, but you can use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;StackExchange Data Explorer (SEDE)&lt;/a&gt; to find these things. I made a few very simple queries with a few examples that I could remember at the top of my head. You can switch whether you are looking at the main site or the meta site in the upper right hand corner. Just copy the code and change the values for the Ids and usernames that interest you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just randomly chose Ids that I could find fast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments where we cited each other&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/872281/citing-each-other&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt;. Just change the UserId and the name. The first UserId is my own and I am searching for a text that would look like &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;bla&lt;/em&gt;dutch&lt;em&gt;bla&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; when converted to lowercase text. This is to find interactions with the user &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/30492/l-dutch&quot;&gt;L.Dutch&lt;/a&gt;. I am combining this with the search for comments by L.Dutch (the second Id is his) where he mentioned my name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find your Id and that from other people by going to their profile and looking at the URL in your browsers address bar. For example &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/28789/secespitus&quot;&gt;my profile&lt;/a&gt; shows &lt;code&gt;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/28789/secespitus&lt;/code&gt; and the important part is 28789.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link in the first column will automatically take you to the specific comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer I posted to a question from the other specific user&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/872271/answer-to-other-persons-questions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt;. This time I used &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/353/mindwin&quot;&gt;Mindwin&lt;/a&gt;'s Id. The first Id should be your own (your answers) and the second from the person you are interested in (their question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link in the first column will take you to the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer the other specific user posted to one of my questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just use the above query and switch the IDs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions where me and another specific user both answered&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/872278/two-people-answered-the-same-question&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this query&lt;/a&gt;. I chose the Id from myself and L.Dutch again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link that you get as a result will take you to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That should give you a start for your interactions with another user, especially about the &amp;quot;one person asks and the other one answers&amp;quot; part. Remember to change the site and to look at the IDs on each site. You have different IDs on different sites of the network and SEDE only allows you to search one specific site at once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The links will also not work directly. You have to change the query and change &amp;quot;worldbuilding.stackexchange&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;stats.stackexchange&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example for this site (&amp;quot;stats.meta&amp;quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/meta.stats/query/884328/comments-from-one-user-under-question-from-another-user&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&#xA;Comments from one user under question from another user&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/users/58675/deltaiv&quot;&gt;your ID&lt;/a&gt; for the question giver (58675) and the ID from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/users/805/glen-b&quot;&gt;Glen_b&lt;/a&gt; as the person to comment (805). Just to be clear: the first ID you can see in the query is the person that is supposed to have written the &lt;em&gt;comment&lt;/em&gt;. The second ID is the person that is supposed to have written the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also changed the link-building part in the first line to say &amp;quot;stats.meta&amp;quot; to link directly to this meta site. The &amp;quot;Posts.PostTypeId&amp;quot; in the last line is the type of post that you are looking at. &amp;quot;1&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;question&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;2&amp;quot; means answer, so if you want to change this to look at cases where one person posted a comment to an answer of another you can change this PostTypeId when adapting the query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I simply chose the IDs because the two of you interacted the way you want to look at here in this meta discussion. SEDE takes some time to update with each data dump, which I think is the reason that I couldn't find the specific comment by ordering the results according to the creation date, but you can see that the query works by clicking on the links and then looking at the person who wrote the comment and the person who wrote the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="146013" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T09:00:27.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5377" CreationDate="2018-08-08T13:26:02.680" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Making my comment into an official answer.)&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@StephanKolassa commented &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/361065/when-is-the-aic-a-good-model-selection-criterion-for-forecasting-and-when-is-it#comment678505_361065&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; explaining his concern with your question. The close reason is &quot;In the meantime, I am voting to close as unclear&quot;. Three subsequent users have voted to close for the same reason, two of whom before you added the code, and one of whom after. &lt;strike&gt;I don't see that Stephan has revisited since his comments, but it's hard for me to tell. If it is closed &amp;amp; he thinks it has become answerable, I can reopen--just flag it.&lt;/strike&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Stephan revisted the thread and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/361065/when-is-the-aic-a-good-model-selection-criterion-for-forecasting-and-when-is-it?noredirect=1#comment678687_361065&quot;&gt;commented&lt;/a&gt;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thanks for adding the code; I have retracted my VTC. I have a suspicion and hope to find time later today to follow up on it. (Note that stepwise and approximation are only relevant for the first model, where I indeed get the same AIC as you do.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have voted to &lt;em&gt;leave open&lt;/em&gt; in the close vote queue.  My vote should be binding, meaning that it will no longer show up in the queue for others to vote to close on.  You should be safe from closing now.  Again, if it does close, just flag it and I can reopen it easily.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T13:26:02.680" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5381" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5383" CreationDate="2018-08-13T11:46:54.307" Score="5" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a problem I encounter relatively frequently when trying to tidy up the unanswered questions list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take this case as an example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/194470/what-do-my-residuals-say-about-my-data&quot;&gt;What do my residuals say about my data?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP posted a relatively meaningless plot and asked for an interpretation. @Glen_b left a comment 2 years ago pointing out that there are far better plots to use, but there's been no response and the question was never edited. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that comments have been left and ignored, it seems reasonable to close. But the question is not obviously off-topic, or too broad, or unclear - it's just misguided. How should I flag it? Does the particular flag matter much in a case like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternative would be to strictly answer the question in the title, but such an answer wouldn't really be helpful - the main purpose would be to remove this from the unanswered questions list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T14:28:00.793" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T14:28:00.793" Title="How should I flag (or otherwise deal with) questions that have not been clarified after comments were left?" Tags="|discussion|comment|unanswered-questions|flagging|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5381" CreationDate="2018-08-13T12:37:50.537" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not answering Glen_b's comment does not seem to have anything to do with this question being a candidate for closing. I'd say that this question is simply too vague/too broad, so I closed it (if someone disagrees, feel free to vote or comment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As about general question, if the question had some quality issues and the comment asked for clarification &lt;em&gt;so that&lt;/em&gt; it is not closed, and there was no response, then it should be closed. The story is different if the comment asked for clarifying something, but nonetheless the question itself wasn't unclear, then there's no reason for closing it. Nobody is obliged to respond to any of the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I &lt;em&gt;ask for clarification without voting to close&lt;/em&gt; if the question is &quot;almost&quot; on-topic, can be easily made on-topic after edits (yes, this is very subjective!). If the question crosses the boundary of being on-topic more significantly, then I &lt;em&gt;vote to close and comment&lt;/em&gt;, since we already have lots of low quality, &quot;abandoned&quot; questions with no answer. From my experience, usually if OP cares about his question they edit it, while in other cases we never see any response, so OP did not seem to care about answer to their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2018-08-13T12:37:50.537" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5381" CreationDate="2018-08-13T15:11:12.453" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a non-moderator, I think it's sufficient to write a comment asking for clarification &amp;amp; register a close vote at the same time. If a comment already asks for clarification, and you agree with it, then you only have to up-vote the existing comment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I say &quot;non-moderator&quot; is that it takes 4 other non-moderator votes to close the question; perhaps it's unclear to you but clear enough to other reviewers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say that you should vote to close at the same time because it helps precisely no one to have an open &amp;amp; unclear question. If OP cares enough, they will revise it. If the question is revised before it's closed, you can retract your close vote. If the question is revised after it's closed, you can vote to re-open. I try to check on the status of the questions I've recently voted to close as unclear (sometimes the edits help a lot but the re-open vote gets stuck at 4 votes) but this is admittedly imperfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The trick is to write a comment that is precise enough that OP knows what kind of clarification to add. Sometimes I get this wrong and I ask for clarification in a way that invites OP to add a bunch of irrelevant context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I also delve into old, unanswered questions that are not closed and which bear a particular tag. For example, I might query&#xA;&lt;code&gt;[neural-networks] answers:0 closed:no&lt;/code&gt; and then sort by date, starting with the oldest questions. The purpose of this exercise is to remediate the question in some way -- upvote &amp;amp; answer it, find a duplicate, or close it. Less commonly, if it's on-topic &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; not a duplicate &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; I don't know the answer, then I just up-vote it and move on; not everyone can answer every question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To do this efficiently, I've outlined a mental procedure that I walk through for each question. These are not in any particular order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this an answerable question? (For example, questions that ask &quot;is a neural network or logistic regression better?&quot; or &quot;what threshold should I choose for my classifier?&quot; is not an answerable question.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can a person who is familiar with this topic write a clear, concise answer to it? Or is critical information missing?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does this question ask about statistics or machine learning as discussed in the help center?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does answering this question rely on writing code or debugging code? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I search stats.SE for the key words, do I find a duplicate question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2018-08-14T13:35:21.017" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T13:35:21.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5384" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5385" CreationDate="2018-08-17T09:20:55.373" Score="11" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many questions with near identical names about 'recognizing a distribution', for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/362595/176202&quot;&gt;What kind of distribution is figure 2 in this study?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/94317/176202&quot;&gt;What kind of distribution is this via t-distribution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/202282/176202&quot;&gt;What kind of distribution is this? Many trials and guess the distributions for different settings&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/8446/176202&quot;&gt;What kind of distribution is this?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/306701/176202&quot;&gt;What kind of distribution is this?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/19981/176202&quot;&gt;What kind of distribution is it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/96186/176202&quot;&gt;What is this distribution?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/102628/176202&quot;&gt;What is this distribution?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/172991/176202&quot;&gt;What distribution is this?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These seemingly identical questions clutter the related questions while they are often unrelated searches: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;About recognizing a formula; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Recognizing a potential distribution from a plot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Recognizing a potential distribution from just a text description of a process;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence the 'related questions' may not help future visitors searching for either of these three, nor does using the search bar. Should we perhaps adopt a distinct way to name these kinds of questions, or flag them duplicate with some reference to canonical answer(s)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176202" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2018-08-17T16:44:10.087" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T16:44:10.087" Title="What can we do about the &quot;What kind of distribution is this?&quot; questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5384" CreationDate="2018-08-17T10:32:28.400" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think a canonical answer is possible here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's just a case when more specific &amp;amp; descriptive titles are needed. If it's about a formula, it can be put into the title, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What distribution has density proportional to $(x-1) \theta^2 (1-\theta)^{x-2}$?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's about a plot, then I'd try to provide some description of the plot in the title:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is this right-skewed distribution over non-negative values?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is this weird-looking bimodal distribution (sea-level measurements)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, the last question I asked falls exactly into this category of questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/358940&quot;&gt;How is the family of distributions with PDF proportional to $(1+ax^2)^{-1/a}$ called?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-08-17T14:44:25.067" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T14:44:25.067" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5386" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-18T17:47:56.723" Score="9" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are now often very long review queues, especially the close vote queue. Accumulating the necessary 5 close votes typically takes more than 24 hours, often twice as long. What can be done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over at math SE, I get 50 close votes a day, but here at CV I only get 20. Why the difference? Can we increase the limit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2018-08-18T18:40:31.683" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T16:01:46.850" Title="What to do about long review queues?" Tags="|discussion|review|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5386" CreationDate="2018-08-19T15:11:30.343" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Solution: Theme Week!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm just spitballing, but what if we have like a week-long theme where we propose a (prolific) tag and the goal is for participants to collaborate in cleaning up that tag? Cleanup goals could include (1) identifying duplicates (2) identifying &quot;blind spots&quot; where a canonical thread is required (3) answering neglected questions as well as anything else we think might be necessary. The idea is that because everyone is working towards the same, common goal in a focused way, participation will be more rewarding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the &quot;teamwork&quot; aspect isn't enough reward in itself, I think that some high-rep users (I'm including myself) could be persuaded to award bounties to users who make significant contributions to the effort. We'll clearly have to work out the details, but I think it is within the mechanisms of CV.SE and the spirit of the SE organization to reward these kinds of computation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(This is a wholesale rewrite of my answer, which was more of a comment. Interested readers can find it in the edit history.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T16:01:46.850" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T16:01:46.850" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5388" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5389" CreationDate="2018-08-19T22:51:56.350" Score="7" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's happened a few times that I recall writing an answer on a topic but can't find it later. I think it happens when the question was deleted -- for example, if the answer has score 0 and the user deleted the question, or if the answer had 0 score and the question had negative score and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/243778/expanding-the-roomba-to-auto-delete-self-accepted-answered-questions-with-low-vi&quot;&gt;Roomba&lt;/a&gt; removed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Although my memory could be playing tricks, such as when I'm misremembering -- sometimes I write part of an answer, become dissatisfied with it, and discard the draft. But there's simply no way to recover the content in that scenario.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an easy way for me to find these answers? I have the privilege that lets me view deleted content, but only if I happen to find a link to it -- I'm not aware of a mechanism that lets me &lt;em&gt;search&lt;/em&gt; or readily list things that are deleted. (Except in the case that I voted to delete something, in which case I can see it in the Delete tab under Votes.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T14:27:00.267" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T14:27:00.267" Title="How do I see my deleted answers?" Tags="|support|search|deleted-answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5388" CreationDate="2018-08-19T23:07:48.277" Score="6" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At high privilege levels (and I don't think there are any rep-related privileges you don't have), your deleted answers should normally appear in your &quot;answers&quot; tab of your activity page: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bhUI2.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bhUI2.png&quot; alt=&quot;Deleted answer on answer tab&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That shading is for a deleted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't remember when that happened for me. [Edit: Actually, it turns out this is really only useful for moderators]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At lower privilege levels at the bottom of the same page there's the deleted recent answers link:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ynT84.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ynT84.png&quot; alt=&quot;Deleted recent answer on answer tab&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Search. This should be more useful. Try: &lt;code&gt;user:nnnn deleted:yes&lt;/code&gt;  (where nnnn is your ID number, 22311 in your case) or just &lt;code&gt;user:me deleted:yes&lt;/code&gt;. You can refine this in various ways. This may be better for your purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I expect you can get them with the SE data explorer (&lt;code&gt;data.stackexchange.com&lt;/code&gt;). I found some queries that purport to do it but the few I checked out didn't quite work right (there may be one that does already). If you're happy to write your own SQL (I think SEDE uses t-SQL) you may be able to do it this way. However, SEDE only updates once a week so it won't find ones from the last few days.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T13:18:35.010" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T13:18:35.010" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5390" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-20T09:17:39.083" Score="7" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the acknowledged and shared long-term objectives of CV and of other .SE Q&amp;amp;A sites appears to be the creation of an on-line high-quality &quot;Repository of Knowledge&quot; (RoK).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While &quot;quality&quot; can be assessed and judged on its own, it is always useful to have some feedback on the matter. Specifically, on whether the CV-RoK is actually &lt;em&gt;used&lt;/em&gt; as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that we could have an indication of whether this happens or not, &lt;strong&gt;by examining the time-distance between upvotes and answers.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;While upvoting fresh questions is subject to a &quot;go vote&quot; bias (i.e. vote to show your appreciation for the quality of the answer, irrespective of whether the answer actually was immediately useful to the voter), when upvoting older answers it is more likely that the vote sends the message &quot;this answer helped me&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we denote $T_{v_j}$ the calendar timestamp of an upvote to answer $A_j$ and $T_{A_j}$ the calendar timestamp of this answer, then we could create the empirical frequency of the variable $TD = T_{v_j} - T_{A_j}$, measured in days.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could take, say, the &lt;strong&gt;upvoting activity of one month&lt;/strong&gt;, and form the empirical frequency distribution to a few intervals, say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;% of Votes casted on January 2018 to answers that are no more than 30 days old&lt;br&gt;&#xA;% of Votes casted on January 2018 to answers that are 31-90 days old&lt;br&gt;&#xA;% of Votes casted on January 2018 to answers that are 91-120 days old&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc The meaningful length and number of such intervals would be decided by trial and error I guess.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also one could consider forming this distribution not by considering the upvoting activity of one month but the upvoting activity of a quarter, etc. (this increases the sample size, but allows for fewer sequential distributions to be compared)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't expect that the proportions of votes to older questions will be large. But in any cases it is an indication about how much the CV-RoK is used. Also tracking this percentage over time, i.e by seeing whether it increases, decreases, or stays the same, would also give a sense of what happens with all this material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly this will be just an indication. People that found an old question useful didn't necessarily upvoted it (they may not even be CV users). Also, since an answer can be edited, there is an issue as to what timestamp should be used for the answer - the original submission date or the date of the latest edition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the main practical issue here is: &lt;strong&gt;are the timestamps required to perform this exercise available?&lt;/strong&gt; Is there a record somewhere that provides the information &quot;&lt;em&gt;this upvote was cast on January 15th 2018 to an answer that was uploaded on July 10th 2012&quot;&lt;/em&gt;? I am pretty certain that they are available to the SE company, but is it part of the user- or mod-accessible stats?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28746" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T09:17:39.083" Title="How are we doing on the &quot;Repository of Knowledge&quot; front?" Tags="|discussion|site-statistics|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5386" CreationDate="2018-08-20T09:58:11.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't yet have enough rep to review the close votes queue, but have been doing a fair amount of flagging lately. If there's been a small surge of similar activity by other low-rep users (which I think would be a good thing), that might explain the extra work y'all are facing. In which case, the problem should reduce as more of us breach the 3k threshold and can help with reviewing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T09:58:11.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5392" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5394" CreationDate="2018-08-21T16:07:41.823" Score="7" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following question (let's call it A) &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/143883/unequal-sample-size-one-way-anova&quot;&gt;Unequal sample size one way ANOVA&lt;/a&gt; has an accepted, upvoted answer. It is also marked as a duplicate of the newer question (B) &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/233139/unequal-sample-sizes-one-way-anova&quot;&gt;Unequal Sample Sizes One-Way ANOVA&lt;/a&gt;. B has 2 lower-quality answers, both with net negative scores. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems amiss. I'd like to flag a third question as a duplicate, and it makes more sense to point to A, given the quality of the answer. Rather than having a chain of duplicates, is there a better solution here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Swapping the direction of duplication (if this were possible) may not be suitable since B has multiple parts to it, not all of which are addressed in A (or any existing answer in B, for that matter). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastActivityDate="2018-08-21T20:24:01.907" Title="Answer in question marked as duplicate is superior" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5386" CreationDate="2018-08-21T16:14:07.153" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The current context seems to be a permanent backlog of ~40 items in the Close Review Queue. In answer to the original question &quot;What can be done&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Suggestion: we could recruit 10 more reviewers to each review 20 a day and then taper off as the queue gets manageable.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Problem: how to find them?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Suggestion: we could find out why Kjetil has 50 votes on another stack and see if we can get the same here.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Problem: he and others who currently review might not want to do 50 a day and concentrating so much in the hands of a few reviewers is not best practice as their idiosyncrasies dominate the site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Suggestion: moderators could have occasional purges when things get beyond non-mod users' capabilities.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Problem: community moderating is preferred, see 2 above.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Suggestion: reduce our efforts to clean up the site by only issuing votes-to-close three or four times a day which if we then review 20 keeps it in balance (I think).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Problem: this defeats the aim of having a site of good quality questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree this all comes from the Department of the Blindingly Obvious but perhaps others may have contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T13:11:25.290" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T13:11:25.290" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5392" CreationDate="2018-08-21T19:09:29.693" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is possible for moderators to switch which thread is considered the master and which is the duplicate.  It isn't necessarily the case that the oldest needs to be the master&amp;mdash;the thread with the best answers can be (see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4826/&quot;&gt;If question A came before question B how can A be a duplicate of B?&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2569/&quot;&gt;Many (historical) duplicate questions - how to pick a “canonical” question?&lt;/a&gt;).  However, a legitimate issue is whether a moderator should override the status quo based on a single flag.  A reasonable approach is that if there is any ambiguity, the question of which would serve as a better master could be raised on meta.CV.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the two threads clearly overlap, but also both have nonoverlapping elements.  My guess is that the most conservative option is for neither to be marked as an exact duplicate.  I think little is lost by this.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Update:&lt;/em&gt; I switched &quot;A&quot; to be a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5392/answer-in-question-marked-as-duplicate-is-superior#comment16410_5392&quot;&gt;@amoeba's&lt;/a&gt; suggested &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/122974&quot;&gt;thread&lt;/a&gt;.  It's clearly a better target.  In addition, I closed &quot;B&quot; as a duplicate of a list of threads that address the various questions raised, starting again with @amoeba's target, but also threads pertaining to the assessment of heteroscedasticity and alternative testing strategies in the presence of heteroscedasticity.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2018-08-21T20:24:01.907" LastActivityDate="2018-08-21T20:24:01.907" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5395" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5396" CreationDate="2018-08-23T22:31:58.927" Score="6" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of us are actively scavenging old questions and voting to close some of them as off-topic or unclear. This is great. If such a question has zero score, then it will be automatically deleted shortly after getting closed. However, if it has a positive score, it will not. Hence, if you think a question is bad, consider downvoting it as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three examples that I had in the review queue right now one after another:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/18473&quot;&gt;Seasonal Unit Root&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/62134&quot;&gt;Locating a set of 5 geometrically constrained points within a cloud of points&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/74120&quot;&gt;How to compute the probability that there is no difference between matched pairs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All three are from 2011--2013. All three had +1 score. All three were found by @Kjetil who voted to close, and all three got closed with me casting the last vote. However, nobody downvoted them until I did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T19:27:42.743" Title="When closing old unanswered but upvoted questions, consider downvoting down to zero (right?)" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|votes|old-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5395" CreationDate="2018-08-24T15:53:25.280" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I basically agree with @amoeba's reasoning. The rest of this post is just elaboration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a matter of expedience, I think it makes sense to down-vote &lt;strong&gt;old&lt;/strong&gt; questions (posted more than 12 months ago) which are off-topic, low-quality, or too broad to be answerable. It takes five people to vote to close a question, but just one person to move a question from 0 score to -1 score. As a matter of policy, SE deletes questions with negative score and no answers (or no answers with positive score) on approximately a weekly basis. On a less-frequent basis, 0-score questions are deleted under certain conditions. It's not a very efficient use of resources to have 5 people involved in closing a &lt;em&gt;years-old&lt;/em&gt; question that asks for code, or &quot;which test do I run?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a reason that I advocate down-voting &lt;strong&gt;old&lt;/strong&gt; questions specifically. The closure queues are primarily oriented around giving recently-active users useful feedback on how to improve a question. &lt;strong&gt;Recent&lt;/strong&gt; questions which might be off-topic or otherwise unsuitable should absolutely be placed in the queue so that active users can receive that feedback and improve their questions. &lt;strong&gt;We want to encourage new users.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all cases, duplicate questions should be closed as duplicates, so that our canonical content is ranked highly by search engines &amp;amp; are otherwise more visible to users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My overall philosophy regarding down-voting is that it should be &lt;strong&gt;rare&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;carefully considered&lt;/strong&gt;. This is because down-voting is pretty strong negative feedback. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Down-voting that is not accompanied by a considered request for clarification or other context is inscrutable to the person who received the down-vote.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Because &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5325/we-have-a-very-large-widening-gap-between-questions-and-answers-how-do-we-fix&quot;&gt;we need more answers, and therefore more answer-writers&lt;/a&gt;, I am particularly cautious about down-voting of new users. Today's new user could be tomorrow's high-value contributor.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T19:27:42.743" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T19:27:42.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5397" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-24T20:33:24.533" Score="7" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in general suggestions/discussions about how to answer questions that are requesting advice on how to perform an (arguably) ill-advised statistical practice. There are various degrees of consensus on what is &quot;ill-advised&quot;, but two perennials that seem to be fairly well-agreed-upon are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/20836/algorithms-for-automatic-model-selection&quot;&gt;stepwise regression&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2492/is-normality-testing-essentially-useless&quot;&gt;tests of the null hypothesis of normality&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in response to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/363821/stepwise-regression&quot;&gt;&quot;how do I do stepwise regression&quot; question&lt;/a&gt;, I gave an answer that was basically &quot;you probably shouldn't do this ... but here's how, if you really want to&quot;, whereas another user answered with an unconditional &quot;don't do it&quot;. Going even farther in the &quot;don't do it&quot; direction, these questions could be closed as duplicates of the original &quot;why you shouldn't do it&quot; question ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2126" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-08-24T22:05:40.827" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T22:05:40.827" Title="Best practices for answering questions about bad practices?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-08-24T21:47:22.237" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5398" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-26T19:05:52.537" Score="2" ViewCount="263" Body="&lt;p&gt;The mission statement of this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;site&lt;/a&gt; includes the sentence &quot;With your help, we are working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about statistics.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, there seems to be a problem with newbie question treatment. Often newbies lack the facility to pose a question properly, and that question is often crouched in terminology that is somewhat self-contradictory, a not unexpected consequence of not knowing enough stats to pose a question properly. Sometimes those questions are closed when there would are simple fixes that could salvage those questions. Similarly, sometimes answers are downvoted because of inaccurate language, even when those questions grossly correct .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some way we could better reward editing of question/answers to fulfill the site mandate than to discourage participation by eliminating both questions and answers? One is mindful that there are more questions than answers in general and a lot of sloppiness in everyone's linguistic rendition of both. Some answers are so complicated that they are inaccessible to some readers, some answers are so simple that they are truth bending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not seem that we are heading in the direction of building up a reference guide as efficiently as possible. In particular, if we can reduce the negative treatment of both questions and answers and enhance the fixing-up of both we might increase that efficiency, as well as create a more wholesome experience for all participants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are we doing our best to make newbies, moderators, and everyone in between feel that their contributions are worthwhile? I do not think so. There seems to be a pervasive attitude of objecting to &quot;stupid.&quot; There are a lot of dumb rocks in this man's universe, and if we try to kick them all we will just be wasting time. When we find a glimmer of intelligent thought, we should contribute to it as intelligent thought is a very rare occurrence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/320175/99274&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt; for @whuber. The original question, if memory serves, I rescued from the close vote stream, because it was interesting enough despite the improper use of the word &quot;family&quot; and the resulting &quot;unclear&quot; close votes, that I tried to answer it. The question is now +7/-3 (2018-08-26). Shortly thereafter, there were more downvotes than upvotes for my answer. However, my answer was eventually accepted by the OP, and has stood the test of time in that it now has twice as many upvotes as downvotes +6/-3. Even the confusion concerning what a &quot;family&quot; is merited a Q/A of its &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/320746/99274&quot;&gt;own&lt;/a&gt; that both @whuber and I tried to contribute to. That question is currently +11/-1. Whuber's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/320801/99274&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; is +9/-0, accepted by that OP (me), and so complicated that I provided an answer, +1/0, myself that was as simple as I could make it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, without squinting at the original question to see the potential value in it, the entire chain of events would not have transpired. In summary, trying to extract value in an idea goes beyond the superficial form of the question itself, and without that effort to polish the apple, so to speak, many upvotes and a few downvotes would not have occurred. I think that the apple polishing should be enhanced and we should consider some type of reward structure for &quot;apple polishing&quot;, not because I am seeking a reward, but because it goes toward completion of our mandate. Let's face it, there are lots of concepts that are difficult to grasp, and it is precisely those difficult concepts that are the most interesting ones. If the participants spend too much time kicking dumb statements and not enough time picking out diamonds in the rough, the overall experience with the site will remain not as rewarding as it could be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example of a question currently in the close question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/364519/99274&quot;&gt;queue&lt;/a&gt; marked as &quot;unclear&quot; three times and as &quot;primarily opinion based&quot; by myself. Now, what is unclear about the question? I do not think it is unclear, I just think it is speculation that is not particularly illuminating. What do you think? My comment was &quot;I'm not sure that that is worth doing as one can just perform a minimization to obtain a best model.&quot; None of the categories seemed particularly appropriate. What do you think? Were we helpfully saying the question is &quot;unclear.&quot; Can you understand it? My understanding did not seem to be especially taxed and it often is in the review queue. Were the other reviews helpful? What is so difficult to understand about this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is another question that was marked as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/364838/99274&quot;&gt;unclear&lt;/a&gt;. However, I provided enough detail in my answer that it clarified the question and was taken off of the list of questions to be deleted. What this proves is that if one really wants to help, one can clarify in an answer what was unclear for both the OP and the reader. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the above, there seems to be a single outstanding issue, and that is that &quot;unclear&quot; is often in the mind of the beholder. &quot;Unclear&quot; is subjective. So, let us put this as a clear question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What can we do to mitigate inappropriate &quot;unclear&quot; closure votes?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="99274" LastEditDate="2018-09-03T19:50:01.657" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T19:50:01.657" Title="Is there a difference between the mission statement of this site and the direction the site has taken?" Tags="|discussion|review|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="11" ClosedDate="2018-08-31T13:33:02.617" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5398" CreationDate="2018-08-26T21:31:35.583" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with trying to edit newbie questions is that they are sometimes so incoherent that editing would have very real risk of making them something other than what the OP wanted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I often link to a blog post I wrote called &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.statisticalanalysisconsulting.com/how-to-ask-a-statistics-question/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;How to ask a statistics question&quot;;&lt;/a&gt; that has what I hope are some helpful pointers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question that was linked to is certainly not what I would consider a &quot;newbie&quot; question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2018-08-26T21:31:35.583" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5398" CreationDate="2018-08-27T02:21:49.587" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have only been 579 people ever awarded an &lt;code&gt;explainer&lt;/code&gt; badge, i.e., people who edited and answered a single question, only 26 people who have done that 50 times; the &lt;code&gt;refiner&lt;/code&gt; silver badge, and only two who have done that 500 times; the &lt;code&gt;illuminator&lt;/code&gt; gold badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you feel about awarding +2 reputation for each time someone edits and answers a question? That might stimulate people toward pulling interesting stuff out of the close vote cue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T02:21:49.587" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5402" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-27T19:59:12.833" Score="22" ViewCount="633" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find that many questions go unanswered for lack of a &lt;em&gt;great&lt;/em&gt; answer. That applies to both CV and here on CV meta. Whether this is due to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5370/is-the-datascience-se-harming-cvs-answer-rate&quot;&gt;brain drain&lt;/a&gt;, or a flood new users, or perfectionism, is hard to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, a lot of ill-posed questions amount to the asker not knowing enough about the field to set them in the right direction, and in the review queue there are plenty of questions that are clear enough to answer, but not clear enough to answer &lt;em&gt;well&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: Other times, the question has an answer, but it seems that none of the expert users on the site know the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I know a little about a lot, and a lot about a little. If a question doesn't attract a good answer, should I answer it with my own sorta-okay answer? (Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/364232/36229&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/364232/36229&lt;/a&gt;) I do my best to be as not-wrong as possible, but is being not-wrong good enough, or should we only answer questions where we can really knock it out of the park, and ignore or close the rest? My opinion is that the former is preferable, but that might be at odds with how others' feel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than starting on some kind of vigilante rampage through the Close Votes queue -- is there an official position and/or community consensus on &quot;okay, but not that great&quot; answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36229" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2018-10-26T09:38:36.737" LastActivityDate="2018-10-26T09:38:36.737" Title="Is a quick-and-dirty answer better than no answer?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5398" CreationDate="2018-08-28T17:29:22.197" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Expand the definition of &quot;low quality&quot; enough to cover the low quality posts? Currently &quot;Very low quality (i.e. no amount of editing can salvage the post) (only new posts scoring 0 or less)&quot; Right now, we are throwing out stuff that has value, mislabeling low quality as &quot;too broad&quot; or &quot;unclear.&quot; The worse effect is upon the OP whose post is inexplicable mischaracterized which misdirects the OP's corrective action. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T17:29:22.197" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5402" CreationDate="2018-08-28T20:56:47.187" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5326/1352&quot;&gt;Embrace the twitter-style answer!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a firm believer in Pareto's principle, and a quick answer that is 80% correct is better than no answer that is 100% correct. I do not believe that StackExchange aims for Utter Impeccability. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5325/we-have-a-very-large-widening-gap-between-questions-and-answers-how-do-we-fix/5326#comment16092_5326&quot;&gt;I like to say&lt;/a&gt; that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5318/1352&quot;&gt;time doesn't grow on trees&lt;/a&gt;, so it's better to give an answer that helps the poster, rather than not give an answer at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone who disagrees with your quick-and-dirty answer can downvote it, or post their own answers. Some of our more interesting threads have exactly this kind of competing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT. To clarify, I am not advocating answering &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; questions. Bad questions should be closed as &quot;unclear&quot; and the poster encouraged to improve them. (Yes, in this order, to avert answers while the question is yet unimproved. An answer to an ambiguous question will only serve to confuse later readers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, I am talking about the kind of question that is clear, though maybe not very interesting. The kind that a student might ask in dealing with their data. These typically do not lend themselves to &quot;great&quot; answers. Frequently, there is nothing overly deep to them. Writing a &quot;great&quot; answer, say by pointing out background theory, or generalizations, will likely go over the head of the asker - who I assume is usually not a statistician, but a consumer of statistics - and rarely help anyone later on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We get tons of such &quot;bread-and-butter&quot; questions every day. These are completely legitimate, and many of them can be answered quickly by any halfway competent statistician.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question then is whether to write short answers to five of these, or a long answer to one in the same time. And this is where I come down firmly on the side of writing five short answers that have a chance of helping five people. Maybe one out of these five will ask for clarification, and then I can invest more time in editing and improving that specific thread. Much better than leaving four questions unanswered and writing a detailed answer on one question, which may well be far more than the OP wanted or needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This position of mine may be influenced by my working in an agile software development environment. We'd rather build something rudimentary, get feedback and improve incrementally, rather than try to build a large intricate piece of software in one go. (And, to repeat: the requirements to develop against need to be clear before the first unit test is written.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1248&quot;&gt;people may see this differently&lt;/a&gt; and advocate writing fewer, more careful answers. This may be more in keeping with the SE &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5390/1352&quot;&gt;&quot;repository of knowledge&quot; aim&lt;/a&gt;, but it will lead to (even) more unanswered questions, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5325/1352&quot;&gt;the community seems to believe is a problem&lt;/a&gt;. And, as I said, it won't help the psychology grad student who just wants to know how to deal with her data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="1352" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T07:34:24.527" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T07:34:24.527" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5402" CreationDate="2018-08-29T06:23:01.353" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I come down strongly in favour of providing quick-and-dirty answers, given two conditions: i) the question is not a bad one (in which case, close and/or downvote), and ii) the alternative is giving no feedback of any kind (comments asking for clarification are therefore an exception). As for why Q&amp;amp;D answers are worth providing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Someone out there needs help. A partial answer may quickly&#xA;address their main point or put them on the path to solving it&#xA;themselves. No answer is no help at all (unless you're giving feedback in&#xA;comments, of course). This reason doesn't apply if the goal is to&#xA;develop a shared library of great answers. In practice, I think many of us are also motivated by a general desire to help people with problems. So I'm happy to write a short answer to help out, even if it's not going to be a general reference in the future.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The voting mechanism exists to sort out the bad from the okay and&#xA;the good. If a Q&amp;amp;D answer I provide is unhelpful or misleading,&#xA;people are welcome to downvote it. And if it gets upvotes, it's a&#xA;signal - if a noisy one - that it was helpful. This is partly why I&#xA;think we should be downvoting more in general - it helps send a&#xA;clearer signal.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Providing a quick answer is not a barrier to someone providing a&#xA;more comprehensive or better one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You mention knowing &quot;a little about a lot, and a lot about a little&quot;. In contrast, I know a little about a moderate amount, period. But this little is &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; enough to be helpful for many simple questions. If I, and other novices like me, can take care of the basic questions, then the true experts can spend their time crafting the great answers that will form the general reference we all desire. It may not be the most efficient use of their time to deal with the basic questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Related to the previous point, if this type of short answer were more common, it could motivate broader participation - with the end result that we eventually have more people writing the great, detailed answers too. As a newcomer, it was difficult and time-consuming to find a question that was a) well-formulated, b) not a duplicate, and c) within my ability to answer in a detailed manner. I suspect that if the community viewed Q&amp;amp;D answers positively, that would make it easier for new users to start contributing to the community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="121522" LastEditDate="2018-08-29T10:55:47.940" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T10:55:47.940" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5370" CreationDate="2018-08-29T11:47:18.343" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://data.stackexchange.com/datascience/query/59302/questions-and-answers-per-month&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://data.stackexchange.com/datascience/query/59302/questions-and-answers-per-month&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the graphs below you might say that this decline in answers seems to be nicely filled up by the data stackexchange. But I do not think that this is like a Gondwanaland falling apart into an Africa and America that fit so nicely together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer rate curve of 'stats' has a stall/decline like most other (older) stackexchange sites in the science corner (math, mathoverflow, physics, chemistry, biology). So there is already explanation like many other sites also having lower activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer rate curve of 'data' has a nice stable/rise with an extreme sudden doubling (during only a few months) in answers and questions from 800 per quarter to 1600 per quarter around new-year. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These numbers are only small and would not severely harm the statistics site. That is assuming that there is even a strong causal relation. But the statistics site did not suddenly loose 800 answers per quarter (although for the statistics site at the peak, the first quarter of 2017, there were 5410 answers and now a year ago first quarter in 2018 there were only 5068 answers, this decline does not match the 800 increase at data site which came in a more abrupt way and a slightly different moment, a few months later). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nY788.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nY788.png&quot; alt=&quot;data&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly there might be some causal influence but it seems unlikely to me that this entire piece of the data site can be added to the statistics site and I imagine that the effects are only small. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that we can better use the sites for what they are good at individually (I see a difference in the questions, along the lines of the technology science distinction how the sites are currently classified by the stackexchange overview, and this enhances the experience). I suggest to approach them as reinforcing each other and with this as starting point the sites can grow alongside of each-other, together, more strongly rather than having a slightly smaller platform when they would be merged together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2018-08-29T13:51:00.423" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T13:51:00.423" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5398" CreationDate="2018-08-30T14:14:30.193" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One idea for a change which could make it easier to give a comment with questions/proposals to the OP, and not VTC immediately:  When a comment is left and &lt;strong&gt;nothing happens&lt;/strong&gt; in, say, 30 days, I am made aware of that fact, and can only then VTC. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T14:45:46.747" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T14:45:46.747" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5398" CreationDate="2018-08-30T19:12:52.977" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;We could award +1 for users with reputation &gt;2000, who leave a first comment when they vote in the close vote review queue. That might help the OP to understand why their question is on the chopping block, and take remedial action, and also, it might clear up the close vote queue. If we do not do something like that, the close vote queue will continue to be blocked. Taking undue advantage of leaving comments would not likely be abused because the comments are there for all to see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T19:12:52.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5409" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5410" CreationDate="2018-08-31T16:22:42.577" Score="14" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across this thread today. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/320082/why-not-use-the-third-derivative/320138#320138&quot;&gt;Why not use the third derivative?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has a very good discussion both in the comments and in the answers, yet it was closed as off-topic because it is about numerical optimization. This is very puzzling to me. We have quite a number of threads about optimization, and a whole &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/optimization&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;optimization&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;optimization&lt;/a&gt; tag dedicated to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Optimization clearly plays a large part in classical statistics (e.g. logistic regression) and modern statistics (e.g. neural networks).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would anyone involved with closing this question care to comment on why it was closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T16:49:42.570" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T17:15:12.177" Title="Is optimization off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5409" CreationDate="2018-08-31T17:15:12.177" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the moment this question appeared, I asked the OP to indicate how it was related to statistics but got no response.  The thread is indeed interesting and many can see implicitly its potential applications to statistics, but on the face of this evidence it was correctly closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this thread is still available, still searchable, and people can still comment and vote on it: its closure just means additional answers will not be forthcoming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FWIW, I was not among those who voted to close.  That's probably because the community did the deed first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T17:15:12.177" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5402" CreationDate="2018-09-01T01:08:31.050" Score="16" Body="&lt;h1&gt;TL;DR - Sometimes, short answers are comprehensive answers.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I believe that if a question can be &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt; answered briefly, then a brief answer is fine. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I also believe that the purpose of stats.SE is to provide a long-term repository of statistics$^*$ knowledge. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that there is necessarily any tension between these two points. Sometimes, people ask questions with simple answers: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the way that you get labels for data is by having a human review the data and label it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the way you figure out if $L^2$ regularization improves a neural network is by conducting an experiment; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the formula for Xavier initialization isn't complicated; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;neural networks depend on the training data;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;loss function&quot; has many synonyms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;None of this changes that questions which are overly broad, unclear, off-topic, or duplicates should be closed as such.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I do not believe that short answers are &lt;strong&gt;necessarily&lt;/strong&gt; lower-quality. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might summarize these points as &quot;A good answer is only as long as necessary,&quot; or &quot;Sometimes, short answers are comprehensive answers.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; write &lt;em&gt;lengthy&lt;/em&gt; answers, there is a gap in answer coverage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the question is on-topic and not a duplicate, it will remain open. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But it will also remain &lt;em&gt;unanswered&lt;/em&gt; if the answer is so straightforward that two sentences suffice &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; there is a taboo against short answers. Unanswered, open questions serve no useful purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If there is a perception that the answer box is solely for five-paragraph answers with equations, figures and citations, then questions are instead answered with comments. This isn't what comments are for, nor is it how SE is supposed to work.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A consequence of not providing appropriately brief answers is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5325/we-have-a-very-large-widening-gap-between-questions-and-answers-how-do-we-fix&quot;&gt;we have a very large &amp;amp; widening gap between questions and answers&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that short answers are inherently in tension with any of the goals of stats.SE. I just think that because we have so many high-quality answers which are of some length, that has created an impression that the only good answer is a lengthy answer. I'm only advocating for a slight adjustment in how answer-writers go about their task, not a shift in how the platform works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$^*$ My definition of &quot;statistics&quot; extends to include what many people call &quot;machine learning&quot; and &quot;data science.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2018-09-03T03:39:21.280" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T03:39:21.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5402" CreationDate="2018-09-02T21:38:14.933" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My time doesn't grow on trees, but sometimes I know what I have doesn't qualify as an answer, so I point toward what I think the right answer is in a comment.  Two or three sentences is still more than zero, and it can help someone who is both unsure, thinking along the right line, and needing a second opinion to help.  Sometimes I'm wrong, and the comment elicits a counter-comment (@whuber, I'm looking at you) that is much more technically correct and the correct answer comes from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22452" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T21:38:14.933" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5402" CreationDate="2018-09-03T06:22:53.127" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. A short answer is still an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a &lt;strong&gt;voting&lt;/strong&gt; system, and if someone else provides a longer, better answer, it likely will be upvoted. There are also comments that can point out errors and limitations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you'll see that askers often prefer quick answers rather than waiting a day or a week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7828" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2018-09-03T16:05:22.493" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T16:05:22.493" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5414" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-06T06:25:10.970" Score="2" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;DISCLAIMER: This isn’t about any moderator decision directly  regarding me (I don’t think I was ever subject to a direct moderator decision, or if I was, I forgot :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the title, I’d like to know if it’s possible to talk to a specific moderator directly and preferably in private. This would be a short and calm discussion, as you could expect of someone who is a “third party”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS the subject of said decision didn’t contact me to ask me to talk to the moderator in her/his place, of course. I would have never accepted to do something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T06:25:10.970" Title="Is there a way to contact a specific moderator directly?" Tags="|discussion|support|moderation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5415" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5420" CreationDate="2018-09-06T08:35:50.527" Score="14" ViewCount="1285" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks to Sycorax, we have an excellent question which can be used to close as duplicate (most of) those questions about neural networks which can't overfit the training set:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/352036/what-should-i-do-when-my-neural-network-doesnt-learn&quot;&gt;What should I do when my neural network doesn&amp;#39;t learn?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This helped to close a lot of &quot;my network doesn't work, please fix&quot; questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5273/whats-the-best-way-to-answer-my-neural-network-doesnt-work-please-fix-quest&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the best way to answer &amp;quot;my neural network doesn&amp;#39;t work, please fix&amp;quot; questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we would also need a similar question for cases when the validation loss doesn't decrease (or does so only slightly). I tried to look for one, but I couldn't find it. Do we have one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer is &quot;No&quot;, I'll write one with the same aim as Sycorax's. Now, to abuse the usual paraphrase from Tolstoy, &quot;training issues are all alike; every generalization issue is particular in its own way&quot;, so it might be harder to give good answers to such a question, but I think that, if framed the right way, it could work. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;My neural network doesn't reach the generalization error it should be able to reach, based on reputable sources or experiments with very similar NNs: which things should I check&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the first thing you need to check in this case is &lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; you're overfitting the training set, and &lt;strong&gt;when&lt;/strong&gt; (at which epoch) the training and validation losses start to diverge. There are a few questions where the OP only reports the accuracy on the validation set at a fixed number of epochs, which is pretty useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; this question has been created: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/365778/what-should-i-do-when-my-neural-network-doesnt-generalize-well&quot;&gt;What should I do when my neural network doesn&amp;#39;t generalize well?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2018-09-07T23:35:42.833" LastActivityDate="2018-10-01T10:25:57.987" Title="Is there a generic question to which we can redirect questions of the type &quot;why does my neural network not generalize well?&quot;" Tags="|discussion|questions|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5416" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5417" CreationDate="2018-09-06T13:24:31.103" Score="8" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I'm reviewing suggested edits, I occasionally encounter suggestions for questions that are on hold. These suggestions tend to tidy the question up a bit, fixing a bit of grammar and formatting. I understand these editors are trying to help, but it seems like wasted effort when the author has not stepped in to fix the primary problem that led to the question being put on hold. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've accepted many such edits on the principle that a) it's pretty harmless, b) it encourages helpful participation, and c) the author might come back and fix the main problem, making the edit helpful in the future. But on the other hand, this sort of edit may be too trivial to be worth encouraging. And the effort would be more helpful if it were directed towards tidying questions that are not being closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you handle these cases? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="121522" LastEditDate="2018-09-07T12:21:14.797" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T12:21:14.797" Title="Reviewing suggested edits for questions on hold, when they don't address the main problem" Tags="|discussion|review|suggested-edits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5416" CreationDate="2018-09-06T19:34:12.703" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I reject such edits.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @Scortchi notes, an initial edit of a closed question bumps it into the reopen queue.  However, if the edit does not address the reason for closure, that thread should be rejected for reopening.  At that point, the OP has lost their first, easiest opportunity for having their question reopened.  (It is still possible for the thread to be reopened, and even for it to enter the reopen queue, but it's not automatic.)  On the other hand, it is possible that, simply by virtue of being in the reopen queue, it will be reopened inappropriately, despite the fact that the problem has not been addressed.  Either way, such edits seem to increase the chance of a poor outcome.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, closed threads are often purged (deleted) &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;automatically&lt;/a&gt;.  Editing them can interrupt this process.  Even if it doesn't, I don't see much value in having tidier threads deleted instead of messier ones&amp;mdash;in either case they're gone and no one will notice their grammar and spelling.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum, there are several possible downsides and little upside from such edits.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T19:34:12.703" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5418" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5419" CreationDate="2018-09-07T10:30:13.387" Score="-8" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have at the present two threads on canonical solutions to common neural network pitfalls, thanks to initiative of @Sycorax and @DeltaIV:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/352036/what-should-i-do-when-my-neural-network-doesnt-learn&quot;&gt;What should I do when my neural network doesn&amp;#39;t learn?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/365778/what-should-i-do-when-my-neural-network-doesnt-generalize-well&quot;&gt;What should I do when my neural network doesn&amp;#39;t generalize well?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These threads are probably good candidates to become community wikis, so that it is possible (or even &lt;em&gt;welcome&lt;/em&gt;) to &lt;strong&gt;expand on existing answers, creating a coherent list of tips and tricks and best practices&lt;/strong&gt; etc., instead of posting semi-repetitive answers where one has to cherry pick to find the relevant part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I feel like I could improve some of the answers by adding extra references, listing a few additional methods in a relevant section of the existing answer etc. However, at the moment I consider doing so a bad practice, as it generally changes the original message of the answer author. On the other hand, posting these bits and pieces in my own answer would probably result in a one-or-two-liner at the bottom of the thread, not useful to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, community wiki posts do not provide score needed for attaining golden tag-badges and our current consensus is that we would profit from having a user or two who would have the ultimate closing powers of a golden [neural-networks] tag badge. In that sense, going community wiki is undesirable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we convert these threads to community wikis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163572" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2018-09-12T07:56:53.227" LastActivityDate="2018-09-12T07:56:53.227" Title="Convert our canonical neural network threads to community wiki?" Tags="|discussion|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5418" CreationDate="2018-09-07T14:06:19.533" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think these threads need to be made community wiki.  While the initial idea of CW was to lower the threshold for editing so that there could be a single group answer, it hasn't really been used that way on any site, as far as I'm aware.  It's certainly never been used that way here.  For what it's worth, I don't even think that's a good goal or ultimately workable.  Posts should have an identifiable author who is responsible for its content.  If others disagree with the content, they should post their own answer so readers can see the two positions spelled out rather than have two people edit and re-edit a post back and forth.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not generally that concerned about lost reputation.  CW posts are typically the kind of thing that shouldn't be a primary source of reputation gain.  Regarding canonical threads specifically, they tend to be authored by high-rep users who don't really need the reputation.  However, you are right that the CW status prevents these threads from counting towards tag badges, which can be a real disadvantage in the case of canonical threads.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What community wiki has evolved to be is a &lt;strike&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzlG28B-R8Y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;twilight&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strike&gt; gray zone for posts that under a stricter application of SE policy would be closed and deleted (what happens on SO), but that we perceive as having real value such that deletion would be an unambiguous loss to the site.  This leads us to thinking that this fudge is the lesser of two evils.  It should be an exception, not a common status.  Note, moreover, that CW remains controversial (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2953/&quot;&gt;What is and what should be our policy on making questions community wiki?&lt;/a&gt;).  In either case, canonical threads clearly do not fall into this category.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2018-09-07T15:17:49.897" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T15:17:49.897" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5415" CreationDate="2018-09-07T14:39:21.970" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Just so this question has an answer...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of a canonical thread on this topic. I think that making one is a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have some general advice for anyone who is considering writing an answer. From my experience working on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/352036/what-should-i-do-when-my-neural-network-doesnt-learn&quot;&gt;What should I do when my neural network doesn&amp;#39;t learn?&lt;/a&gt;, I discovered that the trick is to be comprehensive and organized. Take the time to plan your answer. Use the formatting options to separate the post into distinct sections of related content. It will take time, but it's often the case that specific topics have specialized threads, so it's well-worth the time to dig through the site content to find relevant discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It took me several hours to write my answer, and more time to provide incremental edits and revisions. It's well worth the time, since these threads will be viewed thousands of times or more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2018-09-08T03:06:34.883" LastActivityDate="2018-09-08T03:06:34.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5422" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-10T13:07:13.270" Score="7" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;Right now, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/close/200570&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; is marked for closing as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/296541/determining-statistical-probability-related-to-a-string-event-of-dates&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;. Yet the titles and subjects are totally different at first glance - and someone searching for something similar will have little hope of finding this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, a little thought makes us realize both are about analyzing coincidences. But we don't have such a tag (at least, I could not find one) and neither of the two questions is really canonical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we have some question such as &quot;How can one analyze the probability of coincidences?&quot; ?   Or should we just add a tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2018-09-10T22:13:31.730" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T13:25:47.183" Title="Should we have a canonical question about coincidences?" Tags="|discussion|tags|closing-questions|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5423" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5424" CreationDate="2018-09-11T04:50:54.607" Score="11" ViewCount="284" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am an expert on the topic and answered a set of questions. I am wondering if it is OK to mention the solver that I develop given that it is commercial but has freemium plans. All my answers are about the question and I mention the solver because it is relevant. Please let me know what you think should be improved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48734" LastEditorUserId="121522" LastEditDate="2018-09-11T07:58:12.060" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T13:37:12.650" Title="Mentioning commercial/freemium product that I developed in my answers" Tags="|discussion|answers|spam|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5423" CreationDate="2018-09-11T07:50:39.940" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the site! Expertise is always welcome here, and it's to be expected that many people with such expertise will also use it to develop commercial products.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it does violate a community norm to link and discuss your product unless there's a good reason to; it tends to come across as spammy. I see that you mentioned it in about half of your answers, and that you edited them to remove the link after you got complaints. Notably, 1) removing the link did not detract from the quality or message of the answers, and 2) no other edits were required to make the answer complete by your own estimation. This suggests that the links do not belong there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the help:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Avoid overt self-promotion.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community tends to vote down overt self-promotion and flag it as&#xA;spam. Post good, relevant answers, and if some (but not all) happen to&#xA;be about your product or website, that’s okay. However, you must&#xA;disclose your affiliation in your answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a large percentage of your posts include a mention of your product&#xA;or website, you're probably here for the wrong reasons. Our&#xA;advertising rates are quite reasonable; contact our ad sales team for&#xA;details. We also offer free community promotion ads for open source&#xA;projects and non-profit organizations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How to not be a spammer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some specific behaviors to avoid - even with the best of&#xA;intentions, these will nearly always result in your posts being&#xA;flagged as spam:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't talk about your product / website / book / job too much. Folks&#xA;will read your answers for their ability to solve a specific problem;&#xA;if you're good at doing that, then they'll find themselves more&#xA;interested in who you are and what you're working on. If you respond&#xA;only to questions where the answer can be something you're selling,&#xA;they'll assume you're just here to sell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T08:20:08.280" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5423" CreationDate="2018-09-11T13:37:12.650" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two issues here.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One pertains to self promotion; @mkt has done a good job with that.  Let me add a small piece of complementary information.  You mention that it is recommended to mention your association with a product, which seems to imply discussing your products is not frowned on.  But there is a distinction between &lt;em&gt;mentioning your association with a product&lt;/em&gt; (given that your product has come up as an intrinsic part of the discussion) and mentioning your product in the first place. &lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; your product comes up, you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; disclose your association, however, it is better to leave your product out if it isn't really necessary. Note that many users here have developed products related to the topics they provide answers for, but (with one notable exception) you can't tell from most of their answers.  (On the other hand, you certainly may discuss it and link to it on your user page.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other issue is posting very similar answers to multiple threads.  This is also generally frowned on.  In particular, you should not post &lt;em&gt;identical&lt;/em&gt; answers to multiple questions.  If you really believe that a thread is answered by a post identical to an answer you wrote elsewhere, you should not repost that answer to the current thread.  Instead, vote to close the current thread as a duplicate.  Users (such as yourself) that have lower reputation will not be able to vote to close; however, you can flag to have the thread closed as a duplicate, and that's what you should do in that case.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, what if answers aren't &lt;em&gt;identical&lt;/em&gt;, but are very similar?  That is, how similar is too similar?  This is a judgment call, and the moderators generally lean towards having a lighter touch.  (In this specific case, I only deleted one answer.)  Nonetheless, it is better to see if there is something that can be added that is unique to that question that would provide additional value for that OP.  Again, if there isn't, you should vote / flag for closure.  The best option, as @Scortchi &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5423/mentioning-commercial-freemium-product-that-i-developed-in-my-answers#comment16597_5423&quot;&gt;noted&lt;/a&gt;, is to develop a longer, more detailed, high-quality answer that is canonical for you.  Then you could leave a comment on similar questions in the future ('This is a case of _____, it may help you to read my answer here: ____').  You won't be able to comment until your reputation is &gt;50, but with a good answer that level should be achievable before too long.  Likewise (or in the interim), you could provide a brief answer with information specific to the OP's situation, and link to your main post on the topic.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate that you have expertise specific to this topic, and I hope you will continue to contribute useful answers on that issue here.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T13:37:12.650" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5426" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-12T15:28:25.987" Score="12" ViewCount="351" Body="&lt;p&gt;A gold tag badge requires 1000 votes in at least 200 posts. Could we not fast-track &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/63835/what-are-tag-badges-how-do-they-work&quot;&gt;the rights&lt;/a&gt; that relate to such badges? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current rate at which people (especially non-moderators) acquire these badges is not such fast that we get a reasonable amount of (non-moderator) superusers in specific areas of expertise:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GcujT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GcujT.png&quot; alt=&quot;gold tag badges&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;Note: year has been calculated from the date as $yyyy+(mm-1)/12+(dd-1)/365$&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2018-09-17T08:14:38.670" LastActivityDate="2018-09-17T08:55:54.703" Title="Can we somehow fast-track the achievements that are necessary to get particular people more administrative rights?" Tags="|discussion|moderation|election|privileges|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5426" CreationDate="2018-09-12T17:43:14.837" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you ask two questions, which I will paraphrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Can CV.SE get special dispensation to change gold badge requirements?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only people who have the power to do this are the folks who run Stack Exchange. You can raise it with them, but I doubt they would agree, just because they won't want to open the floodgates and take on management of dozens of different domain-specific modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Does CV.SE need a moderator to specifically moderate the growing number of questions in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/neural-networks&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;neural-networks&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;neural-networks&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there's a compelling case to be made here; the interest in these topics is growing. We have some dedicated users who answer these questions, but it is sometimes the case that threads bearing these tags are left to languish  in the sense that their are unanswered, or answered poorly, because they are unanswerable in their breadth or lack of clarity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, the same questions are asked over and over but are not closed because it is challenging to identify the duplicates, or the closure effort stalls at 3 or 4 votes, just shy of the 5-vote threshold. Stated another way, the specialist knowledge required to recognize and close as duplicates &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/neural-networks&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;neural-networks&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;neural-networks&lt;/a&gt; questions is not present among a quorum of users who are active in the closure queues. (This analysis assumes that the other reviewers are voting to &quot;Skip&quot; rather than register &quot;Open&quot; or &quot;Close&quot; votes; this isn't necessarily the case, though. Perhaps only 2 or 3 other users agree with me in the votes which fail to achieve quorum, in which case the VTC queues are working as intended!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of this is intended as a criticism of our current moderators. I believe that our current moderators are knowledgable, fair-minded, and even-tempered. I only mean to suggest that there is a small gap in moderator coverage pertaining to these particular topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A moderator would have unilateral power to close threads and mark as duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that for a moderator election to happen, the SE website merely needs to make a request to the SE community team, and an election will take place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2018-09-13T16:15:09.280" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T16:15:09.280" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5426" CreationDate="2018-09-13T12:55:30.350" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: This may be gaming the system to an unacceptable degree. It seems like a grey area to me, so I offer this for your consideration. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are particular tags for which we: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;do not have a gold badge member and think it would be beneficial to have one,  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;have a member who's clearly on the path to achieving it, and  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is limited by upvotes rather than by number of answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could, as a community, choose to seek out and upvote the member's answers on that tag (if we think they are helpful, of course). This is leaning on the scales a bit by specifically visiting a set of questions and using our voting power. It's a form of bias, but I think it's worth considering because it is biasing our &lt;em&gt;attention&lt;/em&gt; rather than our assessment of quality. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few votes a day by many of us for one member would probably achieve the goal in days to weeks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T12:55:30.350" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2253" CreationDate="2018-09-13T15:08:24.513" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;After almost 4 years, we can draw some conclusions. There is no clear distinction for users. Topics and questions overlap and there is lots of cross-linking between two sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, stats is a different topic than data science, but the &lt;em&gt;reality&lt;/em&gt; points us in another direction. I would like to see these two merged for the sake of simplicity at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like data science to stay and stats go, even though stats is way more popular. The reason is stats has tons of questions not directly related to statistics, falling into a broader genre of data science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="107213" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T15:08:24.513" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5426" CreationDate="2018-09-13T16:37:39.247" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding to other answers, we need to employ tags better. For example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/182734/what-is-the-difference-between-a-neural-network-and-a-deep-neural-network-and-w&quot;&gt;What is the difference between a neural network and a deep neural network, and why do the deep ones work better?&lt;/a&gt; does not contain the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt;. It could, and in my opinion, should. The answerers did not receive points toward a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt; badge answering a question that's is obviously about a part of machine learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60613" LastEditorUserId="60613" LastEditDate="2018-09-13T17:24:09.613" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T17:24:09.613" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2253" CreationDate="2018-09-13T21:47:26.703" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Data science and statistics is multi- / inter- / cross-disciplinary. The image below from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.r-bloggers.com/how-to-replace-a-pie-chart/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.r-bloggers.com/how-to-replace-a-pie-chart/&lt;/a&gt; shows this well&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The amount of time spent on various tasks by surveyed managers in data-science positions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yh5eG.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yh5eG.png&quot; alt=&quot;bar-chart&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Type of questions on datascience.stackexchange&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions on data science are like (picking the latest 9):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/38225/how-to-determine-filter-size-and-number-of-filters-layers-in-cnn&quot;&gt;how-to-determine-filter-size-and-number-of-filters-layers-in-cnn&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/38222/regression-of-discrete-continuous-averaged-data&quot;&gt;regression-of-discrete-continuous-averaged-data&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/38221/timestamps-in-ridge-regression-scikit-learn&quot;&gt;timestamps-in-ridge-regression-scikit-learn&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/38217/whats-the-best-metric-for-evaluate-an-estimator-for-a-multi-class-problem-with&quot;&gt;whats-the-best-metric-for-evaluate-an-estimator-for-a-multi-class-problem-with&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/38216/appending-dataframes-to-lists-in-a-dictionary-why-does-it-seem-like-the-list-i&quot;&gt;appending-dataframes-to-lists-in-a-dictionary-why-does-it-seem-like-the-list-i&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/38213/pass-2-different-kinds-of-x-training-data-to-ml-model-simultaneously&quot;&gt;pass-2-different-kinds-of-x-training-data-to-ml-model-simultaneously&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/38211/what-is-new-population-in-genetic-algorithm&quot;&gt;what-is-new-population-in-genetic-algorithm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/38205/dropout-on-which-layers-of-lstm&quot;&gt;dropout-on-which-layers-of-lstm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/38203/var-model-valueerror-x-already-contains-a-constant&quot;&gt;var-model-valueerror-x-already-contains-a-constant&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will agree that this is debatable, however the &lt;em&gt;overall&lt;/em&gt; picture and feel of the data science website is much different to me (much closer to computer science, informatics, computational science).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not so easy to put exactly into words &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; they are different from the questions at cross validated, but when you look at it then I would say it is not difficult to see &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; they are different from the questions at cross validated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Performance of datascience.stackexchange&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The datascience.stackexchange seems to do well (At least the &lt;em&gt;quantity&lt;/em&gt; goes well like the number of questions and answers &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5406/164061&quot;&gt;is growing well&lt;/a&gt; and seems to be adding a larger user base to the entire network. I would very much agree that quality is a lot more debatable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding to this that the questions and answers over there look to me much different than at Cross Validated (not necessarily different based on topic or discipline, but more like a different orientation and a style that is less strongly based on rigorous, purely mathematical, foundations. It is along the lines of the difference between technology vs science even though it is called data-&amp;quot;science&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on that the site has some good properties to stay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Analogous case 'bioinformatics'&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently there is also a beta website for &lt;a href=&quot;https://bioinformatics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;bioinformatics&lt;/a&gt;. This is another stackexchange site where the differences might be more clear and it shows a bit of an analogy to my point here about the data science site. Many similar arguments exist that it should be contained or split up to one or more of SO, CV, DataScience or Biology. However I think that arguments about similarities do not have much ground. Bio-informatics/-statistics is the same but different as well&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Analogous case 'difference between languages'&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this answer seems to attract a lot of negative votes, I would wish to add one more analogy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that this will clarify a bit more the intention of this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; like to give so much a clear answer in the sense that this answer is clearly in favour of differentiating data-science and statistics, and especially in the &lt;em&gt;practical&lt;/em&gt; case whether they deserve to be different topics on the stackexchange network (which involves many more arguments than just the &lt;em&gt;principle&lt;/em&gt; whether they are different or not)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, in the other answers I sense little acknowledgement for the difference between datascience and statistics. I would like this answer to show that there is at least an alternative viewpoint. We &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; see, in principle and from particular viewpoints, datascience and statistics as different.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the analogy that I have in mind is the Limburgian language. Limburg is a region in the southeast-tip of the Netherlands and borders Germany and France. The people over there speak a different language than the people in the rest of the Netherlands. It is constantly being debated whether this language should be considered a dialect or a language on it's own (linguists do not really make the differentiation between languages and dialects and speak more about a continuum, but the same happens here where we do not really have a difference between a rank of disciplines, like statistics vs datascience, and deal with a continuum).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Limburgian is often considered, by many Dutch people, as just &lt;em&gt;a variation of the Dutch language&lt;/em&gt;. However, Limburgian is officialy recognized as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;regional language&lt;/a&gt;. And interestingly an important argument (from the linguists) is that the Limburgian language has &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; in common with neighboring French and German, and because of that should be considered as clearly &lt;em&gt;distinct&lt;/em&gt; from the Dutch language (even when most Dutch people believe otherwise or do not recognize/acknowledge the differences).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T08:24:48.377" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5426" CreationDate="2018-09-17T08:46:01.917" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;More rights associated with silver tag badges&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One possible option to increase users with more closing rights would be to use the &lt;em&gt;silver&lt;/em&gt; tag badges as well. (although it requires to change the website)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would make sense because it is in line with the intentions and argumentation for &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/230865/increase-close-vote-weight-for-gold-tag-badge-holders&quot;&gt;the introduction of rights for the gold tag badges&lt;/a&gt; but with a different metric/focus (currently, StackOverflow has awarded 7.9k &lt;em&gt;gold&lt;/em&gt; tag badges, CrossValidated has awarded 127 &lt;em&gt;silver&lt;/em&gt; badges).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2018-09-17T08:55:54.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5426" CreationDate="2018-09-17T08:54:39.953" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;We should not &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to get more people with more rights.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rights for gold tag badges originates from an idea that came from &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/230865/increase-close-vote-weight-for-gold-tag-badge-holders&quot;&gt;StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt;. That site has currently 80 times more questions per day (6.6k vs 79 q/day) with a moderator team that is only four times larger (28 vs 7).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Cross-validated we should be able to manage the moderation of questions sufficiently without technological solutions (changing the website). If it takes too long for questions to pass trough review queues then 'to give certain people more power' would be more like a work-around, rather than a direct solution. In principle we should aim to have consensus decisions rather than a few judges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastActivityDate="2018-09-17T08:54:39.953" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5435" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-17T10:04:49.070" Score="8" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/366990/&quot;&gt;Properties of MLE (minimal sufficient and complete) on a restricted parameter space&lt;/a&gt; was, per the comment, already posted on the math site.  Moreover, people have been voting to close it (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/close/201261&quot;&gt;review queue page&lt;/a&gt;).  I think it belongs here (seems to be statistics, pretty clearly).  But then it should be closed on the math site &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/2917055&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  I'm not sure what to do here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2018-09-17T17:08:04.373" LastActivityDate="2018-09-22T18:30:25.703" Title="What to do when an on-topic question has already been posted on another SE site?" Tags="|discussion|cross-posting|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5435" CreationDate="2018-09-17T11:17:37.463" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the question's on-topic here I most usually comment, adding a link to the cross-post &amp;amp; asking the OP to decide which site they want the question on. I don't close it, partly because we don't have a relevant close reason,&lt;sup&gt;&amp;dagger;&lt;/sup&gt; partly because that makes for more work later if the OP removes the cross-post &amp;amp; wants it re-opening here, but mostly because it seems to me a heavy-handed response to a minor transgression. Once the questions are linked the worst that can happen is that the OP neglects to delete one of them, &amp;amp; other users make the informed choice to provide similar (or different) answers on both sites. The more important thing is to explain what the rule is so that the OP can abide by it in future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I just delete the question; if it's unanswered, has been here a while, &amp;amp; if the cross-post already has an answer. Rarely I suggest splitting it or tailoring it into two questions, each more suited for one or the other site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are so many SE sites now, &amp;amp; so much overlap, that it doesn't seem worthwhile to spend time researching whether the question's on-topic both here &amp;amp; on the site of the cross-post&amp;mdash; though if I do happen to know enough to have an opinion on the most appropriate site I might share it. (I believe Mathematical Statistics is on-topic at the Maths site, for what it's worth.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deliberately &amp;amp; persistently flouting the rules is another matter, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;dagger; There's an &quot;Other&quot; close reason, as @gung suggests using, but the boilerplate reads &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question does not appear to be about statistics within the scope defined in the help center.&#xA;  If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;, which comes across a bit oddly. And what do you do if the question already has an answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2018-09-18T12:44:14.097" LastActivityDate="2018-09-18T12:44:14.097" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5435" CreationDate="2018-09-17T12:37:04.657" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it is on-topic on both sites but the sites do not liaise and it gets closed on both sites it is difficult to feel too much sympathy for the OP since we should not be encouraging cross-posting which potentially wastes people's time. In this case the OP has a clear message in the comments about why people have closed it so knows what to do if they want an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastActivityDate="2018-09-17T12:37:04.657" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5435" CreationDate="2018-09-17T17:12:21.657" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I come across such a question, I close it.  I leave a comment along with closing, asking the OP to decide which site they prefer and delete the other version.  They could then have this version reopened, if they preferred.  I don't usually downvote.  As @Scortchi notes, these OPs are usually new and simply unfamiliar with the SE system.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2018-09-18T11:46:56.347" LastActivityDate="2018-09-18T11:46:56.347" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5435" CreationDate="2018-09-18T19:42:58.353" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can close questions as duplicate and refer to an existing question on stats.stackexchange, we should be able to do the same when there is a similar (cross-posted or not) question already existing on another stackexchange website (currently it is only possible to deal with this in the comments and you see this for instance a lot between math-overflow and math.stackexchange).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current way how the question has been closed is confusing. I would say that it is not off-topic, but the off-topic category has just been (ab)used in order to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, the way that it is handled is ok, and the clarification in the comments explains sufficiently why it has been closed. Also Gung explains well how this category can be used more ambiguously. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for an average user that encounters this situation again and wonders how to deal with closing a cross-posted question, it will be unlikely that he/she is aware of this meta-question or is gonna find it quickly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If cross-posting is a good reason to close a question then this solution should be more clearly available in the options to close a question (instead of currently being ambiguously contained in the off-topic section, while not strictly being off-topic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastActivityDate="2018-09-18T19:42:58.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5441" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-18T21:13:50.080" Score="5" ViewCount="680" Body="&lt;p&gt;As part of implementing the new unified themes across the network, we're gradually rolling out updated site themes for each site. As of today, we have enabled your updated site theme for testing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't see it right now, that's by design! This is a very early test implementation of your design and we need your help finding issues with it before we make it live for everyone permanently. So, keep in mind, there will be things that need fixing! We'll address those things as we can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you'd like to review it, here's how:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How do I enable it?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/users/preferences&quot;&gt;Click here&lt;/a&gt; and check the &quot;Beta test new themes&quot; option. This will turn on the new theme for all sites that have one in testing, including this one. &lt;em&gt;Here's &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/314542/opt-in-to-beta-testing-new-themes&quot;&gt;more info&lt;/a&gt; on how to opt in.&lt;/em&gt; You can uncheck the box to revert to the older theme until the site is live for everyone. Note, while turning it on is immediate, it will take a few minutes to revert to the old view - &lt;em&gt;but it will go through!&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What type of feedback do we need?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;On this post: Bugs related to this site's design elements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help us look for issues/bugs related to the theme design and how we have mapped the old theme to the new. This needs to be done within the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/307862/ch-ch-ch-changes-left-nav-responsive-design-themes&quot;&gt;limits of the new unified theme&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could include colors of sections of the design or text, problems with JavaScript add-ons (if applicable), the logo or top banner appearance or other artwork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also feel free to ask questions about the new layout if you're unsure how to navigate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;On Meta Stack Exchange: General concerns about left nav or theming&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some things that are definitely changing everywhere and can't really be adjusted on a per-site basis. A few of them include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Top banner is shorter in height, so some artwork has to be adjusted along with some logos.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Left Navigation is active everywhere (but can be collapsed into a menu by visiting your site preferences - &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/311237/284336&quot;&gt;instructions here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Responsive layout is active, which lets the site adjust as browser widths change - no side scrolling (some pages haven't been updated, yet, though). For now, if you prefer the scrolling, you can disable this by clicking the &quot;disable responsiveness&quot; link in the footer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many site elements including tags and voting arrows are standardized across the network.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Link underlining is active. In an effort to make links more visible, they are now being underlined.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have concerns or issues regarding the left nav or the overall approach we are taking to theming, then &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/310908/live-left-nav-new-theming-and-responsiveness&quot;&gt;this Meta Stack Exchange post&lt;/a&gt; is the right place for feedback. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I mentioned earlier, there are some unique design elements like voting arrows and tags that are being standardized in this process. Keeping these custom elements makes our ability to maintain the sites too complex and, while we're very sad to see them go, we're in a difficult position of needing to make the site designs work together so that we can continue to address feature requests and bugs that will make your Q&amp;amp;A experience better. This is addressed in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/314799/why-we-initiated-the-latest-round-of-design-changes-and-the-role-of-meta&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange post&lt;/a&gt; if you want more detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What new themes?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're like, &quot;What the heck are you talking about?&quot;, then you should read the Meta Stack Exchange post entitled &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/312365/rollout-of-new-network-site-themes&quot;&gt;Rollout of new network site themes&lt;/a&gt; (and maybe the posts it links to for the full background). To follow along with the rollout of these new themes, go here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Thanks so much for your constructive feedback!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Oh, Who am I?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't know me, I'm one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/99338/who-are-the-community-team-and-what-do-they-do?s=1%7C141.4591&quot;&gt;Community Managers&lt;/a&gt; here at Stack Exchange. I'm here to listen to your input and convey it to our Design team for responses and fixes to bugs. I'll do my best to respond to your concerns and explain whether changes we've made are bugs that can be changed or if they're by design and why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="202450" LastActivityDate="2020-01-09T13:47:15.680" Title="Cross Validated's updated site theme is ready for testing!" Tags="|discussion|design|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5422" CreationDate="2018-09-19T13:25:47.183" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should definitely have a canonical answer since these questions crop up all the time. I wrote the answer linked above, the intention was that it could be used as canonical answer, and has been used as dup target at least once. So if a better one is wanted ... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T13:25:47.183" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5441" CreationDate="2018-09-20T12:02:32.100" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another change, probably unintended: On this machine (and all my other machines), in the old design, posts that I have visited before (on the same machine), and posts not visited before, have a slight title color difference. With the new design that disappeared. Get it back! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="202450" LastEditDate="2018-10-04T16:31:28.550" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T16:31:28.550" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5441" CreationDate="2018-09-21T16:29:50.557" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I liked the way how themes for meta and non-meta where different. With the currently similar themes I get confused and this is annoying because the menu's for navigation are different between meta and non-meta. It has become less clear &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; site I am one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you make different sites and navigation menu's then why not also different themes?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this point of view I do not get why sites should have completely similar looks?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;the new unified themes across the network&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; what does that mean? Does it mean unified in the backend or will it also mean unified for the frontend?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the idea to have the similar (looking) themes only temporarily, due to a reset of the themes, e.g. because of some changes in the background (and stats can look different again later on)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or is the idea to make the themes more permanently similar because some people have decided that the customized front end themes should be more similar?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;NEW&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mAEB8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mAEB8.png&quot; alt=&quot;stats.meta&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FFzh9.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FFzh9.png&quot; alt=&quot;stats&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;OLD&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oWW58.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oWW58.png&quot; alt=&quot;old stats&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Wl3IE.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Wl3IE.png&quot; alt=&quot;old meta&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the difference for me with the old designs was that stats.meta had a uniform background and stats had a non-uniform background (ie a contrast between the center/middle panel and the sides). So even though the background is only a faint pale colour it was a distinctive difference because of the contrast with the sides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T21:04:44.903" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5441" CreationDate="2018-09-22T18:23:41.840" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why waste so much vertical space before the actual content appears?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ix0id.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ix0id.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, with all the white spaces, it looks like the website was designed to be browsed on an iPad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastActivityDate="2018-09-22T18:23:41.840" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5435" CreationDate="2018-09-22T18:30:25.703" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a common issue with the current way Stack Exchange is designed, and it's even getting worse with the creation of the AI and DS websites, which largely overlap with CV. I think the best solution is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/199989/178179&quot;&gt;Build and strengthen the Stack Exchange community with &quot;crossover questions&quot; between sites&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastActivityDate="2018-09-22T18:30:25.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5447" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5449" CreationDate="2018-09-23T15:51:27.067" Score="12" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;We get questions about the normality of residuals from models, e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/368313/1352&quot;&gt;Dependent variable - bimodal?&lt;/a&gt; Often, as in this example, it turns out that the OP wants to perform inference on model parameters and believes that residuals need to be normally distributed for inference to be valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would have expected to find a highly voted question in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/normality-assumption&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;normality-assumption&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;normality-assumption&lt;/a&gt; tag that I could use to VTC as a duplicate, but I couldn't find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where is our canonical answer to questions about normality of residuals and inference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T19:46:59.350" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T19:46:59.350" Title="Where is our canonical answer to questions about normality of residuals and inference?" Tags="|discussion|search|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5441" CreationDate="2018-09-25T13:34:13.693" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;With a wide window the three-column layout looks all right, though you could perhaps make the centre column a bit wider (long lines of text seem to be more legible on screen than on the printed page):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/liBiV.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/liBiV.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screen shot with wide browser window&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But reducing the width of the browser window gradually squashes the centre column&amp;mdash;the one readers are actually reading&amp;mdash;to the point of its being absurdly narrow, in view of all the space available in the left &amp;amp; right columns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/N9479.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/N9479.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screen shot with medium-width browser window&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you continue past this point, the right column suddenly disappears, the text in the centre column gets reflowed, &amp;amp; (after some time scrolling up to find your place again) the centre column is wide again (indeed wider than it was with the widest browser window).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6XXpG.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6XXpG.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screen shot with narrow browser window&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar thing happens as you narrow the window further, with the left column disappearing far too late.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this isn't too tricky to fix; just a matter of changing some settings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T13:34:13.693" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5447" CreationDate="2018-09-26T12:48:09.290" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5447/where-is-our-canonical-answer-to-questions-about-normality-of-residuals-and-infe?noredirect=1#comment16707_5447&quot;&gt;whuber&lt;/a&gt; pointed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=assumption%2A%20residual%2A%20normal%2A%20score%3a1%20answers%3a1%20-logistic&quot;&gt;a very nice search&lt;/a&gt;. It seems to me like the following thread is the most useful one for our purposes here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/29731/1352&quot;&gt;Regression when the OLS residuals are not normally distributed&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T12:48:09.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5451" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5452" CreationDate="2018-09-27T10:00:03.747" Score="5" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/367997/58675&quot;&gt;How to fit a RBF network in R?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;asks an off-topic question (which R package to use to fit RBF networks) and a question which, while on-topic, is very likely a duplicate. Should I close or flag as duplicate? Ask him to eliminate the part about R packages, then close as duplicate? He's a new user, so I'd like to cut him some slack...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2018-10-26T09:37:47.033" LastActivityDate="2018-10-26T09:37:47.033" Title="What to do with a question which asks about R packages and how to fit RBF networks" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|closing-questions|exact-duplicates|new-users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5451" CreationDate="2018-09-28T07:30:06.040" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Tim's comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If it's a duplicate&lt;/strong&gt;, then mark it as a duplicate. That is far more helpful than closing as off-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If it's not a duplicate&lt;/strong&gt; and the non-software part can be answered, then you can answer it, mentioning briefly that you will focus on the non-software part because we're not a software help list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2018-09-28T09:10:48.700" LastActivityDate="2018-09-28T09:10:48.700" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-09-28T07:30:06.040" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5441" CreationDate="2018-09-28T13:56:06.320" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @FranckDernoncourt has pointed out there's a lot of wasted space at the top with this new layout. That's mainly due to the banner which contains just a link to our home page (an icon together with the name of the site) &amp;amp; a mystery graphic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YKUUe.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YKUUe.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow has a neater layout; with no banner at all, &amp;amp; the link to the home page on the top bar, in the left-hand corner:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fBdrO.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fBdrO.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion's that we could have the same layout as SO, roughly like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Knn4Q.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Knn4Q.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be more consistent, &amp;amp; provide a permanent reminder of what site you're currently on (because the banner disappears as you scroll down). It would also resolve the issue raised by @MartijnWeterings of Meta's not being clearly distinguished from the main site. If we want a link to Stack Exchange home page too, there's plenty of space in the left column.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2018-09-28T13:56:06.320" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5415" CreationDate="2018-09-30T19:06:19.547" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I finally posted an answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/369476/58675&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. It's less comprehensive that what I had in mind initially, but I could never find the time  to complete the &quot;unabridged edition&quot;, thus I went for a shorter and more focused answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="58675" LastEditDate="2018-10-01T10:25:57.987" LastActivityDate="2018-10-01T10:25:57.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5441" CreationDate="2018-10-01T14:15:35.953" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Longer mathematical expressions rendered in MathJax can extend into the right column, &amp;amp; are superimposed on what's already there:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6FqJv.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6FqJv.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2020-01-09T12:08:36.703" LastActivityDate="2020-01-09T12:08:36.703" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5458" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-04T10:37:08.063" Score="9" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;Again posts can linger for too long (days) in the review queues without resolution. Now not because the queues are long, they are short so people forgot to visit them.  See my former question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5386/what-to-do-about-long-review-queues&quot;&gt;long review queues&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, this (to me) obvious duplicate have only two votes to close after 5 days!:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/205043/distribution-for-sum-of-square-normal-variables-with-arbitrary-variance&quot;&gt;Distribution for Sum of Square Normal Variables with Arbitrary Variance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2018-10-27T17:41:39.577" LastActivityDate="2018-10-27T17:41:39.577" Title="Please help again with review queues, even if they are short!" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|review|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5459" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5460" CreationDate="2018-10-05T10:20:08.980" Score="6" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to ask the following question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$M$&lt;/span&gt; is a &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$m\times n$&lt;/span&gt; constant matrix and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\eta\sim\mathcal{N}(0,I)$&lt;/span&gt;, then does &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$\mathbf{E}_{\eta\sim\mathcal{N}}\left[\frac{\lVert M\eta\rVert}{\lVert\eta\rVert}\right]$$&lt;/span&gt;&#xA;  exist? Also, let &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x\in \mathbb{R}^n_{\ne 0}$&lt;/span&gt; be an arbitrary non-zero vector. Is it possible to compute the maximum (or at least to find a tight upper-bound) over all &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x$&lt;/span&gt;, of the quantity &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$\mathbf{E}_{\eta\sim\mathcal{N}}\left[\frac{\lVert M(x+\lVert x\rVert \eta)-Mx\rVert}{\lVert Mx \rVert}\right]=\lVert x\rVert\mathbf{E}_{\eta\sim\mathcal{N}}\left[\frac{\lVert M \eta\rVert}{\lVert Mx \rVert}\right]$$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I ask here or on Mathematics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="58675" LastEditDate="2018-10-05T13:31:44.953" LastActivityDate="2018-10-07T08:28:55.030" Title="Should I ask this mathematical statistics question here or on math.se?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5459" CreationDate="2018-10-05T11:59:03.270" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quoting &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;our help page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;CrossValidated is for statisticians, data miners, and anyone else&#xA;  doing data analysis or interested in it as a discipline. If you have a&#xA;  question about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;statistical analysis, applied or theoretical&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;designing experiments&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;collecting data&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;data mining&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;machine learning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;visualizing data&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;probability theory&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;mathematical statistics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;statistical and data-driven computing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So questions on probability theory are perfectly on topic in here, but there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; overlap with the Math page and you can find many good questions and answers on probability theory up there. My impression is that usually you can expect more concise &quot;mathy&quot; answers (&quot;prove that&quot;) on Math page and longer, more descriptive answers (&quot;explain why&quot;) on CrossValidated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="35989" LastEditDate="2018-10-07T08:28:55.030" LastActivityDate="2018-10-07T08:28:55.030" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5441" CreationDate="2018-10-05T12:25:59.287" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not sure if this is caused by the new theme, but this looks like unintended behavior (rendering of the badge container; awarding of the badge is perfectly fine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lLDRM.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lLDRM.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163572" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T12:25:59.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5462" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-05T12:56:39.160" Score="9" ViewCount="398" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question is in the title.  This morning I wake up to 40 more points, on various questions that I had asked since I started using this site years ago.  Yesterday I had something similar.  Is the site's surfacing algorithm deciding that my questions need more exposure?  If not, I suppose that I can infer that I've got either a superfan or a stalker?  I am aware of some people who are trying to recruit me, and someone who was &lt;strong&gt;really&lt;/strong&gt; paying attention could figure out who I am from my posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17359" LastActivityDate="2018-10-07T23:12:47.740" Title="I get surges of upvotes, and they are lumpy in time. Is this because the site is surfacing my questions all at once, or do I have a stalker/superfan?" Tags="|discussion|questions|votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5462" CreationDate="2018-10-05T13:04:10.343" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;My best guess: someone found your answer that s/he liked, up-voted it, clicked your profile and found other answers s/he liked. There is no algorithm that bounces questions in clusters. What is bounced on the main site is the questions with no accepted answer and the ones that were edited (either question or answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T13:04:10.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5462" CreationDate="2018-10-07T23:12:47.740" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can answer this from the perspective of someone who has &lt;em&gt;given&lt;/em&gt; clumps of up-votes to users at various points in time, often for old obscure answers.  As &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/users/35989/tim&quot;&gt;Tim&lt;/a&gt; correctly points out in his answer, this generally starts off either when a profile piques my interest through a good question or answer in the main thread, or simply from browsing through profiles on the ranking pages.  Like most people, when I look at profiles, I usually start by looking at the user's top answers, which are always very good, but for reasons that I explain below, I then look at the last page of their answers with all the zero-vote answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recall seeing a few comments on this site (sorry, can't remember where I saw them) lamenting the fact that there are many good answers to questions that receive zero votes.  There are many times when a user puts in a lot of effort to give a good answer, and for one reason or another it does not get any votes.  For this reason, when I'm looking at profiles, I now make the effort to skip to the end of the answer pages to look at all the answers that a user has made that have received zero votes, or only one or two votes.  Often I find quite a few of these that are worthy of an up-vote, and ---voila--- the user now has a nice clump of up-votes on old obscure answers they made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have done this with a few users now, just owing to getting interested in an answer they wrote, and then looking at their profile page.  (Sorry, I can't remember if you're one of them.)  I'm not sure if that makes me a &quot;superfan&quot; or &quot;stalker&quot; of the profiles I've looked at (a touch derogatory if you ask me), but I have certainly found that users often have a treasure-trove of good answers with zero votes, or low votes, which are deserving of more recognition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173082" LastActivityDate="2018-10-07T23:12:47.740" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5465" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5466" CreationDate="2018-10-10T19:02:45.807" Score="6" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked this question at least 3 months ago: &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/349468/&quot;&gt;Is there an intuitive understanding of the Halmos-Savage Theorem?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;  It's received two upvotes, but few views, and no answers or comments.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119920" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2018-10-10T19:11:16.590" LastActivityDate="2018-10-20T21:56:57.677" Title="Is it allowed to ask questions again if they did not get an answer last time" Tags="|discussion|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5465" CreationDate="2018-10-11T04:58:53.967" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a FAQ: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7046/how-do-i-get-attention-for-one-of-my-own-questions-without-a-good-answer&quot;&gt;How do I get attention for one of my own questions without a good answer?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can &amp;quot;bump&amp;quot; your question by editing the question to &lt;strong&gt;provide status and progress updates resulting from your own continued efforts to answer the question yourself&lt;/strong&gt;, or to explain why the existing answers didn't work. I usually do that unless I really hit a dead end with no further clues to follow. Sometimes I eventually bring about enough understanding to realize the answer, and then post a self-answer to my question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you have at least &lt;strong&gt;75&lt;/strong&gt; reputation points, you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/privileges/set-bounties&quot;&gt;offer a &lt;strong&gt;bounty&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, promising to give some of your reputation to the user who correctly answers your question. This causes your question to receive additional attention, as it will be added to a &amp;quot;featured&amp;quot; list and be promoted more than normal questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post a link to the question on the site's chat. Usually active users of the site will hang out there, and they can offer further help.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use the &lt;strong&gt;share&lt;/strong&gt; button beneath your question to advertise it to your networks. Then, if you find the answer, you can post a self-answer to help others who come across the same question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do not post your question a second time,&lt;/strong&gt; as it will be closed as a duplicate of your first question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62336" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T04:58:53.967" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5467" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-11T12:57:08.987" Score="14" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our guidelines for homework question say to use the self-study tag and tell what you've tried.  But what about when a person says, &quot;I have no idea where to start?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should such questions be closed?  That seems to follow the letter of the rule (and I saw one &quot;close&quot; vote on such a question), but it doesn't seem like the best use of the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely many people have faced a question and had no idea where to begin. It's certainly happened to me!  I think this may be especially common when people are getting used to the idea of having to formally prove things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2018-10-11T15:23:03.310" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T15:23:03.310" Title="What should we do with HW questions where the person says &quot;I have no idea how to start&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|homework|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5441" CreationDate="2018-10-14T12:07:54.617" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two problems that are probably related: On my linux machine (latest (testing) debian, mate desktop) both occurs, but not on windows neither android.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) when clicking on the flag symbol for sending a comment flag, the pop-up window appears partially outside (on the left side) of the visible screen, cannot be moved, so cannot be used. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) In the review queues, the action buttons on top are far to the right that some are invisible. Particularly, the skip button is outside the screen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both problems occurs with firefox (from debian repo), but not with chromium or google chrome. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please fix&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;EDIT&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some time this worked, but now its back again ... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="11887" LastEditDate="2019-01-31T18:15:05.313" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T18:15:05.313" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5472" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5473" CreationDate="2018-10-16T17:20:34.687" Score="7" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/javascript&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;javascript&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;javascript&lt;/a&gt; (16 questions, 4 are closed). It was created in 2011. I saw it prop up again in the active questions feed earlier today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No question is tagged only with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/javascript&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;javascript&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;javascript&lt;/a&gt;, and it seems to cover all kinds of content where people simply employed JavaScript.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we need this tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;r&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;r&lt;/a&gt; is the outlier (one of the biggest tags in the site), we don't need tags for every programming/scripting language out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If JavaScript becomes a major language for statistics, it could be reused in the future, but for now we could simply un-tag the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60613" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T07:04:35.717" Title="Do we really want a tag for Javascript?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5472" CreationDate="2018-10-17T06:58:04.260" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question seems to be answered in comments by &lt;em&gt;@whuber&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It might be good to know that language tags allow the system&#xA;  automatically to markup any code blocks in the question and any&#xA;  answers. For example, this is how various keywords and other lexemes&#xA;  get different colors for &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;em&gt;@gung&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cleanup is always appropriate. I edited the excerpt to include usage&#xA;  instructions based on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;r&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;r&lt;/a&gt; tag excerpt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags are helpful for syntax highlighting. There is not much harm in having multiple tags (but we should merge redundant ones), while hunting and deleting tags is time consuming. Creating tags is relatively easy, so we'll never have a perfect tagging system, so better think about it in terms of their utility, i.e. to improve usability of the site (search, syntax highlighting, &quot;followed&quot; tags etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Better alternatives to tag-hunting are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;clarifying the tag excerpts and descriptions, so it is clear when the particular tag will or will not be useful,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;merging tags with their synonyms, to improve search and indexing,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;re-tagging questions by adding relevant tags and removing the irrelevant ones when possible (abandoned tags are auto-removed by the system). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="35989" LastEditDate="2018-10-17T07:04:35.717" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T07:04:35.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5474" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5479" CreationDate="2018-10-18T11:39:56.823" Score="8" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/52728/searching-for-a-rhythm-in-weight-loss-gain&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on Software Recommendations. As it is getting no response, I think that I might try to make a meaningful chart for my friend, in Excel .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, I would prefer someone else to post an Excel formula to do so, but that is certainly off-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am hoping is not off topic is asking for a mathematical formula which will produce meaningful results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From that question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Basically my friend weighs daily and has historical data in CSV format. They would like a gratis app that takes that data and overlays it in some form of weekly chart. E.g shows only Monday to Sunday (start day preferably selectable), not several months or years.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We are unsure what format the display should take, but the objective is to see if there is a pattern to weight loss/gain on certain days of the week.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My friend has been steadily losing weight for months now, but against that background, there are days when weight is gained and my friend is looking for an identifiable pattern. A very obvious example would be weight gain on Monday after a weekend binge, but this is not the case, just an example.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The idea is that if certain days can be identified as problematic then the cause can be identified and behavio(u)r changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, could I somehow phrase that to be an on-topic question here? I am looking for a pattern in data (and how best to represent it visually).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47980" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2018-10-26T09:35:40.733" LastActivityDate="2018-10-28T21:30:43.627" Title="(How) can I make an on-topic question from this?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5465" CreationDate="2018-10-20T19:28:06.530" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;More tips.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Expanding a question using explanations that make it accessible to a wider readership may garner attempts to answer the question. For example, providing links and definitions for infrequently used terms like &quot;Radon Nikodym derivative.&quot; That is, there are many more people who are competent to answer in a general area than there are for a narrow topic with incidental experience. Moreover, in the case of the introduction of novel concepts to a narrow topic, the experts for a narrow topic are the last ones worth asking about it, such that general knowledge is much more valuable to solicit than particular knowledge for exploring novel concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Changing tags or adding general tags with higher numbers of followers may help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="99274" LastEditDate="2018-10-20T21:56:57.677" LastActivityDate="2018-10-20T21:56:57.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5476" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-25T20:55:25.890" Score="6" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is in the title: which different image/animation file formats can be embedded here? I have searched around without finding any list of formats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2018-10-26T09:40:03.250" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T13:53:22.613" Title="Which image file formats can be embedded in posts on Cross Validated?" Tags="|support|images|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5476" CreationDate="2018-10-25T23:24:47.080" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not a complete list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These definitely work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PNG, JPEG, GIF&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;examples of the first two are easy to locate; the third can be done, as shown &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/369254/330679&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for example, or on our own site &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/153726/proof-of-algebraic-formula-for-the-sum-of-two-dice-toss-as-a-convolution/153775#153775&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;Pretty sure these won't work (currently at least)&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;SVG&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't spotted a bmp or a tiff yet (and not certain stack.imgur.com supports those), but there might be ways to do them. However, the fact that on stackoverflow many posts discuss BMP files but display PNG files when talking about them (e.g. like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39823509/inverting-colors-of-pixels-in-a-bmp-file-in-c&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;) suggests that maybe BMP files are either not possible or may be possible but might be actively discouraged (if so, presumably for space reasons); if that's the case TIFF files would have similar issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2018-10-29T05:37:42.787" LastActivityDate="2018-10-29T05:37:42.787" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5474" CreationDate="2018-10-28T21:30:43.627" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answering it so it does not stay unanswered: this was on-topic as is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. This question was asked and received a great answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/372561&quot;&gt;Searching for a weekly rhythm in weight loss/gain&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2018-10-28T21:30:43.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5476" CreationDate="2018-10-28T22:36:43.880" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;There are other options that work, albeit not via imgur&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically anything that works with the html tag &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;img&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers#Image_format_support&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;but this is browser dependent&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Examples&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;BMP&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.w3.org/People/mimasa/test/imgformat/img/w3c_home.bmp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://www.w3.org/People/mimasa/test/imgformat/img/w3c_home.bmp&quot; alt=&quot;plot&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;SVG&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/svglogo.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/svglogo.svg&quot; alt=&quot;plot&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2018-10-30T13:53:22.613" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T13:53:22.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5481" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-30T08:36:46.363" Score="12" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;We often get questions that focus on how to do something using R (or Python, rarely SAS, MS Excel or others), with little to no statistical content. Such questions are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;off-topic&lt;/a&gt; and should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two alternatives we can vote for: either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because EITHER it is not about statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, or data visualization, OR it focuses on programming, debugging, or performing routine operations within a statistical computing platform. If the latter, you could try the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/793&quot;&gt;support links we maintain&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network -&gt; belongs on &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;stackoverflow.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, my concern is that I see what I believe is too many votes for the second option. Specifically, questions are being voted as &quot;belonging on SO&quot; that are actually &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a good fit for SO&lt;/a&gt;, typically by not containing a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve&quot;&gt;minimal working example&lt;/a&gt;. I assume (but have no data to back it up) that if these questions are indeed migrated to SO, they are closed there, too. More work all around. Such questions should have been closed with the first reason and message in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we improve the voting-to-close dialogue to help close voters find the best alternative? For instance, can we add &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(is the question actually a good fit for the target site, e.g., containing a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve&quot;&gt;minimal working example&lt;/a&gt; for StackOverflow?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to the &quot;belongs on another site&quot; alternative? Or can we include similar wording in the second step, where different target sites are proposed? (I assume the second step may be harder to customize for CV than the first.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, here is step 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/H3Rk3.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/H3Rk3.png&quot; alt=&quot;step 1&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here is step 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xhNq9.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xhNq9.png&quot; alt=&quot;step 2&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2018-10-30T08:38:31.400" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T08:38:31.400" Title="Improve closure-to-migrate voting" Tags="|feature-request|on-topic|closing-questions|migration|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5482" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5485" CreationDate="2018-10-30T17:59:53.607" Score="3" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Cross Validated post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/374470/i-have-a-question-i-want-to-ask-but-i-cant-find-the-appropriate-place-to-ask-it&quot;&gt;I have a question I want to ask but I can&amp;#39;t find the appropriate place to ask it&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&#xA;Is this a statistics question or something else? What tags should it have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225238" LastActivityDate="2018-10-31T15:42:22.463" Title="I can't find the place to ask my question" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5482" CreationDate="2018-10-30T18:38:13.160" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, your question is not appropriate for this site.  It seems to be about statistics in the sense of baseball statistics, that is, some number that is pertinent to describing or understanding some phenomenon.  In the sense used on this site, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;statistics&lt;/a&gt; has to do with &lt;em&gt;analyses&lt;/em&gt; of data in the service of some goal.  The key distinction here is that you want to get an actual number, whereas this site is for people wanting to know what they should do with the numbers they already have.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if there is any SE site that is appropriate for your question.  There is a site for people seeking data (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opendata.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;open data&lt;/a&gt;) that might be able to help you find that information; there is also a site for questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://economics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;economics&lt;/a&gt; that might have information to the extent that how much of the workforce in different industries would be what you call 'direct workers' might be a research topic in economics; similarly, there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://quant.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;quantitative finance&lt;/a&gt; site, and investors might care about the proportions of direct workers in different industries to help them make investment decisions; but I couldn't be confident any of those would think your question is a good fit.  Some [library / internet] 'shoe leather' research might be needed to track that information down.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T18:38:13.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5482" CreationDate="2018-10-31T14:19:15.127" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;What is the percentage of direct workers in an automotive production&#xA;  plant compared to all the employees?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;All of stackexchange&lt;/strong&gt; This question is too broad to be asked on any stackexchange website. The term (an automotive production plant) is too general and ambiguous. Automotive production plants are not all the same, thus without further defining the aim of the question or the context, it is not possible to give a conclusive answer (which 'automotive production plant' are we talking about?). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You would be better off searching in databases of scientific articles. E.g you could use: &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=manufacturing+overhead+automotive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=manufacturing+overhead+automotive&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where the second hit (in my case) gives an article with loads of information (it looks like roughly two thirds of the labor is direct labor). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1937-5956.1995.tb00297.x&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ITTNER, C.D. and MACDUFFIE, J.P., 1995. Explaining plant‐level differences in manufacturing overhead: Structural and executional cost drivers in the world auto industry. Production and Operations Management, 4(4), pp.312-334.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or you look further to get to something that fills your (unclear) needs.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Economics&lt;/strong&gt; If you would be able to better specify your question then I &lt;em&gt;guess&lt;/em&gt; that this question fits 'accounting' or 'management'.  Note that you can not ask this on the economics site (which would be most close) see &lt;a href=&quot;https://economics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Accounting is a separate discipline, and there is no StackExchange site dedicated to that matter yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might be able to frame it as business economics, but it really depends on what the context of your question is. If you explain the context of the question better then it will also be easier to see if there is a stackexchange site where the question might fit.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, you have got an interesting stackexchange history for this question with a lot of iterations of phrases like &lt;em&gt;&quot;don't post on this site &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x_n$&lt;/span&gt; go to &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x_{n+1}$&lt;/span&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mechanics.stackexchange.com/questions/60341/what-is-the-percentage-of-direct-workers-in-an-automotive-production-plant-compa&quot;&gt;Motor Vehicle Maintenance &amp;amp; Repair &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is not about vehicle maintenance or repair, consider trying the workplace stack&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/121730/what-is-the-percentage-of-direct-workers-in-an-automotive-production-plant-compa&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The workplace&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is not about navigating the workplace as explained in the help center &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://engineering.stackexchange.com/questions/24421/what-is-the-percentage-of-direct-workers-in-an-automotive-production-plant-compa&quot;&gt;Engineering&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I see that you are having troubles finding a good place to ask this question, it seems as if no community is for for it. Maybe you can ask where to ask on the stackexchange meta: meta.stackexchange.com/questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/317444/i-have-a-question-i-want-to-ask-but-i-cant-find-the-appropriate-place-to-ask-it&quot;&gt;meta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think you ought to modify the title, Meta is getting a lot of off-topic question that should be posted on Maths, SO, SU, etc. and&#xA;  this title looks like a ruse to bypass inspection. Saying that,&#xA;  wouldn't something connected with statistics be the place you're&#xA;  looking for? stats.stackexchange.com (Cross Validated) try posting on&#xA;  their meta page for guidance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/374470/i-have-a-question-i-want-to-ask-but-i-cant-find-the-appropriate-place-to-ask-it&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;cross-validated&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;CV Meta is for issues arising in the use of CV, not for asking where else you might ask a question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2018-10-31T15:42:22.463" LastActivityDate="2018-10-31T15:42:22.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5487" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5489" CreationDate="2018-11-05T21:12:20.927" Score="2" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;The SE universe has a &lt;strong&gt;&quot;comments are not for extended discussion&quot; policy&lt;/strong&gt;, with the effect that if such an extended discussion occurs, moderators intervene and &quot;move the discussion to chat&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a user that does not use chat -meaning that such a movement effectively kills the discussion for me. So I have the motive to ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;What are the &lt;em&gt;evidence-based&lt;/em&gt; arguments in favor of this policy?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally see none. I stress that &quot;general logical/plausible arguments&quot; are useless after all these years. They may have been useful in the beginning of the SE universe, but not anymore.&#xA;Is there any evidence that extended discussions in comments lower the quality of the SE sites content? Is there any evidence that they confuse users? And  is there any evidence specific to CV?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is certainly evidence that the policy disrupts useful accumulation of knowledge and pisses users off. Where is this evidence? It currently writes this post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PS:&lt;/strong&gt; I used also the tug &quot;bug&quot; because this is &quot;an erroneous behavior in the system that needs to be fixed&quot; (the human system in this instance).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28746" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-11-05T21:44:26.257" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T20:39:54.210" Title="Any evidence-based arguments in favor of the &quot;comments are not for extended discussion&quot; policy?" Tags="|discussion|comment|policy|moderation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5487" CreationDate="2018-11-05T22:58:55.690" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is more of a comment but it grew over-long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is &quot;why should such a policy exist&quot;, I can only say it's part of the original site design (so I guess, ask Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky what their reasons were and what evidence they might have considered for making it that way, though they have written a number of posts that give some hint of what things they were trying to &lt;em&gt;avoid&lt;/em&gt; building - on their personal blogs, in the stackoverflow blog in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2008/page/17/&quot;&gt;2008&lt;/a&gt; and 2009, and in other places) and that a network-wide policy discussion probably belongs on the network meta. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Alecos has explained that the remainder is not relevant to the intended question. I'll leave it here for the present, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is &quot;does a formal policy exist&quot; you can find numerous references to such a policy. For example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In relation to the present instance, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&lt;/a&gt; see especially &quot;When shouldn't I comment?&quot;, in particular the item, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Secondary discussion&lt;/strong&gt; or debating a controversial point&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The FAQ, specifically &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19756/how-do-comments-work&quot;&gt;How do comments work?&lt;/a&gt; - particularly &quot;when should comments be deleted?&quot; and &quot;Miscellaneous information&quot; in the answer&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But before we even need to go and find these specific words elsewhere, the fact that Stack Exchange got someone to code a tool to auto-move messages to chat and which posts that &lt;em&gt;not-for-extended-discussion&lt;/em&gt; comment itself suggests that it is official policy to do so (why would they spend money to provide mods on every site on the network with a tool to do something that was not a mod behavior they considered important behavior to encourage?) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While we're more tolerant on SE of informative comments that are not-quite-answers on our site than many other network sites (it's part of the nature of the topic, I think, though you see it to some extent on math.SE and mathoverflow for example), nevertheless comments are primarily designed for improving a post and in that role, are generally intended to be temporary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Extended discussion&lt;/em&gt; formally belongs on chat, by design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2018-11-05T23:34:28.180" LastActivityDate="2018-11-05T23:34:28.180" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5487" CreationDate="2018-11-05T23:43:51.963" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the actual harm done by an extended discussion in the comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An extended discussion in the comments obscures any other comments that do not belong to this discussion. Simply because they become hard to spot. Only 5 comments are visible without &quot;expanding&quot;; if there are 25 comments of a discussion between users @A and @B, then very few people will ever see a 26th comment by @C that might contain important criticism of the answer, or an important insight. Worse, @A and @B might go on to post another 25 comments after @C's one, in which case it is practically guaranteed that nobody else will ever see it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Extended discussions in the comments tend to escalate. Yes, I can imagine a civil and interesting &quot;extended discussion&quot; in the comments, but very often they get ugly. Even if nobody ends up raising their voice, at least one of the parties will often feel offended. SE wants to prevent this from happening by stating that it is not a platform for debates.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a discussion is ongoing, appears meaningful and remains civil, then I prefer moderators to let it go for some time before eventually moving the whole thing to chat when it's over anyway. However, if it starts to lose civility, I think it makes sense to move it away asap. That might have been the case for the discussion that has triggered this thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-11-12T20:39:54.210" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T20:39:54.210" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4567" CreationDate="2018-11-08T03:27:55.797" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the answer of user @scortchi we read&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Down-votes do tend to be sticky, which is a pity when the down-voted&#xA;  poster makes the effort to improve their post. I don't see any reason&#xA;  to suppose this is due to anything more than people's disinclination&#xA;  to keep on returning to a post they've down-voted to see whether it's&#xA;  been improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is exactly how we treat a crime: we punish the wrong-doer for the crime (bad post) and we also hope that punishment will contribute to better &lt;em&gt;future&lt;/em&gt; behavior (future posts). In the factual world this may be realistic since in most cases an action that has exceeded the threshold for a crime cannot be altered/undone. &lt;em&gt;But SE questions can&lt;/em&gt; - and by not following up on our downvotes, rewarding by removal of the downvote those posts that were improved, we forego the opportunity to beneficially exploit this additional flexibility.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When individuals (users) use rights &amp;amp; granted powers (downoting) in such an incomplete way, and there is no prospect for a change-of-mentality on the horizon, usually the only solution in sight is to have community representatives take up the duty to clean up (this is a large part of what public sectors are tasked with doing across the globe). In our case, our public sector is the moderators, and it would mean moderators being able and tasked with monitoring downvoted posts and removing downvotes from those that were improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28746" LastActivityDate="2018-11-08T03:27:55.797" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5493" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5494" CreationDate="2018-11-08T23:46:59.143" Score="14" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question concerns me personally, but some parts of it might also be of general interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the last week or so, I had been regularly reviewing first posts and late answers. Yesterday @gung told me that I should only tell users to use the self-study tag, not do it for them (I had been doing both). I acknowledged @gung's concern. (This short conversation took place via comments on my most recent post and has since been deleted.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when I next checked the review queues, I found that I no longer had access to them. The stated reason was &quot;Too many of your reviews were rejected&quot;. I have several comments / questions about this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After acknowledging @gung's point (which I think is very valid), I did not review any more posts. Thus it felt like I was never even given a chance to &quot;improve my ways&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a way I can see which of my reviews were rejected and why? (I understand from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2517/182174&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2147/182174&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;the overview of moderator tools&lt;/a&gt; that some of this information is only available to user with 10k in reputation or more.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do people get banned from the review queues after hitting some threshold or do moderators manually ban them?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a specific cool-off period after which banned users can access the review queues again or will that be at the discretion of moderators?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Let me add that it is not my intention to criticize the work of our tireless moderators.&lt;/strong&gt; This site has been very helpful to me on occasion and I try to give back a bit through writing a few answers when I can and to contribute my two cents to the moderation of the site. I am happy to respond to whatever feedback I get and also to stay away from the review queues if I'm doing more harm than good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="182174" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T07:23:06.113" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T07:23:06.113" Title="How can I figure out why my reviewer privileges were revoked and how can I get them back?" Tags="|discussion|support|moderation|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5493" CreationDate="2018-11-09T00:34:58.303" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your efforts to try to improve the site are appreciated! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, if enough reviews / suggested edits are rejected you'll automatically generate a (temporary) ban without any intervention by a moderator. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should lift in a few days. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[If it's still there on Monday, please notify a moderator; we should be able to reverse it.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2018-11-09T00:34:58.303" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5495" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5499" CreationDate="2018-11-09T09:57:16.803" Score="10" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/376141/what-is-a-distribution-over-functions&quot;&gt;What is a distribution over functions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is a duplicate of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2297424/extending-a-distribution-over-samples-to-a-distribution-over-functions&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2297424/extending-a-distribution-over-samples-to-a-distribution-over-functions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but I can't close it as a duplicate since it's been asked on a different site. What should I do? Copying the other answer here seems a waste of space, and closing as off-topic is wrong, IMO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T13:13:51.583" Title="What to do with a question which is a duplicate of a question on Math SE" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5495" CreationDate="2018-11-09T10:46:03.167" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This applies to examples of duplicates that are cross-postings by one individual. That is not the case with the original example, but quite often occurs.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I notice this I usually (should) refer the poster to the advice within &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please note, however, that cross-posting is not encouraged on SE&#xA;  sites. Choose one best location to post your question. Later, if it&#xA;  proves better suited on another site, it can be migrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A related issue is when you notice that (essentially) the same question has been posted in a forum outside Stack Exchange. I usually post a link on CV (or SO, where I am fairly active)  to the other discussion and underline that it's polite to tell people about cross-posting elsewhere. And vice versa, if I am active at the other place. Other forums may have policies on cross-posting that may apply. Statalist has an explicit policy that you are asked to tell people about cross-posting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The principles here are simple, but perhaps worth spelling out: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It can be genuinely difficult, even for people familiar with various sites, to know which is the best place to ask a particular question. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It can be a waste of your time and effort if you answer on one forum when there's already a good answer elsewhere. (There might be some gain for the person answering in the fun or even learning that answering a question imparts, but my guess is that most people tempted to answer a question would rather know if the question has been asked, and so possibly answered, elsewhere.) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People interested in an answer will presumably want to know if an answer may exist elsewhere. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some people regard cross-posting as offensive in so far as the poster is implying that the community can't be trusted to give a good answer and/or that the poster does not care about, or has not thought carefully enough about, the possibility of duplicated effort. I don't go that far personally -- any offence is usually unintentional -- but it's important that posters know that such opinions exist. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've encountered the argument that cross-posting is a good idea because very few people use all the sites in question. But it's because that is so that there is a need to tell people about it. Cross-posting would only be obvious if everyone constantly visited every possible site in a field, which isn't the case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="58675" LastEditDate="2018-11-09T12:59:39.523" LastActivityDate="2018-11-09T12:59:39.523" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5495" CreationDate="2018-11-12T08:43:57.277" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This applies to examples of duplicates that are not cross-postings by one individual. And, of course, that are on-topic here.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can't close it as a duplicate, &amp;amp; the post on Maths won't be found by anyone searching CV:&#xA;a post on another SE site has to be treated in the same way as any other external reference source. So, if that post's useful, link to it in a comment, or in an answer containing at least a brief account of what is to be found there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2018-11-12T13:13:51.583" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T13:13:51.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4567" CreationDate="2018-11-13T20:48:42.247" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several points made here. Currently, there is little oversight for downvoting, perhaps this is not as constructive as it could be. For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) We routinely cast closure votes based upon criteria, and closures can be reversed. If we were to institute something along those lines for downvoting, the quality of downvoting might approach that of question closure, but might have to be individualized for each downvoter. Therein, the down-voter would choose an approved reason for down-voting. Then, we could thus have a review cue for edited Q/A for down-vote reversal by a third party or parties. For example, this could be required for users with less that 500 reputation, so as to train users to down vote appropriately. With or without a reputation threshold for review, this may offer some remedy for 'sticky' down votes, and oversight for 'strategic' down voting, e.g., down voting someone else's answer for spite of the 'How dare you compete with my answer?' type, or down voting to vandalize posts as a form of entertainment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Expert opinion is more needed for down voting for cause than recognition of cause for up voting, for example, currently we can up vote with 15+ reputation and down vote with 125+ reputation. The thinking on this is that it may not be 'enough' of a difference, but at least it is 'something'. (This is human nature, for example, people recognize more concepts (or words) than they are capable of using properly.) I would like to see this 125+ increased if we do not review downvotes. As 200+ is the threshold for being in the leagues, I do not see why someone with so low a reputation as to not be in the leagues should be trusted to issue a down vote that is never reviewed.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) There is currently no limit to the percentage of downvotes one can issue. How would the reader feel about a user who never upvotes? Would that be someone who the reader would be comfortable with to review the reader's posts? Perhaps we should consider behaviour limits of some type, for example, not allowing more than 20% down votes. &lt;code&gt;Down vote quota exceeded. You must up vote 4 more Q/A to down vote again.&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) Downvote avoidance strategies. (a) I note that the use of flippant language, personification, mixed metaphors, and other forms of informal language, even when it is intended to be merely entertaining, or less sterile than formal expression, that it can attract down-votes. (b) I sometimes lose longer posts that are in the process of being edited. Use of the back arrow (above) may be the remedy for this rather than posting incomplete text to obviate incomplete text, non-meritorious, down-voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="99274" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T20:55:57.263" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T20:55:57.263" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5502" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-15T11:54:31.110" Score="6" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/close/207243&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was recently closed as duplicate. I agree with this, but the title is now the title of the older question which is more restrictive than that of the new one (the old one is about two groups, the new one is about a collection). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should be done in cases like this? Should we edit the title of the old question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-11-15T23:06:56.683" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T23:06:56.683" Title="Modifying the title of duplicate questions" Tags="|discussion|editing|exact-duplicates|title|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5502" CreationDate="2018-11-15T12:48:27.697" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question's an old one with a correct, clear, accepted answer that applies to the more general case, so I think we can be bold in editing; it's got many views, &amp;amp; duplicates linking to it, so I think we should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T12:48:27.697" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5505" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-22T16:29:17.230" Score="8" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Example case&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following question &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/224749/unable-to-resolve-the-following-parameters-jags-error-for-latent-class-model&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Unable to resolve the following parameters:&amp;quot; jags error for Latent Class Model&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is a question that is more than two years old now. It has just been bumped up by community for the reason &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question has answers that may be good or bad; the system has marked it active so that they can be reviewed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with that question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is not very easy to understand the exact problem (possibly on the edge of off-topic because it is sort of debugging, the underlying problem might be statistical but it is not stated in an explicit clear way)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The original poster has not been on the website since more than two years.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should we deal with such paralyzed questions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the one hand I might think that closing and deletion is the only way to 'finish' such questions because the original poster is unlikely gonna be around to accept answers or provide further information on the question (e.g. explain ambiguities, clarify text, provide original data, provide code example/output, etc.) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the other hand sometimes those questions may contribute to the site, and they are only not very pretty or clearly written.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In more general terms (I do not necessarily wish to discuss the particular question which might lead to a simple answer 'just close it')&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2018-11-22T16:39:59.253" LastActivityDate="2018-11-22T18:03:44.733" Title="How to deal with paralysed questions where the Original Poster is inactive?" Tags="|discussion|old-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5506" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-22T18:00:36.193" Score="9" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I received the requests for reviewing the questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among them there are questions related to machine learning which I have not any knowledge. Is there any way (for example, modify my profile) such that the questions with machine learning tag will not come to my queue of questions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158565" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-11-23T12:47:34.557" LastActivityDate="2018-11-25T00:47:53.943" Title="Filter for questions for review" Tags="|support|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5505" CreationDate="2018-11-22T18:03:44.733" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, if a question meets reasonable criteria for closure, it should be closed.  It doesn't matter if the question is new or old, or if the poster is active or inactive, etc.  Conversely (but similarly), if a question is good (clear, on topic, etc.) it should stay open, even if it is old and the poster is long gone.  The issue then is what to do with borderline situations.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, if there is an older question that might need some interaction from the OP, but the OP is unlikely to return, I would lean towards closing.  First, I have long thought that the standards for closing old and unattended questions should be somewhat less generous than new questions where the OP is actively engaged.  Second, if a question needs some attention from the OP, and won't be able to get it, it will most likely just linger in limbo.  That doesn't do anyone any good.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I gather that part of your interest in this question is that you believe it might be valuable for the site, if tightened up just a little bit and given a good answer.  So let's add the condition that the thread at issue has a lot of potential.  However, from above, it still needs a little more from the OP, and it still won't get it.  In this case, I think the ideal solution would be to close it and ask a similar question that would afford the answer you believe would benefit the site, but that does not include any of the lingering ambiguities that hamper the current question.  Always remember that you can ask and answer your own question on SE sites.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2018-11-22T18:03:44.733" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5506" CreationDate="2018-11-22T22:50:27.697" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;While you can filter by tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kbNvpm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kbNvpm.png&quot; alt=&quot;filter link at top of Close Review screen&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you can do this within queues for some tag-reasons but not others (I unchecked &quot;off-topic&quot; here since you don't need to know as much about a topic to see a post is off topic for our site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other places in StackExchange (searches, watched-vs-ignored tags), tag-filtering allows you to remove tags (using -[tagname]):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/P9GBgm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/P9GBgm.png&quot; alt=&quot;using &amp;quot;-&amp;quot; in front of tag to filter it out&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.... but - for reasons I cannot fathom - it turns out that this doesn't work for reviews (!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qC6Mx.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qC6Mx.png&quot; alt=&quot;Showing that the &amp;quot;-&amp;quot; gets stripped&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes the tag filter of only marginal value for your needs; we would need to take it up in the network meta -- meta.stackexchange.com. Either you or I could do it, but it's probably best if you take it up -- do search first for duplicates however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2018-11-25T00:47:53.943" LastActivityDate="2018-11-25T00:47:53.943" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5509" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-23T18:36:29.500" Score="3" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;From its excerpt:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Calibration can refer to predicting an explanatory variable from an observation of the dependent variable; to adjustment of measurements to agree with value of some standard; to transform classifier scores into class membership probabilities; etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are quite unrelated uses sharing the same tag, only for language reasons. Especially the first mentioned use, inverse prediction, is quite unrelated to other uses. Should we split this and introduce a new tag 'inverse-prediction' (or in some other way)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2018-11-24T01:14:47.270" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T01:14:47.270" Title="The tag [calibration]" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5511" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-25T02:33:48.693" Score="5" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is our stance on website recommendation questions?  Are they on-topic or off-topic? Assume that the website recommendation pertains to statistics / machine learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any web-based demo that returns the k nearest words given a word using GloVes (English)? &lt;a href=&quot;http://bionlp-www.utu.fi/wv_demo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://bionlp-www.utu.fi/wv_demo&lt;/a&gt; is great but only has word2vec.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5Po8X.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5Po8X.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2018-11-25T03:12:54.940" Title="What is our stance on website recommendation questions?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5511" CreationDate="2018-11-25T03:12:54.940" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The example you give certainly seems off topic, but let's assume that the recommendation request would be on topic (which seems to be the intent of this question).  In that case, the thread could fall within the scope of our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/references&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;references&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;references&lt;/a&gt; tag.  Indeed, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=[references]%20website%20is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;a number of requests for website recommendations&lt;/a&gt; under that tag.  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/7351/&quot;&gt;top voted thread&lt;/a&gt; states, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't want to read a Bayesian textbook just yet. I'd prefer to read from a source (website preferred)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking for a website that, say, provides a tutorial is clearly on topic.  That thread is old and has never been a candidate for closure.  It is highly viewed, highly upvoted, and with several upvoted answers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2018-11-25T03:12:54.940" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2888" CreationDate="2018-11-26T04:24:22.363" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/users/805/glen-b&quot;&gt;Glen_b&lt;/a&gt; here, but more emphatically.  Once a question has been asked and has received an answer, it is not appropriate for the OP to change the question.  That wastes the time of the person who answered, and gives the false impression that they did not answer the question correctly.  Once answers have come in, edits to the question should be limited to refining it to be clear; it is not appropriate to change the substance of the question in a way that renders existing answers defunct.  If the OP wishes to change the substance of the question then he/she should instead ask a new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the fairest thing here is to flag the inappropriate edits to the question and have moderators roll-back the edits so that the original question stands.  This could be augmented by a comment to the OP recommending that they ask a new question.  Although Glen gives some other possibilities in his answer, as second-best cases, I am of the view that the edits should be rolled-back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173082" LastActivityDate="2018-11-26T04:24:22.363" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5514" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5518" CreationDate="2018-11-26T16:25:49.933" Score="15" ViewCount="457" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found that quite a few tags are present at each of these sites in the SE universe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Artificial Intelligence (AI)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Data Science (DS)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Cross Validated (CV)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;reinforcement-learning&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reinforcement-learning&quot;&gt;AI&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reinforcement-learning&quot;&gt;DS&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reinforcement-learning&quot;&gt;CV&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;neural-network(s)&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/neural-networks&quot;&gt;AI&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/neural-network&quot;&gt;DS&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/neural-networks&quot;&gt;CV&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;deep-learning&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/deep-learning&quot;&gt;AI&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/deep-learning&quot;&gt;DS&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/deep-learning&quot;&gt;CV&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering the descriptions of these SE sites doesn't help in drawing clear boundaries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[Artificial Intelligence]&lt;/strong&gt; Q&amp;amp;A for people interested in conceptual questions about life and challenges in a world where &amp;quot;cognitive&amp;quot; functions can be mimicked in purely digital environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[Data Science]&lt;/strong&gt; Q&amp;amp;A for Data science professionals, Machine Learning specialists, and those interested in learning more about the field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[Cross Validated]&lt;/strong&gt; Q&amp;amp;A for people interested in statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, and data visualization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And neither do the tag descriptions, for example &lt;em&gt;reinforcement-learning&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[Artificial Intelligence]&lt;/strong&gt; For questions related to learning controlled by external positive reinforcement or negative feedback signal or both, where learning and use of what has been thus far learned occur concurrently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[Data Science]&lt;/strong&gt; Area of machine learning concerned with how software agents ought to take actions in an environment so as to maximize some notion of cumulative reward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[Cross Validated]&lt;/strong&gt; A set of dynamic strategies by which an algorithm can learn the structure of an environment online by adaptively taking actions associated with different rewards so as to maximize the rewards earned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the site description for AI seems to invite only conceptual questions rather than specific or detailing ones, surveying the posted questions reveals a different trend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example tagged &lt;em&gt;reinforcement-learning&lt;/em&gt; at &lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reinforcement-learning&quot;&gt;Artificial Intelligence&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.stackexchange.com/q/9173/13008&quot;&gt;DQN it's not working properly&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.stackexchange.com/q/9085/13008&quot;&gt;Why are all the actions converging to the same index?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.stackexchange.com/q/9068/13008&quot;&gt;Q-Learning fails to converge even after 50K iterations for a simple board game - What could be the reason for this?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions are quite specific and not conceptual (in a sense that they ask about implementation details or aspects specific to a problem).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surveying the first few pages of the &lt;em&gt;reinforcement-learning&lt;/em&gt; tag at &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reinforcement-learning&quot;&gt;Data Science&lt;/a&gt; on the other hand created the impression of an excess of conceptual questions on that site and the same is observed for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reinforcement-learning&quot;&gt;Cross Validated&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All these sites support MathJax rendering, in favor of conceptual questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Questions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the obvious dilemma (actually &amp;quot;trilemma&amp;quot;) is, if I have a question about any of these shared-tag topics, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;... which SE site should I prefer for posting that question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;... is there a preference regarding conceptual / (implementation-) specific questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;... is cross-posting considered bad manners?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also are there any attempts in merging these SE sites into a single one, in order to merge the corresponding knowledge and competences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Note&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I posted this questions here, at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Cross Validated Meta&lt;/a&gt;, because Cross Validated appeared topmost at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/sites#&quot;&gt;SE sites&lt;/a&gt;, hosting most of the questions, considering the above three candidates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150976" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T15:28:10.733" Title="Overlap with ai.stackexchange and datascience.stackexchange" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|cross-posting|datascience-stackexchange|ai-stackexchange|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5515" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-11-26T20:12:04.170" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-11-26T20:12:04.170" LastActivityDate="2018-11-26T20:12:04.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5516" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-11-26T20:12:04.170" Score="0" Body="Artificial Intelligence is a part of the Stack Exchange network featuring conceptual questions about life and challenges in a world where &quot;cognitive&quot; functions can be mimicked in purely digital environment [AI.SE]" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-11-26T20:12:04.170" LastActivityDate="2018-11-26T20:12:04.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3031" CreationDate="2018-11-27T14:42:58.830" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/repeatability&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;repeatability&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;repeatability&lt;/a&gt; tag, with 26 threads, and no excerpt or wiki. Some of the questions are clearly about the intra-class correlation, but others may be about other topics.  The current threads could be retagged, and &lt;code&gt;[repeatability]&lt;/code&gt; can be deleted automatically after 24 hours.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2018-11-27T14:42:58.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5514" CreationDate="2018-11-27T15:29:49.507" Score="28" Body="&lt;h1&gt;TL;DR&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Machine learning, deep learning and reinforcement learning are all on-topic here, but we ask that questions not be primarily concerned with programming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Preamble&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not active on DSCI.SE or AI.SE so I have no deep understanding of what is on-topic on those fora. However, I have been active on stats.SE for several years and I regularly participate in the review queues and meta.stats.SE. Moreover, my specialization is machine learning, neural networks and I've started learning about reinforcement learning, so I feel that I can speak to your question with respect to stats.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Machine learning is a subfield of statistics, and this is a statistics forum&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've said it before and I'll say it again, &quot;machine learning&quot; and &quot;data science&quot; are terms that you use in place of &quot;statistics&quot; when you want to double the fees on your rate card. Machine learning is just another kind of statistical specialization, among other specializations such as time series analysis or mixed effects modeling. Despite its novelty, machine learning is concerned with core statistical concepts such as random variables, quantifying uncertainty, prediction and forecasts. In this light, &lt;strong&gt;questions about machine learning are squarely on-topic here&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Some words about code&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main caveat to keep in mind is that questions which are &lt;em&gt;primarily&lt;/em&gt; concerned with how to accomplish some task using a programming language are not on-topic here. This is because Stack Overflow already exists, and there would be no point in duplicating all of the &quot;how do I __ in R?&quot; and &quot;how do I __ in &lt;code&gt;sklearn&lt;/code&gt;?&quot; questions here. These questions already have high-quality answers from programmers; why would you want another answer from a statistician? Our core competency is statistics, not programming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most modern statistics involves some level of computer programming, so sometimes it is unclear where to draw the line, or the quoted code is purely incidental, or there are other reasons that a question that includes code is more about statistics than it is about programming. It's a subtle issue, and I encourage other reviewers to be thoughtful when considering whether a question that contains a code block is better open than closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not clear where on the programming-statistics continuum your question falls. If you're trying to fix a bug, or improve the efficiency of code, that's probably off-topic at stats.SE, but if you have a question about statistics and code is more-or-less incidental or expository to your statistical question, then it's probably on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One test I use when questions in the Close queue is whether the question is &lt;em&gt;completely answered&lt;/em&gt; with some computer code; if it is, then the question is probably more about programming than statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Cross-posting is frowned upon&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking the exact same question in two or more fora is frowned upon because it duplicates effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only reason to ask similar questions in two places is because you want to have answers from clearly distinct perspectives. Glen_b came up with a nice example for this: suppose you ask a question about building a fence in your yard on DIY.SE (because you learn about home improvement), but you're not sure about the legal implications (because you don't want to annex some of your neighbor's yard); you ask a similar question on law.SE. &lt;em&gt;This is fine,&lt;/em&gt; but do make it clear that you're interested in &lt;em&gt;two distinct answers&lt;/em&gt;, one about home improvement and one about minimizing legal risk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Why do users face this trilemma?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The creation of three distinct fora which largely overlap is very confusing to new users. It's the direct result of the Area51 process, which allows new SE websites to be created without the intervention of common sense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simultaneously, hapless undergraduates are convinced that because &quot;machine learning&quot; and &quot;data science&quot; are courses taught in the computer science department of their universities, they must be wholly unique fields of study with only a historical relationship to the math or statistics departments; when these students are loosed upon the world, they carry with them their policing of disciplinary boundaries and zealously enforce their misconceptions when they graduate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also confusing to veteran users like me, because SE was designed around creating a durable repository of high-quality questions and answers; duplicate questions are addressed by closing questions as duplicates of the existing, high-quality content. Creating nearly-identical fora directly undermines that objective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My view is that SE websites should strive to be as mutually exclusive as possible. The SE team even built a feature to accommodate confused users: if users post a question in the wrong place, it can easily be migrated to the correct forum. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AI.SE and DSCI.SE would be valuable additions to the SE network &lt;em&gt;if their focus were on the topics not covered by stats.SE&lt;/em&gt;. I'm hard-pressed to find a question that is on-topic here but not on-topic at DSCI.SE; does this imply that we should duplicate every question and every answer on DSCI.SE? If &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;, why does it exist? &lt;em&gt;If &lt;strong&gt;so&lt;/strong&gt;, why does it exist?&lt;/em&gt; As it stands, the only reason for DSCI.SE to exist is to accommodate users unfamiliar with the term &quot;statistics,&quot; but we can easily fix that by redirecting DSCI.SE.com to stats.SE.com.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Occasionally, this topic has been discussed on meta.DSCI.SE and meta.AI.SE, and it is common to see users of those websites claim that machine learning, neural networks, deep learning and reinforcement learning are not on-topic on stat.SE. &lt;strong&gt;These users are simply wrong.&lt;/strong&gt; Machine learning is statistics, and stat.SE is a statistics forum. (Examples of such meta threads are easy enough to find; I don't really want to provoke any specific users by naming them here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When considering arguments in favor of DSCI.SE, one quickly realizes that the same arguments can argue in favor of creating time-series.SE, spatial-data.SE, bayes.SE, missing-data.SE, regression.SE, probability.SE and a specialized SE website for every other statistical topic. I can see no useful purpose for such fine-grained distinctions. Moreover, time-series.SE and spatial-data.SE leave no obvious home for spatio-temporal questions, which can find a home in neither because it includes both topics. Users will be fragmented across the statistical archipelago; total traffic to each website will be much smaller; more questions will be posted to the wrong fora to the consternation of all involved; all users will chafe under the pointless friction of this system and depart for Reddit, Twitter, Quora or Yahoo! Answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2018-12-05T15:28:10.733" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T15:28:10.733" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5519" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5521" CreationDate="2018-11-28T18:14:20.397" Score="8" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that stock trading is a prominent theme among &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reinforcement-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reinforcement-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reinforcement-learning&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/neural-networks&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;neural-networks&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;neural-networks&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/deep-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;deep-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;deep-learning&lt;/a&gt; questions. I think this is because (1) stock trading is an easy &lt;em&gt;problem&lt;/em&gt; to understand (2) the data is readily available and (3) striking it rich on the stock market is a popular fantasy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this warrant the creation of a canonical thread? What should that thread address?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because I'm not aware of another substantive NN/DNN/ML topic which consistently attracts questions. The closest runner-up that I can recall are questions about using neural networks to fit sine waves. (This likely reflects my own biases, since I read most &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/neural-networks&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;neural-networks&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;neural-networks&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/deep-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;deep-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;deep-learning&lt;/a&gt; questions but a much smaller fraction of other questions. Most of these threads are found in this search: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=stock+trade&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=stock+trade&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, the subject matter itself is of secondary importance on stats.SE and users are asking methodological questions about how to design an experiment or account for an unusual quirk of their data (dependency structure such as spatial or temporal correlation, mixed effects, random effects, etc.). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a statistical topic, there are some general comments which would appear to apply to all of the shallow stock trading questions, such as how one might frame the discrete choices available to the model (buy, sell, hold, short, etc.) as a reinforcement or more conventional approach. This seems like it's on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the broadest versions of these questions are perhaps not suitable because they veer into quantitative finance. The most general question, &quot;How do I make a profitable stock trading algorithm?&quot; must certainly require a deep understanding of QF because feature engineering (how to represent financial data in a manner that is amenable to your algorithm) and computer engineering (how to load and process data to execute trades before your decision is &quot;stale&quot;). I think those kinds of questions are best answered by QF.SE, since it is certainly their core topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is motivated by this thread, where I opted to write a rather general answer because I had happened to spend a few dreadful weeks learning about QF. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/377595/how-to-train-a-stock-trading-neural-network-so-that-the-profit-parameter-is-ma/377675#377675&quot;&gt;How to train a stock trading neural network so that the &amp;#39;profit&amp;#39; parameter is maximized?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2018-11-29T01:02:12.003" LastActivityDate="2018-12-06T04:18:05.033" Title="Do we need a canonical thread about stock trading? What would it address?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5514" CreationDate="2018-11-29T10:45:31.987" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I quite regularly visit SE DataScience, SE StackOverflow and SE CrossValidated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I often have the impression that some question fits best on another SE platform but usually the person is kindly asked to place the question elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term data science per se generates some misunderstanding, but I think we can agree that it has now acquired much more sense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the famous McConway diagram, which has now been updated or simply modified by several people, the field is defined according to the interplay of three main sets of skills which are partly related to different SE platforms: coding (SE StackOverflow), math (SE Mathematics) &amp;amp; statistics (SE CrossValidated), subject expertise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me a good question on SE DataScience is one related to the availability or best use of routines/packages for doing some task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0FZ0z.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0FZ0z.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225660" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2018-11-29T14:19:19.047" LastActivityDate="2018-11-29T14:19:19.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5519" CreationDate="2018-11-29T15:43:33.947" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I doubt we really need canonical threads on different subject matter for data.  It might be helpful to have canonical threads on different data types (binomial vs. normal), but not the meaning behind the numbers (e.g., presence of headache vs. not, presence of gastric distress vs. not, etc.).  That seems to me like it negates the need for a canonical stock market thread.  I'm not saying it should be off limits, but I mostly don't think it makes sense.  In particular, the follow-up question, &quot;What would it address?&quot; seems like a major warning sign.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the specific case of the stock market (or generalize to include other investment options, such as bonds, commodities, forex, etc.), I do see some value in a short thread that explains &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/433831&quot;&gt;the principle of no arbitrage&lt;/a&gt;, simply because there is no escaping the occasional ignorant question.  However, we arguably already have that: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/21395/&quot;&gt;What machine learning algorithm can be used to predict the stock market?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if there were a type of question, say about neural networks, that is contextualized in the stock market and pops up commonly, but is always poorly asked, then a canonical thread on that issue would be helpful.  Moreover, it would probably be most helpful to use the stock market as the example situation to motivate the question.  I don't follow either investing or these types of questions on CV well enough to provide a great example, but something like modeling / forecasting a mean when the error variance changes unpredictably might be a the sort of thing where it would be helpful.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2018-11-29T15:43:33.947" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4567" CreationDate="2018-12-05T00:35:17.810" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some research to examine downvoting was performed. The top 500 CV users with respect to reputation were examined with respect to clusters of downvotes using visual inspection then k-means for two populations performed with Mathematica v. 13.0.0.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sjW4H.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sjW4H.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This shows three clusters. Note that reciprocal scaling was used on the &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$y$&lt;/span&gt;-axis to produce a dependent variable distribution that was indistinguishable from a uniform distribution. Also, square root transformation of the &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x$&lt;/span&gt;-axis data removed much of the heavy right-tailed appearance. Visual inspection was used to identify the zero percentage downvoter population as cluster analysis proved problematic for that purpose. Subsequently, k-means did a good job of isolating two populations that were relatively independent of reputation level. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addendum&lt;/strong&gt; Given the copious feedback, I did further processing. @NickCox suggested using folded square root of percentage downvotes, &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\sqrt{x}-\sqrt{100-x}$&lt;/span&gt;, on the &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x$&lt;/span&gt;-axis. This worked well in SPSS in version 13, (old but good), using two-step cluster analysis followed by k-means for a variable number of clusters with the best clustering chosen by BIC. This show the following plot. Two-step cluster analysis showed that classification by reciprocal reputation failed &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$t$&lt;/span&gt;-testing. The cluster data forwarded to k-means then yielded two clusters as below. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fq4ha.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fq4ha.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has similar cluster results to those achieved prior. Once again the visually identified clustering at 0% downvoting is obvious, but in this case was selected &lt;em&gt;post hoc&lt;/em&gt;. The percentage breakdown is &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IT1kb.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IT1kb.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@NickCox suggests that downvoting is a method of removing low quality posts. Therein is a big hint as to what is going on. What's in a downvote? On a social media site based not on evidence but personal taste, voting is like/dislike. On an evidence based site, more like ours, a vote should, to my way of thinking at least, more plausibly suggest correct/incorrect material. What appears to me to be lacking, and needed on our site is some method of indicating material that is contributory/non-contributory to the site. For example, suppose a question is &lt;strong&gt;Why does &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$2+2=4$&lt;/span&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;. Obviously, this is not on the correct/incorrect axis but it appears to add little to the site's compendium of knowledge; it is non-contributory. Thus, currently downvoting is a mixture of two axes &quot;like/dislike&quot; and &quot;correct/incorrect&quot;. That, I think, is what allowed k-means to identify the split in population at circa 12% downvoting rate. Is there any evidence to support this? The SPSS histogram resulting from the three clusters, one of them identified visually at 0% is... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tJjz6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tJjz6.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, we ask if the non-0% clusters follow some recognizable distribution type. Mathematica's FindDistribution routine was applied to this data and it selected two Weibull (squared) distributions as the most likely fits from its extensive library of distributions. That is shown next. &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8mgGn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8mgGn.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Weibull distributions also best fit the original downvote data without square rooting. No matter how I tried to fit the histogram data, the results were not significantly different from Weibull distributions. In absolute terms, this cannot be a Weibull distribution as such a distribution has values beyond 100% downvoting. However, the Weibull result may be relevant as one interpretation of the Weibull distribution relates to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;diffusion of innovation&lt;/a&gt;. As per &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weibull_distribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Weibull&lt;/a&gt; &quot;In the context of diffusion of innovations, the Weibull distribution is a &quot;pure&quot; imitation/rejection model...In the context of the diffusion of innovations, this [&lt;em&gt;Sic&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\alpha&amp;gt;1$&lt;/span&gt; (As it is herein), where &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\alpha$&lt;/span&gt; is the Weibull shape parameter] means positive word of mouth: the hazard function is a monotonically increasing function of the proportion of adopters. The function is first convex, then concave with an inflexion point at &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$1-e^{-1/\alpha}$&lt;/span&gt; [&lt;em&gt;Sic&lt;/em&gt;, notation translated]&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, there is statistical evidence for two groups of adopters beyond the 0% group, who are &quot;non-adopters&quot;. This is evidence for an admixture of downvoting strategies that does not agree with the opinion as voiced in some comments that such a phenomenon does not exist in this data. Such an admixture of voting patterns for downvoting is opaque to the recipient of such votes. That is, although we can sort this out statistically, the individual downvote recipient has no such clues, which implies that downvoting is not efficient and not clean from the user's POV. One remedy for this could be to shunt some of this downvoting in the high downvoting rate category to a closure vote on the contributory/non-contributory opinion axis as this would provide clarity as to what a downvote means for the user while doing a more direct job of addressing material that is non-contributory for the more expert reviewer, as follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CpAZH.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CpAZH.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The selections &lt;code&gt;off topic&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;too broad&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;primarily opinion based&lt;/code&gt; are  currently being used as alternatives for &lt;code&gt;not-contributory&lt;/code&gt;. Those alternatives, even taken together, do not span &lt;code&gt;not-contributory&lt;/code&gt; such that current practice is not really addressing the need to prune the site for content that is just not up to par value for expert opinion; &lt;code&gt;low quality&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;not expert question&lt;/code&gt; and so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For answers, there is no closure voting &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;. However, there is flagging which provides similar functionality, but requires review at my reputation level.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will continue editing and collating to de-bulk and organize a bit better. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="99274" LastEditDate="2018-12-08T10:27:55.397" LastActivityDate="2018-12-08T10:27:55.397" CommentCount="35" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5519" CreationDate="2018-12-06T04:18:05.033" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would avoid it.  This is my area of research.  The two theories that won Nobel prizes were empirically foreclosed as wrong starting in 1963 and have had NO successful validation studies.  ANNs as universal function approximators tend to fall into traps that you see in the traditional methodologies and don't work out of sample.  It only looks easy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="140300" LastActivityDate="2018-12-06T04:18:05.033" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5524" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-08T06:44:41.293" Score="4" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/374062/least-square-estimators-for-beta-0-and-beta-1-and-uncorrelated-relation-b&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/374062/least-square-estimators-for-beta-0-and-beta-1-and-uncorrelated-relation-b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am surprised that was deleted because there is nothing wrong there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked a question, added my solution and asked people to verify if it was correct    (so fits the rules of the site) and puff! it's gone. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="224971" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2019-01-09T02:05:03.467" LastActivityDate="2019-02-09T15:41:36.283" Title="Why was my question deleted if It was not even on hold nor closed?" Tags="|support|questions|deleted-questions|auto-delete|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4567" CreationDate="2018-12-10T16:01:23.653" Score="11" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I for one am swearing off of downvoting, take that pledge with me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just for the record: I have (long time ago) downvoted this question, two (!) of your answers, Alecos's answer, and the answer by SmallChess. I have upvoted Scortchi's and Nick's answers, and have now also upvoted your most recent answer for its nice figures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many other people have voted similarly and this is why we have two excellent answers appearing on the top of this page while less satisfactory answers appear below and some of them are even grayed out in the very bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks, StackExchange, for providing such a reasonable mechanism. Personally, I am certainly &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; going to stop downvoting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2018-12-10T21:33:43.033" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T21:33:43.033" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5526" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5527" CreationDate="2018-12-10T17:53:13.007" Score="18" ViewCount="325" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/381309/cobbler-needed-right-now&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/381309/cobbler-needed-right-now&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is a &quot;question&quot; from a bot or a troll.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we ever bypass &quot;vote to close&quot; and use the flag function if a Q is complete nonsense like this? Or is close -&gt; off-topic -&gt; &quot;other reason&quot; still the preferred approach?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2018-12-10T18:36:06.970" LastActivityDate="2019-01-09T14:17:26.590" Title="Do you flag absolute nonsense questions?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5526" CreationDate="2018-12-10T18:30:15.610" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order of priority:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Flag the post for moderator attention.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Downvote the post.  (As Glen_b helpfully notes in a comment, if you plan to do this, do it first, because if yours is the deciding vote to delete, you won't be able to downvote afterwards.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you have enough reputation, vote to delete the post.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you have enough reputation, vote to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you have the privileges to edit posts and the post is particularly obnoxious, consider editing out the offensive portions in the meantime.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some explanation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;re (1): Moderators respond to the flag by tracking any other &quot;contributions&quot; made by the same individual and dealing with them all at once if necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;re (2): When a new user's first few posts are extensively downvoted, that user is automatically blocked from posting more material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;re (3): Posts can be both closed and deleted.  Deletion makes them invisible to most users and so is preferred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;re (5): It's best not to edit a post unless it's obnoxious, because retaining the original text makes it easier for moderators to review it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a mod is present (which we usually are 24/7 due to our worldwide distribution) then the response to your flag is often swift.  On this site, moderators typically have responded within minutes, if not within seconds, to such material.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2019-01-09T14:17:26.590" LastActivityDate="2019-01-09T14:17:26.590" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5524" CreationDate="2018-12-10T19:29:58.873" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Just expanding on comments so that this has a answer...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your post satisfied the requirements for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;automated deletion by StackExchange&lt;/a&gt; after a certain amount of time had passed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, your question failed the &lt;code&gt;RemoveDeadQuestions&lt;/code&gt; script, which will delete questions if all of the following apply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;question is older than 30 days;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has −1 or lower score;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has no answers;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is not locked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2019-01-11T00:40:10.143" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T00:40:10.143" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2935" CreationDate="2018-12-11T22:16:18.063" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Benjamin Christoffersen's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/368510&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to the question on: &lt;em&gt;Residual standard error difference between optim and glm&lt;/em&gt; is deceptively simple, under-appreciated and requiring a solid appreciation on how standard errors actually are computed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11852" LastEditorUserId="11852" LastEditDate="2018-12-12T20:01:19.057" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T20:01:19.057" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5531" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-30T18:45:13.707" Score="12" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; that accuracy is an improper scoring rule, thus it shouldn't be used to choose among classifiers. In particular, it should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be used to choose the best hyperparameters for a NN. However, since the popularization of Deep Learning, lots of people have been using validation accuracy for NN model selection. All of them, at some point, rediscover the fact that even if the validation loss is increasing, the validation accuracy may keep increasing or oscillate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/368431/can-it-be-over-fitting-when-validation-loss-and-validation-accuracy-is-both-incr&quot;&gt;Can it be over fitting when validation loss and validation accuracy is both increasing?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think at least some of them would be interested in an authoritative answer to the question: &quot;How can validation accuracy increase or oscillate, if the validation loss keeps increasing?&quot;. Do we have a canonical Q&amp;amp;A on this? It would not only be interesting in itself, but also in order to close duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastActivityDate="2019-01-01T00:41:54.680" Title="Do we have an authoritative answer on why validation accuracy can oscillate or even increase, when validation loss keeps increasing?" Tags="|discussion|questions|closing-questions|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5531" CreationDate="2018-12-31T16:48:51.040" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/312780/why-is-accuracy-not-the-best-measure-for-assessing-classification-models/312787#312787&quot;&gt;Why is accuracy not the best measure for assessing classification models?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is the closest answer about this issue; I don't believe it exactly addresses what you're asking about, the change in accuracy or loss &lt;em&gt;across epochs during training&lt;/em&gt;, but only the shortcomings of comparing models on the basis of accuracy reported after training has completed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2019-01-01T00:41:54.680" LastActivityDate="2019-01-01T00:41:54.680" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-01T02:39:04.873" Score="13" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's New Year's Day in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulu_Time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange land&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there certainly are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/11/21/our-theory-of-moderation-re-visited/&quot;&gt;Moderators&lt;/a&gt; here, a significant amount of the &lt;em&gt;moderation&lt;/em&gt; is done by ordinary people, using the privileges&#xA;they've earned by virtue of their contributions to the site. Each of you contributes a little bit of time and effort, and together you accomplish much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we enter a new year, let's pause and reflect, taking a moment to appreciate the work that we do here together.&#xA;To that end, here is how the moderation done here on Cross Validated breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                 Action                  Moderators Community¹&#xA;---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------&#xA;Users suspended²                                 24         18&#xA;Users destroyed                                  33          0&#xA;Users deleted                                     2          0&#xA;Users contacted                                  51          0&#xA;Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue         1,525      5,169&#xA;Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue              963      3,759&#xA;Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue        938      2,752&#xA;Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue               57      2,417&#xA;Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue               234     18,159&#xA;Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue            5,125     19,257&#xA;Tags merged                                      34          0&#xA;Tag synonyms proposed                            34          2&#xA;Tag synonyms created                             31          1&#xA;Tag highlight language set                        8          0&#xA;Revisions redacted                                1          0&#xA;Questions unprotected                             2          0&#xA;Questions reopened                              716         34&#xA;Questions protected                              18        120&#xA;Questions migrated                              334         23&#xA;Questions merged                                 26          0&#xA;Questions flagged⁴                                9      3,152&#xA;Questions closed                              8,834      2,261&#xA;Question flags handled⁴                       1,342      1,819&#xA;Posts unlocked                                   10         73&#xA;Posts undeleted                                  71        509&#xA;Posts locked                                     51        581&#xA;Posts deleted⁵                                2,047     21,399&#xA;Posts bumped                                      0      8,733&#xA;Escalations to the CM team                        6          0&#xA;Comments undeleted                              129          0&#xA;Comments flagged                                  9      4,794&#xA;Comments deleted⁶                             3,596     10,518&#xA;Comment flags handled                         1,726      3,077&#xA;Bounties canceled                                16          0&#xA;Answers flagged                                  29      3,033&#xA;Answer flags handled                          2,735        327&#xA;All comments on a post moved to chat             29          0&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Footnotes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &amp;quot;Community&amp;quot; here refers both to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;the membership of Cross Validated&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;diamonds next to their names&lt;/a&gt;, and to the automated systems otherwise known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/-1&quot;&gt;user #-1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;³ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 3 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 3, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁴ Includes close flags (but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; close or reopen votes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁵ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁶ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wishing you all a happy new year...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4454" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2019-04-13T20:54:43.747" Title="2018: a year in moderation" Tags="|discussion|moderation|site-statistics|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5534" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5535" CreationDate="2019-01-02T11:46:43.143" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aquestion%20sets%20closed%3Ano%20-%22data%20set%22&quot;&gt;some questions&lt;/a&gt; about sets, but there isn't any tag about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to ask questions about them and learn more about them. Thus I thought about creating a new &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/set&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;set&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;set&lt;/a&gt; tag to group the questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently most questions I see are about different similarity metrics between sets or about rank based analysis of sets like gene set enrichment analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposed tag wiki excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about analysis of groups of nominal variables&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prototype of a full tag wiki :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A set (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_(mathematics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;definition&lt;/a&gt;) can be defined as a group of elements:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  set1 = element1, element2, element3&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Questions might be about similarity indices, or analysis on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: Are here some knowledge on operations and tests?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105234" LastActivityDate="2019-01-02T16:17:26.297" Title="Creating a tag for sets" Tags="|discussion|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5534" CreationDate="2019-01-02T16:17:26.297" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that this will lead to potential problems because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 - it might encourage people to ask questions about set theory which are better on another site&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 - the proposed scope is too broad as the analysis of groups of categorical variables might cover many different techniques like item response theory, various forms of principal component analysis, logistic regression, log-linear models, latent class analysis, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastActivityDate="2019-01-02T16:17:26.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2107" CreationDate="2019-01-08T10:02:26.097" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What type of job do you want?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What type of job do you expect with a resume?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I hire people for something, I care more about what the person has done or seems like they are capable of doing,  I do use more than just looking at StackExchange, but it's one of the more impressive variables to me because it signifies they were willing to go in and get their intellectual ego circumcised in order to learn or are actually at that caliber.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some advice I'd give is if people left contact information in their profile if they are seeking or open to potentially intriguing things/ideas.  That, communication skills, like trying to put yourself in their shoes or really listen and think about what you don't know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, I've found high scores have a tendency to correlate with &#xA; a difficulty to work with at times though.  But only a slight tendency.  Many, many, especially if they've been praised a ton, published somewhere, hold some position, have &quot;the most points&quot; intelligent people at the top of their field unfortunately suffer from egotistical bias.  That even happens to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their egos can block them from curiosity, intrigue, teamwork, respect, &quot;degeneracy&quot; (heh) and are therefore difficult to communicate with as they may not realize they don't understand the context even when they say they do and sometimes are unwilling to do anything that requires them to admit a misunderstanding...or to change their means of thought...to listen...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I saw a high rep user here asking questions that would be significant to me....that would be probably the ultimate sign of wisdom to me honestly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, I mean, it's every action that the site records.  And a score discards so much more information...it's unwise to just look at that.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do know that what I need help with needs to be a challenge that intrigues them - but at the same time its hard to pin them down even if they are intrigued.  Many users here are geniuses and come for fun...not to make money.  I find those that I respect on these websites to be quite elusive and already have jobs/a means of making income, but it depends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original question is 4 years old, and I'm trying to give a modern perspective.  If you're making a resume, it's to try to get a job I presume; and if you approach a company with a resume you've already lost by the way anyway - you have to be &quot;the outlier.&quot;  And if they don't recognize your stats on stack-exchange, do you want to work for them anyway?  If they hire you based on your resume, you've also lost imo as it's likely going to lack &quot;fit.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find someone whom has looked at you as you rather than the &quot;meta-you&quot; and then approaches you, you may want to consider that highly significant...and that they are hiding things too...but testing you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I view finding someone to work with likely the most important decision to make - because it WILL make or break things.  I will even see how they respond to various actions I take or things I say....it's potentially thousands of variables - but SE gives a depth a resume cannot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28928" LastEditorUserId="28928" LastEditDate="2019-01-08T12:57:08.203" LastActivityDate="2019-01-08T12:57:08.203" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5524" CreationDate="2019-01-09T01:55:04.580" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Taking advantage of this subject, if anyone is interested:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wrote a &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/960216/one-vote-short-from-removedeadquestions-script&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;query&lt;/a&gt; in Stack Exchange Data Explorer to evaluate borderline questions to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;RemoveDeadQuestions script&lt;/a&gt;, the one which automatically deleted the OP's question in the main site (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5524/why-was-my-question-deleted-if-it-was-not-even-on-hold-nor-closed/5528#5528&quot;&gt;Sycorax's answer&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the query does is to find questions which are one vote shorter from meeting automatic deletion. &lt;strong&gt;However, it serves both ways&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;i) prevent an interesting question from being deleted (just edit it for quality and also upvote it; posting a valuable answer would be even better).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ii) make not complete, not interesting questions to go away.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The advantage of &lt;code&gt;ii&lt;/code&gt; is that a single user can make the difference. With one downvote, it can be automatically deleted in a few days. No need to spend resources from other users reviewing and closing it in the queue (not that they were not reviewed before and failed to collect answers or upvotes). Moreover, deleting less interesting content, &lt;strong&gt;makes the top questions and answers in quality easier to find&lt;/strong&gt; (I think this is the main point).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may be a harsh approach, but I have reviewed such questions in another Stack Exchange site and from my initial experience at least 80% of them were clearly indeed abandoned by OP or lacking details, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I started reviewing by the oldest ones, which I think are the ones more likely to not meet current standards. I also realized while reviewing that questions from inactive users were even more likely to be the ones unclear and/or abandoned, so I tweaked the query setting default parameters to find those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Running the query for CV SE yielded 3.482 borderline questions from inactive users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2019-02-09T15:41:36.283" LastActivityDate="2019-02-09T15:41:36.283" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5538" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-01-09T02:19:13.377" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Auto-deletion is a process which helps cleaning the site by deleting some questions. Criteria for auto-deletion are based on low score and age of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For details see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/78048/enable-automatic-deletion-of-old-unanswered-zero-score-questions-after-a-year/92006#92006&quot;&gt;Enable automatic deletion of old, unanswered, zero-score questions after a year?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5221/how-does-deleting-work-what-can-cause-a-post-to-be-deleted-and-what-does-that&quot;&gt;How does deleting work? What can cause a post to be deleted, and what does that actually mean? What are the criteria for deletion?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;Help Center - roomba&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reference: imported excerpt and wiki from the main &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/auto-delete/info&quot;&gt;Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2019-01-09T12:28:04.480" LastActivityDate="2019-01-09T12:28:04.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5539" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-01-09T02:19:13.377" Score="0" Body="Auto-deletion is a process which helps cleaning the site by deleting some questions. Criteria for auto-deletion are based on low score and age of the question." OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2019-01-09T12:27:59.283" LastActivityDate="2019-01-09T12:27:59.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5540" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5545" CreationDate="2019-01-11T01:48:30.743" Score="6" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m posting this thread reopening request here in keeping with the procedures outlined in the Meta post &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/36415/how-do-you-reopen-a-closed-question&quot;&gt;How do you reopen a closed question?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; I only learned fairly recently that my question “&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/201737/what-are-the-known-existing-practical-applications-of-chaos-theory-in-data-mini&quot;&gt;What are the known existing practical applications of chaos theory in data mining?&lt;/a&gt;” had been closed on the grounds of being too broad. There are several reasons why this no longer applies. As per the Meta reopening checklist, I did an extensive rewrite of the post before Christmas in order to sharply limit the question solely to known, existing implementations of chaos theory, specifically in data mining and related fields, not ordinary scientific inquiry. Secondly, I’ve put a significant amount of effort since I posted it two years ago to acquiring the knowledge to answer it myself; as a result, I now know the reasons &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the list of implementations in data mining etc. are so short in comparison to other scientific applications (with the Three-Body Problem being one of the classic examples of the latter). I retained the numbered list of potential applications in the post precisely because the striking contrast with the paucity of existing implementations &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the story; if I can get this reopened, I can provide an insightful, detailed answer to my own question that will explain precisely why this contrast exists. There some inherent, overarching limitations on the scope of possible applications to data mining and related fields like neural nets, pattern recognition etc., which arise by logical necessity from certain broad characteristics of chaos theory. These characteristics neatly separate the implementations in ordinary scientific studies from the kind of use cases we face in data mining and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I can get the green light to get this question reopened, my intention is to answer it myself within a week or two (give me a little leeway to craft my post) and accept my own answer, in order to bring this intriguing question (which generated a lot of interest) to a more constructive closure. The answer will reference case studies from sources like A.B. Cambel's Applied Chaos Theory: A Paradigm for Complexity and Alligood, et al.'s Chaos: An Introduction to Dynamical Systems (the latter is incredibly useful as a sourcebook for this topic). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The major issues with overly broad Stack Exchange questions is that they may encourage rambling, far-ranging, sometimes opinionated discussions without a clear direction or focus, often without approaching a conclusion. Now that I’ve researched this thoroughly and narrowed the focus to existing implementations, I can explain why such implementations of chaos theory in these particular fields are almost certain to remain few and far between in comparison to general scientific applications. There is no longer a danger of clutter from a wide-ranging discussion, since I intend to answer it and close it myself, by delving into the rather clear reasons for this strange dichotomy. I hate to see the question go to waste and remain forever closed and unanswered, especially since a clear answer is at hand, one I went to great trouble to find. I made an effort to contact the closers first, as mentioned in the Meta checklist on question reopening, but couldn’t find any direct contact info; I even started a chatroom the other day, but have been unable to invite them there to talk to them directly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me know if there’s anything further I can do to get the thread reopened just briefly enough for me to close it myself. If necessary, I can go into more detail here about how certain aspects of chaos theory constrict its applicability, but I’d rather save the bulk of the detail for my answer. If necessary, I suppose I could even submit my answer to moderators first, if that sort of thing’s allowed. I’d also like to retain the numbered list of potential applications in the original post precisely because they’re germane to the answer, which won’t be overtly obvious till I’ve posted it. This thread may help other users like myself who initially had a “the sky’s the limit!” mentality about the applications of chaos theory to these fields understand more quickly just why they’re likely to remain relatively rare, in contrast to other scientific uses. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54091" LastActivityDate="2019-01-25T14:18:33.853" Title="Chaos Theory Thread Reopening Request (with a detailed answer ready)" Tags="|support|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3159" CreationDate="2019-01-14T16:20:53.467" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I try to search for certain things, those questions [dead questions] pop up, they don't help me at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your suggestion (system/mod accepting Qs) would not make those dead and unhelpful questions to go away. If a dead question has a valid/useful answer, upvote it so it can be removed from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=unanswered&quot;&gt;unanswered questions tab&lt;/a&gt; (if possible and necessary, also edit the question for better quality).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is a dead question (with unhelpful answers or without answers) make the difference by pushing some of those questions to cross the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange auto delete bot&lt;/a&gt;. For example, take a look at my answer in &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5524/why-was-my-question-deleted-if-it-was-not-even-on-hold-nor-closed/5537#5537&quot;&gt;Why was my question deleted if It was not even on hold nor closed?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastActivityDate="2019-01-14T16:20:53.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5540" CreationDate="2019-01-15T16:57:11.100" Score="7" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Minimal changes to the question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this meta post you suggest re-opening the question because now you have an answer to it. But to re-open questions you should change the question itself; closing a question is about the question (and re-opening should also be about the question, not about the fact that you now have an answer). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you changed your question a lot, but mostly by providing an explanation about your proposed answer. You have only minimally changed your question (although it is on an essential point).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;What are the &lt;strong&gt;known, existing&lt;/strong&gt; practical applications of chaos theory in data mining?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The emphasis&amp;mdash;by me&amp;mdash;shows the change in your question.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are right that in this way the question has become less vague/broad (because 'unknown applications' is very open-ended). But it is still of a type that asks for a list, which is not so common here. It is not that it cannot be done, but it does make the question more difficult. For example, what do you mean by &quot;applications&quot;: how is that defined? Do you look for a list of books, a list of articles, a list of techniques, etc.? What kind of list are you looking for? Is it something like an example 'what are &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; known...', or something that is exhaustive 'what are &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; known' (cf., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5296/how-can-requests-for-references-be-too-broad&quot;&gt;How can requests for references be &amp;quot;too broad&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Unclear question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the above in mind, it does not help much that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/201737&quot;&gt;your question&lt;/a&gt; is a bit hidden in a large amount of text. Your question is written in the title but does not occur anywhere else in the body text. It is verbose, including lots of additional (but superfluous) text such as: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;In the two years since my original post...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;While casually reading some mass market works...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That makes the intention of your question confusing. What kind of practical applications are you looking for? Why do you look for such a list? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be possible to write that up in just a few words (say like an article abstract) and then many more people will be able to vote on your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Proposal&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How about reframing the question as &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Why are there so few existing practical applications of chaos theory in data mining?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (possibly posting as a new question, but if that means you delete the old then I would say you should better edit the old question). Then you can make a simple and brief question (the current question is very long-winded) which can contain your list of &quot;very rare existing practical applications&quot;. You should be able to write this question in a few minutes with the work that you have already done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you can spend a week on the answer while people open your question (and who knows possibly also answer it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What I would remove:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;While casually reading some mass market works on chaos theory over the last few years&lt;/strike&gt; I began to wonder how various aspects of &lt;strike&gt;it&lt;/strike&gt; could be applied to data mining and related fields, like neural nets, pattern recognition, uncertainty management, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;To date, I've run into so few examples of such applications in the published research that I wonder if a) they've actually been put into practice in known, published experiments and projects and b) if not, why are they used so little in these interrelated fields?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Most of the discussions of chaos theory I've seen to date revolve around scientific applications that are entirely useful, but have little to do with data mining and related fields like pattern recognition; &lt;strike&gt;one of the archetypical examples is the Three-Body Problem from physics.&lt;/strike&gt; I want to forego discussion of ordinary scientific applications of this kind and restrict the question &lt;strike&gt;solely&lt;/strike&gt; to those applications which are &lt;strike&gt;obviously&lt;/strike&gt; relevant to data mining and related fields, which seem to be few and far between in the literature. The list of potential applications below can be used as a starting point of a search for published research, but I'm only interested in those applications that have actually been put into practice, if any.&lt;strike&gt; What I'm looking for are known implementations of chaos theory to data mining, in contradistinction to the list of potential applications, which is much broader. Here's a small sampling of off-the-cuff ideas for data mining applications that occurred to me while reading;&lt;/strike&gt; perhaps none of them are pragmatic, perhaps some are being put to practical use as we speak, but go by terms that I'm not yet familiar with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;Identifying self-similar structures in pattern recognition, as Mandelbrot did in a practical way in the case of error bursts in analog telephone lines a few decades ago.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;Encountering Feigenbaum's Constant in mining results (perhaps in a manner similar to how string theorists were startled to see Maxwell's Equations pop up in unexpected places in the course of their research).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;Identifying the optimal bit depth for neural net weights and various mining tests. I wondered about this one because of the vanishingly small numerical scales at which sensitivity to initial conditions comes into play, which are partially responsible for the unpredictability of chaos-related functions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;Using the notion of fractional dimensions in other ways not necessarily related to fascinating fractal curiosities, like Menger Sponges, Koch Curves or Sierpinski Carpets are. Perhaps the concept can be applied to the dimensions of mining models in some beneficial way, by treating them as fractional?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;Deriving power laws like the ones that come into play in fractals.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;Since the functions encountered in fractals are nonlinear, I wonder&#xA;    if there's some practical application to nonlinear regression.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;Chaos theory has some tangential (and sometimes overstated) relationships to entropy, so I wonder if there's some way to calculate Shannon's Entropy (or limits upon it and its relatives) from the functions used in chaos theory, or vice versa.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;Identifying period-doubling behavior in data.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;Identifying the optimal structure for a neural net by intelligently selecting ones that are most likely to &quot;self-organize&quot; in a useful way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;Chaos and fractals etc. are also tangentially related to computational complexity, so I wonder if complexity could be used to identify chaotic structures, or vice-versa.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;I first heard of the Lyapunov exponent in terms of chaos theory and have noticed it a few times since then in recipes for specific neural nets and discussions of entropy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;There are probably dozens of other relationships I haven't listed here; all of this came off the top of my head. I'm not narrowly interested in specific answers to these particular speculations, but am just throwing them out there as examples of the type of applications that might exist in the wild.&lt;/strike&gt; I'd like to see replies that have examples of current research and existing implementations of ideas like this, as long the applications are specifically applicable to data mining.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;In the two years since my original post, I've done more research into the issue and at this point, I plan on answering this question myself, if I can get it reopened; I will discuss some case studies and explain why there is such a marked tension between the potential applications vs. actual implementations of chaos theory to data mining. There are probably other extant implementations I’m not aware of, even in areas I'm more familiar with (like information theory, fuzzy sets and neural nets) and others I those I have even less competence in, like regression, so more input is welcome. If no other answers are forthcoming though, my current plan is to draw the question to a productive conclusion by accepting my own answer, which will touch on why it is necessary to cast a wide net across this range of potential applications (precisely because the ones that have been implemented are so few and far between). My practical purpose here is to determine whether or not to invest more in learning about particular aspects of chaos theory, which I'll put on the back burner if I can't find some obvious utility. I’ve recently found that there are some instructive, deeply structural reasons for this unexpected dichotomy between the seemingly wide scope of potential uses for chaos theory in data mining vs. the narrow list of practical implementations to date. This disparity in scope is inseparable from the question itself and is a logical byproduct of the nature of chaos theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;I did a search of CrossValidated but didn't see any topics that directly address the utilitarian applications of chaos theory to data mining etc. The closest I could come was the thread Chaos theory, equation-free modeling and non-parametric statistics, which deals with a specific subset.&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Into:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I began to wonder how various aspects of chaos theory could be applied to data mining and related fields, like neural nets, pattern recognition, uncertainty management, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To date, I've run into so few examples of such applications in the published research that I wonder if&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a) they've actually been put into practice in known, published experiments and projects?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;b) if not, why are they used so little in these interrelated fields?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the discussions of chaos theory I've seen to date revolve around scientific applications that are entirely useful, but have little to do with data mining and related fields like pattern recognition. I want to forego discussion of ordinary scientific applications of this kind and restrict the question to those applications which are relevant to data mining and related fields.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The list of potential applications below can be used as a starting point of a search for published research, but I'm only interested in those applications that have actually been put into practice, if any. Perhaps none of them are pragmatic, perhaps some are being put to practical use as we speak, but go by terms that I'm not yet familiar with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Identifying self-similar structures in pattern recognition&lt;/strong&gt;, as Mandelbrot did in a practical way in the case of error bursts in analog telephone lines a few decades ago.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Encountering Feigenbaum's Constant in mining results&lt;/strong&gt; (perhaps in a manner similar to how string theorists were startled to see Maxwell's Equations pop up in unexpected places in the course of their research).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Identifying the optimal bit depth for neural net weights and various mining tests.&lt;/strong&gt; I wondered about this one because of the vanishingly small numerical scales at which sensitivity to initial conditions comes into play, which are partially responsible for the unpredictability of chaos-related functions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Using the notion of fractional dimensions&lt;/strong&gt; in other ways not necessarily related to fascinating fractal curiosities, like Menger Sponges, Koch Curves or Sierpinski Carpets are. Perhaps the concept can be applied to the dimensions of mining models in some beneficial way, by treating them as fractional?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Deriving power laws&lt;/strong&gt; like the ones that come into play in fractals.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since the &lt;strong&gt;functions encountered in fractals&lt;/strong&gt; are nonlinear, I wonder&#xA;if there's some practical application to nonlinear regression.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chaos theory has some tangential (and sometimes overstated) &lt;strong&gt;relationships to entropy&lt;/strong&gt;, so I wonder if there's some way to calculate Shannon's Entropy (or limits upon it and its relatives) from the functions used in chaos theory, or vice versa.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Identifying &lt;strong&gt;period-doubling behavior&lt;/strong&gt; in data.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Identifying the &lt;strong&gt;optimal structure for a neural net&lt;/strong&gt; by intelligently selecting ones that are most likely to &quot;self-organize&quot; in a useful way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chaos and fractals etc. are also tangentially related to computational complexity, so I wonder if complexity could be used to &lt;strong&gt;identify chaotic structures&lt;/strong&gt;, or vice-versa.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I first heard of &lt;strong&gt;the Lyapunov exponent&lt;/strong&gt; in terms of chaos theory and have noticed it a few times since then in recipes for specific neural nets and discussions of entropy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to see replies that have examples of current research and existing implementations of ideas like this, as long the applications are specifically applicable to data mining.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2019-01-25T14:18:33.853" LastActivityDate="2019-01-25T14:18:33.853" CommentCount="27" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5547" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-20T12:32:02.670" Score="6" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have 178 questions tagged as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/artificial-intelligence&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;artificial-intelligence&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;artificial-intelligence&lt;/a&gt;. As you can guess, those questions do not seem to differ anyhow to the questions tagged as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we map &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/artificial-intelligence&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;artificial-intelligence&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;artificial-intelligence&lt;/a&gt; &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\rightarrow$&lt;/span&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt;? Or maybe, there is some artificial intelligence outside of machine learning, and this should be clarified in the wiki, while the irrelevant question are un-tagged? Or maybe, we should tag those questions also with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/blockchain&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;blockchain&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;blockchain&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/big-data&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;big-data&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;big-data&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2019-01-21T02:46:17.597" Title="artificial-intelligence tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5547" CreationDate="2019-01-21T02:46:17.597" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that artificial intelligence is related to, but distinct from, machine learning. Machine learning, at least as it is practiced today, comprises automatic methods to learn from large volumes of data against rather structured problems: given data in a very exactly-laid out format (a feature vector, a graph, a tokenized corpus, an image), make an inference about one specific quantity (e.g. probability of class membership). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People can bicker about what, exactly, AI is, but I think it's fair to say that AI aspires to be more general than simply ham/spam e-mail classifiers or recognizing handwritten digits. I think the dream among AI researchers is that AI will be generic as self-teaching systems which can apply knowledge gained in one area to a new area, or to be reasoning machines, or work with non-structured data on open-ended tasks, or be creative, or other lofty goals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I'd be surprised if the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/artificial-intelligence&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;artificial-intelligence&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;artificial-intelligence&lt;/a&gt; is used in that sense on stats.SE; I suspect (and even hope!) that questions about AI in the sense that I describe above are self-sorted to the AI.SE website, as that would appear to be their &lt;strong&gt;unique&lt;/strong&gt; value-add to the SE ecosystem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastActivityDate="2019-01-21T02:46:17.597" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5549" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-21T16:44:34.620" Score="30" ViewCount="487" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over the course of almost nine years, we have amassed a body of good answers to many clearly stated questions: one of our site's principal goals.  To be useful, though, these answers have to be accessible--and that means &lt;em&gt;searchable.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Searchability&amp;quot; is the capability of offering links to likely answers based on the initial formulation of a question.  Two search mechanisms are currently available to everyone:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The site search mechanism at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;External search engines such as Google, &lt;em&gt;etc.&lt;/em&gt; To search &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; our site, copy into your searchbar: &lt;code&gt;site:https://stats.stackexchange.com&lt;/code&gt; and then add your search terms. This is often the fastest way to search, and looks also at comments, left out by site search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More often than not, new questions posted here have been asked and answered.  &lt;em&gt;Our initial review activities ought to focus on linking them to answers,&lt;/em&gt; leaving us to address the genuinely new questions that remain.  However, more and more, newcomers plead ignorance: they are unaware of the search tools available or uncertain how to use them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The purpose of this &lt;em&gt;Meta&lt;/em&gt; thread is to collect your advice about searching our site so we can refer users here for quick help and advice about finding answers to their questions.&lt;/strong&gt;  What kinds of searches work?  How can a user identify appropriate keywords or tags?  What special options in the site search mechanism can be helpful?  How can external search engines help?  What tips and tricks can you share?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please consider illustrating your replies with sample questions from our site, showing the search or sequence of searches you constructed to find the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="11887" LastEditDate="2020-11-24T19:59:36.437" LastActivityDate="2023-07-26T15:40:22.387" Title="FAQ: Best Practices for Searching CV" Tags="|discussion|faq|search|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2020-11-24T19:59:36.437" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5549" CreationDate="2019-01-21T16:44:34.620" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This reply illustrates a search &lt;em&gt;strategy&lt;/em&gt; by means of an example.&lt;/strong&gt;  The strategy consists of an iterative procedure whose objectives are, in order,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Discover appropriate key words&lt;/strong&gt; and search terms to include.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Find questions and answers related to these terms&lt;/strong&gt;.  Mine them for related terms (which might be new or unfamiliar: that's ok).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Refine the search&lt;/strong&gt; by including and excluding related terms, as appropriate.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Examine top hits by relevance and, separately, by voting.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When there are still too many hits, limit them by asking for posts with positive upvotes (using the keyword &lt;code&gt;score:1&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Repeat&lt;/strong&gt; as necessary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are the original proposer of the question, this activity--which usually takes less than a minute--often will answer your question.  But if it does not, it likely will help you &lt;em&gt;ask&lt;/em&gt; your question in a clearer and more focused way, which will help us &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; the question you came to the site with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are a reviewer, this activity often identifies interpretations you might not have considered upon a first reading, enabling you to guide the OP to clarify their question.  Sometimes it will turn up existing answers and you can vote to close the current post as a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Searching comments (optional)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To construct this example, I needed to find threads on our site where I, user &amp;quot;whuber,&amp;quot; had recommended or mentioned searches.  Because such recommendations would occur primarily in comments, and comments are not targeted by the site search engine, I started with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google&lt;/a&gt;.  As you likely know, you can focus any Google search on a specified site using &lt;code&gt;site:&lt;/code&gt; syntax, as in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;site:stats.stackexchange.com whuber search&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This input requested a search of all pages served at our site that include both &amp;quot;whuber&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;search.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Carrying out the site search strategy&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first hit in this Google search is a closed thread at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/351443&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/351443&lt;/a&gt; about &amp;quot;MLR.&amp;quot;  The sequence of interactions with the original poster (OP) went like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Discover key words.&lt;/strong&gt; I posted a comment asking for an explanation of what &amp;quot;MLR&amp;quot; was intended to mean, along with a suggestion about one possible interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's often a good idea to ask posters for clarification rather than assuming you know what they intended (unless you are very good at asynchronous long-distance mind reading).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, sometimes unclear acronyms can be resolved by searching the web for the acronym along with the term &amp;quot;statistics&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;mathematics.&amp;quot;  In this case, the hits make it clear that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=mlr+statistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MLR really does mean multiple regression&lt;/a&gt;.  It looks like I didn't take the time to do this search before I commented, &lt;em&gt;mea culpa.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The OP patiently confirmed this interpretation in a comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conduct a broad site search.&lt;/strong&gt;  I recommended searching on the&lt;code&gt;multiple-regression&lt;/code&gt; tag along with keywords like &amp;quot;rank,&amp;quot; which was suggested by &lt;em&gt;terms used by the OP in their original question formulation.&lt;/em&gt;  I couldn't do much more than this because grammatical distortions in the question statement made it unclear what the specific question might be.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=multiple-regression+rank&quot;&gt;The search returned hundreds of results.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Use initial results to refine the search.&lt;/strong&gt; This involves several tactics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sort the results by relevance and then by votes&lt;/strong&gt;: both have their advantages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Skim through the first few hits to identify related keywords&lt;/strong&gt; or other technical terms that are relevant to the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When there are many results, &lt;strong&gt;skim through the first page or two of hits to identify &lt;em&gt;unrelated&lt;/em&gt; keywords&lt;/strong&gt; that can be used to exclude irrelevant hits.  A common example is to exclude &amp;quot;logistic&amp;quot; when the focus is on ordinary regression, by including &lt;code&gt;-logistic&lt;/code&gt; in the search term.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In this case, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/35071&quot;&gt;one highly voted thread&lt;/a&gt; refers to &amp;quot;rank deficiency&amp;quot; and several highly-voted threads refer to &amp;quot;multicollinearity.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This already is progress: a tiny bit of searching will have revealed useful keywords &lt;em&gt;that even a novice can use to find an answer,&lt;/em&gt; whether or not they are familiar with those terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today these initial results, along with a review of the original question, suggest simply adding the keyword &amp;quot;unique&amp;quot; to the search and focusing on upvoted posts.  The search expression becomes &lt;code&gt;multiple-regression rank unique score:1&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Top hits (by relevance) indicate that &amp;quot;regularization&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;identifiability&amp;quot; might be useful keywords for subsequent searches.  An &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/142314/identifiability-of-the-linear-regression-model-necessary-and-sufficient-conditi/142341#142341&quot;&gt;identifiability post&lt;/a&gt; might contain an answer, or at least provide useful information to help the OP formulate and refine their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A top hit by votes turned up a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/21022/does-the-order-of-explanatory-variables-matter-when-calculating-their-regression/21136#21136&quot;&gt;nice mathematical analysis of least squares solutions&lt;/a&gt; which, if the OP is of a mathematical bent, might also answer their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2023-07-26T15:40:22.387" LastActivityDate="2023-07-26T15:40:22.387" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5551" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-23T11:41:20.480" Score="5" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;2019 is here! And with the new year, as usual, comes a new iteration of &lt;strong&gt;Community Promotion Ads&lt;/strong&gt;! Let’s refresh these for the coming year :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the site's twitter account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels, or double that if high DPI.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/5551&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72321" LastEditorUserId="72321" LastEditDate="2019-01-23T11:41:44.570" LastActivityDate="2019-06-25T19:30:16.660" Title="Community Promotion Ads — 2019" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2020-03-05T10:48:15.073" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5551" CreationDate="2019-01-23T11:41:33.100" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/StackStats&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rzwq1.png&quot; alt=&quot;Help this community grow -- follow us on twitter!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72321" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T11:41:33.100" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5551" CreationDate="2019-01-23T18:40:56.507" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://opendata.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wqiQI.png&quot; alt=&quot;Need data? Open Data Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T18:40:56.507" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5551" CreationDate="2019-01-24T10:45:57.920" Score="-8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/R4FEK.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user235170" LastEditorDisplayName="user235170" LastEditDate="2019-01-24T11:12:55.800" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T11:12:55.800" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5555" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5557" CreationDate="2019-01-25T18:23:32.683" Score="4" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that this question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/10196/why-does-is-make-sense-to-normalize-rewards-per-episode-in-reinforcement-learnin&quot;&gt;https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/10196/why-does-is-make-sense-to-normalize-rewards-per-episode-in-reinforcement-learnin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;was migrated to AI.SE. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5514/overlap-with-ai-stackexchange-and-datascience-stackexchange/5518#5518&quot;&gt;I think that it is perfectly on-topic here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did OP request the migration? Can anyone involved with the migration decision share their thinking?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastActivityDate="2019-01-25T20:16:02.517" Title="Why was this reinforcement learning question migrated to AI.SE?" Tags="|discussion|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5556" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5558" CreationDate="2019-01-25T19:01:27.127" Score="4" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have the (possibility wrong) impression that most programming questions are closed with the motivation &quot;this is not about stats, but about programming, or  etc.&quot;, rather than being migrated to SO. Is this because they don't seem to be in the right format for SO (e.g., questions about libraries/packages, or questions which don't contain a MRE)? Thus, an attempt to migration would result in the migration being refused by SO moderators. Or are there other reasons?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-01-27T15:23:28.920" LastActivityDate="2019-01-27T15:23:28.920" Title="Why do we close programming questions instead of migrating them to SO?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|migration|stackoverflow|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5555" CreationDate="2019-01-25T20:16:02.517" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OP flagged their question and requested migration.  I migrated it in response.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2019-01-25T20:16:02.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5556" CreationDate="2019-01-25T20:28:17.640" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;@whuber is right.  When I judge that questions would be viable on SO, I'm happy to migrate.  But most of the programming-ish questions I see don't seem good enough.  In particular, they tend to lack &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve&quot;&gt;reproducible examples&lt;/a&gt;.  It's also worth being clear that a, say, 'how do I use R?' question would be off topic here, and can simultaneously be off topic on SO as not really about &lt;em&gt;programming&lt;/em&gt;.  That is, there can be perfectly good (and sympathetic) questions that are not on topic anywhere in the SE system.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2019-01-25T20:28:17.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5441" CreationDate="2019-01-29T07:39:24.027" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sort of thing used to work better than it looks on my machine now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fsTwv.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fsTwv.png&quot; alt=&quot;How the new layout looks on a wide math post&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/389683/805&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/389683/805&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2020-01-09T13:47:15.680" LastActivityDate="2020-01-09T13:47:15.680" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5560" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-29T11:12:34.737" Score="11" ViewCount="248" Body="&lt;p&gt;Almost four years ago there was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2425/shall-we-add-this-is-just-a-software-question-to-our-default-close-reasons&quot;&gt;discussion on Meta&lt;/a&gt; that lead to formulating the &quot;not about statistics&quot; default close reason description as following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because EITHER it is not about&#xA;  statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, or data&#xA;  visualization, OR it focuses on programming, debugging, or performing&#xA;  routine operations within a statistical computing platform. If the&#xA;  latter, you could try the support links we maintain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that we should discuss this close reason again. My feeling is that this close reason is unclear for some users because of the &quot;... EITHER ... OR ...&quot; formulation. I've seen people arguing &lt;em&gt;&quot;but it relates to statistics&quot;&lt;/em&gt; in case of software questions, where they read &quot;OR&quot; as &quot;AND&quot; and the decision was unclear for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, we have a &lt;strong&gt;large number of software questions&lt;/strong&gt;, including questions asking for &lt;strong&gt;code review&lt;/strong&gt;. It often &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5556/why-do-we-close-programming-questions-instead-of-migrating-them-to-so&quot;&gt;seems to be confusing for users&lt;/a&gt; that the question needs to be supplemented with &lt;strong&gt;reproducible example&lt;/strong&gt; for us to consider migrating it to StackOverflow.com.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that we extracted from the &quot;not about statistics&quot; the strictly &quot;software&quot; reason that mentions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;software/programming is off-topic &lt;em&gt;on our site&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;code review is off-topic &lt;em&gt;on the whole SE network&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;questions without reproducible example are off-topic &lt;em&gt;on the whole SE network&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion is to split the current close reason into two reasons like (I don't insist on such wording):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because it is not about&#xA;  statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, or data&#xA;  visualization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because it asks for code review, or focuses on&#xA;  programming, debugging, or performing&#xA;  routine operations within a statistical computing platform. Programming questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve&quot;&gt;with a reproducible example&lt;/a&gt; should be posted on StackOverflow.com. For help with such questions try the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/793/internet-support-for-statistics-software&quot;&gt;support links we maintain&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The proposal was declined&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5607/should-we-remove-the-datasets-close-reason-from-the-list&quot;&gt;follow up thread can be found here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="35989" LastEditDate="2019-04-04T21:55:51.217" LastActivityDate="2019-04-04T21:55:51.217" Title="Extract software-specific default close reason" Tags="|discussion|status-declined|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5560" CreationDate="2019-01-29T11:49:07.867" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Certainly it'd be good to split this close reason into two. How about &quot;particular software&quot; rather than &quot;such questions&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because it asks for code review, or it focuses on programming, debugging, or performing routine operations within a statistical computing platform. Programming questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve&quot;&gt;with a reproducible example&lt;/a&gt; should be posted on StackOverflow.com. For help with particular software try the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/793&quot;&gt;support links we maintain&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this text has 428 characters (including the URLs), &amp;amp; we're limited to 400:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because it asks for code review, or it focuses on programming, debugging, or performing routine operations within a statistical computing platform. Programming questions [with a reproducible example](https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve) should be posted on StackOverflow.com. For help with particular software try the [support links we maintain](https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/793).&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we have to trim it down a bit, unless anyone knows a way to compress the URLs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How about &quot;routine use of statistical software&quot; rather than &quot;performing routine operations within a statistical computing platform&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because it asks for code review, or it focuses on programming, debugging, or routine use of statistical software. Programming questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve&quot;&gt;with a reproducible example&lt;/a&gt; should be posted on StackOverflow.com. For help with particular software try the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/793&quot;&gt;support links we maintain&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That gives 394 characters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because it asks for code review, or it focuses on programming, debugging, or routine use of statistical software. Programming questions [with a reproducible example](https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve) should be posted on StackOverflow.com. For help with particular software try the [support links we maintain](https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/793).&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we'll ask community managers for this additional close reason in a week or so, unless anyone can think of further improvements to the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2019-02-04T23:15:07.617" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T23:15:07.617" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="793" CreationDate="2019-01-31T02:25:34.157" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;ACER ConQuest&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ACER ConQuest is a computer program for fitting both unidimensional&#xA;and multidimensional item response and latent regression models. It&#xA;provides data analysis based on a comprehensive and flexible range of&#xA;item response models, allowing examination of the properties of&#xA;performance assessments, traditional assessments and rating scales.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Support is provided via:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://conquestmanual.acer.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ACER ConQuest manual&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.acer.org/au/conquest/notes-tutorials&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Notes and tutorials&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://shop.acer.edu.au/acer-conquest-5.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Download a demonstration copy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="235980" LastEditorUserId="235980" LastEditDate="2021-06-08T05:22:57.430" LastActivityDate="2021-06-08T05:22:57.430" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-01-31T02:25:34.157" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5563" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-03T19:06:54.250" Score="8" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a &quot;requests for reopen&quot; queue here on meta? I can't find it view a Google search restricted to stats.meta.stackexchange.com nor via a search within meta. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5176" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-02-03T19:59:03.470" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T21:25:59.743" Title="Is there a &quot;requests for reopen&quot; queue here on meta?" Tags="|discussion|reopen-closed|meta|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5563" CreationDate="2019-02-03T19:50:08.480" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/review/reopen&quot;&gt;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/review/reopen&lt;/a&gt;. It can be reached through the 'Review Queues' icon on the top bar (which looks like a horizontal bar chart with a tick in the bottom-right corner).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2019-02-03T21:25:59.743" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T21:25:59.743" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5567" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-07T15:36:12.073" Score="12" ViewCount="1389" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two recent questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/391307/1352&quot;&gt;Regression - variance of predictions much lower than variance of target&lt;/a&gt;, which I voted to close as a duplicate of &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/390210/1352&quot;&gt;Regression predictions show far less variance than expected&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sure we have had this question before, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=variance+of+predictions+lower+than+variance+of+observations&quot;&gt;a simple search&lt;/a&gt; did't show anything that seemed useful, nor was there anything among the &quot;related&quot; threads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we have a canonical duplicate for this kind of questions? If not, should we have one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2019-02-07T15:36:12.073" Title="Canonical duplicate for &quot;Why do predictions vary less than observations?&quot;" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5568" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-07T15:44:21.637" Score="1" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question and it turns out now is [on hold] because 'it's unclear what I asked'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I edited hoping the unclear step was that but I am not sure if it was that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you notify the people who put your question [on hold] that you edited and also to ask them to specify which part is not clear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236336" LastActivityDate="2019-02-07T15:59:51.893" Title="How do you notify that you edited your question if was put _on hold_?" Tags="|support|questions|flagging|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2019-02-07T15:57:57.510" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5570" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-09T06:53:25.510" Score="1" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just writing up an answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/391553/76981&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; when it was decided that it should be closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand why it is closed; the title alone makes it seem both a bit inflammatory and opinion based, which is generally not what we want on the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I feel like it brings up an especially important topic for statisticians; a machine learning type of approach (i.e., using cross-validation to tune hyper-parameters in overly parameterized models) seems to be doing very well at the task of prediction...so where does this leave the field of statistics? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer I was starting to write up was that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) If faced with the challenge of building a predictive model, I think statisticians should embrace what I'm calling the machine learning approach. After all, there are no hard lines between what's a statistical method and what's a machine learning method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) There are &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; of very important tasks which can be addressed with statistics that have nothing to do with building black-box predictive models.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyways, I actually think it's a very interesting question that statisticians should think a little about, especially those early in their career. Do other users think this question could be fixed up or is it in general too open ended to belong on CV?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76981" LastActivityDate="2019-02-09T14:20:06.397" Title="Can we fix up the &quot;Should we trust statistics?&quot; question" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5570" CreationDate="2019-02-09T07:30:27.907" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your drafted answer appears to be to a much more specific question; A question inspired by the actual one, rather than explicitly posed in it. Disquisitions on model checking, the logic of hypothesis testing, maximum-likelihood estimation under a mis-specified model, or causal inference would all seem equally germane.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could help the OP to narrow down their question; or ask &amp;amp; answer your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2019-02-09T10:14:48.177" LastActivityDate="2019-02-09T10:14:48.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5570" CreationDate="2019-02-09T14:20:06.397" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is opinion based and loaded.  It isn't even clear if it is asked in good faith.  At any rate, it is not our place to &quot;fix up&quot; the OP's question for them.  The fixed-up version may not be what the OP wants.  You can leave some comments to engage with the OP and see if you can get them to edit their question to the point where it would be acceptable.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, as @Scortchi suggests, you could ask your own question, inspired by this one, that would be on topic and afford viable answers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2019-02-09T14:20:06.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5573" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-13T00:10:06.827" Score="-11" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've notice that there are several unanswered questions on RL topics on this website. More specifically, about 1/3 (221/617) of the questions on RL on this website have not received an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also means that there isn't enough competent people on this website to answer such questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from the fact that I think that RL is the central topic in AI, I think, all RL questions should belong to &lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;AI Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; website. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, we need a way to bring these questions to &lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://ai.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;, where there are, at least, 2 competent people which could potentially answer such questions. Is there an automatic way of doing that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user82135" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T19:26:05.753" Title="Questions on reinforcement learning topics would be better suited for AI Stack Exchange" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5573" CreationDate="2019-02-13T12:46:03.920" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you consider the lower proportion of unanswered questions on AI overall, there doesn't seem to be much evidence that RL questions have a relatively higher chance of being answered there rather than here compared to other questions.  I obtained counts using the search terms: &lt;code&gt;-[reinforcement-learning] is:question  closed:no isanswered:yes&lt;/code&gt;, etc., and conducted the following analysis:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;  &#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# input search data&#xA;x &amp;lt;- data.frame(      site=c(&quot;CV&quot;,&quot;CV&quot;,&quot;AI&quot;,&quot;AI&quot;), &#xA;                    RL.tag=c(TRUE,FALSE,TRUE,FALSE), &#xA;                  answered=c(341,71298,251,1831), &#xA;                unanswered=c(242, 54360, 83, 761)   )&#xA;&#xA;# fit saturated logistic regression model&#xA;glm(cbind(answered, unanswered)~site*RL.tag, data=x, family=&quot;binomial&quot;) -&amp;gt; sat.mod&#xA;&#xA;x  # print search data&#xA;#   site RL.tag answered unanswered&#xA;# 1   CV   TRUE      341        242&#xA;# 2   CV  FALSE    71298      54360&#xA;# 3   AI   TRUE      251         83&#xA;# 4   AI  FALSE     1831        761&#xA;&#xA;summary(sat.mod)   # print model summary&#xA;# Coefficients:&#xA;#                   Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(&amp;gt;|z|)    &#xA;# (Intercept)        0.87798    0.04313  20.357   &amp;lt;2e-16 ***&#xA;# siteCV            -0.60674    0.04350 -13.947   &amp;lt;2e-16 ***&#xA;# RL.tagTRUE         0.22863    0.13376   1.709   0.0874 .  &#xA;# siteCV:RL.tagTRUE -0.15692    0.15808  -0.993   0.3209    &#xA;&#xA;confint(sat.mod,level = 0.95)  # print confidence intervals around parameter estimates&#xA;#                         2.5 %     97.5 %&#xA;# (Intercept)        0.79392982  0.9630236&#xA;# siteCV            -0.69250867 -0.5219484&#xA;# RL.tagTRUE        -0.02926792  0.4957067&#xA;# siteCV:RL.tagTRUE -0.47007321  0.1500825&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'd caution against reading too much into this kind of analysis&amp;mdash;that doesn't control for the different types or varying quality of questions that get asked on the two sites. And tagging behaviour needs to be thought about; e.g., we've got 65 questions with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/multiarmed-bandit&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;multiarmed-bandit&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;multiarmed-bandit&lt;/a&gt; but without &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reinforcement-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reinforcement-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reinforcement-learning&lt;/a&gt;. And who's to say that comparisons made now will be valid in a year's time, especially if there are only a few users answering RL questions on each site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2019-02-13T18:12:22.467" LastActivityDate="2019-02-13T18:12:22.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5576" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5584" CreationDate="2019-02-16T00:37:26.970" Score="11" ViewCount="410" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was the only responder to a question recently. The question betrayed some misunderstandings on the part of the asker, and while my response was accurate, respectful and responsive, it also asked and answered the question that I thought was lurking behind the mis-asked question.  Even so, the answer received one down vote and no up votes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take criticism well and would be happy to delete my answer if the only feedback is negative.  But then question will then go as unanswered. What should I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="219322" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T09:18:04.483" Title="Is a sole answer with a down vote worse than no answer at all?" Tags="|discussion|votes|deleted-answers|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5573" CreationDate="2019-02-18T09:49:01.693" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the core of the issue is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://ai.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; have way too much overlap. E.g., see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4243/12359&quot;&gt;After Data Science SE: Artificial Intelligence SE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4/4&quot;&gt;Are all questions asked on stats and data science SE also on topic on AI.SE?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1444/4&quot;&gt;What percentage of questions posted on AI.SE are also on-topic on Cross Validated and Data Science?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Stack Exchange wants create a website for each trendy name (AI, data science, etc.) without caring about how much they overlap with existing websites, then I'd suggest to implement &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/199989/178179&quot;&gt;&quot;crossover questions&quot; between sites&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastEditorUserId="12359" LastEditDate="2019-02-18T19:26:05.753" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T19:26:05.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5578" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5579" CreationDate="2019-02-20T21:02:48.290" Score="6" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently gained acesses to some review queues, but most of the times there's something to be reviewed (gray dot beside the queue), there's no notification saying so, other times I see a red dot but there's nothing there, as below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SOmo9.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SOmo9.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the meaning of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127281" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-02-21T14:42:33.347" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T14:42:33.347" Title="What does the red circle at the review queue pictogram mean?" Tags="|support|review|user-interface|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5578" CreationDate="2019-02-20T22:34:37.050" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that reflects a kind of &quot;urgency&quot; about attending to the queue. If my recollection is right (it may be a bit off), blank means the queues are empty (or perhaps nearly so), a grey dot means there's a number of items in at least one queue (i.e. a queue needs attention) and red indicates there's at least one &quot;long&quot; queue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a pretty complete discussion on the network meta here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/302226/how-does-the-review-needed-indicator-work-exactly&quot;&gt;How does the review-needed indicator work exactly?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2019-02-20T22:41:13.197" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T22:41:13.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5580" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5581" CreationDate="2019-02-21T09:27:03.020" Score="3" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;A meta question: how come &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSPP&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSPP&lt;/a&gt; has no tag of its own? Its users are more command line driven than &lt;code&gt;SPSS&lt;/code&gt; users which are more GUI driven. As a result &lt;code&gt;PSPP&lt;/code&gt; has another kind of questions. How (and who?) to convince to create a dedicated &lt;code&gt;PSPP&lt;/code&gt; tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="237923" OwnerDisplayName="OrenIshShalom" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-02-21T12:55:45.053" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T12:55:45.053" Title="PSPP has no dedicated tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5580" CreationDate="2019-02-21T09:52:19.113" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges&quot;&gt;You can create new tags yourself if you have at least 300 reputation.&lt;/a&gt; For now, I &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=PSPP+is%3Aq&quot;&gt;searched for questions containing &quot;PSPP&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and added a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pspp&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pspp&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pspp&lt;/a&gt; tag. (More precisely, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/11887/kjetil-b-halvorsen&quot;&gt;Kjetil&lt;/a&gt; seems to have been doing the work while I was talking about it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also created a rudimentary &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/pspp/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki&lt;/a&gt;. Any improvement would be most welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T09:52:19.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5576" CreationDate="2019-02-22T14:40:25.933" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Update. After several days, there were still no other solutions offered, and I continued to receive negative feedback. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closure. Taking the hint from the community, I concluded that I had way over-interpreted the question and so pruned my answer aggressively, focusing on a small part that seemed to be the most relevant to the OP's needs.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will use the redacted ideas -- which had been so disconcerting to multiple people in the context of the OP's question -- to formulate a new question for the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so, I am at peace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="219322" LastActivityDate="2019-02-22T14:40:25.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5576" CreationDate="2019-02-25T03:01:57.583" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume you are referring to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/392582/&quot;&gt;Determine if data is IID&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no reason you have to delete an answer just because someone downvoted it.  In general, unless the downvoter leaves a comment explaining their downvote, you have no idea who the downvoter is, nor why they downvoted.  Downvotes just happen sometimes.  Unless you've come to change your mind about your answer for some reason unrelated to the downvote, I'd leave it there.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unrelatedly, I applaud your openness about the issue, and your sincere efforts to understand the site and make the best contributions you can.  I find this attitude welcome and refreshing.  You: (1) raised the issue here on meta for discussion, (2) engaged politely and productively with commenters, and (3) substantially reworked your answer based on what you came to understand about the situation.  We should all aspire to this level of maturity.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T03:01:57.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5585" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-27T07:17:55.167" Score="4" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;During each of the last five days, some of my answers - most being&#xA;quite old - were upvoted within a short lapse of time. More precisely:&#xA;5, 3, 3, 3, 3 answers were upvoted within a few minutes for each&#xA;day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is always pleasant to have upvotes, and some of these answers could&#xA;be considered as underrated e.g, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/199343/10479&quot;&gt;this&#xA;one&lt;/a&gt; which was upvoted&#xA;for the first time. Yet this seems quite strange. May I fear to have&#xA;met a robot fan?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10479" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-02-27T14:53:04.290" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T14:53:04.290" Title="Can there be robot upvotes?" Tags="|support|votes|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2019-02-27T11:44:02.823" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5586" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-27T16:58:11.697" Score="19" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I asked for a recommendation for R packages that were capable of doing latent class analysis with mixed indicator types and were capable of doing latent class regression (i.e. treat the latent class as a multinomial random variable and fit a regression model to it). My rationale for asking it on Cross Validated was that the question requires statistical expertise to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@gung closed the thread, stating that it was mainly about programming and was off topic. His verbatim response to me in comments was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions that are only about software (e.g. error messages, code or packages, etc.) are generally off topic here. If you have a substantive machine learning or statistical question, please edit to clarify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I protested that I had seen several questions here that similarly asked for package recommendations, but that were not closed. He responded:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's not a programming question, so it should be off topic on Stack Overflow as well (whether it will be closed is another issue, but at any rate, I won't migrate it). I don't necessarily know where it would best be asked. Presumably one of the r-help listservs. There are plenty of questions here where R plays some role, &amp;amp; there was a time when the line was less clear &amp;amp; less enforced, but if you see any questions that only ask for a package recommendation, please flag them &amp;amp; we'll close them. They should all be closed, but we certainly could have missed some.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I pointed him to two similar questions. To his credit, he closed both; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/95101/r-latent-class-multinomial-logit-model&quot;&gt;one is still searchable.&lt;/a&gt; However, in my view, that post also required statistical expertise to answer. Moreover, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/24540/clustering-of-mixed-type-data-with-r&quot;&gt;year-old post&lt;/a&gt; recently floated to the top of my list because someone provided an answer; again, it asks for recommendations for a package, which requires statistical expertise to answer properly. It has not been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From where I sit, I think this sort of question should be legitimate for Cross Validated, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1/how-to-answer-r-questions&quot;&gt;it seems that I am not the only one&lt;/a&gt; to feel this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gung &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2420/148503&quot;&gt;has stated his reasoning for the current policy here&lt;/a&gt;. However, if my thread was closed, and if Gung closed two similar ones without pushback, then why are threads that ask for package recommendations about a specific statistical technique, and that require some statistical expertise to answer properly, still on the site? If the policy is unclear, and if it can't be clarified, then maybe it's a problem. Alternatively, perhaps the policy is clear enough, it's just that all the moderators just need to get tougher, or to get more lenient. Again, what is the line here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Clarifying why I think statistical expertise is needed, using link #2 as an example: you have to know what cluster analysis is, and you have to know what distance metrics can generalize across both continuous and binary data (that would be Gower's distance, correctly identified by several people). The original poster mentioned the R package &lt;code&gt;polca&lt;/code&gt;, which is latent class analysis and &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; cluster analysis (although the two methods appear to have similar goals).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you thought you would recommend that poster an R package for latent class analysis (actually, that was my deleted question), you would obviously have to know what LCA was, and it would probably help if you knew that cluster analysis and LCA may have similar goals but they approach things pretty differently. The poster above might not be willing to learn LCA. I would certainly have said thanks but no thanks to cluster analysis (but if you told me there was a cluster analysis equivalent to latent class regression, I might reconsider).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sticking to LCA, you would have to know that traditional LCA methods are developed for binary or categorical but &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; continuous indicators; you'd probably want to point the questioner to the &lt;code&gt;flexmix&lt;/code&gt; package. However, my question also asked about latent class regression, and it does not seem to me that &lt;code&gt;flexmix&lt;/code&gt; can perform this. Again, selecting an R package would require you to know what latent class regression is and how it differs from regular LCA - in LCR, you essentially add covariates to the multinomial part of the model that predicts class probabilities, which is &lt;strong&gt;distinct&lt;/strong&gt; from the measurement part of the model (i.e. class predictor isn't an indicator of latent class).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, you could have tried Googling on CRAN. And you might have found one or more packages that do some or all of what you want. However, if you return a lot of results - for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/Cluster.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt; I found on CRAN describes cluster analysis and LCA packages, and it has a LOT of them - then I think it's justified to return here to see if anyone has specific knowledge. It's true I could read through the manuals for a few packages, and I did indeed read the manuals for &lt;code&gt;polca&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;flexmix&lt;/code&gt;, but doing that many times is difficult. Yes, you can RTFM, but if the manual is so long as to be intractable...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148503" LastEditorUserId="148503" LastEditDate="2019-03-07T14:31:06.057" LastActivityDate="2019-03-07T14:31:06.057" Title="Questions asking for statistical package recommendations: how do we differentiate in vs out of bounds for CV?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5587" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5588" CreationDate="2019-02-27T20:23:04.137" Score="6" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/394761/image-classification-with-large-images-in-r-keras&quot;&gt;Image classification with large images in R keras&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP mentions keras a couple time, but to their credit, they don't include code. I'd like to answer the question, but I wonder if I should comment first and suggest them to remove any reference to a specific software library, in order to make the question of more general interest. What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS I used the plural when referring to the OP, because I didn't want to assume a gender. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-03-01T23:53:08.873" LastActivityDate="2019-03-01T23:53:08.873" Title="Is this question mentioning Keras off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5587" CreationDate="2019-02-27T21:11:36.807" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I closed it, with a comment.  It appears to be asking only about how keras works.  If they edit to clarify a machine learning question, I'll be happy to reopen.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For future reference, you are not obliged to hold off on answering, just because a question may be off topic.  I have answered questions that I voted to close, or to migrate to SO, for example.  I believe I have done this even since I have had the ability to close instantly (i.e., as a moderator, rather than sending it into the review queue).  If you think you can help the OP in the interim, there's no reason not to.  (You can also still comment to provide help, if you want&amp;mdash;I've done that too.)  If you are worried about losing reputation in exchange for your efforts, be aware that we don't delete such threads just because they've been closed, and the roomba won't delete them if there's an answer with a positive score.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T21:11:36.807" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5589" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-27T23:30:42.043" Score="-5" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;As per the moderator my question isn't appropriate: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/394780/variance-formula-amplify-outlier-instead-ignoring-it&quot;&gt;Variance formula amplify outlier instead ignoring it!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am learning stats and I tried many resources over internet and books but I could not get cleared my doubt behind the variance formula. In all of my wisdom, I believe I have asked a useful question for the community but I am not able to get off from the hold put by the moderator on my question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need help from someone who could verify this first question of mine in this community and let me know if my question really doesn't have any merit or it is just a person's opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help and kindly justify the moderator action or if I am wrong. I am bringing this up as if the moderator behavior is inappropriate then this is adverse to the essence of great community that all stack exchange community are known for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="239303" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-03-01T14:00:44.930" LastActivityDate="2019-03-01T14:00:44.930" Title="Is my closed question without merit?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|moderation|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5589" CreationDate="2019-02-28T13:40:19.673" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The topic of whether variance (which is square by definition) is a good measure of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_dispersion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dispersion&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deviation_(statistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;deviation&lt;/a&gt; is not without merit and is being discussed a lot. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question, however, is very unclear.  That is why it is closed. See the text that explains the reason for closing &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it’s hard to tell &lt;strong&gt;exactly&lt;/strong&gt; what you're asking.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T13:40:19.673" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5589" CreationDate="2019-02-28T16:08:55.250" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The moderator gave you the opportunity to clarify your question, so that it would be more likely to be understood by the community. This serves two purposes. First, it helps you personally, because it makes it more likely that you'll receive a useful answer. Second, it serves the community at large, because questions and answers should be useful to a wider audience who might run into the same or similar issues. This requires that the question is stated in an understandable way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that your question is not definitively shut down. It can be reopened if you update your question to be more clear. If it is unclear to you where there is room for improvement, there are many people here who would be happy to help you with this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While a question being put on hold may be frustrating, it is not intended as a personal attack on you. Please assume good faith, and bear in mind that our moderators volunteer their time and effort in order to keep our community in good shape. Lashing out at them is not a productive response, even if you believe you have been wronged. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38185" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T16:08:55.250" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5576" CreationDate="2019-03-05T09:06:49.697" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have looked at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/392582/determine-if-data-is-iid&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and I am pretty sure I was the initial down-voter.  (There were other down-voters who came after me.)  The reason for my downvote was that I think your answer, as it originally appeared, was incorrect and misleading to the questioner.  The particular assertion that I had the most concerns with, and led to my down-vote, was this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;....you can always make a phenomenological claim that the usage of phones by their users follows whatever distribution it follows AND that this distribution can be described by some model that is IID distributed on whatever distribution it needs to be to describe your data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That assertion is false, or at best misleading.  Asserting an IID structure to data is equivalent to asserting exchangeability of the data series, which certainly does not hold for all possible types of data.  Perhaps you can make a &quot;phenomenological claim&quot; of IID data (whatever that means), but it will be clearly false in many instances.  Exchangeability of data can be assessed empirically by runs tests, etc.  If the phone-use data is not exchangeable (e.g., obvious order patterns; fails runs tests by wide margin) then it is not appropriate to assert that it is from an IID model structure.  Moreover, in the context of the OP's question, he was interested in knowing how to tell if his two separate populations have independent values.  There are certainly cases where this is false (e.g., paired values).  Thus, I take the view that your original answer was incorrect on this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, that is the reason for my down-vote.  The fact that there were other down-votes that came after mine suggests that others also had similar concerns (or maybe different concerns).  Since you have now changed your answer to remove the previous incorrect assertion, and to improve your answer generally, I have now removed my down-vote.  Since your new answer is quite a reasonable response to the question (much improved) I have added an up-vote instead.  I hope this explanation helps in understanding why you received down-votes on that answer.  Thanks for taking the time to improve your answer and seek feedback on Meta.  I'm glad you are at peace.  ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In regard to your broader question, &quot;Is a sole answer with a down-vote worse than no answer at all&quot;, I would say that there is nothing wrong with keeping an answer with net down-votes.  The fact that there are net down-votes to an answer is already a caution to the OP that the answer is disputed by other users on the site.  So I would not think that this is any worse than no answer at all.  It at least allows the OP to see one person's opinion, and the fact that this opinion is unpopular.  That is sometimes valuable information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173082" LastEditorUserId="173082" LastEditDate="2019-03-05T09:18:04.483" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T09:18:04.483" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5593" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-06T21:40:18.410" Score="11" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;If an OP asks for a R library recommendation (policy under debate in another meta thread, I realize), and no acceptable recommendation exists, what is the policy regarding writing and posting code that accomplishes what the OP needs? In case this is out-of-bounds, what is the in-bounds way of suggesting that the conversation move off CV?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This pertains to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/395075/&quot;&gt;recent request&lt;/a&gt; for survival analysis software to support data not (obviously) supported by the R library &lt;code&gt;survival&lt;/code&gt;. There is now a bounty on this request, so I'm being egged on to do something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="219322" LastEditorUserId="173082" LastEditDate="2021-02-04T22:57:04.497" LastActivityDate="2021-02-05T13:26:29.860" Title="If OP asks for a software referral, and a referral *doesn't* exist, may we answer with the code they asked for?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|answers|r|software|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5593" CreationDate="2019-03-06T21:50:57.583" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;If code is the full answer to a question, then the question is off-topic.  When the code &lt;em&gt;illustrates&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;implements&lt;/em&gt; a statistical answer, such as a procedure or algorithm offered in response to a question about statistics or machine learning, then it is almost always warmly welcomed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2019-03-06T21:50:57.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5593" CreationDate="2019-03-06T21:51:31.907" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question asking for software referral is not on-topic, unless it needs some kind of statistical expertise. The same applies to questions about code. So, for example, a question asking about R packages for reading Excel files, plotting social network data, or asking how to implement linear regression in Python, etc. would be off-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, asking how to translate some theoretical paper to some practical problem, including implementing it, would be on-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distinction is often blurry, but the general rule pivots on whether the question asks about &lt;em&gt;programming&lt;/em&gt; or about &lt;em&gt;statistics&lt;/em&gt;. For me, the easiest way to tell what kind of question it is would be to consider if the question could be answered using pseudocode, ignoring all the language-specific and implementational details. If it can't, it's about programming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2019-03-07T09:54:59.953" LastActivityDate="2019-03-07T09:54:59.953" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5596" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-10T13:15:55.527" Score="0" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed an unexpected upsurge in the frequency by which my past questions are being upvoted. Whereas for most years of my membership I had maybe on average one or two upvotes in a week, since about two weeks now, I have had multiple upvotes per day. My score has risen +294 in the past week (rank #40) and I am among the top 5% this week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may be a coincidence or related to more frequent usage of CV in general, but it still seems very odd to me. Has anybody made similar experiences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar question has been discussed in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5462/i-get-surges-of-upvotes-and-they-are-lumpy-in-time-is-this-because-the-site-is&quot;&gt;thread&lt;/a&gt; and this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5111/odd-upvoting-pattern&quot;&gt;thread&lt;/a&gt;. Several answers are given:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Somebody found an Q/A they liked, clicked on profile and found more Q/A they liked; including giving you a boost because your Q/A's were under-appreciated.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It happens all the time. (not sure what this means?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You have a fan.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find these explanations still somewhat unsatisfactory. In particular, I have had around three upvotes per day. If explanation 1 or 3 would apply it is likely the upvotes would stop after some days. I really judge it unlikely anybody will come back to my profile over a period of weeks to vote on 2-4 questions per day. Explanation 2 seems to hint that this is a common problem of unknown origin. I somehow feel that there is more than this going on, but perhaps not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24515" LastEditorUserId="24515" LastEditDate="2019-03-12T11:09:57.967" LastActivityDate="2019-03-12T11:09:57.967" Title="Strange upsurge in up-voting of my questions" Tags="|support|votes|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2019-03-10T13:44:47.200" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5598" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5599" CreationDate="2019-03-12T16:52:23.583" Score="2" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm talking about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;this fella&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it's a bot (?), but how is it implemented, who maintains it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127281" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-03-12T20:17:57.843" LastActivityDate="2019-03-12T20:17:57.843" Title="Who implemented and operates/maintains the user Community?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5598" CreationDate="2019-03-12T16:58:44.967" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The SE developers implemented and maintain it.  Note that it is the same on all SE sites, so this question presumably belongs on meta.SE, not here (it is almost certainly a duplicate, however).  The place to start is: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/19738/187282&quot;&gt;Who is the Community user?&lt;/a&gt;  From there, you can read through the threads tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/community-user&quot;&gt;community-user&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2019-03-12T16:58:44.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5600" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5601" CreationDate="2019-03-15T15:36:20.627" Score="9" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often need to discern what the State of the Art (SOTA) is for certain Machine Learning Applications, which I currently ask on the Fast.ai forums. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://forums.fast.ai/t/missing-values-in-time-series-data/28155?u=seanny123&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How does Deep Learning deal with missing values in time series?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://forums.fast.ai/t/explanability-of-rnns/31598?u=seanny123&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Explanability&quot; analysis for time-series regression in Deep Learning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think these are on-topic, because the question essentially boils down to &quot;what's out there?&quot; which isn't very answerable and seems more suitable for a forum and/or wiki. However, I wanted to check my conclusion with the community before self-filtering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29949" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2019-03-21T08:31:46.277" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T08:31:46.277" Title="Are &quot;What is State of the Art for Machine Learning in X&quot; on topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5600" CreationDate="2019-03-15T16:09:40.913" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both of those examples seem to me to be well researched, &amp;amp; narrow enough in scope for our Q&amp;amp;A site. &quot;What's state-of-the-art in supervised learning&quot;, on the other hand, would, I think, be too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2019-03-15T16:09:40.913" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5602" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-19T21:51:18.113" Score="2" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wish to ask a question with a similar (or identical) title to a question that is closed. But I'm not able to do this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that this is a mistake. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the previous question is closed for a reason that doesn't preclude it being a perfectly valid question (e.g. a moderator felt the description wasn't clear enough), then why shouldn't the same question be asked again, with a different description? After all, no answers can be provided to the first question, and yet the question merits being asked, and being answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51927" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-03-22T11:43:27.033" LastActivityDate="2019-03-24T11:49:33.263" Title="Question titles cannot be similar to those of a closed question" Tags="|discussion|questions|closing-questions|title|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5602" CreationDate="2019-03-20T10:13:23.667" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, this is not something that we (neither the moderators, nor the community) can solve. This is how the platform is built, so if you wanted this to be changed, you should post a feature request for the whole StackExchange.com network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding using the same title, as was already suggested to you, you can simply use a slightly different title. Furthermore, an SE question can be either closed or deleted. Questions that seem to be off-topic are closed, so they cannot be answered any more, but are still visible on the site. If they don't have up-votes and answers, they are automatically deleted after a period of time. Otherwise they stay, as it is assumed someone may still find them helpful. So there is a point in not allowing for duplicate titles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, I guess that this problem would arise if using a very general title, and you shouldn't typically use very general titles. It is better to stick to titles that are descriptive and specific for your problem, rather than general. If you have a general question and the general title is taken by a question that was closed, or asks for something that is inconsistent with the title (unlike your question), then you could always suggest an edit for the previous question, and then after that edit is accepted, post your question using the title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2019-03-20T18:38:00.197" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T18:38:00.197" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="693" CreationDate="2019-03-21T14:35:11.867" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is another option that has not been pointed out here.  You can insert an HTML comment that will automatically turn on syntax highlighting within a post (see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/184108/187282&quot;&gt;What is syntax highlighting and how does it work?&lt;/a&gt;).  The way it works is that you put &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;!-- language: lang-r --&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; on its own line prior to the code.  Then the next code block will be highlighted as R code.  (Note that the comment itself will not be visible in the post.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be done with a number of languages, including (at least), &lt;code&gt;lang-r&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;lang-python&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;lang-matlab&lt;/code&gt;, as well as the major programming languages (&lt;code&gt;c++&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;java&lt;/code&gt;, etc.).  I don't know if there is support for other statistical software languages (e.g., &lt;code&gt;SAS&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;Stata&lt;/code&gt;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of limitations with this.  First, there will only be highlighting within code &lt;em&gt;blocks&lt;/em&gt;; inline code is not highlighted.  Second, this will only highlight the &lt;em&gt;next&lt;/em&gt; code block, if there is text, or a figure, or something else between one code block and a subsequent code block, the subsequent code block will not be highlighted.  Thus, you need to either add the comment prior to each code block, or use &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;!-- language-all: lang-r --&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; to highlight all subsequent code blocks (note the addition of &lt;code&gt;-all&lt;/code&gt; in the comment).  Third, these comments will not highlight code blocks prior to the comment.  Lastly, the comment will only highlight the code blocks within that post (question or individual answer); other posts on the same thread will not be affected.  (Adding, say, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;r&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;r&lt;/a&gt; tag to the question will highlight all code blocks on the thread.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also use these comments to locally override syntax highlighting on a thread.  For example, if a question included the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;r&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;r&lt;/a&gt; tag, but a code block in an answer was not r code, highlighting could be turned off via &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;!-- language: lang-none --&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, or could be switched to highlighting for a different language, e.g., &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;!-- language: lang-python --&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following provides an example of how this can be done.  Because the HTML comments will not show up, when I place them, I will subsequently place a copy of the comment as inline code to make it clear what was done.  (Hmmm, annoyingly the syntax highlighting does not seem to be working on meta, although I just tested it and everything below shows up as it should on the main site.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is some text answering a question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;here  # is some non-highlighted code in a code block&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I have more pearls of wisdom.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;!-- language: lang-r --&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;  &#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;this = &quot;some highlighted code&quot;  # nifty!&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Random crankiness and weird digressions from old man.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# once again, code is not highlighted&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sage remarks.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;!-- language-all: lang-r --&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;  &#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;highlighted  # code&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Increasingly tedious exposition with every other word inexplicably italicized.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;code &quot;still&quot;  # highlighted &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T14:35:11.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5602" CreationDate="2019-03-23T16:55:48.043" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[W]hy shouldn't the same question be asked again, with a different description? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sounds a lot like you are asking a duplicate of a closed question. If the question was closed because it's unclear, the best course of action is to have the OP refine their question sufficiently so that it may be reopened. (If the duplicate, closed question was off-topic or otherwise unsuitable it is not advisable to ask the same question again; it will simply be closed again for the same reason.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the interim, nothing stops you from asking the same question with a different title. If you find that it is difficult to come up with a title that is not already taken by an existing question, it's worth pausing to consider whether your question is a duplicate of any or all of &lt;em&gt;those&lt;/em&gt; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the OP is not forthcoming about making edits, the question will eventually be deleted by automated cleanup scripts (affectionately called the &quot;roomba&quot;). Downvotes can accelerate that process. Once the closed question is deleted, this will make available the unique title that you desire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/325583&quot;&gt;This question was also posted to Meta.SE&lt;/a&gt;. I believe that the answer there hit the nail on the head, so I'm paraphrasing the core advice given in that answer so that it can reach this audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2019-03-24T11:49:33.263" LastActivityDate="2019-03-24T11:49:33.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5560" CreationDate="2019-03-28T07:42:04.083" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can definitely see that y'all would benefit from this close reason. It seems that you've shoehorned two close reasons into one and it's your second most-used close reason currently, accounting for almost a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tools/question-close-stats?daterange=last90days&quot;&gt;third of all closed questions in the last 90 days&lt;/a&gt; (requires 10k rep to view). For everyone's benefit, the current 90-day numbers look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Reason                Qty.    %/total&#xA;---------------------------------------&#xA;unclear               779     32.30 %&#xA;stats/programming     739     30.64 %&#xA;duplicate             380     15.75 %&#xA;self-study            170      7.05 %&#xA;too broad             166      6.88 %&#xA;another site           88      3.65 %&#xA;other                  25      1.04 %&#xA;opinion-based          23      0.95 %&#xA;datasets               12      0.50 %&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Splitting this into two close reasons is an excellent idea as it allows you to give more guidance to users in each specific case. Helping users understand why their question is closed and guiding them to resources that may lead to the answer they need if the question is truly off topic or how to improve the question if it's not is an excellent thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do generally recommend the format &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about X are off-topic because Y.  For more information, see [Z](link to meta post).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, I suggest a rephrasing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions asking for code review, or that are focused on programming, debugging, or routine use of statistical software are off topic. Programming questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve&quot;&gt;with a reproducible example&lt;/a&gt; should be posted on StackOverflow.com. For help with particular software try the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/793&quot;&gt;support links we maintain&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Questions asking for code review, or that are focused on programming, debugging, or routine use of statistical software are off topic. Programming questions [with a reproducible example](https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve) should be posted on StackOverflow.com. For help with particular software try the [support links we maintain](https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/793).&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fitting in &quot;because Y&quot; here isn't likely going to happen due to length but I'm not sure it's necessary in this case. You have a good amount of help available to users who have their questions closed with this reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, considering this, you may wonder why I'm declining this request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's because of that last line item in the chart above. Half of one percent of closed questions on this site - 12 of them in the last 90 days - use that custom close reason. That's really not enough from our point of view to justify a fourth close reason. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I wonder if you could rework your more generic &quot;this isn't about statistics&quot; close reason to include this somehow. I'm not sure what sorts of questions it tends to catch but it reads like the default &quot;blatantly off topic&quot; close reason&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question does not appear to be about statistics within the scope defined in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's another close reason style that may be a better fit here. Here's an example of how it's being used on Life Hacks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does not seem to need a life hack&lt;/strong&gt; — A &quot;life hack&quot; is a seemingly intractable problem that can be solved by thinking outside the box. Unfortunately, everyday &quot;How to…&quot; questions about learning a craft or new skill are outside the scope of this site. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://lifehacks.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2431/a-lifehacks-manifesto&quot;&gt;about Lifehacks&lt;/a&gt;. If the author can show how this needs an &quot;outside the box&quot; solution, edit and 'flag' to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Y'all will be better able to judge whether that's possible but I could see something like this working:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions on Cross Validated should be about statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, or data visualization but not about datasets. This question does not seem to meet our scope. These questions may be welcome on other sites, see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a much broader close reason than the Lifehacks one, so it's difficult to make it perfectly line up ... but it really seems to be a catch-all. If there's a specific reason most of these questions are closed other than being blatantly off topic, that may be worth adding. There's 67 characters remaining and rewording could increase that count.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One last note, you might want to update your on topic page. It mentions that datasets are welcome on GIS in some cases but says nothing about Open Data! Don't forget to add it and link to their on topic page to make certain that anyone visiting can see what sorts of questions are in scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="202450" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T07:42:04.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5607" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-28T07:57:21.283" Score="10" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our recent proposal for adding one more close reason &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5606/35989&quot;&gt;was declined&lt;/a&gt;. The reason was that we could re-use the &quot;datasets&quot; reason&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about obtaining specific datasets are off-topic on Cross&#xA;  Validated. You are welcome to post this question to the Open Data site&#xA;  instead, thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as it is used only in 0.5% of the close reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we split &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because EITHER it is not about&#xA;  statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, or data&#xA;  visualization, OR it focuses on programming, debugging, or performing&#xA;  routine operations within a statistical computing platform. If the&#xA;  latter, you could try the support links we maintain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;into two reasons while re-using the slot from &quot;datasets&quot; close reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is our decision on this? I personally see no problem, but I'm curious about your opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2019-04-07T02:41:30.627" LastActivityDate="2019-04-12T20:01:01.640" Title="Should we remove the &quot;datasets&quot; close reason from the list?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|closing-questions|moderation|user-interface|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5607" CreationDate="2019-03-28T08:49:49.353" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the idea of splitting. I don't know the exact history here, but it shouldn't determine the best set of reasons to use henceforth. The EITHER/OR structure of that reason has long seemed awkward to me: now it appears that it was a way to get round the limit on number of reasons allowed. What is important here, simply but fundamentally, is that reasons given are clear not just to those who vote for one, but also to the posters on the receiving end, often people new to CV or SE in general. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because it focuses on&#xA;  programming, debugging, or performing routine operations within a&#xA;  statistical computing platform. You could try the support links we&#xA;  maintain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;could be an example of a crisper, more focused reason to close often used here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because it does not relate to&#xA;  the theory or practice of statistics, machine learning, data analysis,&#xA;  data mining, or data visualization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;could be an example of a crisper but catch-all reason to close (otherwise put, irrelevant to what we discuss here, while trying to avoid the circularity of saying this is irrelevant because it is irrelevant). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking for datasets may not now be very common, but we do see it done. That was a useful reason to close, but sacrificing that reason seems practical. But I suggest also adding nuance to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;where we already say &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about obtaining particular datasets are off-topic (they are&#xA;  too specialized). The GIS site welcomes inquiries about obtaining&#xA;  geographically related datasets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could give that a bit of a boost, say &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions about obtaining particular datasets are off-topic. They&#xA;  usually are too specialized or raise programming or other computing&#xA;  issues of downloading and processing files better discussed elsewhere on Stack Exchange.  The GIS site welcomes&#xA;  inquiries about obtaining geographically related datasets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T08:49:49.353" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5609" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5614" CreationDate="2019-03-30T16:50:58.450" Score="11" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that a specific user has engaged in a campaign to add the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt; to a number of posts that do not mention machine learning, particularly posts about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/neural-networks&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;neural-networks&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;neural-networks&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think these edits are useful. I also think that there are a couple of overlapping problems which are at work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The tag description for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Methods and principles of building 'computer systems that try to automatically improve with experience.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is not &lt;strong&gt;obviously&lt;/strong&gt; distinct from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/neural-network&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;neural-network&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;neural-network&lt;/a&gt;. A novice in the field could reasonably think of the two terms as interchangeable, and I think that is exactly what's caused this user to start adding the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt; tag to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/neural-networks&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;neural-networks&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;neural-networks&lt;/a&gt; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view, &quot;machine learning&quot; is the popular name for what Hastie et al call &quot;statistical learning&quot; in their landmark book &lt;em&gt;Elements of Statistical Learning&lt;/em&gt;. Statistical learning, and its synonym &quot;machine learning,&quot; both include neural networks as a special case.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt; description sounds a lot more like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reinforcement-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reinforcement-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reinforcement-learning&lt;/a&gt;, which strives to create self-teaching algorithms to learn from experience, than it describes statistical learning.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it makes sense to apply a more general tag when a more specific tag is sufficient. &lt;em&gt;Elements of Statistical Learning&lt;/em&gt; discusses cubic splines, and you can use splines in a machine learning project, but I wouldn't add the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt; tag to a question &lt;em&gt;solely&lt;/em&gt; about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/splines&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;splines&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;splines&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt; tag is useful if you're asking a soft question, or a question about the general field. For example, the question &quot;Why is cross-validation important in machine learning?&quot; does not need to be concerned with random forest or SVMs or neural networks in particular. Likewise, &quot;What is overfitting and how do you measure it?&quot; is a question generally about statistical learning and not any specific method.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The edit queue doesn't seem to be working. In my view, these edits add irrelevant tags, which is a reason to reject; however a number of these edits were approved anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The overall usage of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt; tag needs some attention. The usage varies from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reinforcement-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reinforcement-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reinforcement-learning&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/neural-networks&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;neural-networks&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;neural-networks&lt;/a&gt; to general statistics questions. I don't know what the best way is to make this tag useful; a large part of the problem is machine learning has become a marketing buzzword that means, essentially, &quot;One of our employees did statistics on a computer.&quot; I think it would be technically correct but quixotic to force the usage of &quot;statistical learning&quot; in the place of &quot;machine learning.&quot; Moreover, such a move might give people the impression that &quot;machine learning&quot; is not on-topic here, which is something we already have enough trouble with.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions for the community are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A.&lt;/strong&gt; What, if anything, needs to be done to improve the &lt;em&gt;description&lt;/em&gt; of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt; tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;B.&lt;/strong&gt; What should be done to improve the &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt; of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt; tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;C.&lt;/strong&gt; How can we best educate reviewers to thoughtfully consider edits which propose adding irrelevant tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-04-08T14:18:47.597" LastActivityDate="2019-04-08T14:18:47.597" Title="How to improve the description and usage of the [machine-learning] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-reorganization|tag-excerpt|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="296" CreationDate="2019-04-02T20:33:25.383" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion it depends very much on the nature of the question. For example, if the question is about how to use a certain color palette, then I rather have that answer posted on Stack Overflow. It is just about how to use some API.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the feedback from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/users/22047/nick-cox&quot;&gt;Nick Cox&lt;/a&gt; on my former answer, I am reconsidered my answer. I believe topics about visualization should be better dealt in the data science site, whereas the focus of cross validated should remain statistics. As Nick points out, talking about how to organize the data will tend to involve how to do that with some specific tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17908" LastEditorUserId="17908" LastEditDate="2019-04-04T06:36:01.797" LastActivityDate="2019-04-04T06:36:01.797" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5611" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5612" CreationDate="2019-04-03T08:55:00.093" Score="2" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently looked over my list of reviews for 'suggested edits'. I found a fair number of cases where the majority vote was to approve the addition of the &lt;code&gt;self-study&lt;/code&gt; tag. I was under the impression that our policy was to reject these edits, so I took a look at meta and found that this has been addressed here multiple times: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1172/should-we-tag-questions-that-smell-like-homework&quot;&gt;Should we tag questions that smell like homework?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Top answer at +16 begins: &quot;I think it's fine to retag (without comment) as long as it is perfectly clear that the problem is homework&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4393/should-i-add-the-self-study-tag-to-a-question-that-is-copy-pasted-from-a-book&quot;&gt;Should I add the self-study tag to a question that is copy-pasted from a book?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers focus on a different aspect of the question (copy-pasting), but the comments show disagreement about whether tagging is acceptable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1904/is-it-okay-to-add-the-self-study-tag-through-an-edit-instead-of-asking-op-to-d&quot;&gt;Is it okay to add the [self-study] tag through an edit instead of asking OP to do it?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No answer, but top comment at +9 begins: &quot;I am one of the people who approved that edit. I don't have a problem w/ people editing questions to add the [self-study] tag&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4405/if-rejecting-an-edit-that-adds-the-self-study-tag-what-reason-should-be-given&quot;&gt;If rejecting an edit that adds the [self-study] tag, what reason should be given?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Top answer is one which does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; reject such edits, and also states: &quot;I usually type a custom message for the editor telling them to leave a comment for the OP&quot;. But comments under the question show disagreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, the responses suggest a majority favour approving these edits, though there's a fair bit of disagreement. However, this is sharply at odds with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/self-study/info&quot;&gt;tag wiki info&lt;/a&gt;, which explicitly states: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The self-study tag should only be added by the one asking the&#xA;  question. If there's any room for doubt at all, it's best to leave it&#xA;  as is. Instead, always add a comment first requesting that the asker&#xA;  clarify the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Arguably, the second sentence walks back the first a bit, so ambiguity remains).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever we decide as a community is fine with me, but I think the present situation is needlessly confusing. If the majority prefers to allow the addition of &lt;code&gt;self-study&lt;/code&gt; through edits, should we just change the tag info to reflect this? Or should we stick to the letter of the present law and reject these edits consistently? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-04-03T09:11:16.473" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T18:53:18.120" Title="Can we resolve the lack of consensus about editors adding the self-study tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|editing|homework|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5611" CreationDate="2019-04-03T09:48:17.523" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;With moderating it is hard to define strict rules. We are humans and dealing with humans, so there are always exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't feel it is that confusing. As a general rule, this tag should be added by the OP &amp;amp; first of all you should comment on that. You should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; just add &lt;code&gt;[self-study]&lt;/code&gt; tag and leave the question as is. On the nother hand, if you are already making other edits, no harm will happen if you add the tag &lt;em&gt;while commenting that you did so and why&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I myself have different solutions for different &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; questions:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In many cases I just close them with &lt;em&gt;self-study&lt;/em&gt; close reason. I do this mostly for the low quality questions from users that are new to the SE network (reputation 1).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a user made some effort and described the problem the greater detail, but it is still inconsistent with our self-study policy, I comment on this and ask for edits rather then closing it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If everything is according to the policies, if needed I make small edits (including tag), including the tag and usually comment about my edits.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2019-04-03T18:53:18.120" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T18:53:18.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5609" CreationDate="2019-04-05T09:31:20.047" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;My opinion is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt; tag is borderline useless because it is too unspecific and too vacuous. It is not the only tag like that. For example we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fitting&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fitting&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fitting&lt;/a&gt;×600 and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;model&lt;/a&gt;×900, which are also vacuous and could well be burninated &amp;amp; blacklisted as far as I am concerned. But &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt; with over 12k threads is the most prominent example of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/tags/tags/topusers&quot;&gt;my experience&lt;/a&gt; with trying to improve our tag system, there is nothing we can do about it: our community has &lt;em&gt;never ever&lt;/em&gt; requested SE admins to burninate a tag. And manual deletion is not an option. So &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt; is here to stay. Also, given its popularity, I don't think we can really influence how people use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A. What, if anything, needs to be done to improve the description of the machine-learning tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are right, the current excerpt does not make sense and we should change it. My suggestion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Machine learning algorithms build a model of the training data. The term &amp;quot;machine learning&amp;quot; is vaguely defined; it includes what is also called statistical learning,  reinforcement learning, unsupervised learning, etc. ALWAYS ADD A MORE SPECIFIC TAG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: I went ahead and made the edit to the excerpt. What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B. What should be done to improve the usage of the machine-learning tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I argued above, nothing can be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C. How can we best educate reviewers to thoughtfully consider edits which propose adding irrelevant tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that a specific user has engaged in a campaign to add the tag [machine-learning] to a number of posts that do not mention machine learning, particularly posts about neural-networks. I don't think these edits are useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this the only edit that they are doing? I think if there are multiple edits and [machine-learning] is added alongside, then it is fine. If the sole purpose of an edit is to add the [ML] tag to a Q on neural networks, then I agree this is not useful and actually harmful because it clogs the queue and the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a first attempt to settle this, can you perhaps get in touch with this user and friendly point them to this discussion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2019-04-08T14:17:40.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="296" CreationDate="2019-04-05T12:50:13.273" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As per &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt;, the questions about how to achieve this or that in &lt;code&gt;ggplot2&lt;/code&gt; are (now, in 2019) off-topic and should be asked elsewhere:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Programming,&lt;/strong&gt; ask on Stack Overflow. If the language is statistically oriented (such as R, SAS, Stata, SPSS, etc.), then decide based on the nature of your question: if it needs statistical expertise to understand or answer, ask it here; if it's about the implementation of an algorithm, routine data processing, or details of the language, then please refer to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/793/internet-support-for-statistics-software&quot;&gt;collection of links to resources&lt;/a&gt; we maintain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good place to ask questions on &lt;code&gt;ggplot2&lt;/code&gt; is StackOverflow that has [ggplot2] tag with 27k+ questions: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ggplot2&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ggplot2&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2019-04-05T12:50:13.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5607" CreationDate="2019-04-07T02:21:01.913" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, we shouldn't&lt;/strong&gt;. If 'asking for datasets' close reason has been used, it has been useful (pretty much the same way as 'opinion-based' has, the second least used topic). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However&lt;/strong&gt;, the idea of splitting the 'not about statistics' and 'pure programming is' good. Despite initially declined, we can try to insist with the SE staff to have a 4th close reason (as many other SE sites already have). Moreover, sooner or later that close reason will be broadened to include other types of shopping list questions here in CV SE (we can observe a shift in how users perceive such types of questions are in course; recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5333/favorite-data-analysis-cartoon-question-should-be-closed/5334#5334&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going either way (removing or not removing, splitting or not splitting), I also suggest we reorder the close reasons in the dialog from top to bottom according to their frequency of use (reported in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5560/extract-software-specific-default-close-reason/5606#5606&quot;&gt;Extract software-specific default close reason&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;programming;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;self-study;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not about statistics, machine-learning, etc.*&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;asking datasets;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;blatantly off-topic (for &amp;lt;3k rep) / other (&gt;=3k rep) .&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I am assuming if split occurs, 'not about statistic' would rank 3rd (but this could be reassessed after some time with real data).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the current dialog order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mWChI.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mWChI.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The picture also illustrates the dialog has space for adding more topics if we want to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2019-04-12T20:01:01.640" LastActivityDate="2019-04-12T20:01:01.640" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5618" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-07T17:09:01.113" Score="2" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Think I am experiencing a weird stalk-upvoting behaviour this week. Every day I see 2-3 of my old answers being upvoted. And the upvoting started from the lowest-score answers (that had 0 score) and seems to be moving upwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if the system is reverting or will revert the score from those votes. And obviously I am not upset about it. But my question is - what am I supposed to be doing in this case? Should I report this somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whoever is doing it seems to be familiar with the SO system and visit this site every day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18417" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-04-07T19:44:15.147" LastActivityDate="2019-04-07T19:44:15.147" Title="Someone upvoting my old answers at a rate of 2-3 per day" Tags="|discussion|votes|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2019-04-07T17:19:01.783" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5619" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-09T12:46:52.480" Score="16" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm dealing with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55592814/lm-and-anova-function-following-id-from-two-columns?noredirect=1#comment97882574_55592814&quot;&gt;question on Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; that's really a &quot;stats review&quot; -- not technically a code review (&quot;is this code OK?&quot;), but &quot;is this statistical approach OK?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This strikes me as inappropriate for CV as well since it doesn't ask a &lt;em&gt;particular&lt;/em&gt; stats question, just &quot;is this OK?&quot;, but maybe those rules about specificity are more applicable to SO than CV; I don't see anything about specificity in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;off-topic&lt;/a&gt; lists, although it might fall under &quot;there is no actual problem to be solved&quot;. (It's not a stellar question, but it might be improved with editing.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is a &quot;please review my statistical approach&quot; question on-topic for CV?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if not, can anyone recommend a more appropriate venue?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2126" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-04-09T20:59:28.900" LastActivityDate="2019-04-09T20:59:28.900" Title="Are &quot;stats-review&quot; questions on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5620" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-10T11:12:52.593" Score="7" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;An &quot;Operations Research and Analytics&quot; site for Stack Exchange has been proposed &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/121892/operations-research-and-analytics&quot;&gt;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/121892/operations-research-and-analytics&lt;/a&gt;, and is now in need of enough committers to get to beta.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was an OR Exchange site. But it has been permanently shut down due to SPAMMING. The proposed new site is viewed as a replacement for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears the long pole in the tent is getting enough committers who have 200+ on other SE sites. Cross Validated has enough overlap with the proposed site that I would think many of its active users would be interested in the proposed new site. Among other things, the proposed new site could become a home for all optimization questions, of which there are many on Cross Validated, not all of them even involving probability or statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to solicit among Cross Validated users or advertise there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;The Stack Exchange site, &quot;Operations Research&quot; entered private Beta yesterday at &lt;a href=&quot;https://or.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://or.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;. It should go to public beta in one to two weeks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until it goes public, I believe only users who have already &quot;committed&quot; to it while in proposal (commitment) phase can actively contribute to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78964" LastEditorUserId="78964" LastEditDate="2019-05-31T11:47:46.657" LastActivityDate="2019-05-31T11:47:46.657" Title="Is there a way to solicit Cross Validated users to Commit to a proposed Operations Research and Analytics site (in Area 51)?" Tags="|discussion|etiquette|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5622" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-11T13:42:58.773" Score="15" ViewCount="346" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/402333/must-know-in-statistics-and-machine-learning&quot;&gt;What must someone know in statistics and machine learning?&lt;/a&gt; is not suitable for the stats.SE format because it is primarily opinion-based. I believe that much is obvious on its face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP's appeal to make this question an exception is premised on a misunderstanding of how this site works. The help center outlines how to ask good questions, and the closure message explains why the question was originally closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making the question community wiki is not a remedy for off-topic content. If it were, we would simply change all off-topic questions to CW; the fact that we do not, but explicitly close them and have robots eventually delete them, suggests that we believe hosting a large volume of off-topic content which continues to attract traffic does active harm to the website. Likewise, community-wiki questions must still be on-topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/258006/must-a-community-wiki-post-follow-the-pattern-of-a-qa&quot;&gt;Must a community wiki post follow the pattern of a Q&amp;amp;A?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2019-04-11T15:31:51.180" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T08:39:09.313" Title="This opinion-based question must be closed" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5622" CreationDate="2019-04-11T14:18:58.267" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is very broad and may be considered a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/&quot;&gt;bad subjective question&lt;/a&gt;. The way that the question is phrased suggests this very clearly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What do you consider a person must....?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes it more like an opinion poll. (it is not only subjective, but also unclear and broad, for instance what scope does the question ask about, which people do we consider, academics, engineers, IT specialists, average people, politicians?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar (closed) questions on &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;physics: &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5495/what-does-it-take-to-become-a-top-physicist&quot;&gt;what-does-it-take-to-become-a-top-physicist&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;maths:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1164787&quot;&gt;mathematical-canon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;mathoverflow:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/26967&quot;&gt;how-to-become-a-good-mathematician&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;stackoverflow:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/726894/&quot;&gt;what-are-the-dark-corners-of-vim-your-mom-never-told-you-about&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;software engineering: &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/91350&quot;&gt;what-should-every-programmer-know&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also questions that did not get closed like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1247803/design-patterns-that-every-developer-must-know&quot;&gt;design-patterns-that-every-developer-must-know&lt;/a&gt; but in principle stackexchange avoids to have these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is, for some reason, not being closed then at least it should be considered to be improved along the lines of the list &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some subjective questions are allowed, but “subjective” does not mean “anything goes”. All subjective questions are expected to be constructive. What does that mean? Constructive subjective questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;tend to have long, not short, answers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;invite sharing experiences over opinions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;are more than just mindless social fun&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good comparison (and contrast) is Gerard het Hooft's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.goodtheorist.science/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How to become a&#xA;GOOD Theoretical Physicist&lt;/a&gt; . If the question could be phrased in such a way that it leads to a fine answer like Gerard het Hooft's then the question may be usefull and constructive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However theoretical physics is a reasonably confined field. Untill a student is starting to do a Phd a lot of the curriculum is pretty much the same or at least there are many resemblences among different programs (you can not say the same for statistics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gerard het Hooft describes this as &lt;em&gt;&quot;Theoretical Physics is like a sky scraper&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and his webpage is describing all the floors. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Statistics is much more like a village with lots of different&#xA;buidlings. Even the building materials may be different&#xA;(wood/concrete/metal). A statistician like Edward Tufte specializes in&#xA;data visualisation, a machine learning Guru like Andrew Ng knowns all&#xA;about computer science, and a statistician like Ronald Fisher knows a&#xA;lot about mathematics (and biology). It will be very difficult to shape the question in such a form that it allows clear (conclusive) answers that will resemble something like Gerard's webpage. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question 'How to become a good &lt;strike&gt;Theoretical&lt;/strike&gt; Physicist' would be similarly difficult. It would also be leading to too much divergent possibilities to answer. (I have to think now about one of my instructors for a workgroup seminar in a first year astronomy class at University, answering to a more complicated question something like &quot;Oh, I do not know anything about general relativity, I don't need to&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2019-04-12T11:03:03.047" LastActivityDate="2019-04-12T11:03:03.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5622" CreationDate="2019-04-11T21:40:32.780" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on the following precedents: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/40808/is-a-strong-background-in-maths-a-total-requisite-for-ml&quot;&gt;Is a strong background in maths a total requisite for ML?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/68793/what-math-subjects-would-you-suggest-to-prepare-for-data-mining-and-machine-lear?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;What math subjects would you suggest to prepare for data mining and machine learning?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/27495/having-a-job-in-data-mining-without-a-phd?rq=1&quot;&gt;Having a job in data-mining without a PhD&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/5026/what-is-the-difference-between-data-mining-statistics-machine-learning-and-ai?rq=1&quot;&gt;What is the difference between data mining, statistics, machine learning and AI?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/109210/what-is-the-daily-job-routine-of-the-machine-learning-scientist?rq=1&quot;&gt;What is the daily job routine of the machine learning scientist?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question in the OP should remain open as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above linked questions are not just cases of opinion based questions that slipped through the net. All are highly upvoted, so presumably that's an indication that the community as a whole approves - and isn't SE supposed to be essentially democratic? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89649" LastEditorUserId="89649" LastEditDate="2019-04-12T16:43:33.700" LastActivityDate="2019-04-12T16:43:33.700" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5333" CreationDate="2019-04-12T10:13:21.697" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The most important thing about rules is that they are not applied differently from day to day but consistently.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saying a question should be closed because it is subjective and at the same time leaving questions like the cartoons open is highly inconsistent, leads to frustration and discussion  and thus harms stackexchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the moment the old answer from Sycorax (Jul 10 '18 at 0:22) has most upvotes and my opinion on the argument that the cartoon question helps marking new bad questions as duplicates is that this is only true for cartoon-like questions and not for all the other subjective questions which invalidates the argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user213325" LastEditorUserId="121522" LastEditDate="2019-04-15T07:43:08.693" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T07:43:08.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5622" CreationDate="2019-04-12T17:01:52.153" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I edited the question and wrote that I want to delete it because of all the shitstorm and those who want can save the answers before they are gone. But my edit was denied. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, cynical answers to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you consider a person MUST know about statistics and machine learning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nothing. There is no must-know knowledge for 'a person'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many people are living happy lives without knowing anything about&#xA;  statistics and/or machine learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;don't help anyone. I am surprised how little constructive users with this much rep can be. Instead of improving the question or asking someone else to improve it after saying what should be improved he decided to point out such problems in a completely useless and cynical and thus offending answer. Although he denied in the comments beneath his answer that the intent of the post was to point out how bad my question was he wrote here &quot;I have added an answer to your question that may prove my point about the subjectivity and fuzziness of your question. It is too much unclear what goal should be&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ironically, the question itself was not the problem and led to little discussion if you read the comments on the answers. But so did the whole &quot;it must be closed because subjective thing lead to endless discussions&quot; comments that started a huge discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, after just seeing that this childish behavior got even positive feedback I delete the whole question. That is too much madness for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user213325" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2019-04-15T08:39:09.313" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T08:39:09.313" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5628" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-13T17:02:16.130" Score="11" ViewCount="348" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am just wondering why it takes more time to get a response in Cross Validated than in math.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any specific reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109372" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-04-13T20:51:25.343" LastActivityDate="2019-04-13T23:31:21.220" Title="Why is math.SE more responsive than Cross Validated?" Tags="|discussion|participation|site-statistics|math-stackexchange|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5628" CreationDate="2019-04-13T17:07:04.347" Score="28" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Math.se has more site traffic than Stats.SE.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#traffic&quot;&gt;https://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#traffic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Math.SE has &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; more site traffic. Moderator @whuber notes that depending on the statistic, the ratio of the sites' traffic statistics can vary between 3:1 and 11:1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The sites' topics are very different&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Math.SE tends to attract questions which are more-or-less help with routine coursework. As long as the notation is clear, answers are well-understood. The more open-ended questions tend toward questions about intuition, or how certain mathematical concepts fit in with others (Borel measurability versus Lebesgue measurability), or why some object (&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\sigma$&lt;/span&gt;-fields) or requirement  (&amp;quot;measurability&amp;quot;) is necessary for a result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stats.SE covers two domains. One domain is answering questions about probability and statistics as a matter of mathematical study, such as showing that OLS coefficients are BLUE or properties of matrix arithmetic or proving results from probability theory. These questions have the most similarity to Math.SE questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other domain is applied statistics. Applications are messy. Subjects of study are not always self-consistent, data collection can be incomplete, and experimental design can leave room for endogenous effects or confounding. It's challenging to write a question which concisely explains the task and asks an &lt;em&gt;answerable&lt;/em&gt; question about how to carry it out. It's also hard to write an &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; that understands the problem completely and presents the correct answer, especially when the question is ambiguous or its explanation is incomplete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions don't have clear-cut answers, so a good answer will contrast the deficits of several alternative approaches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As someone who writes more answers than questions, I've found that I am susceptible to a particular trap: writing answers &lt;em&gt;as if&lt;/em&gt; OP was asking a routine or textbook question. Sometimes OP &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; asking a routine question, but sometimes they're not. Asking for clarification (which may not ever arrive) is an important part of answering questions, as is imagining the myriad of different circumstances in which the question could arise and attempting to pin down which one matches OP's needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;We have some other threads that are related to this&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of an exact duplicate of this specific question, comparing Math.SE and Stats.SE, but we have discussed the Stats.SE answer rate before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5325/we-have-a-very-large-widening-gap-between-questions-and-answers-how-do-we-fix/5326#5326&quot;&gt;We have a very large &amp;amp; widening gap between questions and answers. How do we fix it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2242/are-we-seeing-a-dramatic-drop-in-answers-per-question&quot;&gt;Are we seeing a dramatic drop in answers per question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1538/why-is-our-answer-rate-so-low&quot;&gt;Why is our answer rate so low?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2019-04-13T23:31:21.220" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5630" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-14T11:05:26.890" Score="13" ViewCount="366" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center &gt; Asking&lt;/a&gt; states that questions are on-topic if they're about &quot;statistical analysis, &lt;em&gt;applied or theoretical&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, and whenever it's about programming &quot;if it needs statistical expertise to understand or answer&quot;. This also is the topic of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2007/163114&quot;&gt;this meta discussion&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shouldn't therefore questions concerning the implementation of a particular statistical model in different software be &lt;strong&gt;on-topic&lt;/strong&gt; on Cross Validated (CV)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;What happened:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; A few days ago I encountered the problem of how a specific statistical &quot;far from trivial&quot; model can be implemented in R rather than in Stata. Google's results were rare and one pointed me straight to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/397488/163114&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;this question on CV&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; which gave me valuable hints, but the solution was not provided. I had to do quite an amount of extra research and after I found a solution, and after I've convinced myself that the same statistical method is being used, I wrote an &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/402429/163114&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to share my insights with the OP and the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just after I've posted my answer, the question was closed as &lt;strong&gt;off-topic&lt;/strong&gt;. I am wondering why, since the OP has written his question in a &quot;general format&quot; and elucidates &quot;underlying statistical methods&quot; as demanded in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5586/163114&quot;&gt;this meta discussion&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, perhaps my answer is somewhat off-topic, as it does not contain much statistical explanation.&#xA;The question hasn't been migrated to Stack Overflow (SO), since it might be a &quot;&lt;em&gt;borderline&lt;/em&gt; question&quot; in terms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2009/163114&quot;&gt;@Shog9&lt;/a&gt;. IMO it therefore shouldn't have been closed on CV. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;My point&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is that on CV answers to questions about how a certain statistical model &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; can be implemented in software &lt;em&gt;Y&lt;/em&gt; (perhaps with an unknown package &lt;em&gt;Z&lt;/em&gt;) are often invaluable. I personally doubt to get statistically valid answers on Software Recommendations or r-help - as some &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2418/163114&quot;&gt;suggest where to ask such questions&lt;/a&gt; - when things enter non-trivial statistical areas. I would most likely trust answers or consider them significant if they are right here on CV. There are several other similar questions which are not closed, e.g.: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/6469/163114&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/400223/163114&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/401723/163114&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/378105/163114&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/96657/163114&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;. I have found several of them to be really useful. Some such questions would be off-topic on SO since they are &quot;too broad&quot;, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/5114782/6574038&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, or doesn't contain a MCVE, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/55555492/6574038&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. Further asking to &quot;recommend or find a book, tool, software library, tutorial or other off-site resource&quot; is off-topic on SO as also noted in &lt;em&gt;@Tim&lt;/em&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2418/163114&quot;&gt;CV meta question&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I consider CV as an invaluable resource of such model implementation questions in different software and I would be disappointed to see that to change.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm aware&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; that this topic has its history. Maybe my question contributes to some further differentiation (from e.g. pure programming R questions). &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4590/163114&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; doesn't fit to the type of questions since it doesn't cover model implementation in different software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/795/163114&quot;&gt;this community wiki&lt;/a&gt; isn't suitable to the question since it is not purely software-related and needs a statistically educated brain to give an adequate answer which can't be a entry on a simple package list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163114" LastEditorUserId="163114" LastEditDate="2019-04-15T08:35:51.603" LastActivityDate="2019-04-18T13:31:37.443" Title="Shouldn't CV be a valid resource on how to implement non-trivial statistical models in different software?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|software|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5630" CreationDate="2019-04-14T14:03:41.737" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This issue has been litigated many times on meta.CV, and the specific thread referenced is clearly off topic.  The question is &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; asking about how R works (what package / function, and an error message), not the underlying statistical issues.  In addition, the explicit questions (the places where there is a &quot;?&quot;), are the title, &quot;How to... in R... ?&quot;, and the final sentence / paragraph &quot;Any suggestions?&quot; (which is obviously too broad).  The answer is &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; code and does not contain any statistical explanation, as you note.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's address some of the specific issues:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should CV offer code help and/or tutorials as long as the models discussed are &quot;far from trivial&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.  This is not training or tech support for any software, including R.  We also don't do tutorials.  Software should make resources available (documentation, books, courses, etc.) to provide adequate assistance to users.  Moreover, &quot;far from trivial&quot; is in the eye of the beholder.  I teach introductory statistics classes, and many of my students would consider a simple logistic regression model to be &quot;far from trivial&quot; (I'm guessing you would not&amp;mdash;at least, I do not).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Shouldn't we allow such questions here, since there doesn't seem to be a better place to ask elsewhere on the internet?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.  The universe is not required to provide a free, convenient answer somewhere.  And our scope is not determined by the scope of other SE sites, or other sites generally.  Whether or not any suggestion for where a question can be asked can be given, our scope is the same.  To see the illogic in this suggestion, consider applying it elsewhere, say &lt;a href=&quot;https://cooking.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Seasoned Advice&lt;/a&gt;, SE's cooking Q&amp;amp;A site.  Shouldn't you be allowed to ask how to fit a bivariate probit model there, since it isn't on topic elsewhere?  No, because it is outside their scope.  That may not seem fair, since that is a cooking site, and this is a statistics site.  But that's the point, this site is for questions about &lt;em&gt;statistics&lt;/em&gt;, not about software (even statistical software) and how to use it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Shouldn't we allow this question, since it appears other questions have been allowed?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.  This is a common retort by people who want answers and believe CV should be obliged to give them.  There are several issues: First, the site's standards and scope have evolved over time.  Second, there are many questions asked every day.  No one has read them all.  I don't read all the new questions every day anymore.  If I had seen the thread at issue here when it was asked, I would have closed it immediately.  I have not yet investigated the threads you link, but it is possible they just slipped by and should be closed now.  Third, you need to consider not only the few possible exceptions to the rule, but the many, many threads that have been closed in accordance with our policies.  Moreover, whether or not any other off-topic thread remains open has little bearing on whether this off-topic thread should be closed.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am very sympathetic to the fact that there are people who have questions and need help.  (I have answered over 1.5k questions here, after all.)  I am also sympathetic to the fact that people can find R inscrutable at times and really want help with that&amp;mdash;I've been that person myself more than once.  People commonly say they want to ask here because this is the best site with the highest quality information.  Despite my sympathies, I am also responsible to maintaining the standards of this site, in terms of both boundaries and quality.  In fact, part of the reason the site has high quality information is because we are strict about what we do and how we do it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how do I determine if something is on-topic, or if a seeming code question really &quot;takes statistical expertise to answer&quot;?  It's fairly simple really.  I do not ask if only someone with statistical training would have heard of the test / model at issue, instead, I ask myself what the OP needs explained.  If what needs to be explained is a statistical idea, it's on-topic, if it's not, it's off-topic.  For example, if the question had asked how seemingly unrelated bivariate probit regression works, or how any software could estimate it 'under the hood', that would have been on-topic.  Sometimes people show that what appears to be the same model / test gets different answers from different software.  The issue is always that the software are making different default assumptions or using different estimators.  Other times the way the code is used or how it can go wrong is related to subtle and conceptually difficult aspects of the underlying procedures.  Those are all statistical issues to be explained.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conjunction with my statement that we sometimes miss questions that should be closed, but that their remaining open is not a valid argument that another off-topic question should be allowed, it may be worth laying out the history here.  I became aware of this thread because the answer was flagged for deletion as not an answer by CV's standards.  I agreed with that, but nonetheless I did not delete the answer.  The problem is that the question is clearly off topic and no post that actually answered the question would be a valid CV answer.  On the other hand, I recognize that the answer posted probably does help the OP (and future readers, since the thread won't disappear, even if closed).  So I left the answer, but closed the question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2019-04-18T13:31:37.443" LastActivityDate="2019-04-18T13:31:37.443" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5630" CreationDate="2019-04-15T00:58:18.847" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with many of the points gung makes (and several of his answers to subquestions) but I disagree with the conclusion in relation to the post in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also agree that it has been litigated many times, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt; hasn't changed across many iterations of this sort of question... indicating that its contents are as intended (or presumably they would have been changed, or at least a solid call for change would be made).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt;, it's on topic if it requires &quot;statistical expertise to understand or answer&quot;. I think the indicated question qualifies on that basis. [I don't think every such question does, but there's certainly a subset that do]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a challenge: Let's imagine we find 100 random expert programmers who &lt;em&gt;lack&lt;/em&gt; any statistical expertise, and give them full access to the R manuals, language definition, etc. Now get them to answer the original question. How many will successfully do it? (Maybe a couple?) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now if a somewhat larger proportion of expert statisticians would be able to do it correctly as a result of their statistical background, then there must be something in their statistical expertise that is needed to have a good chance at answering it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's room for disagreement about whether &lt;em&gt;expertise is necessary&lt;/em&gt; in particular cases (until we actually perform such a test I suppose), and if it's not pretty clear that it is required, a degree of conservatism isn't a bad approach -- but my reading of the question suggests that a considerable degree of statistical expertise is &lt;em&gt;certainly&lt;/em&gt; needed to correctly understand what the question is even asking about, and consequently some is required to be confident you have the right answer. (If some of our random expert programmers happened to locate a good solution, would they really know if they had it? Or would they be saying something nearer to &quot;uh, maybe see if this is the sort of thing you want, I don't really know&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the particular instance here, I strongly doubt that &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; could easily produce a correct answer without substantial effort, but it wouldn't be a lack of knowledge of R that would be the barrier on this one (I believe my knowledge of R is more than sufficient) -- it would be my lack of substantial familiarity with the statistical problem in question - my own lack of &lt;em&gt;statistical expertise&lt;/em&gt;. If I was to try to solve this question, I'd &lt;em&gt;begin&lt;/em&gt; by learning more about this particular area of stats, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; I'd start searching based on that knowledge. If that doesn't indicate a case where 'statistical expertise is required', I don't know what does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the question at issue here is an example of the sort of question the particular phrase in the help was intended to encompass. Perhaps we should explore (in a new meta question) whether that phrase should be clarified or tightened/rewritten to be more restrictive but as things stand I think it includes the question-that-was-closed as being within the scope of on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2019-04-15T13:43:40.847" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T13:43:40.847" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5633" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-15T10:51:35.480" Score="5" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a model built with time series data that I want to deploy. Sadly, I haven't found a lot of resources for this and I wanted to ask how to best approach this. The answer I am hoping for contains things related to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Best practices&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;System design considerations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Possible pitfalls stemming from feeding truncated timeseries to a classifier trained on full timeseries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this be on-topic? If not - where would I ask this?&#xA;I kind of assumed that SO would be more about implementation details instead of the big picture I am concerned about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: I was also unsure whether it is rude to ask on meta if I should ask on CV proper or if it rude to ask on CV without being sure that my question is on-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92524" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-04-15T13:17:08.107" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T13:17:08.107" Title="Are questions concerning deployment best practices on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5551" CreationDate="2019-04-16T20:37:38.957" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://or.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SrahK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Operations Research Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="244353" LastEditorUserId="244353" LastEditDate="2019-06-25T19:30:16.660" LastActivityDate="2019-06-25T19:30:16.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5630" CreationDate="2019-04-16T22:54:18.303" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, the example question should be squarely on-topic at Stack Overflow (&amp;amp; the answer a fine one). Both &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; the close reason&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Questions asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, software&#xA;  library, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for Stack&#xA;  Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam.&#xA;  Instead, &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/139399&quot;&gt;describe the&#xA;  problem&lt;/a&gt; and what has been&#xA;  done so far to solve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254393/what-exactly-is-a-recommendation-question/254394&quot;&gt;What exactly is a recommendation question&lt;/a&gt;, where a highly up-voted answer draws the distinction between describing a problem &amp;amp; &quot;shopping&quot;. It would also be suitable for the R-help mailing list. While I agree with @gung that there's no onus on CV to ensure that every type of question can be found a home somewhere on SE or the internet; I think we can, &amp;amp; should, give the existence of other places to ask a given type &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; weight when considering our ambit. In particular, more overlap between SE sites than needed to avoid impractically tortuous delimitation of their scopes doesn't help anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the example question's certainly off-topic here according to our current practice of closing questions that focus on &quot;performing routine operations within a statistical computing platform&quot;. Perhaps our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt; should be clarified. Or perhaps we should embrace such questions&amp;mdash;but I find it hard to imagine how we'd draw a line, even roughly, between the trivial &amp;amp; the non-trivial or between the commonplace &amp;amp; the recondite. Would we need to? &quot;Does not show research effort&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;not useful&quot; are already reasons to down-vote, &amp;amp; we could each vote in individual cases as we see fit rather than collectively struggle with legislation &amp;amp; litigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2019-04-17T11:58:30.550" LastActivityDate="2019-04-17T11:58:30.550" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5637" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5647" CreationDate="2019-04-22T17:53:27.630" Score="0" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5634/244353&quot;&gt;an ad&lt;/a&gt; to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5551/244353&quot;&gt;Community Promotion Ads - 2019&lt;/a&gt; thread, and the ad has had the requisite 6 votes for several days, but as far as I can tell it has not yet run on the Q&amp;amp;A site. Just wanted to check to see how the timing works, or whether there's something else I need to do to trigger the ad to run. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="244353" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T13:56:04.300" Title="How often/how quickly do community ads get posted?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1596" CreationDate="2019-04-26T07:07:54.127" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure, you can find many answers including code examples (more or less sophisticated) on our site. Remember however that code should serve as an example, so you should not post code-only answer without any explanation. Also I'd recommend to post the kind of code that is easy to understand rather then complicated, &quot;production-quality&quot; code. So better post few lines of code that solve particular problem, rather then multiline general solution. If your code is long and complicated, then better post a link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://gist.github.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://gist.github.com/&lt;/a&gt; or similar place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T07:07:54.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5639" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5655" CreationDate="2019-04-26T09:02:55.360" Score="27" ViewCount="436" Body="&lt;p&gt;We already have a thread on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1200/current-tag-synonym-candidates&quot;&gt;tag synonyms&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4525/the-learning-tags&quot;&gt;merging the *-learning tags&lt;/a&gt;, but since deep learning is currently a hot topic, it probably would be better to discuss it separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we make &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/deep-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;deep-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;deep-learning&lt;/a&gt; (2,136 questions) a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/neural-networks&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;neural-networks&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;neural-networks&lt;/a&gt; (4,304 questions)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently people seem to be using &quot;deep learning&quot; to mean neural networks, as &quot;shallow&quot; networks are rarely used. I personally don't find any good reason why keeping two separate tags would have any merits, but I may be wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-04-29T10:38:15.760" LastActivityDate="2019-05-06T07:38:57.720" Title="Should we make [deep-learning] tag a synonym for [neural-networks]?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5639" CreationDate="2019-04-26T20:23:00.800" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm in favor of the merger. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any questions which are specifically about deep neural networks, in contrast to neural networks in general, can be described as such in the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One motivation for the distinction &lt;em&gt;in the literature&lt;/em&gt; is that training a network with more layers can be harder than training a network with fewer, among other similar types of problems (cf vanishing gradient etc). Recently, this challenge has been ameliorated (better initialization, activation, optimization and network wiring). Hence, deep neural networks are accessible to novice and expert practitioners alike, and given the success of deep networks in solving problems, it seems plausible to expect that scientists will tend to prefer using deep networks to solve problems going forward. That is, deep networks will probably come to envelope neural networks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More to the point, as a matter of &lt;strong&gt;tagging&lt;/strong&gt;, this distinction does not seem necessary. The purposes of tags is to organize posts; even though experts understand that deep and shallow networks are distinct, that fact doesn't imply that we need to preserve that distinction in &lt;em&gt;tagging&lt;/em&gt;. If a person is in favor of maintaining the distinction, the justification must hinge on making the &lt;em&gt;tagging system&lt;/em&gt; better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, combining the tags makes the usage clear and makes the organization less haphazard. Today, a user will search twice using &lt;code&gt;[deep-learning] keyword&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[neural-networks] keyword&lt;/code&gt;, or subscribe to both &lt;code&gt;[deep-learning]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[neural-networks]&lt;/code&gt; tags. I don't understand why this is a good system when something like 90% of the &lt;code&gt;[neural-networks]&lt;/code&gt; tags could plausibly also be &lt;code&gt;[deep-learning]&lt;/code&gt; tags and vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider duplicate questions. If we commit to honoring the distinction between deep and shallow networks, can a general question about deriving back-propagation that bears the &lt;code&gt;[deep-learning]&lt;/code&gt; but not &lt;code&gt;[neural-networks]&lt;/code&gt; tag be closed as a duplicate of the same question bearing the &lt;code&gt;[neural-networks]&lt;/code&gt; tag but not the &lt;code&gt;[deep-learning]&lt;/code&gt; tag? On the one hand, the question content could be &lt;em&gt;identical&lt;/em&gt; but for the tag, so decision Vote to Close as Duplicate may be obvious; on the other hand, if we reason that the distinction is vitally important, then we're signing up to double the number of questions under each tag. In the cases where the question &lt;em&gt;contents&lt;/em&gt; are agnostic to network depth, this duplication is pointless from every perspective &lt;em&gt;except&lt;/em&gt; that of tagging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2019-04-30T12:07:50.793" LastActivityDate="2019-04-30T12:07:50.793" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2990" CreationDate="2019-04-27T14:35:25.573" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;As of April 2019, there's a new proposal &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/121892/operations-research&quot;&gt;Operations Research and Analytics&lt;/a&gt; on Area 51.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update May 2019&lt;/strong&gt;: the proposal has passed the commitment stage, and soon will be in public beta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update April 2020&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://or.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Operations Research&lt;/a&gt; is open and functioning normally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49024" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2020-04-21T12:32:40.237" LastActivityDate="2020-04-21T12:32:40.237" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5639" CreationDate="2019-04-29T12:43:24.617" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;In favor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the recent questions with these tags, there seems to be no pattern which get tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/neural-networks&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;neural-networks&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;neural-networks&lt;/a&gt;, which get &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/deep-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;deep-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;deep-learning&lt;/a&gt;, and which get both. On the other hand, there are questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/deep-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;deep-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;deep-learning&lt;/a&gt; that have absolutely nothing to do with it. Making deep learning an explicit synonym of neural networks might (hopefully) even prevent some users from using the tag for any learning (that perhaps feels deep to them, or whatever was their reason for using that tag for questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/402549/should-oob-out-of-bag-error-be-less-than-a-test-set-error-in-random-forests&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163572" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T12:43:24.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5644" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5645" CreationDate="2019-04-29T14:06:29.913" Score="14" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/403741/what-is-sigma-function-in-the-yolo-object-detector&quot;&gt;What is sigma function in the YOLO object detector?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; has been closed as off-topic with the usual explanation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because EITHER it is not about statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, or data visualization, OR it focuses on programming, debugging, or performing routine operations within a statistical computing platform. If the latter, you could try the support links we maintain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think it does not really fit this description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is arguably about machine learning.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is not about debugging neither performing routine operations within a statistical platform.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It clearly asks for explanation of mathematical notation used in one particular paper. It has even got two answers (one being accepted) before being closed. For the OP, it makes no difference whether it stays closed or not, but for any future visitors, it sends a message that &quot;we don't want such questions here&quot;. In my opinion, it is not the case&amp;mdash;except for using a screenshot instead of writing down the equations, it is an on-topic and answerable question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before I vote to reopen, I would like to know if I may have overlooked any other reason for off-topicness of this particular question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163572" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T14:43:10.727" Title="Question about math notation closed as off-topic" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5644" CreationDate="2019-04-29T14:43:10.727" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about notation have been traditionally considered within our scope, provided the notation is ultimately about statistics / machine learning.  In addition, the question of why the exponential is used seems to be a meaningful ML question.  I don't see that it needs to be closed.  I just reopened it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T14:43:10.727" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5639" CreationDate="2019-04-29T15:29:35.233" Score="-1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we make [deep-learning] tag a synonym for [neural-networks]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. The neural-networks tag is for both SNN and DNN, whether NN tagged questions should be retagged deep or shallow is a different question. So keep NN when the question applies to both and use deep or shallow when the other isn't applicable, same for the resolution (width).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/222883/197829&quot;&gt;Why are neural networks becoming deeper, but not wider?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depth and width, or lack thereof, are differentiating factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/214360/197829&quot;&gt;What are the effects of depth and width in deep neural networks?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See this question from 3 1/2 years ago: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/182734/what-is-the-difference-between-a-neural-network-and-a-deep-neural-network-and-w&quot;&gt;What is the difference between a neural network and a deep neural network, and why do the deep ones work better?&lt;/a&gt; (100 up / 0 down) and the useful image included in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/28666/amoeba&quot;&gt;amoeba&lt;/a&gt;'s (Jan 18 2018) &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/184921/197829&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; with 136 upvotes, 0 down, (and the other 9 answers barely scoring 2 dozen votes total):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/trj4L.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/trj4L.png&quot; alt=&quot;Amoeba's image #1&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... for real-world tasks deep architecture are often beneficial and shallow architecture would be inefficient and require a lot more neurons for the same performance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's far from proven. Consider e.g. Zagoruyko and Komodakis, 2016, Wide Residual Networks. Residual networks with 150+ layers appeared in 2015 and won various image recognition contests. This was a big success and looked like a compelling argument in favour of deepness; here is one figure from a presentation ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iVURh.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iVURh.png&quot; alt=&quot;Amoeba's image #2&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Article by Bernard Marr &amp;amp; Co.: &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://bernardmarr.com/default.asp?contentID=1789&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Deep Learning Vs Neural Networks - What’s The Difference?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;. While I disagree that the &lt;em&gt;line&lt;/em&gt; should be &lt;strong&gt;3&lt;/strong&gt; I agree that there's a difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quora Q&amp;amp;A: &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-Neural-Networks-and-Deep-Learning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What is the difference between Neural Networks and Deep Learning?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nicolas Neubauer, PhD in network mining &amp;amp; analysis&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Answered May 27, 2015&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Neural networks&amp;quot; can be used to refer to the whole class of machine learning architectures where individual units are connected via weights and those weights are adjusted as the network is trained. In that sense, deep learning is just a particular branch of network architecture and training.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a more narrow sense, neural networks might refer to the &amp;quot;old-school&amp;quot; way of constructing and training networks, where you have few layers (typically input, output, and 1 or 2 layers in-between), and then deep learning is the &amp;quot;new&amp;quot; way of doing this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia: &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning#Overview&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Deep Learning&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Overview&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most modern deep learning models are based on an artificial neural networks, specifically, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)s, although they can also include propositional formulas or latent variables organized layer-wise in deep generative models such as the nodes in deep belief networks and deep Boltzmann machines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In deep learning, each level learns to transform its input data into a slightly more abstract and composite representation. In an image recognition application, the raw input may be a matrix of pixels; the first representational layer may abstract the pixels and encode edges; the second layer may compose and encode arrangements of edges; the third layer may encode a nose and eyes; and the fourth layer may recognize that the image contains a face. Importantly, a deep learning process can learn which features to optimally place in which level on its own. (Of course, this does not completely obviate the need for hand-tuning; for example, varying numbers of layers and layer sizes can provide different degrees of abstraction.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;deep&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;deep learning&amp;quot; refers to the number of layers through which the data is transformed. More precisely, deep learning systems have a substantial credit assignment path (CAP) depth. The CAP is the chain of transformations from input to output. CAPs describe potentially causal connections between input and output. For a feedforward neural network, the depth of the CAPs is that of the network and is the number of hidden layers plus one (as the output layer is also parameterized). For recurrent neural networks, in which a signal may propagate through a layer more than once, the CAP depth is potentially unlimited. No universally agreed upon threshold of depth divides shallow learning from deep learning, but most researchers agree that deep learning involves CAP depth &amp;gt; 2. CAP of depth 2 has been shown to be a universal approximator in the sense that it can emulate any function.[citation needed] Beyond that more layers do not add to the function approximator ability of the network. Deep models (CAP &amp;gt; 2) are able to extract better features than shallow models and hence, extra layers help in learning features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="197829" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T15:29:35.233" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5637" CreationDate="2019-05-02T13:56:04.300" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/5551&quot;&gt;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/5551&lt;/a&gt; it seems to be already active, it just gets no clicks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well.... one now, since I just clicked on it. Now it says 0.07 clicks per day. So that means it was online 14 or 15 days ago (today is May 2th). That is about 1 or 2 days after you posted the add.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that, I have no idea if, how often and where those ads are shown. I have never seen them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T13:56:04.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5648" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5649" CreationDate="2019-05-02T16:23:14.410" Score="12" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are quite a few questions asking how to run backpropagation when dealing with skip connections, residual networks, &quot;mixed&quot; RNN-CNNs, attention mechanisms, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect the reason for the confusion is that backpropagation is usually taught as &quot;manual automatic differentiation&quot;: the teacher or student manually writes out the symbolic form of the derivative at each layer of a simple feed-forward network using the chain rule. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However backprop / automatic differentiation in general works on arbitrary computation graphs (DAGs), so that &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; computation composed of differentiable primitives can be backpropagated, including all those different types of networks mentioned above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(There are also questions about how to backprop through batch norm, which is itself composed of some simple mathematical primitives and is effortlessly handled by autodiff. Authors of highly optimized libraries might want to write out the &quot;fused&quot; gradient of batch norm to maximize performance, but I suspect that's not what people asking the question are trying to do.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, how should I answer these types of questions? I could just post an outline of how backprop works on arbitrary computation graphs, and then add some good references for backprop/autodiff. But I'd have to repeat this on every question, and whenever someone wants to know how to perform backprop on a newly invented foo-network, they'll still start a new question because it's not obvious to them that BP in foo-networks is the same as BP in every other network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26948" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T18:07:04.633" Title="How to answer questions about backpropagating specific architectures or functions?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5648" CreationDate="2019-05-02T16:54:29.730" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider writing your own question that will get at the underlying issue in the clearest and most concise manner, then answering it yourself.  (Be open to others contributing an answer as well, though.)  This could become a canonical thread for this topic, and could serve as a duplicate target in the future.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some examples, on the main site @Sycorax has done the sort of thing I'm advocating here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/352036/what-should-i-do-when-my-neural-network-doesnt-learn&quot;&gt;What should I do when my neural network doesn&amp;#39;t learn?&lt;/a&gt;.  On meta.CV, he has discussed doing this sort of thing here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5519/do-we-need-a-canonical-thread-about-stock-trading-what-would-it-address&quot;&gt;Do we need a canonical thread about stock trading? What would it address?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the future, you could write a smaller, perfunctory answer to the specific question (e.g., backpropagation in CNN), link to the canonical thread, and vote to close as a duplicate.  That way the OP would get some information specific to their situation, and a pointer to the more general and detailed solution.  If there were subsequent questions that were essentially the same (e.g., backpropagation in CNN again), you could just immediately vote to close as a duplicate of the former.  Note that you can flag closed questions to have moderators add additional duplicate targets, so that thread could end up with both the prior more specific and the more general threads listed.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2019-05-02T18:07:04.633" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T18:07:04.633" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5650" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5651" CreationDate="2019-05-02T20:46:09.970" Score="19" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see a lot of programming questions here. I remind people that programming questions are off-topic here, that they &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be useful for Stack Overflow, and that the requirements are a minimal working example and a description of desired output. 3 or 4 times now, I presume these people are terribly irate about this and serial downvote all my questions and answers, even across different SE networks. I try not to be rude when I comment, but clear enough so that their question can be fleshed out and get useful answers somewhere else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I presume they're trying to get my account locked. Do I keep out of it? Do I just cast a close vote and move on? What have others done? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2019-05-03T12:34:32.173" LastActivityDate="2019-05-03T13:10:27.630" Title="Community moderating vs systemic attacks" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5650" CreationDate="2019-05-03T02:47:24.353" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;To clarify: programming questions are not automatically off-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, they are off-topic if they don't need &quot;statistical expertise to understand or answer&quot;; as we see under &lt;em&gt;Programming&lt;/em&gt; in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if it needs statistical expertise to understand or answer, ask it here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not criticizing or challenging your response to programming questions but seek to clarify for any other readers what the actual situation is with regard to programming questions (because sometimes close-voters seem to miss this important exception). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I haven't checked whether any of the questions you have responded to could actually be on topic under the above criteria -- I presume you're already well aware of this and have always been doing it correctly.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I presume these people are terribly irate about this and serial downvote all my questions and answers, even across different SE networks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typically they can only downvote in a very limited way before it gets detected as serial downvoting and is automatically reversed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless they're determined enough to do it every day for many days (and know the approximate borderlines on voting behavior that the system checks for) it shouldn't make much difference to you, but if you think it's happening longer term (where it could start to bite into reputation in a more serious fashion), contact the mods and let us know, we can make some basic checks (though we don't see who voted on which questions; that's not a privilege available to mods).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they're &lt;em&gt;rude&lt;/em&gt;, flag the comment for mods. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I presume they're trying to get my account locked. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that's their aim it won't work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do I keep out of it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are important for explaining the way things work to new users. You should continue to use them whenever you see fit to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do I just cast a close vote and move on? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you think that's the best course, that's fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What have others done? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I comment a lot for a variety of reasons. I try to always be civil. Sometimes the responses are rude; if they're very rude a mod will remove them. Sometimes I get a few downvotes. Once you pass the highest rep level (as you have done already) what difference could a handful of downvotes make?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2019-05-03T13:10:27.630" LastActivityDate="2019-05-03T13:10:27.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5652" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-03T23:04:30.003" Score="9" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;RPG.SE is currently having a bit of a vigorous discussion about &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/147207/how-i-can-i-roll-a-number-of-non-digital-dice-to-get-a-random-number-between-1-a&quot;&gt;this question about dice rolling&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9065/should-this-dice-question-be-open-or-closed&quot;&gt;meta thereupon&lt;/a&gt;), in which this stack was brought up as a potential migrate target.  There &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a dice tag here, but is this sort of question on topic to begin with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note: I am not in any way a representative of RPG.SE, just a user of it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246829" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2019-05-04T14:48:16.253" LastActivityDate="2019-05-15T18:57:13.377" Title="Would this dice question be on topic if it were posted or migrated here?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5652" CreationDate="2019-05-03T23:56:32.910" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It could be on-topic here, I suppose, if criteria to define the correct answer were explicitly stated. What constraints are there on the types of dice used &amp;amp; the method for combining rolls? What's to be optimized?&amp;mdash;the number of dice needed? the number of rolls? As it stands, the question's much too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2019-05-04T09:16:55.257" LastActivityDate="2019-05-04T09:16:55.257" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5652" CreationDate="2019-05-04T00:24:46.767" Score="12" Body="&lt;h1&gt;TL;DR &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/406723/uniform-integers-at-random-from-1-to-n-using-fair-d6&quot;&gt;A &lt;em&gt;version&lt;/em&gt; of this question is a good fit for stats.SE&lt;/a&gt;, but the question on RPG.SE needs work before migrating to here&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the question will need to be more clearly stated to get interesting answers. Let's build up from vague to better questions. I hope that this exercise illustrates why asking a clearly-specified question is important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;How can I randomly select a passage from among 150 passages of text?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can cut out the dice step entirely if you just write the text on the slips of paper instead, and draw random passages that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;How can I generate uniform numbers from 1 to 150?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use a computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;How can I generate uniform numbers from 1 to 150 without a computer?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use your phone and navigate to &lt;code&gt;anydice.com&lt;/code&gt; or some dice rolling application.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Write the numbers 1 to 150 on identical slips of paper, mix them up in a box, and draw them from the box.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;How can I generate uniform numbers from 1 to 150 using dice?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make a fair d150 and use that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;How can I generate uniform numbers from 1 to 150 using platonic solid dice?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some answerers will make suggestions similar to those on RPG.SE about using different combinations of polyhedral dice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because there are &lt;em&gt;so many&lt;/em&gt; ways to do this, it is probably too broad -- everyone will be tempted to post clever, or even cheeky, solutions without regard to practicality. (This is a very common occurrence for &amp;quot;brainteaser&amp;quot;-type questions. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/193990/approximate-e-using-monte-carlo-simulation/193997#193997&quot;&gt;Approximate $e$ using Monte Carlo Simulation&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/354678/brain-teaser-how-to-generate-7-integers-with-equal-probability-using-a-biased-c/354679#354679&quot;&gt;Brain teaser: How to generate 7 integers with equal probability using a biased coin that has a pr(head) = p?&lt;/a&gt; for examples.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Insisting on using &lt;em&gt;physical&lt;/em&gt; dice brings some additional complications:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can a good solution require a bit of arithmetic?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are the dice fair? Is compensating for possibly unfair dice part of the task? Some statistical questions &lt;em&gt;assume&lt;/em&gt; fair dice, but since you're actually rolling &lt;em&gt;physical&lt;/em&gt; dice, we ignore unfair dice at your peril.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can the user consult a table or other apparatus?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is minimizing the number of dice rolled important?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the efficiency of the procedure in some other sense (such as the number of &amp;quot;rejected&amp;quot; rolls) important?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What's the most efficient way to generate numbers from 1 to 150 uniformly using a fair d6?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems like the best question to ask. Pretty much every house has a pair of d6 in some dusty cupboard, and this question generalizes reasonably well to arbitrary ranges of numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Converting base-6 to decimal could be a stumbling block for some people, and if it is &lt;em&gt;for you&lt;/em&gt;, then you'll have to state that and ask for an answer that doesn't using base-6 conversions (possibly returning to the domain of rolling several polyhedra.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, you could just renumber all of the texts using base-6 &lt;em&gt;once&lt;/em&gt;, instead of doing the math for each dice roll. This will require less work if you’re doing more than 150 rolls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2019-05-15T18:57:13.377" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5639" CreationDate="2019-05-04T21:56:45.837" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question received +20/-0, Sycorax's answer in favor +17/-0, Jan Kukacka's answer in favor +9/-0, and Rob's answer against +2/-3 votes. We should consider the fact that at least some of the votes are by the same users, so the counts cannot be considered as independent. On another hand, there were voices in favor from some of the highest ranking users in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/deep-learning/topusers&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;[deep-learning]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/neural-networks/topusers&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;[neural-network]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; tags, including Sycorax, Franck Dernoncourt (comment), and Jan Kukacka. All this means for me that the voting was &lt;strong&gt;in favor&lt;/strong&gt; for merge, so the tags will be merged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update: The tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/neural-networks/synonyms&quot;&gt;are synonimized&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-05-06T07:38:57.720" LastActivityDate="2019-05-06T07:38:57.720" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5656" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-08T02:57:38.440" Score="12" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without calling anyone out, I suspected someone of downvoting other answers than their own just to have theirs appear higher/attract more upvotes. However, I wasn't sure how to report this and more importantly, I had absolutely no evidence, just a suspicion. Several days later I went to check again and saw that this user was banned for irregular voting patterns, so I can only assume this was the reason. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this indeed a bannable offense?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How, if at all, should this be reported?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176202" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-05-08T08:06:12.287" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T08:06:12.287" Title="Irregular voting patterns" Tags="|discussion|votes|flagging|post-ban|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5657" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5658" CreationDate="2019-05-17T14:40:01.713" Score="7" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently made a question that gathered no attention: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/408516/bootstrap-and-numerical-optimization-of-statistic&quot;&gt;Bootstrap and numerical optimization of statistic&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I've come up with a much simpler and to-the-point way of asking the same thing (posted below). My question here is, can I delete the old question (it doesn't have even a comment) and create a new one, or will this be seen as me trying to game the system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;New formulation of the question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often times the bootstrap is used with a statistic that can be &lt;em&gt;analytically evaluated&lt;/em&gt; (both in the real and the resampled datasets), e.g. the mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if the statistic can not be analytically obtained (e.g., if we are maximizing a likelihood through some &lt;em&gt;numerical optimization&lt;/em&gt; process), each bootstrap resample will contain an &quot;extra&quot; degree of uncertainty, as we are not really obtaining the &lt;em&gt;true&lt;/em&gt; statistic for each resample but an approximation to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the bootstrap account for this &quot;extra&quot; uncertainty?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10416" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-05-27T20:22:44.523" LastActivityDate="2019-05-27T20:22:44.523" Title="Can (should) I delete a question that gained no attention to re-create it with a simpler formulation?" Tags="|support|unanswered-questions|etiquette|self-delete|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5657" CreationDate="2019-05-17T15:01:48.340" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;One clear principle has consistently helped me moderate such situations: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If your intended changes affect only your work, feel free to make them.  Indeed, we encourage you to do so.  But if they might affect the contributions of others, then be careful!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &quot;contributions of others&quot; I mean principally answers that may have been posted in the thread, but I also include comments of substance.  Thus, for instance, if anybody has answered (and &lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; if such an answer has been upvoted), then unilateral deletion of the thread is considered to be &quot;self-destruction,&quot; which is not a good thing.  The system actually flags such acts for moderator review.  If there is a comment thread that illuminates the nature of the question, such as providing links to related materials, pointing out misconceptions, or whatever, then you should also be reluctant to take any action that would remove that material from public view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In the present case, where a question has garnered no comments or answers, the best approach is to edit it.&lt;/strong&gt;  An edit puts the thread into the community's review queue, which will bring it to the attention of the many people who routinely review that queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2019-05-17T15:01:48.340" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5659" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-18T22:28:14.293" Score="5" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I occasionally see an Ad above a question, and it seems to be a native Ad (not powered by Google AdWords). Is there a way to advertise (paid advertising) on CrossValidated? I could not figure out how to do it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="241137" LastActivityDate="2019-05-19T01:37:22.127" Title="How to advertise on CrossValidated?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5659" CreationDate="2019-05-19T01:37:22.127" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at the bottom of any page (including this one), you'll see links that are grouped into thematic columns.  One such column is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/company/about&quot;&gt;COMPANY&lt;/a&gt;, and one of the links underneath it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.stackoverflowbusiness.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow Business&lt;/a&gt;.  If you navigate there, you'll find a section &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.stackoverflowbusiness.com/advertising/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FOR MARKETEERS&lt;/a&gt;.  Beyond that, there's a bunch of different stuff that you can explore.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2019-05-19T01:37:22.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5661" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-25T04:50:06.410" Score="21" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question on CV and linked it to an author of a paper. They are not on CV, but gave me an answer. Is it OK to post it as an answer, as long as I say who it is from and that it isn't my own words? I figure it is better to share the answer here than to keep it just to my inbox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130869" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-05-27T12:20:53.783" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T19:05:52.810" Title="If someone answered my question outside CV, can I post the answer myself and accept?" Tags="|discussion|answers|etiquette|self-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5661" CreationDate="2019-05-25T07:19:28.123" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure. Just quote them and give the source:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;john.doe@example.com answered my question in a private e-mail, I'm posting&#xA;  his answer below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do&#xA;    eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad&#xA;    minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut&#xA;    aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in&#xA;    reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla&#xA;    pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in&#xA;    culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course assuming that the person who contacted you has nothing against quoting them publicly. If in doubt, you can always make them anonymous source, and paraphrase their answer rather then quoting it directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I would encourage you to do so&lt;/strong&gt;. We gain nothing from having unanswered questions hanging in the void, while the answer may be helpful for other users as well. Moreover, if by chance, the answer is wrong, you can get comments pointing out the mistake, so it may help you to validate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="35989" LastEditDate="2019-05-27T12:23:35.933" LastActivityDate="2019-05-27T12:23:35.933" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5663" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5664" CreationDate="2019-05-25T08:55:03.370" Score="0" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is claimed that when a user is removed points will not be taken away when that would result in in an excessive loss of reputation. What is excessive? -170 points is more reputation than most people have total on this site. What does it take, -10000 before it is excessive? I have never earned +170 points in a single day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 1&lt;/strong&gt;  What is excessive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note please, that this is unusual enough that it seems problematic. Either someone was very negatively treated, or had a negative reaction to something and withdrew voluntarily. Either case suggests a problem with the site. I have lately gotten a rather negative impression from some actions taken by this site, can we somehow accentuate the positive a bit more, please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, between downvoting mistakenly, incorrect remarks, &lt;em&gt;ad hominem&lt;/em&gt; argument, bizarre administrative posturing, e.g., ineffectually coercing pathetic niceties.  The quality and 'niceness' itself of the experience on this site could stand improvement.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 2&lt;/strong&gt;  Can something be done to improve user experience,  i.e.,  less negative? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="99274" LastEditDate="2019-05-28T16:11:34.993" LastActivityDate="2019-05-28T16:11:34.993" Title="Just had 170 points removed. Excessive?" Tags="|discussion|reputation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="32" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5663" CreationDate="2019-05-25T23:20:11.530" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of people across the SE network have noticed the same thing: see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/328642/225179&quot;&gt;Massive user removal in one night?&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/328672/225179&quot;&gt;Please update the text in help for &amp;quot;User was Removed&amp;quot; reputation changes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fine, when a user deletes their account, whether or not to reverse the votes they've cast is decided by SE staff if the vote count exceeds a certain threshold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note that we will not define the exact thresholds for how many votes will trigger review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons for not preserving votes include, but are not limited to, vote fraud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2019-05-25T23:20:11.530" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5665" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5667" CreationDate="2019-05-26T00:23:30.607" Score="7" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Cross Validated post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/410010/statistics-what-kind-of-test-to-use-to-test-this-hypothesis&quot;&gt;Statistics: what kind of test to use to test this hypothesis?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&#xA;A member commented on my question in detail, and that comment did answer my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I proposed he submit it as an answer so that I can mark it as such and close the topic while giving credit to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He said he didn't want to, so I submitted an answer where I said that the answer to my question is in that person's comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I can't mark my own answer as the answer until 1 day passes, I went away to do other things only to come back to see that answer deleted by a mod saying &quot;This does not provide an answer to the question. To critique or request clarification from an author, leave a comment below their post.&quot; But I AM the author...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do I do? Submit the same answer again? Flag the mod's comment which I feel would do nothing? Leave the question forever in the open state?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="249005" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-05-27T12:17:39.570" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T02:30:05.213" Title="A mod removed my answer (referencing the answer from comments) to my question saying it doesn't answer it" Tags="|support|answers|comment|moderation|self-answer|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5665" CreationDate="2019-05-26T02:10:23.427" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry for your frustration.  The SE system works in a particular way that isn't necessarily obvious to new people.  Your post was not an answer by our standards, and was thus deleted.  The comment that was left below your post is a stock comment that can be automatically applied in situations like this.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're right that we don't want your question to just linger, and also that the ideal solution is to have the commenter convert their comment into an answer.  Given that the commenter chose not to, you could copy the comment into an answer, acknowledge the source and make the answer community wiki (cf, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2641/7290&quot;&gt;Etiquette for answering old questions addressed in comments?&lt;/a&gt;, although in this case the question is new).  You could then mark the answer as the accepted one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2019-05-26T02:10:23.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5665" CreationDate="2019-05-26T02:13:20.997" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;See so-and-so's comment&quot; doesn't meet the standard for an answer on our site. Answers should be complete in themselves; for example, if BruceET was to delete his comment, your answer would be useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is usually seen as acceptable to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;invite the author of the comment to post as an answer, if you feel it is a complete answer to the question, or&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;to simply post the information in the comment as an answer yourself, expanding on it where necessary to make it a suitable answer (comments are usually overly brief for answers), as long as you credit the source (and as long as the answer doesn't duplicate other answers on site)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You already tried the first. That was well done. The next step would be to try the second thing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I don't see it as absolutely necessary to mark the answer as community wiki (per gung's answer) - some people do it to signal that they're not trying to gain reputation from someone else's information, which is a fine and admirable choice but I think there's no real problem with getting the reputation if you follow the ordinary standards of decent behavior (which I feel you already covered more than sufficiently by inviting the commenter to post an answer); if you happen to subsequently get an upvote or two by turning your question into a properly answered one, good luck to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2019-05-29T02:30:05.213" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T02:30:05.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5661" CreationDate="2019-05-29T19:05:52.810" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I generally agree with @Tim's answer, but I'd like to make a few other points. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) As noted by @amoeba, consent is really important. I can't emphasize this enough. I have tons of &lt;em&gt;opinions&lt;/em&gt; about statistics that aren't well developed enough to be taught to the world / are probably wrong. I'd hate for someone to take some of my opinions and present them as facts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Given that the other party has consented, it's still important to back up the claims with explanations and supporting material. The last thing crossvalidated needs is &quot;PCA is better than factor analysis. Trust me, Obama told me so&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Finally, if someone gives you a solution but would prefer to stay anonymous, I don't see anything wrong with posting it as a solution. If you want to be humble, you could mention &quot;a colleague mentioned solution X&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76981" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T19:05:52.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="793" CreationDate="2019-05-30T06:36:00.850" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;PyTorch&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PyTorch comminity hosts a &lt;a href=&quot;https://pytorch.org/resources&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of educational resources on their page&lt;/a&gt;, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://discuss.pytorch.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Discuss forum&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeADnUNW36fjKjYzyHDOzEB_abKQE9b6gqqW9NXse6O0MWh0A/viewform&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Slack channel&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T06:36:00.850" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-05-30T06:36:00.850" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5672" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-30T16:45:54.823" Score="8" ViewCount="295" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/410778/how-would-someone-use-curves-as-an-input-to-a-supervised-learning-model&quot;&gt;This post&lt;/a&gt; about a question that came up in a test was put on hold, presumably because I am &quot;demanding an answer&quot;. But I'm not, I clearly explained what my thinking was  and how it differed from the provided solution. I also explain why I don't understand the solution (PCA would just transform the input space, not breakdown into usable features). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what am I missing here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="240216" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2019-07-25T07:16:43.223" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T07:16:43.223" Title="Homework question put on hold for &quot;demanding an answer&quot; even though, I did show what my own thinking/approach to the problem was?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|homework|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2990" CreationDate="2019-05-31T11:41:30.077" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NEWEST UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;: Operations Research Stack Exchange has now graduated from Beta, and is still at &lt;a href=&quot;https://or.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://or.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE: Operations Research Stack Exchange is now in public Beta&lt;/strong&gt; at &lt;a href=&quot;https://or.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://or.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; . So everyone can now actively participate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.or-exchange.org/questions/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.or-exchange.org/questions/&lt;/a&gt; has been permanently shut down due to SPAMMING. The new Stack Exchange site was chosen as a replacement for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78964" LastEditorUserId="78964" LastEditDate="2021-12-23T17:22:54.260" LastActivityDate="2021-12-23T17:22:54.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5675" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-03T19:38:23.987" Score="11" ViewCount="360" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/411327/recreating-figure-from-elements-of-statistical-learning&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; earlier today but was quickly put on hold with a generic comment. I can only assume the question is on hold as it has been interpreted as being a coding question. It is clear from the question, however, that I am trying to understand a statistical concept from a textbook. In particular, I am not clear on what the authors mean exactly by the formula on the Y-axis (including code was just a reference explaining my current interpretation and could easily be ignored) and was looking for some guidance on how to interpret it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The alternative is stack overflow, but my code does exactly what I want it to do, my question involves figuring out what I want it to do statistically. Reading from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt; seems to indicate this is the correct place. Maybe I am missing something but is this not a reasonable question to be asking on this site? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="213434" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-06-13T11:16:08.470" LastActivityDate="2019-06-30T16:51:29.660" Title="Why is my question about replicating a figure from Hastie et al. not appropriate?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5675" CreationDate="2019-06-03T20:00:31.813" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is clear and well formulated, so please don't take anything in this answer to be critical of your craftsmanship.  But when code doesn't do what you want it to do, there are two kinds of possibilities: the code is wrong (or there are bugs in the software platform); or the underlying concept is wrong (or the book was incorrect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We address concepts here--the second kind of possibilities--and will tolerate a certain amount of code in the presentation of question when it's otherwise clear what needs to be addressed.  However, this particular question (a) employs a great deal of code--several pages; (b) relies heavily on the code to express itself; (c) has clear coding errors (some of which were addressed in comments); and (d) shows no evidence of having been checked or debugged: it does quite a lot in a few lines, just about any of which could be problematic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On that basis I think this question would be more suitable for SO.  However, it might be closed there if there's a perception that the code does not offer a &lt;em&gt;minimal reproducible example.&lt;/em&gt;   I find this (hard and fast) criterion to be useful here on CV, too: &lt;strong&gt;if we really must rely on code to understand and answer a question, then please make the code be as small, simple, and clear as possible.&lt;/strong&gt;  Show what you have done to assure that its component calculations are correct, so that we can focus on the extent to which it implements the intended procedure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Another good criterion is this: if an effective answer is, or is likely to be, &quot;read the manual page,&quot; then the question is not on topic here.&lt;/strong&gt;  In reviewing the question I note that you are using R's &lt;code&gt;rnorm&lt;/code&gt; function to generate Normal random variables in a way that is inconsistent with the ESL terminology: by &quot;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$N(0,6.25)$&lt;/span&gt;&quot; it means a Normal distribution of mean zero and &lt;em&gt;variance&lt;/em&gt; &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$6.25,$&lt;/span&gt; as indicated &lt;em&gt;inter alia&lt;/em&gt; near Equation &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$(3.9)$&lt;/span&gt; on p. 47, whereas R's &lt;code&gt;rnorm&lt;/code&gt; uses the mean and &lt;em&gt;standard deviation&lt;/em&gt; as arguments.  When the issue is that the function isn't being correctly called, arguably the problem is in the software, not the concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2019-06-30T16:51:29.660" LastActivityDate="2019-06-30T16:51:29.660" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5675" CreationDate="2019-06-04T03:42:32.613" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with @whuber's answer, but another issue is that you are implying multiple questions in a single post: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What does &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\mathbb{E}||\hat{\beta}(k) - \beta||^2$&lt;/span&gt; in the &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;-axis of fig. &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$3.6$&lt;/span&gt;  of Elements of Statistical Learning mean?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is my interpretation of how fig. &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$3.6$&lt;/span&gt;  of Elements of Statistical Learning was made correct?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And ultimately:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why does my implementation of fig. &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$3.6$&lt;/span&gt; of Elements of Statistical Learning not result in the same plot?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On their own, (1) and (2) are both perfectly on-topic. Once you have the answers to these, (3) might be better suited for SO. This might seem like a hassle, but to understand why a compound question is a problem, keep the goal of SE in mind: Ultimately your post should be useful to future readers with similar issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If someone else also wants to know (1), should their question be marked a duplicate of yours? Should they have to find the relevant piece of information in the context of a larger question? Or the other way around, crippling your ability to gain an answer to (2) and (3)? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What should the title of your question be, such that others with any of your questions can find it easily?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a reader knows the answer to (1), or (2), or (3), but cannot/does not want to answer the other questions, is it okay to have an answer that only partially addresses the question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no limit to the number of questions you can ask here and it is both much easier for others with &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt; and for anyone interested in &lt;em&gt;answering&lt;/em&gt; if you post your questions separately. Plus, you can get more reputation from multiple on-topic questions, perhaps allowing you to put a bounty on a question that you want to receive more attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176202" LastActivityDate="2019-06-04T03:42:32.613" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5679" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-10T14:20:32.077" Score="1" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a research-level machine learning site in the StackExchange universe? I don't like Reddit's formatting system. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="133284" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-06-12T10:35:12.007" LastActivityDate="2019-06-12T10:35:12.007" Title="Is there a machine learning StackExchange?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|machine-learning|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5679" CreationDate="2019-06-10T14:48:13.497" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, as already said in @gung's comment, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;CrossValidated &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the site to ask questions on machine learning&lt;/a&gt;. Many machine learning questions (mostly those that focus on coding issues) are also &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=[machine-learning]&quot;&gt;asked and answered on Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, if you search &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Area51&lt;/a&gt;, you'll see that there were already two proposals for &quot;Machine Learning&quot; sites, but &lt;strong&gt;they were closed&lt;/strong&gt; mostly because of small traffic and a small number of active users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yLbD9.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yLbD9.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, there is also a &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Data Science SE site&lt;/a&gt;, that has very similar scope to Cross Validated. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=data%20science&quot;&gt;We discussed it many times&lt;/a&gt;. The general conclusion of users of Cross Validated is that the Data Science site is redundant given Cross Validated, so  the same would apply to any Machine Learning site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2019-06-11T07:35:34.210" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T07:35:34.210" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2107" CreationDate="2019-06-14T20:43:34.813" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I put SE stats on my resume and I am pretty sure it helped me ! Of course this is just one factor and the context is important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Context&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Switch of career from a business oriented job (management consulting) to a more technical area (data analytics)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I spent 8 months up skilling in statistics, data science, programming - using university lectures (we can attend those for free in France), MOOC, books and SE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My posts on SE are mostly additions to existing answers, more detailed proofs, or intuitive interpretations.. but I went from 0 to 3.8k points in less than a year&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What I wrote on my CV&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since my CV was light on the datascience / statistics side I added these bullet points&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Statistics&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bias-variance tradeoff and stability&lt;/strong&gt;: Simulations and literature review contrasting recent research results with widely held views on &amp;quot;Leave One Out Cross Validation&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Active contributor in the online community&lt;/strong&gt;: top 1% this quarter&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also added a link to my SE profile, together with links to LinkedIn and my blog&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;My point of view as a hiring manager&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am now the hiring manager for the analyst / senior analyst role and my personal view (which is somewhat biased) is that SE stats on their own will not land you a job. The stats are just one part of the story you are trying to convey to the recruiter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But given two similar candidates, with a story and context that make sense, then SE stats will definitely make you stand out. Even though having a lot of points on SE does not guarantee that a person is knowledgeable, it does convey strong written communication skills. Being able to explain a technical concept to a wider audience is crucial for analyst and data scientists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="192854" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2019-06-14T20:43:34.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5682" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-17T14:53:55.020" Score="4" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;A couple of days ago I asked the question on main &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/413294/when-conducting-a-study-what-is-standard-practice-with-patterns-you-find-along&quot;&gt;&#xA;When conducting a study, what is standard practice with patterns you find along the way?&lt;/a&gt; and it was put on hold earlier this morning as 'too broad'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am requesting here hints on how to address this (and any other problems) so that people will vote to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone suggest what about it is so broad and how to reduce the broadness?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize it may not be clear (most questions on CV.SE are mathematical and so a statistical practice question may be a little vague). I think I can make the question more precise with an example. But I'm not sure exactly how the question is too broad. Are there just too many possible answers? Are there any other things I can do to make the question answerable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3186" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-06-17T15:26:39.953" LastActivityDate="2019-06-25T07:52:06.813" Title="Request to reopen too broad question about standard/best practice for dealing with discovered ancillary patterns not hypothesized" Tags="|discussion|reopen-closed|too-broad|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5683" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-18T06:23:20.640" Score="12" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems like almost every other day now, we get a new post with somebody asking the question: &quot;My forecasts look very good, they almost follow the actual to the letter, except that they are shifted by one period. How can I fix that?&quot;. They don't realize that their &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$SARIMA(5,3,4)(1,1,0)_{12}$&lt;/span&gt; or 35 layered LSTM is really just copying the value from one week to the next, what I think of as the &quot;Random Walk Trap&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we have (is there already?) a community wiki that explains this problem, complete with a couple of illustrations and some pointers on how to avoid it)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89649" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2019-07-25T07:15:58.283" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T07:15:58.283" Title="Should we start redirecting &quot;why are my forecasts shifted one step ahead from the actuals&quot; questions to a community wiki?" Tags="|discussion|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5684" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5692" CreationDate="2019-06-18T09:18:52.973" Score="15" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see a fair number of these questions from new members wanting to know how to interpret their model result. This is usually followed by a series of comments explaining that there is no general way to judge whether R&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; (or any other such value) is high or not, that this cannot be answered without more expertise in the field, and so on. This type of question not infrequently ends up being closed as unclear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you think it would be useful to create a question/answer that addresses this general point thoroughly, as a duplicate target for these questions? This question is inspired in part by the useful and popular thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/365778/what-should-i-do-when-my-neural-network-doesnt-generalize-well&quot;&gt;What should I do when my neural network doesn&amp;#39;t generalize well?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="44269" LastEditDate="2019-06-19T19:46:47.237" LastActivityDate="2019-06-24T11:04:35.723" Title="Create a canonical question/answer for questions of the form 'Is my $R^2$/AUC/etc. good'?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5683" CreationDate="2019-06-20T13:33:09.007" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't necessarily need a community wiki unless you expect others to edit it; just a single canonical version of the question with a good answer would suffice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely there are some good candidates already present as answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If none are sufficiently generic, one could be chosen and edited to be made more generic -- or if substantial changes would be needed, a new one written and posted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that instance, whoever does the work to make a new one can get points for it as long as they properly credit anything they use. This is the model the network operates on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[If you &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to make it CW, you can, but I don't see it as required.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2019-06-20T13:33:09.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5684" CreationDate="2019-06-22T23:29:56.503" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interpretability actually fundamentally necessary to answer questions about overfitting.  There are a few recent books on the interpretability of models that disagree with the notion that there is no universal way of judging models.  Instead, there is a universal way, the problem is it cannot be automated with the current level of computer vision that we have.  For example see this book: &lt;a href=&quot;https://christophm.github.io/interpretable-ml-book/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://christophm.github.io/interpretable-ml-book/&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Fundamentally, the ability to generalize  necessary to answer questions about AIC.  There are a few recent books on the interpretability of models that disagree with the notion that there is no universal way of judging models.  Instead, there is a universal way, the problem is it cannot be automated with the current level of computer vision that we have.  For example see this book: &lt;a href=&quot;https://christophm.github.io/interpretable-ml-book/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://christophm.github.io/interpretable-ml-book/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main problem is that calculating AUC, Adjusted R^2, and is not universal for all algorithms in Python or R even if the concepts themselves are agnostic and universal.   The moderators would have to allow questions that they have previously struck down as &quot;how to code questions&quot;? (*)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of the issue with a canonical question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*)P.S. I can be more code specific if we are allowed too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main problem is that calculating AUC, Adjusted R^2, and is that methods are not universal for all algorithms in Python or R even if the concepts themselves are agnostic.  To really talk about this we would need to talk about computer code, so moderators would have to allow questions that they have previously struck down as &quot;how to code questions&quot;? (*)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I am still for it, I am just thinking the moderators might need to adjust the a threshold for acceptable questions/answers &lt;strong&gt;just this once&lt;/strong&gt; if this is the direction you guys want to go.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*)P.S. &lt;em&gt;To prove my point,&lt;/em&gt; I can be more code specific about packages and libraries if we are allowed too related to universal methods to interpret models and prevent overfitting.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="140504" LastEditorUserId="140504" LastEditDate="2019-06-22T23:51:20.533" LastActivityDate="2019-06-22T23:51:20.533" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5683" CreationDate="2019-06-23T00:07:06.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I say go ahead, but would be cautious about what you put about this.  Because this is not true for all advanced LSTM time series models.  And whatever answer you put is probably not going to be true in the next 2-3 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Unlike SARIMA, SARCH and GARCH assume a 1 step difference, they don't require it.&lt;/strong&gt; Please see this quote below from chapter 6 of this book the very last paragraph that talks about how this generalized assumption about step intervals might not always be valid:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://christophm.github.io/interpretable-ml-book/influential.html#disadvantages-of-identifying-influential-instances&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://christophm.github.io/interpretable-ml-book/influential.html#disadvantages-of-identifying-influential-instances&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The influence measures only take into account the deletion of individual instances and not the deletion of several instances at once. Larger groups of data instances may have some interactions that strongly influence model training and prediction. But the problem lies in combinatorics: There are n possibilities to delete an individual instance from the data. There are n times (n-1) possibilities to delete two instances from the training data. There are n times (n-1) times (n-2) possibilities to delete three … I guess you can see where this is going, there are just too many combinations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recall that H in ARCH and SARCH stands for Heteroscedasticity. Heteroscedasticity is a type of influence measure as we can see from the author's example of Cook's Distance. As that chapter mentions, Heteroscedasticity is part of a broader concept called Influence (or influence measures) which is in turn part of a broader concept called Anomalies (or anomaly detection). &#xA;Now, look at the quote.  The reason we make the assumption of minus one actually has to do more with limitations of computation power than the limitations of statistics that you learned in college.  In fact, the computation power of a SARCH with a 2 step difference is O(n*(n-1))~O(n^2) of the regular SARIMA is O(n). For a 3 step difference, it is O(n^3).  For a week difference, it would be O(n^7).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In relativity, we used to have the same issue with the 2-body black hole problem.  However, about 5 years ago, we overcame that issue and it leads to the discovery of the first black hole.  Someday, I believe people who do forecasting will overcome the limitations of basic forecasting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, considering the issues with predicting a model like bitcoin which has 100 times the volatility of the stock market, there could be applications of an L-step SARCH (where L is the period).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="140504" LastEditorUserId="140504" LastEditDate="2019-06-23T00:16:56.650" LastActivityDate="2019-06-23T00:16:56.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5684" CreationDate="2019-06-23T20:08:52.313" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for all your feedback. I have now posted a question and answer here: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/414349/121522&quot;&gt;Is my model any good, based on the diagnostic metric ($R^2$ / AUC / accuracy / etc) value?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edits, suggestions, feedback, and additional answers welcome. I hope this is useful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="121522" LastEditDate="2019-06-24T11:04:35.723" LastActivityDate="2019-06-24T11:04:35.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5693" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-24T20:00:43.493" Score="5" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reliability&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reliability&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reliability&lt;/a&gt; tag is meant for reliability of measurements, but today &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/414520/calculating-failure-rate-with-some-failure-cause-data-being-vague&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/414520/calculating-failure-rate-with-some-failure-cause-data-being-vague&lt;/a&gt;  (and certainly before) somebody used it in the meaning of &quot;reliability theory&quot;, as used in engineering and other fields, and covered by books like &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/047147133X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;System Reliability Theory Statistical Applications&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should be done here, put a different tag, or are there existing tags for posts like the one linked? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; EDIT &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a day, it seems the question was interpreted very narrowly. I meant not just that specific post, but &lt;strong&gt;the tag name invites misinterpretation&lt;/strong&gt;. We could change the name, maybe measurement-reliability or something similar, and then maybe later, for the technological use, systems-reliability ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;EDIT  Again&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issues is not resolve, today a post &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/444508/reliability-of-a-multistate-item&quot;&gt;Reliability of a multistate item&lt;/a&gt;  which uses &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reliability&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reliability&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reliability&lt;/a&gt; for what is really engineering reliability ( or systems reliability), another concept. Should I just go ahead and introduce a new tag? What should be the name? engineering-reliability or systems-reliabiliy, or better suggestions? Here &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.in/Stochastic-Reliability-Modelling-Applied-Probability/dp/1489998551/ref=sr_1_7?keywords=reliability+models&amp;amp;qid=1578923611&amp;amp;s=books&amp;amp;sr=1-7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.amazon.in/Stochastic-Reliability-Modelling-Applied-Probability/dp/1489998551/ref=sr_1_7?keywords=reliability+models&amp;amp;qid=1578923611&amp;amp;s=books&amp;amp;sr=1-7&lt;/a&gt; is a book defining the tag, more or less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="11887" LastEditDate="2020-01-13T13:54:46.407" LastActivityDate="2020-03-12T10:00:06.210" Title="Incorrect use of the reliability tag, we need a more informative tag name?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5693" CreationDate="2019-06-24T20:30:49.543" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I edited the question to change the tag.  The issue is somewhat ambiguous, but the question asks about estimating a proportion, so I put the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/proportion&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;proportion&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;proportion&lt;/a&gt; tag on it.  I think this is the first thing to do when a tag is inappropriately applied to a question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relative to this specific tag-inappropriate usage, the tag excerpt has usage guidance that is clear enough, IMO. I suspect people just don't read the excerpts. If someone adds the tag incorrectly anyway, I would probably just edit. If you want, you can also leave a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2020-01-13T17:09:21.257" LastActivityDate="2020-01-13T17:09:21.257" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5682" CreationDate="2019-06-25T07:52:06.813" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;[Trying to rectify my frequent mistake of posting comments instead of answers]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's both an interesting topic of discussion and completely unsuitable for CV, unfortunately. How one ought to deal with this would differ not just by field, but also by type of study (experiment/observation), possibility and cost of obtaining new data, nature &amp;amp; complexity of the analysis that turned up such a pattern, the strength of the pattern, the financial/social/scientific implications of the pattern, and more. You have not really constrained any of these possibilities in your question, and even if you had, a general answer might be hard to provide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastActivityDate="2019-06-25T07:52:06.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5696" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5697" CreationDate="2019-06-26T09:03:43.003" Score="7" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modeling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modeling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modeling&lt;/a&gt; is the 40th most popular tag, having been applied to 1820 questions so far. But I quickly scanned through a handful of the tagged questions and it didn't seem particularly helpful in any of them. Also, there's no usage guidance and the tag description is quite vague:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A statistical model is a formalization of relationships between&#xA;  variables in the form of mathematical equations. A statistical model&#xA;  describes how one or more random variables are related to one or more&#xA;  random variables. The model is statistical as the variables are not&#xA;  deterministically but stochastically related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a purpose to this tag that I'm missing, and if so, can we edit the tag info+guidance to reflect that? And if it is not useful, how can we best deal with it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-06-26T11:29:47.477" LastActivityDate="2019-06-26T11:29:47.477" Title="Is the [modeling] tag useful?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-deletion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5696" CreationDate="2019-06-26T09:58:12.937" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modeling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modeling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modeling&lt;/a&gt; tag is pretty much useless because it is too unspecific and too vacuous. It is not the only tag like that. For example we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fitting&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;fitting&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;fitting&lt;/a&gt;×600 and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;model&lt;/a&gt;×900, which are also vacuous and could well be burninated &amp;amp; blacklisted as far as I am concerned. Some have argued that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt;×12,000 is an even more extreme example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5609&quot;&gt;How to improve the description and usage of the [machine-learning] tag?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I do not think there is anything we can do about such tags: they are too popular for manual deletion and our community has never ever requested SE admins to burninate an existing tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So these tags are here to stay. The only thing we can do is to add something like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ALWAYS ADD A MORE SPECIFIC TAG. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to the tag wiki excerpt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2019-06-26T09:58:12.937" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3031" CreationDate="2019-06-26T15:38:15.617" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5696/is-the-modeling-tag-useful&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt;, I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/modeling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;modeling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;modeling&lt;/a&gt; (though popular, with 1820 questions) is not very useful. There's no usage guidance and the tag description is quite vague:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A statistical model is a formalization of relationships between&#xA;  variables in the form of mathematical equations. A statistical model&#xA;  describes how one or more random variables are related to one or more&#xA;  random variables. The model is statistical as the variables are not&#xA;  deterministically but stochastically related&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastActivityDate="2019-06-26T15:38:15.617" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5699" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-30T20:03:41.203" Score="6" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/368021/suggestions-on-using-model-in-production-1-test-at-a-time&quot;&gt;Suggestions on using model in production 1 test at a time&lt;/a&gt; was closed as off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my mind, the question content is squarely about the generalizability of a specific kind of feature (categorical encodings of particular strings). This seems on-topic! The subject matter seems incidental because OP's question is about a more general kind of dummy variable trap, in the same way that you wouldn't use a categorical encoding of SSN or phone number in a regression model because it uniquely identifies each respondent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that my answer directly addresses the statistical component in its first section. The second section of my answer is probably not on-topic, but since I happen to know about these models, I felt that I could offer some constructive advice. The third section of my answer is about how to construct generalizable features or else use feature-free architectures which support generalizable models.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would anyone involved in the closure of this question be willing to elaborate on their decision to close?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2019-06-30T20:20:28.950" LastActivityDate="2019-07-01T09:55:37.667" Title="Is this question about categorical features on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5700" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-30T20:36:56.930" Score="14" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;The online help of Cross Validated contains the following part at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/editing-help#latex&quot;&gt;LaTeX section&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;Learn more: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.math.harvard.edu/texman/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MathJax help&lt;/a&gt;.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problem is, the link leads to a site about TeX, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; MathJax. This is not really fortunate, as they're not equivalent; a link like &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mathjax/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; would have been much more helpful here. (The reason why I used the word &quot;misleading&quot; is that it literally says &quot;MathJax&quot; help, yet the link leads to a TeX site.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6476" LastActivityDate="2019-06-30T20:36:56.930" Title="Misleading link about MathJax help" Tags="|bug|math-display|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2023-03-25T04:10:40.043" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5699" CreationDate="2019-07-01T08:20:01.363" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to close as &quot;Unclear what you're asking&quot; because I genuinely could not follow the question. The main statement of the problem is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My big question is how do I handle one test feature where part of it&#xA;  has not been trained?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...which I didn't really understand till I read your answer just now. And an apparent secondary problem was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The issue that I am running into is the training set has seen the&#xA;  ChildPath &quot;C:\Windows\System&quot; and the ChildExe &quot;cmd.exe&quot; which are&#xA;  normal, but the training set has not seen the ParentPath&#xA;  &quot;C:\Windows\Malicous&quot; or ParentExe &quot;badscipt.exe&quot; so these have not&#xA;  been label or one hot encoded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...which seems like more of a programming issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I notice that your answer also begins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The challenge that you've discovered is a natural consequence of how&#xA;  you've organized your research project: your model has no&#xA;  generalizable information about new file paths or new names of .exe&#xA;  files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also seems to suggest a programming/organisational problem rather than a statistical/machine learning one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I don't have much expertise in this. So my confidence in my judgement is not very high and I'm willing to reverse it. I do think the question is poorly written, though, and would benefit from some editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="121522" LastEditDate="2019-07-01T09:55:37.667" LastActivityDate="2019-07-01T09:55:37.667" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5693" CreationDate="2019-07-02T22:40:38.060" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I have two responses to the main post and one follow up comment that has not been brought up yet.  My opinion is that if we want to distinguish between the different kinds of reliability, then yes, we should have separate tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Reliability Theory actually has two different definitions (general statistical reliability and educational reliability).  The latter reliability is more biological in that it is specific to psychology, teaching, education, and a few biological fields: &lt;a href=&quot;https://chfasoa.uni.edu/reliabilityandvalidity.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://chfasoa.uni.edu/reliabilityandvalidity.htm&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;I am not sure how the tagging process works, but it probably necessary to have more than one tag we can distinguish the different definitions of reliability. After posting this I realized that there is more than one tag.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Inter-rater reliability is a type of statistical reliability and a part of reliability theory.   I personally think all inter-rater reliability questions are also reliability questions, but hey I don't know everything.  So at least for me, reliability indeed leads to some misinterpretation if we are trying to keep questions about reliability and inter-rater reliability separate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A heads up about reliability:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There can be a cross-over between educational reliability and statistical reliability.  Here is a very specific recent research example involving Bayesian Statistical reliability:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/1404.3656&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://arxiv.org/abs/1404.3656&lt;/a&gt; .  I know no other specific examples; however, so the cross-over would be very narrow on StackExchange to questions about applying better math to grading in education. I would imagine this means that there should be some kind of reference or link in the question if the two are mixed. This is of a heads up statement for the mods and administrators rather than something actionable, as I can find little examples of this happening in the stack-exchange (but there could be deleted posts I don't see). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="140504" LastEditorUserId="11887" LastEditDate="2020-03-12T10:00:06.210" LastActivityDate="2020-03-12T10:00:06.210" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5703" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5705" CreationDate="2019-07-03T11:07:41.697" Score="8" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be honest, I was not even aware of the term &quot;dummy variable trap&quot; until a few days ago, but it seems like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=%22Dummy%20variable%20trap%22&quot;&gt;the term is popping up more and more frequently at CV&lt;/a&gt; (note chonological ordering).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we need a tag for this? Maybe look for a canonical answer (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/222128/1352&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, though it goes into many other aspects of collinearity besides the &quot;trap&quot;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2019-07-31T17:36:49.303" Title="Do we need a &quot;dummy variable trap&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5703" CreationDate="2019-07-04T18:41:17.310" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is mostly a question of how categorical variables should be encoded.  (The 'dummy variable trap' is simply that there is perfect multicollinearity if you use a separate dummy code for every level of a categorical predictor when there is an intercept in the model; see my answer at: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/70700/7290&quot;&gt;Qualitative variable coding in regression leads to “singularities”&lt;/a&gt;.)  As such, we have a relevant tag already: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/categorical-encoding&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;categorical-encoding&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;categorical-encoding&lt;/a&gt;, although it's also related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/multicollinearity&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;multicollinearity&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;multicollinearity&lt;/a&gt;. What might be helpful is to make a &lt;code&gt;[dummy-variable-trap]&lt;/code&gt; tag &amp;amp; make it a synonym of &lt;code&gt;[categorical-encoding]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2019-07-06T19:24:45.433" LastActivityDate="2019-07-06T19:24:45.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1561" CreationDate="2019-07-07T11:22:28.177" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/1074636&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SEDE query&lt;/a&gt; shows that most activity is between 15:00 and 15:59 UTC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the graph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xxC4Z.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xxC4Z.png&quot; alt=&quot;time of creation of posts&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking and answering follow the same trend but in the evening a bit more answers are posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="38391" LastEditorUserId="38391" LastEditDate="2019-07-08T07:44:55.337" LastActivityDate="2019-07-08T07:44:55.337" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5709" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-11T21:26:13.790" Score="6" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I entered the following question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/417047/&quot;&gt;How do you calculate an exact two-tailed p-value using binomial distribution?&lt;/a&gt; The system generated a warning that this &quot;appears to be an opinion&quot; and &quot;is likely to be closed&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would love to know the algorithm that would flag a query such as this as &quot;opinion&quot;.  And, I'd love to know what &quot;should have been&quot; entered to avoid the &quot;opinion&quot; warning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199063" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2019-07-25T07:15:05.693" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T07:15:05.693" Title="Why is something flagged as &quot;opinion&quot;?" Tags="|support|questions|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5709" CreationDate="2019-07-12T00:43:31.570" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edit to pull in a clarifying comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to clarify, the warning came up immediately after I entered the title...none of the post/question had even been typed into the system&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's amazing that it correctly predicted that the body of your question would be problematic*; I couldn't have guessed it from the title. It may be  the phrase &quot;how do you&quot; or perhaps the word &quot;exact&quot; could be what's causing it, but not being familiar with anything about the coding of it, I am unsure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* More seriously, it's probably a misfiring rule if it just had the title to go on -- on the basis of the question title I could not have predicted it would contain opinion&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Initial answer that discusses issues with the question body)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't encountered it but that sounds like a (perhaps new for CV) network-wide feature. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds like it's a rule in the part of the system that is trying to help people write questions that won't just be closed because they contravene the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aid along these lines for people writing questions were rolled out on stackoverflow a while ago, if I remember rightly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like it is picking up on several things in the way you phrased your question that may seem somewhat tendentious. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, I think it's (correctly) identifying a problem with your question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most directly - you explicitly seek support for a particular opinion: &quot;&lt;em&gt;I would like more evidence that the use of 19th and 20th century approximations play little to no pedagogic advantage in modern intro stats or intro data science courses.&lt;/em&gt;&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, your question as presently phrased certainly appears to express opinions in ways entirely unnecessary to the question (like the use of &quot;addicted&quot; when discussing significance level). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phrases like &quot;ulterior motive&quot; and &quot;you can probably see where I might be going with this&quot; also strongly hint that there's an opinion being expressed that could be better put in a more neutral way and the system may well be picking up on things like those. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest you consider taking notice of it and making your question more neutral in tone (asking for information is fine, asking for people to support a conclusion you already arrived at is usually not). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question may well be closed as it stands now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2019-07-12T00:51:40.817" LastActivityDate="2019-07-12T00:51:40.817" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5712" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-18T06:43:24.893" Score="9" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry for bringing &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5703/1352&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; up again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I created a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dummy-variable-trap&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dummy-variable-trap&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dummy-variable-trap&lt;/a&gt; tag yesterday. As &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5703/do-we-need-a-dummy-variable-trap-tag?cb=1#comment17861_5703&quot;&gt;I wrote&lt;/a&gt;, I was doubtful that synonymizing it to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/categorical-encoding&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;categorical-encoding&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;categorical-encoding&lt;/a&gt; is helpful. By now I am not doubtful any more: I believe it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; helpful. Unfortunately, the synonym has already been established.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22Dummy+variable+trap%22+is%3Aq&quot;&gt;questions about the dummy variable trap&lt;/a&gt;. I have already retagged some of them &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dummy-variable-trap&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dummy-variable-trap&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dummy-variable-trap&lt;/a&gt;. Mouse over the tag at one of those questions. Picture a user who is hazy enough about the trap to ask a question here. Will the tag wiki excerpt for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dummy-variable-trap&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dummy-variable-trap&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dummy-variable-trap&lt;/a&gt; (which now is the same as for the synonym &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/categorical-encoding&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;categorical-encoding&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;categorical-encoding&lt;/a&gt;) be helpful for them? Here it is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Representing categorical variables as sets of numerical variables. Necessary in many types of analysis for them to process categorical data. A common example is using a categorical predictor in regression/ANOVA via dummy coding, effect coding, Helmert coding, user-defined contrasts, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this will help the user in any way. In particular, the links to questions that actually explained what the trap is, why it occurs, what the consequences are, and how to avoid it, which I included in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dummy-variable-trap&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dummy-variable-trap&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dummy-variable-trap&lt;/a&gt; tag wiki are of course now gone that it has been synonymized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dummy-variable-trap&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dummy-variable-trap&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dummy-variable-trap&lt;/a&gt; occurs only in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/categorical-encoding&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;categorical-encoding&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;categorical-encoding&lt;/a&gt;. The latter is a necessary condition for the former. Does that mean that the two are synonyms? No. Does that mean that questions with the latter tag are usually helpful for someone asking about the former? I don't think so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose de-synonymizing the two tags again. I can reconstruct the tag wiki and excerpt for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dummy-variable-trap&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dummy-variable-trap&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dummy-variable-trap&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2019-09-05T07:15:23.720" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T07:15:23.720" Title="Should we de-synonymize dummy-variable-trap and categorical-encoding?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5713" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5715" CreationDate="2019-07-18T09:16:48.507" Score="9" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a number of questions posted by new users asking how to interpret basic linear model output with interactions. An example from just now: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/418024/one-main-effect-is-positive-while-other-is-negative-but-interaction-effect-is-po&quot;&gt;One main effect is positive while other is negative but interaction effect is positive in an interaction;Interpretation help&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we have a canonical question &amp;amp; answer that addresses these? If not, I can write one that explains this graphically. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="121522" LastEditDate="2019-07-18T12:08:08.867" LastActivityDate="2019-07-18T17:41:43.363" Title="Do we have a canonical thread that explains how to interpret 2- and 3-way interactions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5713" CreationDate="2019-07-18T17:41:43.363" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know that we have a perfectly pure thread that would be considered canonical.  That's especially true for 3-way interactions.  You can sort the questions returned by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/interaction%2Binterpretation?tab=Frequent&quot;&gt;searching&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/interaction&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;interaction&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;interaction&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/interpretation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;interpretation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;interpretation&lt;/a&gt; by votes or frequency of linking to see if there's something you like.  Personally, I tend to link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/122246/7290&quot;&gt;Interpretation of interaction term&lt;/a&gt; in conjunction with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/120035/7290&quot;&gt;Interpretation of betas when there are multiple categorical variables&lt;/a&gt;, but note that (a) these only pertain to a 2-way interaction, and (b) I wrote both of those answers.  Another of my answers I sometimes link to is the top portion of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/49701/7290&quot;&gt;Interaction in generalized linear model&lt;/a&gt;.  Again, partly I'm more familiar with those because I wrote them.  Assuming someone actually goes to all three places and reads all of the answers, I think they could get a reasonable grasp of the idea, but then again, people may not do that and it wouldn't hurt to have all the information in a general form in one place.  So a canonical thread isn't a bad idea.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that also trying to adequately cover 3-way interactions will be difficult and make the answer pretty long, though.  You'll also need to consider if you want to work through the distinction between categorical and continuous variables in an interaction.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2019-07-18T17:41:43.363" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5712" CreationDate="2019-07-18T18:25:54.973" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe, but I'm not sure.  Note that my answer / suggestion to make it a synonym was well upvoted (+8) with no downvotes or dissenting comments for nearly two weeks before I went ahead with making the synonym.  You posted a dissenting comment yesterday, which now has 1 upvote, but it's not clear if it was before or after I made the synonym.  I do think it was reasonable to interpret the situation as a consensus for making the synonym at the time.  Of course, that doesn't guarantee a synonym is the best choice and we can always delete the mapping with little difficulty.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I imagine a user who wants to ask a question here about the dummy variable trap, and who has (at best) a hazy grasp of the idea, I don't picture them trying to learn about it by mousing over the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/categorical-encoding&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;categorical-encoding&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;categorical-encoding&lt;/a&gt; tag.  Instead, I imagine them trying to ask a question.  I figure they would have some title with &quot;dummy variable trap&quot; in it, and would also type that in the tags field.  If someone were to do that under the status quo, they would see something like the following:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ygtnT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ygtnT.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, the similar questions section would show links to some relevant, existing threads, and the tag suggestions would include &lt;code&gt;[dummy-variable-trap]&lt;/code&gt;, with it's appropriate excerpt.  (After they select &lt;code&gt;[dvt]&lt;/code&gt; and post the question, &lt;code&gt;[dvt]&lt;/code&gt; would be silently replaced by &lt;code&gt;[ce]&lt;/code&gt;, but many people don't even notice that.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, I might imagine such a user searching on the terms &quot;dummy variable trap&quot;.  If I search on CV, I get &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=dummy%20variable%20trap&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;.  That is, the synonym didn't impair the search.  Searching Google is fine as well.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the issue is how the synonym affects searching on the tag (which I suspect primarily users more familiar with SE would do), and how having the mapping vs. not affects how well the information on the site is organized.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm open to arguments on that issue.  In truth, I wasn't married to the idea of making the synonym beforehand.  But I continue to lean towards having the synonym&amp;mdash;call it 60-40 for.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2019-07-18T18:25:54.973" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3175" CreationDate="2019-07-23T11:48:17.270" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here's the entire train of thought I had from the moment I dreamt up the project till I just finished writing this question, including every irrelevant detail and conversation with my supervisor (who once taught a stats course and is thinking about writing a book, except they had a skiing accident and got sidetracked, but on the upside they now have some time to read my manuscript but think I did my analysis wrong), plus the flashes of questionable insight I got while pondering this in the shower this morning, though I forgot some of it because my allergies started kicking in, isn't it crazy how that happens just when you've got some important idea, but anyway what I wanted to ask is...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get that it's sometimes hard to tell the difference between relevant and irrelevant detail when framing a question. But when I have to read through 4 meandering paragraphs before getting the tiniest inkling of what help is needed, I'm not inclined to react favourably. These questions are unclear because they distract with excess detail. And they are worse than some of the other types of bad questions because they waste more of the reader's time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonus points for combining this with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4550/121522&quot;&gt;Can anybody help me?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5315/121522&quot;&gt;What do I do with this data?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2019-07-23T14:54:44.447" LastActivityDate="2019-07-23T14:54:44.447" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5718" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-23T23:11:59.563" Score="-5" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Cross Validated post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/418308/can-a-human-be-intellectual-property&quot;&gt;Can a human be intellectual property?&lt;/a&gt; Why is it still closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="251039" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-07-24T11:15:01.533" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T13:10:59.633" Title="Why is my question &quot;Can a human be intellectual property?&quot; still closed?" Tags="|discussion|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2019-08-08T11:19:27.747" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5718" CreationDate="2019-07-23T23:32:03.373" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason given by the majority of the close voters was that it was unclear; I will let them explain that reasoning if they choose to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking for myself, I don't think the central problem is lack of clarity - the question is clear enough that one could close it for a better reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would vote to close it - without hesitation - because it's not remotely on topic on CrossValidated. If the question were made perfectly clear it would still be off topic, so clearly it should close for that reason rather than any lack of clarity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One reason people &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; close it as unclear is if they felt it would (once clarified) be a good candidate for migration to a specific other site, but in that case it would be necessary for them to address the criteria of that destination site in a comment (i.e. to explain how to modify the question so that it could migrate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also possible that some felt that perhaps it might appear nearer to being on topic if it were clarified. I see no hint of that in the question, but perhaps I am missing something the close voters were able to discern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2019-07-23T23:37:36.477" LastActivityDate="2019-07-23T23:37:36.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5718" CreationDate="2019-07-24T18:11:57.870" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted to close as unclear when the original question was, in its entirety&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can be a human be intellectual property ? I think and i am obtain in data&#xA;  MEta thought or is it Meta learning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Think about it one person thoughts being shared in as an open book, real-time feed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is difficult to understand. It is ungrammatical, and the parts which I understand individually do not add up to a coherent question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've asked this question on a statistics forum, and use words like &quot;data&quot; and &quot;real-time feed&quot; and &quot;meta learning&quot;. These are topics which are sometimes discussed on this website, so maybe you had an on-topic idea at the time that you wrote that question but articulated it poorly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the intervening time, you've added additional text to the question. It is not clear how the question is on-topic. I also don't understand what you're asking about in the most-recent version of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the core question you're asking is truly &quot;what is &lt;strong&gt;intellectual property&lt;/strong&gt;?&quot; then you're better off asking a lawyer, not a statistician.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2019-07-25T16:55:21.067" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T16:55:21.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2253" CreationDate="2019-07-26T10:18:26.050" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This might be interesting given that this discussion was started long ago and some data has become available.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the trend in stats.SE typical of large sites? Are the trends dependent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/d62Gb.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;plt&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Query used: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/350553/data-explorer-query-for-questions-per-year-2009-2016&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/350553/data-explorer-query-for-questions-per-year-2009-2016&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54664" LastActivityDate="2019-07-26T10:18:26.050" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5723" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-27T17:18:47.267" Score="8" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to ask a question with the title &lt;strong&gt;Is there a canonical example demonstrating the difference between predictive and explanatory models?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have ideas about the body of this question, with some references, but have not yet written it, although I think the title gets at the meat of it. However, I notice that we have neither an &lt;code&gt;[example]&lt;/code&gt; tag, nor a &lt;code&gt;[pedagogy]&lt;/code&gt; tag which makes me wonder if this kind of question might be appropriate, or if it would be too broad or too subjective a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS I would welcome references which you think might be useful for me to look at on the topic of my intended question posted as comments. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44269" LastActivityDate="2019-07-27T17:18:47.267" Title="Is it on topic for a question to ask for a canonical example?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5703" CreationDate="2019-07-31T17:36:49.303" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a little skeptical that a dummy-variable-trap tag will be useful since it applies to the &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt;, rather than the &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt;. In other words, if you knew enough to tag your question with &quot;dummy variable trap&quot;, wouldn't you also be 99% of the way to figuring out the answer? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7250" LastActivityDate="2019-07-31T17:36:49.303" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5727" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-05T23:13:10.223" Score="2" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I commented several times to one question. I did not receive any thing after my last comment. When I try to check it though my &quot;all actions&quot;, I did not find it after I checked my &quot;all actions&quot; several times across several days. (I did it often and never failed.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, my previous comments on this question also disappeared from my &quot;all actions&quot;. Where did my comments go?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158565" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2019-09-05T07:14:53.503" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T07:14:53.503" Title="Where is my comment?" Tags="|support|comment|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5727" CreationDate="2019-08-06T12:20:19.070" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I moved your comments in one question into a chat yesterday.  The system automatically leaves a comment explaining that and in that comment is a link to the chat.  You can read that comment at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/420032/proof-verification-joint-variance-of-the-product-of-a-random-matrix-with-a-rand#comment784843_420032&quot;&gt;Proof Verification: Joint variance of the product of a random matrix with a random vector&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is routine when a large number of comments appear or when there seems to be an escalating back-and-forth conversation emerging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T12:20:19.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5735" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-17T07:09:23.030" Score="2" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;How should my question be rephrased such that you will reopen it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/421711&quot;&gt;3+ dependent variables, which test for measuring dependency?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm essentially trying to figure out how to show the relationship between 3—or more—categorical variables, to infer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An HD in the pre-course exam means you will get an HD in the final&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An P in the mid-course exam means a C in the final&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;amp;etc., with corresponding probabilities (incl. p values).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8330" LastEditorUserId="8330" LastEditDate="2019-08-17T12:48:04.497" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T22:15:03.327" Title="Asking about which hypothesis testing technique? - My question is on hold" Tags="|discussion|questions|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5736" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-21T10:08:33.090" Score="1" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often have to choose where to post a question and since Crossvalidated is present for a while, I stick with this site.&#xA;But is there any separataion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163146" OwnerDisplayName="Ben" LastActivityDate="2019-08-21T13:21:42.323" Title="What is the difference between crossvalidated and data science?" Tags="|discussion|machine-learning|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2019-08-21T12:57:37.123" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5740" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-05T10:49:05.747" Score="35" ViewCount="456" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is known that CV has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5325/&quot;&gt;large and growing number of unanswered questions&lt;/a&gt;. If that is to improve, increasing the number of people who answer questions and/or help clean up (downvote, edit, comment) is a likely a necessary part of the solution. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reflecting on my experience as a new answerer here, I felt that the greatest impediment to me becoming active on the site was the feeling that I was &quot;speaking into the void&quot;. When I started to feel confident in answering questions, my first answers got almost no reactions (comments/acceptance/upvotes/downvotes). As I did put a lot of effort into those answers, it didn't feel great. Not saying my answers are necessarily great, but I also got basically no feedback on where to improve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I eventually became OK with getting little feedback (though it still feels sad at times) and am now trying to participate on the site actively but I wonder:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To what extent is this a common experience of new answerers? Do we lose noticeable number of potentially active participants this way?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there some way to avoid this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, I am experimenting myself with proactively searching for answers without votes and being generous with upvotes. My current upvote threshold is somewhere around &quot;This answer is more likely to improve the statistical practice of the OP than to make it worse&quot;. Is this considered desirable by the community? Or could it have unintended side effects I am missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Managing expectations of new answerers or providing some hints on how to determine if an answer to a question is likely to attract some feedback might also make sense (e.g. show info to users writing their first few answers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1900/crossvalidateds-rather-extreme-up-voting-problem&quot;&gt;lack of upvoting&lt;/a&gt; has been discussed before, but from a different angle (also it was 5 years ago) and without a strong conclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The discussions on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5402/is-a-quick-and-dirty-answer-better-than-no-answer/5411#5411&quot;&gt;quick and dirty answers&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4763/should-i-upvote-an-elaborated-answer-which-i-do-not-fully-understand&quot;&gt;upvoting answers you are not sure are correct&lt;/a&gt; are also somewhat related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73129" LastEditorUserId="73129" LastEditDate="2019-09-05T13:06:44.593" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T23:51:59.863" Title="Are new answerers feeling like they &quot;speak into the void&quot;? And can we help?" Tags="|discussion|votes|reputation|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5740" CreationDate="2019-09-05T12:26:53.763" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a reader looking to better my practice, I welcome answers that are clear and broken down in detail. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a learner that will eventually look to help others I would welcome some guidance of what a good answer structure is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading various answer I have an idea of what a good answer is &lt;strong&gt;for me&lt;/strong&gt; -- but would be nice to see guidelines to help newcomers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258119" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T12:26:53.763" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5740" CreationDate="2019-09-05T13:45:08.510" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;1. To what extent is this a common experience of new answerers? Do we lose noticeable number of potentially active participants this way?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I felt similarly when I started participating, and it was years before I became a regular user. As with most communities, this one has some unusual norms that take a while to learn - especially since there's no central archive of all of them (the help pages cover things partially at best). The biggest challenge for me was finding questions simple enough to answer that were not going to be closed as duplicates (or for any other reason). Having spent a lot of time here, I now have a decent idea about whether a question has been addressed before or is going to meet the closure criteria. But earlier, finding a question closed half-way through writing an answer could be discouraging. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;2. Is there some way to avoid this?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that upvoting (and downvoting!) more would be helpful, but I'd be surprised if it had more than a small effect. The number of upvotes I get for my answers is mainly a function of how much attention the question gets, and this seems quite random. My most-upvoted answers are nothing special: they just happened to be to questions that ended up being popular. So a few additional intentional upvotes (while appreciated) are probably not going to change this general dynamic. &lt;strong&gt;Edited to add a partial retraction of the above point: on reflection, I realised that those few additional intentional upvotes are not trivial. They would have mattered a lot more when I was new to the site and had a low rep score.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to return to your question about avoiding this engagement problem for new users. I think the problems I faced are structural and hard to address. I think the biggest problem is that the community has to spend a lot of effort to just remove bad questions. This work is largely done by a relatively small pool of people, but new users suffer the consequences too - the new questions page is generally filled with a high proportion of low quality questions. Participating would be easier if this 'background noise' level was lower, but I don't see a good way to make that happen. I'd be fine with mandating some moderately time-consuming steps for new participants to ensure they learn what a good question is before posting, but that's not going to happen. And I don't think anything else would work very well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Edited to add] A second problem is that because simple questions are very likely to have been asked before (and hence would be closed as duplicates), the remaining on-topic questions are more specialised and complex. Answering these is a valuable contribution, but the problem is that there's fewer people who have the expertise to understand these answers. And if I can't understand an answer, I cannot justify upvoting it. This also penalises new users, but I can't see a good solution there either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;3. Regarding your upvoting criterion &quot;This answer is more likely to improve the statistical practice of the OP than to make it worse&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know. Pitching your answer at a level that the OP can understand is valuable, of course, and sometimes I'm happy to upvote answers for the reason you cite. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't follow this as a general rule. There are frequently important lessons to be taught that supersede the specific question being asked. Questions can be so misguided that a technically correct answer could still be a bad way to proceed, and conceptual frameworks can serve as straightjackets that hinder the search for good solutions. For example, instead of telling someone how to do the exact test/p-value calculation they have asked about (which might improve their statistical practice), it can sometimes be more important to point out that there may be better ways to &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; about their problem than through the framework of null hypothesis statistical testing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="121522" LastEditDate="2019-09-10T14:11:04.100" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T14:11:04.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5740" CreationDate="2019-09-07T01:48:29.043" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To what extent is this a common experience of new answerers? Do we lose noticeable number of potentially active participants this way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably. I certainly answer less because of it (not that I'm important at all of course). The main issue is probably the fact that people come here for an answer, then leave when they don't get one. So they are not around to upvote late answers to their question. But that might be my fault for sometimes liking to go through older unanswered questions to give them an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there some way to avoid this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can suggest two things that might help off the top of my head. Although, there's probably some huge issues I haven't thought of yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What if we gave more medals/badges for voting? Maybe in a recurring manner? I thought about giving a tiny amount of rep (e.g., x rep every 1000 upvotes), but that's too easy to abuse.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the backlog, a lot answers, especially late answers to older questions, simply sit without being accepted nor upvoted. So they will be in the unanswered queue forever I guess(?). [Sorry if I misunderstand the system]. If there was a mechanism for the community to accept answers to &quot;dead questions&quot;, it would probably help with this. (E.g., if the questioner hadn't logged in for n months, the question can go into an &quot;old questions with answers&quot; queue, and if enough people vote for it, it could get accepted). This might encourage people to answer some more older questions as well.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128284" LastActivityDate="2019-09-07T01:48:29.043" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5744" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-10T13:20:14.023" Score="14" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;Occasionally we get questions with no statistical content, such as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/425659/return-on-bonds-and-stocks&quot;&gt;Return on bonds and stocks&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So our choices are to either close as off-topic or migrate. But right now, only a mod could migrate this question because Quant.SE isn't a migration target in the VTC dialogue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quant.SE is no longer in Beta, which means it is feasible to add the website as a migration target to the VTC dialogue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we add it as a migration target? Is this a good idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastActivityDate="2019-09-18T06:21:23.570" Title="Quant.SE is no longer in Beta. Can we add it as a migration target?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5744" CreationDate="2019-09-10T15:58:18.020" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't know this, but we are limited to only 3 migration targets. It makes the most sense to allocate these 3 slots to the 3 most prevalent targets, which I assume are &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Meta.Stats.SE,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Math.SE and &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SO.SE.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="128677" LastEditDate="2019-09-18T06:21:23.570" LastActivityDate="2019-09-18T06:21:23.570" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5746" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-11T15:47:21.197" Score="1" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/411035/&quot;&gt;Does LASSO suffer from the same problems stepwise regression does?&lt;/a&gt; is a well-received cromulent question I asked in June. The question has received several helpful &lt;strong&gt;comments&lt;/strong&gt; pointing to insightful texts. However, none of these comments would serve as proper answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@mkt has converted the question to a community wiki under the rationale that &quot;We have a dramatic gap between answers and questions.&quot; I disagree with this conversion and with the motivation for it. Our help center policy says &quot;Community wiki posts have been donated to the community in hopes that others will edit them to keep them up to date, to add useful information, and generally improve their quality.&quot; Three months seems a short period of time to consider a question (and it's lack of answers during that period) in a niche topic &quot;out of date.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this shift to community wiki be reverted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44269" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T16:26:41.577" Title="Can a question classified as community wiki be rolled back to a standard question?" Tags="|discussion|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5746" CreationDate="2019-09-11T16:06:43.527" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;@whuber points out a mistaken assumption in my question: I had falsely assumed that community wiki applied to questions and answers together as one piece, not separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)#%22Unasking%22_the_question&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in the fashion of Zen&lt;/a&gt;, the acceptable answer to my question is &lt;strong&gt;mu&lt;/strong&gt;: unask the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44269" LastEditorUserId="44269" LastEditDate="2019-09-11T16:26:41.577" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T16:26:41.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5735" CreationDate="2019-09-11T22:15:03.327" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not an answer - but it's too big for a comment. Your writing is simply unreadable. It might be salvageable if you used good practices for scientific writing. Here are the specific complaints. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your question is not written in complete sentences. Remarks like this are meaningless:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Given performance in columns, what is a predictor for which?... Generalise for any number of exams between pre and final.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You refer to things that don't exist, like &quot;row ID&quot; and &quot;student number&quot; when there is no row ID &lt;em&gt;nor&lt;/em&gt; student number. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You excessively use dependent clauses. I found this line the most unreadable of all:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, for example—using the regular Fail (F) is &amp;lt; 50; Pass (P) is ≥50 &amp;amp; ≤75; Distinction (D) is &gt;75 &amp;amp; ≤ 85; and High Distinction (HD) is &gt;85—show which exam—and quartile—predicts a more favourable final exam outcome?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You don't define terms, then seem to use different terms equivalently, &quot;marks&quot;, &quot;columns&quot;, &quot;outcome&quot;, &quot;categorical variables&quot;, &quot;quartiles&quot; all seem to refer to one or more exam marks.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You use shorthand and lazy typing when you need to specific. Here, what other &quot;corresponding probabilities&quot; might you be talking about. And what else could &amp;amp;etc. possibly mean?&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;amp;etc., with corresponding probabilities (incl. p values).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your writing is full of unnecessary adverbs: &#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Given the &lt;strong&gt;following&lt;/strong&gt; dataset... I'm &lt;strong&gt;essentially&lt;/strong&gt; trying to figure out...What test can I use for &lt;strong&gt;numerically&lt;/strong&gt; explaining..&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a tip: when people are confused on a subject, they tend to explain &quot;wide&quot; when they need to explain &quot;deep&quot;. If you use consistent terminology, follow a structured format (like data - task - problem), and permit yourself &lt;strong&gt;only one question mark&lt;/strong&gt;, the writing could be improved significantly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T22:15:03.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5740" CreationDate="2019-09-12T23:51:59.863" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my advice for newbies for getting the questions answered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Join a smaller, more 'hobbyist' SE first, one that you either have some expertise in or can ask interesting questions of. Make sure it's one with a generous voting culture (Something like Worldbuilding, Movies or Sci-Fi)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grind questions or answers until you've accumulated 200 rep and obtained the association bonus.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your CV account will now get +100 rep, enough to allow you to give out a bounty.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask your question, make sure it's a quality one and put a bounty on it as soon as you are able.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bounty is absolutely necessary if you are to have any chance at getting a quality answer to your question, I've found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have more questions that need answering, you are put in the unenviable position of having to grind for rep. Even if you have some knowledge and are able to answer some of the easier questions, it is highly likely that your answers will go by without comment, upvote or acceptance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternative strategy is to regularly make edits to your question to keep it in the active queue. People may frown at this strategy, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These strategies are symptomatic of a sick SE. One shouldn't have to resort to gaming the system to have a reasonable chance of getting a decent question answered. The main cause is the constant flood of new people asking their questions, and this is a tide that cannot be stopped, no matter how punitively bad questions by new users are downvoted/closed/deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have any real solutions to this, but one thing I think can help is to &lt;strong&gt;actively upvote questions by new users that are not bad&lt;/strong&gt;. I.e. when going through the first post queue, if the question is not actively bad, but also not actively good, give it an upvote anyway. That little dopamine rush will make it more likely the new person will stay around after their first question, and will give them rep which they could save up for bounties in the future.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="172392" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T23:51:59.863" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5750" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-16T12:47:22.903" Score="2" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;I ran into this: For a certain user with many posts,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;user:4505&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A4505&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A4505&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;search gives (16.09.2019) 812 hits. Augmenting the search with &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;user:4505 views:..10000&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A4505+views%3A..10000&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A4505+views%3A..10000&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;gives none! (same with slight variants). That looks like a bug.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2019-09-16T12:56:17.563" LastActivityDate="2019-09-16T17:25:09.403" Title="Search: Problem with views:keyword in search" Tags="|bug|search|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5751" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5753" CreationDate="2019-09-16T17:24:51.377" Score="5" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm teaching myself how to do meta-analysis, and as a beginner to the subject I would like to read journal article examples of meta-analysis done well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy enough to find examples of meta-analysis, but I don't have the expertise to assess the quality of those examples. It would be helpful for me in my effort to self teach to read meta-analysis articles done well as well as explanations of what is being done rignt in those articles. The flip would also be useful (that is, to read articles where the meta-analysis could be greatly improved and an explanation of where they could be improved).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Cross Validated an appropriate place to ask for this information?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT1: I tried to put this in a comment but ended up being too verbose for the comments section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do see how the question wouldn’t be a good fit for the website (too subjective, insufficiently finite). That said, I do think there is value in seeing examples of things done well. Guidelines are helpful, but to see everything pulled together in an example offers a different kind of insight. A list of anatomy drawing guidelines is helpful in learning how to draw (e.g., the head is one-eighth of the length of the body), but it’s helpful in a different way than actually seeing a figure drawing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now with figure drawings, most people can assess whether or not something looks right. With meta-analysis, that’s not so, and of the reviews of meta-analyses I’ve read (meta-meta-analyses?), it seems many meta-analyses fail to meet basic guidelines even though they passed the peer review process. I would guess that’s because the peer reviewers had subject matter expertise but not meta-analysis expertise, and I would think that the authors of those “needs improvement” meta-analyses would have been well served by seeing acceptable examples of meta analyses. I know I would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the point that people do things differently. No doubt there’s variation in how things can be done acceptably, but I don’t think that makes individual examples of acceptably done meta-analysis useless. Some journals share example abstracts, figures, tables, etc. in their writer’s guides, and I think that’s helpful even if there are other ways to do things acceptably. I think it would be the same for seeing an entire example of a meta-analysis written up, but I am more than happy to agree to disagree on this point. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73619" LastEditorUserId="73619" LastEditDate="2019-09-18T22:08:58.057" LastActivityDate="2019-09-18T22:08:58.057" Title="Is Cross Validated an appropriate place to ask for examples of meta-analysis done well?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5750" CreationDate="2019-09-16T17:25:09.403" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The views only relates to questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance try&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3Ame+views%3A...1000000&quot;&gt;user:me views:...1000000&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which in my case only returns my questions and not my answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So user 4505 must have never asked questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using some more advanced query on the database (matching answers with the views for their parent questions) you could obtain the information you look for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastActivityDate="2019-09-16T17:25:09.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5751" CreationDate="2019-09-18T11:26:51.717" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like the true academic I shall answer a slightly different question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you had asked the question and we (the relatively small collection of people who answer on the meta-analysis tag) had answered with our favourite examples would you be any further forward? My feeling is that you would not. It is of course perfectly true that the underlying mathematical theory of meta-analysis is identical across disciplines but custom and practice differ. Part of this is for good reasons. In the field where I work, health, there are often quite few studies and each gives rise to a single effect size. In other areas there may be many hundreds of studies or each study may give rise to dozens of effect sizes. The range of examples needed to cover all the bases would be large.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A further issue is that the field advances but practitioners are still taught what was current some time, possibly years ago. The advice to look at guidelines offered by @gung in a comment should at least avoid some of the pitfalls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I have written this specifically about meta-analysis I believe that the issues would be quite similar for other fields of applied statistics and underpins the reluctance to have list answers on these sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastActivityDate="2019-09-18T11:26:51.717" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5754" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5756" CreationDate="2019-09-18T17:21:39.247" Score="9" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you go to close a question as a duplicate, CV tries its best to &quot;guess&quot; which earlier question it may be duplicate of. Being statisticians, we are leery of the algorithm, and indeed matching on a few key terms rarely actually finds a good candidate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to flag, save, or index a question as canonical or generic so that we can quickly close duplicates and point users to the better questions and answers? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastActivityDate="2019-09-27T13:30:44.917" Title="Can CV bookmark index questions for which others are commonly closed as duplicates?" Tags="|feature-request|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5754" CreationDate="2019-09-18T17:39:08.053" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;At present there is no mechanism,&lt;/strong&gt; but the way in which you ask this question suggests we might be able to create one.  For instance, we could create (say) a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/canonical-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;canonical-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;canonical-question&lt;/a&gt; tag and, as a community, make sure it is applied to such &lt;em&gt;threads.&lt;/em&gt;  (Tags do not apply to individual questions or answers.)  Thus, a search for keywords that include &amp;quot;[canonical-question]&amp;quot; would reveal only such threads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Edit&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have tentatively created the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/canonical-question&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;canonical-question&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;canonical-question&lt;/a&gt; tag, provided a Wiki excerpt, and applied it to two obvious threads.  In doing so it occurred to me that a good use of this tag would be to identify threads that have been &amp;quot;buried&amp;quot; because they have gone unrecognized and therefore are not highly upvoted.  (There's little need to tag the most highly voted questions, because they're easy enough to find.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;One can envision the need to establish clear standards&lt;/strong&gt; for applying the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/canonical&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;canonical&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;canonical&lt;/a&gt; tag so that we don't have to discuss each case here on the Meta site.  In particular, it's not difficult to imagine individuals applying this tag to threads only in order to gain attention to their posts.  Among the criteria we might want to discuss are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Whether and to what extent to use upvote counts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Whether controversial posts--as evidenced by downvotes or extensive discussion in comments--should be made canonical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Whether to pay attention to &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; other than standard indicators of post quality or popularity (voting, bounties, and views).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;One possibility is to make threads canonical &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; after they have been linked as duplicates to at least one question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2019-09-27T13:30:44.917" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5754" CreationDate="2019-09-18T18:35:06.673" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There isn't really such a mechanism that I'm aware of.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be a partial strategy available if the question is well captured by an existing tag, and you can assume the tags are used correctly (ahem).  In that case, you can search on the tag by clicking it, and you can sort the threads categorized under that tag by &lt;code&gt;Frequent&lt;/code&gt;.  That will give you the threads that are most commonly linked by other posts on CV (think of Google's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page rank algorithm&lt;/a&gt;).  One way that a thread is linked by another is that it is the target of which the other thread is a duplicate.  It could also have been a &quot;related: &lt;code&gt;[this Q](link)&lt;/code&gt;&quot; comment, which is somewhat useful, or a different kind of comment, which is just noise that obscures the signal.  Reading through the top returns can help you find a duplicate target.  Regarding your specific question here, the more threads that are marked as duplicates of a single target (or the more &quot;related&quot; comments posted to other questions), the better this will work.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2019-09-18T18:35:06.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5757" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-22T11:02:43.093" Score="15" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some questions on site which are also about professional ethics. Some examples:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/177604/ethics-of-publishing-covariate-matrix&quot;&gt;Ethics of publishing covariate matrix&lt;/a&gt;,   &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/333052/likert-scale-treatment-of-neutral-or-mid-point-of-5-pt-scale&quot;&gt;Likert Scale - Treatment of Neutral or Mid-Point of 5-Pt Scale&lt;/a&gt;  (and others)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we make a new tag &lt;em&gt;ethics&lt;/em&gt; for this, or is there already some tag which includes this? I thought that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/careers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;careers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;careers&lt;/a&gt; could be used, maybe. Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2019-09-23T08:17:56.100" LastActivityDate="2023-11-21T13:37:24.697" Title="New tag for ethics? Or is there already a tag which can be used?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5758" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-25T09:44:36.830" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question on math.stackexchange.com and I didn't receive any answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I post it on stats.stackexchange? The question is from category statistics, numerics and algorithms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179386" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2019-09-25T16:59:43.717" LastActivityDate="2019-09-25T16:59:43.717" Title="If I didn't get an answer about statistics on math.stackexachange should I post duplicate on stats.stack?" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|math-stackexchange|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5759" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5761" CreationDate="2019-10-01T14:33:55.957" Score="14" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our usage guidance for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;r&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;r&lt;/a&gt; tag is nice and clear: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use this tag for any &lt;em&gt;on-topic&lt;/em&gt; question that (a) involves &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; either&#xA;  as a critical part of the question or expected answer, &amp;amp; (b) is not&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; about how to use &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This advice is not part of the text for the other software-specific tags: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sas&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sas&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sas&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spss&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spss&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spss&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/jmp&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;jmp&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;jmp&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/excel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;excel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;excel&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tensorflow&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tensorflow&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tensorflow&lt;/a&gt;, etc - these just mention what the software is and who makes it. Would it be helpful to have text similar to the &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; guidance for these? I can edit them if this is worthwhile. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I made an edit suggestion for one before realising it was a common issue, and that I should raise it here before editing several)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastActivityDate="2021-12-30T16:38:00.393" Title="Usage guidance for software-specific tags" Tags="|discussion|tag-excerpt|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5759" CreationDate="2019-10-02T15:03:50.850" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/225883/question-stats-by-tag&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this script&lt;/a&gt; I looked up some descriptive statistics for the specific tag names:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;from beginning to 2019-29-09&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Name         N      views   score    closed    answers   accepted  answer    time to answer&#xA;                    median  avg      rate %    avg       rate %    rate %    median [minutes]&#xA;&#xA;r            20665  454     2.8       9.6      1.0       36.2      69.8     235&#xA;python        2614  325     2.3      12.6      0.9       30.8      63.9     234&#xA;spss          1628  474     1.8       7.2      1.0       22.2      66.6     155&#xA;matlab        1175  583     1.8       9.7      1.0       39.7      72.9     232               &#xA;scikit-learn  1158  387     2.3      11.1      1.0       36.4      70.7     317&#xA;stata         1149  483     2.0       7.7      0.9       30.3      62.4     238&#xA;sas            614  397     2.0       8.5      1.0       31.1      67.1     190&#xA;tensorflow     445  256     2.2      15.7      0.9       33.0      65.2     527&#xA;excel          359  517     2.4      14.5      1.3       36.8      80.2     100 &#xA;jmp             47  336     2.2       2.1      1.0       38.3      78.7     448&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;total site  235918  196     1.6      20.4      1.0       20.4      41.9     179&#xA;including &#xA;~ 1/3 deleted&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What we can see the easiest from these statistics is that the number of questions with the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;r&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;r&lt;/a&gt; is much larger than the others&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;However the amount of questions that get closed is smaller for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;r&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;r&lt;/a&gt; tag. And this might indicate that the others are lower quality or more often off-topic (or they are similar and just end up differently in the statistics for other reasons)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/1119070/question-stats-by-tag?tag=%3Cr%3E&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this script&lt;/a&gt; you can also observe the number of &lt;em&gt;deleted&lt;/em&gt; posts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;      Name    Total    Deleted   Deleted    Closed    % deleted&#xA;                       directly  after &#xA;                                 Closing&#xA;&#xA;r             38655    7387      10603      1988      46.5&#xA;python         5266    1004       1648       330      50.4&#xA;spss           3221     817        776       117      49.5&#xA;matlab         2656     702        779       114      55.8&#xA;stata          2298     434        715        88      50.0&#xA;scikit-learn   2166     511        497       128      46.5&#xA;sas            1312     292        406        52      53.2&#xA;tensorflow      976     185        346        70      54.4&#xA;excel           813     136        318        52      55.8&#xA;jmp              79      22         10         1      40.5&#xA;&#xA;total        235918   52184      38450      9645      38.4&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which shows that the tags are similar in having around half the questions deleted, whereas the entire site has 38.4% of the posts deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that based on the above numbers one might argue that for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/python&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;python&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;python&lt;/a&gt; it might be valuable to add a similar description as with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;r&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;r&lt;/a&gt; tag. The number of questions are still reasonable large and the number of closed question indicates that the questions can be problematic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spss&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spss&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spss&lt;/a&gt; it doesn't seem to be a problematic tag, and tags like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/matlab&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;matlab&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;matlab&lt;/a&gt; and others do not occur that often. With tags like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/scikit-learn&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;scikit-learn&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;scikit-learn&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tensorflow&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tensorflow&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tensorflow&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/excel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;excel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;excel&lt;/a&gt;, which have high close rates, one might also wonder whether it is due to the issue of being software specific or whether it is due to other reasons (as these tags may correlate with other issues, like being broad unclear or self-study).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2019-10-02T16:22:14.623" LastActivityDate="2019-10-02T16:22:14.623" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5759" CreationDate="2019-10-03T07:07:03.700" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a good practice for the stackexchange communities to explain the tags by &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; they are used and not by &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; the specific term in the tag means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See for instance the points 2 to 4 in the list in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/03/24/redesigned-tags-page/&quot;&gt;this blog post&lt;/a&gt; from Jeff Atwood&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags are the de-facto map of allowed (and implicitly disallowed by omission) topics on your site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Avoid generically defining the concept behind a tag, unless it is highly specialized.&lt;/strong&gt; The “email” tag, for example, does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; need to explain what email is. I think we can safely assume most internet users know what email is; there’s no value in a boilerplate explanation of email to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Concentrate on what a tag means to your community.&lt;/strong&gt; For “email” on Server Fault, mention the server aspects of email including POP3, SMTP, IMAP, and server software. For “email” on Super User, mention desktop email clients and explicitly exclude webmail, as that would be more appropriate for webapps.stackexchange.com.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Provide basic guidance on when to use the tag.&lt;/strong&gt; In other words, &lt;em&gt;what kinds of questions should have this tag&lt;/em&gt;? Tags only exist as ways of organizing questions, so if we don’t provide proper guidance on which questions need this tag, they won’t get tagged at all, rendering the tag excerpt moot. Think of it as a sales pitch: in a room full of tags screaming “pick me!”, what would convince a question asker to select your tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a strong argument to extend the software related tags, explaining how they should be used, in the same style as has been done for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;r&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;r&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T07:07:03.700" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5762" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-03T15:50:29.597" Score="8" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question seems to handle if its one's own post : &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/735/is-there-a-polite-accepted-way-of-bumping-up-questions&quot;&gt;Is there a polite /accepted way of &amp;quot;bumping&amp;quot; up questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering about what the best approach is if I see an old question that hasn't had any responses, or could do with more. Is there an accepted way to bring it to the attention of others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137921" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2019-10-03T16:18:10.263" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T16:54:08.110" Title="Is there a way to bump questions asked by other users?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5762" CreationDate="2019-10-03T16:54:08.110" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;One way is to offer a bounty on the question. As a mild bonus, you get a badge the first time you do this (Investor).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T16:54:08.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5764" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-04T01:54:10.013" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't just post answers to self-study questions where we give the proof of whatever the OP is asking. I think this is a good policy. However, that seems to mean that any post in response to a self-study question is going to be more like a comment and dialogue, at least according to the usual rules about .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would warrant an answer to a self-study question as opposed to a comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247274" LastActivityDate="2019-10-04T01:54:10.013" Title="what is an answer versus a comment to a self-study question" Tags="|discussion|answers|comment|homework|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5765" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-04T07:48:30.267" Score="122" ViewCount="6219" Body="&lt;p&gt;Additional update:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My diamond was removed something in the ballpark of an hour ago, as per my request from last week. Thanks for your understanding, everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some updates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) I signed this &lt;a href=&quot;https://dearstackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;letter&lt;/a&gt;. It has been signed by a very large number of moderators and ex-moderators&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) David Fullerton, CTO of StackOverflow [1] has posted a considerably better &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334551/an-apology-to-our-community-and-next-steps&quot;&gt;apology&lt;/a&gt; that appears to recognize many of those points. Its an encouraging sign that there's an actual recognition of the issues and some preparedness to address them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) I have also signed this &lt;a href=&quot;https://dearstackexchange.com/lavender&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;letter&lt;/a&gt;; in particular I agree with each one of the three specific requests for action in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] (which I'll continue to think of and speak of as &quot;StackExchange&quot;, since it better represents the network of sites I participate in)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been agonizing over this for quite a few days now. I hate to do it - and I certainly don't do it lightly - but I no longer see my position as a moderator as tenable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A number of things in recent times have concerned me about StackExchange, but recent events have brought matters to a head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, Stack Exchange Inc has gone to some trouble to make it hard for people to know what is actually going on, including changing the algorithm by which hot meta posts will appear on your page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example this meta post &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-and-forced-relicensing-is-stack-exchange-still-interested-in-cooper/334117#334117&quot;&gt;Firing mods and forced relicensing&lt;/a&gt; blew up, and you should have been notified about it in the &quot;Hot Meta Posts&quot; section of the sidebar but SE made sure that it and posts like it would not appear in the Hot Meta Posts notifications. I found it by pure accident. &lt;em&gt;Nice.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the StackExchange community is bothered by something, you no longer get to know that unless you're checking meta.SE carefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what has happened? Skipping a lot of details (but you can find them; the above link has many further links in it, for starters, see later posts in meta and their answers and comments for further information, and check the posts in the various site metas, such Writing, for resigning mods across the network), here's a rough summary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;SE is going to introduce a new Code of Conduct which (among other things) is attempting to make the site more accepting of LGBTQI+ users. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A summary of this Code was posted to a private moderator-only chat room. This is not an unusual eventuality and open robust discussion of proposed changes is also not unusual, such things have been discussed with mods before and their views taken into consideration (usually leading to much better outcomes). One of the mods - one of the most respected mods on the entire SE network, and someone I have held a deep respect for since before StackOverflow was thought of - asked some questions about a particular aspect of this policy and how it would work in practice. This is all to be expected.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;After a while this discussion went to email. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A Stack Exchange employee appears to have accused this moderator of bigotry. Stack Exchange have removed the moderator (Monica Cellio).  This removal occurred hours before a major religious holiday for this moderator (and during which she would not be able to respond)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The official position is that she violated the current code of conduct. Monica's position is that she has not violated any part of the current code and has repeatedly asked for clarification about what it is that she supposedly did.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The moderator was not even told removal would happen. There was no warning. She thought she was participating in an amicable email conversation and only discovered her removal when she noticed she had gained badges moderators can't get.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;She attempted to reach out to achieve some &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334248/an-update-to-our-community-and-an-apology/334269#comment1092977_334269&quot;&gt;resolution&lt;/a&gt;. These have been ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;SE staff appear to have attempted to paint her in a bad light in the media at a time when it was clear &lt;em&gt;she could not respond&lt;/em&gt;, while also telling the community here they couldn't talk about it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334248/an-update-to-our-community-and-an-apology&quot;&gt;apology&lt;/a&gt;&quot; offered by Sara Chipps (overnight my time) was really not adequate. It does not reassure me.  To me it does nothing to right the wrongs here and doesn't seem to really recognize that what was done was wrong or seeming to be actually correcting what was wrong about it. (I recommend reading comments under the top answer at that link.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not quite the whole story, indeed we probably won't have it all since some parts of the story are not public; there's some only moderators can see and we'll probably never know the exact content of the email exchange. Don't trust my take on it though, go read for yourself (keeping in mind that we don't have all the information - but even a very generous take on it doesn't leave Stack Exchange looking good).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Explaining these points in some additional detail (as far as I am aware of them) and my views on them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I support attempts to make the site more accepting of LGBTQI+ people. I support a policy of asking users to use other people's desired pronouns each time you use a pronoun to refer to them. Apparently, so does Monica &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-and-forced-relicensing-is-stack-exchange-still-interested-in-cooper/334122#comment1091831_334122&quot;&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;I would never knowingly misgender with wrong pronouns&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Monica's issue seems largely to have been somewhat more estoeric, which related to something which she sought additional clarification on (and which I think would be difficult for moderators to administer). It led to a discussion about whether it was really a &lt;em&gt;requirement&lt;/em&gt; in the policy &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-and-forced-relicensing-is-stack-exchange-still-interested-in-cooper/334122#comment1091831_334122&quot;&gt;to use preferred pronouns extended to situations &lt;em&gt;in which you did not use pronouns&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now there's definitely some scope for discussion/disagreement here in specific examples, and some mods have explained that they have a problem with a position she took (while &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2228/se-has-removed-a-moderator#comment5866_2233&quot;&gt;not agreeing with what eventuated&lt;/a&gt;). This is something that we should expect to be discussed when a new policy is to be introduced -- particularly by the people being expected to police it. Not everyone will be on the same page and discussions are absolutely necessary for us to understand each other clearly. I am completely okay with Monica asking  &quot;It's okay if I do X, right?&quot; and I am completely okay with Cyn and some of the other mods or members of the community more broadly saying to Monica &quot;We really don't think that it's okay if you do that&quot;. This is not anybody trying to hurt anyone on either side of a conversation. (You might like to read Cyn's &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2228/28724&quot;&gt;post on Writing's meta&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the policy definitely needs more discussion, some clarification and some polishing/refomulating. Not everyone will agree with everyone on all the details, or see them all as workable (in particular, for example, there can be religious restrictions on what some people are even permitted to do -- there should be some attempt to try to find some reasonable compromise in such cases). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could have easily asked similar questions to what Monica seems to have asked. This is not incompatible with wishing to be inclusive and welcoming. I feel I could easily have been dismissed in her place, had I been part of the same discussion (I would have been if I was aware of it happening at the time). I see nothing in what has come since that would suggest I couldn't have very easily found myself in a similar position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's ludicrous to remove anyone over a Code of Conduct we don't even have yet which is what seems to have triggered the whole thing; as far as I can see she has not done anything that would consitute a violation of either the spirit or the wording of the current Code (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334248/an-update-to-our-community-and-an-apology#comment1092899_334248&quot;&gt;on which, see&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's bad faith to remove a community-elected volunteer without several other steps in between (indeed there was already a policy for removal but it doesn't actually seem to have been followed as far as I can tell) and some opportunity for further discussion. There was no review. No appeal. Just gone, without even being given the courtesy of being informed that it would happen. Monica still doesn't seem to know exactly what she's supposed to have done (which is weird -- what if it turns out someone hacked her email account, for example? How could she even know if what she did was not explicit?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people have raised the possibility that it was perhaps to do with not using some people's preferred pronoun (singular they) in a chat room, but that would surely not be handled this way; any discussion and potential consequences for doing so in a site's chat room would surely be up to the moderators for that site, collectively; there's a formal procedure for dealing with site moderators who misbehave, clearly laid out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would take something &lt;em&gt;really extreme&lt;/em&gt; for it to make sense to remove someone so quickly (or else it could wait a few days for more deliberate action); if there was some danger of acting improperly as a mod in the meantime (seriously?) then a temporary suspension from being a mod could be used. Something extreme enough that it couldn't sit for a weekend (that the mod had to be inactive for anyway) would likely require the involvement of police. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; understands what it is to be part of a marginalized and abused minority, it's Monica (I'd provide links that might give you some sense of just how directly, but don't want to give away such specific details without her explicit okay, and she has better things to worry about). Worse, the sacking came just hours before the beginning of important religious holidays for her. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On top of everything else, the present situation has seemingly displayed incredible insensitivity and intolerance toward Monica. If Monica was not as gracious, it would very reasonably have been been called antisemitic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if Monica had done what she's been accused of her removal in this fashion would be egregious, but it seems pretty clear that her actual position is not consistent with how it has been officially portrayed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The present circumstances muddies the waters and seems to hand actual &lt;em&gt;opponents&lt;/em&gt; of tolerance and acceptance of LGBTQI+ people ammunition with which to oppose the original aim. Indeed, I am convinced that as it stands it sounds far worse for LGBTQI+ people than anything Monica seems to have done and even worse than what she's been accused of doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't introduce a policy of tolerance with a purge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many moderators have resigned or stood aside. I pondered my response for while, then I stood aside from moderation while I considered further -- all the while hoping Stack Exchange would come clean, admit they made an error in handling it, apologize and reinstate Monica (or at least wind it back to a more proper handling, in a way that justice could be seen to be done). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Monica maintains that she doesn't know what it is that they think she has done wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead they have doubled down. They have thrown shade in the media and they've acted to make it harder for people to find out it even happened. They've offered a weak apology which doesn't fix what happened and had done nothing to make me feel confident they understand what people think was wrong nor how wrong it was. The assurances that they'd &lt;em&gt;do it better next time&lt;/em&gt; really concern me, since it needs to be better &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Monica has been one of the mods for whom I have the very greatest of respect - a moderator who I would aspire to be as good as. She appears to have been very shabbily treated. How does any of this improve Stack Exchange?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every single employee of Stack Exchange, at every level, needs to think very carefully about one simple fact: the content that pays their salaries is generated for free by its users, and curated by the high reputation users and diamond moderators who donate huge amounts of time and expertise to make this a good place to find answers. Your income depends in very large part on the goodwill of the communities that generate content for you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If mods can be terminated so casually, no matter the feelings of the communities who chose them, then they really should be &lt;em&gt;paid&lt;/em&gt; for it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this could have been solved a week ago, with a few emails and an actual apology or perhaps, two, if it were necessary to apologize both ways. Or failing that, with a simple, considered review of what went on, and then backing up before applying something nearer to proper procedure. How much has this policy of doubling down cost Stack Exchange already? For a company needing to make money they're acting like the sources of that money are both expendable and fungible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange keeps saying they want to listen to moderators and to the community, but increasingly it seems like they do not (they actually did it pretty well, once). Stack Exchange talks of respect and tolerance but throughout this they don't seem to have shown a lot of either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I continue to hope that SE will take real steps to undo the harm they've done to the goodwill of moderators and to Monica in particular (and indeed to any perception that they care about being welcoming and tolerant) but I see nothing to indicate that they will. At this stage an independent review of what happened and mediation would be a reasonable first step on that path, but given the response so far, I can wait no longer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't give the implied support to Stack Exchange Inc that continuing as a moderator would suggest, and I can't be responsible for enforcing a future Code of Conduct that I (seemingly) can't completely understand (and apparently could risk removal for asking serious questions about), for all that I support its underlying aims. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must, with the deepest of regret, step down. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have to take care of some urgent work shortly after I post this, but I plan to notify Stack Exchange officially as soon as I get some time (assuming they don't see this and remove me before I get to it, which is fine, since my intent is 100% clear). [Edit this official notification has occurred; it might still take a while before I actually lose the diamond.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As things stand at the moment I expect this will be my last post as a moderator, though I may add some details and will continue to edit as needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to thank my fellow CrossValidated mods for their kindness, professionalism, support and much else besides, throughout my term as a moderator and before. I have the deepest respect for each of them. I'd like to thank the wider moderation community on the SE network, who have helped me many times during my term as moderator. I'd also like to thank our many knowledgeable and giving users who make our site work so wonderfully. I think our community here in CrossValidated is amazing, and I hope to continue to be an active part of it in the future as an ordinary user, though for a time I will be stepping back somewhat from that as well, reducing my participation as an ordinary user for the present; I'll still be around hoping that Stack Exchange show a clearer recognition of their responsibilities in this relationship. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just in case anyone is inclined to misunderstand the implications of any of the above, let me be clear: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have no trouble whatever with singular &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt;. In fact quite the opposite -- I have been arguing &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; it as a nongendered pronoun since approximately the mid 80s - useful, for example when you don't know a gender for whoever you're referring to - and have used it in my writing, sometimes in the face of quite a bit of opposition from editors. I didn't always win those arguments (in that my text got changed over my objections).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;More generally I have no trouble with referring to people by a preferred pronoun[2]. None of this is in any way a stance by me against calling people what they want, &lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; not people from marginalized and abused communities. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] (except for people who don't take it seriously and want to try to claim they should be referred to using &quot;helicopter&quot; as a pronoun or something; I think that ends up harming the very people it should be helping by making a mockery of it. That's not okay.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="28666" LastEditDate="2020-09-28T21:42:28.590" LastActivityDate="2020-09-28T21:42:28.590" Title="Moderator resignation" Tags="|discussion|moderation|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="31" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="735" CreationDate="2019-10-04T08:39:00.633" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you place a bounty on a question then this will also bump up the question (and in addition it will be featured in the bounty list).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But note that a bounty for unclear questions is not gonna work well. Attention is not the only thing that drives answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastActivityDate="2019-10-04T08:39:00.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5765" CreationDate="2019-10-04T13:14:03.660" Score="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anyone who visits CrossValidated for more than 10 minutes will notice your ubiquitous great contributions to this site, and anyone who visits longer will recognize your enormously valuable insight and skill as a statistician.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When high-profile moderators like yourself across the SE network make this decision it might finally get the message through to those in charge that they are really taking steps in the wrong direction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really hope that this brings about a positive change, and that all these sites do not truly lose their most valuable members as moderators this way... but perhaps I am being too optimistic. Regardless, I think it is a very noble thing to do, after the tremendous effort you must have put in to get where you are now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176202" LastActivityDate="2019-10-04T13:14:03.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5765" CreationDate="2019-10-04T14:52:07.950" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;The thing that SO, Inc. cares most about is that it has something of a unique online community: people who generally behave themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators play a key role in maintaining that. Stepping down or threatening to step down isn't a good solution, because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;good moderators can be replaced with worse ones;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;purging SO of rebellious elements seems like something an malevolent organization would seek to do and volunteering to be removed is cooperation with that goal;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;making SO, Inc. fire you is much more uncomfortable for SO, Inc because instead of the community being upset that one moderator, Monica, was fired, the community will be be upset that dozens of moderators were fired.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, my suggestion is a&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;moderator &amp;amp; user strike&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stop doing moderator tasks until SO Inc takes your grievances seriously and commits to making positive changes. Moderators are an enormous source of free value for SO, Inc. That value evaporates without moderators doing their level best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users can support the strike by doing the same: don’t vote, don’t flag, don’t answer, don’t participate. Make it clear that you're withdrawing your participation explicitly as a result of SO, Inc.'s indifference and opacity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't have to have Glen_b's statistical acumen to grasp that only a small number of individuals on Stats.SE and all of SO do most of the work that keeps the sites useful. The reason we have answers, closure queues and flags is to make the site function smoothly. If the dedicated cadre at the core of every site walks away, SO will break. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsoEf8Yqe3I&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;They have the plant, but we have the power.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2019-10-04T18:53:39.307" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5765" CreationDate="2019-10-05T01:31:52.587" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't fault your decision, @glen_b, and I think SE has behaved very poorly in all of this. But I want to call people here's attention to something that re-colored my opinions on all of this a little bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no inside information, but I'd like other moderators to consider very strongly before resigning. With @glen_b going and @whuber apparently considering it, it's very easy to see a path towards this site more-or-less imploding, which I think all of us would consider a bad thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr/&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For context: I'm transgender, a reasonably active user on stats.SE (not in the top 10 all-time rep, but well within the top 100), and not yet publicly out (hence not using my main account here, since people in my life know it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding, based on obsessively following meta for the past week, is that &lt;em&gt;&quot;asked some questions about a particular aspect of this policy and how it would work in practice&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is not really a full description of Monica's actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, a trans mod &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334248/an-update-to-our-community-and-an-apology?cb=1#comment1093793_334289&quot;&gt;has said&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She referred to someone using gender neutral pronouns in an edit to her post as something that is physically nauseating to her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(It seems that this may not be an accurate paraphrase – &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5765/moderator-resignation/5769?noredirect=1#comment19160_5769&quot;&gt;gung couldn't find it&lt;/a&gt;, and Monica &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334248/an-update-to-our-community-and-an-apology?cb=1#comment1094139_334289&quot;&gt;doesn't remember using the word &quot;nausea,&quot;&lt;/a&gt; but didn't dispute the general sentiment.)&lt;/em&gt; I also believe that Monica has said she's willing to use gender-neutral neopronouns like &quot;xe&quot;/&quot;xer&quot;, just not &quot;they&quot;/&quot;them&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the idea that her prescriptivist opinion about a pronoun usage is &lt;em&gt;so strong&lt;/em&gt; that it makes her feel physically ill to consider it...well, it sure lowers my (previously high) opinion of her, and it sure makes me feel unwelcome to think that someone in a position of such respect and power on this network held their fairly arbitrary linguistic opinion as &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt; much more important than respecting the humanity of a group of people like me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't purely academic; I again don't know any of the behind the scenes stuff, but a different trans mod &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1195/resignation-notice&quot;&gt;resigned the day before Monica's firing&lt;/a&gt;, saying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By other mods, by staff, and by the entrenched power structure of Stack Exchange, I have been made to feel unwelcome for my queerness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Singular &quot;they&quot; is really &lt;em&gt;not that big a deal&lt;/em&gt;. In general it &lt;a href=&quot;https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;has a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; long history&lt;/a&gt;, and even for the relatively newer usage as someone's only pronoun, it's just a really small ask. (It's probably about as novel as that usage of &quot;ask&quot; just was.) As linguist Geoff Nunberg says in an article called &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npr.org/2019/08/06/744121321/even-a-grammar-geezer-like-me-can-get-used-to-gender-neutral-pronouns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Even A Grammar Geezer Like Me Can Get Used To Gender Neutral Pronouns&lt;/a&gt;&quot;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's not a lot to ask — just a small courtesy and sign of respect. In fact, the accommodations we're being asked to make to nonbinary individuals are much less far-reaching than the linguistic changes that feminists called for 50 years ago. Yet the reactions this time have been even more vehement than they were back then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Refusing this small courtesy – particularly when third-person pronouns really come up &lt;em&gt;so rarely&lt;/em&gt; on SE anyway – is really &lt;em&gt;not nice&lt;/em&gt; to a group of people who are already marginalized both in broader society and also to a fair extent on the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr/&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically: SE has clearly behaved poorly here. I 100% support people feeling that they can no longer donate so much time to a for-profit entity that treats its volunteers this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a lot of people across the network seem to be thinking that Monica's actions are completely without blame, or that this is all just nonsense so the company can seem &quot;woke&quot; or whatever. I want to emphasize that the actions she seems to have taken &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; harm people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm very sorry to see you go, @glen_b. I'm very sorry that SE behaved this way that has I think unambiguously made things worse even for queer users here, at least in the short term. And I would be horribly sorry to see such a dumb chain of events stemming from such a silly opinion lead to the collapse of a site I really enjoy, that has benefited me tremendously, and has helped so many people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="261720" LastEditorUserId="261720" LastEditDate="2019-10-05T04:09:39.647" LastActivityDate="2019-10-05T04:09:39.647" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5765" CreationDate="2019-10-05T10:22:38.580" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not an answer (are there such things here?) but just some grieve that I need to place somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently I said &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/18?m=51615356#51615356&quot;&gt;on chat&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&quot;The discussion sketches a horrible situation. The criticism avoiding response like publish.illinois.edu/shavitt/files/2013/07/PNAS-Reply.pdf… cuts away a big chuck out of my last, and already small, remaining idealistic hopes for science and society.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That was in response to the current bad state of science which seems to have turned into a strange economy where side issues (like making the news, making lots of references, marketing etc.) have become more important and are taking over. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This recent issue with gender neutrality has a similar (if not greater) disillusioning impact on me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that it turns into actions like a volunteer moderator being fired makes me feel like the discussion is turning into a completely pointless direction. We just want equality, that means that people to start &lt;em&gt;acting normal&lt;/em&gt; about this concept. This mess... is completely the opposite. We still have a long way to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastActivityDate="2019-10-05T10:22:38.580" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5765" CreationDate="2019-10-06T05:07:40.467" Score="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry to hear. I have never trusted Stack Exchange to be a long-lasting source of information due to their for-profit objectives and sometimes very hostile moderation policy. I encourage everyone to regularly export their data in case one day the ship  sinks for good: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4799/12359&quot;&gt;Is it safe to use Cross Validated as a note keeping software?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastActivityDate="2019-10-06T05:07:40.467" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2606" CreationDate="2019-10-06T20:40:30.557" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;FYI, I noticed a few weeks ago that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/kernel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;kernel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;kernel&lt;/a&gt; had come back from the dead (a little early for Halloween), &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2606/the-kernel-tag-is-dead#comment8487_2773&quot;&gt;again&lt;/a&gt;. I just removed it from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/417129/why-isnt-a-gaussian-kernel-subject-to-the-curse-of-dimensionality&quot;&gt;the last question of this batch&lt;/a&gt;, but bumping this here as a reminder to active users that the tag is bad and should be killed again if it pops up again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9964" LastActivityDate="2019-10-06T20:40:30.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5765" CreationDate="2019-10-07T01:35:24.850" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In light of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334551/an-apology-to-our-community-and-next-steps&quot;&gt;An apology to our community, and next steps&lt;/a&gt; will you, Glen_b, be rejoining the moderation staff? Or are there outstanding issues that you feel have not been addressed and which compel you to eschew the diamond?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastActivityDate="2019-10-07T01:35:24.850" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5774" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-07T07:40:51.873" Score="18" ViewCount="1114" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334551/an-apology-to-our-community-and-next-steps&quot;&gt;An apology to our community, and next steps&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good sign. Hopefully they will follow through well and all &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5765/moderator-resignation#comment19187_5773&quot;&gt;mods who have resigned will return, assuming they want to&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Glen_b has already referred to this in an update to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5765/moderator-resignation&quot;&gt;Moderator resignation&lt;/a&gt; post. I'm sharing this as a new post for those who are not checking updates and may have missed the latest episode in this fracas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: Unfortunately, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/334646/364758&quot;&gt;the follow-through has been very poor&lt;/a&gt; so far. It increasingly appears that the apology was disingenuous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit 2&lt;/strong&gt;: Along with the lack of action to fix the earlier problems, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334900/official-faq-on-gender-pronouns-and-code-of-conduct-changes&quot;&gt;a new FAQ on gender pronouns and the code of conduct changes is proving deeply unpopular&lt;/a&gt;. gung has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5774/fyi-a-second-better-apology-from-se-has-been-posted?noredirect=1#comment19200_5774&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; about it below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="121522" LastEditDate="2019-10-11T16:22:43.140" LastActivityDate="2019-10-28T14:38:49.017" Title="FYI: A second apology from SE has been posted" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="38" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5774" CreationDate="2019-10-13T20:32:21.003" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has become obvious that the second beautifully (management-style) written apology is not sincere. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The follow up actions are not only dissatisfying, but in addition the StackExchange employees are even &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/335173/&quot;&gt;joking about&lt;/a&gt; the moderators quitting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;StackExchange is displaying a lack of talent in how to deal with this difficult matter and is doing more harm instead of trying to do good. And in the process they show that they do not care about their community (and this issue with the change of the Code of Conduct is just a last drop in the bucket).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that moderators resigning seems not to be enough. I guess that a larger signal is necessary like a lot of users going on strike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I myself have little power (just 1% of the answers here) but I will kick off and see if many want to join the list and make StackExchange understand better that they have not been behaving well to the community and have not been leading by example (showing how to be respectful).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No more answers from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Martijn Weterings (pseudonym StackExchangeStrike aka Sextus Empiricus, following &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/336029/389297&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Aksakal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;mdewey (including from review queues)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;To any person that is not identifying as he/she. Note that this post is not against the LGBTQ community. It is against the disrespect of StackExchange towards their contributors. I hope that respect may come to the LGBTQ community without this respect being fabricated by a management that distrusts their contributors and creates hollow draconian rules (that do nothing to change non-accepting people into accepting people, or worse might do the opposite), but instead by a community on StackExchange that is typically caring about others and is just trying to help.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2019-10-28T14:38:49.017" LastActivityDate="2019-10-28T14:38:49.017" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-10-13T20:32:21.003" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5776" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5777" CreationDate="2019-10-16T12:11:26.047" Score="8" ViewCount="531" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our general chat room is &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/18/ten-fold&quot;&gt;Ten fold&lt;/a&gt;.  We sometimes describe it as being, &quot;just for gossip and grumbles&quot;.  People occasionally ask substantive statistics or machine learning questions there, and we often request they ask on the main site instead.  There are some simple reasons why questions should be asked on the main site instead of chat:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question will get more attention from potential answerers.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is more room to give a proper answer, and there are better facilities for doing so (e.g., formatting).  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The information will be better preserved and more easily findable by future people with the same question.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of this, it might be better to have something in the chat room's description that says questions should be asked on the main site (this idea comes from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/52149114#52149114&quot;&gt;suggestion&lt;/a&gt; by @ankii).  Right now it just says, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;CrossValidated general room.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What should it say?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2019-10-16T20:26:00.880" Title="What should the description for our general chat room be?" Tags="|discussion|questions|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5776" CreationDate="2019-10-16T20:26:00.880" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about (136 characters):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;CrossValidated's general room for gossip, grumbles, and idle chat.  All are welcome.  Please ask substantive questions on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2019-10-16T20:26:00.880" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5778" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-17T08:19:52.597" Score="6" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I put a lot of effort into a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/431720/163114&quot;&gt;question about difficulties in reproducing a specific algorithm&lt;/a&gt;. I got stuck in one step, was able to (probably) find a solution myself, but got stuck again in a next step. I've now edited the question showing the solution I have found and where I'm stuck. Anyway, the topic hasn't changed and I'm still having trouble reproducing this algorithm. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there was already an answer - which however was not really an answer (so this question doesn't really match up with this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1159/163114&quot;&gt;related meta&lt;/a&gt;) because it did not help to even solve the first step I was stuck. I know it's not recommended to edit questions when there is already an answer, in order not to produce &quot;chameleons&quot; but I thought it would not have made sense to ask a new question where most of the text is the same. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have now &lt;strike&gt;crossed out&lt;/strike&gt; the text passages that were wrong and inserted a new chapter &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Edit&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; to make it visible that I've made an update. I think the question has a higher value now, but I wanted to know if this was the right thing to do. Or -- to get a &quot;w&quot; into my question -- what should we do when we found a solution ourselves but got stuck in the next step if there's already a - but poor - answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163114" LastActivityDate="2019-10-18T07:14:16.943" Title="What to do if we need to update a question if there's already answering effort?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5779" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-18T01:32:26.580" Score="111" ViewCount="4205" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Update:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Today, is the one-year anniversary of Monica's firing without cause or process.  This still has not been corrected.  It is time for me to go.  I have asked for my diamond to be removed.  I don't know when it will be, but I will not perform any more moderator actions after today.  I suspect SE &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/335173/187282&quot;&gt;won't&lt;/a&gt; miss me...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have expected for a while that this was coming.  I'm sorry that it did, but I can't continue in good conscience.  The things I wrote below still hold.  I am not leaving the community entirely at this time, just stepping down as a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is difficult for me to write this.  I regret suspending my activity in this way.  However, I cannot continue at present with the ongoing &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-and-forced-relicensing-is-stack-exchange-still-interested-in-cooper&quot;&gt;situation&lt;/a&gt; and Stack Exchange's actions (or lack thereof).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had hoped that the situation would be resolved.  There has been plenty of time, and it doesn't seem that hard.  The (second) &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334551/an-apology-to-our-community-and-next-steps&quot;&gt;apology&lt;/a&gt; appeared sincere and implied that this would quickly be sorted out.  But as time continues to pass, I'm left with the impression the apology was really a stalling tactic in the hopes that this would blow over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The status quo is untenable.  The firing and subsequent treatment of Monica have been atrocious.  No supporting information is publicly available.  The issues revolve around a question asked on the moderators' teams site, and in a variety of conversations in a moderators-only chat room.  I have read those and I cannot find anything that constitutes a clear violation of the then-existing code of contact.  This seems to be a nearly consensus position among the moderators who have access to this information and who have examined it.  There were also some emails that only Monica and SE employees have seen, but given the reliabilities of the two parties, it is hard to imagine there could be anything there that justifies how she has been treated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The new CoC was to be discussed with the moderators before publishing.  I couldn't find anything, nor had I heard anything, so I went looking.  I found an old chat message with a link to a Google document with the text.  I doubt more than a small percentage of the moderators contributed.  I, and other moderators, argued that the language should be softened in specific ways to avoid the appearance of coerced speech.  Those changes were made.  When the new CoC was published, a FAQ was published alongside that doubled down on the coerced speech, nullifying our contribution.  The moderators had not been aware of the FAQ before it went live on meta.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are older, festering problems, as well, including: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/316934/revisiting-the-hot-network-questions-feature-what-are-our-shared-goals-for-ha&quot;&gt;twitter-HNQ fiasco&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchange-and-stack-overflow-are-moving-to-cc-by-sa-4-0&quot;&gt;changing of the licensing&lt;/a&gt;, and the new &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/329763/were-testing-advertisements-across-the-network&quot;&gt;ads&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h97kbv4mbsc&amp;amp;ytbChannel=ecloi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;That's all I can stands, and I can stands no more.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to make three things clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I intend this status to be temporary.  Although I haven't committed myself to a particular date, I won't remain as a (self) 'suspended' moderator indefinitely.  At some point in the near future, I will either return to full moderator activities, or resign.  Note that (yet another) &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/335508/monicas-situation-continues-unresolved-is-se-hoping-the-problem-just-goes-away/335607#335607&quot;&gt;promise&lt;/a&gt; has been made that things will move forward very soon.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I continue to care about this community.  It isn't easy for me to do this, but I simply cannot continue as though nothing is happening and thereby lend my tacit support.  Even if I resign, I am not currently intending to boycott the site or delete my account.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are trans users on CV, and I stand with them.  They should not be targeted, and they should not be made to feel unwelcome.  Part of the tragedy of this is that SE is now a worse place for trans users than before (cf., &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334551/an-apology-to-our-community-and-next-steps/334670#334670&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/335785/i-am-non-binary-recent-events-have-made-se-less-safe-for-me-and-other-members&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;).  And yet, SE refuses to take action.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is time for me to temporarily stand down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2020-09-27T13:26:00.547" LastActivityDate="2020-09-28T17:43:05.833" Title="I am resigning as a moderator" Tags="|discussion|moderation|stackexchange|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5778" CreationDate="2019-10-18T07:14:16.943" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that it should be better to ask new question. First, because it was already answered. Second, from practical point of view, if you edit your question it would faster disappear from the main page, then if you asked new one, so asking new one gives you better visibility and chance of it getting answered. Third, asking a new question may give you a chance to reword it and make it more clear, as opposed to adding &quot;EDIT&quot; sections that in most cases make the question more confusing and messy. Also, adding new question gives you a chance to think on what exactly is the aspect of the question that was not covered by the previous one, so that it deserves a new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2019-10-18T07:14:16.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5781" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-24T14:00:24.240" Score="27" ViewCount="678" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has been recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/&quot;&gt;turmoil&lt;/a&gt; on StackExchange (relating to various issues) and there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/336246/&quot;&gt;thoughts&lt;/a&gt; rising that it might be better for the community to be more independent from the commercial side of StackExchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We may repeat that meta-discussion over here. We should/can ask ourselves what &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; measures we can take in the statistics corner? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What can we do to become more independent from the community/&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-and-forced-relicensing-is-stack-exchange-still-interested-in-cooper#comment1104558_334136&quot;&gt;people&lt;/a&gt;'s source &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/10/10/iterating-on-inclusion/&quot;&gt;code&lt;/a&gt; of the old platform and become an open-source source model that is more &lt;em&gt;decentralized&lt;/em&gt; and more &lt;em&gt;controlled by the community&lt;/em&gt;, the community that is also creating the content?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there steps we can take that are specific for CrossValidated?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Any suggestions?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, there is a wide spectrum of possibilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An extreme case would be to create a spin-off as has been done before (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.physicsoverflow.org/faq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhysicsOverflow&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As a softer version of a spin-off we could possibly disentangle our contributions from Cross Validated by posting the majority of our contributions elsewhere. This will create more diversity in the ownership of platforms by which the content is spread to the public/internauts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posting shorter answers here and placing more in-depth content elsewhere may work because it is the length of posts that relates to the quality of the content, at least the &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/1132433/score-of-posts-as-function-of-length-of-body-text#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;score of the posts does relate to the length of the post&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/w0jbp.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/w0jbp.png&quot; alt=&quot;post length&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ideally we should make a smaller step than fully separating (as &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/336303/389297&quot;&gt;proposed on meta by Scortchi&lt;/a&gt;). That is because disconnecting from StackExchange removes many advantages (like connections with other SE sites).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal of this post is that, based on the &lt;em&gt;suggestions&lt;/em&gt;, we might start to &lt;em&gt;develop a consensus solution&lt;/em&gt; that provides options for breaking the corporate monopoly, and &lt;em&gt;unites&lt;/em&gt; the community, and &lt;em&gt;prevent chaos&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;prevent separation&lt;/em&gt;, prevent splits in the community and prevent that we will start to move in different ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2019-10-28T16:58:55.267" LastActivityDate="2019-11-12T11:36:12.773" Title="Is it time for an independent Statistics Q&amp;A website? How can we be more independent? #STEXIT #WhoOwnsTheInternet" Tags="|discussion|moderation|policy|participation|design|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5781" CreationDate="2019-10-24T14:37:34.920" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Solution: The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22my%20blog%22&quot;&gt;my blog&lt;/a&gt; model&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like a system/platform that integrates blogrings related to Q&amp;amp;A by using some shared standard and being a distributed system rather than being centralized. A sort of inverse process how Usenet (distributed) turned into Google Groups (centralized). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the blog model 'we' (the contributors) will have more control over the platform(s). The CrossValidated website will become more like a portal on which we can place short introductions and mix the information and content from different blogs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastActivityDate="2019-10-24T14:37:34.920" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-10-24T14:37:34.920" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5783" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5821" CreationDate="2019-10-25T07:56:14.947" Score="118" ViewCount="14983" Body="&lt;p&gt;Monica Cellio has called for Stack Overflow to address what they did to her: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/336526/256777&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow is doing me ongoing harm; it's time to fix it!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A number of users have &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/336024/how-can-we-put-pressure-on-stack-exchange-inc-without-damaging-the-community?noredirect=1#comment1110223_336024&quot;&gt;changed their username to &quot;Reinstate Monica&quot;&lt;/a&gt; or some variation thereof and changed their avatar as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RZLo7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RZLo7.png&quot; alt=&quot;reinstate Monica&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At CV, it appears that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/users/7290/gung-reinstate-monica&quot;&gt;gung&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/1352/s-kolassa-reinstate-monica&quot;&gt;myself&lt;/a&gt; have done so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is anyone else interested in joining us?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2019-12-26T19:42:06.780" LastActivityDate="2020-02-12T13:15:50.050" Title="Reinstate Monica" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5785" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-25T19:47:09.797" Score="2" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/424778/the-meaning-of-a-parameterization-of-the-logarithmic-distribution&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$&#xA;\Pr(X=x) = \frac{-p^x}{ x\log(1-p)} \text{ for } x = 1,2,3,\ldots\, \tag 2&#xA;$$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I will set that in an inline, rather than displayed, context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\Pr(X=x) = \frac{-p^x}{ x\log(1-p)} \text{ for } x = 1,2,3,\ldots\, \tag 2$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It starts with P(X=x), and in the display above I don't see that at all, nor do I see the expression after the &quot;equals&quot; sign, and where it says &quot;for x = 1,2,3...&quot; I see the top half of the word &quot;for&quot;, the top bar of the &quot;equals&quot; sign, and the top halves of the three digits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are others experiencing this? I've never seen this before. Is someone working on fixing this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0ttyi.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0ttyi.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5176" LastEditorUserId="5176" LastEditDate="2019-10-25T22:44:38.317" LastActivityDate="2019-10-25T22:44:38.317" Title="What's going on with MathJax today?" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5787" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5788" CreationDate="2019-10-29T16:49:50.347" Score="1" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am puzzled by why a moderator deleted my answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/433314/why-is-the-mean-of-the-natural-log-of-a-uniform-distribution-between-0-and-1-d/433359#433359&quot;&gt;Why is the mean of the natural log of a uniform distribution (between 0 and 1) different from the natural log of 0.5?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68527" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2019-10-29T19:56:49.397" LastActivityDate="2019-10-29T19:56:49.397" Title="Why was my answer deleted?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-answers|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5787" CreationDate="2019-10-29T17:07:24.770" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your answer was flagged by two users as being of low quality. I think it's more of a comment, or a hint, than an answer; &amp;amp; it doesn't seem to add anything to the other answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2019-10-29T17:10:24.300" LastActivityDate="2019-10-29T17:10:24.300" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5787" CreationDate="2019-10-29T17:09:47.870" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the original answer in full:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other answers address the question about the natural logarithm directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In more generality, why would you expect that for an arbitrary function &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$f,$&lt;/span&gt; the mean value of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$f(x)$&lt;/span&gt; should be &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$f(0.5)$&lt;/span&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't answer the question.  Indeed, it's explicitly framed as another question! That's ideal as a Socratic &lt;em&gt;comment,&lt;/em&gt; but it definitely should not stay up as an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps that post should have been converted to a comment, another option available at the time.  I would be glad to do that retroactively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2019-10-29T17:09:47.870" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5787" CreationDate="2019-10-29T17:38:20.510" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why would you expect that the first question in a longer socratic dialogue, is supposed to answer the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastActivityDate="2019-10-29T17:38:20.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5783" CreationDate="2019-10-29T18:13:23.013" Score="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Changing your username and avatar are not the only options.  People can also change the text in the 'about me' section of their user page.  Note that if your reputation is &gt;1k, you can have an &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/established-user&quot;&gt;expandable usercard&lt;/a&gt; that will show some of the text from your about me section when someone mouses over your username on a post.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some suggested text was first proffered &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/336283/187282&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The recent actions of Stack Exchange have been reprehensible. The lack of professional conduct, the tone deaf way they've been dealing with the community, and the unfair and unjustified way they've dealt with Monica Cellio.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Monica is an exemplar of the community, it's incredible how she's managed to keep a level head during this time when emotions have been very high.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/336526/187282&quot;&gt;REINSTATE MONICA&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Update: the gofundme campaign has been closed.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A newer option has been proffered &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/337034/187282&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  What has changed is that Monica has started a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gofundme.com/f/stop-stack-overflow-from-defaming-its-users&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gofundme&lt;/a&gt; campaign to offset the costs of legal action.  As a result, people might change their username to append &quot;go fund Monica&quot;, instead of &quot;reinstate Monica&quot;.  The suggested about me text is then:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;Consider supporting Monica Cellio's gofundme &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gofundme.com/f/stop-stack-overflow-from-defaming-its-users&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here &gt;&gt;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A popular and well-respected volunteer network moderator, Monica Cellio, &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5193&quot;&gt;was terminated without warning&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334133/187282&quot;&gt;portrayed to the press as misgendering trans people&lt;/a&gt; by Stack Overflow, Inc. All signs suggest this was an erroneous, if not malicious, decision not founded on fact, which the company is completely failing to take any responsibility for. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/187282&quot;&gt;This has caused an enormous and ongoing uproar in the community.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Monica and the community have been quite literally &lt;strong&gt;begging&lt;/strong&gt; for &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; kind of response from the company either opening up a path to reinstatement, or justifying their decision to terminate her, for more than a month now. She's made many good-faith offers to talk, and others have offered to mediate (and made &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=monica&quot;&gt;dozens of constructive suggestions on how to resolve the situation&lt;/a&gt;). Members of the Lavender community have spoken up on her behalf (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/333992/187282&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/336731/187282&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So far, Stack Overflow, Inc. has met all of this with thunderous silence. As a long-time contributor and someone always willing to see the good in the company's and its employees' actions and assume good faith, I'm still struggling to come to terms with the corporate callousness of this behaviour which we have to assume now is the new normal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/336526/187282&quot;&gt;Having exhausted all other means of communication&lt;/a&gt;, Monica is now raising funds for potential legal action to clear her name. This is in her own interest, but arguably also in the interest of the SO community at large. While only the libel is likely to be legally actionable, it might establish at least &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; boundaries to what the company can do to its volunteers, as well as be a symbolic slap in the face of a business that appears to have lost all respect for the community that keeps it alive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have complete trust the funds will be used well and anything left over (say because they decide to do the right thing after all and legal action becomes unnecessary) will go toward good causes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gofundme.com/f/stop-stack-overflow-from-defaming-its-users&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Consider supporting her today.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2019-12-28T13:36:25.287" LastActivityDate="2019-12-28T13:36:25.287" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5781" CreationDate="2019-10-29T23:28:05.160" Score="9" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Solution: create an independent WIKI portal&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Q&amp;amp;A format of StackExchange has generated a sort of yellow pages for all sort of problems with several advantages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It generates content/information that is relevant to practical cases.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The problem-based question and answers introduce concepts in a way that is easy to understand.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The generation of the content has been completely free based on volunteering work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Stack is changing&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we may wonder how long this system is gonna last (besides the company that is running the system is turning it's back towards the volunteers). The graph below indicates how StackOverflow/StackExchange is changing by looking at the time evolution of the number of votes, where different curves are shown based on the score of the questions after 30 days (&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/1137761#resultSets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;from this Query&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NdtLg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NdtLg.png&quot; alt=&quot;time development&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To compare the trend more easily, the curves have been scaled such that the value is equal to 100 at the time point 2012 year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is: The number of monthly questions with a high vote count is decreasing (especially on StackOverflow on CrossValidated it is still somewhat stable). The number of monthly questions with a low vote count is growing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;StackExchange as a comic:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ohDbK.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ohDbK.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;monkeys&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Most of the pretty fruits have already been picked. The sort of activity we see now are monkeys picking the low hanging fruit (I am one of them) and occasionally there might pass by a giraffe that is able to pick some fruits from the top of the tree. There is an increasingly number of fruit that ends up rotten on the floor and we do not have enough ants to clean that up.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Solution: move over the (majority of the) content to a wiki&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could say that the question activity is currently mostly in lower quality questions (an increasing number is not getting answered and receiving low score). We may ask ourselves whether the Q&amp;amp;A format is still useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could argue that the database is already very full and now needs to be organized and maintained. This is a different ballgame than the continuous posting of questions and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To do this. We could create a portal to the current content (and possible future content) summarizing annotating and clarifying the content on CrossValidated. On this portal, we could use the format of wiki pages (since the Q&amp;amp;A phase is over or will be soon). The additional advantage of a wiki is that there is lots of software available that may help to generate the website (only the conversion of the content from StackExchange to Wiki may be a problem but I imagine it should be possible).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also, we gain independence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2019-10-30T00:53:46.500" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5781" CreationDate="2019-10-30T14:48:49.790" Score="12" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Solution: exact copy elsewhere&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to have a virtually identical format, widely and productively used, under control of a non-SE entity that is invested in high-quality treatment of the subject area. I'm thinking of this site's bioinformatics equivalent, BioStars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biostars.org/info/about/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.biostars.org/info/about/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physicsoverflow.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://physicsoverflow.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recent efforts along this path have been made by several other contributors from StackExchange/StackOverflow and discussiona about it are happening on &lt;a href=&quot;https://forum.codidact.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://forum.codidact.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86176" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2019-11-12T11:36:12.773" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5765" CreationDate="2019-11-02T06:33:02.990" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I am approached in an official capacity (medical doctor) I can only sometimes avoid using biologically relevant pronouns. There is a need to know female for ovarian cancer and male for prostate cancer, as two rather limited examples, and there are many more, e.g., phenotypically female, genetically neuter. In the workplace, I do not tolerate overtly sexual behaviour of any type, straight or gay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a great respect for Glen_b. His level-headed contributions as a moderator I consider indispensable; without them, this site will be very much worse off. I would seriously suggest that just because someone questions 'woke' policy, that does not make them candidates worthy of hatred, reprisal, and doxing; like me, they may be just doing their jobs. The administration of SE would be well advised to reverse their ridiculous stance on Monica and to leave the SE contributors alone as the alternative is to create a dystopia. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2019-11-02T10:54:49.553" LastActivityDate="2019-11-02T10:54:49.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5795" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-06T07:43:09.927" Score="5" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks to me like these three tags have a lot of overlap between them - so much that maybe we should to make them synonyms, remove one (or two?) of them or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag descriptions seem almost interchangeable to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/graph-theory&quot;&gt;Graph Theory&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Graphs are abstract representations of objects and their mutual relations, where the objects are 'nodes' and the connections among&#xA;  them are 'edges'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/networks&quot;&gt;Networks&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Refers to network theory as part of the graph theory. For questions about neural networks, use our [neural-networks] tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/social-network&quot;&gt;Social Networks&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Social network data consists of a collection of &quot;nodes&quot; (which can be any sort of entity - e.g. people, corporations) and &quot;links&quot; (which&#xA;  can be any sort of relationship - e.g. friend, sharing a board&#xA;  member).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out of the 10 newest questions in &lt;code&gt;graph-theory&lt;/code&gt;, 5 include the &lt;code&gt;networks&lt;/code&gt; tag, and I'd argue that most others could include it too - for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/418928/how-to-extract-fixed-sized-feature-vector-from-arbitrary-graph-data&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; is about doing machine learning (specifically feature extraction) where the data has a graph structure (could just as well be called a network structuree or a social network).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have a concrete suggestion yet -  My first though would be to collapse all three into one tag, unless mathematical questions about Graph Theory (not in the practical sense of statistics or learning on networks data) are relevant here (which... I kinda think it isn't?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="239844" LastActivityDate="2019-11-06T07:43:09.927" Title="networks, social-networks and graph-theory tags" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5781" CreationDate="2019-11-12T11:04:31.633" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Solution: Do nothing and accept the ways how Stack Exchange works.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the moment there seems to be not enough discontent with StackExchange and StackOverflow that makes a large share of the community think about change. It makes a move to another platform difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without a community-wide incentive to move, it is too much effort to re-start the community elsewhere and build another library with statistics knowledge. Or at least, the largest part of the current community is not much thinking about leaving and starting alternatives to create a more democratic internet. So this will cripple any effort to start something new elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2019-11-12T11:04:31.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5781" CreationDate="2019-11-12T11:05:46.387" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Solution: Wait.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More time is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, more and more users will be fed up with &lt;a href=&quot;https://hackernoon.com/the-real-reason-for-the-decline-of-stackoverflow-10b0132a13b1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;declining&lt;/a&gt; SE and look for something fresh, new and better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the site does not innovate, if the site does not keep in touch with the online community, then eventually it will be overtaken by some other site as the major platform for Q&amp;amp;A exchange of (expert) knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now might not (yet) be the time. But it &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; seem to have become clear that the question is not '&lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; the community will move somewhere else', but instead the question is '&lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; the community will move somewhere else'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2019-11-12T11:05:46.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5799" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5800" CreationDate="2019-11-18T16:17:17.900" Score="32" ViewCount="2267" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5783/&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; asked by S. Kolassa describing Monica Cellio and the fact that she was mysteriously removed from Stack Overflow. I have also learned from that question that several CV users have changed their avatar to &quot;Reinstate Monica&quot;. Could anyone tell me the following: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Has she been reinstated? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Was there a reason why she was removed or was it just a glitch? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why have so many users including those with very high reputation gotten on the bandwagon? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I want to go along, how do I change my avatar?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11032" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2019-11-18T16:35:00.077" LastActivityDate="2019-12-17T23:29:49.313" Title="Why are Cross Validated users using the avatar &quot;Reinstate Monica&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5799" CreationDate="2019-11-18T16:41:44.063" Score="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;Much of this information is in, or can be found from, the question you refer to.  If you want to read everything, or just warm your feet by the dumpster fire, you can go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;meta.SE&lt;/a&gt;.  The place to start, with much of the information indexed, is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/333965/187282&quot;&gt;Firing mods and forced relicensing: is Stack Exchange still interested in cooperating with the community?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;She has not been reinstated.  SE has dug in its heels, out of obstinacy, as far as I can tell.  They ignored her and the growing storm for over a month.  At this point the lawyers are involved.  Monica has initiated a lawsuit against SE.  SE has decided they want to try to fight it out rather than compromise.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The official claim is that she misgendered trans users.  This supposedly happened in moderator-only spaces.  To the extent mods can see, that did not occur.  Trans mods have spoken up for Monica as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Changing usernames and avatars is one way that people can advocate for her.  Some users know her, others are appalled by the rank injustice on display.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On your user page, you would go to the &quot;edit profile and settings&quot; tab, and change whatever fields you like (e.g., username, about me, and avatar).  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2019-11-18T17:34:03.980" LastActivityDate="2019-11-18T17:34:03.980" CommentCount="30" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="505" CreationDate="2019-12-02T06:22:23.050" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Didn't find this discussion anywhere else in meta, so I'd like to add that we should allow migration to &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="239844" LastActivityDate="2019-12-02T06:22:23.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5805" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-07T04:26:06.150" Score="8" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Edit: It's auto-deleted now...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this post &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/439602/how-to-find-whether-the-variable-is-discrete-or-continuous-where-appropriate&quot;&gt;How to find whether the variable is discrete or continuous where appropriate?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;is on topic. The subject is inherently statistical and identifying whether variables are discrete or continuous (and further details about their type) is not inherently a programming issue (for all that the user wants to implement it in R).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other grounds for concern about it -- the question could be clearer and I think may be a partial duplicate, but I don't see how it fails our criteria for on-topicness:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if it needs statistical expertise to understand or answer, ask it here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user doesn't have an algorithm ready that they're seeking to implement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this user &lt;em&gt;needs&lt;/em&gt; statistical expertise to get a good answer to this question. Why are we closing it as off topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2019-12-17T02:11:28.870" LastActivityDate="2019-12-17T02:11:28.870" Title="Isn't a question about identifying whether a variable is discrete or continuous on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5799" CreationDate="2019-12-09T23:52:57.697" Score="5" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Has she been reinstated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, she has not been reinstated.  To Monica's credit, she is holding her ground.  Whether she is ever reinstated or not remains to be seen.  Given how long this has been drawn out already, I think it's fair to say that SE is ashamed to lose face.  If they do reinstate Monica, it will likely be because of a court order.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Was there a reason why she was removed or was it just a glitch?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no better source than from the horse's mouth, so to speak.  Monica gave a lengthy interview with Tyler from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFiQPkdb5Qs&amp;amp;t=116s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Tyler's Tech&quot; Youtube channel&lt;/a&gt; in which she describes the circumstances, timeline, and backstory to this saga.  As I understand from her own words, a question was asked in a moderator lounge - a genuine &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt;. It spiralled out of control and out of context very fast from there.  But I encourage you to watch the interview for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why have so many users including those with very high reputation gotten on the bandwagon? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some, it is a matter of principle.  For others, especially to those who knew Monica, it is a matter of camaraderie and solidarity.  And for others still, it is a case of &quot;sticking it to the big bad corp.&quot; when they have clearly abused their authority, dishonored a star employee/moderator, broken their own code of conduct, and failed to make amends when warranted (and many more reasons...)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I want to go along, how do I change my avatar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply click this link: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/edit/current&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/edit/current&lt;/a&gt; and edit as required.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="261340" LastEditorUserId="261340" LastEditDate="2019-12-17T23:29:49.313" LastActivityDate="2019-12-17T23:29:49.313" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5808" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5809" CreationDate="2019-12-10T07:34:01.890" Score="2" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;The post, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/440072/general-expression-for-hat-beta-1-in-a-multiple-linear-regression/440093#440093&quot;&gt;General expression for &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\hat \beta_1$&lt;/span&gt; in multiple linear expression&lt;/a&gt; is asking for a closed form expression of part of the coefficient vector in a linear regression model. Nevertheless it has been closed as a duplicate of a question asking for a closed form solution form the entire coefficient vector.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me it is not really clear that these two questions are the same. Actually to me it is pretty clear that they are not the same under one interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall the question is a little unclear, but the present closure of the question makes it more difficult to clarify what the OP was really interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I do not understand is how this comes to be a duplicate of the cited question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I am partly asking with the following discussion in mind &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3119/7290&quot;&gt;Are we closing questions too fast?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16367" LastEditorUserId="16367" LastEditDate="2019-12-10T20:59:35.253" LastActivityDate="2019-12-10T20:59:35.253" Title="Why was the question closed?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5808" CreationDate="2019-12-10T12:27:37.963" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that the question is different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best thing to do is, I guess, improve the question in order to make it more clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/duplicates&quot;&gt;stated in the help information&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see a question and do not agree that it truly is a duplicate, edit it to highlight the differences, then try to get it reopened by casting a reopen vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is what I tried. I have changed some format and text of the question in order to make the question more clear, and especially/hopefully make more clear the &lt;em&gt;difference&lt;/em&gt; with the questions that is linked as duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I do not understand is how this comes to be a duplicate of the cited question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can imagine that this may stem from the fact that the expression &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$Y = \beta_1X_2 + \beta_2 \cdot X_2$&lt;/span&gt; looks very much like &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$Y = \beta_1X_2 + \beta_2 X_2$&lt;/span&gt;. Also, the original question was not very correct in expressing the meaning of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$X_2$&lt;/span&gt;, a matrix instead of a vector, by stating &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\beta_2,X_2 \in \mathbb{R}^k$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2019-12-10T20:47:06.540" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5810" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-11T14:11:53.010" Score="2" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to know why my question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/440348/quadratic-terms-in-glmer&quot;&gt;Quadratic terms in glmer&lt;/a&gt;) was closed here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think my question is not off-topic because it's about statistics and not about the programming itself. My question is regarding the quadratic and multiplication coefficients. So if I understand the theory, the programming is just putting those in the R function. In my question, it doesn't really matter if what package or function I'm using, because my question is regarding the logistic regression model coefficients!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm looking for some references that explain step by step how to model logistic regression to longitudinal data (repeated measurements) in R.&#xA;  I know that I can use the &quot;&lt;em&gt;lme4&lt;/em&gt;&quot; package and the function &quot;&lt;em&gt;glmer&lt;/em&gt;&quot; for generalized linear mixed models, and I use it to add random effects. But I've read some stuff and sometimes people add quadratic terms and multiply and sometimes they don't. Can someone clarify me on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, on the book &quot;Applied Longitudinal Analysis by Fitzmaurice&quot;, in chapter 14.7, he models the logistic regression for a dataset like this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;model1 &amp;lt;- glmer(y ~ time + time2 + trt.time + trt.time2 + (1 | id), family=binomial, nAGQ=50, na.action=na.omit)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;where,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$time2 &amp;lt;- time^2$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$trt.time &amp;lt;- trt \times time$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$trt.time2 &amp;lt;- trt*time2$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why doesn't he simply use &lt;em&gt;model1 &amp;lt;- glmer(y ~ time + trt+ (1 | id), family=binomial, nAGQ=50, na.action=na.omit)&lt;/em&gt; ???&#xA;  I run this last model in R and the AIC and BIC are basically the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is the type of questions that I'm having concerning the R code on this matter. I can't find many literature with R on logistic regression for longitudinal data, and this all very confusing. Can someone explain me when to use quadratic terms, or multiply/add them? Or recommend me a reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I also found this topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/200280/quadratic-terms-in-logistic-regression&quot;&gt;LINK&lt;/a&gt; but didn't help much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="260303" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2019-12-11T15:55:23.553" LastActivityDate="2019-12-11T15:55:23.553" Title="My question was closed, why?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2019-12-12T12:23:41.037" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5811" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5813" CreationDate="2019-12-19T08:22:50.070" Score="2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that asking questions in chat is bad, discouraged, doesn't give proper chance to clarify doubts, bypasses quality control and undermines the purpose of the site itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But could someone, ever been in that situation, otherwise observed something over the years of participation here, shed light on the &quot;reasons&quot; for the same? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally, feel that educational (stark contrast with technical sites) nature of the site has something to do with it, but I am receptive to alternative reasons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pre-emptive note: This is not opinion based just like questions which try to understand the mentality behind downvotes, or review edits which slip through or other holes in the network's working where none other than our peers let undesirable things slip through. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we reach to some conclusive answer which might point out fault in our system, remedy can be initiated. If it's beyond the site's functioning, we can do what can be done, as in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5776/what-should-the-description-for-our-general-chat-room-be&quot;&gt;past&lt;/a&gt; to divert posts as the last resort. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user230053" LastActivityDate="2019-12-19T12:37:52.057" Title="What could be the possible reasons behind people posting substantial questions in CV chatroom?" Tags="|discussion|questions|chat|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5812" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5815" CreationDate="2019-12-19T12:29:49.573" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;How should I re-write my question to have it re-opened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the question, which was closed today: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/441519/comparing-entities-by-their-three-different-parameters&quot;&gt;comparing entities by their three different parameters&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="268996" LastActivityDate="2019-12-19T22:43:20.230" Title="How should I re-write my question?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5811" CreationDate="2019-12-19T12:37:52.057" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There isn't going to be anything we can do to change the site to 'fix' this.  All we can do is request people ask their question on the main site and don't encourage it by answering them in chat.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some reasons people ask in chat include: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's allowed for some other SE sites.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They don't have an account on our site, and don't want to create one (you can chat anywhere, whether you have an account or not).  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; the impermanence of the question, as it will soon disappear and others won't see that they had had that question (perhaps they are a little embarrassed about asking).  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question isn't on-topic on the site (e.g., 'what function for this?').  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last reason is acceptable, in my opinion.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2019-12-19T12:37:52.057" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5814" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5819" CreationDate="2019-12-19T15:56:56.367" Score="11" ViewCount="379" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that we have three threads which appear to address the exact same topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone with expertise in this area make a recommendation of which questions should be closed as a duplicate of which target?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/48028/beta-regression-of-proportion-data-including-1-and-0&quot;&gt;Beta regression of proportion data including 1 and 0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/31300/dealing-with-0-1-values-in-a-beta-regression&quot;&gt;Dealing with 0,1 values in a beta regression&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/262501/why-exactly-cant-beta-regression-deal-with-0s-and-1s-in-the-response-variable&quot;&gt;Why exactly can&amp;#39;t beta regression deal with 0s and 1s in the response variable?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(We may have more than three threads on this topic, these just happened to turn up in an unrelated search.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastActivityDate="2019-12-31T01:45:47.120" Title="Beta regression 0/1 duplicates" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5812" CreationDate="2019-12-19T22:26:44.293" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question has several aspects and it is unclear what statistical topic/problem you are aiming at with the question. You should narrow it down, or at least the problem statement could be more concise/isolated. (if it is about how to incorporate those many aspects into the problem then this can be done, but currently it is unclear what the basic problem is)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;1&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question has a big problem here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as many cards as possible by opening as few boxes as possible&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it is already not clear who wins even when the timers working correctly. (I guess that you meant the person with the most cards wins, and the 'few boxes as possible' is the strategy to do it, but you should clarify that)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;2&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is not complete (as with many practical/story statistics problems), but it is too abstract (no clear context) that allows people to fill in the gaps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...the timers for rooms B and C had not been set up accurately ... we already need to decide the winner on the basis of the present results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no single solution to this problem and there will be different approaches possible. In the current state it is much too broad and it is unclear what the culprit is of your long question (what is the key problem/issue?). How should answers decide on that? It would help if you would give more guidelines what is desired and especially it would be nice if the question could be made to focus on a smaller problem or when the task/objective is mvd more clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me your question reads as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;alice and bob are doing a beauty contest, they have to dress up within 1 hour, alice has three pretty flowers in her hair and bob has two nice cufflinks, but bob finished within 50 minutes due to an error with the clock. Who wins?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is very vague to decide who wins and the underlying statistical problem, if there is any, is not exposed in such complex question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly this question (given to you as an exercise?)  is about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pareto efficiency&lt;/a&gt;, or something related. Then it is meant to make you think and realize that: if there is no single person with both the least boxes and most cards, then there is no clear solution possible when you do not make a decision how to differentiate. (and the problem with the timers is adding more spice into the mix and allows you to ponder about different objectives, fairness/stability/mean utility/etc., that can be optimized).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that efficiency and objectives is speculation about your question. It would greatly help if you explain the background of your question, where it comes from and why you try to answer it, in order for people here to guess the meaning of the questions and such that they do not need to speculate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2019-12-19T22:43:20.230" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5816" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-20T03:27:21.250" Score="9" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Related to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4352/is-there-any-way-to-detect-prevent-user-repeatedly-performing-minor-edits-to-b&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;, which refers to users editing their own questions to make it appear at the top of the feed)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just reviewed about 5-6 suggested edits which were all the same: the user suggested removing &quot;Best regards&quot; from the posts. This user most likely searched for &quot;best regards&quot; and suggested edits on the posts he or she could find. That same user has done this before with other pleasantries (&quot;thank you&quot; or whatever it was).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What bugs me--besides being a cheap way to accumulate +2's--was the edit on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/29889/monte-carlo-approach-to-compute-prediction-interval-for-glm-poisson-neg-bin&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;, which is &lt;strong&gt;a 7-year-old post marked as a duplicated question.&lt;/strong&gt; I don't think this is the kind of posts that we want to push back at the top of the feed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what the solution is, but here are ideas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Somehow lessen the incentive to edit posts &lt;em&gt;for the sake of editing posts&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Filter which types of edits and/or which types of posts warrant getting the post pushed at the top of the feed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24808" LastActivityDate="2019-12-26T12:00:55.917" Title="Preventing minor stylistic edits on old, duplicated posts (or not pushing those posts at the top of the feed)" Tags="|discussion|editing|reputation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5816" CreationDate="2019-12-20T11:09:37.857" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;These proposals are quite different.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reduce the incentive to edit.&lt;/strong&gt; To a reputation gain of 1? To 0? Already the incentive is very small and matches the idea that such edits are small (but positive) contributions. And the implication that any member is driven just by a desire for reputation is hard to test: we don't know what people's motives are unless they tell us. What is plausible or implausible is personal here as always. I have only my own memory of having enough reputation to edit (but not so much that I no longer received increments for editing) to recall that I just liked editing and liked to think I was contributing thereby; I was not doing it for the reputation, although clearly gaining was nicer than losing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Trivial edits should not rise to the top.&lt;/strong&gt; I like the principle. If I edit say &quot;principle component&quot; to &quot;principal component&quot; and that's it, then the thread hasn't become more interesting to anyone and emphatically not more urgent. So, it would good to have an SE-wide flag &quot;this edit is just cosmetic and should not bump the thread to most recent&quot;, except that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As said, this requires a system-wide implementation. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Edits by those on probation still need to be checked. Was the trivial edit really trivial or a rogue case in which a major change has been made by accident or even deliberately, so that is a underhand route to messing up someone else's post and trying harder not to be spotted? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We don't want, I suggest, to start debating criteria for what is a minor edit and what is not, as there will be always be grey cases. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think at bottom this is a trade-off between different kinds of irritation: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. The irritation that the editorially-minded see when they spot little things that cry out to be fixed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. The irritation that some people have when they find that a thread that looks interesting at the top of the list is only cosmetically different. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c. The irritation that people reviewing edits may feel when they find that an edit is purely minor. (For my part, I recognise a kindred spirit and do what else I can to improve the post.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2019-12-20T13:56:11.457" LastActivityDate="2019-12-20T13:56:11.457" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5814" CreationDate="2019-12-20T14:32:44.220" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would not prefer to make them duplicates but instead make their differences more clear. (and in addition add more obvious links to the different questions for the interested reader that wants to read related questions)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the questions ask &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the values 0 and 1 are not allowed. Another question asks &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; to deal with values 0 and 1 if somebody likes to do beta regression. And yet another questions asks for &lt;em&gt;alternative&lt;/em&gt; models for beta regression (which might overlap with the 'how to deal' question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;So my question is instead of modifying the data, why not modify the model? &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/31300/dealing-with-0-1-values-in-a-beta-regression&quot;&gt;Dealing with 0,1 values in a beta regression&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have read elsewhere that theoretically the beta distribution should be able to handle values of 0 or 1 but I do not know how to handle this in R.I have seen some people add 0.001 to the zeros and take 0.001 from the ones, but I am not sure this is a good idea? &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/48028/beta-regression-of-proportion-data-including-1-and-0&quot;&gt;Beta regression of proportion data including 1 and 0&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My question is: which property of beta distribution prevents beta regression from dealing with exact 0s and 1s, and why? &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/262501/why-exactly-cant-beta-regression-deal-with-0s-and-1s-in-the-response-variable&quot;&gt;Why exactly can&amp;#39;t beta regression deal with 0s and 1s in the response variable?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastActivityDate="2019-12-20T14:32:44.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5816" CreationDate="2019-12-21T16:57:52.697" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it is really a problem that old posts are being pushed back to the top of the feed due to minor edits - even if they are duplicates etc. People can always switch to &lt;code&gt;Question&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;-&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;Newest&lt;/code&gt; if the active feed becomes irritating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do agree though that super minor edits as described by the OP aren't necessary and could (should?) be avoided. But I also have to say that when I started out on CV, I liked editing questions and receiving a reputation change once my edit was &lt;strong&gt;approved&lt;/strong&gt;. Through this &quot;approval&quot; process, I quickly learned which edits were acceptable and which ones were not and I refrained from making the same edits that have been rejected before. Quite often people even improved upon my own edit from which I learned more about how to make useful edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think receiving a positive reputation change for &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt; edits is a good incentive to learn and actively participate in the CV community for new members. But which edit suggestions are &lt;em&gt;approved&lt;/em&gt; ultimately depends on the people reviewing those suggested edits. So if a change in &quot;editing habits&quot; seems to be necessary, it would start with the reviewers who should edit more according to whether the suggested edit is useful and improves the post. Then again this decision is also subjective and because you also need more than one reviewer to &quot;accept&quot; a suggested edit, I would say that on average the system works well and does what it is supposed to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32477" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2019-12-22T09:17:36.717" LastActivityDate="2019-12-22T09:17:36.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5783" CreationDate="2019-12-24T11:51:24.173" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/340906/256777&quot;&gt;Monica and Stack Overflow have come to an agreement.&lt;/a&gt; Monica has &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gofundme.com/f/stop-stack-overflow-from-defaming-its-users&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;posted the identical notice at her GoFundMe page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find the agreement utterly unsatisfactory; in particular the first paragraph drips with condescension. SO exhibit the classical signs of narcissism, in particular a complete inability to empathize and apologize sincerely. Narcissists do not change, no matter how much one would hope they do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, this seems to be the end of it. Monica was not reinstated, but was offered the opportunity to reapply as moderator at the six sites she originally moderated, following the new process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ms. Cellio expressed concerns about the new process and has not applied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, I will revert to my old avatar and username in the near future. There is no point in keeping the &quot;Reinstate Monica&quot; one. This is not the outcome I had hoped for, but see above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt;, therefore, keep my updated understanding of SO, Inc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2301&quot;&gt;Monica is leaving the network.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="1352" LastEditDate="2020-02-12T13:15:50.050" LastActivityDate="2020-02-12T13:15:50.050" CommentCount="52" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5816" CreationDate="2019-12-25T00:59:00.630" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I feel an obligation to answer, because the mentioned post was edited by me.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whether you agree or not (which is totally OK) it might be interesting for you to learn about my motivations and my opinion about the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First I share the opinion of Patrick Coulombe and others that approved edits of old posts should not appear on top. That is somehow confusing to users.&#xA;But I don't think one should stop editing old posts for this reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite obviously there are people considering these changes minor: otherwise we wouldn't have this thread. And I think this is OK. I also don't agree with every edit. I personally think every improvement counts, especially also on old posts. New users read these posts and will hopefully shape their first new posts after these. Every improved post is a net win for people reading these posts and for teaching new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cross Validated also has some kind of inbuilt limitation for minor edits.&#xA;(I think you have to change at least x amount of chars to be considered.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned, I  like parsing through all posts (searching for certain terms) and edit stylistic elements that I feel that could be improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing I am looking for is whatever reminds me more of a letter than a Q&amp;amp;A platform. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something that looks like (exaggerated example):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Dear CrossValidated Community, &#xA;&#xA;my kindest greetings[...]&#xA;&#xA;Best regards,&#xA;Caesar&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion people are looking for questions and answers and don't like to parse letters. Still, I usually don't delete a small &lt;code&gt;thanks&lt;/code&gt; or something minor, because I still think it is nice to be able to show gratitude (just not being half of the question text). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I  also like to delete all forms of self-shaming, which I consider harmful and not in line with the values of the code of conduct ('&lt;code&gt;Be respectful&lt;/code&gt;' , '&lt;code&gt;mutual respect&lt;/code&gt;').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like (exaggerated example):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Sorry for asking this utterly stupid question,&#xA;I am a complete idiot for asking this..&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will make beginner users reading the question feel bad. Nobody should even talk in this derogatory manner. Everybody was a beginner once and will be a beginner for certain topics. I don't want to go too much off-topic here, but mental health also means being kind to yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Overall:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I always had the feeling quite a few people agree with these&#xA;  edits: there were not too many edit rejections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I definitely also try to consider the feedback from this thread**&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About the motivation&lt;/strong&gt;  It is hard to know yourself what your exact motivation is. It is even harder to speculate about the exact motivation of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Economically most reasonable would probably be (for us all) to spend the time required for editing or answering earning some real-life money ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My motivations are probably quite similar to most users I guess:&#xA;some  weird mixture of falling for the gamification approach, earning alleged virtual social respect and altruistic motives of making the world (or well at least Cross Validated) a better place and just being a helpful person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like probably most people I would be lying if I say: 'I never looked at my badges or reputation'. In the end, gamification is an essential and popular part of the platform. Otherwise  we wouldn't be discussing whether edits should give reputation 2 and just appreciate that some minor change to the positive occurred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe also nice to know: there is a limit on how much reputation one can earn with edits. I guess it is 2k. So it might be nice to motivate people to do edits but  on the other hand there is some kind of limit to keep a balance in the reputation system. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92235" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2019-12-26T12:00:55.917" LastActivityDate="2019-12-26T12:00:55.917" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5823" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5825" CreationDate="2019-12-25T04:40:57.480" Score="0" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just realised that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/441014/how-do-you-validate-the-output-of-a-clustering-algorithm&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt; has been tagged off-topic and closed. Could please somebody let me know why? From my point of view, the question is quite clear, relevant and to the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; screen-shots of the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/evbSc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/evbSc.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QLfoW.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QLfoW.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246844" LastEditorUserId="246844" LastEditDate="2019-12-26T04:08:22.113" LastActivityDate="2019-12-26T08:25:29.203" Title="Why this question is tagged off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5824" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-25T10:40:59.743" Score="8" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;These two questions answer are very similar, and each has a good, highly upvoted, accepted answer:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/52274/how-to-choose-a-predictive-model-after-k-fold-cross-validation&quot;&gt;How to choose a predictive model after k-fold cross-validation?&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/11602/training-with-the-full-dataset-after-cross-validation&quot;&gt;Training with the full dataset after cross-validation?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also been pointed in comments to both questions that they are similar, and suggested they'd been merged somehow to keep the answers (I don't know if it's possible), or just mark one as a duplicate of the other (but protecting it from deletion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The topic might be basic but it is active - I've marked two questions as duplicates while looking around for it. I marked them as duplicates of the first one (the answer seemed more straight-forward to me...), but it will be simpler to deal with (even for new users) if there's a single target for marking duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="239844" LastActivityDate="2019-12-25T10:40:59.743" Title="Two good questions (with good answers) about fitting after cross validation: to which should we point the dupes?" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5823" CreationDate="2019-12-25T22:27:54.193" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is closed as 'off-topic' but there might actually be multiple reasons. The SE software only lists one of them. As you should already know (after reading the help page about off-topic posts) cross-posting is classified among the off-topic category. It is possible that your question initially obtained close votes for that reason and later on for the other reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me your question 'how to verify clustering algorithms' is rather broad and more like a topic to write an entire book about rather than a question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has some similarity with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/self-study/info&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; questions where we wish to see your own research effort which helps to focus the answering on the culprit rather than writing very lengthy answers (and avoiding &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;xy problems&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem to be asking for help with understanding some article (it is always better to quote some exact passage where you have the problem) but it is unclear (and not to the point) what the culprit is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question might be reopened given that the original close reason 'cross-posting/off-topic' is solved. However, calling people unprofessional in comments is a bit uncalled for and I imagine that you do not get a lot of people on your side to dig through your question, which is not so great based on other grounds as well, and write an answer for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2019-12-26T08:25:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-12-26T08:25:29.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5783" CreationDate="2019-12-27T14:33:04.410" Score="-18" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, all the moderators are on volunteer basis. So the site has the right to determine who gets to be moderator and who doesnt &quot;at will&quot;. Moderators have not signed any contracts with the company,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="249944" LastActivityDate="2019-12-27T14:33:04.410" CommentCount="33" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5783" CreationDate="2019-12-27T16:52:44.000" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not just because of Monica, but I've decided to &lt;strong&gt;stop contributing to StackOverflow and quit&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other reasons include that there was 0 progress towards improving the platform. For example, we still see tons of duplicates across the sites, but we still cannot mark a question as duplicate on stats.SE if there is a perfect answer on SO, or the other way round. I hate the overlap between SO, stats.SE, DS.SE etc. but this seems to not matter at all for the company - on the contrary, they get more views. And there is zero progress in assisting new users to not post duplicates. When a user posts a duplicate, the system should ask him to migrate the question instead, for example. Also, when posting a new user should likely be guided through some relevant similar questions, to reduce the duplicates.&#xA;Instead, the company wastes money on doomed projects such as SO Documentation and SO for teams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, &lt;strong&gt;they have stopped listening to their users&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7828" LastEditorUserId="7828" LastEditDate="2019-12-28T10:34:49.433" LastActivityDate="2019-12-28T10:34:49.433" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5828" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5829" CreationDate="2019-12-30T21:55:04.603" Score="4" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand it's simple to post hyperlinks to articles within a post. However in some cases articles are no longer available online or are behind a paywall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible for Stack Exchange add an attachment feature to posts? Or barring that create a community library of articles?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13634" LastActivityDate="2019-12-31T09:46:43.723" Title="How do I attach articles to a question or response in Cross Validated?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5828" CreationDate="2019-12-30T22:17:42.860" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;If somebody owns the copyright to an article, and has it behind a paywall, they probably won't look kindly on SE posting it as an attachment in one form or another.  In addition, such a change would have to be implemented SE-wide by the developers.  Note further that it wouldn't be relevant for most sites.  So, while I see your point, I don't think this is going to happen.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need to refer to an article, I would say post a complete citation and a link, even if it's to a paywalled site.  Many users here are affiliated with universities, and can access such links.  If there is a short excerpt from the article, you may be able to quote it as 'fair use' (although, there's some ambiguity, as laws differ from country to country, and it isn't clear if US laws should apply--where SE is headquartered, or if those of the country of the poster, or the owner of the copyright).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2019-12-31T09:46:43.723" LastActivityDate="2019-12-31T09:46:43.723" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5831" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-01T02:43:07.807" Score="-1" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's New Year's Day in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulu_Time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange land&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  -- &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there certainly are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/11/21/our-theory-of-moderation-re-visited/&quot;&gt;Moderators&lt;/a&gt; here, a significant amount of the &lt;em&gt;moderation&lt;/em&gt; is done by ordinary people, using the privileges &#xA;they've earned by virtue of their contributions to the site. Each of you contributes a little bit of time and effort, and together you accomplish much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we enter a new year, let's pause and reflect, taking a moment to appreciate the work that we do here together. &#xA;And what could be more festive than a big pile of numbers? &#xA;So here is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Cross Validated over the past 12 months:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                  Action                  Moderators Community¹&#xA;----------------------------------------- ---------- ----------&#xA;Users suspended²                                  28         20&#xA;Users destroyed³                                  27          0&#xA;Users deleted                                      5          0&#xA;Users contacted                                   48          0&#xA;User suspensions lifted early                      1          0&#xA;Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue          1,269      5,164&#xA;Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue               840      2,931&#xA;Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue         894      2,164&#xA;Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue                59      2,243&#xA;Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue                161     16,199&#xA;Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue             4,618     15,084&#xA;Tags merged                                        5          0&#xA;Tag synonyms proposed                             10          2&#xA;Tag synonyms created                              12          2&#xA;Questions unprotected                              1          0&#xA;Questions reopened                               676         21&#xA;Questions protected                               20         58&#xA;Questions migrated                               249         17&#xA;Questions merged                                  22          0&#xA;Questions flagged⁵                                 8      1,931&#xA;Questions closed                               7,630      1,961&#xA;Question flags handled⁵                          937        996&#xA;Posts unlocked                                     1         61&#xA;Posts undeleted                                   91        496&#xA;Posts locked                                      34        460&#xA;Posts deleted⁶                                 1,896     19,944&#xA;Posts bumped                                       0      8,617&#xA;Escalations to the Community Manager team         11          0&#xA;Comments undeleted                                63          0&#xA;Comments flagged                                   8      7,182&#xA;Comments deleted⁷                              3,338     12,240&#xA;Comment flags handled                          2,135      5,055&#xA;Bounties canceled                                  8          0&#xA;Answers flagged                                   41      3,057&#xA;Answer flags handled                           2,827        271&#xA;All comments on a post moved to chat              16          0&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Footnotes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &quot;Community&quot; here refers both to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;the membership of Cross Validated&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;diamonds next to their names&lt;/a&gt;, and to the automated systems otherwise known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/-1&quot;&gt;user #-1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;³ A &quot;destroyed&quot; user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/88994/what-is-the-difference-between-a-deleted-user-and-a-destroyed-user&quot;&gt;Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁵ Includes close flags (but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; close or reopen votes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Further reading:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? I posted a similar report here last year: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5533/2018-a-year-in-moderation&quot;&gt;2018: a year in moderation&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can also check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/search?q=title%3A%222019%3A+a+year+in+moderation%22&quot;&gt;this report on other sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or peruse &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/341507/2019-a-year-in-closing&quot;&gt;detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wishing you all a happy new year...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4454" LastEditorUserId="4454" LastEditDate="2020-01-03T02:09:55.320" LastActivityDate="2020-01-07T11:55:31.060" Title="2019: a year in moderation" Tags="|discussion|moderation|statistics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5832" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-02T16:42:04.470" Score="7" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was curious about this exact question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/126238/what-are-the-advantages-of-relu-over-sigmoid-function-in-deep-neural-networks&quot;&gt;What are the advantages of ReLU over sigmoid function in deep neural networks?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading through there seems to be some confusion, mainly from user Alex R., who doesn't seem happy with many of the answers there. Although they're not happy, they've not left an answer of their own, which leaves me unsure of what I can really trust from the post. The user seems to have a fairly decent reputation, so I'd be uncomfortable with dismissing their views on the thread. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that making another post &quot;&lt;em&gt;because I don't trust the last one&lt;/em&gt;&quot; would be a bit off, so I'm unsure what the best thing in this scenario is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137921" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2020-01-02T23:25:46.833" LastActivityDate="2020-01-02T23:25:46.833" Title="What to do when one's exact question is previous posted with inconsistency in the answers?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5833" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-03T20:22:58.983" Score="8" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have &quot;Do not show me more advertisements&quot; checked in my preferences, which also inform me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You have earned the &lt;strong&gt;Reduce Ads&lt;/strong&gt; privilege. If you'd prefer, you can re-enable them here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless, SE seems insistent on blaring a loud and prominent dumbass advertisement for Amazon at the top of all screens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can hide the dumbass advertisement using &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;uBlock origin&lt;/a&gt;'s eyedropper tool, but seriously?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why the dumbass advert, and where is the setting to hide adverts that will actually be honored?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44269" LastActivityDate="2020-01-07T19:34:13.900" Title="Why am I seeing sponsored advertisements?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5833" CreationDate="2020-01-03T20:33:38.997" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It reads to me as if AWS are now sponsoring our site. Perhaps we should contact them to find out the implications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After looking around a bit&amp;mdash;no, no-one from SE bothered to tell any of us&amp;mdash;I found a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/307861/site-sponsorships-bringing-resources-back-to-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;post on Meta SE&lt;/a&gt; about site sponsorships, which shorn of ballyhoo, says:&amp;mdash;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A sponsorship generally entails enabling ads relevant to the subject&#xA;  and affixing a small &quot;sponsored by...&quot; logo in the upper-right corner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're assured that:&amp;mdash;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] sponsors do not own these Q&amp;amp;A sites. Sponsors work alongside our&#xA;  communities who ultimately build these sites. Communities ask the&#xA;  questions; communities create the tags; communities conduct elections&#xA;  as they do now, and we are not renaming our current sites like a&#xA;  garish sport stadium to the highest bidder. Any ads a sponsor submits&#xA;  still have go through our crazy-strict [sic] ad editorial process… as&#xA;  it has always been. Companies do not have access to personal data, and&#xA;  all Q&amp;amp;A content remains irrevocably licensed under Creative Commons&#xA;  for sharing and attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To a casual visitor our site now looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NC3Rf.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NC3Rf.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pat0t.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pat0t.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This represents a considerable advance over SE's home-grown efforts at uglification, though I've not yet come across any AWS adverts flashing or beeping at me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2020-01-07T19:34:13.900" LastActivityDate="2020-01-07T19:34:13.900" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5833" CreationDate="2020-01-03T20:45:52.800" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The company is shifting to behave more like a standard profit-seeking enterprise and less like an idealistic start-up.  There's no doubt that it takes a lot of money to run SE, and that money has been provided by venture capitalists who want a return on their investment.  There's a new CEO, I think there's been a lot of turnover elsewhere as well.  Jeff is long gone, and I think Joel is gone now, too.  More specifically, this seems to be an extension of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/329763/187282&quot;&gt;the new ad policies SE has been rolling out&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I certainly don't like it (and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/333965/187282&quot;&gt;it's not my only complaint&lt;/a&gt;).  That said, other than the new AWS thing, I've never had issues with ads: I've had adblock plus forever.  Personally, I like the 'acceptable ads' feature.  I recognize that sites need revenue, and ads are ultimately going to be necessary, but there should be limits on their nature (e.g., no animation).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2020-01-03T20:45:52.800" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5831" CreationDate="2020-01-06T10:43:31.307" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you for the effort to dig up those numbers. But, &lt;em&gt;simply&lt;/em&gt; copying the text from last year day's post is not showing that the wishing of a happy new year is very sincere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given what happened last year and how SE has been breaking up with it's contributors and moderators, the tone of the post could have been a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; less festive and positive. The situation is not so great and this should not be covered up with a pile of numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we enter a new year, &lt;strong&gt;let's pause and reflect&lt;/strong&gt;, taking a moment to appreciate the work that we do here together. And what could be more &lt;strong&gt;festive&lt;/strong&gt; than a &lt;strong&gt;big pile of numbers&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis is mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this post supposed to say? Is 2019 a year in moderation like 2018. Like everything is good now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Ostriches-head-in-sand2.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;heads in the sand&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You post a bunch of numbers. Some of them are in the thousands and make it appear as if we are all happy and active in moderating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you really think that this nonsense data makes statisticians happy? There have been several strong negative moments (especially with respect to 'self-regulation' mentioned in the quote) with much more impact than those numbers without context and depth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;2019 is the year where you &lt;em&gt;lost&lt;/em&gt; moderation.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just some other data:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/1175890/number-of-close-and-reopen-tasksreviews-per-quarter#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Number of close and reopen votes per quarter, separated according to the time needed to clear the queue&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xwxab.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xwxab.png&quot; alt=&quot;image1&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/1175882/distribution-of-number-of-votes-in-close-open-queu#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Distribution of number of reviews per review task in close/open queues, separated per year and quarter&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZHstF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZHstF.png&quot; alt=&quot;image2&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The year 2019 separated into quarterly data in order to zoom in on the anomaly that &lt;em&gt;closing and reopening is occurring with much less votes in 2019&lt;/em&gt;, a change that has developed halfway the year and is very strong in the last quarter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IJRhY.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IJRhY.png&quot; alt=&quot;image3&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that we need to look at these numbers in much more depth like the above figures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Certainly the quantity of review tasks will increase as the site grows, and likely the review tasks will be more by non-moderators since there are a lot of them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However... how does the site really change? Some numbers like the&#xA;duration that a task remains in the queue is a much better indicator&#xA;of decreasing efforts and of declining quality of contributions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, let's look at the difference between 2018-2019&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                                                  2018                      2019&#xA;                 Action                  Moderators  Community     Moderators  Community&#xA;Tasks reviewed: Suggested Edit queue          1,525      5,169          1,269      5,164&#xA;Tasks reviewed: Reopen Vote queue               963      3,759            840      2,931&#xA;Tasks reviewed: Low Quality Posts queue         938      2,752            894      2,164&#xA;Tasks reviewed: Late Answer queue                57      2,417             59      2,243&#xA;Tasks reviewed: First Post queue                234     18,159            161     16,199&#xA;Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue            5,125     19,257          4,618     15,084&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What i dislike (an allergy of mine) is managers posting a bunch of numbers (meaningless, without context and depth) and wrap with it a pretty talk/story that has very little to do with those numbers and is just whatever they wish to say and not what those numbers support. (see also Tufte's traffic deaths example in the section &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0000Jr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'context is essential for graphical integrity'&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:30:39.330" LastActivityDate="2020-01-07T11:55:31.060" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5765" CreationDate="2020-01-18T05:32:08.300" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry to see you go. You've always been a great mentor here. I benefit enormously from you. Your answers on statistical testing (and many others) are just classic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your resignation is going to be a big loss for this community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34623" LastActivityDate="2020-01-18T05:32:08.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5839" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5840" CreationDate="2020-01-28T08:37:35.110" Score="4" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd argue that this community are probably the best fit community to answer questions on R, Stata, SPSS, etc. but currently these are deemed &quot;non-statistical questions&quot; and closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These programs are pertinent tools for anyone doing serious statistics and navigating around them is an important part of statistics. You may argue they are the cornerstone of applied statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I therefore ask why not allow statistical questions in which the user may be experiencing difficulties with their software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153364" LastEditorUserId="44269" LastEditDate="2020-02-11T18:31:53.143" LastActivityDate="2020-02-11T18:31:53.143" Title="Why not open the &quot;r&quot;, &quot;spss&quot; and &quot;stata&quot; tags to questions pertaining to these software?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5839" CreationDate="2020-01-28T10:26:51.547" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was discussed in a previous thread some time ago, but I think it is reasonable to bring it up again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a continuum of questions about software. Some are strictly programming , some are somewhat statistical  and some are very statistical and only use the software as an illustration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current policy, as I understand it, is that strictly programming questions are off topic, very statistical questions are on topic, and then ... there's a gray area. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @Tim pointed out in a comment, many of the strictly programming questions (e.g. questions about merging files) are already answered on Stack Overflow. We don't need to duplicate answers and people on Stack Overflow may be more expert in this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And questions that only use software as an illustration, or that ask us to interpret output that could come from any software, are clearly on-topic. E.g. if you are asking about interpreting a covariance matrix it doesn't really matter if it came from R, SAS, Python or whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I would welcome more guidance about the gray area.  E.g. &quot;I ran glm() in R and got these errors&quot; - right now, a lot of these get migrated. But I think that, at least for some errors and some languages, we have experts here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2020-01-28T10:26:51.547" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5842" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-04T15:19:01.413" Score="24" ViewCount="438" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This question is a bit of an open discussion and on the edge of off-topic too broad, but I place it anyway since it is about an interresting development (and people may change/improve the question to be more clear)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two platforms rising up. &lt;a href=&quot;https://topanswers.xyz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://topanswers.xyz&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://codidact.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://codidact.org/&lt;/a&gt;. These platforms may be viable options for the near future to have a Q&amp;amp;A platform where people can ask and answer questions about statistics on an independent platform. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally would like to move my activity over there and I imagine several others may as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could we anticipate a bit, and mainly generate ideas, how we can shape a potential collaboration between the communities on the different websites (which in reality will be just one &lt;em&gt;single&lt;/em&gt; community)? For instance, in order avoid such things as a lot of duplicated content on the internet and an internet that is difficult to navigate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastActivityDate="2020-09-30T19:26:45.393" Title="Brainstorm: Should we collaborate with an alternative Q&amp;A website? (and how?)" Tags="|discussion|migration|participation|etiquette|community|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5842" CreationDate="2020-02-04T15:25:06.440" Score="6" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Create a general landing page for statistics questions.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could create a statistics landing page where all sites, for instance also datascience.SE, could join together in a single same spot. This is a bit more complicated than a simple idea of collaboration, and takes time to develop. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This idea is that we should be able to do like 'big data' and gather everything, or most, on the internet together like a metasearchengine, e.g. also small sites like Andrew Gelman's blog &lt;a href=&quot;https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/&lt;/a&gt; or Edward Tufte's blog &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a?topic_id=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a?topic_id=1&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example of the need for this.. just search &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/search?q=ridge+regression&quot;&gt;https://stackexchange.com/search?q=ridge+regression&lt;/a&gt; and you notice a lot of misplaced questions on some topics in statistics, people do not get in the right place to ask and answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2020-02-04T18:04:48.853" LastActivityDate="2020-02-04T18:04:48.853" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5844" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-04T21:04:48.003" Score="6" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;I responded to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/447741/89649&quot;&gt;post regarding EM vs. Deep Learning&lt;/a&gt;, with an answer, which is to the best of my knowledge a textbook answer to the question (Full disclosure, I have a solid background in neural networks, but not so much when it comes to EM and MLE approximations). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP and another community member both disputed my answer. Although I still think my answer is correct, I don't want to mislead the OP and the community in case it isn't, and I was hoping that someone with a more advanced background in probability theory and learning theory could review my answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My deeper question is: Is it appropriate to ask for this type of review at all, or should I just delete the answer and hope someone else with the appropriate background will step in? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89649" LastActivityDate="2020-03-22T13:06:51.110" Title="Is it OK to ask for the CV community to review my answer to a post?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5845" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5846" CreationDate="2020-02-06T22:16:46.613" Score="19" ViewCount="283" Body="&lt;p&gt;If CV sets up my model for me/verifies my model and my department's statistician agrees with the model after the fact, wouldn't it be fair to credit CV and the statistician in the manuscript?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would including a simple &quot;We would like to thank the people at Cross Validated (Stackexchange) and the statisticians at department X for their help&quot; be discrediting to my paper? Or is this normal practice? I'm just not sure!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153364" LastActivityDate="2020-02-07T10:30:49.553" Title="Would it be silly to acknowledge CV in a manuscript?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5845" CreationDate="2020-02-07T10:30:49.553" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, please: if a CV thread helps you in a non-trivial way, then do acknowledge it. It's polite towards the participants at that thread, and it may even put CV on a few people's radar. And it's always better than just saying that &quot;it's a standard result that XYZ&quot; - if it was sufficiently nonstandard for you to look it up or ask about at CV, then the same may apply to your readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have cited CV threads in a couple recent papers. Sometimes, I'll cite an answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/162430/1352&quot;&gt;to a specific question I posted&lt;/a&gt;. Sometimes, I'll &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/389318/1352&quot;&gt;ask and self-answer&lt;/a&gt; standard calculations so I can refer to them in the future. And I don't think I have ever cited a thread that I was not personally involved in, but if that was helpful, I'll happily cite that, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a little &quot;cite&quot; link underneath each question, which will give you a nice BibTeX entry for your citation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2020-02-07T10:30:49.553" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1082" CreationDate="2020-02-07T10:33:38.803" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This feature now exists with the &quot;cite&quot; link underneath each question. (Just to close this question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2020-02-07T10:33:38.803" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5842" CreationDate="2020-02-07T14:58:29.933" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am so glad @SextusEmpiricus asked this question, and I have been visiting both sites before this question was posted. That said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Top Answers' Code of Conduct is &quot;Be nice.&quot; which seems ripe for abuse, and ripe for implicit biases to manifest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Codidact has a Code of Conduct, it is not immediately visible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For all SO/SE's execrably poor decision making over the past five months, they are actually making an attempt to implement an inclusive environment via a Code of Conduct. I won't be participating in either alternative site without similar work foregrounded to all visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44269" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2020-02-07T16:42:51.873" LastActivityDate="2020-02-07T16:42:51.873" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5849" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-08T17:50:43.807" Score="2" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I haven't been very active the last year, and I didn't perform a statistical analysis on actual CV traffic data, thus I may definitely be wrong. However, I have the impression that the number of unanswered questions has risen with respect to last year. It has always been a sizeable fraction of the total questions, but now it seems larger to me. Am I correct? I guess it's pretty normal for a mature Q&amp;amp;A site. At some point, the site starts to become more of a database of good questions &amp;amp; answers, rather than a place where most of the new questions are answered (or closed as dupes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2020-02-09T08:39:59.257" LastActivityDate="2020-02-09T08:39:59.257" Title="Has the rate of unanswered questions risen in the last year?" Tags="|discussion|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2020-02-11T12:31:39.620" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5850" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5851" CreationDate="2020-02-11T18:21:12.400" Score="3" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is nice that people can ask questions and get answers to whatever question they have. However, we tend to close and deleted questions when they are out of the bounds of the website (not interesting to pursue for the sake of creating a database of questions with related answers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, we do this for duplicates, broad questions, unclear questions, unfocused questions, and off-topic questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among, the off-topic questions we may have self-study questions that get closed because the OP did not do a lot of research themself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among these off-topic questions, we could also regard extremely simple/basic/beginner questions (that show signs of low level or little research effort). But it is not so clear how to deal with them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am thinking of this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/449028/can-a-regression-formula-be-y-a-bx&quot;&gt;Can a regression formula be Y=A - BX&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That question is a bit trivial and simple. But it is a bit strange to close it based on little research effort (it is more like the OP is just at a very early stage of research and can't be blamed for asking a basic question). How should we deal with those?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T10:32:40.913" Title="Should we have a close reason like 'low value/level or trivial question'" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|low-quality-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5850" CreationDate="2020-02-11T19:07:24.993" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your example could be a useful question for others at the same basic level&amp;mdash;I'll bet some introductory texts don't explicitly point out that coefficients can be negative &amp;amp; explain how to interpret them in that case (which is a further, implicit, question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't see any reason to proscribe low-level/trivial questions, not least because we'd spend more time trying to define &quot;low-level/trivial&quot; (and arguing with askers who dispute the classification of their question as such) than we would answering them. That's not to say anything goes: &quot;How do I calculate the geometric mean?&quot; isn't a good question because we presume anyone who uses the term &quot;geometric mean&quot; has looked up how to calculate it &amp;amp; has a particular difficulty in understanding the procedure that they're not telling us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might almost say that &quot;low-level&quot; can only apply to answers, not to questions. In particular, it's not unusual for solutions to an applied problem to vary greatly in their statistical sophistication; but even theoretical issues can be dealt with in more or less depth. It's perhaps only exercises, with a tightly prescribed scope, that can be classified relatively easily (&amp;amp; that suggests a rationale for Math Overflow &amp;amp; Mathematics SE).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2020-02-19T10:32:40.913" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T10:32:40.913" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5854" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-05T10:47:56.043" Score="7" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;2020 has come! But… oops, where did the time go? It’s already March! Belated as it is, it’s time for a refresh of &lt;strong&gt;Community Promotion Ads&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cool events or conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else your community would genuinely be interested in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads every year?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers should be in the exact form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;   [1]: http://image-url&#xA;   [2]: http://clickthrough-url &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question must always be tagged with the magic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/community-ads&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;community-ads&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;community-ads&lt;/a&gt; tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels, or double that if high DPI.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF or PNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Score Threshold&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;strong&gt;minimum score threshold&lt;/strong&gt; an answer must meet (currently &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;) before it will be shown on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/ads/display/5854&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72321" LastActivityDate="2021-06-13T21:06:39.660" Title="Community Promotion Ads — 2020" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2021-06-17T09:52:09.560" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5854" CreationDate="2020-03-06T00:39:46.407" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mattermodeling.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GVzhj.png&quot; alt=&quot;Common topics on Matter Modeling SE&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="211119" LastEditorUserId="211119" LastEditDate="2021-06-13T21:06:39.660" LastActivityDate="2021-06-13T21:06:39.660" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5854" CreationDate="2020-03-06T15:00:56.647" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://or.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SrahK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Operations Research Stack Exchange&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40036" LastActivityDate="2020-03-06T15:00:56.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2412" CreationDate="2020-03-07T23:16:41.293" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;My opinion on this might be in the minority, but I am going to post this anyway, as a suggestion.  If this is inconsistent with policy, consider it a suggestion for a change of policy.  As a premise to my opinion, I note that there is a general consensus that &quot;textbook problems&quot; are valuable problems for statistical learning, and so we do not close or ignore these problems.  Our present practice for self-study questions is to require the user to show what they have done, and where they are stuck, and then provide a &quot;hint&quot; for further progress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that it is sensible not to provide contemporaneous solutions to self-study problems, since this gives the user a facility to have others do their homework for them, and it encourages students to post homework or assessment problems.  However, setting aside the issue of contemporaneous answers, I see no particular problem with this site gradually accruing a large repository of &lt;em&gt;full worked solutions to textbook problems&lt;/em&gt;.  That actually seems to me like a valuable resource, for exactly the same reason that worked solutions in textbooks and courses are valuable resources for learning.  As I see it, the issue is to avoid giving &lt;em&gt;contemporaneous&lt;/em&gt; worked solutions to the student for their homework/assessment.  Thus, once the question is &quot;old&quot; (e.g., at least six-months old, which is past the assessment point) I think it should be okay to post a full worked solution to the problem.  Indeed, at that point, I think it is &lt;em&gt;desirable&lt;/em&gt; to give a full worked solution, to build up a repository of worked solutions to simple problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This proposal retains the property that it does not incentivise students to post homework or assessment problems, to bypass solving these themselves.  By imposing a delay of six months on posting worked solutions, we ensure that the full solution comes too late to be used as submitted homework or assessment in a course.  (I actually think this issue is a bit overblown anyway, since students almost always need to replicate performance on an in-person exam, and SE solutions cannot be used as a substitute in that environment.)  At the same time, it allows us to build up a good repository of worked solutions to simple &quot;textbook problems&quot; which is a useful pedagogical resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173082" LastActivityDate="2020-03-07T23:16:41.293" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5859" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-13T04:08:47.087" Score="12" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's now been almost 6 months since the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-and-forced-relicensing-is-stack-exchange-still-interested-in-cooper&quot;&gt;community has become widely aware of practices by the greater StackExchange company which a lot of people have disagreed with.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has been a lot of dissatisfaction specifically surrounding the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5783/reinstate-monica&quot;&gt;firing of Monica&lt;/a&gt;, but also about practices in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, some of the community have &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/336024/how-can-we-put-pressure-on-stack-exchange-inc-without-damaging-the-community?noredirect=1#comment1110223_336024&quot;&gt;banded together in order to achieve a solution they find satisfactory&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has resulted in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a long list of moderators &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-and-forced-relicensing-is-stack-exchange-still-interested-in-cooper&quot;&gt;resigning in protest&lt;/a&gt;, including from CV (like Glen).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;some form of an &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334015/an-open-letter-on-the-state-of-curation-and-moderation/334029#334029&quot;&gt;organised strike&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/336024/how-can-we-put-pressure-on-stack-exchange-inc-without-damaging-the-community?noredirect=1#comment1110223_336024&quot;&gt;cosmetic changes to usernames to raise awareness about dissatisfaction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it has been some time now, I was curious: Have the actions and practices had any noticeable effect on the activity or efficiency of the site, specifically related to the CV site? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/334638&quot;&gt;query&lt;/a&gt; done by @Glorfindel right at the start of the protests which found some drop in usage (in terms of questions answered and posted). However, it was relatively small and honestly probably not significant. And it was done relatively early, so would not capture any effects which might have a lag time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not have access to site analytics. Perhaps to those that have a means of seeing: has there been any quantifiable change due to the actions taken and listed above, to the activity or efficiency of the site which show pressure has actually been applied to the greater StackExchange company?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176173" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2020-03-13T19:02:05.250" LastActivityDate="2020-03-13T19:02:05.250" Title="Effect of actions done in protest to the SE company on site analytics" Tags="|discussion|site-statistics|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5854" CreationDate="2020-03-13T04:28:43.877" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://opendata.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wqiQI.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tagline to show on mouseover&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1437" LastActivityDate="2020-03-13T04:28:43.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5862" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5863" CreationDate="2020-03-22T09:53:10.830" Score="13" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a bit surprised that this seems to be the only spot of the Internet which hasn't been taken by storm by the COVID-19 infodemic (not necessarily a bad thing). Am I right, or has there been a raise in questions about statistical models for epidemiology lately, and I just missed them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastActivityDate="2020-03-22T12:52:05.873" Title="Are there questions on the modeling of the COVID-19 epidemic?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5862" CreationDate="2020-03-22T12:52:05.873" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;We did have a hot network question that involved COVID-19 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/454684/&quot;&gt;Mother milk of 6 Corona-positive (COVID-19) women does not contain the virus - can we make a confidence statement about this?&lt;/a&gt;), but it doesn't seem like too many to me, either.  I find 17 questions that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=covid%20is%3aquestion&quot;&gt;reference COVID-19&lt;/a&gt;, starting 2/16.  I find another 9 questions that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=-covid+is%3Aquestion+coronavirus&quot;&gt;reference coronavirus&lt;/a&gt;, going back a little earlier to 1/28.  It would be an issue if the site were being spammed with off topic questions, but only 4 of those 26 (15%) are closed, that's double the total proportion over that timespan (380/4514=8%), but not terrible, and not significant (p=.42) for what that's worth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2020-03-22T12:52:05.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5844" CreationDate="2020-03-22T13:06:51.110" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me offer a different option:  Ask a new question (on the main site) referencing the relevant question context and your answer, and asking interested respondents to explain what might be incorrect, or what might be improved.  Then I would delete the original, if you aren't confident that it is correct.  If you wanted, you could leave a comment on the original thread alerting readers of a relevant discussion.  This provides a framework for you to get fuller and better quality information about your post, and removes a source of ambiguity and confusion from the original thread.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2020-03-22T13:06:51.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5865" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-24T16:04:42.323" Score="1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shall we create a separate tag for the &quot;Bayes theorem&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is one of the crucial cornerstones of bayesian statistics and statistics overall. I find 1095 questions treating this topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128677" LastActivityDate="2020-03-24T16:04:42.323" Title="New tag for the &quot;Bayes theorem&quot;" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5867" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-30T19:17:48.870" Score="14" ViewCount="366" Body="&lt;p&gt;At Stack Overflow they have implemented the option to view the site in Dark Mode.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we not at Cross Validated have the option of a Dark Mode like they have on Stack Overflow? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16367" LastActivityDate="2020-04-13T19:41:37.710" Title="Dark Mode - Why/why not?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5868" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-02T18:02:12.267" Score="1" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Cross Validated post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/457861/how-to-incorporate-the-uncertainty-of-the-model-coefficients-in-the-prediction-i&quot;&gt;How to incorporate the uncertainty of the model coefficients in the prediction interval of a multiple linear regression&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what information is needed (and why: what is your intend to learn from it) such that the question can be considered for posting on the statistics stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="279388" LastActivityDate="2020-04-02T18:02:12.267" Title="How to improve the purity of the question" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5869" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-03T19:22:33.837" Score="2" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/458277/76981&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; was closed as being too vague. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree (and voted to open). I wanted to quickly explain why I think this &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; a well posed question, or at the least it suggests an important discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are ways you could estimate the mean, with discussion. Note that this same argument could be made for right censored data: just replace NPMLE with Kaplan Meier curves (for those not so familiar with interval censored terminology). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.) One way to estimate the mean is from parametric models. This of course includes strong modeling assumptions, which may lead to less obvious bias from outliers than in a traditional mean of samples approach. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.) We could also use the the NPMLE to compute the mean. But this is a &lt;strong&gt;really&lt;/strong&gt; bad idea if we have right censoring in our data. The NPMLE will put zero mass beyond the last &lt;em&gt;known&lt;/em&gt; point, which can &lt;strong&gt;greatly&lt;/strong&gt; bias the mean with right skewed data/high censoring rates. Similarly, there is a special case in which the mean of the NPMLE isn't even defined (i.e., when there is a right censored value whose limit is greater than the largest known event time). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, the method I would endorse would be to estimate with a a parametric model, then inspect the model fit using the NPMLE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76981" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2020-04-04T11:54:29.537" LastActivityDate="2020-04-04T11:54:29.537" Title="Reopen mean of interval censored data question" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5867" CreationDate="2020-04-07T17:55:22.383" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;See this question in Stackoverflow: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46876752/generating-random-numbers-based-on-an-inverse-gaussian-distribution&quot;&gt;Generating random numbers based on an inverse Gaussian distribution&lt;/a&gt;. It was mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/396071/2874779&quot;&gt;in the Dark-Mode Meta thread&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how it looks with Dark Mode on (the screenshot is not mine, it's from the same link in Meta I reported above):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WtJV5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WtJV5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60613" LastActivityDate="2020-04-07T17:55:22.383" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5871" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5872" CreationDate="2020-04-10T01:30:34.520" Score="0" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not referencing &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/320354/157457&quot;&gt;Berkson&amp;#39;s Paradox: How does pregnancy affect time for AIDS to emerge from women with HIV?&lt;/a&gt;; did I ask other such questions now deleted? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user157457" LastActivityDate="2020-04-12T15:36:50.747" Title="Did I ask questions on Simpson's or Berkson's Paradox over 30 days ago?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5871" CreationDate="2020-04-10T12:39:34.190" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have asked three other questions with &quot;Berkson's Paradox&quot; in the title that are now deleted.  The most recent was two years ago.  All three were deleted by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/roomba&quot;&gt;roomba / community user&lt;/a&gt; as dead or abandoned.  The questions are:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/320349/&quot;&gt;Berkson's Paradox: Why wouldn't the wealthiest men in the conditioned set be nicer than the whole population's average person?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/320350/&quot;&gt;Berkson's Paradox: How does further conditioning increase the negative correlation?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/320360/&quot;&gt;How is 'Conditioning on a collider' related to Berkson's Paradox?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2020-04-12T15:36:50.747" LastActivityDate="2020-04-12T15:36:50.747" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5873" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-13T12:46:15.197" Score="-3" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;could you not hire a few data scientists to answer more questions,&#xA;,in stack overflow, this rate is much much higher..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="280876" OwnerDisplayName="snackbob" LastActivityDate="2020-04-13T21:32:39.057" Title="Could stats stack exhange invest more money into the stats area, so more questions get answered" Tags="|discussion|machine-learning|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5873" CreationDate="2020-04-13T14:23:51.473" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Neither StackOverflow.com nor CrossValidated.com hires &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; to answer the questions. Both sites rely solely on volunteers. You could ask StackExchange.com why they do not pay people for answering questions, but the likely answer would be that this would be a bad business model (how would they profit from it?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, I'm afraid that the kind of people that you would like to answer  questions for money would likely not be the same group of people you would like to answer them. If you are an expert in your field, then you can easily find a more interesting, and better paid, job than question answering on some Q&amp;amp;A site. On the other hand, the existence of sites like this shows that you can attract people like this to help others, but obviously, none of them would be doing this full time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could make many guesses why the response rate on StackOverflow.com is higher (is it?), e.g. it has more users, or it focuses on questions with reproducible examples, i.e. well-defined problems. On CrossValidated.com many of the questions are open-ended, often ambiguous, etc., but there is not much we can do about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2020-04-13T21:32:39.057" LastActivityDate="2020-04-13T21:32:39.057" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5867" CreationDate="2020-04-13T19:28:03.910" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/345902/178179&quot;&gt;How do I enable dark mode on other sites in the network?&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://darkreader.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dark Reader&lt;/a&gt; Chrome/Edge/Firefox/Safari extension, or natively on Chrome (chrome://flags/ : &lt;code&gt;#enable-force-dark&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've used dark mode on SE for years. FYI &lt;a href=&quot;https://medicalsciences.stackexchange.com/q/9117/43&quot;&gt;Is the blue light emitted by computer monitors deleterious for the human eyes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With  chrome://flags/ : &lt;code&gt;#enable-force-dark&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dzqoo.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dzqoo.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastEditorUserId="12359" LastEditDate="2020-04-13T19:41:37.710" LastActivityDate="2020-04-13T19:41:37.710" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5877" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-14T21:13:22.223" Score="0" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have only 4 questions, now I am getting the message: No questions are accepted from this account. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user209249" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2020-04-14T22:00:15.583" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T22:00:44.480" Title="Why can I not ask a question here?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5877" CreationDate="2020-04-14T21:48:45.767" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Six out of ten questions that you asked were closed as off-topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, in each case the reason for closing was the same &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because EITHER it is not about&#xA;  statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, or data&#xA;  visualization, OR it focuses on programming, debugging, or performing&#xA;  routine operations within a statistical computing platform. If the&#xA;  latter, you could try the support links we maintain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In cases where many of the questions by a user are closed, they get &lt;em&gt;automatically&lt;/em&gt; suspended by the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2020-04-14T22:00:44.480" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T22:00:44.480" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5879" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5880" CreationDate="2020-04-23T04:42:13.970" Score="22" ViewCount="360" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been a huge fan of Cross Validated. This community has helped me learn mathematical statistics through a self-study- although it's hard to say that I self-taught myself with such amazing textbooks and this community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to give back and answer questions; however,  every time I filter questions on this forum, the only questions without answers are either not too related to the math stat theory that I've learned or way beyond what I know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to locate the &quot;low-hanging fruit&quot; to free up more time for you bigger-brained folk to answer the more difficult questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="257939" LastActivityDate="2022-09-27T12:22:01.417" Title="How can I find questions that are easy enough so that I can answer them?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5879" CreationDate="2020-04-23T06:20:04.197" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good question! I am very far from being an expert, so I struggled with the same problem. Here are a few things I found helpful:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Find and follow tags that you know &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; about. I spent a fair bit of time on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/regression&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;regression&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;regression&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;regression-container&quot;&gt;regression&lt;/a&gt; early on because it included a number of basic questions I could answer. I also discovered some more niche tags that were relatively neglected, implying either that the regulars here were not especially interested in them or were not experts in those topics. Answering (and editing) questions on these types of tags helps a lot of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Look up the 'unanswered' questions on these tags. Frequently, there are a number  of old-ish questions that are quite deserving of an answer. Sometimes doing this can be a bit thankless, but answering old questions can draw attention to them. While doing this, you will want to familiarise yourself with the most upvoted questions on those tags. Some of the unwanted questions will be duplicates, so you will help the community more by flagging them as duplicates rather than answering them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Look up the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;'new' questions on the front page&lt;/a&gt; when you visit the site, not just the home page (which also includes questions that were just answered, edited or bumped). Also look up the new questions of the tags you are interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: I realised after being on the site for ~5 years that you can easily achieve much of points 1-3 by creating &lt;em&gt;custom filters&lt;/em&gt; for yourself. Go to your home page, look on the right side of the page below the box about posts on Meta, then click on 'Create a custom filter'. Select a specific tag, filter by 'no answers' (or 'no accepted answers'), sort by 'newest', and then click 'Save custom filter'. This makes a link for you that will show up with a blue circle next to it whenever there is a question posted that meets its criteria. This ends up being MUCH faster than manually navigating through individual tags like I used to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To make sure this does not end up feeling like a slog, pick a strategy that amuses you. Look up the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/help/badges&quot;&gt;CV badges&lt;/a&gt; and pursue any that you'd like, if that floats your boat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There's a bit of disagreement about whether we should answer every basic question that gets posted. Some people prefer to stick to CV's original goal of maintaining a corpus of high-quality Q&amp;amp;As, others are happy to answer basic questions, most fall somewhere in the middle. In case you fall into the second group, you will find it easier to identify questions to answer. But be aware that these questions end up getting closed more frequently than others, either as duplicates or as lacking in important detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When you open any question, CV lists a bunch of 'Related questions' on the right side of the page. So when you find one question you are able to answer, it can frequently lead to discovering a few more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you have not seen it yet, this is a very useful thread about how one can help here even without the advanced training that you clearly possess: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2704/what-is-the-best-way-to-give-back-to-the-community-when-i-dont-have-the-math-sk&quot;&gt;What is the best way to give back to the community when I don&amp;#39;t have the math skills?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="121522" LastEditDate="2022-09-27T12:22:01.417" LastActivityDate="2022-09-27T12:22:01.417" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5881" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-24T21:13:14.860" Score="3" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a number of watched tags, such as &quot;causality&quot;, &quot;confounding&quot;, and &quot;regression&quot;. I have one ignored tag, &quot;R&quot;, since I am not an &quot;R&quot; person. However, if a question is tagged both with &quot;R&quot; and with &quot;confounding&quot;, say, the question appears in light font, just as it would if it didn't have the &quot;confounding&quot; tag. I would prefer my watched tags to override the ignored tags, so that those questions show up in tan with regular fonts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your time!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76484" LastEditorUserId="11887" LastEditDate="2020-04-25T21:27:51.617" LastActivityDate="2020-04-25T21:27:51.617" Title="How can I get the &quot;Watched Tags&quot; to override the &quot;Ignored Tags&quot;?" Tags="|support|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5883" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-28T08:51:03.790" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This tag is used by staff when sharing concepts in the Discovery phase relating to product or configuration changes. In most cases a direction and/or goal has been established, and there has likely been some amount of time invested into discovery work and research. The post is being presented to the Community for feedback to be taken into consideration. Where possible, the post includes specific questions to help guide Community feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-28T08:51:03.790" LastActivityDate="2020-04-28T08:51:03.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5884" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-28T08:51:03.790" Score="0" Body="Indicates that the post shares product or configuration change concepts during the Discovery phase. Open to receiving feedback from the Community preceding implementation." OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-28T08:51:03.790" LastActivityDate="2020-04-28T08:51:03.790" Title="product-discovery" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5886" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-02T09:08:23.140" Score="2" ViewCount="603" Body="&lt;h1&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have added a tag wiki and an excerpt to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/compound-distributions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;compound-distributions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;compound-distributions&lt;/a&gt;. The excerpt notes that these are also known as &quot;mixtures&quot;, but that that term also has other uses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have included a warning in the tag wiki excerpt for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixture&lt;/a&gt;. It now reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A mixture distribution is one that is written as a convex combination of other distributions. Use the &quot;compound-distributions&quot; tag for &quot;concatenations&quot; of distributions (where a parameter of a distribution is itself a random variable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will link to this meta question in the tag wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I will go through threads with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixture&lt;/a&gt; tag in the next days and retag them as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/compound-distributions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;compound-distributions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;compound-distributions&lt;/a&gt; as warranted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Explanation:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;mixture&quot; has two distinct meanings in our context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;em&gt;mixture distribution&lt;/em&gt; is a convex combination of two or more underlying distributions with associated probabilities &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$p_i$&lt;/span&gt; that sum to one. A realization of the mixture distribution comes with probability &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$p_i$&lt;/span&gt; from the &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$i$&lt;/span&gt;-th underlying distribution. Examples include:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The mixture of two or more normal distributions with different means and/or variances: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gaussian-mixture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;gaussian-mixture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;gaussian-mixture&lt;/a&gt;s.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The mixture of a point mass at zero with another (discrete) distribution: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/zero-inflation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;zero-inflation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;zero-inflation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;em&gt;mixture&lt;/em&gt; may also be a &quot;concatenation&quot; of two distributions (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/compound-distributions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;compound-distributions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;compound-distributions&lt;/a&gt;), where our realizations are distributed according to some parameterized distribution &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$X\sim F_\theta$&lt;/span&gt; where the parameter &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\theta$&lt;/span&gt; itself is a random variable, &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\theta\sim G$&lt;/span&gt;. So, to draw an &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x$&lt;/span&gt;, you first draw a &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\theta\sim G$&lt;/span&gt; and then, with this &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\theta$&lt;/span&gt;, draw &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$x\sim F_\theta$&lt;/span&gt;. &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$G$&lt;/span&gt; is called the &lt;em&gt;mixing distribution&lt;/em&gt;. Examples include:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/negative-binomial&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;negative-binomial&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;negative-binomial&lt;/a&gt; distribution arises naturally as a Poisson distribution whose parameter is itself gamma distributed: it is a &quot;Poisson-gamma mixture&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not help that even when people discuss compound distributions as such, they almost invariably call the resulting compound distribution an &quot;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$F$&lt;/span&gt;-&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$G$&lt;/span&gt; mixture&quot;, as in the negbin case (not, e.g., an &quot;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$F$&lt;/span&gt;-&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$G$&lt;/span&gt; compound&quot;). Ah well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixture&lt;/a&gt; tag refers exclusively to the first meaning above. Here is its tag wiki excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A mixture distribution is one that is written as a convex combination of other distributions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The overloaded nomenclature results in people tagging questions as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixture&lt;/a&gt; when they are actually asking about mixtures in the second sense above, i.e., about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/compound-distributions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;compound-distributions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;compound-distributions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;disambiguation&quot; section of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixture&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixture&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixture&lt;/a&gt; tag wiki only disambiguates it from mixed models.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any thoughts, comments or improvements on the tag wikis would be more than welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2020-05-03T16:17:11.747" Title="The &quot;mixture&quot; vs. the &quot;compound-distributions&quot; tags" Tags="|discussion|tag-reorganization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5886" CreationDate="2020-05-03T11:55:38.850" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two meanings don't seem all that distinct. If, in the definition of the 1st sense of &quot;mixture&quot;, you take probabilities as probability densities &amp;amp; sums as integrals, you get a mixture in the 2nd sense; if, in the definition of the 2nd sense, you allow &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\theta$&lt;/span&gt; to index a countable set of distributions, you get &#xA;a mixture in the first sense. (And there seems to be a gap&amp;mdash;what do you call it when &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\theta$&lt;/span&gt; indexes an uncountable set of distributions that don't constitute a parametric family?&lt;sup&gt;&amp;dagger;&lt;/sup&gt;) At any rate the crux of the distinction needs to be made more explicit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if compound distributions are more properly viewed as an extension of mixture distributions rather than as a sub-class, I wonder whether it mightn't be better to let  &lt;em&gt;mixture&lt;/em&gt; cover the general idea, &amp;amp; &lt;em&gt;compound distribution&lt;/em&gt; the particular case&amp;mdash;practically, to refrain from removing the &lt;em&gt;mixture&lt;/em&gt; tag when adding the &lt;em&gt;compound distribution&lt;/em&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;dagger; Wikipedia doesn't help: the article on mixture distributions defines compound distributions as those where &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\theta$&lt;/span&gt; indexes a set of uncountable distributions; while the article on compound distributions defines them as you do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2020-05-03T16:17:11.747" LastActivityDate="2020-05-03T16:17:11.747" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5891" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-14T11:17:50.247" Score="5" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22absolute+value%22+distribution+is%3Aq&quot;&gt;a number of questions on absolute values of random variables&lt;/a&gt;, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/466428/1352&quot;&gt;Expected value of the absolute standardized t distribution&lt;/a&gt; (this is what motivates this question)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/279220/1352&quot;&gt;What is the expectation of the absolute value of the Skellam distribution?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somewhat to my surprise, we don't seem to have an &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/absolute-value&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;absolute-value&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;absolute-value&lt;/a&gt; tag that would allow searching for questions that carry this tag and, say, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/t-distribution&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;t-distribution&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;t-distribution&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/skellam&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;skellam&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;skellam&lt;/a&gt; one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the sheer desirability of such a tag seems so obvious to me that I am sure I am missing something. So: what argues against such a tag? Or should we create it and start (judiciously) retagging?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T20:02:17.013" Title="&quot;Absolute value&quot; tag" Tags="|discussion|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5893" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5896" CreationDate="2020-05-15T12:55:39.523" Score="15" ViewCount="360" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just now (but I have seen it earlier, and even clicked on it. It must be false) this ad appeared&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mGRtm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mGRtm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="202450" LastEditDate="2020-05-18T23:06:09.617" LastActivityDate="2021-01-12T10:19:38.267" Title="Inappropriate ad in sidebar" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5894" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-16T01:48:28.420" Score="2" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have tags for convolution&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/conv-neural-network&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;conv-neural-network&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;conv-neural-network&lt;/a&gt; and recurrent &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rnn&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rnn&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rnn&lt;/a&gt; networks, so I thought it might also be a good idea to have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/graph-neural-network&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;graph-neural-network&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;graph-neural-network&lt;/a&gt; tag, since I've seen a fair number of such questions. At the moment, it seems that some people are using &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/graph-theory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;graph-theory&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;graph-theory&lt;/a&gt; as a stand-in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26948" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T16:18:18.060" Title="&quot;graph neural networks&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5893" CreationDate="2020-05-18T15:17:12.953" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for reaching out! This is an ad that we are running which should redirect you to a survey on Survey Monkey. We really appreciate hearing from you about the brands you're interested in so that we can serve ads that are most valuable to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update January 2021&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a heads-up: We will be running a similar type of ad for a month or so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="285533" LastEditorUserId="285533" LastEditDate="2021-01-12T10:19:38.267" LastActivityDate="2021-01-12T10:19:38.267" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5898" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5899" CreationDate="2020-05-20T10:02:15.047" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Scenario&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/467428/how-to-computing-the-x-coordinate-of-the-nth-quantile-of-a-distribution-usi?noredirect=1#comment863743_467428&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; I ask for a solution that could be solved by selecting some distribution that satisfies some specified criteria and calculating the/a quantile position in python. For every distribution the computation to determine the quantile is different, so for each distribution the question would be unique and could be copied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be interesting but bad to duplicate this question for example 20 times for 20 different distributions that satisfy the posed constraints. Hence I would think it is more valuable to ask a question that captures at least 1, just like it would when the distribution is specified, but allows answers for multiple distributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I think this is the essence of the close vote: &quot;We want single unique questions, not questions that elicit a list of different answers.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Guidelines&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;how to ask&lt;/a&gt; it says: &quot;be specific&quot;. Not &quot;be as specific as possible&quot;. Additionally I have not found a deliberation on what is better, multiple nearly identical questions or a single encompassing question. Therefor, I would like to ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming someone is, or I am, interested in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/467428/how-to-computing-the-x-coordinate-of-the-nth-quantile-of-a-distribution-usi?noredirect=1#comment863743_467428&quot;&gt;this same question&lt;/a&gt; for (a) different distribution(s),&#xA;is it better to pick a single distribution and then copy the question for other distributions when interested, or give the liberty to allow any of the multiple possible distributions to be used to answer the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="238766" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2020-05-20T12:50:39.003" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T12:51:29.550" Title="Specificity of question vs near-duplicates?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5898" CreationDate="2020-05-20T11:15:51.230" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the comment by @whuber, when a question is posed in such generality that it will receive multiple different answers depending on additional assumptions adopted by readers, then it is not sufficiently specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to imply that it is better to ask multiple near-copies of the question for different distributions, when relevant, than to allow for different answers by allowing readers to make additional assumptions leading to significantly different answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a solution to the XY-problem I could include a specification for a specific distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="238766" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2020-05-20T12:51:29.550" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T12:51:29.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5894" CreationDate="2020-05-25T16:18:18.060" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/graph-neural-network&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;graph-neural-network&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;graph-neural-network&lt;/a&gt; has been created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T16:18:18.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5902" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5903" CreationDate="2020-05-29T21:14:30.373" Score="6" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to automatically compile a list of questions/answers ranked from easy to hard that would form a tutorial for learning Statistics from scratch?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently SE is a Q&amp;amp;A site, but it would be more profitable if you could turn the Q/A into course materials assuming every question about the subject has been answered. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user271077" LastActivityDate="2020-06-01T13:11:37.910" Title="Is there a way to compile an ordered list of questions/answers that would form a tutorial for learning Statistics from scratch?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5902" CreationDate="2020-06-01T12:04:25.107" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Profitable for whom? The question is germane as Stack Exchange is a business, although most of us pay nothing and get no income either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you mean useful for students, then surely, but that is just not the main way that SE (including CV) was designed or is maintained. CV for example is messier than Wikipedia (although on many topics more nearly authoritative) and there is much overlap and even much material that individuals may think is badly written, confused or incorrect. &lt;strong&gt;Almost all threads arise in response to particular questions and there is no overall design to cover all possible topics or even to identify and fill in gaps.&lt;/strong&gt; There is no managing committee working to produce a kind of statistical encyclopedia or series of online textbooks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really wouldn't assume that every question has been answered; there are different new questions every day and statistical science isn't static either.  &lt;strong&gt;Learners at any level can search using keywords that are of interest or the names of contributors whose style is congenial and who have obvious expertise&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would see the main strength of CV as going beyond basic texts or courses in various ways, including &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions that are often glossed over, or not well explained, in such places, possibly because the point is both too arcane for elementary treatments and too trivial or mundane for advanced treatments (really good discussions of when and how to use transformations or how or even whether to worry about outliers seem quite unusual)  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions that arise because many treatments are muddled, incorrect or contradictory (some spectacularly popular texts are riddled with error and confusion) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Questions which involve experience, judgement and personal analysis or modelling style in a way that seems open to discussion (many, perhaps most, questions based on the OP's own dataset can be of this form)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A corollary is that &lt;strong&gt;really elementary questions may not attract good threads here, possibly because too few people are interested in writing good answers, or are dubious that they can improve on what is readily available if you look for it&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those most active in answering questions here are by definition sympathetic to posting explanations on the internet, but (I speculate...) almost never did they themselves learn statistics or machine learning mostly by Googling and watching videos. They attended courses and (perhaps especially) worked their way through textbooks, studied papers, and learned by analysing data and making mistakes along the way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2020-06-01T13:11:37.910" LastActivityDate="2020-06-01T13:11:37.910" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5905" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-03T09:59:17.853" Score="1" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've found a site about &quot;spurious correlations&quot;, namely:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Questions about examples (1 example -&gt; 1 question) from the site are on topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="103180" LastActivityDate="2020-06-03T09:59:17.853" Title="Examples from http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5906" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5907" CreationDate="2020-06-04T12:55:08.990" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; has been marked &quot;duplicate&quot;&lt;sup&gt;2-4&lt;/sup&gt; and closed. I believe it's a misunderstanding, since the other question my question has been associated with is different. The other question asks why a given variable becomes non-significant when included in a more complex model. My question asks why a given variable becomes significant when included in a more complex model. That's exactly the opposite, therefore the answers given in the other question (which I read before posting) don't help me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there something I can do to re-open the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/470322/linear-regression-why-is-a-variable-not-significant-on-its-own-but-significant&quot;&gt;Linear regression: why is a variable not significant on its own, but significant together with other variables&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/27257/significant-predictors-become-non-significant-in-multiple-logistic-regression&quot;&gt;Significant predictors become non-significant in multiple logistic regression&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/28474/how-can-adding-a-2nd-iv-make-the-1st-iv-significant&quot;&gt;How can adding a 2nd IV make the 1st IV significant?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/78828/is-there-a-difference-between-controlling-for-and-ignoring-other-variables-i&quot;&gt;Is there a difference between &amp;#39;controlling for&amp;#39; and &amp;#39;ignoring&amp;#39; other variables in multiple regression?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148562" LastEditorUserId="148562" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T13:19:03.527" LastActivityDate="2020-06-04T16:39:30.080" Title="Misunderstanding mark as duplicate question" Tags="|discussion|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5906" CreationDate="2020-06-04T16:39:30.080" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're right that the question at the bottom of your post (&quot;What should be the conclusion regarding the effect of b on value?&quot;) is OK.  In light of that, I'm willing to reopen (and answer) it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For future reference, that question doesn't match the question in the title of your post very well (&quot;why is a variable not significant on its own, but significant together with other variables&quot;).  Moreover, the title question is much more salient, and is a frequently asked question&amp;mdash;that's why it was closed as a duplicate (rightly, in my view: I read it before adding additional duplicate targets and interpreted the question at the bottom in light of the title).  It is your comments here, and your edit to your post, that clarify what the real question is.  For the record, those clarifications are the way to productively deal with having your post closed as a duplicate if you disagree.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2020-06-04T16:39:30.080" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5908" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5909" CreationDate="2020-06-08T17:27:51.617" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to start a bounty again for this question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/468189/how-do-i-perform-an-actual-posterior-predictive-check&quot;&gt;How do I perform an actual &amp;quot;posterior predictive check&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;), since it hasn't received enough attention and no answer has been provided yet. However, I don't see the option &quot;start a bounty,&quot; I only see the option &quot;question eligible for a bounty since may.&quot; What is preventing me to start a bounty?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user272422" LastActivityDate="2020-06-08T20:58:00.267" Title="Why can't I offer a bounty to this question?" Tags="|support|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5908" CreationDate="2020-06-08T17:39:12.893" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you've already offered a bounty of 100 rep., the minimum spend for the next bounty is 200 rep.&amp;mdash;and you haven't got enough yet. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/bounty&lt;/a&gt; for details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2020-06-08T20:58:00.267" LastActivityDate="2020-06-08T20:58:00.267" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5911" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5912" CreationDate="2020-06-12T01:56:12.527" Score="9" ViewCount="248" Body="&lt;p&gt;My activity on CV has not changed drastically over the past year or so, but I have noticed that lately, the past few months, I'm getting significantly more upvotes on my historical posts. Looking at the graph on my CV profile, there's an obvious change in rate of point accumulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fwjJj.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fwjJj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is anyone else seeing a similar trend?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11867" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T21:17:00.327" Title="Has anyone else noticed a inflection point in their scores?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5911" CreationDate="2020-06-12T04:33:12.670" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may have picked up a fan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked at the reputation over time plots for the 36 highest reputation users (the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Reputation&amp;amp;filter=all&quot;&gt;first page of users&lt;/a&gt;, sorted by all time reputation), and I don't see any others with such an inflection point.  I likewise looked at the users with reputation ~10k (i.e., similar to you, in that respect), and I once again see no others with that pronounced change in slope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your inflection point comes about halfway into the portion of 2020 that has elapsed so far.  If I look at your plot of reputation changes per day for 2020, I see that you started getting a higher density of upvotes around the beginning of April.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UzA62.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UzA62.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I look though the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/11867/cam-davidson-pilon?tab=reputation&amp;amp;sort=post&quot;&gt;individual posts&lt;/a&gt; associated with those upvotes, they are mostly all unique.  That suggests someone has started systematically reading your old posts and upvoting many of them.  Since you have a finite number of posts, this phenomenon won't last forever, but enjoy it while it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2020-06-12T05:08:06.803" LastActivityDate="2020-06-12T05:08:06.803" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5913" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5914" CreationDate="2020-06-12T12:09:40.117" Score="8" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because EITHER is not about statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, or data visualization, OR it focuses on programming, debugging, or performing routine operations within a statistical computing platform. If the latter, you could try the support links we maintain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This states that we are supposed to ask questions related to &lt;code&gt;statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, or data visualization&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are we supposed to ask questions related to deep learning/AI?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="260797" LastActivityDate="2020-06-12T12:58:26.783" Title="Can we ask questions related to deep learning/AI?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5913" CreationDate="2020-06-12T12:58:26.783" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Deep learning is a subtopic within machine learning, which is on topic.  Deep learning is just, um, deeper than regular machine learning.  Note that we have an active tag, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/deep-belief-networks&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;deep-belief-networks&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;deep-belief-networks&lt;/a&gt;, that pertains to deep learning with 89 threads.  We have also had tags for &lt;code&gt;[deep-learning]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[deep-rl]&lt;/code&gt; that are now mapped to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/neural-networks&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;neural-networks&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;neural-networks&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reinforcement-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reinforcement-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reinforcement-learning&lt;/a&gt;.  That doesn't mean that those topics became off limits, just that, e.g., deep learning is now nearly synonymous with neural networks and it isn't useful for us to maintain distinct tags from the perspective of organizing the information on the site.  I also &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=title%3Adeep+is%3Aquestion+&quot;&gt;find&lt;/a&gt; 631 questions with &amp;quot;deep&amp;quot; in the title, of which 90% are not closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Artificial intelligence is somewhat trickier.  We do have an &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/artificial-intelligence&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;artificial-intelligence&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;artificial-intelligence&lt;/a&gt; tag that hosts 229 threads.  However, AI is a broader topic than machine learning, rather than a subset.  There are aspects of AI that would not fall within our scope.  In addition, there is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;artificial intelligence&lt;/a&gt; SE site, where such questions (even the broader ones) can be asked and might find a better audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2020-06-12T12:58:26.783" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5915" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-16T15:26:11.013" Score="20" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't intend this to be directed at the Mod and User in question, but this instance has me questioning what kinds of edits to posts are acceptable here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/265170&quot;&gt;recent edit&lt;/a&gt; to a post of mine. It is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;trivial to the point of uselessness, there is zero practical benefit to the reader,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;requires an additional package unrelated to the others to be installed before the code can be used/run.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &amp;quot;trivial&amp;quot; I don't mean specifically &amp;quot;small&amp;quot;; what I do mean is &amp;quot;inconsequential&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;superficial&amp;quot;, where there is no improvement per se following the edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the linked instance, the edit involved changing from using a standard base R data frame to the modern reimplementation of data frames from the &lt;em&gt;tibble&lt;/em&gt; package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the intent comes across as ideological. By &amp;quot;ideological&amp;quot; what I meant specifically was the ongoing debates about &lt;em&gt;base R&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;tidy&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;data table&lt;/em&gt;. I don't think this is specific to R, so that part of the question pertains to how should we treat edits wherein code is edited to change it from one paradigm to another?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that I as the author of the post have an overrule, which I exercised, but as this was approved by a Mod I wondered if it was me that was out of step here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1390" LastEditorUserId="1390" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T21:10:27.530" LastActivityDate="2020-06-20T04:28:46.773" Title="Should trivial (bordering on (if not outright) ideological) edits to post be acceptable?" Tags="|discussion|editing|review|etiquette|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5915" CreationDate="2020-06-16T19:22:14.593" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should trivial edits be acceptable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is trivial? Not all 'trivial' edits are useless (sometimes a comma can change the entire meaning of a sentence). When it comes to review suggested-edits, use your best judgement and stick to the guidance provided in the review dialog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, that edit should have been rejected as it changes the content from OP's post. I would have rejected as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;clearly conflicts with author's intent&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This edit deviates from the original intent of the post. Even edits that must make drastic changes should strive to preserve the goals of the post's owner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other two reasons from the review dialog would also fit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'no improvement whatsoever'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'attempt to reply' (should have been written as a comment).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22468" LastEditorUserId="22468" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T19:29:08.460" LastActivityDate="2020-06-16T19:29:08.460" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5915" CreationDate="2020-06-17T15:03:00.957" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The code in the question was this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;df = data_frame(group = as.factor(rep(1:5, each=100)),&#xA;                x = rep(seq(-3,3, length.out =100), 5),&#xA;                y=as.numeric(dnorm(x, mean=means[group]) &amp;gt; 0.4*runif(10)))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your answer you adapted it to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;df &amp;lt;- data.frame(group = as.factor(rep(1:5, each=100)),&#xA;                 x = rep(seq(-3,3, length.out =100), 5),&#xA;                 y = as.numeric(dnorm(x, mean=means[group]) &amp;gt; &#xA;                       0.4*runif(10)),&#xA;                 dummy = 1) # dummy variable trick&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;, &amp;amp; note that as well as appending &lt;code&gt;dummy&lt;/code&gt;, you changed &lt;code&gt;data.frame&lt;/code&gt; (from the &lt;code&gt;base&lt;/code&gt; package) to &lt;code&gt;data_frame&lt;/code&gt; (from the &lt;code&gt;tibble&lt;/code&gt; package). This gives an error with the &lt;code&gt;data.table&lt;/code&gt; function because &lt;code&gt;group&lt;/code&gt; doesn't yet exist when you try use it to use it to create &lt;code&gt;y&lt;/code&gt;—but doesn't with the &lt;code&gt;data_table&lt;/code&gt; function, which is an alias for &lt;code&gt;tibble&lt;/code&gt;. When the editor was fixing your code they presumably changed &lt;code&gt;data.frame&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;tibble&lt;/code&gt; rather than back to the OP's &lt;code&gt;data_frame&lt;/code&gt; because &lt;code&gt;data_frame&lt;/code&gt; is now deprecated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there were good reasons for the edit in this case. But if there were someone going round replacing &lt;code&gt;data.frame&lt;/code&gt;s with &lt;code&gt;tibbles&lt;/code&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;vice versa&lt;/em&gt;) just for the sake of it they oughtn't to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2020-06-17T15:03:00.957" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5915" CreationDate="2020-06-19T23:12:37.403" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;When providing an edit, the editor should also include feedback as to what and why the changes are being made. It sometimes happens that what appears to be trivial to the author is not at all trivial. For peer reviewed journals, the default procedure for answering a reviewer is to accept whatever the reviewer says. This site is structured more ineffectually than standard peer review, as points are awarded to those of moderate reputation who do edits, so that there can be more garbage reviews than for a standard peer reviewed journal. (Edit) &lt;em&gt;There is an opportunity to provide a justification for not agreeing with peer review when rolling back an edit back and explain why in the edit summary box on this site, whereas for a typical journal this would be a bit less ambiguously directed communication, by just explaining why not to make a change to the reviewer. Herein,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When providing an edit, make it absolutely clear why this is being done, there is only a one time opportunity for doing so.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When reversing an edit be absolutely certain that this is correct. There may be no other opportunities to correct an error that may be insidious.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In cases of disagreement as to edits, the author should consider providing a comment to the attention of the editor. Although this is not an obvious feature of the software, it is actually present and should be used for dispute reconciliation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="99274" LastEditDate="2020-06-20T04:28:46.773" LastActivityDate="2020-06-20T04:28:46.773" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5919" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5921" CreationDate="2020-06-21T11:20:29.650" Score="1" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I flagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/473144/how-to-get-good-accuracy-of-a-linear-regression-model-having-very-few-observatio&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; as &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;needs details or clarity&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;; my flag was declined, while the question was closed as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93018" LastEditorUserId="93018" LastEditDate="2020-06-21T11:33:26.050" LastActivityDate="2020-06-21T12:43:38.647" Title="Why was my flag declined while the question was closed for the flag reason?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5920" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5923" CreationDate="2020-06-21T12:04:50.140" Score="10" ViewCount="315" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see no other forum to raise this, so I'm raising it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/473287/is-there-any-consensus-or-literature-on-the-proportion-of-font-parameters-within&quot;&gt;Is there any consensus or literature on the proportion of font parameters within plots?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that this is a reasonable thing to expect there to be literature on, even though it's not an exact question such as &lt;code&gt;solve for x : 2x + 3 = 8&lt;/code&gt; or whatever. Highlighting literature on the matter was specifically said to be a suitable answer - even if said literature is subjective (I'm happy to follow the subjective advice of someone who's an expert at something).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137921" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T16:32:46.923" Title="I object to the closing of the following question" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5919" CreationDate="2020-06-21T12:43:38.647" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a side-effect of leaving the question open, which will decline the flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/473144/timeline&quot;&gt;timeline&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At 11:27:21 UTC, there was an initial vote to close &lt;em&gt;as a duplicate&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/222179&quot;&gt;How to know that your machine learning problem is hopeless?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Either before or after this, you flagged the question as &amp;quot;needs details or clarity&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At 11:50:45 UTC, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/close/265576&quot;&gt;the review item&lt;/a&gt; was created, garnering another close vote, then a binding &lt;em&gt;leave open&lt;/em&gt; by a moderator. &lt;em&gt;This action declined your flag.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At 13:59:54 UTC, the moderator then voted to close as &amp;quot;needs details or clarity&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/comments/873663&quot;&gt;the moderator's comment&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the question needs more detail before we can tell if it is a duplicate or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the moderator was worried if the question would still be closed as a duplicate instead of &amp;quot;needs details or clarity&amp;quot;. Possibly a confusion, but I believe there was no harmful intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62336" LastActivityDate="2020-06-21T12:43:38.647" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5920" CreationDate="2020-06-21T20:18:12.653" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since it was me who closed the question, let me share my thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, my concerns were mostly pointed out by &lt;em&gt;@Andrew T.&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. choosing font parameters seems to be more related to graphic design. The appearance of the question on CrossValidated.com seems to be a case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14470/what-is-the-boat-programming-meme-about/14486#14486&quot;&gt;boat programming&lt;/a&gt; (although I didn't know this term before). Asking about relative font size does not really differ from asking about choosing font family, or colours, for the graph, how to align it on a page, etc., so this is in a graphic design domain. In many cases if figures are submitted with a publication, a graphic designer is the person who makes appropriate adjustments so that they look nice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, it is a broad question, where the answer would to great extent depend on personal taste (&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;does this look better, or that&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;), but also on many different factors. A figure, or any other element of a publication, or graphic design, would look different on screen, than when posted on  a blog, or in a journal article, different if it were printed in a book, or in a PowerPoint presentation, different depending on whether they are printed in colour, greyscale, black and white, or depending on what would be their size (e.g. a small plot in paper vs poster at a conference), using different fonts may need adjustments in their size, etc. Because of all those factors, there will be no single answer to such question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question has the following acceptance criteria for the answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer does not have to be in Python or use the above code, that&#xA;is just to illustrate the point. If there's a way that the fontsizes&#xA;could me made a function of something such as the title, and&#xA;literature to support the sizing of them, that would be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that this &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; already handled by the defaults of the plotting software you are using. Whatever you are using, matplotlib, base R graphics, ggplot2, Excel, etc. they all have some predefined defaults that are based on what their authors considered as best practice, or what was most consistent with their aesthetic taste. The fact alone that the OP considers changing those defaults shows that there is no &amp;quot;one size fits all&amp;quot; solutions for this problem. Even more, ggplot2 alone has &lt;a href=&quot;https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org/reference/ggtheme.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nine built-in themes&lt;/a&gt; with different visual styles, since different users may prefer different appearances of the figures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making readable plots should be a concern of any statistician or data scientist, since to communicate our findings we often need to present them. The reason why I closed the question was that it simply does not seem to fall into the pretty narrow scope of this site. The boundary in such cases is often hard to draw, so if the community disagrees, I won't insist on this decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="35989" LastEditDate="2020-06-22T07:28:42.163" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T07:28:42.163" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5920" CreationDate="2020-06-22T16:32:46.923" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of statistics is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The art of telling a story with [numerical] data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldofstatistics.org/wos/pdfs/WOSFlyer.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The World of Statistics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The techniques and principles of telling such stories are primarily graphical.  Those who use two-dimensional graphics to represent and communicate quantitative data usually identify themselves as &lt;em&gt;cartographers.&lt;/em&gt;  Statisticians, although we might not aspire to be cartographers, must be intelligent, well-informed users of cartographic methods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cartography literature includes experimental results and recommendations concerning elements outside the immediate plot area.  This includes titles, axis labels, comments, legends, footnotes, captions, and anything else that is integrated with the graphic and is important for interpreting it.  For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borden_Dent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Borden Dent&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Cartography,&lt;/em&gt; Fifth Edition) wrote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... titles, legends, and other explanatory information, like any other graphic elements, need to fit into the whole plan for the [graphic].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Dent, Chapter 14.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He proceeds to recommend a gradation of type sizes for various such elements.  Then he turns to considerations of spacing of titles and (rather vaguely) to the placement of the elements in the overall graphic.  It's all rather obvious when you read it--but then when you examine many statistical graphics, especially those produced only by statisticians, it becomes apparent that these obvious principles are not frequently observed.  (Many people asking questions on CV post graphics that are so deficient in this regard that they are unreadable.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike moderator @Tim, whose opinions I respect, I do not construe this site to have a &amp;quot;pretty narrow scope,&amp;quot; but view it more expansively as covering methods, principles, procedures, and concepts needed for thinking about and applying statistics.  In this context the question we are discussing is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a case of the &amp;quot;boat programming&amp;quot; meme (wherein the involvement of statistics is only incidental to the question, and trivially so).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After reviewing Dent (and a few other cartographic classics) I felt that reopening the question would be appropriate and did so. Please do not read any criticism of the original closure into this action, though: the subject matter clearly is on the edge of what most of us would consider on topic on CV.  That, and the apparent triviality of the question, were sufficient justification for the initial closure decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T16:32:46.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3175" CreationDate="2020-06-23T07:52:27.210" Score="9" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Answer as soon as possible&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I see this in a question I have an urge to close the question even without reading further. I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; read further and usually close the question, because in most cases those are homework assignments that someone wants us to solve for them because they didn't bother and the deadline is coming. Those are sometimes also not homework, but other problems, but usually &amp;quot;I need an answer ASAP&amp;quot; means that someone didn't plan ahead, or didn't think over the problem carefully and now they are desperate. In the latter case the description of the problem is usually chaotic and unclear. In both cases the meta answer is that the OP should plan ahead solving their problem: they could even post a question at an earlier stage and that would increase their chance of solving it on time. Moreover, this is not a question-answering service, so nobody should demand answers to their question &amp;quot;ASAP&amp;quot;. I find that rude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2020-06-23T17:15:21.177" LastActivityDate="2020-06-23T17:15:21.177" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5926" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5927" CreationDate="2020-06-25T19:36:42.357" Score="29" ViewCount="531" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently, it takes 5 &lt;em&gt;close&lt;/em&gt; votes from users with the vote-to-close privilege (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions&quot;&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\ge3000$&lt;/span&gt; reputation&lt;/a&gt;), or 1 vote from a moderator, to close a question.  If the question is being closed as a duplicate of an existing thread, it can also be closed by a single user with a gold tag badge on one of the tags on the question, if the OP had put that tag on the question originally.  On the other hand, if there are 3 &lt;em&gt;leave open&lt;/em&gt; votes on a question in the queue, it will not be closed and will exit the queue.  However, right now (6/25/20) we have 47 threads sitting the the close vote queue.  That seems to be typical.  Over the past few years, the queue has occasionally gotten into triple digits; it has not gotten to 0 and stayed there long enough to be recorded.  If neither voting threshold is reached, the thread will 'age out' of the close vote queue after 4 or 14 days (depending on whether the question has &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\ge 100$&lt;/span&gt; or &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$&amp;lt;100$&lt;/span&gt; views, respectively).  I believe there have been many threads that have been unresolved and simply aged away, but I don't know the number.  To the extent that threads have been closed or left open consciously, it has been primarily due to action by voters with the power to unilaterally resolve the issue.  To a large extent, threads have been resolved due to the efforts of Peter Flom, who has completed more than 15 thousand reviews (thanks, Peter!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This state of affairs seems suboptimal to me:  Many threads are not resolved, those that are often take too long to reach resolution, and too much of the burden and results have been shoulders of too few.  I am now wondering how we should move forward.  I see a couple options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We could continue with the status quo.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;This does not seem like a great option to me, but I don't know if others share that opinion.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We could try to somehow get users with sufficient reputation to engage with the close vote queue more.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;How?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A third possibility is to petition SE to lower the threshold for closing questions from 5 votes (presumably to 3).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Stack Overflow did this, and while their queue remains very long, it did improve.  Another 14 of the smaller SE sites (I don't have the list) have had this policy change.  I gather they have had improvements as well.  One thing to note about this option is that, if we elect to do this, it is unlikely that the change will be implemented very quickly; the SE staff who do this sort of thing has been reduced, even though the network has grown.  Nonetheless, it can be done, if we choose to move forward.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Update:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Something to bear in mind is that we are discussing a very specific proposed change:  Lowering the threshold for closing questions from 5 to 3 (I don't believe that even changing from 5 to &lt;strong&gt;4&lt;/strong&gt; is an option).  This change is on the table because it is something SE has decided they will do (eventually) for sites that want it.  It may be that some other changes will come along with this (e.g., @StephanKolassa's observation that the number of close votes a user can cast was increased on SO), but even that is speculative.  People have proffered lots of other ideas that may help if implemented in addition to or in place of changing the threshold, but those would ultimately have to be the subject of other discussions on meta.SE, approved by SE's hierarchy, assigned to developers' queues, etc.  It is fine to spitball additional options here, but we need to be clear on what we're discussing and what changes are realistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="202450" LastEditDate="2022-06-16T22:07:50.530" LastActivityDate="2022-06-16T22:07:50.530" Title="Should we reduce the vote threshold for closing questions?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|closing-questions|votes|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5926" CreationDate="2020-06-26T12:17:09.847" Score="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm all in favor of option 3: ask SE to lower the threshold for closing questions from 5 to 3 votes. (Importantly, the same should apply to the threshold for &lt;em&gt;reopening&lt;/em&gt; a question. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/reopen-questions&quot;&gt;This is also the case at SO.&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, at SO, qualified users of 3000 rep minimum can cast &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;up to 50 close or reopen votes per day&lt;/a&gt;. Here, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;we only get 24 close (and presumably reopen) votes per day&lt;/a&gt;. So I would also propose to raise these limits to 50 per day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal impression is that a large majority of questions that need closing are really clear-cut cases. We don't need a consensus of five sufficiently experienced users. Three is plenty. And if something gets closed that shouldn't, then the same logic applies. I can't recall a question where a larger consensus would have been useful, and if so, we can always open a question on Meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I don't see a good way to increase participation in the review queues, although that would certainly be a worthwhile goal. I'm as guilty as the next user of not looking at them enough, simply because it's a thankless job. By definition, you don't see the kind of interesting and fun questions that draw you to CV, but the exact opposite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as long as it's a thankless and boring job, let's at least increase our effectiveness by 67% (if 3 votes can close a question instead of requiring 5, then each vote is &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\frac{5}{3}$&lt;/span&gt; as effective).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2020-06-26T12:17:09.847" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5929" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5930" CreationDate="2020-06-30T12:23:40.340" Score="17" ViewCount="256" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made an interesting observation today. A user asked a question which was closed some time later, because the question needed more focus. As I scroll up, I see the same question being asked again with very minor changes by the same user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I don't like to just make assumptions, but I am guessing this person is fairly desperate. It is probable that a moderator or someone with high enough reputation will close the newer question once again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What if this user keeps asking the same question every 40 minutes? Do we have a policy on this?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not been able to find anything on this type of problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="284660" LastActivityDate="2020-06-30T13:10:46.107" Title="Question closed, user asks it again" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|policy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5929" CreationDate="2020-06-30T13:10:46.107" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Tim is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5929/question-closed-user-asks-it-again#comment19984_5929&quot;&gt;right&lt;/a&gt;: users will be automatically banned by the SE system from asking (answering) questions if they have too many posts that are negatively scored, closed, or deleted.  The exact parameters of the ban are not disclosed, even to moderators.  The moderators do not have the ability to impose or lift it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, you don't have to wait for that ban to kick in.  If you see someone reask a closed question, flag it for moderator attention.  We can close it and talk to the OP.  We can also keep an eye on them for a bit.  If they keep posting anyway, we can temporarily prevent them.  It is unlikely this would need to go very far to address the issue.  In truth, we don't want people to get bans.  Those bans are, in effect, permanent.  As I noted above, moderators can't lift them.  So it's better to talk to them and get them on a better track right away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2020-06-30T13:10:46.107" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3175" CreationDate="2020-07-03T07:32:27.540" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Data is included... as a screenshot (or scan)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pqOhJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pqOhJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;data&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are often better able to help you if we know the data you have. However, a &lt;em&gt;screenshot&lt;/em&gt; (or scan) of your data is usually useless. Please don't expect us to type your data off ourselves!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the very least, paste your data into your question as actual text and numbers. If you use R, paste in the output of &lt;code&gt;dput(your_data)&lt;/code&gt;, which has the advantage of giving us the &lt;em&gt;exact&lt;/em&gt; data you are using, including all the &amp;quot;invisible&amp;quot; attributes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; your_data &amp;lt;- ts(rnorm(10),frequency=4)&#xA;&amp;gt; dput(your_data)&#xA;structure(c(1.05933915992086, 0.0232705232306941, 0.559884365949286, &#xA;-0.420069990155258, 0.779473916276636, -1.29044555426724, 0.881259350107899, &#xA;1.42835014304511, 1.97922676401677, -0.0579681924819385), .Tsp = c(1, &#xA;3.25, 4), class = &amp;quot;ts&amp;quot;)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you just pasted in a sequence of ten numbers, we would not know that this was a &lt;code&gt;ts&lt;/code&gt; (time series) object with a &lt;code&gt;frequency&lt;/code&gt; attribute set to 4, so probably quarterly data. This can make a difference! So your question should ideally contain the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;your_data &amp;lt;- structure(c(1.05933915992086, 0.0232705232306941, 0.559884365949286, &#xA;-0.420069990155258, 0.779473916276636, -1.29044555426724, 0.881259350107899, &#xA;1.42835014304511, 1.97922676401677, -0.0579681924819385), .Tsp = c(1, &#xA;3.25, 4), class = &amp;quot;ts&amp;quot;)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; more useful to us than the screenshot at the beginning of this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you make it easy for us to help you, you have a better chance of actually getting help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2020-07-03T07:32:27.540" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5933" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5934" CreationDate="2020-07-04T15:22:56.753" Score="13" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just came across this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/475486/gpu-vs-tpu-for-convolutional-neural-networks-nlp&quot;&gt;GPU vs TPU for convolutional neural networks (NLP)&lt;/a&gt;, which seems more suited to &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;datascience.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; - than CrossValidated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under &amp;quot;This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network&amp;quot; as a reason to close, it is not possible to redirect to data science. Should it be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17072" LastActivityDate="2020-07-04T15:45:10.673" Title="Redirect questions to datascience.stackexchange.com?" Tags="|discussion|datascience-stackexchange|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5933" CreationDate="2020-07-04T15:45:10.673" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In your vote to close you can indicate where you think the post should be migrated.&lt;/strong&gt;  In processing that vote, diamond mods can select any site for migration and usually follow suggestions (because we're grateful for the thought that went into them in the first place).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The system limits how many sites can appear as targets for redirection.  I recall we are at our limit and believe the existing ones (SO and Math) are targeted far more frequently than DS.  Indeed, even if we had the room, DS wouldn't be high on the list.  This year we have migrated posts to Econ, OpenData, GIS, Signal Processing, and even English at least as frequently as to DS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, in this case I elected to keep the question open because it does require some understanding of the underlying algorithms and therefore, it seemed to me, is not solely a question of computing--but I have to agree that it might be more suited to DS.  I tend to defer to the OP's choice of site in such cases and therefore do not immediately vote to migrate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2020-07-04T15:45:10.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5935" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5936" CreationDate="2020-07-07T03:33:52.047" Score="2" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions related to programming/coding is mostly related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;Stackoverflow&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;R is a programming language for statistical computing. Can we ask questions related to R-programming??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="260797" LastEditorUserId="121522" LastEditDate="2020-07-07T08:22:20.580" LastActivityDate="2020-07-07T08:22:20.580" Title="Can we ask questions related to R Programming?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5935" CreationDate="2020-07-07T08:21:53.970" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Programming questions are off-topic, but there are some grey areas. It's fine to ask here if the core of the question is statistical. From the help page &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are certain subjects that will probably get better responses on&#xA;our sister sites. If your question is about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Programming, ask on Stack Overflow. If the language is statistically&#xA;oriented (such as R, SAS, Stata, SPSS, etc.), then decide based on the&#xA;nature of your question: if it needs statistical expertise to&#xA;understand or answer, ask it here; if it's about the implementation of&#xA;an algorithm, routine data processing, or details of the language,&#xA;then please refer to the collection of links to resources we maintain.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastActivityDate="2020-07-07T08:21:53.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5937" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5941" CreationDate="2020-07-08T15:26:08.740" Score="14" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes a user offers an Answer which can be &lt;em&gt;proven&lt;/em&gt; false, but the proof doesn't fit in the comment box. Is there a best practice for pointing this out? (I'm explicitly not asking about differences of opinion or judgement, but things that are provably true or false in a mathematical sense.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Offering the proof in a different Answer to the same Question doesn't seem like appropriate use of the Answer feature.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Breaking the proof into several comments is tedious and hard because the edit duration expires.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asking and Answering a &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; Question, and then posting a comment that links to the new post seems like the best option.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have I missed a better alternative?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2020-07-08T15:48:54.700" LastActivityDate="2020-07-20T07:31:40.527" Title="What to do when an answer is wrong, but a comment box is too small?" Tags="|discussion|answers|comment|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5940" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-13T06:56:24.750" Score="4" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/474938/276972&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; closed by a moderator. The close banner says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question needs to be more focused. It is not currently accepting answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like the question and I hope the question is reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is on explaining the meaning and origin of different names indicating independent variables.&#xA;I tried to edit the question in several ways such as limiting the question range. But it couldn't be reopened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also ready to convert it to community wiki question but it doesn't have any option to convert it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you have any suggestions to change the question in the format which can be accepted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="276972" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T06:56:24.750" Title="How can I reopen this question?" Tags="|support|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5937" CreationDate="2020-07-14T20:07:00.460" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just so that this question has an answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One method is to post your own answer to the question. In passing, it can demonstrate that an alternative strategy is not correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the answer to the question is not known, then asking and answering a question can be one method to provide a demonstration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As always is the case with interacting with other users, it requires careful wording to provide constructive feedback which is not read as an affront. This can be tricky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastActivityDate="2020-07-14T20:07:00.460" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5942" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-15T07:31:31.567" Score="-4" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, such game should exist&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To learn basics of statistics and improve basic concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To improve site traffic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can add those games beside the chat window, or as a sidebar beside main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sample Game 1:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There will be a Gaussian curve. The user requires to put standard deviations and means and the curve will shift accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sample Game 2:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Student's T distribution where the user have to put different values for degree of freedom and to see when the curve approaches the Gaussian&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sample game 3:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;chi-square distribution  with k degrees of freedom is the distribution of a sum of the squares of k independent standard normal random variables (Wikipedia)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How different independent normal random variables make up the Chi square will be visualised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sample game 4:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hypothesis testing: Type 1 error and type 2 error.&#xA;There will be a table.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/teN8N.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/teN8N.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt; ... From Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Computer will tell whether H0 is true or H1 is true. The user have to click &amp;quot;Accept null hypothesis&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Reject null hypothesis&amp;quot;. The computer will hilioght the box on whether the user took right decision or made an error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is no hurry to implement the games&lt;/strong&gt;. Feel free to suggest such silly games to develop insight into statistics, and to learn very basics of statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ideas will help the&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Beginners or novices.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Non-mathematics or Non-statistics people.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Those having misconceptions and confusions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Those not getting the concepts and links.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="161877" LastEditorUserId="161877" LastEditDate="2020-07-15T07:36:35.333" LastActivityDate="2020-07-15T11:32:03.407" Title="Should we have some interactive games or tools about statistics and data science? If yes, Suggest game or tool ideas" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5942" CreationDate="2020-07-15T08:01:28.357" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have no control on the code used on the site, so there is no way for us to introduce new features to the site. You could send this to Stack Exchange Inc as a feature request, but I find it unlikely that they would introduce site-specific features given how many Stack Exchange sites there are. Moreover, this is a Q&amp;amp;A site, it has a specific purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2020-07-15T11:32:03.407" LastActivityDate="2020-07-15T11:32:03.407" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5945" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5946" CreationDate="2020-07-16T11:03:38.137" Score="10" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can we ask for an intuitive explanation of models, algorithms, and topics related to Machine Learning/Deep Learning topics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like -  &lt;strong&gt;Intuitive Explanation of &amp;quot;AutoEncoders&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Optimizers&amp;quot; etc..?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="260797" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T11:30:35.607" Title="Can we ask for an intuitive explanation on Machine Learning/Deep Learning topics?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5945" CreationDate="2020-07-16T11:30:35.607" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have lots of questions like that.  Take a look at what exists under our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/intuition&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;intuition&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;intuition&lt;/a&gt; tag.  If you want, you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/intuition+machine-learning&quot;&gt;search on both &lt;code&gt;[intuition]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[machine-learning]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T11:30:35.607" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5891" CreationDate="2020-07-16T17:44:21.613" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see value in this suggestion, and have created the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/absolute-value&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;absolute-value&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;absolute-value&lt;/a&gt; tag, and invite you to improve upon both my quick and dirty précis and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/absolute-value/info&quot;&gt;info page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also invite anyone critical of the tag to motivate its reform or removal in a separate answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44269" LastEditorUserId="44269" LastEditDate="2020-07-16T20:02:17.013" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T20:02:17.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5937" CreationDate="2020-07-20T07:31:40.527" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would probably go for one of these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ask clarifying questions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These should ideally lead to edits to the answer instead of comment replies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the poster made unsupported claims or had a few missing (and impossible) steps in their argument, you can ask them to expand on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could give you a much smaller part to disagree with, in that you don't need to prove the entire counter-claim from scratch, but you can rather just point out the incorrect part of their justification for their claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also has the advantages that they may see the issue in their answer themselves or you may realise you were actually wrong without having to have &lt;em&gt;been&lt;/em&gt; wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course this doesn't work so well if they don't actually reply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ask a new self-answered question addressing the issue.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the new question would be a stand-alone question that could also be useful to others, then this is indeed probably the best option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Give a brief summary of why they're wrong and link to elsewhere.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is actually also what you'd be doing when posting a new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it isn't a common error and you can't find a reference that explains it well, you could always link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt; and explain it yourself there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="280632" LastActivityDate="2020-07-20T07:31:40.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5949" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-26T12:12:37.257" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A feature request or bug report with this tag is neither declined nor destined for implementation/fix. When such a decision has been made, the tag will be changed accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are multiple factors that may leave a report under review. There could be consideration of whether the proposed feature or bugfix is feasible or useful. There could be investigations on the complexity of the necessary solution. There could be insufficient information in the feature or bug report as presented. Site developers may provide additional comments to request more information or to provide status updates as appropriate to the status of the review, until such time as the decision for approval or decline is made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Status tags can only be applied by staff and ♦ moderators; the latter will only use this tag as part of the escalation process described here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/348642/295232&quot;&gt;What posts should be escalated to staff using [status-review], and how do I escalate them?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Copied from: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/status-review/info&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/tags/status-review/info&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79696" LastEditorUserId="79696" LastEditDate="2020-07-26T12:31:30.610" LastActivityDate="2020-07-26T12:31:30.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5950" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-26T12:12:37.257" Score="0" Body="Indicates that a change in functionality is currently under consideration, or needs further investigation." OwnerUserId="79696" LastEditorUserId="79696" LastEditDate="2020-07-26T12:31:12.593" LastActivityDate="2020-07-26T12:31:12.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5955" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-21T13:57:36.437" Score="-4" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;My post is here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/483798/how-can-i-test-whether-a-single-categorical-variable-significantly-changes-a-lin&quot;&gt;How can I test whether a single categorical variable significantly changes a linear regression model (0.05 level), without using the F test?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have written a very clear, short, focused question that doesn't have any ambiguity, yet the post remains closed.  I spent two days making minor changes, that I usually didn't agree caused ambiguity, to accommodate the feedback.  All of the items have been addressed, there is no more feedback, yet the post remains closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two votes to re-open shown.  I'm not sure if I need 3 or 5.  I know I only need one vote from whuber, who closed it with one vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems the post is closed because some people (or someone) doesn't &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; my question, rather than my question being ambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post was closed for ambiguity with a single vote from whuber, which I was not aware of until I recently reviewed the post's history. &lt;strong&gt;In the comments about the post being closed, whuber made a clear statement that &amp;quot;all you have needed to do to earn my vote is to state what hypothesis you wish to test.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; So I added the hypotheses.  Then there was the complaint that &amp;quot;statistically significant&amp;quot; was in the hypotheses, which whuber agreed with.  I can't even believe that.  How does make my post hard to understand. The post remained closed, so it was closed for that???  So I removed &amp;quot;statistically significant,&amp;quot; yet the post remains closed.&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;I pointed out to whuber what he said, and he has not made any response since.  He clearly hasn't followed up with his vote, as he can reopen it with one vote (as a moderator, just like he closed it with one vote).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the hypotheses: (it originally read &amp;quot;no statistically significant&amp;quot; difference)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;H&lt;sub&gt;0&lt;/sub&gt;: There is no difference between the mean of Var1 (groups combined) and the means of Var1 in any of the three groups defined by the values of X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;H&lt;sub&gt;A&lt;/sub&gt;: There is a difference between the mean of Var1 (groups combined) and at least one of the means of Var1 in the three groups defined by the values of X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a reason for the wording, and if it's a problem (how?) I'll make it a standard ANOVA-type hypothesis, which says that the means of the groups are equal.  I pointed that out in the comments, and this has never been replied to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need to know what is ambiguous, so I can get the post opened. The post is a short read. Or I just need vote(s) to reopen it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user280191" LastEditorDisplayName="user280191" LastEditDate="2020-08-21T14:32:48.393" LastActivityDate="2020-08-21T19:55:33.617" Title="I Request My Post is Re-Opened" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2020-08-24T12:45:15.483" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5955" CreationDate="2020-08-21T16:21:13.867" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me reading the comments to the original post that people got distracted by issues which were possibly not core to your question. Looking at the summary you give in your post here it seems to me that if I take the null and alternative hypotheses and the paragraph which immediately follows them it might be summarised as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it meaningful to compare the overall mean with the mean of one of the sub-groups which comprise it and if it is, is that the same as testing for equality of the sub-group means?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that is what you ask then perhaps it might be better to ask that as a new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also the issue of, if it is possible, how to program a computer to do it but as I am sure you know including that is liable to get people to vote to close it as off-topic so I would strongly advise resisting any temptation to include that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course if I have mis-interpreted your question then that may help you to see how to re-word it to express what you do what to ask. Just for the record I had not seen the question before I saw this post on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastActivityDate="2020-08-21T16:21:13.867" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5955" CreationDate="2020-08-21T17:39:28.880" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is nothing ambiguous about your post.  It doesn't need any revisions.  You have maintained the same question from the original version, while addressing the claimed ambiguity that was brought up in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have a 3,000 rep to vote to reopen your post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user255758" LastActivityDate="2020-08-21T17:39:28.880" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5955" CreationDate="2020-08-21T19:41:30.493" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don’t have unilateral close/reopen privileges, but if I did, I would take the stance that your behavior earned you a timeout.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the ambiguity, you still haven’t explained why you’re fine using Wald test p-values on individual parameters but oppose a global Wald test. Further, your examination of the individual parameters leaves me wondering if a global test really is what you seek, particularly given your interest in testing XA (what about it?). &lt;strong&gt;(EDIT)&lt;/strong&gt; Finally, your first line asks if a categorical variable is significant overall. Does that mean that you want to test that some group has a nonzero mean? What if they all have the same nonzero mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you want an alternative to the usual ANOVA, of which Kruskal-Wallis, likelihood ratio, and permutation testing are three possibilities, but it’s not clear to me that those address the question that you want to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247274" LastEditorUserId="247274" LastEditDate="2020-08-21T19:55:33.617" LastActivityDate="2020-08-21T19:55:33.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5961" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5962" CreationDate="2020-08-26T11:12:12.980" Score="9" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been using the review queue for the last couple of weeks. I have mostly been reviewing &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;first posts&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often I will see a first post where the OP needs to give some more information before anyone will be able to answer it. Normally I would then drop a comment to let them know we need more information. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I have not been in the field of statistics for a long time so there are of course many fields in statistics that I don't know much about. It feels to me like if I comment (even though it is just to ask for more info) the OP often expects that I will be able to help them or give them an answer when I don't know enough to give a good or detailed answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I then rather &lt;code&gt;skip&lt;/code&gt; the post and review posts that I am able to potentially answer? &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Or can I still comment and expect that someone else will help the OP further?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="284660" LastActivityDate="2020-08-26T14:15:52.207" Title="Review queue comments and edits on first posts" Tags="|discussion|review|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5961" CreationDate="2020-08-26T11:33:09.940" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/252195/4751173&quot;&gt;There is no shame in using “Skip”&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, you're not &lt;em&gt;required&lt;/em&gt; to reply to comments from the original author; often, other helpful users chime in and take over the 'conversation'. This is the nature of an asynchronous collaboration platform like Stack Exchange. There's no guarantee the next reviewer &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; be able to help the author; moderation tasks like reviewing are meant to be performed by users who have decent knowledge about a site's topic &lt;em&gt;in general&lt;/em&gt;, but do not require subject matter expertise in a specific area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you still feel uncomfortable, you could use &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/149380/295232&quot;&gt;tag filters&lt;/a&gt; to limit the posts you see in the review queue to those tags you are familiar with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79696" LastActivityDate="2020-08-26T11:33:09.940" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5961" CreationDate="2020-08-26T12:41:11.827" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with everything @Glorfindel said, but have slightly different emphasis and extra details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It can be quite easy to tell that a question is not good or even quite off-topic even if you have no idea of a good answer or of what a good answer would look like.&lt;/strong&gt; This is the positive side of reviewing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Extreme cases include spam and posts with offensive content. It is often better just to flag the question for moderator action. But this is something you grow into. It's not always out of order that several people register displeasure, at least briefly, to send a strong signal, moderately expressed, to the OP. Much depends. There is  a risk that you get caught up in cross-fire, which does not help anybody, and can just lead to frayed tempers and a stressful exchange. On the other hand, some offending posters regard moderator action as arbitrary abuse of power by one person, and commenting in support of a moderator -- or in anticipation of a likely moderator action -- does signal a shared reaction to inappropriate content. But if in doubt, just flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A comment can always express a measure of diffidence, as in &amp;quot;Not my field at all, but my guess is that even experts in this need much more information&amp;quot;. That way, it should be clearer that you won't be following up with much more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A common reaction to &amp;quot;Not clear&amp;quot; is &amp;quot;How do I make it clear then?&amp;quot; which can be difficult to answer to satisfy the OP. If you don't know what is being asked, then it's likely that you can't suggest a way to rewrite it. But advice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to be more specific&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to show some data or more about them, giving a graph or summary statistics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to give an example&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to explain the goals of a project&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to spell out what &amp;quot;didn't work&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to give a context&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is often easy. Many posters are naive, or lazy, or both -- or they expect a first post to be just the start of an exchange. Treating a forum as if it were a helpline is part of what can be going on here, and it can be sensible too. If I consult a medic I expect to show a problem or report symptoms, but then in turn to be asked several questions by the medic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The riposte &amp;quot;It's clear to me, so why isn't it clear to you?&amp;quot; is also common and hard to answer constructively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posting comments always carries some obligation to keep an eye on the thread and to delete them afterwards if they become obsolete, or someone else posts a better comment, or the comment turns out to be irrelevant, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2020-08-26T14:15:52.207" LastActivityDate="2020-08-26T14:15:52.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5964" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-27T04:09:48.900" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently stumbled across the popular &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/5115/most-famous-statisticians/5202#5202&quot;&gt;Most Famous Statisticians thread&lt;/a&gt;, which remains open as a Community Wiki. Some comments in the thread suggest that it was necessary to convert it to a Wiki to avoid closure as a subjective topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is whether or not it might be possible to reopen the popular &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/176718/statistical-anecdotes&quot;&gt;Statistical Anecdotes thread&lt;/a&gt; as a Community Wiki as well, since the questions are so similar in nature. Both are historical in topical matter and conducive to a &amp;quot;list of&amp;quot; format. The anecdote list also seems to fall into the same boat as the well-known &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/726/famous-statistical-quotations?rq=1&quot;&gt;Famous Statistical Quotations&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/109076/what-is-your-favorite-statistical-graph&quot;&gt;What is Your Favorite Statistical Graph?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/423/what-is-your-favorite-data-analysis-cartoon?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;What is Your Favorite “Data Analysis” Cartoon?&lt;/a&gt; threads, all of which remain open as Community Wikis. The same is also true of the threads on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1337/statistics-jokes?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;Statistical Jokes&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/4551/what-are-common-statistical-sins?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;Statistical Sins&lt;/a&gt;, among others. In fact, it might be argued that the anecdotes thread is an even less subjective topic than any of the above, since value judgments aren't involved and merely relate historical events in a matter-of-fact manner, for practical ends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone seems to agree that the anecdote list is a useful thread, but doesn't quite fit the standard StackExchange question model - just like the other threads discussed above. Personally, I find colorful historical illustrations of great use in explaining stats &amp;amp; related fields to others who know even less about the field than I do; like the joke and cartoon threads, they also provide a temporary break from the dry tedium sometimes involved in stats; they also assist in reconnecting the abstractions we work with back to physical examples. They're actually an aid to productivity for all three reasons, not just entertainment.&#xA;I don’t really have any anecdotes to contribute myself, but would like to leverage the answers as a resource, for teaching purposes among others. In the past I've run across many other such interesting tales besides the German Tank Problem in the academic literature, but they're widely scattered. It would be beneficial to us all to have them collected in one place - which might as well be CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of StackExchange is to get questions answered and to act as a productivity tool, both goals which the anecdote thread could help with. If it would break the StackExchange rules rather than bending them as we did to accommodate these other threads, please enlighten me as to the difference from the other Community Wikis listed above. I read some Meta posts on Community Wikis, but couldn’t use what I gleaned from them to discern the difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. It  may have already been converted to a Community Wiki, but not reopened; I’m unsure of the status.  But if that’s the case, I’m still wondering whether reopening under the Wiki status still isn’t warranted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="54091" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2020-08-27T06:29:07.983" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T13:13:00.703" Title="Could the &quot;Statistical Anecdotes&quot; thread be reopened as a Community Wiki?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5964" CreationDate="2020-08-27T13:13:00.703" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is really Should ... (call me pedantic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that it is best kept closed. The one answer posted before it was closed  is a well-known example that deserves wide publicity, but I don't think there is enough focus to the notion of &amp;quot;anecdote&amp;quot; to stop the thread, were it re-opened, becoming an arbitrary ragbag of  case studies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other threads mentioned mostly have much clearer focus and broadly speaking their success follows from that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T13:13:00.703" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="995" CreationDate="2020-09-18T08:31:02.720" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our paper summarizing this discussion: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/328630&quot;&gt;Is ridge regression useless in high dimensions ($n \ll p$)? How can OLS fail to overfit?&lt;/a&gt; has just been published by &lt;em&gt;The Journal of Machine Learning Research&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Optimal Ridge Penalty for Real-world High-dimensional Data Can Be Zero or Negative due to the Implicit Ridge Regularization&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Dmitry Kobak, Jonathan Lomond, Benoit Sanchez; 21(169):1−16, 2020.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://jmlr.org/papers/v21/19-844.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://jmlr.org/papers/v21/19-844.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was a preprint since mid-2018: &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.10939&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.10939&lt;/a&gt; but took some time to publish formally (and got substantially extended over the course of revisions). JMLR is a very respectable journal, so I am happy :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We of course acknowledge CrossValidated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4FKAk.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4FKAk.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@amoeba, @JonnyLomond, @BenoitSanchez&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28666" LastActivityDate="2020-09-18T08:31:02.720" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5779" CreationDate="2020-09-28T17:43:05.833" Score="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gung, thank you for your service as moderator, and I wish you the best success with whatever you choose to do with the time you would have spent moderating CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm glad you have decided to stay and contribute, because your answers have been useful to me in my work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39632" LastActivityDate="2020-09-28T17:43:05.833" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5973" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-28T18:25:26.830" Score="-10" ViewCount="378" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5981/72321&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cross Validated is scheduled for an election &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election/5&quot;&gt;next week, October 5, 2020&lt;/a&gt;. In connection with that, we will be holding a Q&amp;amp;A with the candidates. This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation.  Participation is completely voluntary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how it'll work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Until the nomination phase, (so, until October 5, 2020 at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 4:00 pm EDT on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post &lt;em&gt;one question per answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The first two will be guaranteed to be included, the latter ones are if the community doesn't supply enough questions. This will be done in a single post, unlike the prior instruction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If your question contains a link, please use the syntax of &lt;code&gt;[text](link)&lt;/code&gt;, as that will make it easier for transcribing for the finished questionnaire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into currently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At the start of the nomination phase, the Community Team will select &lt;strong&gt;up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community&lt;/strong&gt; provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions. We reserve some editorial control in the selection of the questions and may opt not to select a question that is tangential or irrelevant to moderation or the election.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Once questions have been selected, a new question will be opened to host the actual questionnaire for the candidates, typically containing 10 questions in total.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&amp;amp;A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any questions or feedback about this process, feel free to post as a comment here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72321" LastEditorUserId="72321" LastEditDate="2020-10-05T20:01:22.400" LastActivityDate="2020-10-05T20:01:22.400" Title="2020 Moderator Election Q&amp;A - Question Collection" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5973" CreationDate="2020-09-28T18:25:26.830" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a set of general questions, gathered as very common questions asked every election. As mentioned in the instructions, the first two questions are guaranteed to show up in the Q&amp;amp;A, while the others are if there aren't enough questions (or, if you like one enough, you may split it off as a separate answer for review within the community's 8).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In your opinion, what do moderators do?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72321" LastActivityDate="2020-09-28T18:25:26.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5842" CreationDate="2020-09-30T19:26:45.393" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a bump to this thread: Codidact now has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.codidact.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Math.Codidact site&lt;/a&gt;, with scope&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;General Q&amp;amp;A about all branches of theoretical and applied mathematics, including closely-adjacent sciences where the central question is about the math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to have a certain overlap with CrossValidated, though a lot of our content here would apparently be off-topic there. It might be interesting at some point in time to create a statistics site there. But as others have written here, the network effects of 167,766 questions at CV are strong...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2020-09-30T19:26:45.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5973" CreationDate="2020-09-30T20:17:13.953" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you have any Meta posts that you're particularly proud of, or that you feel best demonstrate your moderation style?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Taken from &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/352386/452096&quot;&gt;the 2017 SO election Q&amp;amp;A thread&lt;/a&gt;, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4887/2017-moderator-election-qa-question-collection?cb=1#comment13937_4887&quot;&gt;Firebug very helpfully linked to&lt;/a&gt;. Cribbed shamelessly from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4895/1352&quot;&gt;the question collection from the 2017 election&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2020-09-30T20:17:13.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5978" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-04T07:29:36.480" Score="-11" ViewCount="184" Body="&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Cross Validated post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/490271/central-limit-theorem-over-right-skewed-distributions&quot;&gt;Central limit theorem over right skewed distributions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I am writing this post is because as much as I appreciate the stacked change platform I noticed there are moderators, like those answering my question above, who take no minimal effort to understand the question asked and label duplicates such posts, making them invisible to other users who may answer and help sustaining the community. I invite you to read it and be honest, hoping you will do something about it. It is not either about my question per se, which I think I resolved myself and could have helped others asking similar questions. It is about the way these people answering get in the way and kill posts without understanding them or enquiring any further. I do not want to be right, but I want you to make the right thing, since I and others like me will likely be around asking and answering each other questions. Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user298019" LastActivityDate="2020-10-09T17:07:24.640" Title="Complaint about moderators" Tags="|discussion|r|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5978" CreationDate="2020-10-04T08:16:40.853" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your comment touches on several generic issues. Here are some.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is neither possible nor necessary that moderators &lt;strong&gt;understand&lt;/strong&gt; all questions. For one, a question can be closed on the grounds that is unclear, namely that a moderator considers and/or others in the community agree that it appears unclear. Often in such cases the whole point is that people do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; understand what (different) question is being asked. For another, even our widest-ranging moderators can't know in depth about everything covered by CV, and that's not the expectation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, a vote to close is always reversible, but there need to be specific grounds for thinking that a decision was not sound. I've looked at your question and don't see those grounds, so I support the decision to close. Many other people with enough reputation to vote to re-open like myself can consider whether they agree with the decision, and other moderators can do that too. Also, and crucially, you as OP have scope to re-edit the question and/or explain why it is not a duplicate and is also within the scope of CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What doesn't help one bit is to make general accusations without the slightest scrap of evidence beyond your own post. Statements like these are strong, but without extra evidence or detailed analysis they do not help your case or anybody else's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;there are moderators, like those answering my question above, who take&#xA;no minimal effort to understand the question asked and label&#xA;duplicates such posts, making them invisible to other users who may&#xA;answer and help sustaining the community&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;these people answering get in the way and kill posts without&#xA;understanding them or enquiring any further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that a post like yours is not invisible. It remains visible for some time, precisely to allow re-editing (which you are encouraged to do) and to allow others to consider the decision. In principle, what happened to you can be the start of a negotiation, but the onus is on you is not just to complain. You have the right to do this, but also the duty to explain precisely why the decision is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2020-10-04T13:54:17.263" LastActivityDate="2020-10-04T13:54:17.263" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5978" CreationDate="2020-10-04T12:38:32.573" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I run the supplied code I see a plot which is a great deal closer to normality than the original sample so I find it hard to see what is going on here. The code itself seems to show more understanding of the central limit theorem than the quoted explanation of what the central limit theorem in fact states. I would suggest the OP edits the question in the light of the comments made here and under the original question to clarify exactly what they do not understand. I would suggest also inserting as an image the plots so readers who do not use R can join into the conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastActivityDate="2020-10-04T12:38:32.573" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5981" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-05T20:01:14.397" Score="14" ViewCount="844" Body="&lt;p&gt;In connection with the moderator elections, we are holding a Q&amp;amp;A thread for the candidates. Questions collected &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5973/72321&quot;&gt;from an earlier thread&lt;/a&gt; have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as the space for the candidates to provide their answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to the submission count, we have selected all provided questions as well as our back up questions for a total of 6 questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a candidate, your job is simple - post an answer to this question, citing each of the questions and then post your answer to each question given in that same answer. For your convenience, I will include all of the questions in quote format with a break in between each, suitable for you to insert your answers. Just &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/da5d5178-da94-44d7-a415-d2e25b58d2e4/view-source&quot;&gt;copy the whole thing after the first set of three dashes&lt;/a&gt;.Please consider putting your name at the top of your post so that readers will know who you are before they finish reading everything you have written, and also including a link to your answer on your nomination post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once all the answers have been compiled, this will serve as a transcript for voters to view the thoughts of their candidates, and will be appropriately linked in the Election page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck to all of the candidates!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Oh, and when you've completed your answer, please provide a link to it after this blurb here, before that set of three dashes. Please leave the list of links in the order of submission.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To save scrolling here are links to the submissions from each candidate (in order of submission):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5986/22311&quot;&gt;Sycorax&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5981/2020-moderator-election-qa-questionnaire/5992#5992&quot;&gt;Kjetil b halvorsen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In your opinion, what do moderators do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do you have any Meta posts that you're particularly proud of, or that you feel best demonstrate your moderation style?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72321" LastEditorUserId="11887" LastEditDate="2020-10-11T19:53:31.063" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T12:31:45.823" Title="2020 Moderator Election Q&amp;A - Questionnaire" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5982" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-05T20:07:21.113" Score="4" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 2020 Community Moderator Election is now underway!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community moderator elections have three phases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nomination phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Primary phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Election phase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please visit the official election page at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for more detail, and to participate!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/election&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;election&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;election&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastActivityDate="2020-10-05T20:07:21.113" Title="2020 Community Moderator Election" Tags="|discussion|moderation|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2020-10-05T20:07:21.113" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5983" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5984" CreationDate="2020-10-06T06:55:11.313" Score="5" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe I understand how the nomination phase works. I would be very surprised if we had enough candidates to require a primary phase, so let's skip right ahead to the election phase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How precisely does this work? Can we upvote and downvote, or only up? Are the two candidates with the most net upvotes elected, or is there some threshold or similar, or other more complicated details?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd assume there is some in-depth explanation somewhere but haven't found it. (AKA: How about linking to such an in-depth explanation from the election announcement directly, instead of having us puzzle this out ourselves or insert noise into Meta?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2020-10-06T07:59:47.497" Title="How precisely does the election work?" Tags="|support|election|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5983" CreationDate="2020-10-06T07:59:47.497" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some general information about how elections work is here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/135360/225179&quot;&gt;There&amp;#39;s an election going on. What&amp;#39;s happening and how does it work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you say, it's unlikely we'll need the &lt;em&gt;primary&lt;/em&gt; phase (we never have before).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that we currently need two moderators. It's possible, though, that should we find we need more before very long, the third-place candidate will be called up rather than our having a whole new election (so don't be put off standing because there are already two candidates you prefer to yourself for the job).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2020-10-06T07:59:47.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5985" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-06T20:19:40.870" Score="22" ViewCount="302" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/strong&gt; Recently, it seems to me like we have been a little trigger-happy about closing questions as &amp;quot;only about software/programming&amp;quot;. I ask that we please ease off a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Our help page on on-topic-ness&lt;/a&gt; says (emphasis in the original):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if it [the question] needs &lt;em&gt;statistical expertise&lt;/em&gt; to understand or answer, ask it here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closure notice I am concerned about here says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because EITHER ... OR it focuses on programming, debugging, or performing routine operations within a statistical computing platform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, of course there is a continuum and room for reasonable disagreement as to where &amp;quot;needs statistical expertise&amp;quot; ends and &amp;quot;programming, debugging, or performing routine operations&amp;quot; begins. I will happily VTC questions on R that ask about how to use the &lt;code&gt;*apply()&lt;/code&gt; functions, or how to create a particular plot in &lt;code&gt;ggplot&lt;/code&gt;. My personal litmus test usually is whether J. Random R Programmer would be expected to be able to answer, potentially on StackOverflow. (I am not concerned with &amp;quot;unclear&amp;quot; questions here.) As in: are help pages and R tutorials enough to answer, or do we actually need to know some statistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, here are just two recent examples of questions that were (almost) closed, although I would definitely argue that the &amp;quot;needs statistical expertise&amp;quot; criterion is met - even if this expertise need not be very deep:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/490599/1352&quot;&gt;Why are my fitted values returning greater than 1 in GLM?&lt;/a&gt; OP ran a logistic regression with &lt;code&gt;glm()&lt;/code&gt; without specifying &lt;code&gt;family=binomial&lt;/code&gt;. You need to understand the difference between OLS and logistic regression to answer here. No, this is not statistical rocket science, but it's something a run-of-the-mill programmer does not know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/490746/1352&quot;&gt;Can I use bottom up, middle out, or top down approaches with fabletools:reconcile?&lt;/a&gt; OP struggles with what I would consider a beta release (the 3rd edition of an online textbook, which is missing a key chapter that can be found in the 2nd edition, and a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; rudimentarily documented R function). To answer, you need to have an understanding of hierarchical forecast reconciliation. I referenced &lt;em&gt;JASA&lt;/em&gt;, the &lt;em&gt;International Journal of Forecasting&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Computational Statistics &amp;amp; Data Analysis&lt;/em&gt; in my answer, and necessarily so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it feels to me like some of us see a question that asks about R, perhaps even in the title... and jump to conclusions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask that we please be just a &lt;em&gt;tiny&lt;/em&gt; little bit more relaxed about leaving questions open where there might be some statistical aspect, even if it is in the context of software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, we could be more stringent than I would prefer. Fair enough. But then we should communicate this explicitly in our on-topic help page, and hopefully have a discussion here beforehand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&amp;amp;q=%5bon-topic%5d%20software%20is%3aq&quot;&gt;we have discussed similar topics before&lt;/a&gt;, which in fact informed our current closure notice as cited above, and also our on-topic page (?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2020-10-06T20:19:40.870" Title="Closing &quot;software questions&quot;" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5981" CreationDate="2020-10-07T00:46:24.050" Score="37" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Sycorax&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm nominating myself for a moderator position mostly because I want the election itself to succeed. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135360/theres-an-election-going-on-whats-happening-and-how-does-it-work&quot;&gt;To wit, if there are not enough participants in the election, then the whole election fails&lt;/a&gt;.) The stats.SE moderators themselves requested this election; it seems they would like some help in keeping up with the responsibilities of running the site. Therefore, I would like for the election to succeed so that stats.SE keeps running smoothly. Towards that end, I hope that additional candidates will stand for election so that voters may have a slate of candidates to choose among.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tactical decisions aside, if elected, I'll do my best to make the site work more smoothly will encourage more answerers to participate and help answer our unanswered questions. I understand that this can take as much as an hour a day; this is time I have available and often already spend on stats.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe in taking a broad view of what is on-topic on stats.SE. Stats.SE is a place to discuss statistics in all of its flavors: probability, regression, time series, machine learning, neural networks, and more esoteric topics. This is part of what makes it such a great place to learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question time!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In your opinion, what do moderators do?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main task of moderators is to lead by example: show users new and old how to interact with the website and each other. Many of the activities that fit this description are actually available to non-moderator users -- voting to close, editing tags, or leaving comments asking for clarification. I appreciate that the diamond itself is interpreted as conferring special authority, but it bears repeating here that while moderators have access to specific tools and capabilities, most of those powers are already delegated across the website to hundreds of others who take the time to wrangle the review queue, edit tags and leave comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second task is to remediate what happens when users do not interact well with the website or with each other. Scrubbing abuse, unkind remarks, bigotry and spam and the like are not pleasant, but are necessary tasks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't recall where I read this quip, but someone once said something to the effect of &amp;quot;All you have to do to be embarrassed by something that you've written is leave it in a drawer for six months and then take it out and read it again.&amp;quot; The distance of time can allow one to see one's writing in a different light. In most cases, the edit features allow a person asking a question or writing an answer to fix any shortcomings. I sometimes revisit an answer years later to revise it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are a little different because they can only be edited for five minutes, so any poorly-informed or abrupt comments are, unfortunately, stuck that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't feel that the addition of a moderator diamond will alter the suitability of my questions, answers or comments. If there are any objectionable posts, then flagging them in the usual way seems appropriate and correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that the intent of this question is to highlight that the privileges of high-rep users have a lot of overlap with the privileges of moderators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, I have more than 60,500 rep and gold badges in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/neural-networks&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;neural-networks&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;neural-networks&lt;/a&gt;. Taken together, I have a very high level of privilege on this site, and can carry out a number of tasks, like voting to close, dupe-hammer, review queues, and edits to posts. In this sense, I have powers which are similar, but less exhaustive, compared to a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that a number of unclear or low-quality questions will linger at 3 or 4 votes before the closure vote expires and the question remains open. I think this is just because we don't have a machine learning specialist among our moderators, who would otherwise also close. (This isn't a criticism or a slight -- our moderators are very knowledgable experts in their domains, but no person can know everything.) I think that I will be able to serve the community by closing these questions with useful feedback about how to clarify them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But more broadly, moderators are the only users who can access specific tools, such as reviewing flags or unilaterally opening/closing posts. Access to these tools is the only thing that will allow me to carry out moderation tasks and keep the site running smoothly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several layers to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first is that any and all comments which do not adhere to the community standards (flags for &amp;quot;harassment, bigotry, abuse&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;unfriendly or unkind&amp;quot; are plausible in this hypothetical) are removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is to address the pattern itself. I would remind all parties involved of the standards of discourse on stats.SE, with a link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/conduct&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/conduct&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third is to consider where the behavior falls in the &amp;quot;Enforcement&amp;quot; portion of the Code of Conduct, and whether a warning or temporary suspension are appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than attempting to reverse their action unilaterally, I would speak to the moderator about it. It's possible that my reasoning is mistaken, or that the other moderator observed a key fact that I missed. (Once I thought two questions about a certain inequality were duplicates, but actually the inequality was &lt;em&gt;reversed&lt;/em&gt;. I'm only human; sometimes, I misread.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or it's possible that in discussing the question, the other moderator will come around to my understanding, or learn of a key fact that I observed in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be productive to raise the issue in Meta.Stats.SE, to illustrate how moderators think about closing. There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5985/closing-software-questions&quot;&gt;sometimes disagreements&lt;/a&gt; about where to draw the line for closing, and discussing that can be helpful for reviewers because it clarifies where the line is and helps inform their thinking when considering a closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you have any Meta posts that you're particularly proud of, or that you feel best demonstrate your moderation style?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These meta questions have been well-received. I think they shed some light on my philosophy: there are places to make changes to how the site works, some small (reorganizing tags) and some large (how to fix the gap between questions and answers), as well as some elaboration about how broadly I imagine stats.SE's scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5639/should-we-make-deep-learning-tag-a-synonym-for-neural-networks/5640#5640&quot;&gt;Should we make [deep-learning] tag a synonym for [neural-networks]?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5514/overlap-with-ai-stackexchange-and-datascience-stackexchange/5518#5518&quot;&gt;Overlap with ai.stackexchange and datascience.stackexchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5325/we-have-a-very-large-widening-gap-between-questions-and-answers-how-do-we-fix/5326#5326&quot;&gt;We have a very large &amp;amp; widening gap between questions and answers. How do we fix it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are any outstanding questions about what my views are about stats.SE or how I intend to use my moderation powers in the event of my election, please add a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2020-10-07T23:44:57.337" LastActivityDate="2020-10-07T23:44:57.337" CommentCount="28" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5987" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5991" CreationDate="2020-10-08T17:50:23.513" Score="24" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often find myself wondering about the best way to present R code, and output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue is in R itself, in the console, we will see this type of thing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; X &amp;lt;- rnorm(100)&#xA;&amp;gt; Y &amp;lt;- X + rnorm(100)&#xA;&amp;gt; lm(Y ~ X) %&amp;gt;% summary()&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;Residuals:&#xA;    Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max &#xA;-3.0024 -0.6662  0.0044  0.7071  2.2079 &#xA;&#xA;Coefficients:&#xA;            Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(&amp;gt;|t|)    &#xA;(Intercept)  -0.0247     0.1073  -0.230    0.818    &#xA;X             0.9865     0.1091   9.041 1.46e-14 ***&#xA;---&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&amp;gt; lm(Y ~ -1 + X) %&amp;gt;% summary()&#xA;&#xA;Residuals:&#xA;     Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max &#xA;-3.02849 -0.68970 -0.02017  0.68257  2.18443 &#xA;&#xA;Coefficients:&#xA;  Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(&amp;gt;|t|)    &#xA;X   0.9855     0.1085   9.082  1.1e-14 ***&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems perfectly natural to present this code and output exactly as above. It has the advantage of clearly marking code (prefaced with &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;/code&gt; as per the R console) from the output of the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the problem with that is, for a user that wants to actually try the code out for themselves, they have to manually remove the &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;/code&gt; from each line. I have had a number of my posts edited by other users to remove them. So one alternative is to present it like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;X &amp;lt;- rnorm(100)&#xA;Y &amp;lt;- X + rnorm(100)&#xA;lm(Y ~ X) %&amp;gt;% summary()&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;Residuals:&#xA;    Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max &#xA;-3.0024 -0.6662  0.0044  0.7071  2.2079 &#xA;&#xA;Coefficients:&#xA;            Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(&amp;gt;|t|)    &#xA;(Intercept)  -0.0247     0.1073  -0.230    0.818    &#xA;X             0.9865     0.1091   9.041 1.46e-14 ***&#xA;---&#xA;&#xA;lm(Y ~ -1 + X) %&amp;gt;% summary()&#xA;&#xA;Residuals:&#xA;     Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max &#xA;-3.02849 -0.68970 -0.02017  0.68257  2.18443 &#xA;&#xA;Coefficients:&#xA;  Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(&amp;gt;|t|)    &#xA;X   0.9855     0.1085   9.082  1.1e-14 ***&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might be fine for experienced R users, but it blurs the distinction between code and output. So we might break it up like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;X &amp;lt;- rnorm(100)&#xA;Y &amp;lt;- X + rnorm(100)&#xA;lm(Y ~ X) %&amp;gt;% summary()&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which produces&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Residuals:&#xA;    Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max &#xA;-3.0024 -0.6662  0.0044  0.7071  2.2079 &#xA;&#xA;Coefficients:&#xA;            Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(&amp;gt;|t|)    &#xA;(Intercept)  -0.0247     0.1073  -0.230    0.818    &#xA;X             0.9865     0.1091   9.041 1.46e-14 ***&#xA;---&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then we fit the model:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;lm(Y ~ -1 + X) %&amp;gt;% summary()&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which produces :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Residuals:&#xA;     Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max &#xA;-3.02849 -0.68970 -0.02017  0.68257  2.18443 &#xA;&#xA;Coefficients:&#xA;  Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(&amp;gt;|t|)    &#xA;X   0.9855     0.1085   9.082  1.1e-14 ***&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which takes more time to write and makes the post longer and more verbose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe I am being a little too pedantic, but I just wondered if others have had similar thoughts or if there is an alternative, or indeed if one of the above approaches is considered better in general ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7486" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2020-10-08T18:25:51.193" LastActivityDate="2020-10-10T19:08:29.450" Title="Is there a preferred way to present R code?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5987" CreationDate="2020-10-08T18:32:35.940" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; code:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;lm(rnorm(10) ~ I(rnorm(10)))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been formatted according to the new method (here on CV) of preceding and following it with a left-justified row of three backticks ```.  The user can copy everything directly because there are no extra formatting marks within the block itself -- not even indentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is its output:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Call:&#xA;lm(formula = y ~ x)&#xA;&#xA;Coefficients:&#xA;(Intercept)            x  &#xA;     0.5912      -0.7138&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter was formatted first as a code block then that itself was quoted, producing the vertical line to the left that visually distinguishes the output from the code.  These are fast, easy steps: select the text and hit the appropriate icon above the textbox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2020-10-08T18:32:35.940" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5987" CreationDate="2020-10-09T16:08:55.063" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like to use the &lt;code&gt;reprex&lt;/code&gt; package. If you do &lt;code&gt;reprex::reprex(venue=&amp;quot;so&amp;quot;)&lt;/code&gt; it produces a stackoverflow-friendly formatted text out of whatever R code you have on the clipboard right now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;lm(rnorm(10) ~ I(rnorm(10)))&#xA;#&amp;gt; &#xA;#&amp;gt; Call:&#xA;#&amp;gt; lm(formula = rnorm(10) ~ I(rnorm(10)))&#xA;#&amp;gt; &#xA;#&amp;gt; Coefficients:&#xA;#&amp;gt;  (Intercept)  I(rnorm(10))  &#xA;#&amp;gt;     -0.13374      -0.09452&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Created on 2020-10-09 by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://reprex.tidyverse.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reprex package&lt;/a&gt; (v0.3.0)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you see, the output is included as R comments so it will not interfere with copy/paste. As a bonus it automatically renders whatever plots are in there and uploads to imgur, inserts the right link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43625" LastActivityDate="2020-10-09T16:08:55.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5978" CreationDate="2020-10-09T17:07:24.640" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answers here already are spot on, but just want to add a few thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been using the site for a little while now, but it still fills me with wonder and gratitude that people have actually taken the time to read through and answer my questions. What's more, I have often got a response from people with so much statistical knowledge and experience. It's really quite amazing that people are so generous with their knowledge. I try to join in to repay some of that, but can only contribute at a basic level myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking back at my own questions, I think I could definitely have formulated some of them better, but I don't always find it easy to ask a question elegantly without a full understanding of the topic I was asking about! I've benefitted from comments and answers pointing me to look at areas that I previously hadn't properly understood, been aware of, or understood how they'd linked to my problem. The people answering guessed at where the gap in my knowledge was and pointed me in the right direction. I learned much more than I would have done from a narrow response to the question I thought I'd posed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's hard work putting together a question and disappointing if you don't get an answer. But it still doesn't mean that you are owed an answer, because that requires someone else to give up their time for free to get one! Actually my personal experience of Cross Validated as a community is that people &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; tried to answer my questions and I haven't felt like I'm speaking into a void. True, sometimes an answerer hasn't really responded to what I was asking and hasn't added to my understanding, or a comment pointing me in a helpful direction has felt a little sharp! But that person has still taken the time to respond to me and try to help, for free. I think that is still amazing and deserves to be responded to with courtesy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators regularly give up their time for free to try to improve and maintain the quality of the content of the site, and to guide users in the right direction. I think that is an extremely generous act, and I'm very appreciative of what they do. I don't think they are making minimal effort in giving up their time for free to try to help other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moderators are people who know a lot about their subject, so if your question was unclear to them, on balance it suggests that it's likely to be unclear to many of the people on the site. Given that, I think it's best to work with the process wherever possible. If you disagree with the moderation decision and feel that your question was asking a new, different question, the best thing to do is to try to edit or reformulate your question to make it clearer what you are asking (and maybe explain what you think differentiates it from the marked duplicate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if you have been able to resolve your own question, great! If you are able to edit your question to make it clear that it is new and not a duplicate, and then post an answer to your own question with how you resolved it, that would be a valuable contribution to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="212689" LastActivityDate="2020-10-09T17:07:24.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5987" CreationDate="2020-10-10T13:18:00.073" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I occasionally run the (R) code in people's answers, so I think about it from that perspective.  I don't include the R console's command prompt, &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, because when you copy and paste code you have the added hassle of taking all that out before you can run it.  I also don't like code in many separate small chunks with text in between, because it's more of a hassle to copy and paste.  Consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First I did&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;stuff&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I did&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;other stuff&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then I fit the model&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;model&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which yields output&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;output&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but notice that to get what you want, you have to process the output&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;process&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then you can get what you want by computing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;extra computations&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so now you can get your desired output&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; output&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the idea of narrative flow, but this is really tedious to copy and paste if you want to try playing with the code yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I prefer to put the code into fewer, longer code blocks to the extent possible.  When small comments are needed to discuss moving from one step to the next, I use code-comments.  (I also try to use comments to make the code as transparent as possible for people who may not be very fluent in R, and I use only base R, use &lt;code&gt;=&lt;/code&gt; instead of &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;-&lt;/code&gt;, etc.)  Of course, showing the output is important to the answer, so I do, but I comment it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example code block from a recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/374500/7290&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; of mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;set.seed(8649)     # this makes the example exactly reproducible&#xA;N      = 10        # this is how much data I'll generate&#xA;latent = rnorm(N)  # this is the actual latent variable I want to be measuring&#xA;&#xA;##### generate latent responses to items&#xA;item1 = latent + rnorm(N, mean=0, sd=0.2)  # the strongest correlate&#xA;item2 = latent + rnorm(N, mean=0, sd=0.3)&#xA;item3 = latent + rnorm(N, mean=0, sd=0.5)&#xA;item4 = latent + rnorm(N, mean=0, sd=1.0)&#xA;item5 = latent + rnorm(N, mean=0, sd=1.2)  # the weakest&#xA;&#xA;##### convert latent responses to ordered categories&#xA;item1 = findInterval(item1, vec=c(-Inf,-2.5,-1, 1,2.5,Inf))  # fairly unbiased&#xA;item2 = findInterval(item2, vec=c(-Inf,-2.5,-1, 1,2.5,Inf))&#xA;item3 = findInterval(item3, vec=c(-Inf,-3,  -2, 2,3,  Inf))  # middle values typical&#xA;item4 = findInterval(item4, vec=c(-Inf,-3,  -2, 2,3,  Inf))&#xA;item5 = findInterval(item5, vec=c(-Inf,-3.5,-3,-1,0.5,Inf))  # high ratings typical&#xA;&#xA;##### combined into final scale&#xA;manifest = round(rowMeans(cbind(item1, item2, item3, item4, item5)), 1)&#xA;manifest&#xA;# [1]  3.4  3.6  3.4  3.8  2.6  3.4  3.2  2.0  3.8  3.2&#xA;round(latent, 1)&#xA;# [1]  1.3  0.6  0.2  1.0 -1.5  0.1  0.4 -2.5  2.3 -0.3&#xA;cor(manifest, latent)&#xA;# [1] 0.9280074&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was also some discussion about how to get syntax highlighting.  If the &lt;code&gt;[r]&lt;/code&gt; tag is on a thread, syntax highlighting (for R) should automatically occur.  Before any code block, you can initiate, or override, local syntax highlighting with &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;!-- language: lang-r --&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; on a prior line.  If you want that to span several code blocks within your answer, use &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;!-- language-all: lang-r --&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, instead.  Note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/353983/187282&quot;&gt;SE is switching the engine it uses for formatting&lt;/a&gt;.  The new system will let you set off a code block without indenting by using ``` before and after the block, and you can turn on syntax highlighting for that block by appending &lt;code&gt;lang-r&lt;/code&gt; to the set of opening backticks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2020-10-10T19:08:29.450" LastActivityDate="2020-10-10T19:08:29.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5981" CreationDate="2020-10-10T16:31:27.010" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Kjetil b halvorsen&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In your opinion, what do moderators do?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Helping the site function better ... resolving disputes, being an example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you&#xA;will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about&#xA;that?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I really like that! Maybe I will have to go back and edit some of my first answers here, which was not very good. One of the effects of participating here is training in communication, good for aspies --- I still have much to learn here!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am already way beyond 20k, so maybe not much ... but the site needs more effective closing and marking as duplicates, and I can be more effective at that. There are way to many unanswered questions which are unclear, and abandoned by their owners, better to close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of&#xA;arguments/flags from comments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure how big a problem this is ... valuable answers is important, so I hope some diplomatic hinting would help, suspension should only be an ultimate resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this were an old, abandoned post, I would leave it. Otherwise discuss it with the other moderator, so trying to reach a common viewpoint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you have any Meta posts that you're particularly proud of, or that you feel best demonstrate your moderation style?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not really, one post that I think made a difference at its time was &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5386/what-to-do-about-long-review-queues&quot;&gt;What to do about long review queues?&lt;/a&gt;.  Maybe we should try to followup on @Sycorax answer in that thread?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="11887" LastEditDate="2020-10-12T12:31:45.823" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T12:31:45.823" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5993" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5994" CreationDate="2020-10-12T08:27:55.853" Score="7" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;Going through the review queue I saw a late answer from a user that has 1 reputation. The answer should very much have been a comment, since it only pointed out a mistake the OP made in their derivation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was keen to &lt;strong&gt;flag&lt;/strong&gt; the answer as &lt;code&gt;not an answer&lt;/code&gt; but then realised that the user could not comment since one can only comment once you have 15 reputation (I believe). I therefore just stayed with &lt;code&gt;No action needed&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Of course I had the option to just use &lt;code&gt;skip&lt;/code&gt; but then someone else would have had to make the decision which is perfectly fine, but I would like to know what to do in a situation like this for future reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to think that this would be a problem that has come up in the past, but I have not been able to find any information on it. Any thoughts on how to handle a situation like this in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="284660" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T13:24:03.873" Title="Late answer in the review queue should be a comment" Tags="|discussion|review|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5993" CreationDate="2020-10-12T10:56:44.613" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;♦ moderators have the ability to convert answers into comments. I'm a moderator on a few other sites in the network, and Not An Answer flags are the primary way the community notifies me of these situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, using the Not An Answer flag will also send the it into the Low Quality Posts review queue, and the reviewers there may delete it before it can be turned into a comment. If you're worried about this, it's fine to add the comment to the question yourself (with attribution) and leave a comment under the answer like the one provided by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackapps.com/q/2116/34061&quot;&gt;AutoReviewComments userscript&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is really a comment, not an answer. With a bit more rep, &lt;a href=&quot;/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;you will be able to post comments&lt;/a&gt;. For the moment I've added the comment for you, and I'm flagging this post for deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79696" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T10:56:44.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5993" CreationDate="2020-10-12T13:24:03.873" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;New users cannot comment until they reach &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment&quot;&gt;50 reputation&lt;/a&gt;, not 15.  This is part of the design of the SE system.  It is a feature, not a bug.  Preventing new users from being able to comment reduces the amount of spam and nonsense on the site and help keep it clean.  On balance, the benefits of this design choice far out weigh the costs.  Sooner or later, someone with the privilege will comment on the thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should flag the (non) answer for deletion.  It is nice to leave a polite comment for the OP explaining that they need to earn the reputation before they can comment, and that they should not post comments as pretend answers in the interim.  As @Glorfindel notes, moderators can convert the answer to a comment, if they think it best.  I used to do a lot of that when I was a moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T13:24:03.873" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="455" CreationDate="2020-10-14T21:08:07.517" Score="-9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please do another site name poll and include the possibility of learnedmachine.com or something more up to date.  Cross-validation is only an &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.08737v1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;approximation&lt;/a&gt; to Bayesian inference, and the five-fold method, although popular, has some serious flaws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, the size of the validation set should never be smaller than the size of the training set (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/491268/272731&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for details).  A good rule of thumb is to make the training set &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$n^{3/4}$&lt;/span&gt; when &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$n$&lt;/span&gt; is the overall size of the training/validation data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That makes both the name and the site logo representative of a currently wasteful/inefficient and ineffective practice, for which I personally do not advocate.  True Bayesian optimization is always more efficient; see and contribute to &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/brethvoice/optuna_demo_MNIST&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; demo example if you have time and/or interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="272731" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T21:08:07.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2155" CreationDate="2020-10-14T21:26:58.303" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we should change the name to Machine Learning or something.  Do it before the Data Scientist SE site takes the glory:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions&quot;&gt;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="272731" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T21:26:58.303" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5998" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5999" CreationDate="2020-10-15T09:22:01.250" Score="6" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I stumble upon a question where some close votes already have been cast (but the question is not closed yet). How I can vote for &amp;quot;Leave Open&amp;quot; now ? I can not search for a specific question in the review queue, can I ? The &amp;quot;close-dialog&amp;quot; on the question page does not contain the &amp;quot;Leave Open&amp;quot; option, as far as I can see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="264" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T10:23:29.127" Title="How can I vote for &quot;Leave open&quot; outside of the review queue?" Tags="|support|review|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5998" CreationDate="2020-10-15T10:23:29.127" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't do that from the Q&amp;amp;A page, just like you can't vote 'leave closed' when there are pending reopen votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; search in the Close Votes review queue with a bit of a workaround; you can filter by type of close vote (not suitable for this site, needs details or clarity, etc.) or by tag. Choose the least used tag (that's the rightmost one) and you'll have a good chance to find it immediately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kpDyj.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kpDyj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;(screenshot from Math.SE since I don't have enough reputation here)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79696" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T10:23:29.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6001" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-16T14:31:05.070" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does the question get transferred to the moderator or is it removed by the system itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="300179" OwnerDisplayName="a_manilla" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T15:31:51.973" Title="What happens if a question is given 6 flags?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6001" CreationDate="2020-10-16T15:31:51.973" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts&quot;&gt;our help pages&lt;/a&gt;, when six 'spam' or 'abuse' flags are raised on a post, it's deleted automatically. (Like @whuber, I've never seen that happen.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T15:31:51.973" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6003" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6007" CreationDate="2020-10-19T09:29:38.483" Score="9" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently came across the following question on Stackoverflow (after getting stuck on the same issue independently):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60439187/why-grpreg-library-and-gglasso-library-in-r-are-giving-different-results-for-gro&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60439187/why-grpreg-library-and-gglasso-library-in-r-are-giving-different-results-for-gro&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It turns out that the answer is nuanced and relates to the impact of group-wise orthogonalization on the group lasso penalty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is worth writing down the answer to the above question; however I don't want to answer on Stackoverflow, because math mode seems not to be enabled and also it seems that the question would be of a lot more interest to the cross-validated community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the above, how should I proceed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Open a similar (better phrased) question on cross-validated and answer myself and then link to the response as a comment on the Stackoverflow post?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bite the bullet and reply directly on Stackoverflow?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there any other reasonable option?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58602" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T12:58:58.253" Title="Answering old stackoverflow question that is of interest to Cross Validated" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6006" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-20T20:01:52.097" Score="36" ViewCount="336" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cross Validated's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election/5&quot;&gt;fifth moderator election&lt;/a&gt; has come to a close, the votes have been tallied and the two new moderators are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/22311/sycorax&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/flair/22311.png&quot; alt=&quot;Sycorax&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/11887/kjetil-b-halvorsen&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/flair/11887.png&quot; alt=&quot;kjetil b halvorsen&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They'll be joining &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;the existing crew&lt;/a&gt; shortly—please thank them for volunteering, and share your assistance and advice with them as they learn the ropes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, please join me in thanking Peter Flom who will be stepping down as moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For details on how the voting played out, you can download the election results &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/election/5&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.opavote.com/results/5664538390167552/0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;view a summary report online&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72321" LastActivityDate="2020-10-20T20:01:52.097" Title="2020 Community Moderator Election Results" Tags="|discussion|election|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6003" CreationDate="2020-10-22T12:58:58.253" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions and answers are under CC BY-SA 4.0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means that you can literally copy the question over if you make it explicitly clear in the text its attribution (a link to the original question and user, and probably quoting the question is more than acceptable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also paraphrase the question (linking the original as the inspiration would be fine) in better terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60613" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T12:58:58.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6008" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6009" CreationDate="2020-10-27T07:13:17.183" Score="11" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since privileges are obtained after crossing respective thresholds, I was wondering do they also get taken away if reputations fall back, especially after awarding bounty, to a level below the threshold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="239481" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T08:59:38.420" Title="Are privileges lost if reputations fall (below threshold) because of awarding bounty?" Tags="|discussion|bounty|privileges|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6008" CreationDate="2020-10-27T08:59:38.420" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you'll lose privileges. See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/set-bounties&quot;&gt;Help Center article about setting bounties&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If your new reputation brings you below the requirement for any privileges, you will lose access to those privileges.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79696" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T08:59:38.420" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6010" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-28T15:16:52.960" Score="12" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is Wald estimator? the tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/wald-estimator&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;wald-estimator&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;wald-estimator&lt;/a&gt; has no wiki and unclear use, is it just a synonym for wald test, or something else? (some of the use should be retagged to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/wald-test&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;wald-test&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;wald-test&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastActivityDate="2020-10-28T15:16:52.960" Title="wald-estimator tag: What is it?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6011" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-29T13:22:01.767" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if there is a way that members could review a question to make it more answerable? I know that this is done to some extent already, but for my question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/494093/how-to-construct-panel-regression-with-categorical-independents&quot;&gt;How to construct panel regression with categorical independents?&lt;/a&gt;) I had already posted a similar question and taken it down and now have reposted it trying to be very focused in what I have done and where my issue lies. Yet, I'm not sure why it hasn't received any interest. I would be more than happy to re-work it as necessary, but would like to know what to focus on with regard to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I improve my question? If it has been viewed already, is there a way that members could display some interest but point me in a direction of improvement, by ticking off a field in a pop-up or something similar, when they view the question? It seems like members may not be as interested in commenting, but could this be a way to facilitate questions becoming better? I understand if its not a great question, but in that case I would have thought it'd be easily answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92324" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2020-10-30T11:32:00.043" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T11:32:00.043" Title="Seeking guidance for ny questions that didn't receive a response" Tags="|discussion|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5911" CreationDate="2020-10-30T21:17:00.327" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was nice while it lasted! Goodbye, sweet fan!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZuJKQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZuJKQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11867" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T21:17:00.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6015" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-03T08:09:12.613" Score="3" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a question about a derivation once, and someone supplied an answer to it. Soon after, the question was closed, however, but I was still discussing and referring to that person's answer there. Now I can't seem to find that question in my list of questions asked, or whenI search words from its title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has the question disappeared because closed questions are eventually deleted by moderators? If so, how many days between time of closed to time of deletion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="250716" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T09:58:01.503" Title="Are closed questions eventually deleted?" Tags="|support|closing-questions|deleted-questions|auto-delete|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6015" CreationDate="2020-11-03T08:37:53.313" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a question gets on hold (gets &amp;quot;closed&amp;quot;), it is automatically deleted if it has no upvotes, and no answers, or no upvoted answers. You can find the details in this post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/78048/enable-automatic-deletion-of-old-unanswered-zero-score-questions-after-a-year/92006#92006&quot;&gt;Enable automatic deletion of old, unanswered, zero-score questions after a year?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2020-11-03T09:58:01.503" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T09:58:01.503" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6017" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-03T19:10:18.220" Score="3" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may be a silly question but I was about to use an image from an article in order to support my post (citing the article / authors), but I don't know if is there some kind of copyright infringement by doing that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would guess it may depend on the article but I just wanted to know if there is a general advise to follow on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258451" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T19:25:18.657" Title="Copyright: Can we copy an image from an article and paste it into our questions / answers emphasising it belongs to the paper?" Tags="|discussion|images|papers|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2020-11-03T19:24:44.800" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6018" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6019" CreationDate="2020-11-03T20:10:34.413" Score="10" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I for one posted several links (PDF or HTML files) in several answers of mine or in comments, and it appears that many are just dead. I can fix some of them here and there, but I wonder: Shall we just update all of them using, e.g., the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/web/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wayback Machine&lt;/a&gt;, or is there an established policy regarding dangling pointers on the SE network, and in particular on Cross Validated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T20:26:22.547" Title="Is it worth checking dead links?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6018" CreationDate="2020-11-03T20:26:22.547" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have time for it, feel free to do so. When I notice such links and there is an easy way of replacing them with something that works, I do so. If there is no obvious way to solve it, I usually leave comment for OP noticing them that the link is dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T20:26:22.547" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6020" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6021" CreationDate="2020-11-05T21:09:11.707" Score="18" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just saw this and, since I'm not accusing anyone, I'm curious if deliberately changing username to match the username of a diamond moderator is within the rules of Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60613" LastEditorUserId="60613" LastEditDate="2020-11-05T21:20:30.290" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T13:51:53.147" Title="User changed display name to match a diamond moderator, high-rep user in the community" Tags="|discussion|moderation|user-accounts|users|display-names|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6020" CreationDate="2020-11-05T21:15:11.040" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/legal/acceptable-use-policy&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/legal/acceptable-use-policy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Identity Theft and Privacy.&lt;/strong&gt; Users that misleadingly appropriate the&#xA;identity of another person are not permitted. Users may not post other&#xA;people's personally identifying or confidential information, including&#xA;but not limited to credit card numbers, Social Security Numbers, and&#xA;driver's and other license numbers. You may not post information such&#xA;as other people's passwords, usernames, phone numbers, addresses and&#xA;e-mail addresses unless already publicly accessible on the Web.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, keep in mind that the discussed case is using username that is rather distinct (there are other &amp;quot;Tim's&amp;quot; on the site and I wouldn't bother if anyone used same username as me, I probably wasn't the first one as well). Moreover, it was about using username of one of the diamond moderators of this site, so this may lead to impersonating the moderator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="35989" LastEditDate="2020-11-06T13:51:53.147" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T13:51:53.147" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6024" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-09T13:00:16.623" Score="25" ViewCount="388" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bit of a weird question. A while ago I asked a question on Cross Validated and received no answers. I worked through the problem myself. This was part of some research I was doing which I  then published in a paper: the &amp;quot;solution&amp;quot; is included in the paper. It's published in an astrophysics journal, not a statistics one, and the solution wasn't the main aim of the paper (though perhaps if other people in the field use the solution in their own work, which is very possible and in fact they probably should, it could turn out to be more useful than the main result).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to answer my question on CV now, but can I include a link/citation of the paper (or in fact, is this something I would actually need to do)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not some profound result, but I thought it was interesting, and if this is a question that occurred to me it could certainly occur to someone else too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing: I was a bit surprised that I couldn't find the answer somewhere, as it seems like a problem that someone else should have come up against and solved. I would even assume that it's probably been done many times before, I probably just couldn't find whichever papers had the answer. Do I need to first try and do another search for papers that may have done something similar before or do I just put mine for now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="144520" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2020-11-09T13:45:06.747" LastActivityDate="2020-11-09T13:52:44.227" Title="I asked a question, got no answer, then worked it out and published it in a paper (not as the main result). Do I need to/should I cite the paper?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6024" CreationDate="2020-11-09T13:52:44.227" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's entirely in order to cite your own published work in answers on CV. That is very often helpful. I can't think of any good reason for suppressing a reference you know about -- beyond not giving authorities for utterly standard results, evidently not the case in this instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think you're obliged to look for yet other papers. You've put some effort into an answer already. In any case one of the pluses here is that other people will know the literature of their own fields.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps your diffidence is based partly on an understanding of Wikipedia's principles about original research, but their rules and expectations are not ours in this respect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't over-interpret the lack of answers. Many of us keep an eye largely on what's new and it's easy -- given work and sleep and other commitments -- to miss a good question on which you have something to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I look forward to your posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastActivityDate="2020-11-09T13:52:44.227" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6026" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6027" CreationDate="2020-11-16T08:50:43.873" Score="5" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-validation_(statistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; for &amp;quot;Cross Validation&amp;quot; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cross-validation&lt;/strong&gt;, sometimes called &lt;strong&gt;rotation estimation&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;out-of-sample testing&lt;/strong&gt;, is any of various similar model validation techniques for assessing how the results of a statistical analysis will generalize to an independent data set. It is mainly used in settings where the goal is prediction, and one wants to estimate how accurately a predictive model will perform in practice. In a prediction problem, a model is usually given a dataset of known data on which training is run (training dataset), and a dataset of unknown data (or first seen data) against which the model is tested (called the validation dataset or testing set). The goal of cross-validation is to test the model's ability to predict new data that was not used in estimating it, in order to flag problems like overfitting or selection bias and to give an insight on how the model will generalize to an independent dataset (i.e., an unknown dataset, for instance from a real problem).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, Cross Validation is a statistical technique which is used to infer something about some data. As far as I know, there are thousands of such techniques or approaches which we use for solving different kind of problems relevant to statistics. Then, why is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;stats.stackexhange.com&lt;/a&gt; is called &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cross Validated&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; ? Shouldn't it be called something like &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Statistics Stack Exchange&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, just like the &lt;em&gt;Mathematics&lt;/em&gt; one ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry if my question is silly, or had been answered previously. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="263886" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T13:17:46.993" Title="Why is stats.stackexchange.com called Cross Validated, not Statistics Stack Exchange?" Tags="|discussion|support|statistics|cross-validated|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2020-11-16T13:16:04.973" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6026" CreationDate="2020-11-16T09:20:18.027" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ten years ago, it was a custom that every site got its own name (i.e. Stack Overflow, Super User, Server Fault), not just &lt;em&gt;[topic]&lt;/em&gt; Stack Exchange. There was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/412/79696&quot;&gt;community poll&lt;/a&gt; (sadly, the results are no longer visible) and Cross Validated was the winner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79696" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T09:20:18.027" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6031" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6033" CreationDate="2020-11-24T16:38:06.687" Score="5" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please, can somebody who follows &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/image-segmentation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;image-segmentation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;image-segmentation&lt;/a&gt; or otherwise know what it is, write a tag wiki?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T18:15:12.753" Title="Tag [tag:image-segmentation] what is this?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6032" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-24T17:17:01.763" Score="0" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;How to do effective search on Crossvalidated? Or, specific advice for how to search the web for statistics or machine learning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intention is to make a FAQ-style question, for layout we could emulate &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;this mathjax tutorial&lt;/a&gt;. Then additions as new answers, which later can be incorporated (or edited directly if the answerer feels comfortable.)  But for a start, answers could be just for discussion about this FAQ proposal. I start below with a very basic outline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;SE help page for search&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/searching&lt;/a&gt;   (but I'm not sure if this is fully updated or comprehensive.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;google or other external search engines can also be useful for site search&lt;/strong&gt;: copy &lt;code&gt;site:https://stats.stackexchange.com&lt;/code&gt; into the search box in your browser, and add your search terms. This will also search in comments, which is left out from SE site search. This is often much faster than site search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to be continued!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastActivityDate="2020-11-24T17:17:01.763" Title="FAQ: How to search Crossvalidated" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2020-11-24T17:20:12.377" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6031" CreationDate="2020-11-25T18:15:12.753" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for the reminder, kjetil. I've added a synopsis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T18:15:12.753" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6035" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6036" CreationDate="2020-12-01T09:05:33.517" Score="10" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have trouble finding relevant research in a specific sub-field. Is it off topic for Cross Validated to either ask for such research or ask for help in finding it? How could I make it a better fit for the site instead of just a lazy cry for help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The field itself is relevant to Cross Validated. I would be asking about time series literature, specifically related to the behavior of time series features when it comes to shortening or lengthening the series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="211258" LastActivityDate="2020-12-08T18:05:57.043" Title="Is asking for help finding relevant research off topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6035" CreationDate="2020-12-01T22:33:40.517" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reference request are (often) on-topic, but try to make it as concrete and specific as possible, maybe with an (applied?) example? Maybe you could include a (simulated?) data example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have a look through &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Breferences%5D+resear*+closed%3Ano+-book+-textbook&quot;&gt;this list of posts&lt;/a&gt; and the specific example &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/95376/what-is-the-current-research-on-missing-not-at-random-data&quot;&gt;What is the current research on missing not at random data?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is good advice about asking questions in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1479/how-to-ask-a-good-question-on-crossvalidated&quot;&gt;How to ask a &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; question on CrossValidated?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastActivityDate="2020-12-01T22:33:40.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6037" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-05T17:01:39.173" Score="5" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have given good answers that I said I would like to wrap up, or revisit, or continue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/494762/xgboost-compared-to-other-ensemble-methods-example/494833#494833&quot;&gt;XGBoost Compared to Other Ensemble Methods Example&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I find all my answers where I had a &amp;quot;I want to go this way eventually&amp;quot;?  Is there a way to search for &amp;quot;to-do&amp;quot; in my answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22452" LastActivityDate="2020-12-05T17:09:12.820" Title="Revisiting my incompletes" Tags="|support|search|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6037" CreationDate="2020-12-05T17:07:18.633" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you used the same phrase each time that you wrote about your intention to revisit an answer later, you could do a search like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;user:me I want to go this way eventually&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or similar; the code &lt;code&gt;user:me&lt;/code&gt; restricts search hits to only posts you've written, and then you can include whatever search terms you like as normal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastActivityDate="2020-12-05T17:07:18.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6037" CreationDate="2020-12-05T17:09:12.820" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5549/faq-best-practices-for-searching-cv&quot;&gt;FAQ: Best Practices for Searching CV&lt;/a&gt;  but here, if you said &amp;quot;I want to go this way eventually&amp;quot;  (or something like) &lt;em&gt;in the post itself&lt;/em&gt;, not in a comment, you could try site search with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;user:me eventually&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or &lt;code&gt;user:me to-do &lt;/code&gt; and variants.  But if you might have said so &lt;strong&gt;in comments&lt;/strong&gt;, site search do not see in comments, so then use google (or some other external engine) with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;site:https://stats.stackexchange.com  EngrStudent  to-do&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and experiment/modify if necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastActivityDate="2020-12-05T17:09:12.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6035" CreationDate="2020-12-08T18:05:57.043" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the things that I like to do, to help those helping me, is to show that I have done a credible effort.  I show where I have looked, and I update it as I progress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal here is teaching and sometimes finding.  Communicating knowledge.  The form isn't always &amp;quot;I know x&amp;quot; but is often and commendably &amp;quot;This person at &lt;em&gt;reference&lt;/em&gt; did y&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my personal opinion, this is more of a &amp;quot;how do you go about asking the question&amp;quot; and the &amp;quot;may I ask this type of question&amp;quot; is already answered in the affirmative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22452" LastActivityDate="2020-12-08T18:05:57.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6043" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-20T10:32:20.340" Score="6" ViewCount="278" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why should questions contain motivation and why does the absence of motivation make questions ambiguous?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wrote this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/500094/probability-mass-function-making-the-truncated-normal-discrete&quot;&gt;Probability Mass Function making the Truncated Normal Discrete&lt;/a&gt; and it was closed because it was ambiguous probably because it lacked motivation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="226383" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T18:50:02.823" Title="Why is motivation important" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|questions|moderation|policy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6044" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-21T13:45:27.773" Score="4" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once a CV participant has a reputation of 10,000, a threshold is reached which grants them access to &lt;em&gt;moderator tools&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would someone describe what these tools enable that participant to do? Edit other participants' comments? Delete other participants' comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elaboration would be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78229" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2021-01-01T10:17:39.940" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T10:18:09.910" Title="What do &quot;moderator tools&quot; consist of?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6044" CreationDate="2020-12-21T14:31:48.583" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;They're as described in the help page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only diamond moderators can edit/delete other users' comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also a site-wide elaboration of the role of moderators here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/75189/who-are-the-diamond-moderators-and-what-is-their-role&quot;&gt;Who are the diamond moderators, and what is their role?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2020-12-21T16:17:21.823" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T16:17:21.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6044" CreationDate="2020-12-21T14:32:37.703" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you can't edit or delete other users' comments; only ♦ moderators are capable of that. For some more explanation, see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/19757/295232&quot;&gt;FAQ about comments&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt; pretty much sums up what you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; get; personally, I find the 'edit tags inline' feature the most helpful and the ability to view deleted posts the most interesting. (I don't have 10k here but I do on a few other sites in the network.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also an FAQ page on Meta Stack Exchange: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/4565/295232&quot;&gt;What are the moderation tools available to 10,000+ reputation users?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79696" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2021-01-01T10:18:09.910" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T10:18:09.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6043" CreationDate="2020-12-21T15:47:45.457" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is difficult to read what your question is about. Your introduction is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really like the truncated normal but I want to make it discrete. I need a discrete distribution and I hate approximations (the best fit for my data is truncated normal but my data are discrete [0,25]) I am fixated on the kernel and the nice relations and ratios of the different values.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you hate approximations... but what is the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already answered why. Most people when they have such data use Normal or Truncated Normal at best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't clarify at all why you want to discretize the normal distribution and what the problem is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is very general/broad and cannot be easily answered without the question having more focus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There might be a reason why you 'really like the truncated normal'. But if you leave it open for others to guess why this is the case, then this information is not very  useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you want some discretized truncated normal distribution, what are the properties of the truncated normal that should remain when the distribution is discretized?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do you want the discretization to be done? The underlying mechanism in your problem, why it is that a normal distribution is a good model, will  influence  the way to do the discretization.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you explain the problem and the motivation then all such considerations do not need to be guessed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to be honest. I did not read the second half of the question. It is a big block of text which might become more readable if you split it into multiple paragraphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2020-12-21T18:50:02.823" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T18:50:02.823" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6049" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-02T07:00:39.333" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hypothesis-testing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hypothesis-testing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hypothesis-testing&lt;/a&gt; tag is quite popular yet has a very brief Wiki. Extending it could be helpful. Unfortunately, I do not think I am knowledgeable enough to do a good job at it myself. Let this post serve as an encouragement for someone who is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2021-01-03T10:30:07.110" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T10:30:07.110" Title="Improve Wiki for the `hypothesis-testing` tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6050" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-04T18:46:20.253" Score="-5" ViewCount="347" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reinforcement learning (RL) is &lt;em&gt;currently&lt;/em&gt; on-topic here. However, Stats SE, as we all know, is more statistics-oriented, so there are users here that have no interest in RL, which is a framework for &lt;strong&gt;intelligence&lt;/strong&gt; (based on how animals learn): that's why I (and &lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1450/2444&quot;&gt;others that have been answering RL questions both on Stats SE and AI SE&lt;/a&gt;) have suggested that Artificial Intelligence SE is the best place to ask theoretical questions related to RL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, AI SE has the highest number of questions tagged with RL among &lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reinforcement-learning&quot;&gt;AI SE&lt;/a&gt; (currently, we have 1,548 questions out of 8,057 tagged with RL, so this means that more than 1/8 &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\approx$&lt;/span&gt; 0.19 of the questions are about RL), &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reinforcement-learning&quot;&gt;Stats SE&lt;/a&gt; (currently, 908 questions are tagged with RL out of 172,687 questions, so the ratio is about 0.005, which is a lot lower than 0.19), and &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reinforcement-learning&quot;&gt;Data Science SE&lt;/a&gt; (currently, they have 480 questions tagged with RL, out of 26611, for a ratio of 0.01), and almost more than Stack Overflow (which has 1777 questions tagged with RL, with ratio 0.00008). Of course, these ratios are not completely informative of the interests of the community, but they are at least suggestive. In fact, I've personally noticed that many people interested in RL end up on AI SE and they regularly visit the site, and this includes people that answer RL questions even on Stats SE and Data Science SE, as you can see &lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.stackexchange.com/tags/reinforcement-learning/topusers&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/reinforcement-learning/topusers&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/tags/reinforcement-learning/topusers&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you also look at the most popular tags on these three sites, RL is the 3rd most popular tag (just behind neural networks and machine learning) on AI SE, while, as it should be clear now, it isn't as popular on the other sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it's true that both AI SE, Stats SE, and Data Science SE are &amp;quot;competing&amp;quot; for users, wouldn't the 3 (overlapping) communities benefit from having a more solid collaboration? I think so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I would suggest that all theoretical RL questions are asked on AI SE. Why? Because of the reasons I just mentioned above (i.e. AI is about intelligence and intelligent agents, and RL is one, if not the main, approach to achieve that), while it's not strictly related to statistics or data science. In this way, all users interested in RL would know that that is THE site where to ask the question and we can decrease the number of questions that went unanswered because the right user that knew about the topic was in another community. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2346/82135&quot;&gt;I know that this may not be beneficial for Stats and DS in terms of activity (and some of you will downvote this post because of that)&lt;/a&gt;, but, in any case, the amount of activity related to RL in these sites is relatively small (compared to all other topics). As we are all part of SE, we should try to collaborate more so that SE is a place where users can come and get good answers and questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what do you think about this? Should users on Stats SE and Data Science SE encourage askers to post their RL questions on AI SE? Note that this does not mean that RL questions will be &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; off-topic on Stats SE or Data Science SE. It only means that we will build more cohesive communities, both in terms of questions and users (with common interests).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user82135" LastEditorDisplayName="user82135" LastEditDate="2021-01-04T20:54:37.523" LastActivityDate="2021-01-12T06:48:47.180" Title="Should Stats SE encourage RL questions to be asked on AI SE?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6050" CreationDate="2021-01-04T19:45:10.433" Score="15" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No, we should not encourage on-topic posts to be posted elsewhere.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We both agree with this statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reinforcement learning (RL) is on-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being on-topic means that RL questions can be posted here; there's no reason to send the question away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By proposing that RL questions are on-topic here on the one hand, but should be encouraged to go elsewhere on the other hand, OP is suggesting some kind of a middle-ground between &amp;quot;on-topic&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;off-topic.&amp;quot; This is harmful, because the disposition of those posts is ambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;RL posts shouldn't be closed as off-topic (they're on-topic).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;RL posts need not be migrated (they're on-topic here).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OP could &lt;em&gt;request&lt;/em&gt; the post be migrated, for instance if the question draws little interest after some time. (But we already have a mechanism to do that: OP flags a post, and it's migrated if that's suitable.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only mechanism to &amp;quot;encourage&amp;quot; a user that they should post elsewhere is to leave a comment on the post to that effect. But this is confusing, because the comment will give the asker the impression that their RL question is not on-topic here, when, in truth, it is on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SE ecosystem works differently from the rest of the Internet, and this difference is counterintuitive to new users. I don't think that adding this additional obstacle to users asking questions is productive or welcoming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;New SE sites shouldn't cannibalize old ones.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I support creating new SE websites which extend the usage of the SE software to new topic areas. However, the arrival of the AI.SE website overlaps with stats.SE. This isn't &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; a problem -- two websites can cover the same topic and coexist. But I think it goes too far to attempt to annex a topic from another website just because one site thinks it's a better home for a topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/10/01/an-area-51-apology-and-clarification/&quot;&gt;The SE blog has written about this phenomenon in the past&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Area 51 was always envisioned as a tool for broadening our scope — for creating new sites serving new topics and answering questions that were previously considered off-topic on our existing sites. Area 51 was never intended as a tool for creating overlapping sub-sites that would cannibalize users from our existing sites!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem of site overlap could have been avoided. A hypothetical Area 51 proposal for a website about the philosophical and conceptual components of AI could have been written. If this proposal excludes statistical topics in AI, this website would not overlap with stats.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now we're in a place where AI.SE has a topic that &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; overlap with stat.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;OP's reasoning is not sound.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Stats SE, as we all know, is more statistics-oriented, so there are users here that have no interest in RL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The observation that some topics are not interesting to all users doesn't change the scope of Stats.SE. If we accept this as a standard for determining scope, stats.SE would be fragmented into time-series.SE, clustering.SE, boosting.SE and so on whenever some number of users became uninterested in other on-topic material. This harms users, because expertise will be scattered across a number of sites. Narrowly-construed website topics also create ambiguity about where to put questions that straddle two domains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To some extent, this is already happening because the Area 51 process allows the creation of new sites that have large overlap with existing sites. This is baffling, but not really something we, as users of stats.SE, can solve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think that having a broad topic area is beneficial. I've read numerous posts outside of my research area, coursework and professional duties. If stats.SE were a more narrow community, I would be worse off because I wouldn't have the benefit of reading these posts from thoughtful contributors. And it's often happened that I can read a post that I come back to when I need to learn about that topic some years later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AI SE has the highest number of questions tagged with RL among AI SE, Stats SE, and Data Science SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The observation that other SE websites have a larger or smaller number of posts about RL doesn't change the scope of Stats.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, there is a &amp;quot;branding&amp;quot; effect at work. &amp;quot;Artificial intelligence&amp;quot; is a hot topic with a lot of buzz, especially in the popular press. A few years ago, the popular press conferred similar buzz to &amp;quot;big data&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;machine learning.&amp;quot; A user with no knowledge of the SE ecosystem might end up at AI.SE to ask a question simply because of the site's name, even if their question already has an answer on stats.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that counting tags is sufficient to establish where a question is on-topic. AI.SE also includes philosophical questions about the nature of intelligence among its topics, whereas such questions would be off-topic on stats.SE. Because the union of philosophical questions about RL and quantitative questions about RL must be at least as large as quantitative questions about RL on their own, a simple count of tags on two websites is not making an apples-to-apples comparison between the sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the logic of counting tags cuts both ways. Clearly, there are large segments of AI.SE which are squarely on-topic here. Stats.SE has far more &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt; posts (~16,000 on stats.SE versus ~1700 on AI.SE), and probably similarly for several related topics. Should we divert AI.SE users who ask about machine learning to stats.SE? I don't think this makes sense, but it's the inevitable conclusion if we make topic decisions based on tag counts. And I doubt that the AI.SE community would want to part with a core topic in artificial intelligence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the occurrence of more RL tags on AI.SE could stem, at least in part, from a particular user's unilateral effort to leave comments discourage RL questions from being posted on stats.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've personally noticed that many people interested in RL end up on AI SE and they regularly visit the site, and this includes people that answer RL questions even on Stats SE and Data Science SE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same users having accounts across one or more of the quantitative fora doesn't change the scope of stats.SE. Probability and statistics questions regularly show up on math.SE; some of them are answered by users who also post to stats.SE. This doesn't change what is topical on math.SE, nor does it change what is topical here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it's true that both AI SE, Stats SE, and Data Science SE are &amp;quot;competing&amp;quot; for users, wouldn't the 3 (overlapping) communities benefit from having a more solid collaboration? I think so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The communities are not competing for users. Membership or participation in one community doesn't preclude membership or participation in another. I simply don't grant the premise of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &amp;quot;collaboration&amp;quot; suggests people working together towards a common goal. What is the common goal that you have in mind here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The core problem is &lt;em&gt;fragmentation&lt;/em&gt;, which we can't stop.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my mind, the goal of stats.SE is to answer statistical questions (broadly conceived). Fragmenting the statistical field (to include data science, machine learning and AI) across multiple websites seems to work against that goal, and does not promote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fragmenting the field across an archipelago of quantitative websites makes it more difficult for new and existing users to make use of these websites because they will have to know the exact, arcane delineations between each site's scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fragmentation makes it harder to find answers, because you have to search in multiple places. To some extent, general purpose search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing) can help, but SE has unique search tools for searching within a specific site. I've found these tools are very helpful, but they only search one SE site at a time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fragmentation creates duplicated effort. The same question can be asked and answered in 2 places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate that fragmentation is happening already, but it is unresolvable as long as there are SE websites with overlapping content. Because we both agree that RL is on-topic here, there's simply no reason to send on-topic posts elsewhere. On-topic posts are on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's useful to consider this question from the perspective of &lt;em&gt;minimizing site overlap&lt;/em&gt;.  A Venn diagram of AI.SE, DS.SE and stats.SE has a lot of overlap, so if the problem we seek to solve is reducing fragmentation, does AI.SE need to exist as a distinct website?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, since there is an interest in philosophical questions about intelligent agents, should AI.SE's scope be narrowed to only include questions which are not topical on stats.SE? This solves the problem of topic overlap, while retaining all of the unique content and expertise at AI.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not trying to pick a fight with the AI.SE folks by asking these provocative question, so please don't read it that way. I am trying to tease out what the core issue is. The answers to these questions will provide a better understanding of how to approach topic overlap and mitigate the problems stemming from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, the root of this problem is that questions about what is on-topic will persists as long as there are multiple, overlapping websites with very similar topics, but with fine-grained distinctions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Users can choose where to ask their questions.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A user might want to ask about building a fence. This user has a number of places they might ask such a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They could ask on DIY.SE to learn about construction methods or get materials recommendations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They could ask on law.SE to learn about potential legal entanglements, such as legal risks arising from a contractor getting injured on their property while building the fence, or the consequences of annexing some of their neighbor's property due to a surveying error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They could have a question about how to construct the shape of the fence so that a tethered goat grazes over a specific area. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematician-solves-centuries-old-grazing-goat-problem-exactly-20201209/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This example is inspired by an old mathematical puzzle.&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think users' choices are important to keep in mind, because the decision to post in one place but not another place is a deliberate decision by the user to seek help from a particular community. (Sometimes a user asks an off-topic question, but we both agree RL questions are on-topic.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What tag-counting &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; tell us is that users have tended to ask their RL questions on AI.SE. To me, this suggests that the only thing we need to do for AI.SE to continue to attract RL questions is for AI.SE to continue to provide high-quality answers, a task that AI.SE is doing very well today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2021-01-06T03:01:59.373" LastActivityDate="2021-01-06T03:01:59.373" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6050" CreationDate="2021-01-04T23:03:52.237" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the question is getting ahead of things.  I think the first thing you should figure out is: where are RL questions most likely to get the best answer?  That's not clear to me.  I suspect it is likely to depend on the specific question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The statistics that 19% of questions on AI.SE are about RL and 0.5% of questions on Stats.SE are about RL don't seem relevant to me.  That tells me little about whether any particular question is more likely to get a good answer here or there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A statistic that &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be more relevant is what fraction of questions on RL are answered, on AI.SE and on Stats.SE.  When &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5574/2921&quot;&gt;Scortchi did that analysis two years ago&lt;/a&gt;, the results were apparently that approximately 58% on Stats.SE were answered and 75% on AI.SE were answered.  There are some major caveats, though.  For instance, it doesn't measure what fraction received a good answer, and doesn't take into account whether those are a similar population of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a more fruitful way to advance the conversation would be through further data and analysis.  For instance, are there some categories of RL questions that are more likely to get a good answer on AI.SE than on Stats.SE?  Can you gather any data on it, by taking a random sample of 20 such questions on both sites and rating how many received a good answer?  That might yield some advice to question-askers that could be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be skeptical of a proposal to declare RL off-topic here and direct all such questions to AI.SE.  &lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; there was sufficient evidence or consensus, it's possible that there might be utility to some general (non-binding) advice that says &amp;quot;if your question meets these criteria, then it might do better here, if it meets those criteria, it might do better on AI.SE&amp;quot; and leaves it up to askers where is best suited for them.  But that would need to be developed and fleshed out further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also encourage you to look for policies that might be a win-win for all sites.  Proposing a site policy that appears to benefit one site at the cost of another site does not appear likely to succeed.  Since you raised the idea of collaboration, I like to think of &amp;quot;collaboration&amp;quot; as a project that everyone involved views as to their mutual benefit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that part of the challenge is that there is considerable overlap in topic areas between folks who work on statistics, computer science, data science, and AI.  So, for some subjects, you have multiple communities of people who each have their own perspective and approach to the subject.  That might admit any simple bright-line solution involving pushing all such questions to one site or the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2921" LastActivityDate="2021-01-04T23:03:52.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6053" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-05T17:06:15.723" Score="2" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like to answer questions in my areas of interest.  Just this week I learned that the &amp;quot;unanswered&amp;quot; really means &amp;quot;no answer selected&amp;quot; not &amp;quot;no answers at all&amp;quot;.  I now go into the filters and have found lots of new and relevant stuff to contributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is the default set to &amp;quot;no answers selected&amp;quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If we wanted more answers to totally unanswered questions, why not change the search default?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22452" LastActivityDate="2021-01-05T17:06:15.723" Title="default search for &quot;unanswered questions&quot;" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|search|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6050" CreationDate="2021-01-05T22:28:30.613" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions can be on-topic on multiple sites. &lt;strong&gt;In principle a question should be placed on the site that is most suitable.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But this can be difficult to determine. There might be multiple reasons why a person asks a question on CV instead of AI, and we should not overrule this when a question is on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Also, it doesn't hurt if occasionally a question turns up on a different site (it may be even beneficial), or gets cross-posted.  Already because of that we should not actively promote to move questions that are on-topic here. The point of  multiple SE sites is not (I believe) to have sharp boundaries between them. That is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; going to be a benefit. To me this idea of cohesive (but separated) communities sounds like the opposite of collaboration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatives would be to &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/114513/search-comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mention ai.stackexchange&lt;/a&gt; more often in the comments (currently this only occurs 44 times). Make more references in tag infos (currently this happens for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/artificial-intelligence/info&quot;&gt;artificial-intelligence&lt;/a&gt;). Be more open to cross-posting. (And probably there are many others.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2021-01-06T03:02:43.013" LastActivityDate="2021-01-06T03:02:43.013" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6055" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-06T08:12:08.280" Score="12" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been flagging questions that are cross-posted.  Usually this leads to the question being closed; sometimes, my flag is marked helpful but no action is taken and the question is left open.  Can I get some clarity on the Cross Validated position on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like I've flagged 15 cross-posts in 2020.  Of them, about 11 have been closed after being flagged, and 4 have not.  Here are the 4 that remain open:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/502373/2921&quot;&gt;Classify tweets per topic&lt;/a&gt; - simultaneously cross-posted on 5 SE sites (word-for-word identical; no cross-linking); I flagged, but it hasn't been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/488793/2921&quot;&gt;Model of dithered lattice quantization error/noise&lt;/a&gt; - simultaneously cross-posted on one other SE site (word-for-word identical; cross-linked); I flagged twice, but it hasn't been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/489205/2921&quot;&gt;Comparing a large/general CNN to a smaller more specialized one?&lt;/a&gt; - simultaneously cross-posted on one other SE site (word-for-word identical; no cross-linking; answered on the other site); I flagged, but it hasn't been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/489249/2921&quot;&gt;the probability of random subset&lt;/a&gt; - cross-posted on one other SE site (word-for-word identical, no cross-linking; slight differences in typesetting; answered on the other site; also re-posted here on Stats.SE a second time, and answered that second time); I flagged, but it hasn't been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure how to interpret the differing responses.  Do the moderators want cross-posted questions to be flagged?  Do you want me to stop flagging them?  Is this a difference in the views of different moderators?  Is this an oversight?  Should I be re-flagging if they are't closed on my first attempt, on the theory that perhaps my custom text was not sufficiently clear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have I misunderstood some aspect of Cross Validated's policy?  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/64069/160917&quot;&gt;SE-wide default policy is that cross-posting is discouraged or prohibited&lt;/a&gt; (and to the extent that there is any wiggle room, it seems pretty clear that cross-posting word-for-word identical questions is not the way to go about it).  The policies that I can find articulated on this meta seem similar: see, e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/896/2921&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1194/2921&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1948/2921&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4473/2921&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2131/2921&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;.  My preference and request would be for moderators to close cross-posted questions when flagged, but if moderators are aware of cases or criteria where they don't plan to do that, it'd be helpful to know that, if possible, so I don't waste your time or my time raising unwanted flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2921" LastActivityDate="2021-01-11T20:04:40.707" Title="Handling of cross-posted questions when flagged" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|moderation|cross-posting|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6055" CreationDate="2021-01-07T15:24:41.900" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From my point of view the main reason I dislike cross posting is the potential waste of my time and that of other users answering some question which has already been answered elsewhere. Given that the comments which the OP has posted specifying the cross posts are very helpful as I would not answer any question where I saw such comments. It seems less necessary to also close the question as if someone wishes to proceed to answer it in the knowledge that there may be duplication of effort then that is their privilege.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastActivityDate="2021-01-07T15:24:41.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4257" CreationDate="2021-01-10T21:01:04.970" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are topics, like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;expert systems (and, more generally, symbolic AI),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;artificial general intelligence,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;meta-heuristics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;evolutionary computation (swarm intelligence, evolutionary algorithms, etc.),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;traditional search algorithms (such as A*),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;philosophical and social aspects of AI (such as super-intelligence, tests and definitions of intelligence, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;as far as I know and interpret the on-topic page here&lt;/a&gt;, are not on-topic here, &lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;but are on-topic on AI SE&lt;/a&gt;. Some of them have little to do with statistics or machine learning (though some may disagree, as there may be a way to study these from a statistical point of view). So, there is not a perfect overlap between Artificial Intelligence SE and Cross Validated SE. However, there's a big overlap between the two sites, especially because machine learning (a big part of the two) is on-topic on both sites. Nevertheless, AI SE and Stats SE are significantly different to be separate sites. In any case, we should probably collaborate more, in some way, when it comes to machine learning questions. For instance, we could &amp;quot;advertise&amp;quot; our ML questions to each other, or something like that, so that askers can get an answer more quickly or likely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site that I really think has an almost perfect overlap with Stats SE is Data Science SE, though some may disagree (because Data Science SE maybe covers certain topics that are not very welcomed here, such as certain implementation questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user82135" LastEditorDisplayName="user82135" LastEditDate="2021-01-10T21:12:05.100" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T21:12:05.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6055" CreationDate="2021-01-11T10:10:27.167" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once links to the cross-site duplicates have been provided, there doesn't seem to be a pressing need to close the question if it's squarely on-topic at this site; potential answerers can now decide whether or not they want to write an answer in full cognizance of actual or potential answers elsewhere, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6056/17230&quot;&gt;@mdewey's answer&lt;/a&gt; points out. (The notion that a question should be on topic at one site only seems very dated now; plenty are on-topic at several without any need for &amp;quot;tailoring&amp;quot;.)&lt;sup&gt;†&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And once the OP's been informed of the cross-posting policy, shouldn't they be given the chance to decide on which site they want the question? It's perhaps a little heavy-handed to immediately decide for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another issue that sometimes arises is that even a currently unanswered question is part way along to getting an answer—there are comments asking for clarification, edits in response to the clarification—&amp;amp; it would be a shame to throw that work away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all I feel it's better to deal with the flag by taking the opportunity to weed out poor questions &amp;amp; to check on the OP's other posts (such flags are certainly helpful), &amp;amp; otherwise just ensuring that the necessary links are there &amp;amp; that the OP's now aware of the policy.&lt;sup&gt;‡&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;† That's not to say we should jettison the policy: the consequences of allowing cross-site duplication &lt;em&gt;en masse&lt;/em&gt; might still be unpalatable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‡ A repetition, though, should be dealt with by closing/deleting the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2021-01-11T20:04:40.707" LastActivityDate="2021-01-11T20:04:40.707" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6055" CreationDate="2021-01-11T11:24:47.147" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we want to take a firmer line:—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators can close the cross-site duplicate using a custom reason (neater than using an inappropriate default close reason). If we think there's value in keeping it here purely to link to the duplicate on another site, we can up-vote it, which will protect it from automatic deletion. In fact any user can vote, up or down, so an advantage of this approach is that the decision isn't made by a single person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2021-01-11T11:24:47.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4257" CreationDate="2021-01-12T04:45:10.293" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a mental model, it can be helpful to consider the scope of Stats.SE and AI.SE as two circles of a Venn diagram.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some topics, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sigma-algebra&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sigma-algebra&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;sigma-algebra&lt;/a&gt; or statistical hypothesis tests, are only on-topic on Stats.SE.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some topics, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reinforcement-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reinforcement-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reinforcement-learning&lt;/a&gt;, are on-topic on &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; sites.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some topics, like philosophical or social consequences of AI, are only on-topic on AI.SE.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And, of course, there are lots of topics that aren't on-topic on either site but are on-topic somewhere else, or no where else, on Stack Exchange.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, &lt;strong&gt;it's best to ask questions about &lt;em&gt;non-statistical&lt;/em&gt; AI on AI.SE.&lt;/strong&gt; If any user is unsure where to post a question, you can ask about it on stats.meta.SE and we'll point you in the right direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastActivityDate="2021-01-12T04:45:10.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6050" CreationDate="2021-01-12T06:48:47.180" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;What I see on this page is well-intended people wasting their time due to SE systemic issues. I believe there are only two solutions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Implement this feature request: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/199989/178179&quot;&gt;Build and strengthen the Stack Exchange community with “crossover questions” between sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Merge AI, CV and DS.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastActivityDate="2021-01-12T06:48:47.180" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6064" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-19T17:10:43.037" Score="8" ViewCount="144" Body="&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22year+in+moderation%22+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the past 12 months&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't eliminate the need for having &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/11/21/our-theory-of-moderation-re-visited/&quot;&gt;moderators&lt;/a&gt; altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as we welcome 2021, and in keeping with tradition, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pU1Al.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;exciting&lt;/em&gt; stats&lt;/a&gt;. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Cross Validated over the past 12 months:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Action&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Moderators&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Community¹&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users suspended²&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;9&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;13&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users destroyed³&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;31&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users deleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users contacted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;30&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;931&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5,016&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;505&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,290&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;621&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,676&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;128&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,773&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;162&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;15,312&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,796&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;7,290&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tags merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;32&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms proposed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;31&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms created&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;32&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag highlight language set&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Revisions redacted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions reopened&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;390&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;23&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions protected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;33&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;48&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions migrated&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;311&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;29&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;39&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions flagged⁵&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;16&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,156&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions closed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;6,505&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,048&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Question flags handled⁵&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,075&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,100&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts unlocked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;59&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;82&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;564&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts locked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;49&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;554&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts deleted⁶&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,438&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;16,219&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts bumped&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;8,572&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Escalations to the Community Manager team&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;32&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;289&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,299&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments deleted⁷&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,293&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;7,743&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comment flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,408&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;180&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Bounties canceled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;10&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answers flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;56&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,448&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answer flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,155&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;349&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;All comments on a post moved to chat&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;16&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Footnotes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &amp;quot;Community&amp;quot; here refers both to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;the membership of Cross Validated&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;diamonds next to their names&lt;/a&gt;, and to the automated systems otherwise known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/-1&quot;&gt;user #-1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;³ A &amp;quot;destroyed&amp;quot; user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/88994/what-is-the-difference-between-a-deleted-user-and-a-destroyed-user&quot;&gt;Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁵ Includes close flags (but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; close or reopen votes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Further reading:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5831/2019-a-year-in-moderation&quot;&gt;2019: a year in moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can also check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/search?q=title%3A%222020%3A+a+year+in+moderation%22&quot;&gt;this report on other sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or peruse &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/359735/208518&quot;&gt;detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A big thank you to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/users/620/shog9&quot;&gt;Shog9&lt;/a&gt; for writing the queries and script to facilitate fetching and posting this data to all the sites in the network, and to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/users/459488/brian-nickel&quot;&gt;Brian&lt;/a&gt; for the subsequent work making the whole thing more user friendly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wishing everyone a happy 2021!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72321" LastEditorUserId="72321" LastEditDate="2021-01-21T11:24:27.460" LastActivityDate="2021-01-21T11:24:27.460" Title="2020: a year in moderation" Tags="|discussion|moderation|statistics|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6066" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6067" CreationDate="2021-01-27T08:46:55.093" Score="25" ViewCount="496" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over time, a large number of machine learning questions have been asked and answered on Stack Overflow, amassing a significant amount of useful information. However, these questions are unfortunately off-topic for Stack Overflow, and as they come to members' attention, they are being closed (SO is for implementation questions, not theory).  For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2480650/what-is-the-role-of-the-bias-in-neural-networks&quot;&gt;What is the role of the bias in neural networks?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1832076/what-is-the-difference-between-supervised-learning-and-unsupervised-learning&quot;&gt;What is the difference between supervised learning and unsupervised learning?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2595176/which-machine-learning-classifier-to-choose-in-general&quot;&gt;Which machine learning classifier to choose, in general?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11632516/what-are-advantages-of-artificial-neural-networks-over-support-vector-machines&quot;&gt;What are advantages of Artificial Neural Networks over Support Vector Machines?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5064928/difference-between-classification-and-clustering-in-data-mining&quot;&gt;Difference between classification and clustering in data mining?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9782071/why-must-a-nonlinear-activation-function-be-used-in-a-backpropagation-neural-net&quot;&gt;Why must a nonlinear activation function be used in a backpropagation neural network?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning?tab=Votes&quot;&gt;many&lt;/a&gt; more similar questions that are likely to be on the chopping block as mods get to them.  And I'd really hate to lose the ability to have experts add new answers to them (or for them to be silently deleted if someone got overzealous without anyone noticing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, there's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/151890/disable-migration-for-questions-older-than-60-days?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;60 day limit on migrating questions between sites.&lt;/a&gt;  Moderators can't even override this, only SE employees can.  This is for good reasons, smaller stacks didn't want StackOverflow dumping a backlog of terrible questions on small sites with even fewer moderation resources, or for bad questions to get passed around like White Elephants from stack to stack.  Additionally, high-rep users on smaller stacks were rightfully upset that one migrated question from a big stack could shoot a member that never participated in their stack to the top of their rep ladders (and occasionally, vice versa).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leaves SO in a difficult situation.  Close the questions and let these questions stagnate?  Delete them and hope the vacuum promotes similar questions to be asked on the correct stacks?  Leave them open and set a bad precedent for newer theory questions (that should probably be asked here?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have two other possible solutions, but either would require the buy-in of the receiving stack.  And I'm pretty sure the rightful home of most of these questions is here on Cross Validated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/404799/lets-gift-wrap-our-good-machine-learning-theory-questions-for-cross-validated#404799&quot;&gt;Nominate a large block of well-maintained theory questions&lt;/a&gt;, link them here on stats.meta, get approval from CV members, then bring the list to se.meta and beg for migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pros/Cons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;easier on mods, users, and google algorithms (which would be directed here instead of SO)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;high-rep questions getting migrated might distort the rep landscape of CV&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;consensus on many questions is difficult to get simultaneously&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;after all that effort, se.meta might just say no or leave it in limbo forever.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Manually copy &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; ML theory questions and answers from SO to CV when they are closed, and then ask for SO mods to add a redirect link here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pros/Cons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many of these old questions are asked/answered by users that may have not been active for years, so requesting reposts from them is likely a fool's errand.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Manually &amp;quot;cross-posting&amp;quot; would be quite a lot of manual work, so it wouldn't be undertaken for anything but the most worthy Q&amp;amp;A's&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CV users can judge their worth for themselves and up/down/close vote as appropriate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I were to do this, I'd ask the mods to make both question and answer Community Wiki, because honestly I don't want to leech rep from work I didn't do.  That is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/227290/stop-using-community-wiki-as-a-reputation-denial-mechanism&quot;&gt;controversial method&lt;/a&gt;, but personally, I'd rather err on the side of not taking credit for other's work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally lean towards 2, although 1 would put most of the work on SE employee's shoulders (which the lazy slob in me likes) and bring more traffic here form Google (which may be a dubious benefit).  But either would depend on buy-in from CV members and mods.  So what do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; After some delay, I've started closing questions on SO for this purpose.  It would be helpful to have CV mods chime in on the MSO answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/404800/4427777&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for clarification on disputed questions (whether they are on-topic here, or may be on-topic elsewhere, like Data Science or AI)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="156974" LastEditorUserId="156974" LastEditDate="2021-02-10T13:02:29.280" LastActivityDate="2021-02-10T13:02:29.280" Title="Would Cross Validated want Machine Learning Theory questions that are no longer on-topic for Stack Overflow?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|migration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6066" CreationDate="2021-01-27T16:49:55.743" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;They should be migrated here! Already two comments prefer option 1) so that looks a good one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastActivityDate="2021-01-27T16:49:55.743" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6066" CreationDate="2021-01-29T08:51:46.593" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to raise on of the concerns from the MSO question - the issue of duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SO: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/879432/what-is-the-difference-between-a-generative-and-a-discriminative-algorithm&quot;&gt;What is the difference between a generative and a discriminative algorithm?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CV: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/12421/generative-vs-discriminative/223850#223850&quot;&gt;Generative vs. discriminative&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there agreement that in these cases, if one is duplicate-targeted of the other, that the questions would get reciprocal links (say, a note and &amp;quot;see also&amp;quot; link at the top of the canonical pointing towards the dupe) and a historical lock, or be merged?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is concern that the questions might be more likely to be deleted here if they get dupe-closed than if they got off-topic closed on SO, especially if the scores are reset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="156974" LastActivityDate="2021-01-29T08:51:46.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6069" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-30T05:18:33.297" Score="15" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that some tags need better names, and want to start out, but will ask here first about opinions and ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Distribution tags should have names ending in &lt;em&gt;-distribution&lt;/em&gt; (there might be exceptions like &lt;em&gt;chi-squared&lt;/em&gt; which nothing can be done with). So &lt;em&gt;uniform-distribution&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;pareto-distribution&lt;/em&gt;, ... For example, while we have both &lt;em&gt;exponential&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;exponential-distribution&lt;/em&gt;, the shorter name invites misuse (rampant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;online&lt;/em&gt; -&amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;online-algorithms&lt;/em&gt; (the short name invites misunderstandings)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;var&lt;/em&gt; -&amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;vector-auto-regression&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ensemble&lt;/em&gt; -&amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;ensemble-learning&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;kruskal-wallis&lt;/em&gt; -&amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;kruskal-wallis-test&lt;/em&gt;  (and other similar)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;mgf&lt;/em&gt; -&amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;moment-generating-function&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;irt&lt;/em&gt; -&amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;item-response-theory&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;and certainly others ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2021-01-30T11:16:37.700" LastActivityDate="2021-01-30T11:16:37.700" Title="Some tags need better names" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6074" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-05T01:44:22.227" Score="15" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;We already have another excellent question on CV.SE setting out &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2810/&quot;&gt;editing dos and don'ts&lt;/a&gt;, but that mostly focuses on the limitations that apply to editing other people's posts, rather than the substance of &lt;em&gt;what are some good practice for editing to improve a post&lt;/em&gt;.  The purpose of the present question is to elicit some general recommendations on how to improve posts on CV.SE using standard editing methods.&#xA;This will be of use for the benefit of both original posters and editors.  We have many excellent contributors here who have learned a lot of good ways to structure and format their posts, and edit to improve the clarity, so I think it would be valuable to list some proposed &amp;quot;best practices&amp;quot; or tips for other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Caveat: I am aware that there are different considerations depending on whether one is formatting one's own post or a post written by another user.  In the latter case, it is established practice on CV.SE that edits should not change the substance of the original post, or even correct statistical errors in the original post.  Advice on &amp;quot;best practices&amp;quot; should take this as given.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173082" LastEditorUserId="173082" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T00:37:56.080" LastActivityDate="2024-02-28T21:45:11.403" Title="What are some &quot;best practices&quot; for editing to improve a post?" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|editing|formatting|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6074" CreationDate="2021-02-05T01:44:22.227" Score="15" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Improve external references and add hyperlinks&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CV.SE questions and answers should be self-contained, but often they will refer to external material such as academic papers, course notes, blog posts, software programs or packages, other questions/answers on SE, etc.  Improving external references and adding hyperlinks can simplify the formatting of a question or answer, and it is convenient for readers to have direct links to the source material.  Here are some tips for &amp;quot;best practice&amp;quot; with regard to improving external references:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Only include external references when they add something:&lt;/strong&gt; Sometimes we see posts where the poster makes a gratuitous reference to external material only to tell us it was not helpful.  That is rarely something that adds value to the question or answer.  When giving external references, check if they actually add anything of value to the post, and take them out if they do not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Consider adding Wikipedia links for concepts/objects/rules in probability and statistics:&lt;/strong&gt; Most basic concepts, objects and rules in probability and statistics have their own page on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, and the quality of these pages is usually quite good.  It can be helpful to add links from these pages when writing a question or answer in order to assist users who might be unfamiliar with some of the material.  This is particularly helpful when giving answers that invoke a particular concept or rule in probability or statistics that the questioner, or other similar readers, may be unfamiliar with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Have a clear textual citation/description and a hyperlink:&lt;/strong&gt; References to academic papers, course notes, blog posts, etc., are sometimes made without a clear reference or link, or with a textual web address in place of a reference/link.  A good external reference will give the name of the linked item (e.g., a simple citation or a description of the item) and a hyperlink that links to a stable source for that item.  References to external material do not require full bibliographic details, since the link itself gives access to the full details; consequently, it is best to give a reference in a simple format (e.g., Harvard style references to papers) and let the hyperlink take care of the rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Replace textual web addresses with hyperlinks:&lt;/strong&gt; Unless there is a compelling reason to the contrary, textual web addresses should always be changed to hyperlinks.  Textual web addresses are ugly and distracting, and they are unnecessary given the ability to hyperlink text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Give page numbers, direct quotations, etc., where necessary:&lt;/strong&gt; As with citations in academic papers, all external links should give sufficient detail to find the source of any referenced material.  If you quote from an external document you should use quotation marks to indicate a direct quote.  If you link to a document and quote from that document, or paraphrase a particular part of the document, you should include a page number in the reference (if it has page numbers) to allow the reader to identify the specific part containing the quoted/paraphrased material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rephrase statements saying &amp;quot;I have read ...&amp;quot;:&lt;/strong&gt; Sometimes references to external materials will be given in way where the description focuses on the fact that the poster has read the material, rather than focusing on the substance of what is in the material.  For example, a post might say something like, &amp;quot;I have read X and they say Y.&amp;quot;  This is unnecessary, since the reader may take for granted that if you cite a reference and describe its content, then presumably you have read it.  Thus, it is generally preferable to reduce &amp;quot;I have read X and they say Y&amp;quot; to something simpler like &amp;quot;X says Y&amp;quot;.  In cases like this it is usually possible to edit to give a more parsimonious description that focuses on the substance of what is in the external material at issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the section below I show an example of a bad version of a question that uses poor practices for structure and formatting of external material, and then an edited version that applies the above practices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bad version:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is about robustness testing in linear regression analysis.  I consulted my lecture notes on this for my linear regression course, but they weren't any help --- they don't say much about robustness.  Aside from my lecture notes, I was reading this paper at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/2345881?seq=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.jstor.org/stable/2345881?seq=1&lt;/a&gt; where the authors look at methods for robustness in regression modelling, and they have some useful technical material for how to do robustness testing in this context.  However, I also saw on Andrew Gelman's blog that he has a post where he comments on the limitations of robustness testing, and he says that robustness tests are typically to confirm your beliefs, which is typically a bad game to play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I reconcile the use of robustness procedures in academic literature to the concerns expressed by Gelman?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Good version:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_testing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;robustness testing&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_regression&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;linear regression analysis&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/2345881&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Carroll &amp;amp; Pedersen (1993), &amp;quot;On Robustness in the Logistic Regression Model&amp;quot;, J. R. Stat. Soc. B, 55(3), pp. 693 – 706&quot;&gt;Carroll and Pederson (1993)&lt;/a&gt; look at methods robustness in regression modelling, and they have some useful technical material for how to do robustness testing in this context.  However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2018/11/14/robustness-checks-joke/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Andrew Gelman's blog&lt;/a&gt; comments on the limitations of robustness testing.  In particular, he says that &amp;quot;[p]art of the problem is that robustness checks are typically done for purpose of confirming one’s existing beliefs, and that’s typically a bad game to be playing.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I reconcile the use of robustness procedures in academic literature to the concerns expressed by Gelman?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173082" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2024-02-28T12:16:33.217" LastActivityDate="2024-02-28T12:16:33.217" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5593" CreationDate="2021-02-05T02:38:27.900" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Consider taking a long-term view and writing a new package&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that is worth bearing in mind in regard to this query is that questions on CV.SE (particularly if they are fairly regular questions) can give a useful indication of &amp;quot;gaps&amp;quot; in the market for software tools to perform a particular task.  If you have sufficient expertise to write code to implement some task (where that task is not already accomplished well in an existing package) then it is worth thinking about whether you might want to turn that into a bigger project where you write and publish a more comprehensive package to assist users with methods of that kind.  If you are willing to do that then you might possibly create something of broader value, and you can also come back to the question later and make reference to your published package.  Of course, this is a large amount of work, so it is generally only a good idea when you observe a set of questions that ask about similar things, and this provides the impetus to create a suite of functions that accomplish a broad range of tasks that answer those questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I speak here as someone who has done this quite a few times on this site.  I have written three &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; packages (&lt;a href=&quot;https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=stat.extend&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;stat.extend&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=ts.extend&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;ts.extend&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=utility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;utilities&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) that largely came out of writing functions to solve problems from users who asked questions on this site.  (Of course, all of these packages are quite general, and they do a lot more than answer the specific questions that initially motivated them, but that was the impetus for starting each of the packages.)  I have answered a whole bunch of questions on CV and SE (see e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/180779/482928#482928&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/171458/482752#482752&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/289008/461606#461606&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/410534/494363#494363&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/145823/494362#494362&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/494612/494692#494692&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/458455/502166#502166&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/12164/494366#494366&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/502689/502701#502701&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/37437/494360#494360&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/498035/505483#505483&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/43159/504974#504974&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/397799/397842#397842&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52399474/66054980#66054980&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53243565/65100073#65100073&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27821238/65100239#65100239&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31997361/65100187#65100187&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60933803/65100104#65100104&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42986446/64707395#64707395&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22284502/64707446#64707446&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) where the answer shows how to use one of those packages to solve the question at issue.  In some cases, the question was asked before I had written the package, but it served as part of the motivation for creating the package.  Writing these packages allows me to give simple user-friendly answers to all questions that ask for implementation of the kinds of problems in the original questions that motivated package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173082" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2021-02-05T13:26:29.860" LastActivityDate="2021-02-05T13:26:29.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1200" CreationDate="2021-02-09T02:41:59.150" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/survey-sampling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;survey-sampling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;survey-sampling&lt;/a&gt;  (wiki, 162q)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/polling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;polling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;polling&lt;/a&gt;  (no wiki, 45q)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastActivityDate="2021-02-09T02:41:59.150" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6074" CreationDate="2021-02-17T09:07:25.433" Score="9" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Improve references to computer code, software, packages, functions, etc.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions and answers on CV.SE will often refer to computer code, software, packages, or individual functions.  That might include full chunks of code for implementation of statistical methods discussed in the post, or it might include in-text references to packages and functions that are useful for the methods.  Here are some tips for &amp;quot;best practice&amp;quot; with regard to improving these aspects of a post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Use &lt;code&gt;computer-code font&lt;/code&gt; for all references to code, software and packages:&lt;/strong&gt; Full code chunks are automatically shown using &lt;code&gt;computer-code font&lt;/code&gt; but it is also desirable for in-text references to these things to appear in this font.  (You should also make sure you use correct capitalisation of names of packages and functions in any software applications that are case-sensitive.)  This assists the reader in seeing which aspects of the discussion pertain to software implementation, and it also ensures that references to packages and functions appear in a consistent font both in the body of the text and in any accompanying code chunks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;State what language you are using:&lt;/strong&gt; This may seem an obvious point, but sometimes posters forget to specify the language they are using for their code (e.g., &lt;code&gt;Python&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Stata&lt;/code&gt;, etc.).  Many experienced coders will recognise the language, but not all users will.  Best practice here is to &lt;em&gt;explicitly&lt;/em&gt; state the coding language you are using.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Add relevant external links for packages and functions:&lt;/strong&gt; When giving an in-text reference to a package for a piece of statistical software, it is desirable to give an external link to the relevant documentation for the package.  When giving an in-text reference to a function, it is desirable to give an external link to the page showing the information for that function (e.g., function arguments, output, description, examples, etc.).  You only need to do this once, so that the reader has a link to relevant documentation, so don't feel the need to link over and over again if you mention a package or function multiple times.  Links may not be necessary for functions and packages that are in common use, but they are extremely helpful for obscure functions or packages.  For packages in &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; you can link to their page in &lt;a href=&quot;https://cran.r-project.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CRAN&lt;/a&gt; and for functions in &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; you can link to their information pages at &lt;a href=&quot;https://rdrr.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rdrr.io&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the UPenn R help pages&lt;/a&gt;.  These sources give useful links for readers to help them understand the syntax used for a package or function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Make sure your code runs and is replicable:&lt;/strong&gt; When you give chunks of computer code you should check to make sure that your code runs on a newly loaded console, without any other preliminary commands that have not been included.  You may assume that the user has the relevant software and has downloaded all required packages, but you need to remember to include commands to load relevant packages if you are using functions from them.  If you are doing randomisation then you should also &amp;quot;set the seed&amp;quot; to ensure that any pseudo-random numbers generated in the code are replicable.  If you include graphical output in your post then you should make sure that the graphical output you give is what is produced in your code.  (There may be some cases where you give a graph without showing the code, in which case this does not apply.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Use proper annotation in chunks of computer code:&lt;/strong&gt; Even though questions and answers will usually have some accompanying text giving context to any relevant computer code, it is still good practice to ensure that chunks of code are annotated with labels that break up the parts into manageable chunks, and tell the reader what the parts of the code are doing.  As a general rule, the code should not be out of place in an application where the user does not have access to the original question/answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Avoiding hard-coding specific parameter values in code:&lt;/strong&gt; Many questions on CV.SE ask for the answer to a specific statistical question with a particular set of parameters.  Notwithstanding this fact, the goal of answers is to be broadly applicable to variations of the question that might be of interest to other readers.  This means that when giving computer code for answers, it is often useful to separate out the specific parameter values used for the particular question from the general form of the code to get the answer.  Rather than &amp;quot;hard-coding&amp;quot; the parameter values, instead add a line of code defining each relevant parameter value and then reference these values in the code.  This makes it easier for readers to substitute other parameter values if they want to apply your method to their own problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Use helpful names for things in code:&lt;/strong&gt; Ideally, all variables and other objects in your code should have names that bear a close resemblance to their actual content, or to the notation usually used to represent them in statistical discussions.  For small pieces of code it is usually possible to name your objects in a helpful way, but this may become cumbersome if you have a long piece of code with many intermediate objects, so some reasonable judgment is needed.  In any case, consider naming your data as &lt;code&gt;DATA&lt;/code&gt; and your model as &lt;code&gt;MODEL&lt;/code&gt; and so on, to make it obvious to the reader what these objects are.  In programs like &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; that are case-sensitive, one useful thing you can do is to name your objects with upper-case and then have these roughly match up with argument inputs of functions which are written in lower-case (e.g., if you have a function that takes an input &lt;code&gt;slope&lt;/code&gt; then create a variable &lt;code&gt;SLOPE&lt;/code&gt; for its value and then input it to the function as &lt;code&gt;slope = SLOPE&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the section below I show an example of a bad version of a question that uses poor practices for coding, and then an edited version that applies the above practices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bad version:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can implement Kaplan-Meier using bootstrap methods with the bootkm function in hmisc, but you will need to set &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$q = 0.8$&lt;/span&gt; because that is not the default.  Here is how you do this with one-hundred bootstrap repetitions for a test of quantile difference for a variable for males and females:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;S &amp;lt;- Surv(runif(400))&#xA;dd &amp;lt;- data.frame(var = S, type = c(rep('M', 200), rep('F', 200)))&#xA;ssm &amp;lt;- bootkm(a['type' == 'M'], b = 100, q = 0.8)&#xA;ssf &amp;lt;- bootkm(a['type' == 'F'], b = 100, q = 0.8)&#xA;describe(ssm-ssf)&#xA;quantile(ssm-ssf)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Good version:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can implement Kaplan-Meier using bootstrap methods with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/R/library/Hmisc/html/bootkm.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;bootkm&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; function in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://math.furman.edu/%7Edcs/courses/math47/R/library/Hmisc/html/Overview.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;Hmisc&lt;/code&gt; package&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt;.  The function takes an input &lt;code&gt;q&lt;/code&gt; for the quantile, so you will need to set this to your desired value.  The function also takes an input &lt;code&gt;b&lt;/code&gt; for the number of bootstrap iterations (500 by default), but we will only use 100 iterations.  Here is how you perform 100 bootstrap iterations for a test of quantile difference for the survival time for males and females in a mock set of data (where the true difference is zero):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# Load required libraries&#xA;library(survival)&#xA;library(Hmisc)&#xA;&#xA;# Create some mock survival data (using the survival package)&#xA;# Survival times for a sample of males (M) and females (F)&#xA;set.seed(1)&#xA;n &amp;lt;- 400&#xA;TIME &amp;lt;- Surv(runif(n))&#xA;DATA &amp;lt;- data.frame(Time = TIME, Sex = c(rep('M', 200), &#xA;                    rep('F', 200)))&#xA;&#xA;# Perform the bootstrap iterations (using the Hmisc package)&#xA;QUANTILE    &amp;lt;- 0.8&#xA;ITERATIONS  &amp;lt;- 100&#xA;BOOT.MALE   &amp;lt;- bootkm(DATA[DATA&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$Sex == 'M', ], b = ITERATIONS, &#xA;                  q = QUANTILE)&#xA;BOOT.FEMALE &amp;lt;- bootkm(DATA[DATA$&lt;/span&gt;Sex == 'F', ], b = ITERATIONS, &#xA;                      q = QUANTILE)&#xA;&#xA;# Describe the quantile difference&#xA;describe(BOOT.MALE-BOOT.FEMALE)&#xA;quantile(BOOT.MALE-BOOT.FEMALE)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173082" LastEditorUserId="11887" LastEditDate="2024-02-28T21:45:11.403" LastActivityDate="2024-02-28T21:45:11.403" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6081" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6082" CreationDate="2021-02-18T02:01:35.420" Score="9" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/271607/do-not-reinstate-monica&quot;&gt;this user profile&lt;/a&gt; after their name is the tag &amp;quot;Unregistered&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean, and what is different in comparison with a common (registered) user?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236645" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T19:03:57.307" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T19:03:57.307" Title="What does it mean that a user is unregistered?" Tags="|discussion|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6081" CreationDate="2021-02-18T07:22:11.790" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You do not need to register in order to participate here (on other Stack Exchange sites it may be different); just leaving a display name and email address is enough. You can test this yourself by opening a private browser window (or another browser) and start writing a question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QlGXp.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QlGXp.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The system will remember you through cookies, but once you clear those, &lt;em&gt;you're effectively logged out forever&lt;/em&gt;, meaning you can't edit your posts, reply to comments or upvote. Unregistered users are also not shown in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/&quot;&gt;the list of users&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information, see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/unregistered-users&quot;&gt;questions about 'unregistered users'&lt;/a&gt; on Meta Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79696" LastEditorUserId="79696" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T07:25:50.017" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T07:25:50.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6086" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-25T23:55:59.760" Score="4" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it just me, or did anyone else not receive Newsletter for the Feb 18 ? Is there some way to get it ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also I noticed in the last few newsletters that the &amp;quot;hits from previous week&amp;quot; section was not there. Is this a permanent thing ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6884" LastActivityDate="2021-02-26T18:57:09.610" Title="Cross Validated Newsletter Feb 18 2021" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6087" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-26T17:26:43.447" Score="9" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our community has 3 custom closure options (self-study, either not stats or about software, data set requests), plus two immutable closure options (migration, other/leave a comment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users with more than 10k rep can view how often the closure reasons are used during the previous 90 days via this query: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tools/question-close-stats?daterange=last90days&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tools/question-close-stats?daterange=last90days&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;data sets&amp;quot; option is the least-used option. Even the option which prompts the user to write a comment is used more often than the &amp;quot;data sets&amp;quot; option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that adding an additional closure reason is not an option available to us at this time. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5606/22311&quot;&gt;A previous effort to add a fourth custom closure reason was declined.&lt;/a&gt; Moreover, in explaining why it was declined, Catija (an SE representative) explained that the relative disuse of the &amp;quot;data set requests&amp;quot; was a part of the reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Removing a vote-to-close reason doesn't change what's on- or off-topic on this site, it just changes the menu options when a person opens the VTC dialogue. A user can still select &amp;quot;this is not about statistics as described in the [help],&amp;quot; or  they could select &amp;quot;other - add comment&amp;quot; and paste the text of the current &amp;quot;data set request&amp;quot; option. The menu of options is just a matter of convenience, so that reviewers have ready-made closure reasons for the most common varieties of off-topic questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the &amp;quot;data set request&amp;quot; option is so rarely used, should we retire it? Doing so would free a slot for a custom option which could be more useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Follow-up: see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6092/should-we-replace-the-data-set-request-with-distinct-this-is-an-off-topic-sof&quot;&gt;Should we replace the &amp;quot;data set request&amp;quot; with distinct &amp;quot;this is an off-topic software question&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;this is not about statistics&amp;quot; closure reasons?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2021-03-08T05:22:04.937" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T05:22:04.937" Title="Should we retire the &quot;data set request&quot; closure reason?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6086" CreationDate="2021-02-26T18:57:09.610" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's called the &amp;quot;Cross Validated Community digest.&amp;quot;  Google gives a link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/digest/preview&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/digest/preview&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2021-02-26T18:57:09.610" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6087" CreationDate="2021-02-27T16:33:39.717" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should retire it.  Sycorax has given enough reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastActivityDate="2021-02-27T16:33:39.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6087" CreationDate="2021-03-01T12:42:01.703" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't retire it until we have a different option in mind that we prefer over the dataset option.  For example, in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6087/should-we-retire-the-data-set-request-closure-reason#comment20585_6087&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt;, @Sycorax states he would prefer to split the EITHER not about stats OR about software option into two different VTC options.  That might be better, or something else might be better, but we shouldn't eliminate the data request option until we have decided on its replacement.  Another issue is whether we could add &lt;a href=&quot;https://opendata.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Open Data&lt;/a&gt; to our list of migration targets; I think we can't, but if we could, that would make more sense than just eliminating it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2021-03-01T12:42:01.703" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6092" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-08T01:35:04.123" Score="10" ViewCount="396" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a follow up to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6087/should-we-retire-the-data-set-request-closure-reason&quot;&gt;Should we retire the &amp;quot;data set request&amp;quot; closure reason?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My interpretation of the votes and answers on that thread is that there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6089/22311&quot;&gt;some support for retiring the &amp;quot;data set request&amp;quot; option (+8/-0)&lt;/a&gt;, but there is also a feeling that there should be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6090/22311&quot;&gt;concrete option that will replace the &amp;quot;data set request&amp;quot; option (+6/-0)&lt;/a&gt;. I want to put forward this post as a suggestion for how we could use the slot freed up if we choose to retire the &amp;quot;data set request&amp;quot; option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, we have two distinct closure reasons occupying a single slot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because EITHER it is not about statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, or data visualization, OR it focuses on programming, debugging, or performing routine operations within a statistical computing platform. If the latter, you could try the support links we maintain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion is that we divide this into two distinct reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because it is not about probability, statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, or data visualization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because it focuses on programming, debugging, or performing routine operations within a statistical computing platform. You could try the support links we maintain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is a helpful change because it provides question-askers with more precise feedback about what caused a question to be closed. While it might be obvious to experienced users why a given question was closed, I think that it can be confusing to newcomers when a question is closed with the EITHER/OR closure message because the newcomer is not clear on the boundaries for reasons (1) and the boundaries for reason (2). This means that the newcomer won't be certain if the question was closed because it's not about statistics (broadly conceived), or if was closed because it's about routine programming tasks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Newcomers are the users we should have foremost in our minds when writing closure reasons because they're the users whose questions are most likely to be closed, and they're the users who have the most information to learn about how the site works. By definition, they're the least-experienced users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, the more experienced users who are doing the closing have a clear reason fixed in their minds (either they're closing it for reason 1, or they're closing it for reason 2), but the limitations of the closure dialogue make that communication difficult because the new user is only told that the question was closed &amp;quot;ETIHER for reason 1 OR for reason 2.&amp;quot; This means that the new user has to learn two things about how the site works (which quantitative topics are on-topic here, and which computing topics are on-topic here) in order to revise their question for reopening. But it's likely that only one of these reasons caused the question to be closed, so they have to learn the details of the 2 reasons just to ameliorate the single problem. I think this is an obstacle to new users engaging successfully with the SE paradigm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2021-04-09T16:24:12.370" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T16:24:12.370" Title="Should we replace the &quot;data set request&quot; with distinct &quot;this is an off-topic software question&quot; and &quot;this is not about statistics&quot; closure reasons?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6094" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-08T18:09:34.363" Score="2" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;We currently have the following&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/survey-sampling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;survey-sampling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;survey-sampling&lt;/a&gt; with 161 questions and a wiki&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/survey-weights&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;survey-weights&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;survey-weights&lt;/a&gt; with 138 qs, a wiki&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/survey&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;survey&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;survey&lt;/a&gt; 974 qs, no wiki&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/polling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;polling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;polling&lt;/a&gt; 45 qs, no wiki&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/voting-system&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;voting-system&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;voting-system&lt;/a&gt; 21 qs, wiki&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that voting-systems is quite distinct but the others offer scope for rationalisation. I shall post two answers with proposals to attract comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This follows on from some discussion in a post in the current tag synonym thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastEditorUserId="101426" LastEditDate="2021-03-08T18:13:27.210" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T18:13:49.997" Title="What shall we do about the survey tags?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6094" CreationDate="2021-03-08T18:09:34.363" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/survey-weights&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;survey-weights&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;survey-weights&lt;/a&gt; is really a proper subset of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/survey-sampling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;survey-sampling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;survey-sampling&lt;/a&gt; and so could be made a synonym of it. Survey sampling as it is usually understood generates weights to be used in the subsequent analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2021-03-08T18:13:49.997" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T18:13:49.997" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6094" CreationDate="2021-03-08T18:12:04.793" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a distinct meaning for polling as most people would use this either for opinion polls or for the action of taking part in an election (although I am not sure if that is used in all anglophone jurisdictions). The concept of survey is much broader. Nonetheless I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/polling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;polling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;polling&lt;/a&gt; could well be made a synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/survey&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;survey&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;survey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T18:12:04.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5258" CreationDate="2021-03-17T07:21:28.160" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5258/what-tools-does-cv-recommend-or-provide-for-users-to-share-their-data/5272#comment15782_5258&quot;&gt;clarinetist&lt;/a&gt; proposed &lt;code&gt;dput()&lt;/code&gt; for R users. I also like it a lot. It has the advantage that it outputs &lt;em&gt;all the information&lt;/em&gt; a data structure carries, down to the attributes. For instance, in questions about time series analysis, one of the (often) key attributes is the &lt;code&gt;frequency&lt;/code&gt;, and this may get lost if a question only gives the time series values.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, someone may have a question about a dataset. Let's take the built-in &lt;code&gt;AirPassengers&lt;/code&gt; dataset as an example. The questioner can simply type&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; dput(AirPassengers)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and get the following output, which they simply paste into the question here at CV:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;structure(c(112, 118, 132, 129, 121, 135, 148, 148, 136, 119, &#xA;104, 118, 115, 126, 141, 135, 125, 149, 170, 170, 158, 133, 114, &#xA;140, 145, 150, 178, 163, 172, 178, 199, 199, 184, 162, 146, 166, &#xA;171, 180, 193, 181, 183, 218, 230, 242, 209, 191, 172, 194, 196, &#xA;196, 236, 235, 229, 243, 264, 272, 237, 211, 180, 201, 204, 188, &#xA;235, 227, 234, 264, 302, 293, 259, 229, 203, 229, 242, 233, 267, &#xA;269, 270, 315, 364, 347, 312, 274, 237, 278, 284, 277, 317, 313, &#xA;318, 374, 413, 405, 355, 306, 271, 306, 315, 301, 356, 348, 355, &#xA;422, 465, 467, 404, 347, 305, 336, 340, 318, 362, 348, 363, 435, &#xA;491, 505, 404, 359, 310, 337, 360, 342, 406, 396, 420, 472, 548, &#xA;559, 463, 407, 362, 405, 417, 391, 419, 461, 472, 535, 622, 606, &#xA;508, 461, 390, 432), .Tsp = c(1949, 1960.91666666667, 12), class = &amp;quot;ts&amp;quot;)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note, as above, all the meta information being included at the end.) Then someone contemplating an answer can simply type&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;AirPassengers &amp;lt;- structure(c(112, 118, 132, 129, 121, 135, 148, 148, 136, 119, ...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and be guaranteed to get &lt;em&gt;the exact data&lt;/em&gt; the OP was working on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course the drawback of &lt;code&gt;dput()&lt;/code&gt; is that its output is harder to work with for non-R users. However, I for one prefer this over having to read in a tabular structure and fiddling with field types and meta information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2021-03-17T07:21:28.160" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6092" CreationDate="2021-03-18T03:49:13.597" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading the comments, my revised suggestion is that we (a) retire the &amp;quot;data set request&amp;quot; closure reason and (b) divide the EITHER/OR reason into two distinct reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This question appears to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;off-topic&lt;/a&gt; because it is not about probability, statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, or data visualization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This question appears to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;off-topic&lt;/a&gt; because it focuses on programming, debugging, or performing routine operations, or it asks about obtaining specific datasets. You could try the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/793/internet-support-for-statistics-software&quot;&gt;support links we maintain&lt;/a&gt; or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opendata.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Open Data site&lt;/a&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2021-03-22T18:40:38.693" LastActivityDate="2021-03-22T18:40:38.693" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6102" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6103" CreationDate="2021-04-03T10:59:13.850" Score="8" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been a long time since I've been active on CV and I don't want to botch it by asking an off-topic, opinion-based, or duplicate question. Here is my attempt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to answer to critiques about the inapplicability of the framework of frequentist statistics to the real world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I often hear the argument that frequentist stats is useless or contorted because no event is precisely repeatable, let alone repeatable infinitely many times, and because there are no iid sequences in the real world, since &amp;quot;causal factors cause distributions shifts (?!)&amp;quot;. Here is an example of the egregious use of this sort of arguments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;http://mitchgordon.me/math/2021/04/02/probability.html&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having applied frequentist stat with success to real world problems for years, I couldn't disagree more with the argument(s). Can you help me finding the weak points of these arguments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, I used to learn a few good answers against these arguments when I first studied probability theory, but I don't remember them at the moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58675" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T15:16:33.727" Title="Help me frame a question on the relevance of the frequentist model to real world applications in a way that it's on topic on CV" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6102" CreationDate="2021-04-04T17:20:38.360" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Turning my comment into an answer.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first blush, this seems reasonable to me. It might be worth quoting the explicit arguments where you want help finding the weak points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2021-04-04T17:20:38.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6104" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-06T16:58:53.457" Score="0" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here the mod has pasted another's comment as an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/392914/transforming-non-normal-to-normal-distribution-and-back-transform&quot;&gt;Transforming non-normal to normal distribution and back-transform&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm tempted to flag as &amp;quot;this should be a comment&amp;quot; because it's not a thorough answer, but it doesn't add anything to what's already added to the existing comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastActivityDate="2021-04-06T17:27:04.830" Title="Is copying another's comment to an answer really an answer?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6104" CreationDate="2021-04-06T17:27:04.830" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comments are not answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose behind embodying a comment in an answer is to bring some finality to a thread: it thereby receives a definite reply on which users can vote.  The question will no longer be considered unanswered by the SE system, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The principal danger to relying on comments to answer a question is that the comments could be wrong!  Thus, reposting those comments carries some weight.  It indicates someone has thought enough of the comments to believe they are correct, that they adequately answer the question, and they are willing to risk a bit of their reputation on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, we consider answering older questions -- regardless of the source of the answer -- to be beneficial to our site.  We encourage it (and so does the system, by potentially awarding various badges for answering questions that have received no replies for a month or more).  Flagging late answers would be helpful only when those answers violate site norms so badly that they should immediately be edited or deleted.  (Examples include spam posted as answers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2021-04-06T17:27:04.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6106" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-07T15:14:15.353" Score="9" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently, our &amp;quot;self-study&amp;quot; closure reason reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Self-study questions (including textbook exercises, old exam papers, and homework) that seek to understand the concepts are welcome, but those that demand a solution need to indicate clearly at what step help or advice are needed. For help writing a good self-study question, please visit &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12&quot;&gt;the meta pages&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me like we are getting an increasing number of questions that originate from job interview questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say we should treat them just like self study questions (request that the tag be added, show work instead of only asking for the answer etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the community agrees, I would also ask that we include &amp;quot;interview&amp;quot; explicitly in the closure reason, i.e., modify the parenthetical expression to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(including textbook exercises, old exam papers, &lt;em&gt;homework, and interview questions&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then also include this in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot;&gt;the tag wiki excerpt&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2021-04-07T16:01:35.700" LastActivityDate="2021-04-08T09:50:05.537" Title="Should we include interview questions in &quot;the self-study&quot; category?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6102" CreationDate="2021-04-07T15:16:33.727" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you ask how to respond you already close the option for the answer to say they disagree with the notion and in fact think frequentism is intrinsically flawed. It doesn't get to the point that it's opinion based, but I find it's easier to ask: &amp;quot;Is frequentism flawed?&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Why is frequentism valid?&amp;quot; - answers naturally come up with arguments to why frequentism is or isn't invalid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60613" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T15:16:33.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6108" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-07T16:03:14.677" Score="0" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;3 months ago I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/500094/probability-mass-function-making-the-truncated-normal-discrete&quot;&gt;Probability Mass Function making the Truncated Normal Discrete&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't seem to get enough attention &lt;strong&gt;to get multiple attempts to answer the question&lt;/strong&gt; probably because of my poor wording. &lt;strong&gt;There is no implication that it was largely ignored (it did not get ignored at all. It got enough attention to get Closed and Re-opened it de facto did not get enough attention to get multiple attempts to answer it).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could use the distribution I asked for for a Bayesian prior but I wouldn't like the need to use Bayes' theorem to get my posterior everytime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd rather assume that every random variable which is assumed to be normally distributed simply follows the generalisation (the discrete truncated normal) and then simply estimate the parametres (the Normal and Truncated Normal would be included as special cases which would mean that if the variable is trully normally or truncated normally distributed I would have no problems) I would first find out what transformations of the mean and the standard deviation the parametres (μ and σ) are, estimate the mean and the standard deviation (a, b and c should be known a priori) and then solve the equations (the transformations) to find my estimates for my parametres. And get my distribution (in the technical term) which describes the random variable (the distribution in the common, natural, colloquial term).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How could I word my main Question to attract views and answers?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="226383" LastEditorUserId="226383" LastEditDate="2021-04-14T13:28:50.930" LastActivityDate="2021-04-14T13:28:50.930" Title="Difficulty finding an answer to a specific question and difficulty with wording" Tags="|discussion|support|questions|answers|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6106" CreationDate="2021-04-07T17:43:25.100" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I usually agree with @Stephan Kolassa but on this issue I feel there are distinctions to be made, perhaps tenuously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as assessments are concerned, students outsourcing their work to any internet forum is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a species of dishonesty that may (?should) clash with rules and regulations a student should be respecting -- as a teacher I know that there are frameworks under which my students may ask me for advice on work in progress, but I don't expect them to ask elsewhere&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;arguably not even in the students' best interests as students who get help on questions of the kind asked here are on the whole not better placed to answer later, more complicated questions, let alone undertake more challenging project or thesis work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;not in the best interests of any field or profession, as students getting grades or qualifications they don't deserve don't benefit the wider field (this is more a matter of principle possibly).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interview questions are more problematic in various ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Advice to interviewees is part of what many of us feel free to do, particularly if we know people well for some reason. I never feel guilt about any possibility of disadvantaging others indirectly, as there is a symmetry whereby those other people should have yet others they can ask, and if not I can do nothing about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Interview questions that are distributed in advance are, however, like assessments. Interview questions that are asked at the time and not in advance can't be asked about here, except that sometimes people have an inkling of the kinds of questions that might be asked (e.g. from gossip from previous interviews).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the whole, this is a grey area where I don't support an explicit ban or even discouragement. I would want rather to emphasise people's freedom to ignore questions they don't want to answer, as always.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2021-04-08T09:50:05.537" LastActivityDate="2021-04-08T09:50:05.537" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6110" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6111" CreationDate="2021-04-09T16:15:01.547" Score="5" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I edited &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/518900/what-is-rate-distortion-theory-and-why-is-mutual-information-minimized-in-the-ra&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; to make it more general and to be more clear about what the OP was asking. I also edited it so that I can provide a brief overview of what rate distortion theory is and to answer the question in detail. My edit was approved, but the question wasn't re-opened. I've already prepared a detailed answer, but I can't post it since the question wasn't re-opened. I also don't want to post a similar question with my own answer to avoid a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296197" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T16:20:56.440" Title="Improved a closed question to answer it, but it wasn't re-opened. What next?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6110" CreationDate="2021-04-09T16:20:56.440" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some clarification about how SE works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Editing a question doesn't automatically re-open it; it populates the review queue where reviewers will vote to reopen it or not. Not everyone who participates in the review queues understands the details of every question in the queue, so it can take time for enough votes to reopen a quesiton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A new question can't be closed as a duplicate of a question with 0 answers. (Except by a moderator; this exception is rarely utilized. It is generally only used for the case of a user repeatedly posting the same question over and over again.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice is to wait a day. If the question isn't reopened in the next 24 hours, you can post your question &amp;amp; answer. If you like, you could even post a comment on the closed question linking to your question and answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T16:20:56.440" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6112" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-12T06:07:18.320" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/519216/classification-performance-metrics-for-logistic-regression-from-the-properties-o&quot;&gt;My question&lt;/a&gt; was closed as a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/50609/validation-data-splitting-into-training-vs-test-datasets&quot;&gt;another question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was asking for a formula, if any, to compute accuracy for a logistic regression without using a separate test set. For instance (I am just making it up):&#xA;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$ \text{accuracy} = (\hat{\sigma}^2/N) \hat{y}^2 \text{Var}(\hat{\beta})$&lt;/span&gt;&#xA;or whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;duplicate&amp;quot; question would have me compute the accuracy using the bootstrap. Which of course is just averaging many test sets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is that an answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think my question wasn't clear. Can I modify it and have the question re-opened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="154990" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2021-04-12T21:01:29.507" LastActivityDate="2021-04-12T21:01:29.507" Title="Question closed as duplicate of a totally different question" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6112" CreationDate="2021-04-12T09:01:17.997" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can edit your question to clarify how it differs from the proposed duplicate; in fact, that's exactly you're expected to do when the answers aren't what you wanted. In this particular case, explain that you're asking about analytic solutions, &amp;amp; not resampling-based estimators of out-of-sample performance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For what it's worth, bootstrapping is probably the best approach here, &amp;amp; a valid answer to the original version of the question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2021-04-12T09:01:17.997" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6115" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6118" CreationDate="2021-04-14T20:57:01.680" Score="3" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have the question below. I think it is more about statistics than English. Thus, it would belong here. However, one might argue that it has too little statistical substance to merit posting here, and so it would be better on &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language Learners SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://aeon.co/ideas/the-smart-move-we-learn-more-by-trusting-than-by-not-trusting&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;The smart move: we learn more by trusting than by not trusting | Aeon Ideas&quot;&gt;The smart move: we learn more by trusting than by not trusting | Aeon Ideas&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We find the same pattern in other domains. People who trust the &lt;a href=&quot;https://press.princeton.edu/titles/9607.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;media&lt;/a&gt; more are more knowledgeable about politics and the news. The more people trust &lt;a href=&quot;https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0963662506070159&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;science&lt;/a&gt;, the more scientifically literate they are. &lt;strong&gt;Even if this evidence remains correlational&lt;/strong&gt;, it makes sense that people who trust more should get better at figuring out whom to trust. In trust as in everything else, practice makes perfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the bolded phrase mean? Does it mean that even if the evidence isn't causal, the next phrase still makes sense? And what is the &amp;quot;evidence&amp;quot; they are referring to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot; title=&quot;What topics can I ask about here? - Help Center - Cross Validated&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here? - Help Center - Cross Validated&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59765" LastEditorUserId="59765" LastEditDate="2021-04-17T17:09:55.990" LastActivityDate="2021-04-17T17:09:55.990" Title="Does this question belong here or ELL?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6116" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6119" CreationDate="2021-04-15T13:06:03.380" Score="6" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question in title: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/normalizing-flow&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;normalizing-flow&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;normalizing-flow&lt;/a&gt; needs a tag wiki ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastActivityDate="2021-04-17T13:41:08.887" Title="Normalizing Flow ? Can somebody who knows about that write a tag wiki?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6115" CreationDate="2021-04-16T13:31:55.170" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the revised question should be acceptable on the main site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recognize @NickCox's point that there isn't much to say in answer beyond what &amp;quot;a simple reading suggests&amp;quot;.  Since the OP is not a native English speaker, the issue might simply be help with a &amp;quot;simple reading&amp;quot;, and thus belong best on ELL.  Nonetheless, there are statistical concepts at the center of the passage that need to be understood, and explaining them seems to me to be the bulk of answering this Q.  In general, my test for whether a Q is on topic is 'what does the OP need explained?', and if it's a statistical concept, then I think the Q should be considered on topic.  What constitutes a &amp;quot;simple reading&amp;quot; to a person who is statistically savvy may not be what constitutes a &amp;quot;simple reading&amp;quot; to a person who is not.  In addition, I think that when there is a Q that may be on topic on multiple sites, we should generally defer to the OP's preference regarding which site it is to be posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2021-04-16T13:31:55.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6116" CreationDate="2021-04-17T13:41:08.887" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to mark this as resolved—I submitted a tag wiki edit, and it’s been approved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="155836" LastActivityDate="2021-04-17T13:41:08.887" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1264" CreationDate="2021-04-19T22:46:59.057" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While it is an interesting suggestion (with which I have some misgivings), I think this is a solution in search of a problem that isn't there.  One thing that is worth bearing in mind here is that there is already a species of &lt;em&gt;de facto&lt;/em&gt; weighting, from the empirical fact that users with higher reputation use the site more often/consistently and therefore cast more votes.  For example, at the time of writing this post, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/919/&quot;&gt;our highest reputation user&lt;/a&gt; is listed as having cast 32,216 votes on CV.SE and another 1,433 votes on CV.SE.meta.  (Using the simplifying assumption of 10 points per vote, that is 336,490 score contributed by that user.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, while an individual vote from a high reputation user is treated as giving the same score as an individual vote from a low reputation user, high reputation users have generally contributed far more score to questions/answers merely from higher numbers of votes cast, which follows from their generally higher level of participation on the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173082" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T22:46:59.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6121" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-20T07:28:32.537" Score="1" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen some nice &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\LaTeX$&lt;/span&gt; font for including function names or package names in questions. I cannot find any of them now and am looking for the name of the &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\LaTeX$&lt;/span&gt; font. This is probably not the best place to ask for it, sorry. (I have spent quite a bit of time searching for it on the &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\TeX$&lt;/span&gt; forum with no luck. I guess it should be there somewhere, but I just cannot find it...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastActivityDate="2021-04-20T07:28:32.537" Title="Nice $\LaTeX$ font for including function names or package names in questions" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2021-04-20T11:27:47.267" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6122" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-21T03:16:27.910" Score="-2" ViewCount="86" Body="&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Cross Validated post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/520613/diagnostic-plots-doubt&quot;&gt;Diagnostic Plots Doubt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="319207" LastActivityDate="2021-04-22T00:14:08.790" Title="what's the error in posting this question although it is statistics based?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6122" CreationDate="2021-04-21T03:59:23.633" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closing the question follows the policy stated in wiki for the self-study tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/self-study/info&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/self-study/info&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, self-study questions are welcome, but we require the person asking to show what they've tried and where they're stuck. If you were to edit your question to include this information, it would be eligible for reopening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2021-04-22T00:14:08.790" LastActivityDate="2021-04-22T00:14:08.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6124" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-27T17:51:45.310" Score="9" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like being a &amp;quot;necromancer&amp;quot; in CV and digging through the bones of things that have been abandoned but are meaningful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to search unanswered, as in zero answers at all, questions by my tag, ordered from oldest to newest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I do that.  I saw that the interface had a &amp;quot;newest&amp;quot; option, but not an &amp;quot;oldest&amp;quot; option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22452" LastActivityDate="2021-04-28T18:37:26.697" Title="How do I find oldest unanswered question" Tags="|support|unanswered-questions|old-posts|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5333" CreationDate="2021-04-27T18:34:25.070" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There are other options besides closure.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have edited the original question to show more explicitly what I believe most of us already knew: this is a valuable, practical thread.  It deserves to remain open, to be curated, and to grow with our profession.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2021-04-27T18:34:25.070" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6124" CreationDate="2021-04-28T08:31:01.823" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can you use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;StackExchange Data Explorer&lt;/a&gt; to write an SQL query that does exactly what you want. Below a query that returns what you are looking for. That is, unanswered posts, sorted from oldest to newest, that are not closed and contain the tags you will define in the parenthenses in the &lt;code&gt;t.TagName IN ('r', 'monte-carlo')&lt;/code&gt; clause (I used 'r' and 'monte-carlo' just for example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;select distinct p.Id AS [Post Link], p.*&#xA;from Posts p&#xA;  inner join PostHistory ph on ph.postid = p.id&#xA;  join PostTags pt ON pt.PostId = p.Id&#xA;  join Tags t  ON t.Id = pt.TagId&#xA;where p.PostTypeId = 1 and p.AnswerCount = 0 and ph.PostHistoryTypeId != 10 -- closed&#xA;and t.TagName IN ('r', 'monte-carlo')&#xA;order by p.CreationDate asc&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the site queried is not part of the query itself. You have to select it in the query configuration page by searching for the site you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use the above query already configured for the Cross Validated site &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/1402777/oldest-unanswered-questions-in-cross-validated-filtered-by-tags-and-sorted-oldes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (allow it some seconds and it will probably execute automatically; if not just click &amp;quot;Run Query&amp;quot;). You may fork it and edit it as you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to learn more about writing queries against the Stack Exchange Data Explorer, have a look into their &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/tutorial&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tutorial&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="222295" LastEditorUserId="222295" LastEditDate="2021-04-28T09:52:27.220" LastActivityDate="2021-04-28T09:52:27.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6124" CreationDate="2021-04-28T11:30:10.447" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use the various &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;advanced search features&lt;/a&gt;.  To find unanswered threads, search for &lt;code&gt;answers:0 closed:no&lt;/code&gt;.  Then you can sort by &lt;code&gt;Newest&lt;/code&gt;, and skip to the last page (currently &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?page=1074&amp;amp;tab=Newest&amp;amp;q=answers%3a0%20closed%3ano&quot;&gt;1074&lt;/a&gt;): the oldest non-closed question without answers appears to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2079/whats-good-about-i-projections&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s good about I-projections?&lt;/a&gt; posted on Aug 24, 2010.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2021-04-28T11:30:10.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6124" CreationDate="2021-04-28T18:37:26.697" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a comment to the answer by @gung, some more examples of the advanced search features, modify, mix &amp;amp; match at will. The first is my standard starting point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;experiment-design answers:0 closed:no duplicate:no                (845 hits)&#xA;experiment-design answers:0 closed:no duplicate:no score:0        (249 hits)&#xA;experiment-design answers:0 closed:no duplicate:no views:..20     (171 hits)&#xA;experiment-design answers:0 closed:no duplicate:no created:..2012 (44 hits)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more search operators, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/searching&lt;/a&gt;. Note that &lt;code&gt;..&lt;/code&gt; is the &lt;strong&gt;range operator&lt;/strong&gt;, which can be used with many search operators, as in &lt;code&gt;2015..2018&lt;/code&gt; which is inclusive, so from 1 January 2015 to 31 December 2018, or &lt;code&gt;2021..&lt;/code&gt; which is after (inclusive) 1 January 2021.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastActivityDate="2021-04-28T18:37:26.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6129" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-04T14:01:27.927" Score="4" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did not originally ask the question below that was closed, but would appreciate some clarity so I can better understand SE Q&amp;amp;A policies. The generic reason given for closure was that it was off-topic. More specifically, it was stated in comments by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/919/whuber&quot;&gt;whuber&lt;/a&gt; that it was a self-study question and was in violation of self-study policies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/522562/memoryless-property-how-does-px-s-t-mid-x-s-px-t-s-t-ge-0-i&quot;&gt;Memoryless property: how does $P(X &amp;gt; s + t \mid X &amp;gt; s) = P(X &amp;gt; t), s, t \ge 0$ imply that $F^c(s + t) = F^c(s) F^c(t), s, t \ge 0$?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am unable to understand why this question was determined to be a self-study question. Please may someone assist me in understanding what features of this question rendered it so, resulting in its closure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="294515" LastActivityDate="2021-05-04T15:24:13.160" Title="Why has the following question been determined to be a self-study question which violates self-study policy?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6129" CreationDate="2021-05-04T15:24:13.160" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Extended comment.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not dispute that the content of the question amounts to a simple application of conditional probability. However, you paraphrase the question as if it were a trivial manipulation of real numbers that could be conducted by a 4 year old able to multiply and divide. And perhaps it may seem that way to you as a seasoned statistician.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think where my concern lies is in how a question being self-study was used as a reason to close a post whose content was deemed too trivial, rather than it being obviously a homework question. The OP took the time to type out in LaTeX the referenced context of the query, rather than it being a screenshot, or other tell-tale signs that they were seeking to turn people into homework machines. They've also made a reasonable attempt to engage with your prompts, even if there has been communication failure in the sense that they were unable to successfully reconstruct the frame of reference from which you trivially see the (non)-problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've said yourself that you were searching for a reason to close on the basis of the question not being sufficiently interesting. If the question is not in any material violation of Q&amp;amp;A policies (i.e. blatant homework) shouldn't it be for the community to decide whether the content of a question is interesting, worthwhile, or even sufficiently trivial to not merit upvotes, not warrant responses, or even to merit a downvote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And doesn't the fact that another user &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/306241/double-ought-not&quot;&gt;DoubleOughtNot&lt;/a&gt; felt that it was appropriate to take the time to supply a further prompt to the OP run counter to a unilateral determination of what is and is not sufficiently interesting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not trying to make an issue here, I value the work of the moderation team on this Q&amp;amp;A. I just feel that this particular decision (out of hundreds and thousands of spot-on moderator decisions) on the basis of what I have heard so far might not have been the right one. Unless there is something I've missed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="294515" LastActivityDate="2021-05-04T15:24:13.160" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5926" CreationDate="2021-05-05T19:41:32.880" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of you may have noticed the Meta Stack Exchange post - &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/364007/testing-three-vote-close-and-reopen-on-13-network-sites&quot;&gt;Testing three-vote close and reopen on 13 network sites&lt;/a&gt; (it's linked in the featured on meta sidebar) - we've finally got this project under way and Cross Validated is one of the sites we'll be running the test on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Starting tomorrow, I'll be changing the site setting and closing and reopening will require only three votes. This test will run for 45 days and will be turned back to five votes to close and reopen while I review the data from the 13 sites. After we've seen the impact, I'll be posting results and, if there aren't negative impacts, we will change the setting to three permanently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few weeks into this, I'll be posting a question here on meta to ask for your thoughts about this change, so you will have an opportunity to discuss the impact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you so much for your patience while we got this prioritized and scheduled. There's a lot more information in the MSE post, so please review it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address some of the specific points made&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes, this will be a symmetric change - both closing and reopening will require three votes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the interest of running a fair test, we're only going to change one variable at a time. We can discuss raising the number of reviews later but I'd want to analyze how many people are reviewing and hitting that max reviews per day frequently before doing that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We've made some &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/360198/visual-design-changes-to-the-review-queues&quot;&gt;recent changes to Review&lt;/a&gt; in an attempt to make the review queues findable, easier to use, and understandable by people who may be new to reviewing. We've been collecting data about this change for a while.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="202450" LastEditorUserId="202450" LastEditDate="2021-05-05T20:02:35.270" LastActivityDate="2021-05-05T20:02:35.270" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6132" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6133" CreationDate="2021-05-10T07:31:44.893" Score="5" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question in question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/523214/59765&quot;&gt;Is there any relation between intersection in set theory and correlation in statistics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is closed as lacking details or clarity. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/523214/is-there-any-relation-between-intersection-in-set-theory-and-correlation-in-stat#comment963320_523214&quot;&gt;According to one mod&lt;/a&gt;, the question &amp;quot;might be answerable, but there are a lot of different possible answers, so it would help to rephrase that question into something more specific.&amp;quot; However, I don't know what I should include more. Can you give some examples on how this question can be answered in different ways, so I can choose the one I'm interested most?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59765" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T14:48:25.040" Title="How to make the question about the relation between statistics and set theory clearer?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6132" CreationDate="2021-05-10T14:48:25.040" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(from our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;help on asking questions&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The set theory/correlation question strikes me as being of this type. I said as much in comments, but because the space for explanations is limited there, here I will elaborate a little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Set theory is fundamental to mathematics, so it would not be unfair to draw some parallels between the subject question and hypothetical questions one can think of asking about how correlation (or some other statistical concept) might be &amp;quot;related&amp;quot; to, say, addition or logic or real numbers.  These hypotheticals might help make the breadth and vagueness of such questions more apparent.  In particular,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What form of &amp;quot;correlation&amp;quot; do you have in mind? Pearson, Spearman, Kendall's Tau, &lt;em&gt;etc.&lt;/em&gt;?  Some generic concept of &amp;quot;linear relation&amp;quot;?  Or even a broad concept of &amp;quot;statistically related&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What kind of &amp;quot;relation&amp;quot; are you considering and why might it be important?  Many correlation coefficient formulas involve addition in some form, but in most cases it's doubtful this sheds any light either on the concept of correlation or of addition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Addition can be exploited in many different ways, according to the many different formulas for the many different forms of correlation.  Which way is of interest and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another problem with the original question is that if such questions were considered on-topic here, we would open ourselves to moderating and curating an endless number of vague, open-ended questions of the form &amp;quot;is there any relation between [broad mathematical concept X] and [broad statistical concept] Y?&amp;quot;  No such question is sufficiently specific and focused to be appropriate here on CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more guidance, please read the remainder of the help page I cited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T14:48:25.040" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6134" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6136" CreationDate="2021-05-11T00:29:59.087" Score="8" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;SE made a change to their fonts which seriously impairs my ability to read the site today. Is there a setting or option to change this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44269" LastEditorUserId="44269" LastEditDate="2021-05-11T01:15:32.897" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T01:15:32.897" Title="How to change SE’s readability-destroying font?" Tags="|support|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6134" CreationDate="2021-05-11T00:37:58.760" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry that this change has harmed your experience using the site. Unfortunately, this is a system-wide change. It is out of our hands as CV moderators. More information: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/364048/we-are-switching-to-system-fonts-on-may-10-2021?cb=1&quot;&gt;We are switching to system fonts on May 10, 2021&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2021-05-11T00:44:59.780" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T00:44:59.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6134" CreationDate="2021-05-11T00:54:23.373" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a reasonable work-around on FireFox:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Install &lt;a href=&quot;https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&amp;amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;amp;utm_content=search&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stylus&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Click Stylus' badge in the tool bar, and select Manage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Select Write new style, and paste the below into it (edit as needed, e.g., add &lt;code&gt;domain(&amp;quot;askubuntu.com&amp;quot;),&lt;/code&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/* ==userstyle==&#xA;@name Stack Exchange&#xA;@namespace Steven Penny&#xA;@version 1.0.0&#xA;==/userstyle== */&#xA;@-moz-document&#xA;domain(&amp;quot;stackexchange.com&amp;quot;),&#xA;domain(&amp;quot;stackoverflow.com&amp;quot;),&#xA;domain(&amp;quot;superuser.com&amp;quot;) {&#xA;   body {&#xA;      --ff-sans: Arial;&#xA;   }&#xA;   .topbar-dialog .modal-content .message-text h4,&#xA;   .topbar-dialog,&#xA;   header {&#xA;      font-family: var(--ff-sans) !important;&#xA;   }&#xA;   .full-diff .content,&#xA;   .wmd-input,&#xA;   code {&#xA;      font-family: Consolas !important;&#xA;   }&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Click Save.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Close the Stylus&amp;gt;Manage window, and breathe a sigh of relief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44269" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T00:54:23.373" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6146" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-25T19:28:09.120" Score="0" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to review posts on the site, but my settings seem to have got stuck with showing a narrative on the function buttons (see Figure screenshot below).  I have restarted my browser, the machine and searched for a relevant setting all to no avail.  Any thoughts as to how I remove this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xs0T6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xs0T6.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21167" OwnerDisplayName="hydrologist" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2021-05-27T11:27:23.230" LastActivityDate="2021-05-27T11:27:23.230" Title="How to remove comments from posts" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6149" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6150" CreationDate="2021-06-03T22:16:38.197" Score="10" ViewCount="418" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is (or should be) the policy on deleting &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; questions after getting help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Context.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This question is prompted by whuber's remark on someone's self-study question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/527230/155836&quot;&gt;How would this Markov chain problem be solved?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is nearly the same problem as the one posted in your last several questions. Draw the diagram!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember commenting on a previous question by the asker on this same topic, but I can't seem to find it. Its comments were rather lively, too. I suppose it was deleted, presumably by the asker. I don't know whether there are more deleted questions about Markov chains like it. It sounds like there are 'several'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Opining.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It rubs me the wrong way that a self-study question would be deleted. After you've gotten help from the community, you prevent others from benefitting from the discussion. It also removes a bit of insurance against people asking, e.g., take-home exam questions: the instructors would no longer be able to find the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there is nothing to prevent someone from deleting their own question &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/25088/how-can-i-delete-my-question-on-stack-overflow&quot;&gt;unless it has popular &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, but often self-study help happens as a series of comments. (Maybe we hope the asker will post an answer in the end, or maybe it happens too often that an 'answer' becomes the comment-magnet instead of the question itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When someone vandalizes a question that they've asked (instead of deleting it), it's often rolled back. Deleting doesn't put the question on the main page, so it's subtler. Still, can/should it be watched for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My question is, unfortunately, multipart:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it indeed a problem to delete &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; questions after getting help, or is it just me?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it is a problem, how do/should we dissuade or prevent this deletion?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="155836" LastEditorUserId="155836" LastEditDate="2021-06-03T22:32:02.040" LastActivityDate="2021-08-08T21:18:59.503" Title="Deleting self-study questions after asking?" Tags="|discussion|homework|deleted-questions|self-delete|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6149" CreationDate="2021-06-03T23:42:45.317" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;A poster can delete their question if there isn't an upvoted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are entitled to feel irritated, even annoyed, if you answered the question, or regarded the question as good but made extensive comments, and then the OP deleted. But this is allowed behaviour. It's happened to me -- and to many others, I imagine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, when comments run that a question is inappropriate or poor, it is often a good thing whenever an OP deletes the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags and kinds of question are immaterial here, but empirically it seems likelier that posters of self-study questions may wish to cover their tracks. Even if a poster is not identifiable by name, they may fear vigilance and be on dangerous ground given local policies on plagiarism or collusion, or may even be thinking competitively and desire to inhibit others finding out about a good answer. However, this is speculation and doesn't affect policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of what you can do about it, I think the short answer is not much, but&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As here, Meta exists as a way to express frustration. (Over the years, I have come to value that greatly. The extent to which you will hear  &amp;quot;I agree with you, and it's antisocial, but there you go&amp;quot; is valuable mutual support. There are dozens of people active here who I have never met and in some cases they remain unidentifiable to me, but I have immense respect for all their work, including not only providing well-crafted answers but also voting, commenting and otherwise working to keep the site clean and tidy. That is the best of what a community means.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, posting a comment expressing frustration directly to the OP is tempting. The result can be anything from excellent -- someone realising that they shouldn't have done what they did -- to appalling, an almighty ding-dong in which offenders fight back in all sorts of ways, making nasty remarks or counter-accusations against you, even offsite as well as onsite, and mark you down long term as a personal enemy. I do not exaggerate.  Moderators tend not to like that, any way, and they are usually right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If there appears to be a pattern so that someone is identifiably behaving badly and repeatedly, a custom flag to moderators may help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2021-06-04T16:42:03.030" LastActivityDate="2021-06-04T16:42:03.030" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6151" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-04T19:09:36.737" Score="11" ViewCount="736" Body="&lt;h2 id=&quot;update-while-the-testing-period-has-ended-this-change-has-been-well-received-by-the-community-so-we-have-opted-to-not-reset-the-votes-needed-to-closereopen-to-5-while-we-look-at-data-nuqb&quot;&gt;UPDATE: While the testing period has ended, this change has been well-received by the community so we have opted to not reset the votes needed to close/reopen to 5 while we look at data.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please let me know if you have any concerns about this change in the planned process or if you feel the number of votes should be changed back at least temporarily. I'll be back in a few weeks with the results of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of understanding the impact of three-vote closure is to understand what impact it's having on y'all. I'd like to ask anyone who feels up to it to &lt;strong&gt;write an answer to this question&lt;/strong&gt; and to tell us about your experience over the past few weeks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sorts of things I'm interested in knowing (feel free to address all or none or add your own) -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did this help?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did it hurt?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did it make you more interested in close/reopen reviewing? Less?&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there things other than 3-vote close impacting your interest in reviewing?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you can't vote but do flag, did this make you more/less likely to flag?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would you prefer to go back to 5?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should it be permanent?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What would you like me to look into when it comes to analyzing the data from the test?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Were there any side-effects (good or bad) that you want me to be aware of?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are merely prompts, so feel free to add anything I'm missing that you think is worth saying. This is focused on how you're feeling about it and what data you want me to look at, so don't feel like you need to analyze the data over the last 30 days - though you're welcome to if that's how you figure out what you feel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any outstanding questions, also feel welcome to ask them here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The test will run until about Monday the 21st of June, at which point we'll be resetting the votes to close up to 5 while I review the responses here and dig into the data that we've been collecting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="202450" LastEditorUserId="202450" LastEditDate="2021-07-16T16:22:45.007" LastActivityDate="2021-07-16T16:22:45.007" Title="3-vote close - how's it going?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|votes|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6151" CreationDate="2021-06-04T19:45:40.280" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've long thought we ought to close questions faster and grumbled that the burden on the small number of active, high-rep users with close-vote privileges was too high. I'd also support some other changes that reduce this burden (e.g. reducing the points threshold for close-vote privileges a bit, increasing users' daily limit of votes), but 3-vote closure has fewer obvious downsides than most other possibilities. I've voted more than usual lately and felt like those votes were at least a bit more useful. I have no idea how frequently the questions I voted on previously would get stuck on 3 or 4 votes, but it did happen. It was a mild but unnecessary annoyance that made the site worse and I'm happy to experience it less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please keep the 3 vote threshold!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="121522" LastEditDate="2021-06-06T10:09:17.970" LastActivityDate="2021-06-06T10:09:17.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6153" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-06T01:41:55.333" Score="0" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/529428/why-is-the-two-sample-test-giving-me-inconsistent-results&quot;&gt;Why is the two-sample test giving me inconsistent results?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was closed afterwards and a comment was left requesting more details. I updated the question, but I'm not sure if the question is being reviewed or if even more details are needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I tell if I've addressed the reason for which this question was closed? Is there a way to see the status of the review process?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="183484" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2021-06-06T09:18:46.290" LastActivityDate="2021-06-06T09:18:46.290" Title="How do I know if I added enough detail to satisfy the &quot;question needs details or clarity&quot; after being closed?" Tags="|support|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6151" CreationDate="2021-06-06T10:39:52.057" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at my voting history for the last few days I observe two things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the ones where I voted to close have indeed been closed and obviously I would not expect 100% anyway. I am sure I am wrong every so often, for some meaning of wrong. Since there is still only a handful of regular close voters this implies to me that the change must have had a marked impact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the old days I regularly used to hit the limit of 20 votes per day. This hardly ever happens now. I have no idea whether this is because hardly anyone is putting them in the queue or because they are being cleared faster but I assume someone with a better knowledge of the system could elucidate that. The advantage of having fewer to do each day is that I am more likely to visit the queue as seeing 50 waiting for me was always a bit off-putting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that all boils down to a vote for keeping it at 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastActivityDate="2021-06-06T10:39:52.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6151" CreationDate="2021-06-06T12:09:09.627" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closing poor questions quicker increases the quality of the site as a whole. I agree with the others that &lt;strong&gt;it can stay permanently&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you asked what might be interesting to analyze: One potential side effect is that more questions will get closed without any comments giving details. This may seem unwelcoming to new users (they can at least be referred to the tour if we can't think of any specific constructive criticism). I would be interested to see &lt;strong&gt;how many questions were closed with and without comments&lt;/strong&gt; before and after the 3-vote rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there things other than 3-vote close impacting your interest in reviewing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you close a question as a duplicate it automatically comes with a &amp;quot;Does this answer your question: ...&amp;quot; comment. I would be more interested in reviewing if there were also an automatic comment for poor quality questions referring them to the tour for example. We can delete or edit the comment anyway, and there will be more time saved writing comments, then the occasional time deleting the comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176202" LastActivityDate="2021-06-06T12:09:09.627" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6156" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-11T17:21:20.813" Score="12" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a typo in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/restricted-boltzman-machine&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;restricted-boltzman-machine&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;restricted-boltzman-machine&lt;/a&gt; tag. Boltzma&lt;strong&gt;nn&lt;/strong&gt; is spelled with a double &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; but the tag currently has a single &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1703/fix-transfromation-typo-in-tag-synonym&quot;&gt;this Meta post&lt;/a&gt; I got the impression the moderators can fix typos like this. Would any of the moderators kindly do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastActivityDate="2021-06-11T19:03:06.627" Title="Fix a typo in [restricted-boltzman-machine] (RBM) tag" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6156" CreationDate="2021-06-11T19:03:06.627" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's supposed to be a mechanism for users to propose tag synonyms, but it is rarely invoked and never works because it requires (as I recall) five votes for approval and there's no queue to alert people a synonym is pending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, this change is effected by creating the new tag and merging the old tag with the new as a &amp;quot;synonym.&amp;quot;  This process &amp;quot;orphans&amp;quot; the tag wiki (if it exists).  Mods can find orphan wikis in order to recover their text, which I have done.  There's probably a better way to do all this, but what I have described is how it most naturally happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2021-06-11T19:03:06.627" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6149" CreationDate="2021-06-15T03:36:36.163" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;OP here. I had no idea this discussion existed until I just now randomly clicked on it in the &amp;quot;Featured on Meta&amp;quot; window on the side of the website, so I'm late to the party.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The previous question was indeed based on the same problem &lt;em&gt;description&lt;/em&gt;, but the &lt;em&gt;problem itself&lt;/em&gt; was different. It is common knowledge that, in such a case, best practice is indeed to post a &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; question. As you can infer from my extensive history on stats.stackexchange (and other stackexchange websites), I'm familiar with the rules, and so I would not have deleted the question and reposted the same one again (if anything, I would have just undeleted the deleted question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I deleted the previous question (based on the same problem description) is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I figured out the answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The comments were full of various discussion but not really substantively helpful, and this discussion activity eventually died down.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No one had posted an answer, and there was no indication that anyone would post an answer (see 2.).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seemed to me that the question was just a waste of space, since it would keep getting bumped by the system as a 'zombie question', and so the best course of action was to just delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163242" LastActivityDate="2021-06-15T03:36:36.163" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6160" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-17T09:51:58.880" Score="6" ViewCount="327" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;September update:&lt;/strong&gt; Community Ads are now live network-wide. All ads with a score of 6 or higher, or with a score of 4 or higher &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; no downvotes will be displayed (except for any that have a note from the CM Team explaining why it wasn't selected). Go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/364556/208518&quot;&gt;the main post on MSE&lt;/a&gt; for a list of the ads that are being displayed. And stay tuned for 2022's edition for the next opportunity to submit more ad proposals!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;AUGUST NOTE:&lt;/strong&gt; This post has now been locked and new submissions are not being accepted. Ad submissions are now undergoing review by the Community Team, and this question will be updated once the ads are live.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're almost halfway through 2021, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/364556/208518&quot;&gt;in case you missed it&lt;/a&gt;, Community Promotion Ads are gonna be a bit different this time! &lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: submit and vote for ad proposals before August 2nd!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are Community Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Community Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, or on other sites in the network. They can show up in the right sidebar, or in banners in question pages. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be considered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/99341/208518&quot;&gt;the Community Management Team&lt;/a&gt; to be displayed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we have Community Ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. The goal of this initiative is for future visitors to find out about &lt;em&gt;the stuff your community deems important&lt;/em&gt;. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are &lt;em&gt;relevant to your own community's interests&lt;/em&gt;, both for those already in the community and those yet to join. You may want to promote external resources, or Meta guidance for newcomers, for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This initiative has an added goal of providing your community with &lt;em&gt;an opportunity to showcase exemplary questions from your main site, as well as frequently-linked-to guides from your Meta site&lt;/em&gt;. While the latter makes sense to be shown solely on this site, the former can be shown all across the network. These should avoid hot button topics, and instead focus more on evergreen questions that show what your community’s all about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we reset the ads?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. Historically, we've reset the ads every year — since this is the first run of a new format, we'll run the ads collected in this post through the end of 2021 and reassess the rotation cycle then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The community ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a previous exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Are there restrictions to the ads I can post?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All proposed ads need to abide by &lt;a href=&quot;/conduct&quot;&gt;our Code of Conduct&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/advertising/guidelines&quot;&gt;Our ad creative guidelines&lt;/a&gt; also generally apply (note that the first 2 bullet points on the “Tracking” section do not apply, and a lot of the guidelines surrounding claims, comparisons, proof, etc., while still applicable, may not be particularly relevant). Finally, ads can not be promoting products nor soliciting programmer time or resources for: knowledge sharing or collaboration tools for technologists, or for sites where ad buyers are primarily targeting technologists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does it work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers you post to this question &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Each answer must relate to a single ad submission.&lt;/strong&gt; Please do not post multiple ad submissions in the same answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All answers must be in one of the below formats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you have an image for the ad you want to display on this site (must be the case for ads to external sources):&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[![Image name. Example: &amp;quot;community_ad_name_300x250&amp;quot;][1]][2]&#xA;&#xA;  [1]: https://image-url&#xA;  [2]: https://clickthrough-url&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you want to create an ad for a question from your main or meta site, to be advertised on this or other sites in the network (staff will generate a frame for the ad with this site's theme, for brand consistency):&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Question title  &#xA;Question URL&#xA;Ad size (right sidebar or banner ads)&#xA;Site(s) to be displayed in. Can be:&#xA;  - &amp;quot;self&amp;quot; for ads to be displayed on this site&#xA;  - &amp;quot;all&amp;quot; for ads to be displayed all over the network&#xA;  - a specific subset of sites&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not add anything else to the body of the post&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Image requirements&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels for right sidebar ads or 728 x 90 pixels for banner ads. Images can be double that if high DPI.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be GIF, PNG, or JPG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No animated GIFs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Selection process&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This post will remain open for ad submissions and voting until August 2nd&lt;/strong&gt;. At that point, the question will be closed/locked, and no more ad submissions will be accepted. For ad submissions to be considered for selection by the Community Management Team, they must have &lt;strong&gt;a minimum score of 6 at the time the post was closed/locked for submissions.&lt;/strong&gt; Given this is the first run with this new format, we may adjust the score threshold to be a bit lower if we see ads struggling to get to it (especially if the ads are not getting downvotes) by the time submissions and voting are closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Reporting statistics&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once this cycle is over, at the end of 2021, the Community Management Team will provide you with reporting statistics, as described in the &amp;quot;reporting&amp;quot; section of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/364556/208518&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to use the question's comment section to ask for any clarifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72321" LastEditorUserId="72321" LastEditDate="2021-09-09T11:32:53.953" LastActivityDate="2021-09-09T11:32:53.953" Title="Community Ads for 2021" Tags="|discussion|community-ads|" AnswerCount="13" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6160" CreationDate="2021-06-17T22:51:19.647" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mattermodeling.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GVzhj.png&quot; alt=&quot;Common topics on Matter Modeling SE&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="211119" LastActivityDate="2021-06-17T22:51:19.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6160" CreationDate="2021-06-18T10:56:55.743" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://opendata.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wqiQI.png&quot; alt=&quot;Need Data? Open Data Stack Exchange&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="72321" LastEditDate="2021-08-04T10:38:06.207" LastActivityDate="2021-08-04T10:38:06.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6165" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-23T16:42:42.283" Score="-5" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;Validation is not inherently tied to repetition over folds. Considering the hundreds of &amp;quot;unanswered&amp;quot; questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cross-validation&quot;&gt;tagged&lt;/a&gt; with [cross-validation] (meaning no answer is either up-voted or accepted), I propose the following new design:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Name: Statistics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Symbol: A Cauchy pdf overlaid with Gaussian, showing fat tails of former.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="272731" LastActivityDate="2021-06-23T17:08:24.463" Title="Could we change the title of this sub-stack, as well as the image which seems to hype a five-fold cross-validation strategy?" Tags="|discussion|site-name|site-promotion|display-names|cross-validated|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6165" CreationDate="2021-06-23T16:55:30.687" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I take the name to mean that we do not just check one source (many members can answer), much as cross validation, as opposed to just checking on one out-of-sample set, checks many out-of-sample sets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would have voted for &amp;quot;Confidence Region&amp;quot; eleven years ago, but I like the name we have and see no reason to change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247274" LastActivityDate="2021-06-23T16:55:30.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6168" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-25T05:52:21.713" Score="0" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a well-known fact that overlap is high between the three sites: &lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Artificial Intelligence&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;data sciences&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;cross validated&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we go through the meta-questions of individual sites, we can also find a lot of differences based on what is on-topic on a particular site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one can deny that they are highly related or overlapped to each other. So, it is clear that the users, whether beginners, intermediates, or experts, can contribute to the three sites based on the questions asked. But it can be noticed that the users contributing to all three or at least two sites are rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasons I'm thinking are that the users either are interested in contributing to a single site or may be unaware of the questions on other sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter reason can be at least slightly fixed by streaming the hot questions on the other two sites somewhere on the main page of the third site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will provide users an advantage to read at least two to five hot questions on the other two sites so that they can diversify the contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do the members of the Cross Validated stack exchange welcome this feature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I am sure that Artificial Intelligence community is ready to ask this feature, I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2578/community-conscious-on-viewing-hot-questions-from-artificial-intelligence-and-cr&quot;&gt;the same question&lt;/a&gt; only on Data Sciences meta .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42883" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2021-06-25T10:07:38.240" LastActivityDate="2021-06-25T10:07:38.240" Title="Community conscious on viewing hot questions from artificial intelligence and data sciences stack exchange" Tags="|discussion|site-promotion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6169" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6170" CreationDate="2021-06-26T11:27:44.443" Score="-1" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am Simran,  I have been studying for a govt exam with statistics as optional  (which is rarely opted by students ) , due to which there isn't any good  professional coaching available  , I have been studying on my own with help of internet .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes my doubts are resolved while sometimes not .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I took the help of this platform for a few  questions,  and in one of the question on vital statistics I wasn't able to do it even after the hint provided,  although I tried really hard to solve but couldn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think in such a situation the other person could be a little considerate by looking at the efforts of other  , but no they aren't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please tell me why ??&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just want you to know  that I am preparing on my own without any teacher and not to solve any homework questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="324659" OwnerDisplayName="simran" LastActivityDate="2021-06-26T12:42:10.927" Title="Why is it difficult to get help here" Tags="|discussion|homework|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6169" CreationDate="2021-06-26T12:42:10.927" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have asked 6 questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/529335/why-is-hazard-function-tending-to-infinity&quot;&gt;why is hazard function tending to infinity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This has an answer by @AdamO which you haven't accepted. If you don't accept people's answers, or at least explain why their answer doesn't answer your question, they will be disinclined to answer again. The same goes if you don't upvote an answer that you find useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/530589/monte-carlo-simulation-for-generating-random-numbers-from-a-distribution&quot;&gt;Monte Carlo simulation for generating random numbers from a distribution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This was closed as off-topic although you did receive 2 answers (one of which you acccepted, so that is good)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/531251/rhods-method-of-logistic-curve-fitting-y&quot;&gt;Rhods method of Logistic curve fitting y&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This was closed due to needing more focus, although you got some good hints in the comments. I see that you have edited the question and I have just voted to re-open it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/531666/population-growth-projection&quot;&gt;Population growth projection&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The problem with this question is that you have just uploaded a picture. Please show some effort by using &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\LaTeX$&lt;/span&gt; to format the mathematics nicely. Having said that, you have received a very useful hint from @Ben. This is the best way to learn - by using hints, rather than getting someone to just tell you the whole answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/531810/complete-expectation-of-life-in-demography&quot;&gt;Complete expectation of life in Demography&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The same problem as the previous question. Please don't upload pictures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/531870/mortality-rate-calculations&quot;&gt;Mortality rate Calculations&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Same again, please don't upload pictures. For this one it takes hardly any longer to write it in &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\LaTeX$&lt;/span&gt; than by hand. I get that if you don't know &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\LaTeX$&lt;/span&gt; then it can be a bit time consuming at first but it is easy to learn and a useful skill to have (there is also a tex.stackexchange.com in case you have problems)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$ l_{45} = 30,450$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$ l_{46} = 30,320$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$ d_{45} = 30,450 - 30,320 = 130$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$ q_{45} = \frac{130}{30,450} = 0.0043$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do this, then people will be much more inclined to help. For example in these kinds of situations often there is a simple typo or missed step. If someone wants to answer then it is much easier to copy your &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\LaTeX$&lt;/span&gt; and edit it rather than type it all in from scratch. Plus, it looks a LOT nicer !!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7486" LastActivityDate="2021-06-26T12:42:10.927" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6160" CreationDate="2021-06-28T21:09:59.437" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Principled way of collapsing categorical variables with many levels?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/146907&quot;&gt;Principled way of collapsing categorical variables with many levels?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ad size: right sidebar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Site(s) to be displayed in: all&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2021-06-28T21:09:59.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6160" CreationDate="2021-06-28T21:11:04.410" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;When if ever is a median statistic a sufficient statistic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/122917&quot;&gt;When if ever is a median statistic a sufficient statistic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ad size: right sidebar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Site(s) to be displayed in: all&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2021-06-28T21:11:04.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6160" CreationDate="2021-06-28T21:12:08.213" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;What should I do when my neural network doesn't learn?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/352036&quot;&gt;What should I do when my neural network doesn&amp;#39;t learn?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ad size: right sidebar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Site(s) to be displayed in: all&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2021-06-28T21:12:08.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6160" CreationDate="2021-06-28T21:13:43.453" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;How to find a good fit for semi-sinusoidal model in R?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/60500&quot;&gt;How to find a good fit for semi-sinusoidal model in R?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ad size: right sidebar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Site(s) to be displayed in: all&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2021-06-28T21:13:43.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6160" CreationDate="2021-06-28T21:14:50.077" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Algorithms for automatic model selection&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/20836&quot;&gt;Algorithms for automatic model selection&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ad size: right sidebar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Site(s) to be displayed in: all&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2021-06-28T21:14:50.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6160" CreationDate="2021-06-28T21:15:57.150" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why do we only see L1 and L2 regularization but not other norms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/269298&quot;&gt;Why do we only see $L_1$ and $L_2$ regularization but not other norms?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ad size: right sidebar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Site(s) to be displayed in: all&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2021-06-28T21:15:57.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6160" CreationDate="2021-06-28T21:17:30.677" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the shortcomings of the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/299712&quot;&gt;What are the shortcomings of the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ad size: right sidebar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Site(s) to be displayed in: all&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2021-06-28T21:17:30.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6160" CreationDate="2021-06-28T21:30:01.163" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is accuracy not the best measure for assessing classification models?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/312780/&quot;&gt;Why is accuracy not the best measure for assessing classification models?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ad size: right sidebar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Site(s) to be displayed in: all&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2021-06-28T21:30:01.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6160" CreationDate="2021-06-28T21:32:24.907" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;When to choose SARSA vs. Q Learning&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/326788&quot;&gt;When to choose SARSA vs. Q Learning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ad size: right sidebar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Site(s) to be displayed in: all&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2021-06-28T21:32:24.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6160" CreationDate="2021-06-28T21:37:06.360" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can simple linear regression be done without using plots and linear algebra?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/204930&quot;&gt;Can simple linear regression be done without using plots and linear algebra?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ad size: right sidebar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Site(s) to be displayed in: all&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2021-06-28T21:37:06.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6160" CreationDate="2021-06-28T21:41:47.373" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Problems with pie charts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/8974&quot;&gt;Problems with pie charts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ad size: right sidebar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Site(s) to be displayed in: all&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2021-06-28T21:41:47.373" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6183" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-30T22:02:17.603" Score="1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that questions that are as concise as possible without sacrificing clarity get more attention. More specifically, questions that avoid repeating information, avoid adding unnecessary context (e.g. the first paragraph in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/52756/probability-of-overlap-between-independent-samples-of-different-sizes&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;), and ask a single question at a time. Should this be mentioned in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;How do I ask a good question?&lt;/a&gt; guide?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296197" LastActivityDate="2021-06-30T22:02:17.603" Title="Should conciseness be a part of the &quot;How do I ask a good question?&quot; guide?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6188" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-13T12:10:07.947" Score="-8" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;So , it has been quite some time i started using this platform , and I was just looking at few questions that showed &amp;quot; this question is not accepting any answers &amp;quot; which means it must have been downvoted and closed,  right ??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my question is if any user feels that the given question is not good or precise or too direct for them then they can leave it , why to stop others  from answering if the other person wants to .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2797397/sufficient-statistic-function-for-fx-theta-x-2-0-theta-leq-x&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2797397/sufficient-statistic-function-for-fx-theta-x-2-0-theta-leq-x&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So one should restrain his choice only to oneself , if you don't like a question then comment that , but altogether closing the question doesn't seem to be fair ..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just a thought , maybe  I am thinking only from one dimension , buti really want your views on this thing .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="324659" LastActivityDate="2021-07-15T18:19:16.827" Title="Why can some people close others answer" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|questions|markdown|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6189" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-13T23:27:42.420" Score="1" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've thought better of more than 5 of my questions. They are better-suited to being answered outside SE. I started to delete them and discovered there was a 5-per-day limit. What is the motivation behind this limitation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69508" LastEditorUserId="69508" LastEditDate="2021-07-13T23:35:54.060" LastActivityDate="2023-01-26T06:01:50.757" Title="Why can I only delete 5 of my questions per day?" Tags="|support|deleted-questions|self-delete|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6189" CreationDate="2021-07-13T23:40:00.780" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The purpose of this website is to create a durable repository of questions and answers, and destruction of useful content works against that purpose. You agreed to this when you created your account; when you posted on SE, you gave up&#xA;ownership of the content under&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/licensing&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 4.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2021-07-13T23:40:56.877" LastActivityDate="2021-07-13T23:40:56.877" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6188" CreationDate="2021-07-15T18:19:16.827" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your most recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/534272/176202&quot;&gt;closed question&lt;/a&gt; has been closed for being a self-study question that is lacking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; tag. The idea is that you read the wiki when you add it to your post so that...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...you are aware that self-study questions &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; in fact allowed! As long as you include what you have tried and where you are stuck.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We encourage new users to &lt;strong&gt;read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Common reasons for closure are actually covered in the tour:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZIqHA.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZIqHA.png&quot; alt=&quot;CVtour&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, you even get a badge for going through the tour completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither closing a question, nor downvoting is a statement of &amp;quot;I don't like this&amp;quot;. Instead, it is as @whuber mentions in the comments, a way of curating the site. In fact, you are free to edit your question, delete it, ask another, as many times as you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176202" LastActivityDate="2021-07-15T18:19:16.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6149" CreationDate="2021-08-08T21:18:59.503" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it is a problem, how do/should we dissuade or prevent this deletion?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One doesn't have to dissuade or prevent such (indeed unfortunate but often due to SE issues, not CV issues) deletions:  one can instead simply re-post the question oneself with the proper credits, since the Stack Exchange license allows it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastActivityDate="2021-08-08T21:18:59.503" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6196" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-13T12:28:30.657" Score="10" ViewCount="271" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have this question of etiquette. I was wondering if at the end of a discussion in the comment section a question, once my doubt has been clarified, should I add a final comment thanking the person who took the time, or if that is not in tune with the site's etiquette.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="283126" LastEditorUserId="155836" LastEditDate="2021-08-16T20:48:28.093" LastActivityDate="2021-08-16T20:48:28.093" Title="Do you say &quot;thank you&quot; to commenters who solve your problem?" Tags="|discussion|questions|comment|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6196" CreationDate="2021-08-14T12:15:49.460" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;We commonly edit out &amp;quot;thanks&amp;quot; from the body of a question (see revision history on this Q).  In the question, we want to get as quickly as possible to—and through—the relevant information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, at the end of a comment thread, or after an answer, &amp;quot;thanks&amp;quot; is more tolerated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2021-08-14T12:15:49.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6202" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-23T20:49:45.393" Score="7" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/541124/&quot;&gt;recent question about the statistics profession&lt;/a&gt; was closed as off-topic.  It clearly does not fall within the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;listed topics on our help pages&lt;/a&gt; so I have no objection to the moderating decision.  Nevertheless, it got me thinking, should CV allow questions about the statistics profession?  (I.e., should the scope of allowable topics be modified to include this?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, obviously we don't want generic workplace questions that would be more suited to &lt;a href=&quot;https://workplace.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;the workplace site&lt;/a&gt;.  We could count out such questions by making the scope of the topic clearly limited to questions that are specific to the statistics profession and not generic workplace questions.  Still, almost all of our experts here work in (or are retired from) the profession, either as academics, consultants, industrial workers, etc., so we have a substantial repository of knowledge about how the statistical profession works.  Indeed, we are probably the only site on StackExchange that has this expertise.  This seems to me to be a valuable repository of knowledge for younger users who want to get into this profession.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Should the scope of topics for CV.SE be changed to allow questions on the &amp;quot;statistics profession&amp;quot;?  Is there some existing reason why this is excluded from the allowable topics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173082" LastActivityDate="2021-08-23T20:49:45.393" Title="Should questions about the statistics profession be added to the scope of CV?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="995" CreationDate="2021-08-26T17:10:36.767" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently looking into the class imbalance problem, which is a very common methodological issue on this site, and have been working on a tutorial paper.  The lack of an answer to my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/539638/how-do-you-know-that-your-classifier-is-suffering-from-class-imbalance&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;How do you know that your classifier is suffering from class imbalance?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; suggests there are some issues with current practice that need to be addressed.  Cross Validatated seems a good place for finding out what people actually do (or don't do)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="887" LastActivityDate="2021-08-26T17:10:36.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6205" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-27T04:11:35.047" Score="15" ViewCount="474" Body="&lt;p&gt;SE users,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Request for information on top users --- name, profession, institution, title&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am currently writing an academic paper on statistics education using CV.SE, which is expected to be published in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://iase-web.org/Publications.php?p=Regional_Publications&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Proceedings of OZCOTS 2021&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.  As part of this paper I will comment on the expertise of the top users on the site, as indicated by their professions and institutions.  Specifically, the paper will contain supplementary materials listing the &lt;strong&gt;top 30 users&lt;/strong&gt; (as determined by total reputation at the present time), their real names, profession and institution (if known).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some of these top users, it is possible for me to identify you and find your professional details online through public sources.  For other users, I can't identify you unless you are willing to write to me and let me know who you are.  If you are happy to be identified in the paper, can you &lt;strong&gt;please message/email me your full name, profession, institution and title (e.g., Mr, Dr, Prof)&lt;/strong&gt; for this table.  If you do not wish to be identified, please let me know and I will list your details as unknown/redacted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For anyone who I can already identify based on publicly available information, it is possible that I might disclose publicly available information about you unless you write to me and specifically tell me not to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your assistance and for all your good work on CV.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yours Sincerely,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ben O'Neill&lt;/strong&gt; (ben.oneill@anu.edu.au),&#xA;Research Fellow, ANU&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; Thanks to everyone who is emailing me with instructions on this matter!  I am overwhelmed with how lovely you all are!  Once the paper is published I will add a link to it on this post so that you can all read it (for those who are interested).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update - paper now published:&lt;/strong&gt; The conference paper on this topic has now been published as part of the &lt;em&gt;Proceedings of the 10th Australian Conference&#xA;on Teaching Statistics (OZCOTS)&lt;/em&gt;.  ​The full conference proceedings are &lt;a href=&quot;https://iase-web.org/documents/ANZCOTS/OZCOTS_2021_Proceedings.pdf?1636858858&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and my article is pp. 65-72. ​ The user details I requested are not in the main article, but they are part of supplementary materials that were sent to the journal (to justify my observations on the qualifications of top users on the site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173082" LastEditorUserId="173082" LastEditDate="2021-11-14T20:34:21.737" LastActivityDate="2021-11-14T20:34:21.737" Title="Request for information on top users --- name, profession, institution, title" Tags="|discussion|users|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6206" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-30T04:23:04.123" Score="16" ViewCount="309" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently learned from another user that one of our high-ranking users, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/11032/&quot;&gt;Michael R. Chernick&lt;/a&gt;, passed away earlier this year (see obituary &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fluehr.com/obituary-detail.php?obitid=4630&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).  His profile page remains as he left it when he was alive, and some of that information is no longer accurate now that he is deceased (e.g., wanting to finish up some books he was writing).  The profile also does not let users know that he has passed away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In such cases, my own view is that it would be a nice idea if someone in the community could amend the profile page to remove information that is no longer relevant, and give some kind of commemoration and perhaps a link to the obituary.  I understand that it is possible for site moderators to edit a user profile unilaterally, though it might bolster that request if we have first discussed the matter on CV.meta.  I would like to solicit views from other community members on what is a good procedure for dealing with deceased accounts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should deceased user profiles be amended to give a commemoration, or should we just leave the profile as it is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Assuming an amendment is desired, who should do this?  Should it be part of the moderators' jobs?  Should we just leave it up to whoever takes initiative to contact the moderators with a proposed amendment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How do we decide what to say in the amended profile?  Should we solicit draft commemorations on a meta-post for each deceased user, or should we just leave this to the judgment and discretion of the person making the request to SE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything else by why of procedure that people would like in dealing with deceased accounts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Would anyone have any objection if I contact SE and request an amendment to Dr Chernick's profile page with a commemoration and link to his obituary (which I am happy to draft)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; Some other SE sites have also asked similar questions about what to do for deceased accounts (see e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/38742/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19822/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/29937/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7427/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).  At an organisational level, SE have decided not to form a policy on this matter, since they are afraid it may cause other problems.  I presume that it would still be okay for SV.SE users to develop our own approach to the matter through discussion on CV.meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173082" LastEditorUserId="173082" LastEditDate="2021-08-30T22:35:22.990" LastActivityDate="2021-09-09T11:19:23.680" Title="What (if anything) should we do about user profiles for users who have passed away?" Tags="|discussion|user-accounts|profile-page|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6206" CreationDate="2021-08-30T04:43:14.617" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll get the ball rolling with my own view on this matter.  In the event that we can confirm the death of a user (particularly a user who has made a substantial contribution to the site), I am happy for another user to take the initiative and contact SE to seek an amendment to the user profile.  (For anonymous accounts I think we should not do this, since we should respect the user's desire to remain anonymous, but for accounts where the user is easily identifiable, this would be a nice touch.)  I think the amendment should be minor and non-controversial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In regard to the wishes of the family/executor, I think it would probably be over-kill to try to contact them to solicit permission for an edit to the CV profile.  This is a very minor issue that can be handled non-controversially by a well-meaning user or moderator.  My view is therefore that the family/executor should not be contacted over the matter, though if they contact us and express a view (e.g., a preferred edit) then that wish should be respected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, I think the amendment should be minor, and should consist of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At the top of the page, give the name and lifetime of the user (e.g., Michael Chernick 1947-2021) and then give a brief commemoration giving biographical information about the person, roughly in line with the information in their eulogy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Keep the user's own self-description below this, but remove/amend parts that are no longer relevant/ accurate after their death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I do not think it is necessary to contact the family/executor prior to performing an edit.  However, in the unlikely case where the family/executor specifically requests a particular amendment, or opposes an amendment, their wishes should be respected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173082" LastEditorUserId="173082" LastEditDate="2021-08-30T22:39:23.977" LastActivityDate="2021-08-30T22:39:23.977" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6206" CreationDate="2021-08-30T13:39:54.613" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the safest thing to do when it is clear what has happened is to place a line at the top stating name and dates. Then place a note immediately below it stating that the profile has been left untouched. Editing the profile any further risks introducing misleading information. For instance if the profile says the user is working on a project we do not know for sure whether it was ever finished. I would also resist any attempt by interested parties to perform further edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastActivityDate="2021-08-30T13:39:54.613" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6209" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-31T16:29:34.657" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Context.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my experiences with this site, I've noticed standard proofs in statistics and probability theory, generally on foundational, textbook topics, tend to get answered and dealt with extremely quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently posted a question about the Vapnik-Chervonenkis inequality below, and after some digging , it turns out the question is not trivial in the sense of requiring detailed comparison of two hefty proofs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/540272/what-are-the-arguments-in-getting-from-the-theorem-of-vapnik-chervonenkis-197&quot;&gt;What are the arguments in getting from the theorem of Vapnik &amp;amp; Chervonenkis (1971) to the common form seen in Devroye, Gy&amp;#246;rfi &amp;amp; Lugosi (1996)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because I wasn't sure whether it appropriate to post at Cross Validated or Mathematics Stack Exchange, I placed a comment below it saying that I would migrate it myself to the latter if it wasn't appropriate. That comment received 2 upvotes, possibly indicating a degree of support for migration, but I am soliciting a more authoritative, explicit position from the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Are questions concerning proof in journal papers more suited for Cross Validated or for Mathematics Stackexchange? In particular, I mean proofs which are non-trivial that do not occur textbooks, but say in machine learning, theoretical statistics, and statistical learning theory journals.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thoughts.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, my view is that the 'sanitised' world of abstract proof is much more in the spirit of Mathematics Stackexchange, rather than the 'messy' realism of data analysis and hence Cross Validated. This would suggest Mathematics Stackexchange for this kind of question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it would seem that proofs in machine learning, theoretical statistics and statistical learning theory, while 'mainstream' to MSE in the sense of being proofs, are also esoteric in the use of specialised concepts, terminology, notation that are not within the realms of more traditional subfields in mathematics. In my opinion, the difficulty that this creates is that whilst I may be able to solicit assistance on parsing a proof on MSE, some of the proof steps may be motivated by specialised understanding that is more commonly found on Cross Validated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, how does one post a question on MSE, and reasonably expect someone there to assist in parsing a proof in the Annals of Statistics or the Journal of Machine Learning Research about theoretical guarantees on the AdaBoost algorithm if knowledge of its workings are in short supply? Clearly, proof is in the realm of Mathematics Stackexchange, but the requisite knowledge to understand its motivations is in greater supply on Cross Validated. Can someone advise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="294515" LastActivityDate="2021-08-31T16:29:34.657" Title="On posting questions concerning proofs of results in machine learning, theoretical statistics, and statistical learning theory papers" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6210" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-01T10:33:20.810" Score="7" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;The current tag except (and description) of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hypothesis-testing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hypothesis-testing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hypothesis-testing&lt;/a&gt; reads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hypothesis testing assesses whether data are inconsistent with a given hypothesis rather than being an effect of random fluctuations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me this is a false dichotomy, as data can often be considered outcomes of a random data generating process regardless of whether &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$H_0$&lt;/span&gt; holds or not. I wonder if we could get a better excerpt (and description).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not feel competent enough to write a really good excerpt myself, but we do have highly competent users around; maybe they will find my concern valid and will chip in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastActivityDate="2021-11-06T09:38:56.417" Title="Improve [hypothesis-testing] tag excerpt and description" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-excerpt|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6210" CreationDate="2021-09-02T11:12:53.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the spirit of keeping the description short, here are some suggestions for removing the imprecise language of &amp;quot;random fluctuations&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;s&gt;Hypothesis testing provides an empirical answer to a yes or no question.&lt;/s&gt; &lt;em&gt;(See comments.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hypothesis testing assesses whether data provides sufficient evidence to favor one hypothesis over another.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or a slightly longer one for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_hypothesis_testing#Null_hypothesis_statistical_significance_testing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NHST&lt;/a&gt; specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A frequentist statistical tests assesses how likely it is that the data were generated under the null-hypothesis, and then decides whether or not to reject it in favor of the alternative.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176202" LastEditorUserId="176202" LastEditDate="2021-11-06T09:38:56.417" LastActivityDate="2021-11-06T09:38:56.417" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6212" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-04T21:05:19.237" Score="4" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the new First Questions Review Queue, if I flag a question, say, as needing clarification, in my opinion the Actions box should have a button saying &amp;quot;I'm done&amp;quot; or the entire screen should advance to the next item. It's not at all clear what I should do next, as in my mind, I've already left feedback on that question. I notice that on Math.SE, the First Questions queue has the same behavior. Wondering if this is a SE-wide issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76484" LastActivityDate="2021-09-08T13:47:42.740" Title="First Questions Review Queue: Flagging a Question Does Not Advance the Actions or Move to Next Item" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6212" CreationDate="2021-09-06T01:39:10.847" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is already on SE's radar. See this thread:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/369013/review-queue-workflows-final-release&quot;&gt;Review queue workflows - Final release&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and check out the answer &lt;strong&gt;No way to correctly handle non-answers in First Answers.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76484" LastActivityDate="2021-09-06T01:39:10.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6214" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6215" CreationDate="2021-09-07T12:04:58.113" Score="3" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/543804/154990&quot;&gt;my question&lt;/a&gt;, the very last code snippets ends with the triple backticks &amp;quot;```&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same exact code snippet on StackOverflow does NOT end with the triple backticks (I thought I erred with the Markdown code somehow and tried to post on StackOverflow). Those backticks are only visible on CrossValidated and here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe some Markdown misconfiguration on this side?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the code snippet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; table(df&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$y, df$&lt;/span&gt;gender)&#xA;&#xA;         0      1&#xA;  0 194276  88007&#xA;  1    995    237&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="154990" LastEditorUserId="154990" LastEditDate="2021-09-07T13:04:30.473" LastActivityDate="2021-09-07T15:46:20.590" Title="Code snippet ends with triple backticks" Tags="|support|bug|markdown|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6214" CreationDate="2021-09-07T15:46:20.590" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This appears to happen if a code chunk is the last part of a post. You can get rid of it by adding a line break after the final code chunk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176202" LastActivityDate="2021-09-07T15:46:20.590" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6212" CreationDate="2021-09-08T11:47:18.737" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a new option now: Other action. It works similar to &amp;quot;I'm done.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xd77Hm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xd77Hm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109647" LastEditorUserId="109647" LastEditDate="2021-09-08T13:47:42.740" LastActivityDate="2021-09-08T13:47:42.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6206" CreationDate="2021-09-09T10:33:36.210" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say profiles should just be left as is, unless the family reaches out and expresses a different desire. Because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Simply put, Stack Exchange is not user focused. It's about Q&amp;amp;As. Outside of chat, it's pretty much all about the content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Users can have profiles, but ultimately what they write there is their own choice (assuming it's within site guidelines). Stack Exchange shouldn't be editing that. If a user passes away, the family essentially takes over their account and it's up to them to edit it if they wish to do so. Of course if they don't actually have access to the account, then they can ask Stack Exchange to edit it on their behalf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually I'd also feel very weird about a user-focused site, e.g. Facebook, taking it upon themselves to edit someone's profile. In a much tighter-knit community where basically everyone knows each other quite well, it may be more appropriate though. Some Stack Exchange communities may get a bit closer to this than others, but even that probably doesn't get close to the level where it'd be appropriate in my opinion and you'll probably always have a whole lot of random users outside of whichever bubble you think you're in (making adding a personal note to a profile that doesn't belong to you a whole lot less appropriate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't think a good case can be made for any user actually &lt;em&gt;needing&lt;/em&gt; this information (considering that the site is about the content). You can't send private messages to users. The only place you could realistically expect a reply is by leaving a comment on their post. But users can and do already go offline for extended periods or permanently for a whole range of reasons, or they could simply miss or choose not to engage with replies to their older content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It can bring unwanted attention to the family. If some random user sees this, and the contributions of the deceased user meant a lot to that user, they may try to reach out to the family to express their condolences. Some may appreciate this, for others it could bring back painful memories. That's not our choice to make for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The family may not appreciate an obituary note. Perhaps they simply want to browse the contributions the deceased user made without being reminded of the fact that they're deceased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The family should ultimately be in control of any public obituary notices. Even if the information is already public, that doesn't mean it's appropriate for anyone else to publicise that elsewhere (perhaps outside of private communities where that person was well-known).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It may simply not align with the wishes of the deceased or the family. I personally would just prefer if this information weren't noted on any public profile of mine after my passing, and the only people who I'd say could override this preference is my family. I generally keep my private life private and I don't see why dying should change that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Let's not even get started on the risk of adding such a note if an obituary turns out to be fake, premature or for someone who just shares the same name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/38742/how-should-a-users-death-be-handled&quot;&gt;How should a user&amp;#39;s death be handled?&lt;/a&gt; on Meta SE, which contains similar thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On a site like ours, it's not as necessary as it is on more social networks. ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just being absolutely certain who's dead is harder than it sounds. ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even when you can confirm death, the deceased's wishes can be hard to discern and honor. ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="171828" LastEditorUserId="171828" LastEditDate="2021-09-09T11:19:23.680" LastActivityDate="2021-09-09T11:19:23.680" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6219" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-12T14:43:09.957" Score="5" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many newcomer users incorrectly apply tag 'metric' (defined as a subclass of distances) to questions where word &amp;quot;a metric&amp;quot; is used by them simply as &amp;quot;a coefficient&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;a  measure&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So please create tag 'metric-distance' and make tag 'metric' a junior synonym of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3277" LastEditorUserId="3277" LastEditDate="2021-09-12T14:48:14.580" LastActivityDate="2021-09-12T14:48:14.580" Title="Change tag 'metric' into 'metric-distance'" Tags="|feature-request|tags|tag-synonyms|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6220" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-14T21:56:43.307" Score="14" ViewCount="267" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/369568/256777&quot;&gt;See the relevant thread at Meta.SE.&lt;/a&gt; As of Sep 8, answers on SO are sorted differently than before: previously, accepted answers were always shown first, but now, answers are strictly sorted by votes. SE are collecting feedback until Sep 19 as to whether other sites would like to also implement this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do we feel about this change? Do we want this on CV?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="1352" LastEditDate="2021-09-15T13:44:58.953" LastActivityDate="2021-09-20T20:29:58.483" Title="Unpinning the accepted answer from the top of the list of answers on CV" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6220" CreationDate="2021-09-15T07:56:37.743" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where the most upvoted and accepted answers differ, I agree that the most upvoted is usually better. So I'm for the change but don't feel very strongly about it. It seems likely to affect a relatively small proportion of answers (anyone know what % we're talking about?) and the difference in quality in these cases is often fairly obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Based on @Scortchi's SEDE query above, this change presently affects 2899 questions, or about 1.5% of all non-deleted questions the site has ever received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="121522" LastEditDate="2021-09-20T10:31:21.187" LastActivityDate="2021-09-20T10:31:21.187" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6220" CreationDate="2021-09-16T11:22:19.610" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that this is a worthwhile change, but I think a slight augmentation would be ideal.  Currently, you can sort answers several ways (by votes, by default, but also by recent activity or age).  It would be helpful to have a sort option that returns the old style ordering (accepted on top).  There can be cases with lots of answers and it might be helpful to see the accepted one quickly without having to scroll though everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2021-09-16T11:22:19.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6220" CreationDate="2021-09-16T15:11:37.160" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 'accepted answer' is a way for the questioner to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;grant a specific answer a bonus&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;notify that their problem/question has a sufficient answer (it provides a way to close the question; at least from the point of view of the questioner)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems no good reason to me why the questioner should be granted powers to influence the order of answers except for one potential problem...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some questions have a long history and because of this there develops a large discrepancy between votes. For instance, at Cross Validated, a 'hot network question' can gather a large amount of votes in just a day. For that situation, a late answer will never catch up with the votes but might be a better answer (it breaks the voting system, which in my opinion &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/338680/is-the-voting-and-reputation-system-sustainable-how-can-we-improve-it-or-maybe&quot;&gt;doesn't work correctly&lt;/a&gt; because it is not a rating system).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In such a case it is nice when the questioner can bump up an answer beyond discrepancies in votes. The accepted answer can be a better measure than the votes, or at least it is good to have it in addition to the votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in principle I do not see why the 'accepted answer' should be on top. But in practice there is a good reason to have it on top. I guess that on CV it would be good to stick with the old way and choose for the practical reason to have it on top. There is not much harm in having the accepted answer on top. (One case would be when the accepted answer would be bad, but &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; problem should be dealt with differently.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2021-09-16T20:34:29.060" LastActivityDate="2021-09-16T20:34:29.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6220" CreationDate="2021-09-19T19:38:07.423" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't a proposal for action but rather an extended comment that flags up some things we may want to keep an eye on if this change goes ahead. I suggest distinguishing &lt;em&gt;static&lt;/em&gt; considerations, whereby orderings of historic posts already in our repository may change, from &lt;em&gt;dynamic&lt;/em&gt; effects this change might produce on voting on new questions. Much of the discussion, and indeed cited data, concerns the former but the latter effect is less clearly evidenced. It's well known that answers listed at the top of a page tend to receive more votes, because not everyone scrolls down to read the lower ones. This is one of the problems with treating the voting system as if it were a rating system (as @SextusEmpiricus points out).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes an excellent answer is posted weeks or months after a question was first answered, and such answers inevitably struggle to catch up with ones posted when the question had its higher initial traffic. Occasionally these answers represent changes in the state of the art, e.g. when a new paper has been published (or particularly on StackOverflow, when there are a changes to a programming language or library, as anyone who regularly refers to the &lt;code&gt;ggplot2&lt;/code&gt; resources there will tell you while tearing any remaining hair out). Such answers often really deserve to be the top-listed, and a voting system will only rarely achieve this. There are ways to try to influence the votes, like high-rep users promoting the answer by posting a bounty for it and deliberately leaving it in the bounty queue to encourage more eyeballs/voters, but when a question was initially popular and the original answer garnered dozens or even hundreds of votes, it's very hard for a new answer to overcome that kind of lead even if it technically supersedes prior ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;These dynamic considerations suggest that voting is not only dubious as a rating system, but also as a curation system&lt;/strong&gt;. There is an advantage to having &lt;em&gt;curated&lt;/em&gt; content. Future readers, whom this site is intended to benefit, are helped when deprecated answers no longer appear at the top of the page, regardless of vote count. Question pages &amp;quot;owned&amp;quot; by active users can be curated this way under the &amp;quot;green-ticked shows first&amp;quot; system, if superior answers come along later. This is not flawless since many of our most-viewed questions were asked by drive-by users or long-time users who have become inactive, and as @NickCox points out, a proportion of green-ticked selections seem perverse. (I think, perhaps more charitably than Nick, that some, but not all, of the unusual-looking decisions by OPs come when a question addresses their individual practical needs or clears up a point of confusion that was very specific to them, whereas a more general or comprehensive answer may be more valuable to everybody else.) I remain unconvinced that changing to a &amp;quot;best-voted shows first&amp;quot; system will solve the curation problem on old or abandoned questions due to the way voter traffic tails off so rapidly, and only gets a temporary bump when a new answer is posted. If we were concerned about curation of such questions — and I think arguably we ought to be, since many of the more important or persistent questions in statistics, the ones which readers will keep flocking to for years to come, have already been asked on this site — I think we might need more radical changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Perhaps SE devs could establish a &amp;quot;black tick&amp;quot; for &amp;quot;moderated choice&amp;quot; of the answer most likely to be useful for future readers, and any black-ticked answers appear first, regardless of votes or which answer was green-ticked. This would necessitate a dedicated review queue accessed by high-rep users for questions which have been flagged as having a deprecated, incorrect, or clearly technically inferior answer currently appearing in prime position. I can see obvious risks of misuse or contention in the case of subjective questions, but on a largely technical site where some answers are either objectively incorrect or outdated, and with a voting system that doesn't always correctly rate answers, some kind of solution along these lines seems inevitable eventually.&lt;/em&gt; This is just a piece of brainstorming rather than a solid suggestion but I can't see how our direction of travel can avoid such discussions in future, as our task becomes increasingly to curate the body of material the site has already produced. Voting in its current form doesn't seem to be a sufficiently powerful curation tool; again, it wouldn't surprise me if eventually higher voting power for high-rep users is introduced as an attempt to address the curation issue, or editing of existing, highly placed answers by inactive users becomes normalised. At some point, something will clearly have to be done to keep top-positioned answers to highly viewed question correct and updated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If we do opt for &amp;quot;best-voted shows first&amp;quot; we need to pay attention to the dynamics of voting on new questions, and any weakening of the link between answer quality, green-ticked answer and best-voted answer.&lt;/strong&gt; Timing affects voting not just when updated answers appear months later, but even within the first few hours or days of a question being asked, when voting activity is at its peak. Until the OP green-ticks an answer, we do operate under a &amp;quot;best-voted shows first&amp;quot; regime, and it's very clear we have a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Matthew Effect&lt;/a&gt; (&amp;quot;the rich get richer&amp;quot;) as a consequence. Answers even a few minutes earlier than another have a few more votes, get a higher position on the page, and as a result tend to attract even more votes, since not all readers/voters scroll down far enough to see the newer answers. I think most long-time users of this site will have witnessed cases where the OP influences voting by selecting what appears to them to be the best answer — at the point they make this choice, they have access to answers early voters could not see, and they are more likely than later voters to have read the full set of answers, so despite occasional perverse choices there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; reasons to think their choice is better informed than the recorded vote distribution is. It often happens on questions with multiple answers that the OP green-ticks an answer which has climbed its way up to midway through the answer list on vote terms (and sometimes stalled there for a while), but after some time in prime position on the page, the green-ticked answer accumulates votes more rapidly to catch up or surpass the previously best-voted answer. If it had been left halfway down the page, I am sure it would have attracted a bit more attention and a few more votes by dint of having the green tick, but I very much doubt the effect would be so dramatic as when it gets a positional promotion too. This is why I'm not convinced data about agreement between green-ticked and best-voted answers on our existing question are a good guide to the effect of such a change in future, and some caution and a beady eye would be needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="22228" LastEditDate="2021-09-20T20:29:58.483" LastActivityDate="2021-09-20T20:29:58.483" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6227" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-01T16:14:33.303" Score="5" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed recently that when I write a new question such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/546716/prove-least-squares-prediction-equation-contains-mean-point&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, the &amp;quot;Similar questions&amp;quot; box just above the Body text entry box shows results that are similar, but they're similar for the wrong reasons. I format my (self-study) questions the same way: problem statement (including which question and which book I'm asking), my work so far, and my question. You can see that if you look at my last 10 questions, at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the problem: the &amp;quot;Similar questions&amp;quot; box, which I rely heavily on to know whether I'm asking something that's already been asked, has lately been returning almost all questions that &lt;strong&gt;I've&lt;/strong&gt; asked before! If the question I'm currently writing is that similar to previous problems, I wouldn't be very likely to ask it. I'm guessing that the ML matching algorithm is picking up on my formatting and keywords like the textbook I'm studying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a proposed solution: the &amp;quot;Similar questions&amp;quot; box should at least limit results authored by the same author as who is writing the current question, if not exclude them entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[EDIT] Per whuber's suggestion, I have &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/411932/improve-similar-questions-results-when-writing-a-question&quot;&gt;re-posted this&lt;/a&gt; to meta.so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76484" LastEditorUserId="76484" LastEditDate="2021-10-01T17:02:08.650" LastActivityDate="2021-10-01T17:02:08.650" Title="Improve &quot;Similar questions&quot; results when writing a question" Tags="|feature-request|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6228" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-02T11:39:48.030" Score="-8" ViewCount="356" Body="&lt;p&gt;I respect the moderators in general but this time their behaviour is just super weird to me. Please read these 2 links &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/546430/nn-embedding-similar-general-purpose-for-float-values&quot;&gt;nn.embedding similar general purpose for float values&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/546775/how-nn-embedding-algorithm-makes-embedding-vectors&quot;&gt;how nn.Embedding algorithm makes embedding vectors&lt;/a&gt; and I think someone not with a lot of prior knowledge can judge who is right?!&#xA;I clarified my position in comments that you can read, but to summarize:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;all I want a guidance to improve my question but moderators don't let proper people reach me!!!.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can see my efforts to clarify my question in my question edits and in my comments trying to follow moderators instructions, trying to come up with new details and explain whatever I can, like in my 1st post I edited it a lot adding useful details, made 2nd post more clear without insisting to reopen my first post again and trying to avoid argument, so all these show I'm not here to argue.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ofc for a question like mine there are lot of ways to help me but one of possible one could be &amp;quot;For discrete data there is a method named &amp;quot;x&amp;quot; and for continuous data I'm asking if someone have a ready code for method &amp;quot;x&amp;quot; in which to assimilate discretion, partition float data to periods and puts centroid of period data as a representation of that period (viola now we have a discrete like data) then uses method &amp;quot;x&amp;quot;, so please tell me how method &amp;quot;x&amp;quot; could be implemented, do u have useful sources and show me where a code like that is? btw I'm sure you know other ways of discretion of data also exists.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Their reason is that &amp;quot;you don't know this method&amp;quot; and my answer is &amp;quot;isn't that why everyone asks a question&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They don't let my question to be open in the case if it really needs clarification, I would get what I should add while these moderators just enforce themselves meddling into my question not asserting &amp;quot;what should I add&amp;quot; while Ive done whatever I could.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Taking away chance to get an answer while it's obvious that someone here most likely know the answer, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/543324/word-embeddings-with-nn-embedding-except-glove&quot;&gt;on my other post related to this&lt;/a&gt; in less than 10 minute and 1.5hour I got two good answers, so again moderators insist on closure of this post is suspicious, because if someone has proper knowledge on this issue they can ask me their needs of clarifications, and I would gladly answer them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are unable to answer &amp;quot;what should I add?&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;what I should focus more on&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;why u don't let if anyone knows that help me&amp;quot; in countless cases, making these whole arguments not productive, they just want it closed!; all I want is please tell me what to do, they said more precise and I did whatever I could but when they r unable to convey what they want, it just senseless no matter in what position you are.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I admit sometimes in these arguments I was a little bit sarcastic but in my defence just follow places of such, it's always after their inabilities of clarifying their intention on insisting on it unreasonably.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to be brutally honest its a bit awkward people with such sophistications can't respond to a normal question like &amp;quot;what I should add more&amp;quot; etc and insist on their decision and while trying not to be pessimistic or accuse them cause maybe I'm wrong but it just seems they re just defending or try clean up the fault of their co-moderators&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a person with common sense knows who should give right to. but I'm open to hear your opinions. please tell me what should I do? What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;after many people coming and checking this discussion and just upvoting my opposite opinions and downvoting me, literally no one giving the right to while I have made several points to open the my question, answering that Ive addressed their points as possible in the comment of @Tim 's answer. I'm just thinking either I'm wrong in the all of my logical cells in my brain don't help or then again the last bullet Ive mentioned here, cause people still don't answer my questions and they just support their mates. but at least a single person, I don't say fully supports me, but realizes parts of my reasons, would have been a heartwarmin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if u want to be productive please just tell me about why my bullet no.3 can't or may can't be implemented? I'd like to listen just about this, if u want to make a reasonable closing reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="322887" LastEditorUserId="322887" LastEditDate="2021-10-03T23:56:15.287" LastActivityDate="2021-10-06T08:36:58.680" Title="Problem with moderators trying to keep my question closed" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="19" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6228" CreationDate="2021-10-02T22:42:44.740" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;In case of both questions you asked me and @Sycorax had a lengthy discussion with you in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We both suggested that you should make the question more precise because it is not clear what you mean by &amp;quot;embeddings for float variables&amp;quot;. In neither of the cases, you did anything to edit the questions and clarify them. We gave you guidance on what can be improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We both took attempts to clarify it and partially answering it in the comments by pointing out that the equivalent of embeddings for continuous variables is using a dense layer since embeddings &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/546819/how-does-torch-nn-embedding-or-tf-keras-layers-embedding-compare-to-a-dense-laye&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; dense layers&lt;/a&gt;, just the fact that we are dealing with sparse, binary vectors enables us to use a more efficient implementation that the direct matrix multiplication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Consider that two of your questions were closed by different moderators. In this thread, you got comments from other users commenting in favor of the moderator's decision. You asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/102612/nn-embedding-alternative-for-float-numbers&quot;&gt;exactly the same question on another SE site&lt;/a&gt; and got no response and no upvotes. It seems like there are at least several people for whom your question was not clear enough to be answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your question is basically an &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-problem&quot;&gt;XY problem&lt;/a&gt;, you are asking about an attempted solution rather than your actual problem. You want to get answered on how to implement &amp;quot;embeddings for floating-point variables&amp;quot;, but you do not clarify what you want to achieve by this and what kind of problem you are trying to solve, what is this going to do. The problem is that the thing you are asking doesn't exist, so we cannot help you with your intended solution. That is why we tried to clarify what is the underlying problem and what you mean by those &amp;quot;embeddings&amp;quot; but you failed to address the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For further guidance, you can check our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1479/how-to-ask-a-good-question-on-crossvalidated&quot;&gt;How to ask a &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; question on CrossValidated?&lt;/a&gt; guide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2021-10-02T22:42:44.740" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6228" CreationDate="2021-10-05T17:22:25.110" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if u want to be productive please just tell me about why my bullet no.3 can't or may can't be implemented?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point number 3 is about a request for code implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For discrete data there is a method named &amp;quot;x&amp;quot; and for continuous data &lt;strong&gt;I'm asking if someone have a ready code&lt;/strong&gt; for method &amp;quot;x&amp;quot; in which to...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is extremely off-topic here. The website is about questions about 'statistics' and not about 'how to write code' or 'where to find code'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if it needs statistical expertise to understand or answer, ask it here; if it's about the implementation of an algorithm, routine data processing, or details of the language, then please refer to the collection of links to resources we maintain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, code still occurs on the website. But only as a means to improve a question about statistics or when it statistics oriented. But 'ways to implement an algorithm' are not about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2021-10-05T18:43:26.490" LastActivityDate="2021-10-05T18:43:26.490" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6228" CreationDate="2021-10-06T08:31:52.697" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have no knowledge of embedding and neural networks, but formatting the question is already helping a lot to clarify a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example with the following changes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;place code at the end&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use capitals&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;add section headings&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;turn the long paragraph into points&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;remove stuff about the error message&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;remove repetitive use of 'please' and 'tell me'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;highlighted question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;removed question about positional embedding to improve focus&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understood from comments by others who know this stuff better there might also be some XY problem underlying the closure and embedding float numbers is something you do not do. To clarify why you are thinking about doing this at all is to explain why you have this problem. For instance &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;question: can I add up 1+1 = 3? answer: no, but why would you want to do that? reply: because my keyboards '2' is stuck.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; To avoid that start with what you are doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question relates to pytorch code of transformers suitable for machine translation. (See the code at the end of the question)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One the first steps is embedding the word vectors. But for none word integer purposes, is it possible to also use &lt;code&gt;nn.Embedding&lt;/code&gt; or something alike so to have float numbers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why does &lt;code&gt;nn.Embedding&lt;/code&gt; only deal with words? What are alternative ways to embed floating numbers which are commonly used (e.g in non-machine-translation, non-integer tasks like most of neural nets, time series analysis, CNNs etc)?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know float numbers don't work with nn.embedding. My question is when we are dealing with integers, someway we embed them but what is usually done equivalently when we are working with float numbers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of possible ways is to use fully connected layer but in machine translation they also can use indexes(in form of float) and map them to another float vector ,except and avoid using word embeddings or in case of general (nn.embedding).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They probably trying to preserve some features of language and so thats why they use word2vec embeddings rather than using vanilla fully connected layers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But, in terms of using transformer models to get float inputs, we don't know what should be preserved&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;So my question is what the other researchers of this field have done?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Example code&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;import torch&#xA;import torch.nn as nn&#xA;class Encoder(nn.Module):&#xA;    def __init__(&#xA;        self,&#xA;        src_vocab_size,&#xA;        device,&#xA;        embed_size):&#xA;        super(Encoder, self).__init__()&#xA;        self.embed_size = embed_size&#xA;        self.device = device&#xA;        self.word_embedding = nn.Embedding(src_vocab_size, embed_size)&#xA;    def forward(self, x):&#xA;        out = self.word_embedding(x)&#xA;        print(out)&#xA;        &#xA;if __name__ == &amp;quot;__main__&amp;quot;:&#xA;    device = torch.device(&amp;quot;cuda&amp;quot; if torch.cuda.is_available() else &amp;quot;cpu&amp;quot;)&#xA;    x = torch.tensor([[1, 5, 6, 4, 3, 9, 5, 2, 0], [1, 8, 7, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 2]]).to(device )&#xA;    src_vocab_size = 10&#xA;    embed_size=512&#xA;    model = Encoder(src_vocab_size,device,embed_size).to(device)&#xA;    out = model(x)&#xA;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;```&lt;/span&gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2021-10-06T08:36:58.680" LastActivityDate="2021-10-06T08:36:58.680" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6233" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6234" CreationDate="2021-10-19T06:14:41.757" Score="5" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that there seem to be issues with the syntax highlighting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/548609/11849&quot;&gt;this recent post&lt;/a&gt; as an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8OvI9.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8OvI9.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of example&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, the question is tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;r&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;r&lt;/a&gt;. Thus, R syntax highlighting should be applied. However, it isn't. You can easily see that because comments (starting with &lt;code&gt;#&lt;/code&gt;) should be grey. I suspect a default (C?) highlighting is applied. The strange thing is that in some posts correct syntax highlighting is used (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/548357/11849&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;) and in some not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a screenshot from Stack Overflow showing the correct syntax highlighting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GvG5H.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GvG5H.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot from post rendered at Stack Overflow&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11849" LastActivityDate="2021-10-21T14:03:47.100" Title="Issues with syntax highlighting (r tag)" Tags="|bug|syntax-highlighting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6233" CreationDate="2021-10-19T13:10:03.980" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I learned something new today. Apparently the tag wiki pages have default syntax highlighting setting on the bottom and we used the default one for the  &lt;code&gt;[r]&lt;/code&gt; tag (for Python it is correct).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now it's fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ph2KO.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ph2KO.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, remember that you can always use&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;!-- lang-all: lang-r --&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;somewhere in the body of the post to set highlighting for all snippets, or start the snippet with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;```lang-r&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="11887" LastEditDate="2021-10-21T14:03:47.100" LastActivityDate="2021-10-21T14:03:47.100" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6236" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-21T10:10:02.980" Score="6" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/548953/289885&quot;&gt;My question&lt;/a&gt; was closed as &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;unfocused&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;. At the same time it didn't receive any kind of feedback to describe what is unfocused about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's while the question has a specific and focused question right in it: &amp;quot;3. Ideas for how to filter the data to get rid of the dependance between samples? Would using something like an unscentend Kalman filter be a good idea?&amp;quot;.&#xA;The other data is provided to create a context for it, the previous two (no.1 and no.2) are there just to show that I'm open to the possibility that &amp;quot;I'm holding it wrong&amp;quot; and that my whole approach is incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289885" OwnerDisplayName="Hubert Kario" LastActivityDate="2021-10-21T10:35:14.180" Title="Marking question as &quot;unfocused&quot; without feedback isn't helpful" Tags="|discussion|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6238" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-13T07:25:51.533" Score="6" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where can I ask for tools useful for high school level statistics? Currently I am looking for something that can visualize standard deviation and compare two distributions with each other (with some &amp;quot;levers&amp;quot; so I can easily adjust their shape etc). Googlings just returns a lot of YouTube-clips.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="255059" LastActivityDate="2022-05-21T05:46:21.543" Title="Where can I ask for tools?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6239" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-15T16:48:58.813" Score="5" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;When navigating to a users page, I now see &amp;quot;questions&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;answers&amp;quot; as usual but also &amp;quot;articles&amp;quot;. What are these? Are preprints intended to be posted there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A link can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/173082/ben&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and an image is below: &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IJxUf.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IJxUf.png&quot; alt=&quot;image&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the purposes of placing the above screenshot on a user's page, attached below is a larger screenshot of my view of whuber's page on the meta site:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bMPVD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bMPVD.png&quot; alt=&quot;whubers page&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203822" LastEditorUserId="203822" LastEditDate="2021-11-15T17:02:01.233" LastActivityDate="2021-11-15T17:02:01.233" Title="What are articles?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6240" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6241" CreationDate="2021-11-25T06:53:24.757" Score="2" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/classification&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;classification&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;classification&lt;/a&gt;, which covers the more basic situation of two classes, but also that of &lt;em&gt;multiple&lt;/em&gt; classes. The tag wiki is taken from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_classification&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Statistical classification is the problem of identifying the sub-population to which new observations belong, where the identity of the sub-population is unknown, on the basis of a training set of data containing observations whose sub-population is known. Therefore these classifications will show a variable behavior which can be studied by statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we do get a number of questions on &lt;em&gt;multi-class&lt;/em&gt; classification. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=%5Bclassification%5D+multi&quot;&gt;A simple search for &amp;quot;multi&amp;quot; in the &amp;quot;classification&amp;quot; tag currently returns 607 hits.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am kind of wondering whether it would make sense to introduce a new tag like &amp;quot;multi-classification&amp;quot;. Or &amp;quot;multi-class-classification&amp;quot;, which sounds more correct but also more cumbersome - anything as long as the tag shows up when people start typing &amp;quot;multi&amp;quot;. Or do we assume that simply searching for &amp;quot;multi&amp;quot; in the &amp;quot;classification&amp;quot; tag is enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts, anyone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2021-11-25T12:48:56.430" Title="New tag: &quot;multi-classification&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6240" CreationDate="2021-11-25T12:48:56.430" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's necessary.  We already have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/multi-class&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;multi-class&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;multi-class&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/multilabel&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;multilabel&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;multilabel&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[multi-class]&lt;/code&gt; Wiki excerpt: &amp;quot;Multiclass classification is a classification task in which there are more than two classes. It is also called multinomial classification.&amp;quot; 387 threads, 237 with &lt;code&gt;[classification]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[multilabel]&lt;/code&gt; Wiki excerpt: &amp;quot;Multi-label classification where multiple target labels might be assigned to each instance.&amp;quot;  162 threads, 82 with &lt;code&gt;[classification]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2021-11-25T12:48:56.430" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6242" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6243" CreationDate="2021-12-07T15:53:31.143" Score="8" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to ask for advice about plotting a growth curve model, preferably using SAS, SPSS or Excel. Is that an appropriate question for CrossValidated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122394" LastActivityDate="2021-12-07T15:59:58.703" Title="Is it appropriate to ask about plotting/graphing/visualizing data here?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6242" CreationDate="2021-12-07T15:59:58.703" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the question is purely about how to make the plot in some software, but you know which plot you want to make, it is off-topic here, and better asked at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if the question also is about how to choose a way of plotting, how to choose between different possibilities, then it is a statistical question and on-topic here. Often these two aspects got intermingled, then you have a choice, but if the programming aspect is secondary, it is on-topic here to (and maybe also at the other site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastActivityDate="2021-12-07T15:59:58.703" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6244" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-08T01:12:38.007" Score="3" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently the new UX design stresses less information on the page, and more scrolling around looking for it. I suspect this is a decision driven by the type of corporate mindset that assumes a Ux that has not changed lately must be a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this execrable gob of shite revertible, or do we need to just wallow in the stink of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44269" LastActivityDate="2021-12-08T01:12:38.007" Title="Dear gods, is there any way to roll back the Ux on the user pages?" Tags="|discussion|user-interface|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2021-12-08T01:21:59.120" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6245" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-09T03:35:00.080" Score="-8" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few topics on this site (unbalanced data, up-weighting, accuracy, F1 score, precision/recall etc) that whenever a user asks a question regarding one of these methods/metrics, a few high reputation users immediately ignore the question at hand and post copy pasted responses about how that method is bad. Usually the question has nothing to do with the merits of that method/metric and rather the implementation of it and so this response has nothing to do with the question actually being asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/555136/class-imbalance-training-set-is-balanced-but-test-set-is-imbalanced-how-to-tra?noredirect=1#comment1020890_555136&quot;&gt;Class imbalance: training set is balanced but test set is imbalanced, how to train?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user asks about the implementation of training a model with under-sampled data and a user responds with 3 comments back to back about how imbalanced data isn't a problem (this is entirely unrelated as the asker was only under-sampling for computational reasons) and how accuracy/precision/recall etc shouldn't be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again the user asked no questions about whether someone should use any of these methods; they simply asked if they were to use them how would they do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The responses by these users are spam. They detract from the actual question being asked and make new users feel frustrated when an honest question is answered with &amp;quot;don't use that; it is bad&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will add that all of the methods that these users dislike are widely used, in peer-reviewed papers, in statistical textbooks, across various internet sources. I am not saying that this means they are in fact valid, but I am also saying that a few guys here on cross validated agreeing that they are bad does not either make them invalid. Further the only proof offered against the validity of these methods are cross-validated posts written by the commenter (that have since been closed). If the user wants to discuss the merits of those methods then there are already questions for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should comments/answers that answer something other than the question being asked be allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See other examples here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/553225/model-accuracy-versus-f1?noredirect=1#comment1017137_553225&quot;&gt;Model accuracy versus F1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/549800/is-it-appropriate-to-use-npv-and-ppv-when-performing-undersampling?noredirect=1#comment1010255_549800&quot;&gt;Is it appropriate to use NPV and PPV when performing undersampling?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/425716/reporting-f1-scores/426815#426815&quot;&gt;Reporting F1 Scores&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are just a few examples, I am sure there are others&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="204292" LastEditorUserId="204292" LastEditDate="2021-12-09T15:43:06.387" LastActivityDate="2021-12-09T19:55:14.927" Title="Answering a question other than the one that is asked" Tags="|discussion|answers|spam|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6245" CreationDate="2021-12-09T13:20:51.033" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should all agree in abstraction that good answers (and good comments) should be correct and relevant, but who is the judge of either? Even in a community defined by overlapping technical interests, there can be marked disagreements about principles or good practice. (Supposedly, R.A. Fisher defined &lt;em&gt;variance&lt;/em&gt; informally as the attitude of one statistician to another.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no policy issue here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If existing answers or comments are inaccurate or irrelevant, that means &lt;strong&gt;there is always scope for posting better answers or comments&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Further, &lt;strong&gt;it can be in order to answer or comment that a question is misguided and that there is a better way to proceed or a better way to pose the analysis&lt;/strong&gt;. As in teaching, sometimes a poster needs an explanation that they would be better off backing up and seeing what they are doing differently. CV is not a help line with an absolute commitment to try to adopt the poster's point of view; it is a forum with freedom to express other points of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In addition to answers, &lt;strong&gt;comments can be used to broaden the discussion or even to make wry or witty asides&lt;/strong&gt;. If a comment strays too far from the main topic, it can always be flagged for deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the question the examples given are some distance from my usual territory so I won't attempt any judgment on what in particular threads is relevant or irrelevant or fair comment or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;strong&gt;calling such answers &lt;em&gt;spam&lt;/em&gt; is unhelpful&lt;/strong&gt; (if not offensive, as my impression is that almost all contributions to CV are made in good faith). StackExchange has a specific definition of spam: &amp;quot;Exists only to promote a product or service, does not disclose the author's affiliation.&amp;quot; Other way round, we have a clear policy that whatever is spam should just be flagged for deletion by moderators. So, again, if anything really is spam there is no policy issue to be discussed here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some strong generalisations here and [in the original post] just one example by way of a particular thread. I guess that you don't want to single out particular people but the difficulty remains that &lt;strong&gt;strong claims require strong evidence&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2021-12-09T19:55:14.927" LastActivityDate="2021-12-09T19:55:14.927" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6245" CreationDate="2021-12-09T18:57:04.347" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answers should answer the question. Comments should comment on the question. Stephan and I are using Cross Validated as it is intended to be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have learned in statistical consulting that, yes, I should answer questions that the customer has. However, it is important to answer the questions that the customer should have had.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247274" LastActivityDate="2021-12-09T18:57:04.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6245" CreationDate="2021-12-09T19:04:07.707" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the user whose comments you take offense at, I would like to offer a word of explanation. (Incidentally, I would have appreciated a pointer to this Meta question, e.g., in a reply to one of my comments. Complaining about me behind my back is not good style.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that I will often post comments under questions about imbalanced data and over-/undersampling, even if the questions themselves are not about &lt;em&gt;whether&lt;/em&gt; this is a good idea, but about &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; to go about over-/undersampling (or similar). True. My reasoning is that over-/undersampling is, in my opinion, akin to shooting yourself in the foot. When someone asks for the best way to shoot yourself in the foot (use a shotgun? a crossbow?), I'll post a comment pointing out that the foot-shooting &lt;em&gt;itself&lt;/em&gt; may be misguided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally think that these comments add value. And note that I am posting them as &lt;em&gt;comments&lt;/em&gt;, not as &lt;em&gt;answers&lt;/em&gt; - which they are not, as you point out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, you could make a point that if I did post these as answers, they could at least be downvoted if enough users felt the way you do. True again. I think reasonable people can disagree about whether my comments should really be answers. But judging from the upvotes my comments sometimes get, I suspect that any such answers would also garner their share of upvotes - and getting rep out of these non-answers-only-posted-as-answers-so-people-can-downvote-them feels at least as spammy to me as posting comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Funnily enough, I posted a Meta question about this precise issue here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5000/1352&quot;&gt;What to do about &amp;quot;wrong&amp;quot; questions?&lt;/a&gt; The top voted answer there was indeed to post an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also complain that I use boilerplate comments. Again, I plead guilty as charged. Why am I doing it? Because we get one or more of these questions every single day. Every one a slightly different question about shooting yourself in the foot. One day it's shotguns vs. crossbows. The next day it's about right foot or left foot first. Then whether it might not be best to start by shooting yourself in the calf first. I still believe that a boilerplate answer &amp;quot;don't shoot yourself in the foot at all&amp;quot; is useful, even if the question is one about shooting yourself in the hand or in other body parts. After all, the alternative would be to either spend a lot of time crafting tailored answers to each separate question, which I honestly don't have the time or inclination to do, or not to do anything. Call me obsessive, but I believe that if my comments make someone think twice about unbalanced data and over-/undersampling, then they are useful, and not posting anything because I didn't have the time to do a thorough job but did not want to post boilerplate would have been a loss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, note that we have a very useful Meta question here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2468/1352&quot;&gt;How best to use the review queue?&lt;/a&gt; It contains a lot of boilerplate you can use for comments, and which I also use often, especially for what I think are self-study questions. Yes, boilerplate has its place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, it is not the case that I post my boilerplate &amp;quot;without even considering the question at hand&amp;quot;, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6245/answering-a-question-other-than-the-one-that-is-asked#comment21062_6246&quot;&gt;you allege&lt;/a&gt;. Per above, my comments may not address the specific foot-shooting question, but also per above, I believe it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5326/1352&quot;&gt;better to have a short imprecise comment than nothing at all&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, you note that my position is a minority one, and that lots of people are thinking deeply about the imbalance &amp;quot;problem&amp;quot; (you will excuse the scare quotes), SMOTE etc, even in peer reviewed articles. Yes, that is true. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6245/answering-a-question-other-than-the-one-that-is-asked#comment21058_6245&quot;&gt;With Nick Cox&lt;/a&gt;, I have little faith in the statistics published in peer reviewed journals and conferences, especially in papers from non-statisticians. Among whom I count ML scientists, who are typically far more competent in computer science, algorithm design, database operations, software development and straight-up coding than in statistics. I started my statistical &amp;quot;career&amp;quot; in psychology, and the statistical half-knowledge that is published in psychology journals is breathtaking - because authors, reviewers and editors are psychologists, not statisticians, and they frankly are misremembering half of what they learned in their one undergrad stats course. Thus, the fact that there are peer-reviewed articles on foot-shooting does not carry much weight with me. Sorry to be blunt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, yes, I know that I am one of the more vocal people here when it comes to the topic under question, but I am certainly not the only one to weigh in here. It is also not the case that the only arguments I give are posts I wrote myself. Yes, I do link to my own posts in my comments - because (a) I know them best, and (b) I wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/357466/1352&quot;&gt;one of them&lt;/a&gt; for the express purpose of having a canonical question to link to (and invested quite some time and effort in it), after noticing this deluge of &amp;quot;class imbalance problem&amp;quot; questions. I assume you have seen the comments below this question of mine, which to me indicate my mystification is shared by some.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Believe me, I would be the first to rejoice if this particular stream of &amp;quot;wrong questions&amp;quot; were to stop, and we could go back to answering interesting questions. Unfortunately, it doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the moderators believe that my commenting is not welcoming to new users, and that I should cut back on it, then I will certainly do so. If so, I ask them to contact me. Until then, I will probably continue commenting, because I actually think it's the right thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me close by thanking you for bringing the fact that my commenting is off-putting to some to my attention. The feedback is appreciated, and I will try to moderate my behavior. Conversely, I would like to ask you to consider my points in good faith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2021-12-09T19:04:07.707" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6249" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-16T21:49:21.770" Score="5" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to find out how many times I have posted a link to a question? Last month, I wrote a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/551915/247274&quot;&gt;question and self-answer&lt;/a&gt; so that I could link to it when a common misconception arose, and I am curious how many times I have done so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247274" LastActivityDate="2021-12-17T12:25:54.357" Title="Is there a way to find out how many times I have posted a link to a question" Tags="|support|hyperlinks|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6249" CreationDate="2021-12-17T12:25:54.357" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is quite a hassle.  It's a shame SE doesn't have better tools for that—they'd be more useful than some things that time has been spent on...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, you can go through your comments and search &amp;amp; count, but it will be painful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other thing to do is to go to the thread and look at the &amp;quot;Linked&amp;quot; list on the upper right hand.  Those are threads that either &lt;em&gt;are linked from&lt;/em&gt; that page, or that &lt;em&gt;have links to&lt;/em&gt; that page.  You have to navigate to each page and search for comments with your name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2021-12-17T12:25:54.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6252" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-17T07:36:51.457" Score="9" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to use the figure in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/123651/geometric-interpretation-of-multiple-correlation-coefficient-r-and-coefficient&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; showing the geometry of the correlation coefficients.  I am currently writing a book and would like to include this figure.  How do I obtain permission to use this figure and how do I then cite the figure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="344610" OwnerDisplayName="Matt Yedlin" LastActivityDate="2021-12-17T12:51:07.800" Title="Usage permission and citation text for figures on CrossValidated" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6252" CreationDate="2021-12-17T09:15:57.423" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The figure in the post was uploaded on 23 December 2014, so per the StackExchange Terms of Service it is licensed under the terms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA-3.0&lt;/a&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/licensing&quot;&gt;licensing information in Help Centre&lt;/a&gt;).  This license is a creative commons share-alike license which allows you to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, including a commercial purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some requirements in the license: you must give appropriate credit for the figure (a proper citation should accomplish this) and if you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must indicate that you made changes to it and distribute your contributions under the same license as the original figure.  (I would presume that this would only require any alteration to the figure to be licensed in this way, not your whole book; read the details of the license to be sure.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of citation, the style depends on the citation style for images you are using in your book.  Irrespective of style, your citation should include the author's name (or alias if the true name cannot be established) and the URL of the post.  The citation should make it clear that the image was posted on CrossValidated.  This will ensure that both the author and StackExchange are given appropriate credit for the image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173082" OwnerDisplayName="Ben" LastActivityDate="2021-12-17T09:15:57.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6254" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-17T18:40:48.987" Score="4" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed a trend where questions about portfolio weight estimation and optimization tend to either be suggested for transferring over to quant SE, or even closed as off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a few examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/32032/efficient-portfolio-optimization-through-simulation&quot;&gt;Efficient Portfolio Optimization Through Simulation&lt;/a&gt; (note the comments)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/11120/markowitz-portfolio-mean-variance-optimization-in-r&quot;&gt;Markowitz portfolio mean variance optimization in R&lt;/a&gt; (note the first comment)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/224069/alternative-applications-of-portfolio-optimization&quot;&gt;Alternative Applications of Portfolio Optimization&lt;/a&gt; (closed as off-topic)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when one reads the literature - the problems discussed in these topics are of clear statistical nature, involving issues of sample size, uncertainty estimates, and model complexity. Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6408289&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Portfolio of Automated Trading Systems: Complexity and Learning Set Size Issues&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I am just curious - why is it considered to be off topic by many?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18417" LastEditorUserId="18417" LastEditDate="2021-12-17T18:47:46.017" LastActivityDate="2021-12-17T18:47:46.017" Title="Why are questions about &quot;portfolio optimization&quot; considered offtopic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6074" CreationDate="2021-12-19T03:52:59.303" Score="12" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Trim gratuitous content in questions (and make the question clear)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions on CV.SE may contain unnecessary content that distracts from the substance of the question.  This excess content can make it harder to see the question at issue.  Common forms of gratuitous content include preliminary apologies for lack of understanding, thanks for attention to the question, or pleas of urgency (hat-tip to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/users/22047/nick-cox&quot;&gt;Nick Cox&lt;/a&gt; for pointing this out in comments).  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;description of StackExchange&lt;/a&gt; clearly states that &amp;quot;This site is all about getting answers.  It's not a discussion forum.  There's no chit-chat.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Remove apologies and thanks:&lt;/strong&gt; If the question contains any preliminary apology or self-effacement for lack of understanding, or thanks-in-advance for attention or answers, these should generally be removed.  It is not necessary for users to apologise for lack of understanding of statistical material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Remove pleas of urgency or attention:&lt;/strong&gt; Not only is this content gratuitous, but it also solicits special attention to a question.  Such content does not advance the goal of giving a clear question or constructing long-term value for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Remove gratuitous context:&lt;/strong&gt; Sometimes context is useful to understand the substance of a question, but in some cases it is gratuitous.  Care should be taken to distinguish these cases, but if gratuitous context is added, this can often be trimmed or removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Make the question clear and prominent:&lt;/strong&gt; In some cases the question at issue is hidden among other material and it is difficult for the reader to find.  If the question is buried inside large amounts of contextual content, or if the question is only implicit, it can take multiple readings of the question to understand what is being asked.  In such cases it is useful to make the question more prominent and make it explicit.  This can be done by explicitly marking the question at the end of the required context (an example of this technique is shown &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/503814/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't change the substance of the question, or remove a preliminary confusion:&lt;/strong&gt; When trimming gratuitous content from questions, it is important not to change the substance of the question.  This includes ensuring that you do not remove preliminary assertions that are confused or false, since those parts constitute areas where the questioner may need a response that corrects their preliminary misunderstandings.  Care should be taken to determine when gratuitous material can be trimmed without altering the substance of the question.  If in doubt, ping the OP to draw attention to your changes and ask if this still captures the essence of their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bad version:&lt;/strong&gt; Hi everyone.  Sorry if this post doesnt make sense but I'm not a statistics expert and I only did a few simple courses many years ago.  I really need help on this for a project and my boss is putting pressure on me to get it done, so I really need an answer quickly!  I'm doing analysis where x and y are whole numbers and I did linear regression.  All good so far and I got results, but a collegue said you can't use linear regression for whole numbers.  I need to figure out if there is a relationship so then I used correlation.  Correlation is 0.3341 so it confirmed a relationship.  Collegue is still not happy with it and says correlation is also not good for whole numbers.  Ive looked at lots of other posts on regression and I can't figure out what to do when my variables are correlated by they are whole numbers also.  My x is number of days of TV advertising for companies and my y is number of offices for company.  I want to look at relationship with sales revenue maybe and I have another variable for this.  Maybe I need to add this in too but first I am doing this other part. Thanks in advance for helping me!  If I can know how these things affect sales revenue I will make my boss happy!  I'm going to do more statistics courses later to learn this but at the moment I don't know it well, so thanks for attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Good version:&lt;/strong&gt; I am examining advertising and sales for companies.  I have a dataset containing data for companies, with variables for the sales revenue, the number of offices, and the number of days of TV advertising.  I want to know the effect of advertising days on sales revenue.  So far I have fit a linear regression between number of offices and advertising days and I have also computed the correlation between these variables.  However, I have been told that linear regression and correlation are not suitable for whole number variables.  What should I do to determine the effect of the other two variables on sale revenue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173082" LastEditorUserId="173082" LastEditDate="2021-12-19T20:21:15.347" LastActivityDate="2021-12-19T20:21:15.347" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6238" CreationDate="2021-12-20T03:14:47.027" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are familiar with a programming language(Matlab, R, Mathematica, Python) or a mathematical software (Excel/SPSS/Maple), googling [what your want] + [programming language] makes searching results more precise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111861" LastActivityDate="2021-12-20T03:14:47.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6257" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-23T23:25:21.453" Score="0" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made few posts where I was not sure about how to use a specific hypotesis testing on R and my post has got closed but I've seen a lot of post regarding about some error output error and they haven't been closed.So I'd like to know what makes a post gets down due to 'code programming'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="318298" LastActivityDate="2021-12-23T23:25:21.453" Title="Why did my post closed due to code programming?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6258" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-23T23:58:41.523" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to know where on Stack Exchange I should ask about how to use a specific hypothesis test on R and where to ask if my code tests do what I would like to without theoretical foundation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="318298" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2021-12-24T10:17:50.387" LastActivityDate="2021-12-24T10:18:12.880" Title="Where can I ask how to use a specific hypothesis test in R?" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6258" CreationDate="2021-12-24T00:24:47.290" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two components to what you want to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which statistical test is appropriate for your specific problem?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to write code to carry out the desired statistical test?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question (1) is on-topic here, because it is about statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question (2) is off-topic here, because it is solely about writing code. Depending on the nature of the programming problem you face, there are several sites that could be a good fit. You'll need to read the Help Center for each and make a choice about which site is best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2021-12-24T10:18:12.880" LastActivityDate="2021-12-24T10:18:12.880" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6261" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6262" CreationDate="2021-12-27T20:31:53.943" Score="5" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually when CrossValidated marks a question as &amp;quot;active today&amp;quot;, I can see something (edits or answers or bounties) that tells me what changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/208201/predictions-from-poisson-glmm-lme4-lower-compared-to-glm&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; is marked as &amp;quot;active today&amp;quot;, but I don't see why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/371280/what-makes-a-question-active&quot;&gt;This meta SO question&lt;/a&gt; provides the list of 'bumping' actions appended below, but none of them seem to apply here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Am I missing something obvious?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are the rules for activity different on CV (and if so how)?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In any case, is there a way for me to see/figure out what changed?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I know that's more than one question, but they're closely related ...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following activities will cause a question to be bumped:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Addition of an answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Editing the question or any of its answers (even if the answer is deleted) (with some exceptions; see Exceptions for edits bumping posts below)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A suggested edit gets approved [...]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Editing duplicates list of the question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Starting a new bounty (not awarding of an existing bounty, see below)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Successful reopening (if the question was closed previously)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Community user will bump non-negatively scored, open questions every hour that have at least one answer scoring 0 and none scoring more than that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2126" LastActivityDate="2021-12-27T20:43:51.543" Title="What is 'active' about this question?" Tags="|support|recent-activity|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6261" CreationDate="2021-12-27T20:43:51.543" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Community Bot&amp;quot; commented&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question has answers that may be good or bad; the system has marked it active so that they can be reviewed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evidently this is the kind of activity referenced in the last quoted bullet of your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the third time this automated &amp;quot;bump&amp;quot; has been applied, doing so roughly at eight-month intervals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2021-12-27T20:43:51.543" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5759" CreationDate="2021-12-30T16:38:00.393" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I might take it a step further and prevent a question from being posted if it only involves software tags. While it might not be possible for Stack Exchange to prevent a question from being posted if it only contains certain tags, the idea appeals to me for the possibility to alert posters that the question is likely off-topic. Consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/558779/looping-over-pandas-data-frame-cells-for-counting-values&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; from today, which only has the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pandas&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pandas&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pandas&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came to Meta to post something like this question when I saw that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pandas&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pandas&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pandas&lt;/a&gt;-only question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247274" LastActivityDate="2021-12-30T16:38:00.393" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6266" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6267" CreationDate="2022-01-04T19:38:20.920" Score="13" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it preferable to have equations in LaTeX format instead of images, and if so, is it a desideratum to convert images to LaTeX when possible? I have been going through some older questions and converting equation images to LaTeX, but realized I should probably get a consensus on whether this is desired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29617" LastActivityDate="2022-01-06T10:51:17.830" Title="Is having equations in LaTeX preferable to images and if so, is it desireable to convert them in others' questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6266" CreationDate="2022-01-04T19:47:26.363" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;LaTeX can be read by screen-reader software used by people with impaired vision, &amp;amp; is often more legible in any case. It can also be searched, copied, &amp;amp; modifed. So it's a good thing you're doing, but make sure the posts are worth it—there'd be no point bumping a dozen five-year-old posts with no up-votes or answers to the site's front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2022-01-06T10:51:17.830" LastActivityDate="2022-01-06T10:51:17.830" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6268" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-07T14:09:42.023" Score="7" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;From time to time when reviewing questions I stumble upon posts that are terribly formatted. Here is a good recent example (note the screenshot with almost invisible text): &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/559542/transformation-retransformation-von-estimates&quot;&gt;transformation retransformation von Estimates&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Poorly formatted questions usually use screenshots where text would be better, or they just paste some formulas or tables without formatting, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is - what are reviewers expected to do in such situations? Should I downvote, leave a comment about formatting, vote to close, or try to transcribe the text from the screenshot (some nice souls do this, but ...)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18417" LastEditorUserId="18417" LastEditDate="2022-01-07T15:03:15.340" LastActivityDate="2022-01-08T12:38:24.400" Title="How should reviewers handle questions with awful formatting?" Tags="|discussion|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2022-01-09T08:52:46.870" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6268" CreationDate="2022-01-07T18:10:38.003" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it depends on how egregious the poor formatting is. In this particular case, I would probably leave a comment to the OP asking them to first paste the output into a text editor and then copy-paste that into a code block instead of the image, for the reasons you describe. If a reasonable amount of time passes without an update, I personally would leave this one, as despite being poor, I think it's readable, but it all depends on how bad the formatting is in the eyes of the reviewer. For example, someone pasting as text the result of a PDF should be closed/deleted pretty much right away as it is not salvageable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29617" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2022-01-08T12:38:24.400" LastActivityDate="2022-01-08T12:38:24.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6270" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-10T17:20:00.893" Score="18" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just finished self-studying my way through &lt;em&gt;Mathematical Statistics with Applications, 5th Ed.,&lt;/em&gt; by Wackerly, Mendenhall, and Scheaffer. I read every word, and solved every problem (well over 1k). I couldn't possibly have done it without all your help here on Stats.SE. Especially big shout-out to whuber and Spätzle. Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76484" LastActivityDate="2022-01-10T17:20:00.893" Title="Big Thank You for All Your Help!" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6271" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-12T14:47:14.750" Score="7" ViewCount="84" Body="&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22year+in+moderation%22+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't eliminate the need for having &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/11/21/our-theory-of-moderation-re-visited/&quot;&gt;moderators&lt;/a&gt; altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as we say goodbye to 2021, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KZntT.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;exciting&lt;/em&gt; stats&lt;/a&gt;. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Cross Validated over the past 12 months:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Action&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Moderators&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Community¹&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users suspended²&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;15&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;47&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users destroyed³&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;68&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users deleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;8&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users contacted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;45&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;User suspensions lifted early&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,263&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,171&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;614&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;812&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;150&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;828&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;184&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,276&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: First questions queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;113&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4,395&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;114&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;8,974&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: First answers queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;24&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;952&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,906&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,496&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tags merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;88&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms proposed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;78&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms created&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;81&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag highlight language set&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;7&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Revisions redacted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;8&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions reopened&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;482&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;28&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions protected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;75&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;35&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions migrated&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;201&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;18&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;41&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions flagged⁵&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;118&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,447&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions closed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;6,559&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;697&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Question flags handled⁵&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,075&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;441&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts unlocked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;59&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;144&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;474&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts locked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;78&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;397&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts deleted⁶&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,371&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;16,336&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts bumped&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;8,249&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Escalations to the Community Manager team&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;12&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;66&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,150&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;698&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments deleted⁷&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,005&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;6,630&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comment flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,761&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;87&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Bounties canceled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;10&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answers flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;127&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,718&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answer flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,728&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;117&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;All comments on a post moved to chat&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;24&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Footnotes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &amp;quot;Community&amp;quot; here refers both to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;the membership of Cross Validated&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;diamonds next to their names&lt;/a&gt;, and to the automated systems otherwise known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/-1&quot;&gt;user #-1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;³ A &amp;quot;destroyed&amp;quot; user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/88994/what-is-the-difference-between-a-deleted-user-and-a-destroyed-user&quot;&gt;Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁵ Includes close flags (but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; close or reopen votes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Further reading:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6064/2020-a-year-in-moderation&quot;&gt;2020: a year in moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can also check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/search?q=title%3A%222021%3A+a+year+in+moderation%22&quot;&gt;this report on other sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or peruse &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/374784/208518&quot;&gt;detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wishing everyone a happy 2022! ^_^&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72321" LastActivityDate="2022-01-12T14:47:14.750" Title="2021: a year in moderation" Tags="|discussion|moderation|statistics|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6272" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-17T08:39:30.840" Score="-3" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Created just now &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/probability-limit-theorems&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;probability-limit-theorems&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;probability-limit-theorems&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just copied from here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/tags/probability-limit-theorems/info&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/tags/probability-limit-theorems/info&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44339" LastActivityDate="2022-01-18T13:17:10.733" Title="New tag [tag:probability-limit-theorems]" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6272" CreationDate="2022-01-17T14:35:42.370" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;At an absolute minimum, it needs a short and long description, just as every other tag does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastActivityDate="2022-01-17T14:35:42.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3175" CreationDate="2022-01-17T16:25:41.170" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Please check my homework&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions post a routine exercise, give (often in great detail) an answer (that often is correct) and ask&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my answer correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this problematic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We are not a homework-checking site.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question effectively has been asked and answered.  What is any answer supposed to add?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In most cases, the question is a duplicate of another post, anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How to improve such a question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably, if you are posting such a question you have some doubt about what you are doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Isolate the step&lt;/strong&gt; in your solution at which you first experience a concern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Show us your work&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;through that step.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Show us what steps you have taken to &lt;strong&gt;check your work&lt;/strong&gt; up to this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Describe the research&lt;/strong&gt; you did to find answers here on CV (and elsewhere).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Express your concern:&lt;/strong&gt; what is it that causes you to think you might not be correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point you likely have a definite, constructive, answerable question--and the responses you get will be more helpful to you than a simple &amp;quot;yes, you got the right answer.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2022-01-17T16:25:41.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6272" CreationDate="2022-01-18T13:10:36.030" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Relevant tags currently in use include &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/asymptotics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;asymptotics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;asymptotics&lt;/a&gt; (701 questions, broader than just limit theorems), &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/convergence&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;convergence&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;convergence&lt;/a&gt; (990 questions, also applicable to solutions found by iterative algorithms), &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/central-limit-theorem&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;central-limit-theorem&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;central-limit-theorem&lt;/a&gt; (705 questions, concerning a particular limit theorem of especial fame), &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/law-of-large-numbers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;law-of-large-numbers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;law-of-large-numbers&lt;/a&gt; (135 questions, ditto). There's a &lt;em&gt;prima facie&lt;/em&gt; case for reorganization, but it's not evident that simply throwing &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/probability-limit-theorems&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;probability-limit-theorems&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;probability-limit-theorems&lt;/a&gt; into the mix will help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2022-01-18T13:17:10.733" LastActivityDate="2022-01-18T13:17:10.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6277" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-26T03:51:44.203" Score="3" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following question has some formatting issues that I wanted to correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/561879/247274&quot;&gt;Econometrics problem with regression&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot edit it, even though I can edit other questions (not just my own).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What’s going on? All I can think is that I missed&#xA;a rule that only diamond mods can edit posts by brand new members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the question got closed, I could edit it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247274" LastEditorUserId="247274" LastEditDate="2022-01-26T04:04:04.233" LastActivityDate="2022-01-26T04:04:04.233" Title="Why can’t I edit this post?" Tags="|bug|editing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2022-01-26T16:24:08.490" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3175" CreationDate="2022-01-28T17:30:55.507" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;What is wrong with my code?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am working on a statistical problem.  &lt;em&gt;Here are pages and pages of the code I wrote&lt;/em&gt; (followed by those pages).  What am I doing wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why this is problematic&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It requires everyone to read through your code&lt;/strong&gt; just to understand the problem.  Did you comment it, by the way?  Did you even tell us what language it is in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Your code evidently doesn't do what you want.&lt;/strong&gt;  Perforce it does not convey what you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; want.  &lt;em&gt;You need to state your question in (English) words.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The question reads like it's asking for coding help:&lt;/strong&gt; it belongs on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example&quot;&gt;StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt;, not here on CV.  But it likely won't be acceptable there, either: see their help and guidelines for asking good questions.  Look especially for information about constructing a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;minimal reproducible example.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  This is why we cannot migrate the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How you can improve the question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Describe your problem in words&lt;/strong&gt; (perhaps supplemented with commonly understood mathematical symbols).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Make it clear that you are not asking for programming help or debugging:&lt;/strong&gt; describe the &lt;em&gt;statistical&lt;/em&gt; issue where you need help or better understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Strip any code to its bare essentials.&lt;/strong&gt;  Make it reproducible, small, and clear.  State what you expect (or hope) it to do.  Include (small) inputs we can use to reproduce the problem.  Display relevant output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2022-01-28T17:30:55.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6279" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-30T16:26:55.617" Score="20" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some questions have answers which are obsolete, or outdated. One prominent example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/181/how-to-choose-the-number-of-hidden-layers-and-nodes-in-a-feedforward-neural-netw?answertab=active#tab-top&quot;&gt;How to choose the number of hidden layers and nodes in a feedforward neural network?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;This question has an answer with an incredible (for stats.SE) 605 upvotes. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=answers%3A1&quot;&gt;The question is among one of the most up-voted questions on our site.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the time that this question was asked (2010), was just before neural networks had their recent renaissance. It would not be until 2012 that the AlexNet paper (Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey E. Hinton, &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://papers.nips.cc/paper/4824-imagenet-classification-with-deep-convolutional-neural-networks.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;) used CNNs for the ImageNet task and &lt;a href=&quot;https://qz.com/1034972/the-data-that-changed-the-direction-of-ai-research-and-possibly-the-world/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;vastly out-performed their competitors&lt;/a&gt;, sparking a resurgence of interest in neural networks generally, convolutional neural networks specifically, and the technique of multi-layered networks along with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the current state of the art has advanced well beyond the suggestions in most of the answers to this question. The question itself, I believe, is implicitly asking about simple feed-forward neural networks because CNNs, RNNs, residual networks and other exotic architectures had not yet experienced this explosion in attention. Related neural network techniques, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/word2vec&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;word2vec&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;word2vec&lt;/a&gt;, hadn't even been invented yet. (Mikolov et al published in 2013.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of the deficiencies in the answers to this question, and perhaps the limitations of the question itself (due to its place in time), what, if anything, should be done to direct readers to more recent, and more relevant, answers to the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are two options that have occurred to me. There are probably more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One option is to simply use the SE machinery as it is to &lt;strong&gt;write a new answer&lt;/strong&gt; and hope that intrepid readers will make it all the way down to the bottom of the list to find recent information. Or that they'll sort by &lt;em&gt;recent&lt;/em&gt;... and scroll past the Accepted answer pinned to the top.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ask a new question which is deliberately distinct&lt;/strong&gt;. &amp;quot;How do I choose the right number of layers and neurons in light of the many recent advancements in neural network architectures since 2011?&amp;quot; This question, lacking the upvotes and visibility that comes from 10ish years of accumulated hyperlinks, might be harder to find but would report more recent information. This question, because it deliberately asks about what's changed in the intervening time, cannot be closed as a duplicate of the older question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2022-03-18T17:27:58.957" LastActivityDate="2022-04-04T15:08:17.130" Title="What to do about obsolete, or out-of-date questions, specifically this one about neural networks?" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|old-posts|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6279" CreationDate="2022-01-30T23:32:21.490" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Eventually the activity of making new questions and answers decreases (a lot of questions have simply already been asked, some even several times) and the activity should be replaced by curating the answers and questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Community Wiki&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be done in a Wikipedia style. Instead of many multiple questions and answers, which creates a chaotic database where only a layer of votes creates an overview, we could also strive for having less posts, which are edited by multiple people instead of each writing their own separate two cents of contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a bit confusing on the platform here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand there is an individualistic style of writing posts where individuals each write their own posts and the contributions are being mixed in some sort of ranking of posts by means of votes. Editing by others is only done to a limited extent. There is some sort of ownership of the post because votes are being 'collected' by the person that wrote the original post. Not only are the posts being ranked but also the people that write those posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand there is in principle no objection to editing another person's post. Anybody can edit a question and/or answer and you do not even need an account for this. In some cases this is explicitly promoted by turning posts into wikis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly we could turn older posts with many votes into community wikis. The voting, to measure popularity, has become deprecated for such questions and answers. Improvements should be made to the existing questions and answers, rather than adding a new answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A major problem with this approach is that many old posts are of high quality and moving towards a community style of answers may actually reduce the overall quality. In addition it will remove the individual style of answers and turn it into &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;writing-by-committee&lt;/a&gt; with little variation. Stackexchange is not a Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2022-01-31T17:15:49.330" LastActivityDate="2022-01-31T17:15:49.330" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6279" CreationDate="2022-01-30T23:35:15.353" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Canonical questions and answers&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question allows it, then a new question can be made and a reference can be added to the old question to point to the new question. In the case of questions that make no sense at all because of developments in technology they could (and maybe should) be locked (and left undeleted for historical reasons).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastActivityDate="2022-01-30T23:35:15.353" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6283" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6284" CreationDate="2022-02-04T01:40:24.610" Score="7" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to ask a question on CrossValidated about statistics reporting, rather than statistical analysis itself. The question is: Is it necessary to report on the step-by-step results from a model-building process, or is it Ok to just describe the methods behind the best fit model selection process, and then report the actual results solely on the best fit models themselves? In this case, I am building mixed effects growth curve models. I am fairly confident that there may be some element of opinion for an answer to this sort of question, and there is certainly likely to be variation across field. I am within the field of health / psychology / medicine / social science, but I would welcome insight from any field because I have been researching this topic and have found it very challenging to hone in on an answer. Is this a sort of question that is appropriate for me to ask here? Do you have any feedback about what would make it most appropriate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="122394" LastEditorUserId="44269" LastEditDate="2022-02-15T23:10:57.010" LastActivityDate="2022-02-15T23:10:57.010" Title="Is this question appropriate - Is it necessary to report on the step-by-step results from a model-building process?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6283" CreationDate="2022-02-04T08:58:49.080" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;That &lt;em&gt;kind&lt;/em&gt; of question's fine, but this one appears to solicit answers so generic as to be platitudinous. Better to describe the context, your model selection process, the purpose &amp;amp; intended audience of your report, &amp;amp; you'll likely get more useful answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2022-02-04T08:58:49.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6286" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-04T18:29:51.077" Score="4" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;A moderator edited one of my answers, but just to add indent the &lt;em&gt;whole&lt;/em&gt; thing. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/22574/5503&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/22574/5503&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be a pointless edit: if that kind of indent is desirable site-policy then it should be done in the site CSS?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was going to revert the edit, but thought better to ask here if I'm missing some new guideline, before I get into a petty edit war :-).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5503" LastEditorUserId="5503" LastEditDate="2022-02-05T08:46:49.303" LastActivityDate="2022-02-06T14:51:45.300" Title="Indenting code snippets?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6286" CreationDate="2022-02-05T08:46:32.420" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ah, I see! It was the addition of surrounding it with triple backticks that was the edit, but that doesn't show on the default side-by-side edit view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I change to &amp;quot;Side-by-side markdown&amp;quot; I can see the actual edits that were made, and everything makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5503" LastEditorUserId="5503" LastEditDate="2022-02-06T14:51:45.300" LastActivityDate="2022-02-06T14:51:45.300" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5325" CreationDate="2022-02-15T07:49:17.887" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So what?&lt;/strong&gt; My dear friends, are we perhaps worrying about a statistic without establishing that it has any particular meaning? One should be aware that we can often satisfy an OP with comments, and so the question becomes not if something has a formal answer that wouldn't really be an answer, but whether the OP got what was needed from the asking. So, one appropriate thing to look at may be total responses, because not every response, even the definitive ones, are &amp;quot;answers.&amp;quot; Now there are multiple reasons for commenting rather than sticking out one's neck with an answer that may be discussed to death, downvoted on for all the worst reasons, picked apart mercilessly despite the irrelevance to the OP of the endless discussion, when the whole idea was to give some preliminary guidance to the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a different site, someone actually answered my question in a comment, which was nice, I then requested that that very highly ranked person convert that into an answer so that I can accept  and upvote it. That person thanked me, did as requested and I did what I said I would. I found the thank-you to be most gratifying, that a high reputation person behaved in a genteel fashion made my day. Think about the mechanics of that for a moment and then perhaps consider which statistic actually means something. I think please and thank-you matters a lot. It sometimes is so difficult to get an answer out, and explain it, with such drawn out quibbles about various and sundry, and then have it deleted by people who just don't get where I am trying to go, and with emotions raging, no less, that the process is too often not wholesome. Perhaps we should give some thought to people trying to change answers to get the point across more frequently, like coauthors usually do, rather than competing for chits: &amp;quot;Mine--all mine---my precious.&amp;quot; If we could somehow encourage more of that we would all feel better about actually answering, I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="99274" LastEditDate="2022-02-15T16:38:38.717" LastActivityDate="2022-02-15T16:38:38.717" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6290" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6295" CreationDate="2022-02-20T23:45:06.483" Score="14" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/random&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;random&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;random&lt;/a&gt; (without wiki) seems to be used for a lot of different things, like random factors, random variables, ... Probably a lot should be retagged, and the rest changed (by a synonym) to tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/randomness&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;randomness&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;randomness&lt;/a&gt;. Opinions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the earlier &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4614/ambiguous-randomization-tag-and-friends&quot;&gt;Ambiguous [randomization] tag and friends&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastActivityDate="2022-03-08T12:39:35.937" Title="Tag *random* very non-specific" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-reorganization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1200" CreationDate="2022-02-21T01:16:48.883" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feature-scaling&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;feature-scaling&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;feature-scaling&lt;/a&gt;  (120 posts, no wiki) must be synonymous to either &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/normalization&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;normalization&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;normalization&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/standardization&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;standardization&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;standardization&lt;/a&gt;  (both with wikis), or both ... ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastActivityDate="2022-02-21T01:16:48.883" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6293" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-27T15:05:43.860" Score="11" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;When we close questions that appear to be about programming, a message appears that links to Open Data or to a CV Meta post about software support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not mentioning Stack Overflow seems like a gigantic oversight. Why don’t we mention Stack Overflow in that closure message?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247274" LastActivityDate="2022-02-28T20:25:54.417" Title="Why does the “programming” closure message not mention Stack Overflow?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|software|stackoverflow|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6293" CreationDate="2022-02-27T16:05:26.193" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a good &amp;amp; reasonable question to ask because the observed behavior is counter-intuitive, and it gives occasion to lay out some of the subtle practices around closure and migration which, by their nature, can't be exposed in a radio button-style user interface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Omitting Stack Overflow from the closure reason text is a &lt;strong&gt;deliberate choice&lt;/strong&gt;, not an oversight. Stack Overflow has a number of requirements for a good, on-topic question, and almost all of the programming questions we see here are deficient in that regard. Here is a summary from Stack Overflow's help center: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The default closure reasons are intended to address the most common closure reasons. We don’t mention Stack Overflow because the vast majority of posts closed as programming questions would not be a good fit on Stack Overflow. Recommending users go to a different site means that, in most cases, these users will simply copy/paste a poor question to the other site; then the question is closed. This doesn't help anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, the better alternative is for users to learn on their own how to determine which site is a good fit for their questions, as well as the standards for asking on their chosen sites. This is what the Help Centers are for, and why new users of a site are prompted to take the Tour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; want to recommend an alternative site, you can do so using a custom closure reason, but there are some risks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question may not be on-topic at the destination site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question may not fit the quality, reproducibility, or other standards on the destination site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question actually has statistical content, but that content is buried under a pile of code, distracting content, or poor explanation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users may be confused because &lt;em&gt;to their understanding&lt;/em&gt; the question is about statistics, but the comment leads them to believe that their statistics question is not on-topic on Cross Validated. This is confusing, at best. For example, &amp;quot;I'm using Keras! You have a Keras tag! Why is a machine learning question about Keras off-topic?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's challenging to know all of the details of all of the various SE sites and their various scopes and practices. As an example, I was surprised when I first learned that quant.SE only considers questions from people who are either (1) currently employed in quantitative finance or (2) pursuing graduate study in quantitative finance. In other words, hobbyists and other laypersons are not welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's perfectly fine to not know where a question can go, if anywhere. Not every question has a home where it is on-topic for some Stack Exchange site; the Stack Exchange Q&amp;amp;A model is oriented to answering only certain kinds of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you truly feel a question should be moved to a different site, &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; you are confident that it would be on-topic and well-received there, use the migration option instead. But if you're not sure whether the question is a good fit for the destination, or the question is poor in quality overall, then it's best to simply close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A long-standing principle of migrations is “Don’t migrate crap.” &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/91446/320588&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/91446/320588&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2022-02-28T20:25:54.417" LastActivityDate="2022-02-28T20:25:54.417" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6290" CreationDate="2022-03-08T12:39:35.937" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For now, there are no more &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/random&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;random&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;random&lt;/a&gt; posts left.  For the future, we need to see into blacklisting ... as mentioned in a comment by @Stephan Kolassa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastActivityDate="2022-03-08T12:39:35.937" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6296" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6339" CreationDate="2022-03-08T13:18:11.647" Score="22" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;At present, the reputation threshold for creating new tags is at 300, making this accessible for relatively new and inexperienced users. A lot of new tags created now (2022) are unnecessary, or simply misspellings or new names for existing tags. One of the last ones I nuked was &lt;em&gt;stoch&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A low threshold was necessary when the site was young, to populate the tags! but those days seem past. Some sites have increased the threshold, like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Math SE (1000)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;SO (1500)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while some others keep it at 300 (Tex/LaTeX, MathOverflow).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose we ask SE to increase the threshold to 1500.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="202450" LastEditDate="2022-06-14T21:36:50.217" LastActivityDate="2022-06-17T00:50:26.590" Title="Increasing reputation needed for creating tags?" Tags="|feature-request|status-completed|tags|reputation|privileges|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6296" CreationDate="2022-03-10T12:56:29.617" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think us going towards a higher threshold is reasonable. In a way, CV.SE is a mature site/community anyway so the &amp;quot;obvious&amp;quot; tags are by and large covered. Bringing our threshold in line with Math.SE that already uses 1000 is most likely adequate. The even higher threshold using SO might be motivated by other parts too (e.g. much larger user base).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11852" LastActivityDate="2022-03-10T12:56:29.617" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6279" CreationDate="2022-03-22T14:41:45.700" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally I prefer your option 1 relying on existing SE machinery.  As a user in search of any SE answer, you should look at both the date of the question and answer.  A 10 year old question/answer may be out of date, so the onus is on the user to find the answer that is most relevant.  A newer answer that is better/more relevant can make its way toward the top and positive comments on the quality of the new answer can guide users to its accuracy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've responded to old popular questions that had high-rated original accepted answers, and I've seen my new answer slowly march its way toward the top over years.  The new/better answer may never be accepted ('tis the case with all good answers), but a combination of submission dates, votes, and comments should be sufficient to guide users to the most timely answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also don't have an issue with your solution 2, so long as sufficient time has passed between original question and new question (AT LEAST 5 years perhaps?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36381" LastActivityDate="2022-03-22T14:41:45.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6300" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-28T07:47:44.613" Score="10" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently someone posted a few questions that contain an extract of what appears to health-related data: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/569235/237901&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/569347/237901&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and all their questions so far actually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's only 10 data points but it seems to come from a medical database/study and looks like &amp;quot;real data&amp;quot;. It seems wrong to dump such sensitive personal information online, even it is just for a handful of people. And the questions could have been easily asked with simulated/fake data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should questions that seem to contain sensitive data be flagged? Should there be guidelines that say &amp;quot;Don't use sensitive data for your reproducible examples&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is already part of the guidelines, it's not included in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;How do I ask a good question?&lt;/a&gt; wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="237901" LastActivityDate="2022-04-06T17:13:45.510" Title="Using personal data for reproducible examples" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6300" CreationDate="2022-04-04T20:08:24.543" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've generally assumed that all user-posted questions and answers (including example data) were submitted under the cc-by-sa license as indicated in the page's footer. If the data legally can't be posted under that license I think it should be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6378" LastActivityDate="2022-04-04T20:08:24.543" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6300" CreationDate="2022-04-06T17:13:45.510" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We all have a duty to scan for questions displaying personal and identifying information and &lt;strong&gt;flag them for deletion&lt;/strong&gt;. Even editing the question to remove data values leaves the edit history containing the data. I don't think the datasets in OP's question meet these criteria exactly, but I defer to others...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we allow posters to violate likely compliance laws from their institution, then we denigrate the credibility of our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two questions in OP's example have &amp;quot;reproducible datasets&amp;quot; that suspiciously contain &amp;quot;age&amp;quot; as a decimal. If one knows when the data snapshot was performed, one can backtransform &amp;quot;age&amp;quot; into a birthdate which is identifying. Age can also be identifying when it gets too old, say over 80 or 90, that when combined with another &amp;quot;innocuous&amp;quot; variable like sex and race, can also identify individuals in some cases. Different institutions have different requirements, no set of laws is complete nor completely required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, HIPAA has a defined list of variables that are considered personal and identifying:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hipaajournal.com/what-is-considered-protected-health-information-under-hipaa/#:%7E:text=Under%20HIPAA%2C%20protected%20health%20information,provision%20of%20healthcare%2C%20payment%20for&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.hipaajournal.com/what-is-considered-protected-health-information-under-hipaa/#:~:text=Under%20HIPAA%2C%20protected%20health%20information,provision%20of%20healthcare%2C%20payment%20for&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;This is a partial list, I can identify someone for instance, with variables such as &amp;quot;OwnsASpaceFlightCompany&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;OwnsAnElectricCarEnterprise&amp;quot;. In the words of Mad Eye Mooney, &amp;quot;Constant Vigilance!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastActivityDate="2022-04-06T17:13:45.510" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6304" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-04-07T10:24:39.770" Score="31" ViewCount="678" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some time ago I decided to employ a policy for upvoting the questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When I answer the question, it means that it was worth answering, so I automatically upvote it. There are some minor exceptions when there are issues with the question or it doesn't show much research from OP, but I still decide to answer with no +1, but those are rare.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I upvote all the questions by new users if they follow some minimum quality standards.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? It encourages participation. It also promotes visibility for the question (both psychologically &amp;quot;others voted for it&amp;quot; and in terms of the recommender system behind it). The +1's also come with moderation privileges on the site, so we have more people that vote, edit, create tags, etc, so the site works better as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just wanted to share it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="35989" LastEditDate="2022-04-08T05:37:22.967" LastActivityDate="2022-04-08T05:37:22.967" Title="My upvoting policy" Tags="|discussion|votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6304" CreationDate="2022-04-07T12:53:26.607" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I have been using a similar policy since our site was in beta.&lt;/strong&gt;  (I might have stricter minimum quality standards, though ;-), because we are mature enough that many new questions can be answered with just a little research.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It especially bothers me when I see an answered question with no upvotes,&lt;/strong&gt; because it means the respondents are neglecting to vote for questions that nevertheless were good enough to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bear in mind that we are a kind of &lt;em&gt;micro-economy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in which reputation is the currency.  Voting is like printing money: it's essentially free and creates the supply needed to reward people with bounties and visibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2022-04-07T18:46:44.927" LastActivityDate="2022-04-07T18:46:44.927" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6308" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6309" CreationDate="2022-04-16T18:31:54.390" Score="12" ViewCount="295" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's very common for users to want to find &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/references&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;references&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;references&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;references-container&quot;&gt;references&lt;/a&gt; about a specific topic in machine learning, statistics, or probability. Often, these questions start from a place where the user &lt;em&gt;doesn't know what they want to know&lt;/em&gt;, so it is challenging to give a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A vague question - a question with little context or explanation of what kind of information is sought - is very likely to be closed as &amp;quot;Needs details or clarity.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A question that asks about a broad or general topic (e.g. &amp;quot;computer vision&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;machine learning&amp;quot;) is likely a duplicate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how should a user who does not know what they want to know about ask for references (books, articles, tutorials, websites) about an area with which they are unfamiliar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2022-12-22T12:56:05.033" LastActivityDate="2022-12-28T11:27:20.947" Title="How to ask a good [references] question?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6308" CreationDate="2022-04-16T18:31:54.390" Score="15" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Search&lt;/strong&gt;. The first thing to do when asking any question, but especially a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/references&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;references&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;references&lt;/a&gt; question, is to do a site search. At this point, the site has a robust collection of questions providing references for a rich variety of topics. A comprehensive outline of how to search the site can be found in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5549/faq-best-practices-for-searching-cv&quot;&gt;FAQ: Best Practices for Searching CV&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Specificity&lt;/strong&gt;. If you've done a search and have not found anything that is specific to what you want to know, then the next step is to articulate what makes your question distinct from similar reference requests you've already reviewed (if there are any relevant questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you're asking about a specific aspect of a topic, please clearly state what that is. For example, if you're asking for references about &amp;quot;computer vision&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;neural networks&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;machine learning&amp;quot; (without elaboration), then it's very likely to be closed as a duplicate of existing threads. But a question &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; to a certain aspect of a topic may not be a duplicate, especially if you can be explicit about what aspect is not covered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you're looking for &amp;quot;more recent&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;more current&amp;quot; literature on a specific topic, then you're actually hot on the trail of finding what you need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you found a thread containing &lt;em&gt;relevant but older&lt;/em&gt; references in (1), then check whether the authors have published a newer edition. It often happens that authors will write a high-quality book and then revise and expand it at a later date &lt;em&gt;for precisely the same reasons that you want a more recent text&lt;/em&gt;. The authors are acutely aware that there's more to know about their topic, so they've obligingly expanded and updated their text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Even if a newer edition of an older reference doesn't exist, it's easy to find books and texts published after a certain date. For example, Amazon has an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.com/advanced-search/books&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;advanced book search&lt;/a&gt; that allows users to specify subject matter, keywords, and publication date (among other fields). Carefully using these filters can turn up a promising crop of books published in the past several years. Reading over the tables of contents gives overview of their contents. &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Scholar&lt;/a&gt; also has date filters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the older literature doesn't address your question and there are no updated texts, then you need to &lt;strong&gt;be specific about what you want to learn from a newer text.&lt;/strong&gt; Other than the publication date, what distinguishes a more recent resource from an older one? Why is recency important, and how does recency relate to what you want to know about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Literature Review&lt;/strong&gt;. If you can answer the questions in (2), then you have all the material you need to write a good question. On the other hand, if find yourself thinking &amp;quot;But I don't know what I don't know!&amp;quot; or if you don't know how to answer (2.1) or (2.2), then you need to do a literature review to understand what topics exist. I've found that the best way to do this is to do a &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Scholar&lt;/a&gt; search for &amp;quot;review&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;survey&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;overview&amp;quot; articles. Google Scholar has a special filter for review article. Also, Google Scholar &lt;a href=&quot;https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;supports the usual Google search syntax&lt;/a&gt;, so you can do things like exact phrase matching, use boolean operators, and so on. Additionally, Google Scholar lets you filter results by publication date, so you can focus on recent articles. Finally, Google Scholar also lets you search within the resources that cite an article, which can be helpful if you want to know about what people have written about a topic since the publication of the document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finding good references on a topic is an iterative process. Once you've reached (3), you should be able to identify the key terms that you want to know more about. Now you can return to (1) and search CV for these topics, to find anything that wasn't turned up the first time around. If you've done (1) and not found what you need, then you can proceed to (2) and write a &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; question that is &lt;em&gt;explicit&lt;/em&gt; about what you what to know about and explains why any similar threads are not responsive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2022-05-06T15:04:03.677" LastActivityDate="2022-05-06T15:04:03.677" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6310" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6311" CreationDate="2022-04-17T15:18:55.710" Score="6" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many of my posts which have links to blog articles such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://fharrell.com/post/po&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://fharrell.com/post/po&lt;/a&gt; are having the URLs systematically changed to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fharrell.com/p/blog-page.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.fharrell.com/p/blog-page.html&lt;/a&gt; which is not even a valid page.  Help appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2022-04-19T17:37:25.110" Title="System is systematically changing URLs in many of my posts" Tags="|support|bug|hyperlinks|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6310" CreationDate="2022-04-19T10:54:18.570" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Web archive&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These links seem to have been in place at least since October 2020, at least one and a half year ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can see this in the following archived webpage which contains the link &lt;code&gt;http://www.fharrell.com/p/blog-page.html&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20201020171335/https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/266670/how-often-should-a-statistical-model-lets-say-logistic-regression-be-evaluated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://web.archive.org/web/20201020171335/https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/266670/how-often-should-a-statistical-model-lets-say-logistic-regression-be-evaluated&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Stackexchange dump&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to dig further by using the database dump from stack exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems very unlikely that the system can change the body text without leaving a trace in the post history. That history can already be viewed via the website and there is no trace in the history like user 'community' editing some link or style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, if there would be such a change that did not show up in the post history then it should be still possible to see it in the database dumps. Because I have currently no access to my laptop, I can not perform that search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Potential explanation&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The web address ending with &lt;code&gt;/p/blog-page.html&lt;/code&gt; is not so strange. It might stem from the blogspot webpage: &lt;a href=&quot;https://feharrell.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://feharrell.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be possible that you wrongly combined two url's. This might explain why, as Whuber mentioned in the comments, only posts from 2017 have the error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Other occurances (and potential explanation 2)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link also occurs in comments&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/287362/analysis-of-variance-for-binary-data#comment549971_287363&quot;&gt;Analysis of variance for binary data&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some intuitive and simple approaches are discussed in BBR Chapter 16 - see link at fharrell.com/p/blog-page.html&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And on twitter&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mobile.twitter.com/5_utr/status/1497980771432386563&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://mobile.twitter.com/5_utr/status/1497980771432386563&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clinical trialists: please quit computing change from baseline. See BBR Chapter 14: &lt;a href=&quot;http://fharrell.com/p/blog-page.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://fharrell.com/p/blog-page.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On twitter it seems that also others have linked to the broken links:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NmAH5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NmAH5.png&quot; alt=&quot;search on twitter&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't search this easily because I don't have a Twitter account and that makes Twitter evil towards me when I try to search it's pages. But anyway, those references might indicate that possibly you were using your website in a different mode with different links around 2017.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes indeed, the page &lt;code&gt;https://www.fharrell.com/p/blog-page.html&lt;/code&gt; used to exist back in 2017. Or at least, the internet archive seems to agree with me. This page can be found in the archives&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On 27 December 2017 it looked like this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20171227182433/http://www.fharrell.com/p/blog-page.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://web.archive.org/web/20171227182433/http://www.fharrell.com/p/blog-page.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On 18 January 2018 it was a 'page does not exist' webpage: &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20180118062901/http://www.fharrell.com/p/blog-page.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://web.archive.org/web/20180118062901/http://www.fharrell.com/p/blog-page.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2022-04-19T17:37:25.110" LastActivityDate="2022-04-19T17:37:25.110" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2468" CreationDate="2022-04-21T14:51:10.453" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Answers&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Link-only answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the site. At present this is more of a comment&#xA;than an answer. You could edit to expand it, perhaps by giving a&#xA;summary of the information at the link, or we can&#xA;convert it into a comment for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Welcome to the site. At present this is more of a comment &#xA;than an answer. You could [edit] to expand it, perhaps by giving a &#xA;summary of the information at the link, or we can &#xA;convert it into a comment for you.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the site. We are trying to build a permanent repository of high-quality statistical information in the form of questions &amp;amp; answers. Thus, we're wary of link-only answers, due to link rot. Can you edit to include a full&#xA;citation &amp;amp; a summary of the&#xA;information at the link, in case it goes dead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Welcome to the site. We are trying to build a permanent &#xA;repository of high-quality statistical information in the &#xA;form of questions &amp;amp; answers. Thus, we're wary of &#xA;link-only answers, due to link rot. Can you [edit] to include a full &#xA;citation &amp;amp; a summary of the &#xA;information at the link, in case it goes dead? &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Code only answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Although implementation is often mixed with substantive content in questions, we are supposed to be a site for providing information about statistics, machine learning, etc., not code. It can be good to provide code as well, but please elaborate your substantive answer in text for people who don't read this language well enough to recognize &amp;amp; extract the answer from the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Although implementation is often mixed with substantive &#xA;content in questions, we are supposed to be a site for &#xA;providing information about statistics, machine&#xA;learning, etc., not code. It can be good to provide code &#xA;as well, but please elaborate your substantive answer in &#xA;text for people who don't read this language&#xA;well enough to recognize &amp;amp; extract the answer from the &#xA;code. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ambiguous answer / comment / new question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the site. Was this intended as an answer to the OP's question, a comment requesting clarification from the OP or one of the answerers, or a new question of your own? Please only use the &amp;quot;Your Answer&amp;quot; field to provide answers to the original question. You will be able to comment anywhere when your reputation is &amp;gt;50. If you have a new question, click the blue &lt;code&gt;ASK QUESTION&lt;/code&gt; at the top of the page &amp;amp; ask it there, then we can help you properly. Since you're new here, you may want to take our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;tour&lt;/a&gt;, which has information for new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Welcome to the site. Was this intended as an answer to the &#xA;OP's question, a comment requesting clarification from the &#xA;OP or one of the answerers, or a new question of your own? &#xA;Please only use the &amp;quot;Your Answer&amp;quot; field to provide &#xA;answers to the original question. You will be able to &#xA;comment anywhere when your reputation is &amp;gt;50. If you have &#xA;a new question, click the blue `ASK QUESTION` &#xA;at the top of the page &amp;amp; ask it there, then we can help &#xA;you properly. Since you're new here, you may want to take &#xA;our [tour], which has information for new users.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Original poster posting a clarification to the question as a new answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Unlike forum-style discussion sites, Cross Validated threads do not consist of a sequence of posts forming a conversation between the original poster and the answerers. We use a Q&amp;amp;A style where the question is posted once at the top, and is updated (using the &amp;quot;edit&amp;quot; button) where necessary for clarification. Sometimes it makes sense to ask a new, follow-up question instead of editing the old one. Please don't use the &amp;quot;answer&amp;quot; space to post clarifications to your own questions - have a look at the [tour] to understand how our site works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Unlike forum-style discussion sites, Cross Validated &#xA;threads do not consist of a sequence of posts forming a &#xA;conversation between the original poster and the &#xA;answerers. We use a Q&amp;amp;A style where the question is posted &#xA;once at the top, and is updated (using the &amp;quot;edit&amp;quot; button) &#xA;where necessary for clarification. Sometimes &#xA;it makes sense to ask a new, follow-up question instead of &#xA;editing the old one. &#xA;Please don't use the &amp;quot;answer&amp;quot; space to post clarifications &#xA;to your own questions &#xA;- have a look at the [tour] to understand how our site &#xA;works.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Low quality / too short&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is being automatically flagged as low quality, probably because it is so short. At present it is more of a comment than an answer by our standards. Can you expand on it? You can also turn it into a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This is being automatically flagged as low quality, &#xA;probably because it is so short.&#xA;At present it is more of a comment than an answer by our &#xA;standards. Can you expand on it? We can also turn it into &#xA;a comment.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;OP comments that he liked an answer, but does not upvote/accept&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you found this answer helpful, then please consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/why-vote&quot;&gt;upvoting&lt;/a&gt; and/or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/accepted-answer&quot;&gt;accepting&lt;/a&gt; it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;If you found this answer helpful, then please consider &#xA;[upvoting](https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/why-vote) &#xA;and/or &#xA;[accepting](https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/accepted-answer) &#xA;it.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that posting this about someone else's answer is often a good thing to do, while suggesting this about your own answer is better left for someone else to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;OP accepts the first answer five minutes after it is posted&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Oops ... thank you for accepting. However, seeing an accepted answer may discourage other users from answering (or even looking at your question), and they may have something better to say. So please consider un-accepting and seeing whether something better comes along. You can always re-accept later!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Oops ... thank you for accepting. However, seeing an &#xA;accepted answer &#xA;may discourage other users from answering (or even looking &#xA;at your question), and they may have something better to &#xA;say. So please consider un-accepting and seeing whether &#xA;something better comes along. &#xA;You can always re-accept later!&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer used to ask question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the site. Please do not use the &amp;quot;Your Answer&amp;quot; field to ask new or follow-up questions. Instead, click the blue &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;ASK QUESTION&lt;/a&gt; link at the top of the page &amp;amp; ask there. If you want to address the author of an answer, you will need 50 reputation first to leave comments. Since you're new here, you may want to take our [tour], which has information for new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Welcome to the site. Please do not use the &amp;quot;Your Answer&amp;quot; &#xA;field to ask new or follow-up questions. &#xA;Instead, click the blue &#xA;[ASK QUESTION](https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/ask) &#xA;link at the top of the page &amp;amp; ask there. If you want to &#xA;address the author of an answer, you will&#xA;need 50 reputation first to leave comments. Since you're &#xA;new here, you may want&#xA;to take our [tour], which has information for new users.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Posts tentative answer &amp;amp; asks for feedback&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the site.  Please don't post tentative answers and ask for feedback.  [stats.SE] is strictly a Q&amp;amp;A site, not a discussion forum.  If  you want to ask about your understanding of something, please post it as a new question.  Since you're new here, you may want to take our [tour], which has information for new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Welcome to the site.  Please don't post tentative answers &#xA;and ask for feedback.  [stats.SE] is strictly a Q&amp;amp;A site, &#xA;not a discussion forum.  If you want to ask about your &#xA;understanding of something, please post it as a new &#xA;question. Since you're new here, you may want to take our &#xA;[tour], which has information for new users.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Non-answer as answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please only use the &amp;quot;Your Answer&amp;quot; field to provide answers to the OP's question. CV is a strict Q&amp;amp;A site, not a discussion forum. Since you're new here, you may want to take our tour, which has information for new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Please only use the &amp;quot;Your Answer&amp;quot; field to provide answers &#xA;to the OP's question. CV is a strict Q&amp;amp;A site, not a &#xA;discussion forum. Since you're new here, you may&#xA;want to take our [tour], which has information for new &#xA;users.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Duplicate answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is very similar to the answer here. Please do not post duplicate answers. If you believe a question is completely answered by an answer elsewhere, flag / vote to close that question as a duplicate of the other. If it isn't &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt; answered by the other answer, customize your answer here to be more specific to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This is very similar to the answer [here](). Please do not &#xA;post duplicate answers. If you believe a question is &#xA;completely answered by an answer elsewhere, flag / &#xA;vote to close that question as a duplicate of the other. &#xA;If it isn't *completely* answered by the other answer, &#xA;customize your answer here to be more &#xA;specific to the question.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer should have been a comment&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the site.  This should be a comment; it isn't an answer by our standards.  You will be able to comment anywhere when your reputation is &amp;gt;50.  Since you're new here, you may want to take our [tour], which has information for new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Welcome to the site.  This should be a comment; it isn't &#xA;an answer by our standards.  You will be able to comment &#xA;anywhere when your reputation is &amp;gt;50.  &#xA;Since you're new here, you may want to take our [tour], &#xA;which has information for new users.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Comment that would make a good answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;@: do you want to post your comment(s) as an answer? &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5326/&quot;&gt;Better to have a short answer than no answer at all.&lt;/a&gt; Anyone who has a better answer can post it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;@: do you want to post your comment(s) as an answer?&#xA;[Better to have a short answer than no answer at&#xA;all.](https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5326/)&#xA;Anyone who has a better answer can post it.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Insert the commenter's nick after &amp;quot;@&amp;quot; so they are notified.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;General&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Duplicate Account&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please register &amp;amp; merge your accounts (you can find information on how to do this in the &lt;strong&gt;My Account&lt;/strong&gt; section of our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help&quot;&gt;help center&lt;/a&gt;), then you will be able to edit &amp;amp; comment on your own question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Please register &amp;amp;/or merge your accounts (you can find &#xA;information on how to do this in the **My Account** &#xA;section of our [help]), then you will be able to &#xA;edit &amp;amp; comment on your own question.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answering a question but without upvoting it&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6304/my-upvoting-policy&quot;&gt;My upvoting policy&lt;/a&gt;, when you find a question sufficiently clear to write an answer, consider to upvote the question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Please see &#xA;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6304/my-upvoting-policy, &#xA;when you find a question sufficiently clear to &#xA;write an answer, consider to upvote the question!&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Non-English post&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the site.  While it may seem unfair, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Cross Validated&lt;/a&gt; is an exclusively English language based site.  All posts here need to be made in English.  Since you're new here, you may want to take our [tour], which has information for new users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Welcome to the site.  While it may seem unfair, [stats.SE]&#xA;is an exclusively English language based site.  All posts &#xA;here need to be made in English.  Since &#xA;you're new here, you may want to take our [tour], which &#xA;has information for new users.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Uses R's tidy-code&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the site. Please consider using base R, &amp;amp; commenting it extensively, when illustrating posts here with R code. Not everyone who will come to this page will be familiar with R, &amp;amp; not all of those will be able to read tidy-code. This is a Q&amp;amp;A site for &lt;em&gt;statistics&lt;/em&gt;, not R.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Welcome to the site. Please consider using base R, &amp;amp; &#xA;commenting it extensively, when illustrating posts here with  &#xA;R code. Not everyone who will come to this page will be &#xA;familiar with R, &amp;amp; not all of those &#xA;will be able to read tidy-code. This is a Q&amp;amp;A site for &#xA;statistics, not R.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question asked in chat&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;@ , please ask that on the main site. There we have better facilities for asking &amp;amp; answering questions (e.g. formatting options will work) and the information will be available for people with the same question. That isn't a chat item.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;@ , please ask that on the main site. There we have better &#xA;facilities for asking &amp;amp; answering questions (e.g. &#xA;formatting options will work) and the information&#xA;will be available for people with the same question. That &#xA;isn't a chat item.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Insert the commenter's nick after &amp;quot;@&amp;quot; so they are notified.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2022-06-20T17:15:30.393" LastActivityDate="2022-06-20T17:15:30.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6314" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6316" CreationDate="2022-05-11T21:25:45.053" Score="4" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's my impression that on this site (and &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;) that many times questions aren't answered but just hints in the comments are given.  (This is different on &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathematica.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;https://mathematica.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; where unless it's obvious a homework problem or self-study a detailed answer is many times given.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my impression is not wrong, are there guidelines as to when to give hints as opposed to detailed answers?  If my impression is wrong, I'd like to hear about that, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79698" LastActivityDate="2022-05-21T05:40:49.703" Title="When should an answer be given as opposed to just giving a hint" Tags="|discussion|answers|comment|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6314" CreationDate="2022-05-12T11:20:37.603" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no particular need to use the commenting feature.  You can use comments or the answer field.  The issue is that if the post is a homework-&lt;em&gt;type&lt;/em&gt; question (people will sometimes say it's not homework), then our policy is to provide hints to help the OP figure it out for themselves.  Once they've figured it out, you can post a final, complete answer.  This only applies to homework-type questions, though.  Our homework policies are listed &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/self-study/info&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;; you can peruse out meta.CV threads regarding the policies by clicking on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;homework&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; tag; you can see examples of how I've dealt with such questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/190535/7290&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/58718/7290&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2022-05-12T16:24:10.130" LastActivityDate="2022-05-12T16:24:10.130" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6314" CreationDate="2022-05-12T16:45:53.307" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;When it's not a homework-type question, a full answer is merited. People nevertheless sometimes leave hints in comments: I can't presume to speak for anyone else, but when I do that it's usually because I can't answer properly (or find a suitable duplicate) owing to lack of some combination of time, brains, &amp;amp; interest; yet hope that the hint will help someone else to. From time-to-time it's also a factor that I feel the O.P. will find it satisfying to arrive at the answer for themself, given a nudge in the right direction (as with homework-type questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know why the practice should be more prevalent on some sites than others. Perhaps on sites with higher answer rates, people assume hints are otiose—an answer's likely to come along anyway. Perhaps on some it's more the case that you know the answer or you don't, &amp;amp; if you do it's not much trouble to write it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2022-05-12T16:45:53.307" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6314" CreationDate="2022-05-21T05:40:49.703" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When should an answer be given as opposed to just giving a hint&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As often as possible, regardless of the question. Up to the readers to make the most of it. A few reasons: &amp;quot;homework-type questions&amp;quot; may very well appear outside a classroom, humans are lifelong learners and some students like myself learn faster with full answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastActivityDate="2022-05-21T05:40:49.703" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6238" CreationDate="2022-05-21T05:46:21.543" Score="2" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/software&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/software&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/datascience/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.reddit.com/r/datascience/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/statistics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.reddit.com/r/statistics/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastActivityDate="2022-05-21T05:46:21.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6319" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6320" CreationDate="2022-05-25T14:02:30.337" Score="4" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I was interacting with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/576399&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, I noticed that the author incorporated the comments to ask an &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/576511&quot;&gt;equivalent question&lt;/a&gt; (instead of editing the original one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I think that this constituted a duplicate, I flagged the equivalent question as duplicate and provided a link to the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now when I go to the comment section of the original question, there is a new comment under my name which I did not write, which roughly reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this answer your question? [link to equivalent question by same author]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not write this comment myself. It is a nonsensical comment, since the author should know about his second question anyways. So why did CV post this &lt;strong&gt;in my name&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;without notifying me&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="295673" LastActivityDate="2022-05-25T14:09:39.073" Title="(Why) does CV post comments under my name and without notifying me?" Tags="|support|comment|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6319" CreationDate="2022-05-25T14:09:39.073" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is what the software does when a user proposes that a question is a duplicate. The software isn't smart enough to figure out the contextual information about who authored which question, and the relationships among the authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main meta.stackexchange site is the best place to ask questions about how the Stack Exchange software works. Here's the duplicate thread: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/339563/the-auto-comment-does-this-answer-your-question-generated-when-voting-to-clos&quot;&gt;The auto-comment “Does this answer your question?” generated when voting to close as a duplicate is sometimes confusing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastActivityDate="2022-05-25T14:09:39.073" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6321" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-05-28T14:58:53.563" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A feature request or bug with this tag is something that has been evaluated as positive on potential, but it is not present in the current work timeline. It is also not guaranteed to be implemented - when it resurfaces the proposal may be re-evaluated and declined depending on how the situation has changed since then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-planned&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-planned&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-planned&lt;/a&gt;, in which a feature is something that the site developers have definitively approved for implementation but the timing is unknown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Status tags can only be applied by moderators and site developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30155" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2022-05-29T11:54:21.250" LastActivityDate="2022-05-29T11:54:21.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6322" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-05-28T14:58:53.563" Score="0" Body="Indicates that the feature request or bug is something that is intended to be implemented or fixed, but not in the near term." OwnerUserId="30155" LastEditorUserId="30155" LastEditDate="2022-05-30T20:35:26.740" LastActivityDate="2022-05-30T20:35:26.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6323" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-05-28T14:59:31.923" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A feature request or bug with this tag is something that has been evaluated as definitive to implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, either there is ongoing investigation on the methods to implement the proposal, or there are other active projects that are ahead of it in priority for the site developers. Ideally, this tag indicates that the proposal is intended to be implemented in the near term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-deferred&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-deferred&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-deferred&lt;/a&gt;, in which the feature is of lower priority and may be re-evaluated on feasibility at a later date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Status tags can only be applied by moderators and site developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30155" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2022-05-29T11:53:52.197" LastActivityDate="2022-05-29T11:53:52.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6324" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-05-28T14:59:31.923" Score="0" Body="Indicates that the feature request or bug is something that is intended to be implemented or fixed, ideally in the near term." OwnerUserId="30155" LastEditorUserId="30155" LastEditDate="2022-05-30T20:35:36.320" LastActivityDate="2022-05-30T20:35:36.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6325" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-05-29T12:55:15.927" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A bug report is considered not reproducible if it is a bug that the site developers would fix, but cannot due to an inability to recreate the problematic behavior in spite of attempts to do so. Reports that are not reproducible typically represent bugs that come from using unsupported browsers and tools, or because of sunspots and other activity entirely unrelated to the site creating a momentary issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a bug can’t be reproduced due to being immediately presented as being through an unsupported browser, thus bypassing the need of the site developers to even attempt to reproduce the bug, then &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-declined&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt; should be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are the reporter of a bug that receives this tag, it may indicate that the bug was intermittent, or merely that you didn't thoroughly explain the circumstances under which you encountered it. First, verify that &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; can still cause the bug to appear, and (if you can) then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Describe in detail what you were doing when it happened. Include links to any relevant pages / posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;List the steps you took to encounter the bug.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Describe your environment: browser make and version, OS, add-ons, userscripts (if applicable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Include screenshots if applicable. Use hand-drawn circles to highlight key portions of the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Status tags can only be applied by moderators and site developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30155" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2022-05-30T11:43:30.433" LastActivityDate="2022-05-30T11:43:30.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6326" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-05-29T12:55:15.927" Score="0" Body="Indicates that the site developers were not able to replicate the behavior reported." OwnerUserId="30155" LastEditorUserId="30155" LastEditDate="2022-05-30T20:35:44.950" LastActivityDate="2022-05-30T20:35:44.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6327" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-05-29T12:55:53.390" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A bug report is considered reproduced only if the site developers have successfully reproduced the bug. This tag should only be applied if the site developers cannot immediately address the bug, such as if it requires further investigation into solutions or if the implementation of a fix would be stalled for other reasons. When a fix is eventually implemented, the tag should become &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-completed&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-completed&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-completed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Status tags can only be applied by moderators and site developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30155" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2022-05-30T11:43:59.830" LastActivityDate="2022-05-30T11:43:59.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6328" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-05-29T12:55:53.390" Score="0" Body="Indicates that the site developers were able to replicate the behavior reported, but cannot address its cause at this time." OwnerUserId="30155" LastEditorUserId="30155" LastEditDate="2022-05-30T20:36:00.290" LastActivityDate="2022-05-30T20:36:00.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5374" CreationDate="2022-05-31T17:00:20.477" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will add a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/tags/data-explorer/info&quot;&gt;SEDE&lt;/a&gt; query &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/25355/have-we-met?MyId=805&amp;amp;TheirId=58675&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Have we met?&lt;/a&gt; - you can replaced the userids, I've put there two users as examples. This query was mentioned, for example, here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/179427#179439&quot;&gt;How deep can the dive into user's interaction data be?&lt;/a&gt; (Meta Stack Exchange)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/382991#382992&quot;&gt;How can I search for interactions between users?&lt;/a&gt; (Meta Stack Overflow)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/search?q=url%3A%22*query/25355*%22&quot;&gt;several other discussions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30155" LastActivityDate="2022-05-31T17:00:20.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6330" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-06-01T02:35:25.963" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A bug report is considered &lt;em&gt;bydesign&lt;/em&gt; if, after review of the detailed erroneous behavior, it is determined that the behavior is desirable to keep in place rather than fix. This is independent of whether or not the behavior was formerly known to the site developers prior to the time of the report - the important thing is that the behavior will not be altered because its current behavior is preferred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag should only be used on questions reporting what is purported as erroneous behavior and suggests them being fixed / reversed. For when a question that is requesting a new feature that addresses a behavior that the asker believes to be erroneous, &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-declined&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-declined&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;status-declined&lt;/a&gt; should be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Status tags can only be applied by moderators and site developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30155" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2022-06-01T11:16:16.657" LastActivityDate="2022-06-01T11:16:16.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6331" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-06-01T02:35:25.963" Score="0" Body="Indicates that the reported behavior is intentional and not subject to change" OwnerUserId="30155" LastEditorUserId="30155" LastEditDate="2022-06-27T05:02:51.593" LastActivityDate="2022-06-27T05:02:51.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6332" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-03T06:44:27.337" Score="1" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like that my post &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/577100/consecutive-steps-to-get-the-posterior-of-parameters-1-determine-fiducials-2&quot;&gt;Consecutive steps to get the posterior of parameters : 1) determine fiducials, 2) Fisher information&amp;#39;s formalism, 3) Validation with MCMC estimation&lt;/a&gt; to be deleted please. Could a moderator perform this ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance, Regards&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user226073" LastActivityDate="2022-06-05T13:53:21.450" Title="delete post please" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6332" CreationDate="2022-06-03T11:39:16.497" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The relevant sequence of events is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it was migrated to Cross Validated;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it was closed on Cross Validated (because it needed more focus);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the migration was rejected (because it was closed).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Locking happens whenever a migration is rejected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, the robots will delete the post. This is explained in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/78048/enable-automatic-deletion-of-old-unanswered-zero-score-questions-after-a-year/92006#92006&quot;&gt;Enable automatic deletion of old, unanswered, zero-score questions after a year?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because this question pertains to how the Stack Exchange software works, the best place to ask about it is Meta.Stackexchange. Please note that moderators have no power to change how the software works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2022-06-05T13:53:21.450" LastActivityDate="2022-06-05T13:53:21.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6334" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-06-05T11:01:41.470" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before posting your question, please check the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faq&quot;&gt;FAQs&lt;/a&gt;, and do a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/search&quot;&gt;search&lt;/a&gt; to see if your problem already has a known solution or procedure. If you cannot find an answer, we will be happy to help you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30155" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2022-06-05T11:57:56.377" LastActivityDate="2022-06-05T11:57:56.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6335" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-06-05T11:01:41.470" Score="0" Body="Use this tag to indicate you need help with the use of one or more of the site's features." OwnerUserId="30155" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2022-06-05T11:55:55.180" LastActivityDate="2022-06-05T11:55:55.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6336" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6337" CreationDate="2022-06-11T09:01:19.980" Score="2" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a discussion with an ex-user of the platform, I noticed how some policies of the platform are too harsh, and hence users do not have a pleasant experience, especially for those who are new to statistics and need a bit of understanding in a lighter manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such policies include deleting the post by other users if they feel the post isn't well explained, down-voting the post if a person knows nothing of the question and still posts it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel this platform is for discussion: hence we are free to upload things that we feel we don't understand but showing no effort is used as tag to delete such posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kindly let me know your view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="324659" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2022-06-12T15:11:23.827" LastActivityDate="2022-06-17T08:34:02.800" Title="Is this platform losing significance?" Tags="|discussion|votes|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6336" CreationDate="2022-06-11T10:43:31.400" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Long-term members of the forum who are active in answering questions and particularly in sometimes voting to close or down-voting questions or answers that seem poor are -- in my overwhelming experience --&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;highly mindful that many, indeed most, questions here come from learners -- it would be astonishing if that were not so (the point of a question is that you don't know or understand something or need advice)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;not trying to be or seem unpleasant -- indeed posts or posters showing unpleasantness tend to disappear one way or another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key fact, however, is that Cross Validated, like any other part of Stack Exchange, is not a help line or discussion forum. It is designed to be a repository of good, answered questions. So there is qualified intolerance of poor questions and poor answers that is, quite frankly, in the best long-term interests of most users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The counter-example is to imagine infinite tolerance that indulges an attitude of &amp;quot;this is my question, so I have a right to post it and for it not to be down-voted, edited or removed&amp;quot;. That is just not how Stack Exchange works generally. If you want that model, there are other ways to express it on the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CV is untidy enough, partly because too few people check for existing answers and because so few people (me too!) lack the time and inclination to look through older threads to try to clean up a bit. The paradox -- except it's not a contradiction -- is that greater tolerance would just lead to a site littered with junk, with many useless threads -- and in total a site that would be harder to use and less helpful. If that's what you want, try any social medium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of checks and balances here. For example, even as a user with some reputation my votes need to be matched by others, my edits are reversible, my powers of deletion don't even include everything I post, and I too am subject to down-voting, moderator action, and other censures. That is how it should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if a particular decision seems too harsh, it can usually be revisited. Even moderators are the first to admit that their decisions are sometimes wrong; there can be down-voting for bad reasons; and so forth. The answer is not to raise a generalised complaint of our being &amp;quot;too harsh&amp;quot;; it is to raise particular bad decisions that you think you see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many threads here about down-voting. I don't particularly want to open all that up again, but simply&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;down-voting is allowed here with enough reputation (some people with enough reputation never or rarely down-vote and that's entirely their choice); that is the SE model&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;there are explicit grounds for down-voting&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;no-one else knows the particular reasons why anyone down-votes unless they leave a comment explaining why (like I suspect many other long-term users I've experienced seemingly random drive-by down-votes which can only be guessed at as some kind of spitefulness).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2022-06-12T09:03:51.097" LastActivityDate="2022-06-12T09:03:51.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6336" CreationDate="2022-06-13T16:08:02.937" Score="20" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel this platform is for discussion: hence we are free ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is where you go wrong! See the Meta post &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/are-stack-exchange-sites-forums&quot;&gt;Are Stack Exchange sites forums?&lt;/a&gt; which explains clearly that Cross Validated (as other SE sites) is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a discussion forum, it is a site strictly for answers &amp;amp; questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @Nick Cox have explained, for a Q&amp;amp;A site to function, there must be some policing. If you want a Q&amp;amp;A forum without policing, try maybe &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/topic/Science&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.quora.com/topic/Science&lt;/a&gt;  and see how well it works for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A directory list of Q&amp;amp;A sites is at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.refseek.com/directory/answers.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.refseek.com/directory/answers.html&lt;/a&gt;  and if you find any of those working better for you than CV, please tell us!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastActivityDate="2022-06-13T16:08:02.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6296" CreationDate="2022-06-14T21:36:40.997" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've raised the reputation required to create tags to 1000 - in general this setting doesn't get customized on a per-site basis. It's pretty much 300 network-wide with the exception of Math and Physics, at 1000, and Stack Overflow at 1500.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also somewhat difficult to get data to back up the request because tags are hard-deleted when they disappear from the site, so we can't even look for examples unless you provide them for us. That said, there's not generally a huge amount of harm in changing this provided the community here is willing to retag stuff that may need new tags created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to tag management, please also consider whether you're seeing tags created frequently that shouldn't exist - such as the &amp;quot;stat&amp;quot; tag mentioned in the comments here. If there are specific tags that are problematic and keep coming back, we can block them from being created again, without the need to block all tag creation for lower-reputation users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information on the tag blocking process, please see the main MSE FAQ about it - &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/239189/how-do-we-request-to-have-a-tag-blocked&quot;&gt;How do we request to have a tag blocked?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="202450" LastEditorUserId="202450" LastEditDate="2022-06-17T00:50:26.590" LastActivityDate="2022-06-17T00:50:26.590" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6336" CreationDate="2022-06-17T08:34:02.800" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the first two answers, by users of high reputation and long experience on this site, seem somewhat defensive to me, I'd like to offer my 2 cents:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site, like many others on the internet, is a community. It has its rules. Some are explicitly stated (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tour&lt;/a&gt;) and some are implicit, having developed through the usage and being more-or-less consistently enforced by experienced users and moderators. Learning these rules takes time and you can never be sure to have mastered them all. Even the explicit rules are subject to interpretation, and the implicit ones, in addition, may gradually shift over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In consequence, I am not surprised that new users have some unpleasant experiences on this site. Moreover, I'd say that it's not always the new user's fault. Sometimes the experienced users and moderators make mistakes, too. They are not perfect and errors are part of life, not just in statistics :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, taking all pros and cons into account, I tend to agree with Kjetil that this site, while imperfect, is still better than any other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="169343" LastActivityDate="2022-06-17T08:34:02.800" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6341" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6342" CreationDate="2022-06-27T20:48:39.460" Score="7" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;I arrived at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/580206/1352&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. When I arrived, it had been posted one minute ago, had three views, one upvote, and a single comment, posted by the Community Bot 57 seconds ago (so well within a minute after the question was posted):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please clarify your specific problem or provide additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it's hard to tell exactly what you're asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find this automated comment a little... trigger-happy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone shed a little light on how such auto-comments happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2022-07-07T20:21:52.513" Title="Unclear questions according to the Community Bot" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6341" CreationDate="2022-06-27T21:13:03.020" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've reviewed the Question's history. The sequence of events is that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a user asked their first question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the question populates the First Question Queue&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a reviewer decided that selecting the feedback option was best&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the robot applies the comment to the post.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think these changes were implemented as part of this project: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/369013/review-queue-workflows-final-release/369148#369148&quot;&gt;Review queue workflows - Final release&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2022-07-07T20:21:52.513" LastActivityDate="2022-07-07T20:21:52.513" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6343" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-29T17:03:26.927" Score="3" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;On another StackExchange site (&lt;a href=&quot;https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/270097/remove-outliers-in-boxwhiskerchart?noredirect=1#comment674078_270097&quot;&gt;https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/270097/remove-outliers-in-boxwhiskerchart?noredirect=1#comment674078_270097&lt;/a&gt;), I've run into resistance because of my mentioning about potential ethical issues with removing the display of &amp;quot;outliers&amp;quot; from a standard box-and-whisker plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are ethical concerns considered &amp;quot;off topic&amp;quot; here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not noticed any questions with potential ethical issues at this site but I certainly don't read all of the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79698" LastActivityDate="2022-06-29T19:22:58.980" Title="Should mentioning &quot;potential&quot; ethical issues with data analysis/display be part of an answer?" Tags="|discussion|data-visualization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6343" CreationDate="2022-06-29T19:22:58.980" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Users do sometimes raise ethical concerns with regards to questions or answers on Cross Validated, &amp;amp; I don't recall any occasion on which they were contested as being off-topic. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5757/17230&quot;&gt;Recently&lt;/a&gt; an 'ethics' tag was proposed, though it hasn't yet been created. All the same, an unqualified equation of outlier removal to &amp;quot;data tampering&amp;quot; would likely be challenged here too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2022-06-29T19:22:58.980" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6345" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-04T14:42:28.213" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a statistics newbie and I have recently ported a function or subroutine in fortran into python. But I have no idea what it does. Is it on topic to ask such questions here ? I am looking to find the equivalent library in python that does the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user69189" LastActivityDate="2022-07-04T14:42:28.213" Title="Showing a function source code and asking what it does" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1200" CreationDate="2022-07-07T09:38:08.957" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not sure, but perhaps:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mixed-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mixed-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mixed-model&lt;/a&gt; (5495) &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\leftarrow$&lt;/span&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/random-effects-model&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;random-effects-model&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;random-effects-model&lt;/a&gt; (1450)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose one can have a model with only random effects and no fixed effects, which would make it different from a mixed model, though I don't think the conceptual distinction is so large that it would merit a separate tag. And I think all the questions I've seen with this tag are about using random effects in mixed models.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastActivityDate="2022-07-07T09:38:08.957" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6347" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-14T14:24:41.137" Score="19" ViewCount="706" Body="&lt;p&gt;We're thrilled to announce that &lt;a href=&quot;https://aws.amazon.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AWS&lt;/a&gt; will be sponsoring Cross Validated starting on &lt;strong&gt;July 18 through December 31&lt;/strong&gt;. We wanted to give you a heads-up and walk you through what that means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How and where will the sponsorship be displayed?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sponsorship will be found on the right side of the header at the top of the site similar to what you see below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/28Y2o.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/28Y2o.png&quot; alt=&quot;Cross Validated Home Page with AWS Sponsorship Banner&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What else changes?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not a thing! Borrowing from &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/307861/site-sponsorships-bringing-resources-back-to-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;the original MSE announcement on sponsorships&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First — sponsors do not own these Q&amp;amp;A sites. Sponsors work alongside&#xA;our communities who ultimately build these sites. Communities ask the&#xA;questions; communities create the tags; communities conduct elections&#xA;as they do now, and we are not renaming our current sites like a&#xA;garish sport stadium to the highest bidder. Any ads a sponsor submits&#xA;still have go through our crazy-strict ad editorial process… as it has&#xA;always been. Companies do not have access to personal data, and all&#xA;Q&amp;amp;A content remains irrevocably licensed under Creative Commons for&#xA;sharing and attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sponsorships are a tool that our clients can use to let folks who could be interested in their products know about them in a non-intrusive way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What if I've found a design glitch/bug?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If something looks off, please report it as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bug&quot;&gt;bug&lt;/a&gt; so we can investigate and squash it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's all. If you have any other questions or concerns, please leave them as answers below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, thank you. These types of partnerships help us bring more resources to our communities, and they wouldn't be possible without the work you've put into making Cross Validated successful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="311783" LastActivityDate="2022-08-03T14:28:13.690" Title="AWS will be sponsoring Cross Validated" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1200" CreationDate="2022-07-15T12:25:20.197" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seems to be a fair bit of overlap between:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/p-value&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;p-value&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;p-value&lt;/a&gt; (2573) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/statistical-significance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;statistical-significance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;statistical-significance&lt;/a&gt; (5,774)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the usage of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/hypothesis-testing&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hypothesis-testing&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hypothesis-testing&lt;/a&gt; (9591) overlaps a fair bit as well, though in principle it does differ more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a case for merging the first two? And perhaps editing the tag info for the third to make a distinction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastActivityDate="2022-07-15T12:25:20.197" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6349" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6353" CreationDate="2022-07-21T11:04:14.883" Score="21" ViewCount="2002" Body="&lt;p&gt;We appear to have a number of overlapping threads on imbalanced data. Here are just a few of the more highly-upvoted ones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/357466/are-unbalanced-datasets-problematic-and-how-does-oversampling-purport-to-he&quot;&gt;Are unbalanced datasets problematic, and (how) does oversampling (purport to) help?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/283170/when-is-unbalanced-data-really-a-problem-in-machine-learning&quot;&gt;When is unbalanced data really a problem in Machine Learning?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/6067/does-an-unbalanced-sample-matter-when-doing-logistic-regression&quot;&gt;Does an unbalanced sample matter when doing logistic regression?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/247871/what-is-the-root-cause-of-the-class-imbalance-problem&quot;&gt;What is the root cause of the class imbalance problem?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these threads themselves link to and summarise even more questions and answers on the topic (there are 950 questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/unbalanced-classes&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;unbalanced-classes&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;unbalanced-classes&lt;/a&gt;, many of them popular). &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/357466/are-unbalanced-datasets-problematic-and-how-does-oversampling-purport-to-he&quot;&gt;Stephan Kolassa's heroic effort to summarise and pin down the problem&lt;/a&gt; is probably the most comprehensive &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt; on the topic, but there are useful answers strewn across many of these threads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We still keep getting new questions about this, though, and IMO they often seem to attract misleading/incorrect answers. It would be useful to have a canonical thread to point people to on this, but I don't know enough about the topic to judge which of these could be merged/closed as duplicates/deemed canonical, so I thought I'd ask here. &lt;strong&gt;How can we best simplify this situation?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="1352" LastEditDate="2022-09-29T09:55:16.817" LastActivityDate="2022-09-29T09:55:16.817" Title="Profusion of threads on imbalanced data - can we merge/deem canonical any?" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|meta-faq|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6349" CreationDate="2022-07-25T09:22:12.757" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;In the interest of taking a decision, I will post a few answers for you to vote on. Please feel free to post more. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Option 1: Do nothing&lt;/strong&gt;. First do no harm, etc etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="121522" LastEditDate="2022-07-25T09:29:12.110" LastActivityDate="2022-07-25T09:29:12.110" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6349" CreationDate="2022-07-25T09:23:52.613" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;In the interest of taking a decision, I will post a few answers for you to vote on. Please feel free to post more. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Option 2: Vote to close threads as duplicate&lt;/strong&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/283170/when-is-unbalanced-data-really-a-problem-in-machine-learning&quot;&gt;When is unbalanced data really a problem in Machine Learning?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Not just new threads, but also the other threads in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="121522" LastEditDate="2022-07-25T09:29:20.700" LastActivityDate="2022-07-25T09:29:20.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6349" CreationDate="2022-07-25T09:24:56.940" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;In the interest of taking a decision, I will post a few answers for you to vote on. Please feel free to post more. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Option 3: Vote to close threads as duplicate&lt;/strong&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/357466/are-unbalanced-datasets-problematic-and-how-does-oversampling-purport-to-he&quot;&gt;Are unbalanced datasets problematic, and (how) does oversampling (purport to) help?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Not just new threads, but also the other threads in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="121522" LastEditDate="2022-07-25T09:33:56.107" LastActivityDate="2022-07-25T09:33:56.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6349" CreationDate="2022-07-25T09:26:26.247" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;In the interest of taking a decision, I will post a few answers for you to vote on. Please feel free to post more. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Option 4: Vote to close threads as duplicate&lt;/strong&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/247871/what-is-the-root-cause-of-the-class-imbalance-problem&quot;&gt;What is the root cause of the class imbalance problem?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Not just new threads, but also the other threads in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="121522" LastEditDate="2022-07-25T09:34:02.293" LastActivityDate="2022-07-25T09:34:02.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6349" CreationDate="2022-07-25T09:28:21.963" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;In the interest of taking a decision, I will post a few answers for you to vote on. Please feel free to post more. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Option 5: Merge some subset of the threads in the question&lt;/strong&gt;, and close others as duplicates of this new canonical thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you choose this option, please specify which threads you think should be merged in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastActivityDate="2022-07-25T09:28:21.963" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6349" CreationDate="2022-07-25T09:31:44.137" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;In the interest of taking a decision, I will post a few answers for you to vote on. Please feel free to post more. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Option 6: Close new questions as duplicates of all 4 threads in the question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this seems to be a lot more work for the mods; I think it is best avoided for that reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastActivityDate="2022-07-25T09:31:44.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6359" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6370" CreationDate="2022-07-30T14:40:53.133" Score="7" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/comparison&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;comparison&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;comparison&lt;/a&gt; tag has 121 questions, almost half of which have zero upvotes and only one of which has a score &amp;gt;10. There is no tag wiki or usage guidance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A substantial proportion of statistical questions involve some sort of comparison, so this vague tag doesn't seem to serve much purpose. A quick skim through some of the tagged questions also suggests that they would be better served by more specific tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shall we delete this? And is this something that the mods can do at the site level, or does it involve manually removing the tag from each of the questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="11887" LastEditDate="2022-08-27T04:26:14.907" LastActivityDate="2022-08-27T04:26:14.907" Title="Suggestion: delete [comparison] tag" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tag-deletion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6347" CreationDate="2022-08-03T14:17:39.087" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m not sure I like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a sentiment in some circles of software engineering that statistics is a sub-field, as if knowing how to code &lt;em&gt;sklearn&lt;/em&gt; on the cloud is what it means to be a statistician.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am concerned that this sponsorship reinforces such buffoonery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247274" LastEditorUserId="247274" LastEditDate="2022-08-03T14:28:13.690" LastActivityDate="2022-08-03T14:28:13.690" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1200" CreationDate="2022-08-03T16:53:04.110" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;multilevel analysis &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\iff$&lt;/span&gt; mixed model&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user318514" LastEditorDisplayName="user318514" LastEditDate="2022-08-13T18:13:48.733" LastActivityDate="2022-08-13T18:13:48.733" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6362" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6363" CreationDate="2022-08-05T00:29:48.003" Score="1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why not add tags for Rao's score-test and nuisance-parameter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions are about wikipedia.org definitions. Why not introduce a wikipedia.org tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user318514" LastEditorDisplayName="user318514" LastEditDate="2022-08-05T02:55:44.473" LastActivityDate="2022-08-05T20:36:29.840" Title="Why there are no tags for score-test and nuisance parameter or wikipedia?" Tags="|feature-request|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6362" CreationDate="2022-08-05T19:56:05.777" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anyone with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/create-tags&quot;&gt;create tags privilege&lt;/a&gt; can create a new tag, although some created tags are later merged into others or deleted.  When someone perceives the need for a tag, they type a new name in the &lt;code&gt;tags&lt;/code&gt; field when asking or editing a question and the tag is created.  This can be done by the original asker, by someone answering the question, or by someone editing the thread and maintaining the tidiness of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be aware that the site has been around for ~13.5 years and has had more than ~200k questions posted.  There may be 1570 tags &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags?page=44&amp;amp;tab=popular&quot;&gt;currently&lt;/a&gt;.  If a tag doesn't exist right now, that is prima facie evidence that it may not be needed.  While that's certainly not absolute, we recently had SE raise the reputation threshold for creating new tags, because so many of the new tags created at this point need to be merged or deleted (cf., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6296/increasing-reputation-needed-for-creating-tags&quot;&gt;Increasing reputation needed for creating tags?&lt;/a&gt;).  For example, I'm open to considering an argument that a &lt;code&gt;[score-test]&lt;/code&gt; and/or &lt;code&gt;[nuisance-parameter]&lt;/code&gt; tag would be helpful, but I agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6362/why-there-are-no-tags-for-score-test-and-nuisance-parameter-or-wikipedia#comment21424_6362&quot;&gt;@mkt's comment&lt;/a&gt; that a &lt;code&gt;[wikipedia]&lt;/code&gt; tag would not be useful and I would quickly delete it, if I saw it created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2022-08-05T20:36:29.840" LastActivityDate="2022-08-05T20:36:29.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6365" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-15T20:32:19.333" Score="6" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;p&gt;My (perhaps incorrect) impression is that few stats.SE regular users specialize in modern research-level statistics and that the website is most appropriate for undergraduate or masters level content, with a largely applied focus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a widely known and agreed upon assessment? Is it is right, what is the appropriate venue for modern research level statistics? Is it mathoverflow itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="365540" LastActivityDate="2022-08-16T06:03:07.493" Title="math.SE is to MathOverflow as stats.SE is to ________" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6365" CreationDate="2022-08-16T05:22:49.670" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;So many people study and apply statistics of some kind that it’s only natural that we would get lots of applied questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, there are excellent statisticians among our ranks, and users should not feel any need to hold back when it comes to posting research-level questions. I personally have posted multiple questions about fairly recent literature, for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/569036/challenge-an-icml-paper-for-a-given-set-of-probability-predictions-and-a-log-lo&quot;&gt;Challenge an ICML Paper&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/552533/247274&quot;&gt;Does Multinomial Probability Calibration Consider the Probabilities of the Non-Dominant Classes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there were to be a “Stat Overflow”, it would come from users wanting to separate out the research-level questions from more routine questions, not because Cross Validated lacks the technical acumen to handle research-level questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And “Stat Overflow” would be quite the name for us to use!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247274" LastActivityDate="2022-08-16T05:22:49.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6365" CreationDate="2022-08-16T06:03:07.493" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;There really isn't one.  There just hasn't been a perceived need thus far.  You could suggest a new site on &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Area 51&lt;/a&gt;, but we are the site for both applied and research-level statistics.  Note that there is a lot of overlap amongst SE sites.  A question that goes here can often also be on topic on Stack Overflow, Mathematics, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Operations Research, Quantitative Finance, Economics, among possibly others.  Math Overflow does have an &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/st.statistics&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;[st.statistics]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; tag with 1,666 threads, so I guess people could post there, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a bit skeptical, though.  I don't think the proliferation of sites on SE is the best way to organize information.  Also, people often post what they think are research-level questions that really aren't—an example might be the extremely poor use of our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-statistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-statistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mathematical-statistics&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2022-08-16T06:03:07.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6368" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6369" CreationDate="2022-08-18T12:18:29.457" Score="11" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked this question on Philosophy Stack Exchange: &lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/q/93007/48437&quot;&gt;Epistemic value of multiple eyewitness accounts: single event vs. multiple events given a fixed number of eyewitnesses?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intuitively speaking, multiple independent eyewitness accounts of a&#xA;single event are more convincing than a single eyewitness account. For&#xA;example, multiple independent eyewitness accounts of a loud explosion&#xA;in a remote area (e.g. from different locations and viewpoints) are&#xA;more convincing/reliable than a single account (e.g. maybe the single&#xA;witness hallucinated the explosion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bit more formally, if we define X as some truth claim about some&#xA;event, process or phenomenon in the real world, we could say that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P(X is true | multiple eyewitness accounts) &amp;gt; P(X is true | a single&#xA;eyewitness account)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what happens if we keep the number of eyewitness accounts&#xA;constant and only change the number of events?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, let X = &amp;quot;alien abductions are real&amp;quot;, and let&#xA;E&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt; be a concrete example of an (alleged) alien abduction. X&#xA;is a general claim, E&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt; is a claim about a very specific&#xA;instance of X. It is clear that E&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt; entails X. Thus, which&#xA;of the following probabilities is greater than the others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;P(E&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt; is true | N eyewitness accounts for E&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;P(E&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt; is true or E&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt; is true or ... or E&lt;sub&gt;N&lt;/sub&gt; is true | one eyewitness account for E&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt;, for&#xA;each i in {1, ..., N})&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;P(E&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt; is true or E&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt; is true or ... or E&lt;sub&gt;N/2&lt;/sub&gt;  is true | two eyewitness accounts for E&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt;,&#xA;for each i in {1, ..., N/2})&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;P(E&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt; is true  or E&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt; is true or ... or E&lt;sub&gt;N/3&lt;/sub&gt; is true | three eyewitness accounts for E&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt;,&#xA;for each i in {1, ..., N/3})&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, given N eyewitness accounts, what is the optimal&#xA;distribution of eyewitnesses over specific alleged instances of X that&#xA;maximizes the probability of X being true? What should be more&#xA;convincing, 1000 eyewitness accounts for E&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;, 500 eyewitness&#xA;accounts for E&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt; + 500 eyewitness accounts for&#xA;E&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;, etc.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: I used eyewitness reports of abductions by aliens as an illustrative example, but the reasoning can be extended to other rare&#xA;events, such as reports of miracles, paranormal phenomena, angelic&#xA;encounters, Bigfoot sightings, testimonials from whistleblowers&#xA;(conspiracy theories), etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I received the following suggestions in the comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Interesting question, but probably would get better answers on math.stackexchange.com or statistics.stackexchange.com !&lt;/strong&gt; If a witness claims they have seen event E_1, they might be lying or hallucinating, or someone else might have staged E_1. So you have to account for P(E_1 | eyewitness account), but also for P(X | E_1), which is the probability that aliens exist knowing that a possibly-staged alien abduction event happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You may get better answers on Cross Validated&lt;/strong&gt;. Under some simplifying assumptions (like equal credibility of reports, independent events, etc.), this is essentially a mathematical question about calculating Bayesian posteriors. The formula for multiple reports of a single event is standard, but I am not sure how they are calculated for derivative statements implied by multiple reported events. You may want to use a less provocative example than alien abductions there, so it doesn't become a distraction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;: How can I adapt this question to fit CV on-topic standards?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user365786" LastActivityDate="2022-08-18T15:48:44.210" Title="How to adapt this Philosophy.SE question to fit CV on-topic standards?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6368" CreationDate="2022-08-18T15:48:44.210" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it’s fine to post as it is, and I look forward to reading replies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247274" LastActivityDate="2022-08-18T15:48:44.210" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6359" CreationDate="2022-08-20T18:55:59.230" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the discussion in comments pointed to, there is no good synonym, so we should just start to eliminate little by little. There are many other tags with comparison in name, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/model-comparison&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;model-comparison&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;model-comparison&lt;/a&gt;, so try to find good replacement tags when eliminating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastActivityDate="2022-08-20T18:55:59.230" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1200" CreationDate="2022-08-21T17:43:09.193" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are now two tags, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pre-post-comparison&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pre-post-comparison&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pre-post-comparison&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/change-scores&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;change-scores&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;change-scores&lt;/a&gt; essentially covering the same topic. I propose we let &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/pre-post-comparison&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;pre-post-comparison&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;pre-post-comparison&lt;/a&gt;  be the main one (even if is is newer and less used), as it is the most general one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="121522" LastEditDate="2022-08-21T17:48:34.843" LastActivityDate="2022-08-21T17:48:34.843" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3175" CreationDate="2022-08-24T09:17:12.240" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Is it okay for me to delete outliers or other data I don't like?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a &lt;em&gt;surprisingly&lt;/em&gt; popular question. It's usually phrased in terms of '&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/254023/do-i-remove-outliers-to-make-the-data-normally-distributed-for-anova&quot;&gt;improving normality&lt;/a&gt;' or '&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/584022/unsupervised-learning-clustering-before-supervised-learning&quot;&gt;reducing noise&lt;/a&gt;' or '&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/575483/can-i-remove-sample-outliers-using-standard-deviation&quot;&gt;improving model performance&lt;/a&gt;'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of this stems from bad stats education, basic misunderstandings and a desire to apply a simple technique to data that is ill-suited to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As a rule, a data point should not be removed unless it is an error&lt;/strong&gt;. Questions that do not explain in sufficient detail why their situation may be an exception to this rule should be closed because any answer would be reiterating a simple point that has been made over and over on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several threads about this covering common ground, but the best duplicate target I could find seems to be&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/200534/is-it-ok-to-remove-outliers-from-data&quot;&gt;Is it OK to remove outliers from data?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastActivityDate="2022-08-24T09:17:12.240" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6374" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6377" CreationDate="2022-08-26T12:13:39.027" Score="5" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Update: I've re-tagged all questions tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/statistical-confidence&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;statistical-confidence&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;statistical-confidence-container&quot;&gt;statistical-confidence&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came across a question tagged &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/statistical-confidence&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;statistical-confidence&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;statistical-confidence-container&quot;&gt;statistical-confidence&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/582751/find-the-confidence-in-an-accuracy-measurement&quot;&gt;Find the confidence in an accuracy measurement&lt;/a&gt;. I interpreted it as a question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/statistical-significance&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;statistical-significance&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;statistical-significance-container&quot;&gt;statistical-significance&lt;/a&gt;, so I made an edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I looked at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/statistical-confidence&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;statistical-confidence&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;statistical-confidence-container&quot;&gt;statistical-confidence&lt;/a&gt; tag. It doesn't have a description. There are only 24 (now 22) questions tagged with it, all within the last year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should this tag be deleted and the question re-tagged with &lt;code&gt;statistical-significance&lt;/code&gt; instead, if appropriate?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What's the procedure when one comes across a (potentially) unwise tag like this example?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question from 2015 seems related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2613/ambiguous-confidence-tag&quot;&gt;Ambiguous [confidence] tag&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="237901" LastEditorUserId="237901" LastEditDate="2022-08-29T06:50:20.047" LastActivityDate="2022-08-29T06:50:20.047" Title="Is the tag `statistical-confidence` portmanteau of `confidence-interval` and `statistical-significance` and should it be deleted?" Tags="|discussion|tag-reorganization|tag-deletion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6375" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6376" CreationDate="2022-08-26T18:58:46.407" Score="12" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, I considered posting this on the academia SE, but since this is more a question of statistical validity, I thought it more appropriate to post here. If there are similar questions/answers here or there, please direct me to them, as I've searched for a while and not yet found anything useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A colleague with the same background as me (Ecology) is now working in a different research field and has started a project. Both of us have concerns about the validity of tests and results used in similar studies (potential pseudo-replication, wrong choice of hypothesis test, not correcting for multiple comparisons), yet it seems pervasive in the field. Relevant journals have decent impact factors, and I assume that this field has resolved any issues that we perceive as problematic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recognize there are often differences in how data or results are presented from one discipline to another, and I may simply be overlooking something that is implied or established knowledge in a field different from mine. However, the 'Statistical Analysis' sub-heading within Methods often does not describe any actual methods; rather, it states (in a single sentence or two) the software used, and relegates the actual hypothesis test used and associated stats/metrics to Figure captions. This baffles me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Journals typically require detailed statistical analysis methodology explaining the reasoning for choosing a particular test, that assumptions were checked and data transformed if necessary, type of post-hoc analysis, etc. However, I am encountering articles that lack this detail and present figures that (to me) look like results of ANOVA, but state that t-tests were used. Thus, I'd like to ask some questions here in hopes that the community can help me understand if/why these particular analyses are correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not my goal to find errors or call out publications, just to understand the analyses and address any gaps in my own knowledge. My question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to refer to a particular article(s) with the analysis I have a question about, or do I need to create a similar reproducible example with relevant context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="305971" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2022-08-28T06:41:42.443" LastActivityDate="2022-08-28T06:41:42.443" Title="A published article uses statistical analyses that don't seem appropriate to me. Can I ask for clarification as to if and why the analysis is valid?" Tags="|discussion|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6375" CreationDate="2022-08-26T19:37:59.663" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think pointing to specific articles is fine. It's fairly common here for readers to quote sections of textbooks and ask for explanations of concepts that aren't clear. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/459501/a-smaller-dataset-is-better-is-this-statement-false-in-statistics-how-to-refut&quot;&gt;Questions calling out bad statistical arguments from scientists are not common but also accepted&lt;/a&gt;, so I think you're probably on safe ground asking to understand/critique methods from a paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, while quoting a paragraph or three should be fine, it would probably go too far if that text wasn't sufficiently comprehensive for readers to understand your question. If after reading your question, readers still need to refer to the paper or ask for more context to understand, it may be a poor fit for SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But some of us here are ecologists! So there may be members who have the background to answer even without a detailed explanation of field-specific concepts (though minimising or explaining such jargon is a good idea).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="121522" LastEditDate="2022-08-26T20:08:54.510" LastActivityDate="2022-08-26T20:08:54.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6374" CreationDate="2022-08-28T12:02:23.320" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Turning my comment into an answer)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nearly half (13/22) have either &lt;code&gt;[sc]&lt;/code&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;code&gt;[ci]&lt;/code&gt;, or &lt;code&gt;[sc]&lt;/code&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;code&gt;[ss]&lt;/code&gt;.  That's prima facie evidence that it's seen as strongly related to those tags and just adding some nuance in the OP's mind.  The others I'd have to look at, but I strongly suspect something better could be found in each case.  I think we should remove and/or retag them, and then &lt;code&gt;[sc]&lt;/code&gt; will just disappear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="121522" LastEditDate="2022-08-28T14:51:00.743" LastActivityDate="2022-08-28T14:51:00.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6379" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-31T09:16:39.993" Score="6" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was doing an image search for other examples of something relating to a question I had already asked on Cross Validated, and came across this word-for-word copy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://solveforum.com/forums/threads/how-to-interpret-a-missing-data-combination-frequency-plot-e-g-vim-aggr.1476718/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://solveforum.com/forums/threads/how-to-interpret-a-missing-data-combination-frequency-plot-e-g-vim-aggr.1476718/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CV original is here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/587209/how-to-interpret-a-missing-data-combination-frequency-plot-e-g-vimaggr&quot;&gt;How to interpret a missing data combination-frequency plot (e.g. VIM::aggr)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83548" LastActivityDate="2022-08-31T09:16:39.993" Title="Why is my CV question here duplicated on 'Solve Forum'?" Tags="|discussion|policy|participation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6381" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6382" CreationDate="2022-09-03T22:03:18.783" Score="4" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a question in need of an answer, so I went to post a bounty of 50. The lowest option available was 100. Is this because I have another 50-point bounty happening simultaneously?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247274" LastActivityDate="2022-09-05T03:09:13.920" Title="Two 50-point bounties at once?" Tags="|discussion|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6381" CreationDate="2022-09-05T03:09:13.920" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/303814/247274&quot;&gt;This is the question.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I posted an answer is hopes of bringing some resolution to an old question, I am not happy with the speculative nature of my answer, so I wanted a definitive answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because I had answered, however, the bounty had to be at least 100.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/16067/320588&quot;&gt;If you have already answered the question before, the minimum bounty offer is 100.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247274" LastActivityDate="2022-09-05T03:09:13.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6383" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6384" CreationDate="2022-09-05T14:33:19.447" Score="-2" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to propose a modification to the rules for awarding a bounty on Cross Validated.  A couple of times, including this recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/586281/minimum-sampling-for-maximising-the-prediction-accuracy/586817#586817&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt;, I have provided a legitimate answer to a question, been the only poster to try, did not receive the required 2 up-votes for automatic award, and was not awarded the bounty.  My guess is that the original poster did not return to cross validated during the period after the bounty closed due to the lack of a comment from them, but I have no other direct evidence to support that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the relevant section of the current rule:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do not award your bounty within 7 days (plus the grace period), the highest voted answer created after the bounty started with a minimum score of 2 will be awarded half the bounty amount (or the full amount, if the answer is also accepted). If two or more eligible answers have the same score (their scores are tied), the oldest answer is chosen. If there's no answer meeting those criteria, no bounty is awarded to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the bounty was started by the question owner, and the question owner accepts an answer posted during the bounty period, and the bounty expires without an explicit award then we assume the bounty owner liked the answer they accepted and award it the full bounty amount at the time of bounty expiration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there is good reason for the two vote rule because we generally don't want lower quality answers getting the bounty.  However, if only one person decides to take their time to answer the question, and the original poster does not take any action, then I would award the bounty down to zero votes.  Sometimes people ask very specific questions where most viewers don't feel like they have the knowledge to upvote an answer (although I'm not sure that was the case in this example, in others, it might have been).  The person who provided the answer should not be penalized because of the poster's inattentiveness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is my proposed amendment which I feel encourages people to attempt an answer at sometimes difficult questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is only one post to the question during the bounty period and the bounty is not manually award, then the bounty will be awarded to the only post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any other disadvantages to this rule?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any other proposals to address this problem?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does someone have data on how many bounties are not awarded each year?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Related posts on meta.stackexchange&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/306966/changes-to-bounty-rules-removal-of-double-rep-retention-blocking-of-owner-dele&quot;&gt;ref1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/185616/automatic-bounty-award-rules-please-fix-the-help-to-leave-no-open-questions&quot;&gt;ref2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/185967/do-not-implicitly-award-bounty-to-an-answer-that-has-been-downvoted-by-the-inves&quot;&gt;ref3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/220176/existing-answers-should-be-eligible-for-bounty-auto-award-when-the-reason-for-b&quot;&gt;ref4&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/78975/tentatively-award-bounty-better-control-of-auto-award&quot;&gt;ref5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="212798" LastEditorUserId="148698" LastEditDate="2022-09-22T21:31:00.727" LastActivityDate="2022-09-22T21:31:00.727" Title="A Proposal for a Change to the Bounty Rules" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|bounty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6383" CreationDate="2022-09-08T20:06:33.287" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3 Does someone have data on how many bounties are not awarded each year?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Data on bounties is available in the votes table of the database.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The easiest way would be to count the number of bounties that awarded zero answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to figure out the bounties that are half points, I believe this is not easy to see. Possibly you could work it out by doing some bookkeeping and for each user that has awarded bounties you compute how much their reputation score should be and how much the score actually is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively you could create a web crawler that searches the bounties granted by each person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, the bounty on the specific case of this question is still visible. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/285740/noone?tab=bounties&amp;amp;sort=offered&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/285740/noone?tab=bounties&amp;amp;sort=offered&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I wonder whether this is also available in the database, it seems to be not the case. One thing that I am sure about is that the information of the user profiles shows the correct value of bounties granted and awarded, with that I mean that you can see values of 25 being awarded I  the profile of the receiver while the granter has awarded 50 for the same question)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2022-09-08T20:11:42.610" LastActivityDate="2022-09-08T20:11:42.610" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6385" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6386" CreationDate="2022-09-15T09:46:52.450" Score="3" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few Mathematical Statistics/Statistical Learning Theory blogs I enjoy reading, and wanted to ask on the main site for recommendations of similar theory-focused Statistics/ML blogs, as I thought it may interest not only me but many other visitors of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, I wanted to ask a &amp;quot;big-list type&amp;quot; Community Wiki question along those lines :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for  blogs that focus on the mathematical theory of Statistics and Machine Learning, ideally at a research or advanced level.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The blog doesn't have to be solely about these topics but ideally most of the posts would be exposing the mathematical theory of an idea/concept/algorithm that is either directly or closely related to them. Here are two examples of what I'm looking for (&lt;strong&gt;Disclaimer : I have no affiliation with any of these people&lt;/strong&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gregorygundersen.com/blog/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gregory Gundersen's blog&lt;/a&gt; which neatly presents the theory of many well-known algorithms and results in Statistics, such as Conjugate Gradient Descent, Ordinary Least Squares, Hidden Markov Models... Some of the posts contain illustration with available source code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://francisbach.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Francis Bach's Machine Learning Research blog&lt;/a&gt; which introduces some of his research topics and results in a more accessible way than reading his papers. There are many excellent in-depth writings about kernel methods, optimization algorithms for Machine Learning and general Statistical Learning Theory.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please limit your answer to less than 2-3 links and provide a short description for each blog, as above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before posting this question, I had concerns about it possibly violating some guidelines related to spam, self-promotion, conflict of interest or something related. I couldn't figure out if were the case by reading the FAQ, so I wanted to ask about it on meta first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, as I looked to see if similar questions had been asked before, I found these two similar questions : &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/29386/which-machine-learning-blog-do-you-recommend&quot;&gt;Which Machine Learning blog do you recommend ?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/114/what-statistical-blogs-would-you-recommend&quot;&gt;What Statistical blogs would you recommend ?&lt;/a&gt; which have been closed as &lt;strong&gt;off-topic&lt;/strong&gt;, and the reason is not clear to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I want to know : Why have these two questions been closed ? Would my question count as off-topic and be closed as well ? If so, why, and is there any way I can salvage it ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="305654" LastActivityDate="2022-09-21T09:16:24.087" Title="Why are these blog recommendations questions considered off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|closing-questions|questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6385" CreationDate="2022-09-15T13:11:11.690" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/references&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;references&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;references&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;references-container&quot;&gt;references&lt;/a&gt; where you can find many threads about book recommendations, I guess the questions about blogs could fall into this bucket as well. The question you linked was closed because of being opinion based and so does not fit the Q&amp;amp;A site format. This would be the case of questions like &amp;quot;what are the best/your favorite blogs about statistics&amp;quot;, but I don't see any problem with asking for &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2022-09-15T13:11:11.690" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6387" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-17T16:40:58.380" Score="3" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;  I have found out that my request below has nothing to do with this site.  But because there are at least a few folks occasionally posting &lt;em&gt;Mathematica&lt;/em&gt; code, I'll shortly provide an answer with approaches to obtain more easily readable &lt;em&gt;Mathematica&lt;/em&gt; code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For both Mathematica.StackExchange.com and Math.StackExchange.com there is an available button to format &lt;em&gt;Mathematica&lt;/em&gt; code with the installation instructions found at &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathematica.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1043/additional-useful-buttons-for-our-m-se-editor&quot;&gt;https://mathematica.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1043/additional-useful-buttons-for-our-m-se-editor&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This allows &lt;em&gt;Mathematica&lt;/em&gt; coding for Greek letters such as &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\alpha$&lt;/span&gt; to be displayed as α  rather than the default &lt;code&gt;\[alpha]&lt;/code&gt; which makes for reading the code much nicer.  Here is where that button shows up (with that button highlighted with a red rectangle):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/H7k1Y.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/H7k1Y.png&quot; alt=&quot;Example of a Mathematica editor screen&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are not hordes of folks providing &lt;em&gt;Mathematica&lt;/em&gt; code on this site and the same goes for Math.StackExchange.com but that site does provide that functionality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question is: Should or can such a formatter be added for this site?  (Or is such functionality already available and I'm just not aware of that?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79698" LastEditorUserId="79698" LastEditDate="2022-09-22T16:44:52.447" LastActivityDate="2022-09-23T15:54:32.590" Title="Should or can a formatter for Mathematica code be added?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6385" CreationDate="2022-09-19T11:13:00.913" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not entirely against the formation of a community wiki Q&amp;amp;A about relevant blogs for some topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, one critical note: these things often tend to end up in long lists of answers that are not very well currated, not uniform, and difficult to browse through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, the voting system makes that answers will appear in an order that makes little sense (often it is just the oldest answers that end up with the most votes and get on top).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would advise placing this on a &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; wiki. Possibly wikipedia or some other wiki could provide this service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An option to make these type of q&amp;amp;a questions more dynamic and suitable here would be to have the questions that are tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/reference&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reference&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reference&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;reference-container&quot;&gt;reference&lt;/a&gt; being closed after some time. If somebody would have the same question as you 5 years later then they simply have to re-ask/duplicate the question. For these type of questions I would expect different answers when the time is 5 years later. But unlike wiki-type of websites the questions and answers don't evolve much on this website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe there are some guidelines about questions that are time dependent (and I believe questions about references/blogs relate to it). Time-dependent questions are in general not regarded suitable for the q&amp;amp;a format, but I can not find a reference that explains this better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2022-09-21T09:16:24.087" LastActivityDate="2022-09-21T09:16:24.087" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6385" CreationDate="2022-09-21T06:19:50.470" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;These questions tend not to be a good fit for the site format.  If one is not extremely careful, these tend to devolve into opinion polls, where the primary criterion for voting is what people consider to be a &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; blog.  The typical fate of such questions is that they tend to not age well; over time, they become uncurated, out of date, and hard to salvage.  Also, voting on these answers is heavily affected by which answers were posted first.  I don't think the Stack Exchange format works well for recommendations that are based largely on opinion.  You could always try asking in the site chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the help page &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&lt;/a&gt;, especially &amp;quot;your answer is provided along with the question, and you expect more answers&amp;quot;.   If you want to see some example policies from other sites around the Stack Exchange network, the following might be of interest to you: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2&quot;&gt;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2665/34181&quot;&gt;https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2665/34181&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as community wiki, you can find one perspective here (caveat: it might not 100% match the views of some here on this site): &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/08/19/the-future-of-community-wiki/&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/08/19/the-future-of-community-wiki/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2921" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2022-09-21T09:13:34.443" LastActivityDate="2022-09-21T09:13:34.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6390" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6392" CreationDate="2022-09-21T09:11:29.850" Score="6" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I occasionally see reasonable questions get deleted by their authors after being closed as duplicates. Here's one recent example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/588900/does-fixed-effect-and-mixed-effect-model-have-same-prediction&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/588900/does-fixed-effect-and-mixed-effect-model-have-same-prediction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that this undermines the value of the close-as-duplicate system; having linked questions makes finding good answers here easier - and probably via google too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this a situation in which voting to undelete the question is acceptable and a good idea?&lt;/strong&gt; I'm aware of the conditions in which we &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt;, but I've not seen much advice about when we &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also aware that authors cannot delete their question if it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has an answer with upvotes (even if that answer has a net zero or negative score)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has an accepted answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has multiple answers (even if there are no upvotes)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has an answer with an awarded bounty&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has at least one other question that is marked as a duplicate of your    question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quoted text above is from  &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5221/how-does-deleting-work-what-can-cause-a-post-to-be-deleted-and-what-does-that&quot;&gt;How does deleting work? What can cause a post to be deleted, and what does that actually mean? What are the criteria for deletion?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="121522" LastEditDate="2022-09-21T12:05:02.770" LastActivityDate="2022-09-21T13:54:26.547" Title="Should we undelete reasonable questions that have been closed as duplicates?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6390" CreationDate="2022-09-21T13:34:18.100" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did this on Math.SE yesterday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question was (correctly) closed as a duplicate. Because I had made some incorrect assumptions in the question, I decided that it would be best to delete it and keep newcomers from reading the incorrect information and skipping the comment pointing out the mistake (without giving a correction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would expect Math.SE to respect my decision to delete, and I expect the same from Cross Validated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247274" LastActivityDate="2022-09-21T13:34:18.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6390" CreationDate="2022-09-21T13:54:26.547" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is not enough benefit of keeping such questions to undelete them. Yes, they may make finding relevant questions easier, but on another hand, they add to the overall &amp;quot;noise&amp;quot; of the multiple questions and answers we have. I would say that there is no harm in keeping them, but also no harm if they are deleted. We want to keep the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/32311/do-not-delete-good-duplicates&quot;&gt;good duplicates&lt;/a&gt;, not all the duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10841/how-does-duplicate-closing-work-when-is-a-question-a-duplicate-and-how-should&quot;&gt;See also&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Should duplicates be deleted?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, no: most duplicates stay around. Having multiple copies of&#xA;the same question with different wording is useful as search fodder,&#xA;because people looking for an answer may use different wording too. On&#xA;the other hand, duplicates that are word-for-word copies or that are&#xA;so poorly written that they are not useful may be deleted by users&#xA;with sufficient privilege.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So again, we want to keep most of the duplicates, but there is no need to keep them all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2022-09-21T13:54:26.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6387" CreationDate="2022-09-22T08:05:20.333" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We as a community, or as moderators, have no way of adding it. It is a kind of change that can be done by the StackExchange developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I see no reason for adding it. Mathematica is far from the most popular among statisticians and data scientists. Moreover, we support &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\TeX$&lt;/span&gt; and if you look at the posts, most of the users have no problem with using it, so it would solve a problem for a small group of users who know Mathematica but don't know &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\TeX$&lt;/span&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2022-09-22T08:05:20.333" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6394" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-22T20:07:40.237" Score="13" ViewCount="423" Body="&lt;p&gt;The moderators recently received the following message from the SE community team:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you may know, on sites where MathJax is enabled, the &lt;code&gt;/editing-help&lt;/code&gt; page includes a LaTeX section, with a &amp;quot;MathJax help&amp;quot; link at the bottom of it. By default, this link points to the URL &lt;a href=&quot;https://legacy-www.math.harvard.edu/texman/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://legacy-www.math.harvard.edu/texman/&lt;/a&gt;. However, I recently discovered that this URL can be customized for each site that has MathJax enabled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, only a few sites have actually had this changed (several of them link to a post on their own Meta, though a few link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;Math.SE's MathJax guide&lt;/a&gt;). I wanted to reach out to your mod team to see if this is something that would be useful for your community as well. (Ideally, it'd link to a post on your site's Meta tailored to your own community.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, you (or a community member) should start a discussion on your Meta site about what this &amp;quot;MathJax help&amp;quot; link on your site should point to. Anyone can then post an answer suggesting what this link should point to (whether it's an existing post on your own Meta site or something else). Once there's consensus from the community, you can add the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/status-review&quot; class=&quot;post-tag moderator-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-review&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;status-review&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;status-review-container&quot;&gt;status-review&lt;/a&gt; tag to bring it to the CMs' attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned, the link in question appears &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/editing-help#latex&quot;&gt;here on the Editing Help page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Learn more: &lt;a href=&quot;https://legacy-www.math.harvard.edu/texman/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MathJax help&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What should this &amp;quot;MathJax help&amp;quot; link point to?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A new or existing post on this meta, explaining how to use MathJax on Cross Validated?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference&quot;&gt;Math.SE's MathJax guide&lt;/a&gt; (or a guide on another meta site)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The default link (&lt;a href=&quot;https://legacy-www.math.harvard.edu/texman/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://legacy-www.math.harvard.edu/texman/&lt;/a&gt;)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some other useful resource?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to post your suggestions, one per answer. Please upvote the answer(s) you support the most.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="148698" LastEditDate="2023-06-07T02:45:09.237" LastActivityDate="2023-06-07T02:45:09.237" Title="What should the &quot;MathJax help&quot; link (in the LaTeX section of the &quot;Editing Help&quot; page) point to?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|math-display|hyperlinks|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6387" CreationDate="2022-09-22T21:14:39.130" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When answering questions on this site with &lt;em&gt;Mathematica&lt;/em&gt; code, Greek letters and special characters (which are valid in variable names in  &lt;em&gt;Mathematica&lt;/em&gt;) look like &lt;code&gt;\[Alpha]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;\[Beta]&lt;/code&gt;, for example.  This can make the code harder to read and understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It turns out that the button I was asking for above has nothing to do with this site's management and depends only on a script that can be made to work on any of the StackExchange sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few ways to turn such characters in more readable characters with that script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;0.  Use a special website that does the conversion.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://steampiano.net/msc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://steampiano.net/msc/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can paste in text and all of the &lt;em&gt;Mathematica&lt;/em&gt; codes (like &lt;code&gt;\[Alpha]&lt;/code&gt;) get converted.  From that webpage:  &amp;quot;Some of these are mapped to characters in the Unicode character set, and can therefore be translated into Unicode, suitable for displaying outside Mathematica. Others, however, are in the Unicode Private area, and are displayed correctly only using Mathematica fonts.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1.  Install the script:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mathematica.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1043/additional-useful-buttons-for-our-m-se-editor&quot;&gt;https://mathematica.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1043/additional-useful-buttons-for-our-m-se-editor&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This gets you a button to convert such characters (selecting some text and then pressing the added button) but works currently only on Mathematica SE and Math SE (because those sites are specifically mentioned in the script and CrossValidated SE is not).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can then go to a &amp;quot;Your Answer&amp;quot; box on those sites (Mathematica or Math SE), type in your answer for CrossValidated, and then copy-and-paste it into &amp;quot;Your Answer&amp;quot; box on CrossValidated.  (Yes, that's not a very attractive approach.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Modify the script yourself.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This (in my opinion) is not for the faint at heart.  One can use a script editor such as Tampermonkey to add in the 1 line of necessary code to the above script:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// @include       https://stats.stackexchange.com/* &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(as discovered by @Scortchi-ReinstateMonica).  I am not recommending or giving more details to this approach but only give it as a possible alternative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3.  Wait until the authors of the script add in the above line of code.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then it will work on CrossValidated directly.  (I have asked the authors and am awaiting a response.)  If and when this happens, this will be the best alternative as it doesn't require installing things like Tampermonkey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="79698" LastEditorUserId="79698" LastEditDate="2022-09-23T15:54:32.590" LastActivityDate="2022-09-23T15:54:32.590" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6394" CreationDate="2022-09-23T07:20:11.877" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I'm all for having the link as &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\TeX$&lt;/span&gt; is heavily used on our site and while most of the users seem to be familiar with it, it's not all, and sometimes the knowledge is partial, for example often we see people writing things like &lt;code&gt;$X$ ~ $N(0, 1)$&lt;/code&gt; because they don't know the &lt;code&gt;\sim&lt;/code&gt; symbol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the best solution would be to have our own post surfacing the notation that is most commonly seen on CrossValidated.com, so related to probability, statistics, and machine learning. This would include things like &lt;code&gt;\sim&lt;/code&gt;, matrices, vectors, different fonts that can be used (blackboard, boldface), subscripts and superscripts, maybe &lt;code&gt;\operatorname&lt;/code&gt;, etc. The subset of the notation commonly used here seems to be much smaller than on Math.SE, so we probably could have a shorter but more focused tutorial linking to the Math.SE one for readers interested in more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a post already exists here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1604/instructions-on-how-to-use-latex-on-crossvalidated&quot;&gt;Instructions on how to use LaTeX on CrossValidated&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="148698" LastEditDate="2023-04-29T20:22:31.647" LastActivityDate="2023-04-29T20:22:31.647" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6387" CreationDate="2022-09-23T10:54:27.800" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think if I were writing Mathematica code to illustrate a statistical point for readers who probably aren't familiar with Mathematica, I shouldn't want to use Greek letters. On their own, they're only a small step towards mathematical notation, &amp;amp; while it would be nice to be able to write &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\sigma_1^2$&lt;/span&gt; rather than &lt;code&gt;sigma1^2&lt;/code&gt;, it feels to me as if &lt;code&gt;σ1^2&lt;/code&gt; is neither fish nor fowl.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A less subjective concern is that not all readers will have the necessary fonts installed on their system to render the Unicode characters properly, or at all. For example, on my 'phone I see a script &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\alpha$&lt;/span&gt;, &amp;amp; a 'white square' rather than &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\varphi$&lt;/span&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2022-09-23T10:54:27.800" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6398" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-23T11:08:17.853" Score="-4" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I'm having a problem with running neural network code presented in an online Python training course.  I've checked and double checked the code I've written/copied from the presentation, and it is verbatim to what the instructor presented.  I posed the question on Stack Exchange (I'm new, so forgive me for putting a question in the wrong place - I'm learning here).  I got a couple non-answers, more like questions and a request to see the code more fully.  During that exchange, StackExchange decided my question should be posted here on Cross Validated.  Shortly after that, Cross Validated closed the question because it did not fit the site's parameters, so now I'm back to ground zero and loosing confidence in the usefulness of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the site is not for Q&amp;amp;A between original posters and those trying to answer the question, then obtaining solutions to a question quickly come to a stand-still.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the site reposts a question to another location, and that new location deems the question out of bounds for the location and shuts the question down, that kills any hope of obtaining a helpful answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does one overcome these hurdles?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user368427" LastActivityDate="2022-09-26T05:38:22.607" Title="Obtaining answers with site imposed stumbling blocks that stifle and prevent communication and feedback" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6398" CreationDate="2022-09-23T14:09:11.513" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A sense of frustration is reflected here. So, it deserves few explication:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is imperative for the community to seek clarification from OP - it enhances the chance of receiving a meaningful answer. As long as it remains ambiguous or there is dearth of research effort, that would be unsalvagable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then comes how to ask a good question. Please check &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;How do I ask a good question?&lt;/a&gt;. Merely asking some programing fix wouldn't be tantamount to a good post, for example.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prior asking, it is apt to check the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tour&quot;&gt;scope&lt;/a&gt; of the site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A question is closed for &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;valid reason(s)&lt;/a&gt;. Once it is edited properly, then it would likely be reopened:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any closed question that receives one reopen vote by a user with sufficient reputation is automatically added to a reopen queue for community review. In addition, any question with significant edits that address the close reason(s) gets added to the reopen queue. If enough community members agree, the question will be reopened and can accept answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it is evident, this is a community driven Q&amp;amp;A site and not a forum. Everyone is here to help others. So, while it might be daunting a bit, it's not a point of dilemma. If the community didn't deem the post provided ample clarity or the question is not within the scope or it still lacks sufficient research, then it would face necessary action(s). And in each phase, OP does have the ability to make their posts more concise and suitable, answerable for the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastActivityDate="2022-09-23T14:09:11.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6398" CreationDate="2022-09-25T16:16:37.650" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;That seems like a mistake by Stack Overflow. We shouldn’t be closing questions as “off-topic due to being coding questions” when they have been migrated from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, I thought there was a way to block the migration or send it back, if Cross Validated (or any other Stack to which a question is migrated) deems the question to be off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t see your question, so I cannot judge if it is a clear question that can result in useful answers, but debugging a piece of neural network code seems completely within the scope of Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247274" LastEditorUserId="247274" LastEditDate="2022-09-26T05:38:22.607" LastActivityDate="2022-09-26T05:38:22.607" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6401" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-29T01:14:19.640" Score="0" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the top bar of this Cross Validated Meta site, I see that I have one gold, six silver, and five bronze badges. In my profile pages, however, I see one gold (fanatic), one silver (enthusiast), and six bronze badges (Autobiographer, Critic, Student, Suffrage, Supporter, Vox populi).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is there such a discrepancy?&#xA;1, 6, 5 vs. 1, 1, 6&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15997" LastActivityDate="2022-09-29T01:14:19.640" Title="Incorrect number of badges?" Tags="|discussion|badges|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6402" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6407" CreationDate="2022-09-29T06:50:28.653" Score="8" ViewCount="410" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/590488/discovering-groupings-of-descriptive-tags-from-porn&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Discovering groupings of descriptive tags from porn&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in a way that I felt avoided being overly explicit. I chose to mention that the question is about the analysis descriptive tags on porn media, rather than leave it open-ended about any generic variables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I am also curious about what rules, best practices, norms, and guidelines exist (or should be discussed here) for asking about the analysis of sexually explicit data. This seems relevant to me at least because I might like to ask more questions, but I don't want overstep on a topic that can inadvertently make people feel uncomfortable or unwelcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some basics I guidelines I followed in making the above post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No sexually-explicit images&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No links to explicit media (e.g. images, videos, audio)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No disclosure of private information&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No sexually-explicit language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No discriminatory language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No jokes or sarcasm&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Avoiding sexually-explicit language is perhaps the most difficult to decisively draw the line on. I imagine that medical terminology &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be fine if carefully introduced. Another approach might be to abstract the details of the language (e.g. &lt;em&gt;Suppose &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$X_1$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$X_2$&lt;/span&gt; are descriptive tags on images of porn, then how can I quantify their statistical dependence?&lt;/em&gt;). I imagine the guideline of avoiding jokes or sarcasm may not have complete agreement from SE users, but I made that choice to help prevent the question's earnestness or respectfulness from being doubted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your thoughts and guidance are appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="368930" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2022-09-29T23:26:36.207" LastActivityDate="2022-09-30T08:24:07.783" Title="How to ask statistical questions about sensitive or taboo topics (e.g. pornography)?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6403" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-29T06:56:59.100" Score="9" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;We regularly get questions about log transforming dependent variables, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/62093168#62093168&quot;&gt;in some quarters appears to be seen as a magic silver bullet that solves all problems&lt;/a&gt;, because apparently, &amp;quot;everything is normally distributed after log-transforming&amp;quot; (which, to be explicit, is &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5447/1352&quot;&gt;not even useful&lt;/a&gt;). Here are a few useful prior threads in this vein (contributed by &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/62093277#62093277&quot;&gt;User1865345&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/62093996#62093996&quot;&gt;mkt&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/18844/1352&quot;&gt;When (and why) should you take the log of a distribution (of numbers)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/298/1352&quot;&gt;In linear regression, when is it appropriate to use the log of an independent variable instead of the actual values?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/18480/1352&quot;&gt;Interpretation of log transformed predictor and/or response&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/576504/1352&quot;&gt;Interpreting log-log regression with log(1+x) as independent variable&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6349/1352&quot;&gt;this analogous question on imbalanced data&lt;/a&gt;, it probably does not make sense to attempt to merge them into the One Question To Rule Them All As A Canonical Duplicate. However, I would propose that we collect a couple of useful threads on this topic here (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/data-transformation%2blogarithm?tab=Votes&quot;&gt;threads tagged both &amp;quot;data-transformation&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;logarithm&amp;quot; might be a good start&lt;/a&gt;) to use as duplicate targets, depending on the nuance of the newly posted question, and ask the moderators to slap the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faq&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;faq&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;faq-container&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; tag on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2022-09-29T06:56:59.100" Title="Profusion of threads on log transform - find candidates for FAQ tag" Tags="|discussion|meta-faq|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6402" CreationDate="2022-09-29T07:02:02.840" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be honest, I would have preferred your question to have been more generic. There are lots of other places where users can provide tags (for instance, all StackExchange sites), and nothing would have stopped you from formulating your question using SE as an example. As it is, this question is almost certain to hit the Hot Network Questions list, and we do have minors on lots of SE sites. Not a happy outcome, in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this is what I would propose for any future question about sexually explicit topics: try to cast them in a less controversial way. I think this should be possible in most cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2022-09-29T07:02:02.840" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6402" CreationDate="2022-09-29T07:23:52.543" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Honestly, I see no problem with your question. It was a good idea from your side to deliberately avoid giving an example that would use explicit language. The question was later edited to remove mentioning &amp;quot;porn&amp;quot; from it. While I agree that mentioning it in the title was not necessary, as about the body, such information might in some cases give important context for understanding the question, so personally, I &lt;em&gt;wouldn't&lt;/em&gt; remove such information from the question unless it is of explicit nature by itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I don't think any topic should be taboo on our site. Pornography (legal or illegal) can be a valid research topic. Given that, I don't think we should censor ourselves here as long as the content of the question is not offensive or explicit and the question is on-topic regarding statistics and machine learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="35989" LastEditDate="2022-09-29T10:33:46.983" LastActivityDate="2022-09-29T10:33:46.983" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6402" CreationDate="2022-09-29T19:28:30.067" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the subject matter of a statistical analysis is unsavoury, or otherwise emotive, best to not go into more detail than you need to. I agree with @StephanKolassa here—your statistical question in this case is generic enough that you lose nothing from not mentioning that it has to do with pornography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you do need to go into some detail—and @Tim is surely right that no topic should be taboo—be serious, &amp;amp; use neutral, formal vocabulary. (It's a small point, but &amp;quot;pornography&amp;quot; sets the tone better than the slangy &amp;quot;porn&amp;quot;.) If the topic also invites controversy, resist any temptation to editorialize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, the expectation is that you'll be attentive to other users' concerns, &amp;amp; willing to work together towards a mutually satisfactory resolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2022-09-30T08:24:07.783" LastActivityDate="2022-09-30T08:24:07.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6408" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-30T15:23:38.393" Score="3" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few hours ago, I posted a comment and an answer to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/590626/1352&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; (deleted questions are only visible for users with enough rep). Someone had found a nonstandard parameterization of the negative binomial distribution in some paper; I commented whether they could add a link to the paper and a few minutes later answered that the parameterization was nonsensical, because the PMF would be convex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the question seems to have disappeared down the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;memory hole&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not among the questions on the main page. It's not among the &amp;quot;recently deleted&amp;quot; questions. I see neither my comment nor my answer in my profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not the first time something like this has happened to me. It's a bit frustrating to invest a couple of minutes on a post and then have it simply disappear. Can anyone (mods?) tell me what is going on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="1352" LastEditDate="2022-09-30T15:33:40.283" LastActivityDate="2022-09-30T15:37:29.937" Title="Disappearing questions?" Tags="|bug|deleted-questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6408" CreationDate="2022-09-30T15:37:29.937" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question does appear in the list of recently deleted questions available to diamond mods, but the site has &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/590602/how-to-derive-the-deviance-of-binomial-model&quot;&gt;no record that you answered.&lt;/a&gt;  (Interestingly, it does not show up in the public list of recently self-deleted posts at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tools?tab=Delete&amp;amp;daterange=last2days.&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tools?tab=Delete&amp;amp;daterange=last2days.&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before you tried to submit your answer, either the original poster deleted their question or it was closed.  This is unusual but it does happen regularly, especially with questions showing signs that they need improvement (as indicated by two earlier comments to the question in this case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you encounter this situation, if you think of immediately copying and pasting your answer to a safe place to preserve it, you can ask for moderator intervention to undelete the original post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2022-09-30T15:37:29.937" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1604" CreationDate="2022-10-03T00:51:13.333" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably the easiest option is offered in the Operations Research site's MathJax FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://or.meta.stackexchange.com/a/372/51&quot;&gt;How do I use MathJax on this site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That answer lists three tools, the last one, MathPix, will convert a PDF to MathJax. After conversion little or no editing is required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OR's FAQ isn't as huge as the one at Math.SE, but it is probably closer to statistics than the ones offered at &lt;a href=&quot;https://quantumcomputing.meta.stackexchange.com/a/76/278&quot;&gt;Quantum Computing&lt;/a&gt; or other sites. If CV creates their own MathJax FAQ (which they should) they can provide links to the other sites MathJax FAQs at the end of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="197829" LastActivityDate="2022-10-03T00:51:13.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6411" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-04T10:07:03.850" Score="44" ViewCount="423" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today, it has been noted (by &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/62129623#62129623&quot;&gt;Nick Cox&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/18/ten-fold&quot;&gt;Ten Fold&lt;/a&gt;) that recently Dr. Bruce E. Trumbo, professor emeritus of statistics, biostatistics, and mathematics, author of two books, and most prominently &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/85665/bruceet&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt; of the top users in our community, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/springfield-il/bruce-trumbo-10852976&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;passed away&lt;/a&gt; at his home on July &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$8, 2022.$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was a prolific teacher and a magnificent explainer that was reflected in his numerous posts here. As summed &lt;a href=&quot;https://magazine.amstat.org/blog/2022/10/01/obituaries-for-october-2022/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bruce loved to teach and devoted his life to teaching and learning. His teaching spanned seven decades. He taught his last class at CSU East Bay the week before the first Bay Area COVID-19 lockdown. After leaving the university, he continued to teach on the Stack Exchange website as BruceET, answering more than 3,000 probability and statistics questions; he often included R code for demonstration purposes. Through these efforts, Bruce earned 49,382 reputation points, placing him in the top 0.48 percent overall. His impact was impressive; he reached ~2.6 million people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the sake of cognizance of the entire community, this has been reported here. His absence will be felt here and he will be missed greatly. For the years to come, his posts would inevitably help many.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastActivityDate="2022-10-04T10:07:03.850" Title="Regarding the passing away of Bruce E. Trumbo" Tags="|discussion|user-accounts|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6412" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6413" CreationDate="2022-10-09T02:05:33.500" Score="1" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;This closed question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/140463/can-the-likelihood-take-values-outside-of-the-range-0-1#:%7E:text=Likelihood%20must%20be%20at%20least,it%20may%20also%20be%20positive.&quot;&gt;Can the likelihood take values outside of the range[0,1]&lt;/a&gt; comes up when I search Google for &amp;quot;likelihood greater than 1&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I recently learned in my course that it can not be.&#xA;How should I best ask for clarification on why the answer here, that it can be, is wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="284610" LastActivityDate="2022-10-09T06:07:00.450" Title="What is the best way to ask why an old answer to a closed question is wrong?" Tags="|support|homework|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6412" CreationDate="2022-10-09T06:07:00.450" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's at stake here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP has doubt regarding the veracity of an answer to a question that has been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now OP needs clarification. What could be done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Comment!&lt;/strong&gt; Seriously, leave a comment to the post seeking clarification re OP's concern. The poster, if needed, would surely respond or(and) might edit the post, if necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; If the user is no more in the site, then still leave a comment behind, for there could be others who could notice and respond to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Ask a follow-up question.&lt;/strong&gt; Explain the concern in a new question re any assertion made in the answer to the previous question. But make sure to explicitly reason as to why it's not a duplicate. That is, it is to be asked with clarity why, at the very first place, the concern is legit and that warrants a different post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; Also, one thing to be noted is to why the original question was closed: it was marked duplicate. So, one can resort to that question for more info.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, one more I would like to add is that if a post is wrong or disseminating misleading assertions, chances are there would be responses from the community: it's highly likely the errs don't remain overlooked from the vigil eyes, if there is any error at the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Interact with the poster airing the concern primarily by resorting to comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some related posts across our sister sites in the same vein:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/128449/how-to-ask-for-clarification-of-an-answer&quot;&gt;How to ask for clarification of an answer? &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/110216/what-should-i-do-if-i-want-more-clarifications-about-an-answer-posted-on-an-old&quot;&gt;What should I do if I want more clarifications about an answer posted on an old question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4108/clarify-an-old-answer&quot;&gt;Clarify an old answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14154/how-to-ask-for-clarification-on-a-very-old-answer&quot;&gt;How to ask for clarification on a very old answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastActivityDate="2022-10-09T06:07:00.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6414" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6415" CreationDate="2022-10-09T19:40:56.033" Score="1" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if there is a way (e.g. a unique and stable ID), other than the full link, that one can use to cite a post, in the same vein as we can cite a journal article via its DOI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56940" LastActivityDate="2022-10-14T10:57:28.323" Title="Is there a way to cite a post other than providing the full link?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6414" CreationDate="2022-10-10T15:04:51.483" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As noticed in the comments, the shortest link is &lt;code&gt;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6414&lt;/code&gt; (this question), where the &lt;code&gt;questions/6414&lt;/code&gt; part of the URL got shortened. It can be obtained from the &amp;quot;share&amp;quot; button, but it also appends your user ID creating something like &lt;code&gt;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6414/35989&lt;/code&gt; where &lt;code&gt;35989&lt;/code&gt; is my user ID.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if I want to cite, say, this post within another post X, will it work by using only the key '/q/6414' in the &amp;quot;link&amp;quot; field of post X?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to use only the string &amp;quot;/q/6414&amp;quot; as a reference then I'm afraid it would be meaningful only to a small subset of users of this site that understand how its API works. It also does not mention which StackExchange (or other) site this part of the link refers to (maybe &lt;code&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/q/6414&lt;/code&gt;?). If the link needs to be useful as a reference, it needs to be meaningful for the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need a shorter link, you can always use one of many URL-shortening services available online. For example. Bitly created &lt;code&gt;https://bit.ly/3yvSSCJ&lt;/code&gt; for the link to your question. There are some downsides to URL shorteners; this article lists some of them. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/pros-and-cons-of-url-shorteners/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/pros-and-cons-of-url-shorteners/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2022-10-10T18:50:58.697" LastActivityDate="2022-10-10T18:50:58.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6414" CreationDate="2022-10-14T10:57:28.323" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The use of off-site URL shorteners has been discouraged for a long time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/113660/282094&quot;&gt;No URL Shorteners&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/205806/282094&quot;&gt;URL Shorteners cleanup&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our official URL shortener list is here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/109795/282094&quot;&gt;What shortened URLs are available through s.tk?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="197829" LastActivityDate="2022-10-14T10:57:28.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6417" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-21T16:30:29.367" Score="7" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure how LaTeX packages are loaded into StackExchanges like Stats, but I'm curious whether the multicolumn functionality can be added for arrays? I know some of the amsmath symbols are loaded since characters like &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\nabla$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\mathbb{F}$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\mathcal{S}$&lt;/span&gt; are loaded by default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, I was trying to implement this table as would appea&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$ &#xA;\begin{array}{c|cccc}&#xA; &amp;amp; \multicolumn{2}{c}{W=0} &amp;amp; \multicolumn{2}{c}{W=1}&amp;amp; \\&#xA; &amp;amp; X &amp;amp; \bar{X} &amp;amp; X &amp;amp; \bar{X} \\ \hline&#xA;Y &amp;amp; a &amp;amp; b &amp;amp; r &amp;amp; s \\&#xA;\bar{Y} &amp;amp; c &amp;amp; d &amp;amp; u &amp;amp; v \\&#xA;\end{array}$$&lt;/span&gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that it was clear we depicted an X-Y relation stratified by groups according to W=0 and W=1, like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7W9aA.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7W9aA.png&quot; alt=&quot;Desired output&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastEditorUserId="44269" LastEditDate="2022-11-01T16:55:44.017" LastActivityDate="2022-11-01T16:55:44.017" Title="Possible to add multicolumn functionality to LaTeX mark down?" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6418" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6419" CreationDate="2022-10-23T21:10:50.703" Score="2" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I improve &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/593301/conditional-entropy-in-words&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question that has been downvoted? and now flagged as a duplicate of my previously closed question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The down vote help says &amp;quot;This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have spent hours trying to formulate this question ( as evidenced by the linked closed question.) Thus I discount lack of research as the reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus how is my question unclear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="284610" LastActivityDate="2022-10-23T21:23:27.877" Title="How to fix a question that has been flagged as a duplicate of closed question?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6418" CreationDate="2022-10-23T21:23:27.877" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question wasn't closed as unclear, it was closed as a duplicate. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/593134/conditional-entropy-in-pseudo-code&quot;&gt;The duplicate question has the answer to the question you ask&lt;/a&gt;, right in the first comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Substitute &amp;quot;H&amp;quot; for &amp;quot;E&amp;quot; in the tower formula for conditional expectation: there's nothing new to memorize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a complete answer to the new question. If you read further in the comments, we find the term of art &amp;quot;Law of Total Expectation&amp;quot; and a link to a Wikipedia article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I did not down-vote this question, it seems to fit the description &amp;quot;This question does not show any research effort.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastActivityDate="2022-10-23T21:23:27.877" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6420" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6421" CreationDate="2022-11-24T20:38:36.510" Score="5" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I see questions migrated from StackOverflow, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/596874/56940&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, where the user's account on Cross Validated seems (kind of) inactive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the Cross Validated account of the user in the link actually active? If not, If I answer this question, is the OP still able to accept/upvote my answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56940" LastActivityDate="2022-11-26T17:09:02.900" Title="Question migrated from StackOverflow with (or without?) OP account" Tags="|support|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6420" CreationDate="2022-11-24T20:52:18.533" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at this user's StackOverflow account, it is new as of today. He does not seem to have any other accounts in the SE system. The way this user is shown on CV is standard when he didn't yet make a user himself. He might very well visit here now after the migration ... and then the account could be active. It's up to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2022-11-26T17:09:02.900" LastActivityDate="2022-11-26T17:09:02.900" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6422" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-07T11:46:42.363" Score="24" ViewCount="1148" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you may be aware, over the last week Stack Overflow has been plagued by some users' feeding questions posted there into the chat-bot '&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ChatGPT&lt;/a&gt;' then copy-&amp;amp;-pasting its responses into purported answers. This practice has now been prohibited on S.O. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/temporary-policy-chatgpt-is-banned&quot;&gt;Temporary policy: ChatGPT is banned&lt;/a&gt;), &amp;amp; may yet be prohibited network-wide (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/384396/ban-chatgpt-network-wide&quot;&gt;Ban ChatGPT network-wide&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After reviewing answers since 30th Nov. (when ChatGPT was launched), I'm confident that there's been only a single case of this on Cross Validated up till now. So no cause for alarm: but if an answer does raise your suspicions please flag it as &amp;quot;in need of moderator attention&amp;quot;—we'd like to know even in the unlikely event that it's a useful one. (And of course be advised that it's probably not worth your while to put much effort into engaging with the answerer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There've been three more now (7th Dec.)—from the same account, in quick succession. I note that four people have wasted their time writing comments asking for clarification or challenging the &amp;quot;answers&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of 12th Dec. we've still had a total of only twelve or thirteen, from five accounts. It doesn't seem we're going to suffer as S.O. has, though I note that ChatGPT has been at operating at full capacity for the last few days &amp;amp; is no longer accepting new accounts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2022-12-12T15:27:50.990" LastActivityDate="2023-02-21T22:32:03.483" Title="What to do about answers written by ChatGPT" Tags="|discussion|moderation|policy|low-quality-posts|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="39" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6422" CreationDate="2022-12-07T18:42:04.437" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sharing an example—of an answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/66407/17230&quot;&gt;Confidence interval for Uniform($\theta$, $\theta + a$)&lt;/a&gt; generated by ChatGPT. I think it will be agreed that it's either wrong or nonsensical in large part &amp;amp; entirely unhelpful; while being to all appearances worth spending one's time in reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue here is that the confidence interval you derived relies on&#xA;the assumption that &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$Z - Y \le a\sqrt[n]\gamma$&lt;/span&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[It's not an assumption at all, but a statement of when the confidence set is empty.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this assumption&#xA;does not hold, then the interval &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$[Z -ad_2, Y -ad_1]$&lt;/span&gt; is not&#xA;guaranteed to be a valid confidence interval for &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\theta$&lt;/span&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[The O.P.'s interval &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; valid in the technical sense that matters here.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to fix this issue would be to derive a different confidence&#xA;interval that is valid for all values of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$Z$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$Y$&lt;/span&gt;, rather than just&#xA;for those satisfying &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$Z - Y \le a\sqrt[n]\gamma$&lt;/span&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Again, the O.P.'s interval is valid for all &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$Z$&lt;/span&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$Y$&lt;/span&gt;, &amp;amp; &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$Z - Y \le a\sqrt[n]\gamma$&lt;/span&gt; is the problematic case.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To do this, you&#xA;could start by deriving the distribution of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$Z$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$Y$&lt;/span&gt; directly,&#xA;rather than using the fact that they are sufficient statistics for&#xA;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\theta$&lt;/span&gt;. This would allow you to find a valid confidence interval for&#xA;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\theta$&lt;/span&gt; without making any assumptions about the relationship between&#xA;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$Z$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$Y$&lt;/span&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[The distribution of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$Z$&lt;/span&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$Y$&lt;/span&gt; is what it is, regardless of how you derive it; their being sufficient has nothing to do with it (nor did the O.P. claim otherwise).]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, you could try to find a different set of sufficient&#xA;statistics for &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\theta$&lt;/span&gt; that do not have the issue you have&#xA;identified. This would also allow you to derive a valid confidence&#xA;interval for &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\theta$&lt;/span&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Finding different sufficient statistics loosely describes what you need to do, but too loosely to be of any help.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've carefully read a score of answers now; a pool of those generously provided by new users over the last week or so, and others generated by me from actual C.V. questions. One could be called useful&lt;sup&gt;†&lt;/sup&gt;; the rest either missed the point, begged the question, or else were riddled with contradictions, non-sequiturs, or brazen confabulations. ChatGPT seems to do anything like a decent job only of answering straightforward, generic questions—of the kind we'd tend to say showed a lack of research in any case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;† The 'useful' one did give a correct explanation of when a paired vs an unpaired test would be appropriate in the particular context; but didn't pick up, as a human would have done, that the destructive testing process described ruled out the obvious way of carrying out a paired t-test, or suggest ways of pairing different experimental units.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2023-02-06T13:25:08.167" LastActivityDate="2023-02-06T13:25:08.167" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6422" CreationDate="2022-12-08T04:00:28.327" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;ChatGPT and similar large language models (LLMs) will revolutionise tech support. I  worked as a support engineer in the past, and I am &lt;em&gt;certain&lt;/em&gt; it will happen as a good chunk of tech support questions are just &amp;quot;careful definitions and links to documentation&amp;quot;. Are some of our question like that too? Let's face it, they are. Is a ChatGPT-like system therefore &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; for those answers? Yes. Should it be used? I want to say no because for me CV.SE is like a game, there is an exchange of curiosity and knowledge. I wouldn't play a pub quiz against someone using Google search and similarly I would think that using LLMs on CV.SE is cheating at best, trolling at worst. So, yeah, nuke those answers. The answers in the thread: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/974/&quot;&gt;What motivates people to answer questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; exemplify how a ChatGPT-like  system can be problematic and very distruptive for communities like CV.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11852" LastEditorUserId="11887" LastEditDate="2023-02-08T18:04:28.840" LastActivityDate="2023-02-08T18:04:28.840" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6422" CreationDate="2022-12-08T17:27:00.527" Score="6" Body="&lt;h3&gt;ChatGPT is harmful&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of stackexchange is to generate &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ChatGPT is creating a summary or average of &lt;em&gt;previous&lt;/em&gt; content and is able to formulate this with grammatically correct sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in addition, it can be nonsense as ChatGPT doesn't need to understand the question. Although this is not limited to bots and sometimes I wonder whether certain posters here are bots instead of human and are using stackexchange to try out algorithms on people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be useful to answer questions outside the scope of the website, but it is not useful for the answer and question format at stackexchange. So it should be recommended to not use this for generating answers. (On the other hand, spelling control and such things might be useful, so maybe variants of answer generators, that help to improve formulations and text, could be useful)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;ChatGPT is harmless&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been playing around with ChatGPT, for the moment it is able to write sentences that typically make sense in a certain context, but the content can be nonsense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically you can use any theorem or statement and have chatGPT prove the opposite by asking it to prove the opposite. In simple cases chatGPT will recognize it as a trick question and tell that it is wrong, but in complex cases it will just start a long verbose story ending with the conclusion that the statement is proven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some point we will easily recognize answers by chatGPT and downvote them or even block the users that are placing nonsense answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9tfID.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9tfID.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;example of nonsense from chatGPT&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;ChatGPT is useful&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of AI can help improve answers like improving spelling and the tone of posts. ChatGPT can write better than many people. (It only doesn't have much knowledge and logic, yet)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such tools are already used. For instance by user &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/-1&quot;&gt;'community'&lt;/a&gt; who uses it to detect low quality posts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZQt9I.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZQt9I.png&quot; alt=&quot;example of using AI by stackexchange itself&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2023-02-07T06:53:05.033" LastActivityDate="2023-02-07T06:53:05.033" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6427" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6428" CreationDate="2022-12-15T04:22:56.970" Score="4" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the title suggests, I saw this question from a new user &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/599114/how-do-i-solve-this-actuarial-science-problem-for-ex3&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The question was closed as self-study and I can understand why...on the surface it appears to be asking for someone to solve the question for them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cZOOA.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cZOOA.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what they are actually asking is what the notation is, which can be difficult to find given Euler's Number isn't something you can easily type into a Google search (googling &amp;quot;e&amp;quot; for example isn't helpful and the symbol &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$e$&lt;/span&gt; doesn't make that any more useful). Does this count if they are just asking for what this symbol is? I think this question is somewhere in a gray area, but maybe I'm overlooking the problem. I don't have a hardline stance on the subject, just curious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="345611" LastActivityDate="2023-01-01T17:47:59.757" Title="Why was this question closed if they are not directly asking for the answer of their homework?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|homework|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6427" CreationDate="2022-12-15T04:44:51.157" Score="12" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The title of the Question is &amp;quot;How do I solve this actuarial science problem for ex:3?&amp;quot; This is a self-study question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;While it's true that the body of the Question contains a grammatical question, the text of that question begins &amp;quot;sort of related, ...&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taken together, OP is asking primarily about how to do their homework. It's a self-study question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that it's not true that asking about how to solve a homework/exam problem is off-topic. Instead, someone asking for help with a self-study problem must also make a good-faith effort to show how they tried to solve the problem: what they know, what they've tried, and where they are stuck. Only questions that do not provide this information are closed. The lack of demonstrated effort is the reason that this question was closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2023-01-01T17:47:59.757" LastActivityDate="2023-01-01T17:47:59.757" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6427" CreationDate="2022-12-15T15:30:38.517" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Such questions ought to be moderated on their merits and not on any intentions we might impute to the OP.&lt;/strong&gt;  Whether it's &amp;quot;homework&amp;quot; is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the question is perfunctory – that includes true/false and multiple choice questions, as well as questions with no statistical context – that makes it &lt;em&gt;clearly&lt;/em&gt; a self-study question from &lt;em&gt;our&lt;/em&gt; perspective, regardless of how the OP is using it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a question – as in this example – is copied without appropriate context or preparation, rendering it meaningless or ambiguous, it doesn't matter whether it's considered self-study or not: it's not on topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therein is the problematic nature of objectively self-study questions: the OP usually cannot provide any kind of statistical objective or any deeper explanation of what they are hoping to achieve.  In most cases that reduces the question to mere calculation, often makes it a duplicate, and makes further clarification (on the part of the OP) impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="44269" LastEditDate="2022-12-19T19:42:34.613" LastActivityDate="2022-12-19T19:42:34.613" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6308" CreationDate="2022-12-20T21:16:24.350" Score="-8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found the selected answer exceedingly unfair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only possible audience for this self answered q/a is someone who is still learning about the topic at hand. They are struggling to ask a question for learning resources and it's very likely because they are early on the journey  to deeper knowledge and require guidance on how best to make it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For them, I'd like to say that the simple reality is - you won't know what you don't know.  But that's ok, instead of worrying about what you need to learn, think more deeply about what you want to do with what you learn.   What are your goals?  How will you utilize what you want to know?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try to be as short term and specific as possible, though some longer time frame context can help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't wish to answer that question (some don't), then the answer above will be your only alternative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="340812" LastEditorUserId="340812" LastEditDate="2022-12-28T11:27:20.947" LastActivityDate="2022-12-28T11:27:20.947" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6431" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6432" CreationDate="2022-12-30T10:14:06.653" Score="9" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that CV questions have a &amp;quot;cite&amp;quot; option that returns the BibTeX citation of the question. I just did a quick search in StackOverflow and Data Science SE and none of them have this option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does this work?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are they indexed later?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why does CV have this option while others don't?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="270023" LastEditorUserId="53690" LastEditDate="2023-01-04T20:31:13.500" LastActivityDate="2023-01-04T20:31:13.500" Title="Are CV citations indexed?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6431" CreationDate="2022-12-30T15:16:13.660" Score="13" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does this work?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clicking the &amp;quot;cite&amp;quot; button populates some elements of the webpage to BibTeX and amsrefs citation formats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are they indexed later?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indexed where? For whom? For what purpose? Some service somewhere probably scrapes these citations. On the other hand, these citations don't appear in Google Scholar, either because this Q&amp;amp;A site doesn't fit Google Scholar's criteria for inclusion, or Google simply hasn't gotten around to including it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why CV has this option while others don't?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, this thread is why we have a &amp;quot;cite&amp;quot; button -- we asked and SE implemented it: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4870/is-there-no-cite-tag-to-generate-a-bibtex-misc-entry-for-answers-on-cross-valida&quot;&gt;Is there no cite tag to generate a bibtex MISC entry for answers on Cross Validated?&lt;/a&gt; Other sites haven't asked for citation buttons, or SE has not chosen to implement it for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2023-01-01T16:55:52.110" LastActivityDate="2023-01-01T16:55:52.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6433" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-02T19:47:08.180" Score="4" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few minutes ago my review queue for low-quality posts was as in the figure below. After clicking on the red bullet I expected to see the flagged post but I couldn't see any, i.e. the queue was cleared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps this is normal behaviour but I wonder what it means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JiMnn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JiMnn.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56940" LastEditorUserId="56940" LastEditDate="2023-01-04T11:06:31.143" LastActivityDate="2023-01-04T11:06:31.143" Title="Why my Review queue for Low quality posts appears this way?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6435" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-04T10:34:28.673" Score="4" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a follow-up to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4283/56940&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; post and its related comments &amp;amp; answers, I wonder what's the correct action to take when we encounter the issue. For instance, I came across a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/473208/56940&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; that contains two answers from the same user and IMO they can be merged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is not clear (to me) how to flag this properly. Should we flag it as &amp;quot;in need of moderator intervention&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way Happy 2023 to all!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56940" LastActivityDate="2023-01-04T10:34:28.673" Title="Multiple answers to same question (follow-up)" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6436" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6437" CreationDate="2023-01-05T18:30:32.580" Score="5" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I earned hats on CV!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I earned &lt;strong&gt;secret&lt;/strong&gt; hats on CV!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where are these secrets divulged? This is very important stuff, people!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44269" LastEditorUserId="44269" LastEditDate="2023-01-11T21:25:16.307" LastActivityDate="2023-01-11T21:25:16.307" Title="Where can we see and learn about the Winter Bash 2022 hats?" Tags="|discussion|winterbash|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6436" CreationDate="2023-01-05T18:51:24.477" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am totally stealing the comment by @Sycorax to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/384707/winter-summer-bash-2022-hat-list-%ef%b8%8f-%ef%b8%8f&quot;&gt;There is an annual Meta.SE thread for revealing hats and their meanings&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you know. Knowledge is power. Power corrupts, and oops I just made you all a little more corrupt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44269" LastActivityDate="2023-01-05T18:51:24.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6438" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6439" CreationDate="2023-01-06T10:53:43.867" Score="10" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted a question on here recently that was closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9Rbp3.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9Rbp3.png&quot; alt=&quot;My closed machine learning question.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was unsure if it fit into this site anyway, so I'm fine with it being closed. But it left me wondering, what is an acceptable Machine Learning question on Cross Validated? The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic section&lt;/a&gt; of this site says Machine Learning is acceptable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EiABm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EiABm.png&quot; alt=&quot;Acceptable topics on Cross Validated.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's not clear to me what aspects of Machine Learning you're allowed to ask about. Can someone provide clarification?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363857" LastEditorUserId="363857" LastEditDate="2023-01-06T15:35:53.697" LastActivityDate="2023-01-06T15:35:53.697" Title="What Questions are acceptable in the Machine Learning section of Cross Validated?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|machine-learning|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6438" CreationDate="2023-01-06T11:55:22.933" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Re &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/machine-learning&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;machine-learning&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;machine-learning-container&quot;&gt;machine-learning&lt;/a&gt;, its acceptability had been unanimously discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2760/ml-questions-here-or-at-data-science?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;ML questions: here or at Data Science?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16/is-machine-learning-a-part-of-statistical-analysis&quot;&gt;Is machine learning a part of statistical analysis?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The scope of the site is crystal clear: anything pertaining to statistical concepts that OP listed above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming to the present context as to why the question was closed - the reason has been mentioned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because it is not about probability, statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, or data visualization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, the close voters couldn't churn out any statistical query in it. In fact, it was asking to compare two algorithms, their speed etc. Now, asking about algorithms is not forbidden provided there has to be a specific and explicit statistical query about it, which in this case, seemed to be at best not clear or outright absent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, it is further mentioned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In edge cases or for very opaque questions, it can be helpful to ask what OP's statistical content of the question is, which might prompt OP to revise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be that the close voters failed to comprehend any legit statistical query that OP tried to articulate. So, edit the post to clear it up what the relevant statistical content was!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing is not the end of the day; rather it's an opportunity to reframe the post so that it might be more comprehensible. It would go to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/reopen&quot;&gt;Reopen&lt;/a&gt; for the community to vet whether it was modified to an extent enough to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastActivityDate="2023-01-06T11:55:22.933" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6436" CreationDate="2023-01-06T15:17:10.353" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can find the Winter Bash 2022 Leaderboard at &lt;a href=&quot;https://winterbash2022.stackexchange.com/leaderboard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://winterbash2022.stackexchange.com/leaderboard&lt;/a&gt;. By the way, as far as the number of hats earned is concerned, Cross Validated got the 13th position!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56940" LastActivityDate="2023-01-06T15:17:10.353" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6441" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-16T08:40:01.290" Score="7" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;This weekend a question got asked about exploratory analysis and p-hacking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/602020/is-exploratory-data-analysis-fundamentally-at-odds-with-p-hacking&quot;&gt;Is &amp;quot;Exploratory Data Analysis&amp;quot; Fundamentally At Odds With &amp;quot;P-Hacking&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a broad topic to begin with and the question — in my opinion — is too long and lacks clarity. However, it's also an important and interesting topic, so instead of &amp;quot;Needs more focus&amp;quot; I voted to close and found threads that discuss the topic with eloquence and pointers to further resources, etc. I can only suggest one duplicate but in a comment to the question I linked to 5 (near) duplicates as it's hard to find close duplicates for a question that asks many sub-questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today the question has been re-opened. This is fine by me. It's possible that I misjudged the qualities of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would like to ask for some practical advice on how to calibrate my understanding of what &amp;quot;needs more focus&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;is a duplicate&amp;quot; and esp. at the intersection of these two cases. Searching for duplicates takes time and often it seems easier to write a new answer than to look for great existing answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related meta threads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2310/what-is-our-policy-on-merging-duplicate-questions&quot;&gt;What is our policy on merging duplicate questions?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2569/many-historical-duplicate-questions-how-to-pick-a-canonical-question&quot;&gt;Many (historical) duplicate questions - how to pick a &amp;quot;canonical&amp;quot; question?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure they address this case because the examples seem to be short questions with more obvious duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="237901" LastEditorUserId="237901" LastEditDate="2023-01-17T19:10:40.817" LastActivityDate="2023-01-17T19:10:40.817" Title="A broad question has many near duplicates — How to decide whether to suggest it for closing?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6441" CreationDate="2023-01-17T15:55:35.120" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I answer my question with a summary which incorporates advice from the comments and further reflection:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a question seems too broad/includes many sub-questions, it's better to flag it as lacking focus, even if some sub-questions already have answers. This provides helpful feedback to the OP and encourages them to write questions in a better way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &amp;quot;is a duplicate&amp;quot; option is meant for close duplicates. This is helpful not only to the OP but to anyone who happens upon the question later on looking for specific information/answers and doesn't need &amp;quot;context&amp;quot;.&lt;sup&gt;⭑&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Related threads are best linked to in a comment. Yes, not everyone reads comments but there is probably overlap between those who read comments and those who would be interested in reading more on the topic in question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⭑ By happy coincidence, today someone &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/602205/237901&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt; about exploratory vs confirmatory analysis. They didn't find the broad thread useful even though it contains the answer to this much more specific question (somewhere, if you read everything). But I happened to know that a nice &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/354538/237901&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; from @Ben discusses the exploratory vs confirmatory aspect, so I voted to close as a duplicate. Worked very well actually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="237901" LastEditorUserId="237901" LastEditDate="2023-01-17T19:09:05.353" LastActivityDate="2023-01-17T19:09:05.353" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6443" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-18T15:52:30.200" Score="10" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR The system promotes popular questions, but popular might not need to align with characteristics that are desirable. Especially complex and difficult questions might be very desirable, but difficult to showcase in a popular way. If we would want to changes this, then how can we do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw among the questions with bounties a question that interested me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/434561/&quot;&gt;How is EMSE derived for causal trees in Athey and Imbens (PNAS 2016)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I had a hard time to follow it (a bunch of formula's that don't make immediately sense to me, to be fair in light of my further &amp;quot;complaint&amp;quot;, these type of questions might be improved). It requires either previous knowledge or some amount of research effort to understand the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question had an answer, but I don't understand it enough at first glance in order to give it an up-vote. (and while working on my second glance, I think that I will only get it during my third or higher try).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine that this is the case for many other questions and many other people. Many interesting questions don't get attention, because we have a voting system that punishes them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;I know for my personal situation that some of the answers that I value myself as very good, are not very well received. And at the same time some answers that I value myself as very bad (or not much special) are very well received.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The consequence is that these type of posts that might be very good (although difficult to understand by most people), but receive much less attention (measured by up-votes, which is a system that has a strong positive feedback loop as popularity leads to more votes and popularity is acquired by votes).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The consequence of the up-vote system is that topics that are less popular or known, will receive less up-votes (obviously). It is questionable whether we want 'popular' votes to dominate the presence on the website. Those popular questions are often the simple questions (or the ones that got a boost via the 'hot network questions') and maybe, the network should turn towards a direction of improving the quality of more sophisticated questions and answers? (maybe the stackexchange software neural network that selects these hot topics should use a bit more randomness like adding an extra dropout layer? Or use a different way to evaluate the 'success' of it's actions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure whether it is possible to turn the direction of the website, and whether this is even desirable. Maybe answering simple questions is the formula that works well. And, it can be an interesting endeavor to make slightly simple questions even more simple with good answers (that's the area where I am placed, I can only hit a few of the difficult topics). But, the popularity of the simpler questions is overshadowing the more difficult questions, and I have a feeling that this doesn't value those questions in the right way. Popularity is not the sole measure of relevance, and certainly not of quality. If we want to improve quality, then maybe we should have more ways beyond the voting system that relies entirely on (self-reinforcing) popularity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2023-01-18T19:57:13.963" LastActivityDate="2023-01-18T23:59:55.493" Title="How to improve attention to interesting/advanced, but complex/difficult, questions?" Tags="|discussion|votes|participation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6443" CreationDate="2023-01-18T23:53:54.943" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been here for not quite long but I do have a taste of what HNQ does. So, count me in among the league of those users who feel exasperated when an HNQ bloats a mediocre question and it gets unnecessary number of upvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But before investing in too much, let's take a stroll. HNQ has been the centerpiece of debate among many of our sister sites and Meta since time immemorial, mostly for the reason you articulated. (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.superuser.com/questions/11712/dealing-with-low-quality-questions-that-end-up-on-hot-network-questions&quot;&gt;Dealing with low-quality questions that end up on Hot Network Questions&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/238420/prevent-questions-on-the-hot-list-from-being-upvoted-by-casual-visitors-only-re&quot;&gt;Prevent questions on the Hot List from being upvoted by casual visitors (only rep is from association bonus)&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/219922/what-is-the-goal-of-hot-network-questions&quot;&gt;What is the Goal of &amp;quot;Hot Network Questions&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/31508/what-is-the-goal-of-having-questions-from-math-se-in-the-se-network-hot-question&quot;&gt;What is the goal of having questions from Math.SE in the SE Network Hot Questions List?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12515/do-physics-hot-network-questions-help-or-harm-the-site&quot;&gt;Do Physics Hot Network Questions help or harm the site?&lt;/a&gt; etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Few points are noteworthy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; The intention of HNQ is to advocate the field among the wider community to popularize the field. To evoke interest among the non-users and lure those who aren't yet in the community. (And &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/220099/1266833&quot;&gt;entertainment&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; In pursuit of those, we witnessed not every time &amp;quot;popular&amp;quot; questions are synonymous to well-researched sophisticated conceptual/computational query that practitioners, veterans and students of that field would like at the outset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; There is the assertion that casual users who join only after viewing the HNQ would flood the posts with upvotes and so there a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/238420/prevent-questions-on-the-hot-list-from-being-upvoted-by-casual-visitors-only-re&quot;&gt;proposal&lt;/a&gt; was raised to prevent that. But it didn't go anywhere. IMO, it can be a reasonable issue to ponder about but would not jump to the conclusion that  this is the sole issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; Not every time HNQ posts are low-quality. Sometimes even though the original query is mediocre, the answers are are broadly appreciable (eg. Ben's post on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/590925/362671&quot;&gt;possibility theory&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Crux is that while HNQ can be flawed, it's not outright useless. How it can be fixed and any other issue are, however, not the relevant queries to be addressed here - those are for another debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming to the main query: how can we improve attention to the not so popular and yet the more useful, more conceptual and more intricate posts that are lurking in the deep vault of CV?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are my takes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Advocate our site among your peers!&lt;/strong&gt; Seriously, I urge you and all comrades of this community to advocate and disseminate the site among your colleagues, your social media influence sphere. Invite the professionals you are acquainted with. Invite your professors here. Draw in more professionals who can appreciate the genuine posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CV regularly tweets posts (different from HNQ) in its handle. Share those among your followers. We do have an envious number of veteran practitioners and big guns here. But we want way more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Award those unsung posts by putting bounty.&lt;/strong&gt; And why not? What are these reps worth for if not for uplifting other good posts? If you have come across any post that you feel the user has toiled and sewed meticulously to concoct a well-researched post, then reward it! Questions but not answered yet? Put bounty. Bring it to the center stage. Well-researched formal answers, properly cited answers, nitpicking yet formal derivations that were written years ago but only received paltry votes? Reward them! By doing so, you are necessarily infusing them with new lives. The posts would be revived again to be viewed by the present community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; This is more of a speculative lament: &lt;strong&gt;Adopt practices that potentially can make well-researched posts to HNQ.&lt;/strong&gt; Unfortunately, I haven't yet delved into what makes a post to HNQ apart from some quick votes. If it is so, then so be it. Quickly upvote those good piece of questions that seem to be very well-researched and conceptually rich and intricate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But imo, the goal should be to rope in more  veteran practitioners, professors and other advanced people who aren't in our site yet. After all, we are here to make a knowledgeable repository of statistics and that should include those advanced posts that otherwise get snubbed thanks to handful few users who could appreciate the worth or have the knowledge firsthand to respond. Increasing the knowledgeable base here would certainly be beneficial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, again, my humble opinion only. Perhaps let me stay here for a year or two to acquire more experience to provide a better commentary but for now these are the options that I can conjure up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-01-18T23:59:55.493" LastActivityDate="2023-01-18T23:59:55.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6445" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-21T08:22:00.593" Score="4" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;On Kaggle, recently there is a person who's been answering questions with what is likely customized AI.  It's not Chat GPT, but probably something more boutique / hand rolled, and possibly a result of a number of different contests which have been created to solve similar q/a problems on Kaggle.  This is an extremely well studied / well understood problem on Kaggle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's probably not just all AI but it's also likely the user is supplementing the material as well, via either more detailed prompts or just directly editing the material.  They are clearly an expert in this field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's sort of cool about what they're doing lately is that they're starting to answer questions deep in the weeds.  For example, they'll find a notebook that's been barely looked at by anyone and give deep and voluminous (and accurate!) feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a combination of Q/A and summary generation, but this is absolutely not upvote grubbing behavior.  They are already a GM with a huge number of gold medals and these postings will only marginally benefit their standing.   It's someone who's playtesting their AI and trying to help folks in the community at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me be clear - the answers are actually quite good and they've been getting a number of gold medals for their postings.   I frequently upvote the best ones myself.   However, I am somewhat concerned that they are not being entirely transparent about how the content is being generated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know there is a ban on posting ChatGPT answers.  I personally think Chat GPT should be allowed - but only if it's carefully cited / credited.  Other than that, I agree people shouldn't be allowed to plagiarise, which I think is a terribly immoral activity.  This goes for Chat GPT or any source material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about something that is the effort of effective Human-AI collaboration?  An expert working intelligently with AI that has been trained carefully to answer questions in a particular domain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally think if they cite that AI helped generate the answer it should be allowed.  Because of the cite, the answers will get careful scrutiny.  If the answers are awful, the user's credibility will suffer.  If the answers are good, more questions will get answered and we'll have an interesting chance to see what Human/AI collaboration is capable of.  AI developers will also have a chance to better train and test their toolsets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you could try to enforce a policy of just banning the answers completely, but given what I'm seeing out there lately - good luck with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="340812" LastEditorUserId="340812" LastEditDate="2023-01-21T08:54:04.660" LastActivityDate="2023-01-31T21:47:28.443" Title="What's the policy on Human/AI collaboration for answering questions?" Tags="|discussion|ai-stackexchange|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6445" CreationDate="2023-01-21T21:14:19.197" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The use of AI is already ubiquitous. Examples are spelling control or language improvement and programs that help searching for resources (e.g. Google search).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that it is not relevant &lt;em&gt;whether&lt;/em&gt; AI is used, and instead it is more about &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; it is used and &lt;em&gt;what result&lt;/em&gt; comes out of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example of a bad case: If you get questions/answers from a language model (which is currently far from being good at logic and able to answer substantively; it can create a related language for some given content, but it can not create the content itself, at least not when it is complex), and if they are posted unedited without care, then&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;what result:&lt;/em&gt; you might get an increase in nonsense responses*. Nonsense will be moderated in any case. Whether it is human created or AI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;how:&lt;/em&gt; you might get people answering questions without appropriately crediting resources. I am not sure how to credit an AI language model and whether this is possible at all. At least one might give information that the answer has been obtained with the help of some AI, (not if this is for correcting spelling, but yes if the AI created an important amount of the answer), but there are potentially original resources that are not credited. The novel language models that harvest all of the internet do not provide a good way to credit original resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess that, untill AI is able to appropriately credit resources, it is better to restrict the use of AI to trivial tasks (like correcting language) and not use it for creating publications/articles/answers/questions that tap into the intellectual property without crediting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But just as well as the bad stuff, you might also get good uses. I have found that chatGPT is able to improve my French writing by a lot (and probably it would do well with my English as well) and it is also good at correcting the tone of my texts. For people that are not great writers, a language model can be a good thing to improve their writing. Would you publish an article without having others check your writing? If no, then why not also use AI to help improve writing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the website here we regularly see problems with text in the form of images, equations that are poorly written and not in latex, or English that is at a low level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the point of view of the quality of the website it would not be bad to get this improved with AI. (From other points of view one might critise humans in using too easily some tools without improving themselves, but that is another discussion)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2023-01-23T15:00:13.087" LastActivityDate="2023-01-23T15:00:13.087" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6445" CreationDate="2023-01-22T19:10:31.183" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see a need, at the moment, for a specific anti-A.I. policy. Stack Overflow's ChatGPT ban was a consequence of their getting so many answers wholly written by ChatGPT that they could no longer afford the time to consider each on its merits; &amp;amp; that's not the situation we're in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, we oughtn't to, &amp;amp; don't, deal with low-quality content posted deliberately or negligently in the same fashion as with that posted in good faith, as an honest expression of someone's opinion. &amp;quot;If the answers are awful, the user's credibility will suffer&amp;quot;—no, we need to act quickly &amp;amp; firmly to stop other users' time being wasted by computer-generated dross. And users of our site haven't volunteered to take part in an experiment—any desire on the part of developers to &amp;quot;better train &amp;amp; test their tool-sets&amp;quot; must be satisfied as a by-product of constructive participation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2023-01-22T20:11:09.950" LastActivityDate="2023-01-22T20:11:09.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6448" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-26T05:10:07.253" Score="12" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;A strong majority of the questions I have seen on this site relate to technical aspects of statistics such as mathematics, algorithms, and sample design. I am curious if questions about ethics are on-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example of a question I am interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In healthcare we are often concerned with studying the quality of care and clinical outcomes. Patients come from a diverse range of backgrounds when they arrive in a clinical setting, and some of these backgrounds can be accounted for in the analysis. For minorities or under-represented populations there can be relatively few individuals per group, motivating the use of techniques such as mixed effects models rather than doing without pooling. Such techniques exhibit shrinkage in the sense of pulling the random effects sizes toward the fixed effect, which may or may not be biasing in an estimator sense. This shrinkage might result in underestimating how different some of these populations are, leading to decisions that decrease quality of care or clinical outcomes. Is there an ethical way to use mixed effects in an analysis of such populations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yet, I doubt this question is suitable for this site. Questions about ethics require systems of values which can differ in important ways between people, making potential answers subjective. It is also somewhat vague or open-ended. I think such a question is better answered outside of this site by each health authority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think of the on-topic-ness of questions about the ethics of applying statistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69508" LastEditorUserId="69508" LastEditDate="2023-01-26T05:19:28.153" LastActivityDate="2023-01-28T11:01:42.613" Title="Are questions about ethical use of statistics on-topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6448" CreationDate="2023-01-26T09:05:43.153" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't believe there's any precedent for ruling such questions out of scope. Their requiring statistical expertise to answer would be the general principle under which they're in scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The kind I don't think we want include questions that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;are too specific—say pertaining to the standards of an ethics&#xA;board at a particular institution&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ask us to resolve a conflict between statistical &amp;amp; extra-statistical&#xA;ethical imperatives. &amp;quot;If I don't do the p-hacking my boss insists on,&#xA;I may lose my job &amp;amp; not be able to pay for my son's violin&#xA;lessons&amp;quot;—write to the agony aunt at your newspaper of choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2023-01-26T09:05:43.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6448" CreationDate="2023-01-26T09:50:15.583" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The example that you mention is interesting, but it might be better to frame the question in a way such that it doesn't become a question about ethics of medicine and deals instead with the different aspects (among which one is the statistical aspect) separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A discussion about ethics is not on-topic here. For the specific example that you mention the discussion about ethics would also only muddle the technical approaches that are relevant in the discussion. The technical approaches are ontopic, but the discussion is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In principle questions that involve ethics are not off-topic, anything that is about statistics is on-topic, but the questions should not become broad, unclear, opinion, etc. It are those aspects that make questions about ethics in practice off-topic, but it is not the ethics that is in principle off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastActivityDate="2023-01-26T09:50:15.583" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6448" CreationDate="2023-01-26T12:41:41.720" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't recommend closing that question or migrating it to, say, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Philosophy&lt;/a&gt; SE site.  The ethical concerns are grounded in the properties of the analyses, which we can discuss here.  For example, the question is motivated by the assumption that using a mixed model will yield a biased estimate.  What methods are biased, how much, and in what manner, are things we can explore.  In the end, there will be different pros and cons for different choices; I don't think we should tell you that you are obligated to chose pro A over pro B given con B vs. con A, but by the time all of that is clear you will be equipped to make the appropriate decision yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2023-01-26T12:41:41.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6452" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-26T14:57:12.430" Score="10" ViewCount="87" Body="&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22year+in+moderation%22+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't eliminate the need for having &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/11/21/our-theory-of-moderation-re-visited/&quot;&gt;moderators&lt;/a&gt; altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as we say goodbye to 2022 (and where did January go, right?) and dive head first into 2023, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/V0TPg.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;exciting&lt;/em&gt; stats&lt;/a&gt;. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Cross Validated over the past 12 months:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Action&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Moderators&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Community¹&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;All comments on a post moved to chat&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;10&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answer flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,459&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;156&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answers flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;139&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,475&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Bounties canceled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;15&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comment flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,472&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;251&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments deleted⁷&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,379&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;6,064&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,057&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;666&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;57&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Escalations to the Community Manager team&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;16&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts bumped&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;8,300&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts deleted⁶&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,170&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;14,772&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts locked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;48&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;252&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;87&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;406&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts unlocked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;34&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Question flags handled⁵&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;953&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;527&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions closed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5,622&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,006&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions flagged⁵&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;258&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,344&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;30&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions migrated&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;80&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;20&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions protected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;65&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;14&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions reopened&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;299&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;41&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Revisions redacted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag highlight language set&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms created&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;26&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms proposed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;27&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tags merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;24&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;Close votes&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,586&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,843&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;First answers&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;79&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,494&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;First questions&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;491&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;11,830&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;Late answers&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;40&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,300&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;Low quality posts&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;80&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;725&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;Reopen votes&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;323&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;696&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁴: &amp;quot;Suggested edits&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;731&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,486&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;User suspensions lifted early&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users contacted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;23&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users deleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users destroyed³&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,337&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users suspended²&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;7&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;77&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Footnotes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &amp;quot;Community&amp;quot; here refers both to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;the membership of Cross Validated&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;diamonds next to their names&lt;/a&gt;, and to the automated systems otherwise known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/-1&quot;&gt;user #-1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;³ A &amp;quot;destroyed&amp;quot; user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/88994/what-is-the-difference-between-a-deleted-user-and-a-destroyed-user&quot;&gt;Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁵ Includes close flags (but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; close or reopen votes). Community can handle these flags by at least one person voting to close a question that has a close flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Further reading:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6271/2021-a-year-in-moderation&quot;&gt;2021: a year in moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can also check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/search?q=title%3A%222022%3A+a+year+in+moderation%22&quot;&gt;this report on other sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or peruse &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/386090/208518&quot;&gt;detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wishing everyone a happy 2023! ^_^&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72321" LastEditorUserId="72321" LastEditDate="2023-01-26T17:56:58.100" LastActivityDate="2023-01-26T17:56:58.100" Title="2022: a year in moderation" Tags="|discussion|moderation|statistics|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6453" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-27T09:05:28.010" Score="5" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was thinking about asking for academic references relative to conducting a survey on the human population that frequents a transit neighborhood (transit neighborhood may be particularly challenging to study, if I believe what my fellow researchers tell me), i.e. what kind of specific design survey method and design to use to reduce bias and non-response rate, etc. (e.g. should we avoid face-to-face interviews, should we go through intermediaries/gatekeepers, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, at first glance, it would be a social science question and not (entirely) a statistics question—so off-topic—, but I guess that other disciplines than social sciences (ecology, medicine, etc.) may have also survey methods specifically designed for some challenging contexts they may encounter. So I'm unsure if this kind of question would be really off-topic or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to waste my time writing a precise question for it to be eventually closed, and I certainly don't want to waste other people's time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any thoughts relatively to that? Would it be off-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164936" LastActivityDate="2023-01-27T09:05:28.010" Title="To what extent are questions about survey methodology and design appropriate?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6448" CreationDate="2023-01-27T11:15:48.577" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would add a simple point that questions can be ethical and technical at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a good or at least defensible idea to omit outliers? is a frequent example, where one simplified answer might start with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes possibly, if it is clear that an outlier is wrong and can't be corrected, or turns out to be irrelevant to your goals, but be clear about what you are doing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No almost certainly, if the motive is that such outliers are awkward or inconvenient for your actual or intended analysis&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- and what underlies the second point is a concern for being honest and realistic about the data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other examples could be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Binning variables where one motive is to reduce the possibility of tracing data points back to individuals (often desirable or even mandatory), but otherwise the usual statistical reaction is that such practice is throwing away information&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Blurring variables by adding noise where similar concerns arise&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Transforming variables where one concern (usually misplaced, but it exists) is that this amounts to changing the data, which would be wrong&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and perhaps above all&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The tension between &lt;em&gt;exploratory data analysis&lt;/em&gt; (advised or presented positively as looking at the data carefully to spot problems and possibilities not necessarily evident in advance) and &lt;em&gt;data snooping&lt;/em&gt; (advised against on several grounds)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Shady or dubious practices with multiple significance tests, where one dimension of concern is how that is statistically or scientifically honest, where honesty is ethical as well as technical&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leo Breiman has this advice on p.1 of his (excellent, but seemingly little known) text &lt;em&gt;Statistics: With a View Toward Applications&lt;/em&gt; (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main thing to learn about statistics is what is sensible and&#xA;honest and possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flagging &lt;em&gt;honest&lt;/em&gt; is a little unusual in such a text -- not that texts advocate the opposite! -- but it is totally in order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2023-01-28T11:01:42.613" LastActivityDate="2023-01-28T11:01:42.613" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6448" CreationDate="2023-01-27T17:03:19.623" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are questions where the main point is ethics but to answer requires statistical background. For instance if you serve on the data monitoring committee for a clinical trial you may be faced with a situation where it seems that the trial may need to be stopped early for safety (not for futility or for benefit). This is an ethical issue balancing the interests of various parties but in order to give a good answer you need to understand the issues involved in early stopping which I believe are statistical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastActivityDate="2023-01-27T17:03:19.623" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6456" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-28T02:27:46.753" Score="1" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I search &amp;quot;moose&amp;quot; in the search engine I see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/574089/the-moose-must-flow-but-how&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; has 3k views:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pLbyg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pLbyg.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I open up the question's page I see 4k views:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/61X7j.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/61X7j.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this some kind of difference in rounding rules, or something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69508" LastEditorUserId="69508" LastEditDate="2023-01-28T06:37:54.567" LastActivityDate="2023-01-28T06:37:54.567" Title="Inconsistent view count between question page and search results page?" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6445" CreationDate="2023-01-30T22:18:23.050" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suppose until AI is considered to have to equal or at least more rights, the policy of Nature is likely what will stand for most reasonable organizations and hopefully stackexchange as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00191-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00191-1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, no LLM tool will be accepted as a credited author on a research&#xA;paper. That is because any attribution of authorship carries with it&#xA;accountability for the work, and AI tools cannot take such&#xA;responsibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, researchers using LLM tools should document this use in the&#xA;methods or acknowledgements sections. If a paper does not include&#xA;these sections, the introduction or another appropriate section can be&#xA;used to document the use of the LLM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They also make a point elsewhere which I strongly agree with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00188-w&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00188-w&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some publishers say that chatbot use should be documented in the&#xA;methods or acknowledgements sections — and that not doing so could be&#xA;considered &lt;strong&gt;plagiarism&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit to add:  It's unfortunate that I have to state the obvious, but this discussion should be about about LLMs and AI (&lt;em&gt;large&lt;/em&gt; language models and artificial intelligence) and not shallow ML, like spell checkers and grammar checkers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="340812" LastEditorUserId="340812" LastEditDate="2023-01-31T21:47:28.443" LastActivityDate="2023-01-31T21:47:28.443" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6460" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-18T16:51:47.693" Score="5" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;Only a limited subset of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\LaTeX$&lt;/span&gt; is supported on this site, though enough for the vast majority of equations we'd be likely to use. Unicode symbols can still be useful, perhaps especially the more &amp;quot;pictorial&amp;quot; ones. For example, I recently edited &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/604266/revisions&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; and in doing so replaced many images by Unicode symbols, e.g. filled and empty circles, and numbers on circular backgrounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This certainly made the question easier to edit and annotate, and I hope easier to read. But are there pitfalls I should be aware of if using Unicode in questions and answers? For example, will what I did just be garbled by a screen reader, in which case for accessibility purposes I might have been better to use an image and provide an alt-text? Is Unicode well-supported these days, so if it looks good on my browser I can generally assume it will render okay for other people? Are there particular areas of Unicode we should avoid using?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastActivityDate="2023-02-18T16:51:47.693" Title="How well do unicode symbols work in questions and answers?" Tags="|support|math-display|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6461" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-18T19:11:13.373" Score="8" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the less precisely-defined (mathematically or otherwise) aspects of performing Bayesian inference is assignment of priors based on domain knowledge, and there are plenty of questions on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=choosing+priors&quot;&gt;choosing piors&lt;/a&gt; on this site. Advice that I have read (from Andrew Gelman, Richard McElreath, and others) has ranged from choosing weakly-informative priors to choosing priors that balance being uninformative with regularization to leaning into use as much prior information as possible. This meta-post is not about choosing priors &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;, but a closely-related topic: soliciting domain knowledge from experts to help me design priors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It a further step removed from selecting density functions for (proper) priors to solicit information from domain experts, which may happen before any mathematical ideas are even put on the table. We're not always the domain knowledge expert, and it is important to learn what we can from them. I recently added a random effect to a model due to a conversation I had with an expert that I would not have thought to include otherwise. I believe these solicitations are part of the &lt;em&gt;workflow&lt;/em&gt; of statistics, and cannot be safely ignored in practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The trouble, for me, is that I can't seem to find the words to ask &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;good questions&lt;/a&gt; about this. I have developed my own ways of doing these things based on reading and practice, and some of what I want is to compare notes with others. This doesn't fit the format here, so I don't ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Broadly &amp;quot;comparing notes&amp;quot; is off-topic on the main site, I believe, but I wonder if there are questions about soliciting information from domain experts that &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be asked. I find that I run into a labyrinth of problems around candidate questions either not being broadly relevant to others (i.e. too specific) or subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do you think of asking about questions about how to solicit information from domain experts to use later in selecting priors?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you think it can/should be done here, can you provide an example or describe requirements?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you don't think it can be done, are there problems beyond being too specific or subjective that you would like to share?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69508" LastEditorUserId="69508" LastEditDate="2023-02-18T19:17:16.010" LastActivityDate="2023-02-18T19:17:16.010" Title="If and how to ask about soliciting domain knowledge relevant to priors" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6422" CreationDate="2023-02-21T18:03:38.757" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The goal of CV.SE is to give good answers to good statistics questions. If those good answers are created by some kind of AI like ChatGPT, then that seems to accomplish the goal. If the AI gives bad answers, we deal with them how we would deal with any other bad answer: downvote and possibly delete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we believe AI to be an easy way to spam garbage posts on here and want to ban AI-generated posts to avoid creating such a mess for the moderators to clean, the rule-breakers who would post such garbage would not be expected to follow such a rule, would they?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not so sure that we need special rules for AI-generated posts. We already know how to handle good posts, bad posts, and bad behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247274" LastActivityDate="2023-02-21T18:03:38.757" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6422" CreationDate="2023-02-21T22:32:03.483" Score="-6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;embrace&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's embrace it. Let's have a meta user ChatGPT, and make it generate answers to all questions asked. This user will be clearly marked, and as any other users, its answers can be edited by us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;watch IP theft&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's keep a track of cases, document them, when ChatGPT clearly stole the answers from CV. At some point let's get lawyers involved and sue their pants off. I see a class action law suit, which we'll all join if interested&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36041" LastActivityDate="2023-02-21T22:32:03.483" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6465" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-22T07:46:48.373" Score="7" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I search for closed questions that have been answered by a particular user?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53690" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2023-02-22T21:48:05.017" LastActivityDate="2023-02-22T21:48:05.017" Title="Search for closed questions answered by a particular user" Tags="|support|search|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6465" CreationDate="2023-02-22T09:37:18.153" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found this script&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/1703865/answers-to-closed-questions-for-user&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Answers to closed questions for user&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is a line that prevents all results from showing up&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;questions.ClosedDate &amp;lt; answers.CreationDate&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I edited it into &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/1712823/answers-to-closed-questions-for-user?UserId=53690&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this script&lt;/a&gt; and it seems to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastActivityDate="2023-02-22T09:37:18.153" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6465" CreationDate="2023-02-22T13:49:51.127" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A53690+is%3Aanswer+closed%3Ayes&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A53690+is%3Aanswer+closed%3Ayes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3GM6f.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3GM6f.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For details, please consult the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/searching&quot;&gt;search help page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To find a user's identifying number, look them up on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;Users page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2023-02-22T13:49:51.127" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6465" CreationDate="2023-02-22T15:28:01.613" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apart from Sextus Empiricus' &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6466/362671&quot;&gt;script&lt;/a&gt;, the query provided at  Maths Meta &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/20029/provide-a-way-to-search-for-a-users-answers-to-closed-questions#comment76008_20029&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; also essentially caters to your requirements. Here is the link to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/edit/1712825&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;script&lt;/a&gt;: basically it orders the posts as per the scores.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastActivityDate="2023-02-22T15:28:01.613" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6470" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6472" CreationDate="2023-03-02T02:00:30.017" Score="8" ViewCount="337" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just downvoted a post (now deleted) by a new member who has a reputation of one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downvoting cost me some reputation, but it also cost that user some reputation, or at least it would have if that user had more than one reputation point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens with that user’s reputation? When they get their first upvote, will it be worth the full ten points?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247274" LastEditorUserId="247274" LastEditDate="2023-03-02T18:47:44.283" LastActivityDate="2023-03-02T18:47:44.283" Title="Downvoting a new member" Tags="|discussion|votes|new-users|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6470" CreationDate="2023-03-02T05:46:50.703" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would search for more meaningful posts at Meta. But a quick experimentation showed this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; Downvote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hg4V1m.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hg4V1m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; Result:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/b9DEmm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/b9DEmm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Waiting for &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$15$&lt;/span&gt; minutes...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; Subsequent upvote at another post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dHRJNm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dHRJNm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; Result:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dVY0jm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dVY0jm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(NB: All the votes have been undone after sufficient time.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2023-03-02T13:58:12.587" LastActivityDate="2023-03-02T13:58:12.587" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6470" CreationDate="2023-03-02T13:57:44.163" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reputation never drops below 1 and previous downvotes are not accumulated to be applied afterwards.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Downvotes help the system&lt;/strong&gt; automatically block people who make a habit of posting bad questions or answers.  When a new user is downvoted several times on their first few posts (the exact amounts are not disclosed), temporary blocks are applied to encourage them to improve their existing posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;However, new users tend to react negatively to downvotes as well as to most forms of moderation, such as closing questions.  &lt;strong&gt;Please try to post a comment welcoming a new contributor&lt;/strong&gt; and explaining the reason for the downvote.  (It doesn't hurt to add your comment to any other welcoming comments: the more the better!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Generally, for the same reasons, &lt;strong&gt;it is good to accompany any downvote with an explanatory comment.&lt;/strong&gt;  (One general exception is when you know the poster is a serial violator of site norms and you have already tried, in another thread, to explain your position.  You don't have to keep posting the same explanation only to have it be ignored again!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2023-03-02T13:57:44.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6473" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6475" CreationDate="2023-03-14T14:15:56.533" Score="8" ViewCount="260" Body="&lt;p&gt;We will see more and more questions that involve ChatGPT, in two ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about the inner workings of ChatGPT and similar Large Language Models (LLMs)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about &amp;quot;advice&amp;quot; dispensed by ChatGPT - &amp;quot;ChatGPT told me X, can you explain this to me?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We currently have a tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/chatgpt&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;chatgpt&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;chatgpt&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-chatgpt-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;chatgpt&lt;/a&gt;, which is apparently mostly about case (1) above, but it starts to get used for case (2), e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/609418/1352&quot;&gt;in this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose we create a tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/chatgpt-advice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;chatgpt-advice&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;chatgpt-advice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-chatgpt-advice-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;chatgpt-advice&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;em&gt;questions about advice given by ChatGPT&lt;/em&gt;, clarify the distinction in the tag wiki, and start the thankless and likely perennial task of cleaning up incorrect tag usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2023-03-14T20:03:17.770" Title="Tags for questions involving ChatGPT" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6473" CreationDate="2023-03-14T15:29:05.503" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This could be generalized to other sources beyond chatgpt, for instance&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Y told me X,&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with Y being chatGPT, quora, reddit, google, online course etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chatgpt is just a current instance of a language learning model or 'online oracle'. In the future we may have additional names from chatGPT rivals like Google's bard, and who knows Amazon is gonna come up with a third version as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more generic name might be welcome. Potentially we can keep a tag chatGPT for the moment as an alias for the more general term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from this, it may not seem like GPT is gonna be used as an important resource for statistics advice. Tagging potential questions that have specifically chatGPT as a source might be a bit exaggerated and is giving this source of information more attention in the tags than needed. Rather than making a separate tag, to lure away users from wrongly using a tag, it might be better to discourage the use of the currently existing chatGPT tag for such problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same is true for the first description of the chatgpt tag. This is more like a language learning topic. The chatGPT is just currently a hype but doesn't seem to require a special tag (except as an alias to help people find the correct language learning tag)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2023-03-14T15:35:31.453" LastActivityDate="2023-03-14T15:35:31.453" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6473" CreationDate="2023-03-14T19:37:55.310" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would make sense for 'chatgpt' to be a synonym of 'large-language-models', as it is rather too specific. The way that would work is that 'chatgpt' would appear in the list when you look for a tag to add to a question, but what gets added is 'large-language-models'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't say I favour the 'chatgpt-advice' tag—why not have tags for any other source of (mis)information? who on earth would want to follow them? It would seem its &lt;em&gt;sole&lt;/em&gt; utility would consist in heading off some questions from being wrongly lumped together with questions about L.L.M.s, &amp;amp; it might not even be terribly effective at that. (Furthermore, its existence might be taken as encouragement to use ChatGPT.&lt;sup&gt;†&lt;/sup&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;† And I don't think that ought to be encouraged. Human error, as found in textbooks, blogs, lectures, &amp;amp;c., may be instructive—offering a chance to dispel common misconceptions or suchlike—, but the same can't be said of ChatGPT's confabulations &amp;amp; non sequiturs. I don't think there will be many cases where ChatGPT's &amp;quot;advice&amp;quot; is worthy of critique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2023-03-14T20:03:17.770" LastActivityDate="2023-03-14T20:03:17.770" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6476" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6477" CreationDate="2023-03-16T12:56:36.090" Score="7" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do we need the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/drug&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;drug&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;drug&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-drug-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;drug&lt;/a&gt; tag? It has no wiki, and only 6 questions. &amp;quot;Drugs&amp;quot; are not a statistical topic. While it's true that there are statistical components to medical research about the benefits and detriments about drugs, these are parts of larger topics that are subsumed by other tags (statistical hypothesis tests, for instance).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="11887" LastEditDate="2023-03-22T15:43:00.637" LastActivityDate="2023-03-22T15:43:00.637" Title="Do we need the Drug tag, or can it be discarded?" Tags="|discussion|status-completed|tag-deletion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6476" CreationDate="2023-03-16T13:29:42.170" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/clinical-trials&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;clinical-trials&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;clinical-trials&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-clinical-trials-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;clinical-trials&lt;/a&gt; that should overlap with &amp;quot;drug&amp;quot; while being more relevant. We have few other relevant tags as well. &amp;quot;Drug&amp;quot; seems broad and not really helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2023-03-16T13:29:42.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6476" CreationDate="2023-03-16T14:19:38.090" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;With 'drug' I might potentially think about pharmacology which is about dynamics and kinetics. But all of the 6 question seem to be just some clinical trial, where Tim mentions there's already a tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/clinical-trials&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;clinical-trials&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;clinical-trials&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-clinical-trials-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;clinical-trials&lt;/a&gt; (currently 392 cases). It seems superfluous to place have an additional tag for just those cases of clinical trials that involve drugs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/236099/how-to-study-the-effect-of-2-drugs-used-singly-and-in-combination-compared-to&quot;&gt;How to study the effect of 2 drugs (used singly and in combination) compared to a placebo on a disease&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/501193/most-appropriate-calculation-of-mean-and-standard-deviation-for-drug-compliance&quot;&gt;Most appropriate calculation of mean and standard deviation for drug compliance?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/236480/study-the-effect-of-2-drugs-on-a-symptom-caused-by-2-diseases&quot;&gt;Study the effect of 2 drugs on a symptom caused by 2 diseases&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/416150/percentage-change&quot;&gt;Percentage change&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/609687/test-for-synergy-using-bliss-independance-model-for-two-drugs&quot;&gt;Test for synergy using Bliss independance model for two drugs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/370372/how-to-calculate-whether-a-disease-outcome-in-a-population-is-by-chance-or-signi&quot;&gt;How to calculate whether a disease outcome in a population is by chance or significant?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last one might be more of an epidemiological study rather than a clinical trial. It is difficult to say because the question is not very clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition there is a tag &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/medicine&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medicine&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;medicine&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-medicine-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;medicine&lt;/a&gt;, which has 144 questions. That might also need to be added to clinical-trials, although not every case out of those 144 might be fitting such migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastActivityDate="2023-03-16T14:19:38.090" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6479" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6480" CreationDate="2023-04-02T11:45:42.380" Score="1" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not entirely sure how good this idea is, but basically there have been a few times here where, as a by-product of answering/asking a question, I learn about something fairly new in statistics that I wish more people would know about. Something I learned about this year was this method of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/610856/345611&quot;&gt;making model predictions with SEM&lt;/a&gt; and another method I learned about a year or two when it first came out was the &lt;code&gt;partR2&lt;/code&gt; package for mixed models, which again came about randomly from asking questions here and on SO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea I was considering is having some kind of mega-thread or wiki that updates new advances in statistics that are notable in some organized place so people who casually browse can keep themselves up to date with what is considered cutting-edge. Best would be having the statistics explained in a simple way rather than just linking whatever, but any information is better than none. Some of these things get lost under the mat and it would be good to have a resource to point people to if they want to learn what's out there. I also realize that some of these things can simply be looked up in places like &lt;em&gt;Psychometrika&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Journal of Statistical Software&lt;/em&gt;, etc. but the point is to make these techniques more accessible to a wider audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to shoot this idea down if it has been suggested before or is infeasible. Just a thought. I found a somewhat similar suggestion &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1002/upcoming-journal-editions-read-em-and-ask-on-the-stack-and-get-prizes&quot;&gt;here.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="345611" LastEditorUserId="345611" LastEditDate="2023-04-02T11:53:12.330" LastActivityDate="2023-04-09T17:21:16.660" Title="Can there be a &quot;new in stats&quot; thread or wiki added somewhere here?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6479" CreationDate="2023-04-02T15:17:41.793" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only way we could have it is to create a community wiki question that anyone could answer. There is no blog functionality in StackExchange.com, so it could only be a question with answers. There would be multiple problems with it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anyone could answer it, posting anything since the open-ended nature of the question. We would not be able to control for duplicate entries or the quality of the answers. It would basically be a mess.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no tags functionality for answers, it would be hard to search. It would possibly have hundreds of answers that would be hard to navigate. It wouldn't be a great format for it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CrossValidated.com is organized about a broad variety of topics, so likely such a thread would also be like this. It would mix niche topics in Item Response Theory with recent developments in epidemiology, ChatGPT, etc. Unless you are interested in reading completely random news on many topics at once, it would be hardly useful for anyone.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are already many blogs, journals, podcasts, site aggregators (e.g. Reddit) etc that are much better for this purpose. They have predictable quality, are focused on specific topics, and have better UX for the purpose. I don't think that having it would be a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2023-04-02T15:17:41.793" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6481" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6482" CreationDate="2023-04-06T01:55:59.343" Score="13" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75944119/variance-of-truncated-normal-distribution&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75944119/variance-of-truncated-normal-distribution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;asks how to read a formula in order to perform a particular calculation. As I read it, it's not a computing question. It might arguably be a mathematics question, but to my reading of it, it's well within the borders of what we would normally discuss here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would we be migrating it to stackoverflow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2023-04-06T05:04:35.020" LastActivityDate="2023-04-06T13:43:11.827" Title="Can anyone explain the reasoning for this migration away from Cross Validated?" Tags="|discussion|migration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6481" CreationDate="2023-04-06T13:43:11.827" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I migrated it.  I agree it was a borderline case for migration, but it was a very clear case for closure for multiple reasons (which I am sure most of you can readily enumerate: self study, duplicated, image-only, off-topic, &lt;em&gt;etc.&lt;/em&gt;).  Because the question explicitly is &amp;quot;somebody show me how to do the calculation&amp;quot; and it had received an answer in code, I felt the more constructive solution was migration rather than closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2023-04-06T13:43:11.827" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6479" CreationDate="2023-04-07T08:58:18.640" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with @Tim's reasoning that a &amp;quot;everything new in stats&amp;quot; thread would be unmanageable and not very helpful. Part of the problem is the open-ended timeframe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One option might be to ask a question on the main site with a limited time-frame and perhaps topic. Probably best if asked somewhat retrospectively rather than as a constantly ongoing thread in which recent answers get buried.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;What were the big developments in machine learning in 2022?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;What were the major statistics methodology publications in 2023 Q1 (Jan-Mar)?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think questions like those would be considered on-topic here, though choosing the landmark developments is obviously subjective (and easier in retrospect). I don't know what quality of answers they would bring or whether asking in a different forum would do better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I think @gung is right that the way I phrased those question suggestions, they may be liable to be closed for being opinion-based. So it would be necessary to tighten them up by introducing more objective criteria, e.g. asking which papers in a particular field from a particular period have been most highly cited, or (more subjectively) have been awarded a prize or cited by other researchers or textbooks as being particularly influential.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastEditorUserId="22228" LastEditDate="2023-04-09T17:21:16.660" LastActivityDate="2023-04-09T17:21:16.660" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6484" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-04-12T12:22:52.617" Score="9" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't been reviewing long, but it seems like almost daily I see questions closed due to programming or data requests. But to me the majority of these are more often statistical questions rather than programming questions (which statistics often is going to involve I'm afraid). A good example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/612655/mediation-analysis-with-3-level-data-in-r&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MbFbP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MbFbP.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me this is not about programming. The OP is clearly asking about whether or not the structure of their clusters in the mixed model is correctly defined and how to program this. This to me doesn't scream &amp;quot;I need somebody to debug code&amp;quot; but rather &amp;quot;I need to understand how hierarchical structures work in these models.&amp;quot; Oftentimes there are questions I pose here about GAMs that almost inevitably require some programming feedback on because that is the nature of the beast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is only one example, but can someone here clearly define what is considered programming-only and what is considered CV-worthy? I am more often leaned towards keeping these kinds of questions open, but not sure if that is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Edit 1:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example recently that gets to the heart of my issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/close/344885&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/close/344885&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Edit 2:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One more that doesn't seem to fit this specific close vote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/close/344919&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/close/344919&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And another that I would consider borderline given it's not clear if it's a programming question or stats question (as it's currently phrased, this could be a contender for a close given they really only highlight the error code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/close/344946&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/close/344946&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="345611" LastEditorUserId="345611" LastEditDate="2023-04-16T03:35:39.570" LastActivityDate="2023-04-16T03:35:39.570" Title="Programming or data request confusion" Tags="|discussion|support|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="28" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6485" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-04-18T23:32:28.803" Score="-7" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this site could be improved by the addition of a tag for a &amp;quot;general&amp;quot; question, or a &amp;quot;non-specific&amp;quot; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag could be used when the person asking the question is interested in a general answer not in help solving a specific statistical problem or troubleshooting an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this would help people answer questions, as they wouldn't have to ask a poster for more details about the specifics of their problem when they have no specifics to give. Instead they could concentrate on a general answer or not answer if they think it would take too long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think this would make the site more friendly to new people who might have broad open questions about statistics, but no particular use case in mind. I think having good answers to broader, less specific questions will make the site more useful, and more used. It may also result in more answered questions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I think it would avoid frustration on both ends caused by a misfit of intentions and expectations!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted in the comments this is a grievance of mine, so all the examples are my own questions! Here are some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/613150/do-you-lose-information-when-you-encode-numerical-columns-with-two-values&quot;&gt;Do you lose information when you encode numerical columns with two values?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/611222/are-large-samples-always-needed-for-a-z-test&quot;&gt;Are large samples always needed for a Z-Test?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/611236/calculating-the-probability-my-observation-y-i-is-drawn-from-a-random-variab&quot;&gt;Calculating the probability my observation, $Y_i$, is drawn from a random variable $X$?&lt;/a&gt; (Long string of comments and revisions before an answer is given, when what I was after was mdhak's comment, but as an authoritative answer).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll add more as I find them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363857" LastEditorUserId="363857" LastEditDate="2023-04-19T09:05:54.307" LastActivityDate="2023-04-20T10:22:55.497" Title="Adding a tag for general (non-specific) questions" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6485" CreationDate="2023-04-19T08:39:05.407" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the very outset, let me share my own quick assessment of your cited examples (your own posts) based on the original forms (without looking at any of the comments, at first):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/611222/are-large-samples-always-needed-for-a-z-test&quot;&gt;Are large samples always needed for a Z-Test?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were improper usage of notations and terminologies and some misunderstandings. I feel a bit hesitant seeing words like &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/613150/do-you-lose-information-when-you-encode-numerical-columns-with-two-values&quot;&gt;Do you lose information when you encode numerical columns with two values?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seemed to be also not replete with proper usage of notations; in fact it was outright ambiguous which prompted it being closed. Finally you edited it to provide better structure and I was one of the reviewers who voted to reopen it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/611236/calculating-the-probability-my-observation-y-i-is-drawn-from-a-random-variab&quot;&gt;Calculating the probability my observation, $Y_i$, is drawn from a random variable $X$?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again it is infested with the same problem: improper usage of notations and terminologies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I do feel all those queries were not bad; they were sanguine and intended to be valid queries - unfortunately they were not adequately articulated, at least in the original form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't know everything. That's why questions arise (that's basic). However, there is a certain extent of knowledge that we apparently take for granted as if we were well versed with those notions and concepts. So when we mould a query resorting to the language from that &lt;em&gt;for granted&lt;/em&gt; knowledge that we acquired (might be a quick reading of a blog, site, video etc.), we are certain we have raised a legit proper question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But things go awry when we see responses from people that implicitly attack that &lt;em&gt;for granted evident&lt;/em&gt; knowledge. It might start to seem nitpicking to us: instead of answering in a &lt;em&gt;general&lt;/em&gt; way to our &lt;em&gt;evidently clear&lt;/em&gt; queries, their comments are vacillatory and moving back and forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, then a mature way to react is to take a step back and try to read between the lines of the comments: what are they are trying to air and &lt;strong&gt;communicate&lt;/strong&gt;? Then we can realize what we have been regurgitating might not be correct. The notations and handwavy concepts might need to be altered or outright restructured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then we would be able to conclude while the query could be genuine, the way it was raised proved to be its own impediment in getting a good concise answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments are absolutely necessary. When it gets long, chances are OP is not able to clearly provide ample explanation of what they are asking: the question could be sensed, but a proper useful answer warrants an explicitly clear post, even the confusion that evoked the question at the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/247165/christian-hennig&quot;&gt;Christian Hennig&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/35989/tim&quot;&gt;Tim&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/247274/dave&quot;&gt;Dave&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/56940/utobi&quot;&gt;utobi&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/164061/sextus-empiricus&quot;&gt;Sextus Empiricus&lt;/a&gt;  and all other respected users could have easily dissuaded from interacting and commenting for the sole purpose of eliciting further details and informing you of any misconception. They didn't. Why? Because they understand the value of this community and the site's goal: create a repository of high quality contents: be it an undergrad homework, a research based query or an industrial programming query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally you were able to receive a good answer to one of your posts thanks to those interactions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing comments as response instead of an answer that solves everything can be indeed frustrating. But for the latter, you need the former in the light of the perspective added above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One's knowledge can be limited, what I think is correct need not have to be. Those long comments help to remove those misconceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I would assert comments are quintessential. You need to be patient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[It takes days for me to sometimes understand something, takes hours for me to sometimes solve a problem which when seeing the hint/solution showed me how my approach was wrong. But instead of getting frustrated, I take a break and try to learn the necessary materials needed or other things.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate you reacted rationally by asking a meta question rather than ranting at those users (I have witnessed many things during my not so long stay here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your titular question, I am of the conviction that such kind of tag is not necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2023-04-19T12:57:26.000" LastActivityDate="2023-04-19T12:57:26.000" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6485" CreationDate="2023-04-20T09:52:52.840" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;First cent:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had a short interaction in the comments about the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/613150/&quot;&gt;Do you lose information when you encode numerical columns with two values?&lt;/a&gt; and I didn't respond yet (instantly) to your reply because I am still confused about your question and what it means. (With or without 'general' as tag)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead they could concentrate on a general answer or not answer if they think it would take too long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my thought process is like, ok let me read that post a second time, or a third time again before answering. Often I might be juggling multiple questions at the same time and some end up on the floor and so forgotten if they are not shiny enough. I actually have a quite long backlog of open questions in which I had an interest to answer them, but which were in a way requiring some additional work to get it done and that I could not quickly fix. Questions being posed in a general way and with several unclear definitions, expressions, motivations, background, etc. are among them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So currently my mind goes like 'not answer' (yet) because it takes too long. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to clarify your question better. Adding a tag 'general' isn't changing people's responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While a question might be non-specific, the problem remains that you still need specific examples to easily explain the non-specific issue. Examples are maybe not neccesary, but they are still helpful. You can not replace that helpfulness with a tag 'general'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Second cent:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tags are mainly metadata that help to easily classify questions. The purpose of the classification can be variable, but functions like communicating how one would wish the question to be received or how it should be interpreted might be far stretched (one tag that has such a function is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-self-study-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; and it is a bit of an abuse of tags). #Dont-take-this-the-wrong-way #yes-that-is-an-ironic-hashtag #this-aswell-and-showing-how-tags-shouldnt-be-abused&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2023-04-20T10:22:55.497" LastActivityDate="2023-04-20T10:22:55.497" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6488" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-04-20T18:02:24.520" Score="1" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any value of ensuring the site retains only answerable questions, and if a question is in fact answerable, is it the responsibility of the community or the moderators to find these questions and promote them? Many answerable questions are in the fullness of time buried due to lack of activity. I wonder how these are found and handled. I as a user get notifications for first posts, edits, potentially low quality posts, etc. but nothing says &amp;quot;oh hey this post has sat for 5 years and no one has interacted with it.&amp;quot; I mostly find these posts by accident if, say, I browse a users history or an obscure tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastActivityDate="2023-04-20T18:48:02.723" Title="How to identify &quot;sleepy&quot; questions?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6488" CreationDate="2023-04-20T18:48:02.723" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The primary mechanism is voting: vote up the questions you come across or look for that are useful &amp;amp; clear, vote down the ones that aren't; if enough people do this, someone searching for questions to answer in an area they're knowledgeable about will easily be able to find the worthwhile ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2023-04-20T18:48:02.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6490" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-04-22T03:55:05.733" Score="0" ViewCount="655" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I’ve seen a number of CV users plugging questions into ChatGPT to help generate answers/content. Some of these users self-report to be educators. So, here’s the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we turn inquisitive minds to ChatGPT, &lt;em&gt;are we not participating in our own obsolescence?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I worry that because ChatGPT is “free” (for now) and most of us use it (or have tried it because of its novelty), we’re actively abetting the OpenAI developers in our own labor displacement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “we” in my question is a bit broad, but may apply to professors, web developers, and investment bankers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="246835" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-04-22T05:35:02.290" LastActivityDate="2023-06-24T22:12:05.540" Title="Are we free labor for OpenAI?" Tags="|discussion|low-quality-posts|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6490" CreationDate="2023-04-26T09:48:43.627" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Are we free labor for OpenAI?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, 'labor' is a physical or mental activity/effort with the &lt;em&gt;purpose&lt;/em&gt; of producing value in an economical system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An AI like GPT is using the community for written texts, images, and actions, and produces an economic value out of it, but that might be better described as 'mining'. To OpenAI we might be  considered a resource, but that is not yet the same as labor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, people that are playing an amateur level game of chess or soccer are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; performing labor. Their purpose is the fun of the game. Yet, their activities can be used by others to generate value. A chess game might end up in a database that is commercially used by a chess computer or a professional chess player. The soccer players might be photographed by a professional photographer who uses the photo for art or news and makes money out of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Additional discussion&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is surrounded with several other statements/questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;are we not participating in our own obsolescence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ChatGPT already takes advantage of 60–70% of the common crawl data, mostly from webpages. Isn't that enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;should we encourage participation in a process that may displace us?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contributor tells the OP to “try that” but I doubt the OP understands the nuance of the code or how the model works. Is this acceptable practice here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it seems to be motivated by some potential outcomes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I worry that ... we’re actively abetting the OpenAI developers in our own labor displacement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do predict OpenAI’s ChatGPT will have more monthly visitors than Amazon by the end of the year. I’m trying not to catastrophize, but I am more worried than hopeful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a very broad range of questions and it might be good to bring the meta-question down to a single clear statement. Several of the statements/questions might be tackled on their own, but while people do this (and I will make a little attempt below) it might get lost in the large puddle of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers to the individual questions might be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This has a varying degree of answers as it is very broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first place it is a loaded question and presupposes that the use of GPT or AI is leading to our own obsolescence. Even if it is used to our own obsolescence, then it is implied that this is a bad thing. This is a bit like the question whether an employee should strive to make themselves obsolete or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another approach to the question is to question whether or not AI leads to obsolescence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This relates to the comment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By default it appears the user is the product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user being the product is not restricted to OpenAI. It is more in general a matter in the information industry that we have intellectual property that is produced for free or at a cost, and commercially or open source. And, these two worlds are blended with each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not only when I ask OpenAI to translate my texts, it is also when I interact on a forum providing help about using R or linux that I am contributing to a free resource while indirectly helping commercial companies. Such companies might be for instance RedHat or Canonical who benefit from open source developments in Linux, or Posit (formerly Rstudio Inc.) who benefits from R and other open source development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;like 1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is an issue independent from OpenAI specifically and answered in the comments by Scortchi&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what people may suggest in comments isn't strictly policed, but &amp;quot;try that&amp;quot; wouldn't constitute a valid answer (regardless of where the code came from.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The four arguments here are very straightforward and simple, but I believe that the issue is more delicate. The problem is not as much the technology itselve in principle, and instead how it is gonna be used in practice (similar to discussions around genetically modified organisms, GMOs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This more delicate discussion is at the same time a very broad discussion, and might be better suited for a platform like economics or politics, rather than stats.meta, because in the end it is more generally about how we see the future of the order in our society and the distribution of the wealth that comes out of earth's resources like AI, mineral mines, fossil fuels, etcetera. For a long time we have been able to enslave workers into doing simple tasks in exchange of a bith of money/wealth. In the near future this model might need to be revisioned. Possibly not global since it is a big question mark how much impact the new technology is gonna have, but at least locally and short term the new technology is gonna stir up the labour market.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2023-04-27T08:45:58.343" LastActivityDate="2023-04-27T08:45:58.343" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6490" CreationDate="2023-04-27T08:59:33.233" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there's a confusing mix of different questions and concerns here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are we free labor for OpenAI?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, we are. As is &lt;em&gt;nearly everyone who has ever written any form of public (and some private) text that survives&lt;/em&gt; - in books, documents, websites, etc. I understand Sextus Empiricus' argument but am willing to accept a broader definition of 'labour' - though I think it ultimately does not matter, for the reasons that follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we turn inquisitive minds to ChatGPT, are we not participating in our own obsolescence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the first half - nobody here is actually advocating telling people to go to ChatGPT for answers. This community is arguably more hostile to it than most (perhaps understandably so).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the obsolescence part, I have multiple disagreements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most questions here are basic and many are entirely misguided. A tool that could address even the basic questions automatically (and LLMs cannot do this yet, but maybe in the future) would make this website much better and more fun to participate in.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are already contributing your expertise for free (with a CC BY-SA 4.0 license) on a website&#xA;that allows anybody in the world to ask a question and get an&#xA;answer. This is what makes CV great, as well as StackOverflow, and what to me is one of the greatest sources of knowledge in the world -&#xA;Wikipedia. Wikipedia is run by a nonprofit but note that CV and StackOverflow are also making a private company money. Under what principle is contributing to CV/StackOverflow/Wikipedia fine and not an LLM?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maybe what bothers you is the lack of credit/status that accrues to the originator of the text? But many of us participate anonymously or pseudonymously, so it seems unlikely that this is a broadly shared concern. Providing such attribution may not even be possible given how LLMs work. Like a human-produced text, the output arises from a mishmash of many sources, at least some of which will be contradictory.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Much of the world is arguably expertise-limited. If we raise the general standard of understanding and skill, the world could become a much better place! I would love it if LLMs can make this happen, even a little. And if they do rise in importance and change our societies, the people who created the large corpuses of useful training data - such as the anonymous wikipedia writers and editors - will have had a remarkably large role in shaping our future. I suspect many of them would be quite pleased by this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's entirely possible that raising the general standard of knowledge &amp;amp; skill will lead to a greater demand for real expertise! Which could increase demand for our services. We really have no idea how this will play out: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/nobody-knows-how-many-jobs-will-be&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/nobody-knows-how-many-jobs-will-be&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I asked you about your proposed alternative and you say that we could &amp;quot;stop using it&amp;quot;. If you mean stop using ChatGPT, well, that doesn't matter one way or the other - your writings will still be part of its training data. You just won't be able to take advantage of what it provides. If you instead mean to stop using CV, I don't know what that achieves. As I said - your previous participation here was already making a private company money. You could do so but many of us will continue for the reasons I mentioned above.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of advocating that we all down our pens, you could consider directing your efforts towards policy/regulation. I don't claim to know the best path forward but there are ongoing debates about what we should allow AI companies to make use of for free and what they owe the rest of us. These are normally framed in the context of plagiarism of art (for models like DALL-E, Midjourney, etc) but the principles apply more broadly. For example, is it acceptable/legal to train an LLM on data with a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence and not provide specific attribution in any answer? I think this would be technically impossible for LLMs and I personally hope such concerns don't kill them, but it seems like a grey area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="121522" LastEditDate="2023-05-10T11:28:30.127" LastActivityDate="2023-05-10T11:28:30.127" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6493" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-04-28T07:56:42.840" Score="2" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across an old question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/20701/computing-p-value-using-bootstrap-with-r&quot;&gt;Computing p-value using bootstrap with R&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and I thought that the answers might benefit from a graphical presentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I liked the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/28725/164061&quot;&gt;answer by Jan S.&lt;/a&gt; which shares my idea about it; The problem with the discrepancy between the p-value and bootstrapped distribution is similar as the recent question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/603545/&quot;&gt;Why do the bootstrap calculated p-value and the confidence intervals seem to contradict each other [R code, specific example]?&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking about adding some graphics and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I could do this in a new answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but that thread is already more than 10 years old and adding a new answer to answers that have already been upvoted several times might be an answer that gets less attention. Also one might worry about getting too many answers on a single question, possibly it could be better to just upgrade another answer instead of adding a completely new answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I could also add my idea to the already existing answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that answer is already old and the user that created it is not active, and also all the votes that it gathered in the past might not reflect my additions. In addition, people that initially created answers might like to have some personal control over curating how the questions develop (not much the issue here with an inactive user, but possibly problematic in other cases).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I perceive the Q&amp;amp;A format on stackexchange as very individualistic. Sometimes I have the urge to change a current answer rather than adding a new answer that is 'completely my own'. But as explained in the example case above I feel there are several considerations with changing an already existing answer (and I have the feeling that big changes are not very common). For that particular case, how should I handle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-04-28T08:52:40.177" LastActivityDate="2023-04-29T12:50:46.600" Title="Editing an old answer or adding a new answer: which is more appropriate in this case?" Tags="|discussion|old-posts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6493" CreationDate="2023-04-29T12:50:46.600" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should not make &lt;em&gt;substantive&lt;/em&gt; changes to someone else's answer.  This has been discussed before on Meta.CV, e.g., in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5368/7290&quot;&gt;Are you allowed to edit an answer that you disagree with?&lt;/a&gt;.  That does not mean that no edits are possible.  You can see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Editors&amp;amp;filter=all&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; that over the years I have found nearly 10k places where an edit would be beneficial (I believe edits to my own posts are not included in that count).  Many of those were answers, but none of them were substantive (excepting the instance mentioned below).  Edits are best for things like spelling, punctuation, grammar, formatting and clarification that preserves the authors intent.  The post that is listed as by a user, even if they've deleted their account, should reflect what they wanted to say.  If you think an answer is incorrect, or incomplete, you can vote down and/or leave a comment.  You are free to add your own answer and reference theirs.  But you should not make a substantive change &lt;em&gt;without their permission&lt;/em&gt;.  The idea that a figure would be helpful is, at least in the abstract, quite reasonable.  I can relate &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/101490/7290&quot;&gt;an occasion&lt;/a&gt; in which that happened with me.  I made some plots to illustrate a point someone else was making, and I thought they would benefit the answer.  So, I asked them in comments if it would be OK.  If they had said no, or not responded because they were no longer around, I could have put them in another answer and referred back to the answer at issue, and I could have put another comment under that answer pointing to mine.  But I would not have changed someone else's answer in a meaningful way without their permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2023-04-29T12:50:46.600" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6495" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-04T10:16:53.233" Score="13" ViewCount="653" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/388556/225179&quot;&gt;Imgur TOS change on May 15th 2023 could cause the loss of thousands of Stack Exchange images!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note first that images with &lt;code&gt;https://i.stack.imgur.com&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;https://stack.imgur.com&lt;/code&gt; URLs (those automatically uploaded through the GUI interface) are not at risk. Images with &lt;code&gt;https://i.imgur.com&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;https://imgur.com&lt;/code&gt; URLs are perhaps at risk—we don't know which are owned by an Imgur account, &amp;amp; criteria around age &amp;amp; no. of views haven't yet been determined (&amp;quot;We plan to use a combination of total views and recent views, among other criteria, to define content as inactive&amp;quot;—&lt;a href=&quot;https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/14415587638029-Imgur-Terms-of-Service-Update-April-19-2023-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Imgur Terms of Service Update [April 19, 2023]&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Glorfindel has &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/388726/225179&quot;&gt;already&lt;/a&gt; written &amp;amp; run a script to copy images from &lt;code&gt;https://i.imgur.com&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;https://stack.imgur.com&lt;/code&gt;. There were 872 successfully copied, so these can be replaced if the current link breaks, or preëmptively—S.E. &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be willing to help by automatically replacing them. There were 28 that could not be copied—for many of these it seems the link is already broken for some reason. (If anyone wants to find them, the post IDs are not given but you can use the site search with the URL e.g. &lt;code&gt;url:&amp;quot;https://i.imgur.com/48kXw9k.gif&amp;quot;&lt;/code&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&amp;amp;q=url%3ahttps%3a%2f%2fimgur.com&quot;&gt;A site search&lt;/a&gt; shows 180 posts with &lt;code&gt;https://imgur.com&lt;/code&gt; URLs. I hope Glorfindel will find the time to run his script for these too. [He did, just now, &amp;amp; there are a few that could not be copied—I'll post these when I get the chance.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fine I don't think we have a huge problem, given that 80% or so are now banked, that of the remainder only some will be removed (if they haven't already been), &amp;amp; that only some will be all that important to the post. On the other hand we only have eleven days before some may start to disappear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2023-05-11T18:39:30.367" LastActivityDate="2023-05-15T08:05:57.457" Title="Possible loss of some images from posts owing to Imgur's plan to remove old, unowned content with low views" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6495" CreationDate="2023-05-04T13:52:39.803" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Two notes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record the 28 that did not get copied are these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;from &lt;a href=&quot;https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Glorfindel83/SE-Userscripts/master/upload-imgur-images.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Glorfindel83/SE-Userscripts/master/upload-imgur-images.md&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Cross Validated&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Frequency&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;URL&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Failure&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Fixed&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/48kXw9k.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/48kXw9k.gif&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;APIException: Image uploads are limited to 2 MiB; please use a smaller image&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;fixed Reduced size a lot (17.5 Mb to 2 Mb), uploaded to i.stack.imgur, &amp;amp; edited link&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/5IWH9Qd.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/5IWH9Qd.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;FatalException: Wayback Machine can't be reached.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/7NvnRJl.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/7NvnRJl.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;FatalException: Wayback Machine can't be reached.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/9tY9sLE.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/9tY9sLE.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;FatalException: Wayback Machine can't be reached.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/ALQfTcs.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/ALQfTcs.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;FatalException: Wayback Machine can't be reached.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/DJsKegq.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/DJsKegq.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;FatalException: Wayback Machine can't be reached.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/EfcnrIf.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/EfcnrIf.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;FatalException: Wayback Machine can't be reached.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/Hudw20v.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/Hudw20v.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;FatalException: Wayback Machine can't be reached.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/MC4AT8E.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/MC4AT8E.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;FatalException: Wayback Machine can't be reached.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/MQLsxMQ.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/MQLsxMQ.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;FatalException: Wayback Machine can't be reached.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/VasiB3e.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/VasiB3e.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;FatalException: Wayback Machine can't be reached.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/VpIj86Z.mp4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/VpIj86Z.mp4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;FatalException: Wayback Machine can't be reached.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Inessential: the relevant snapshot from the linked animation is already embedded with an &lt;code&gt;i.stack.imgur&lt;/code&gt; URL.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/Zqgbc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/Zqgbc.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;FatalException: Wayback Machine can't be reached.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/a/Xd9JcHg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/a/Xd9JcHg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;FatalException: Wayback Machine can't be reached.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Fixed (OP had already provided text)&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/bB5iP6u.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/bB5iP6u.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;APIException: Image uploads are limited to 2 MiB; please use a smaller image&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Reduced size slightly, uploaded to &lt;code&gt;i.stack.imgur&lt;/code&gt;, &amp;amp; edited link&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/eyRBF7C.jpg/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/eyRBF7C.jpg/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;APIException: You didn't enter a valid URL&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Fixed - re-uploaded image (which the script hadn't done on account of the trailing black-slash) &amp;amp; edited post.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/fdX26L7.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/fdX26L7.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;FatalException: Wayback Machine can't be reached.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/g8ERIjw.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/g8ERIjw.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;FatalException: Wayback Machine can't be reached.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/hYBiBwm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/hYBiBwm.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;FatalException: Wayback Machine can't be reached.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/iv2eTlX.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/iv2eTlX.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;FatalException: Wayback Machine can't be reached.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/jqfjcwR.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/jqfjcwR.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;FatalException: Wayback Machine can't be reached.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/kHpvTQH.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/kHpvTQH.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;APIException: Image uploads are limited to 2 MiB; please use a smaller image&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Reduced size slightly, uploaded to &lt;code&gt;i.stack.imgur&lt;/code&gt;, &amp;amp; edited link&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/lJZM1mc.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/lJZM1mc.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;FatalException: Wayback Machine can't be reached.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/pon8eKL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/pon8eKL.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;FatalException: Wayback Machine can't be reached.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/q18e0zh.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/q18e0zh.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;FatalException: Wayback Machine can't be reached.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/rN4eGRU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/rN4eGRU.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;FatalException: Wayback Machine can't be reached.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/uyZMCLp.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/uyZMCLp.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;FatalException: Wayback Machine can't be reached.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/vW6UuLB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/vW6UuLB.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;FatalException: Wayback Machine can't be reached.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For cross validated meta&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Frequency&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;URL&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Failure&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Fixed&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MRR8V.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MRR8V.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;FatalException: Wayback Machine can't be reached.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;fixed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/RDR9I.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/RDR9I.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;FatalException: Wayback Machine can't be reached.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;not fixed earliest snapshot from 2013 already broken &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20130515000000*/https://i.imgur.com/RDR9I.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://web.archive.org/web/20130515000000*/https://i.imgur.com/RDR9I.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I started searching my own posts and found an i.imgur.com image that I re-uploaded to imgur using the stackexchange accounts, but that was unnecessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could have searched the list from Glorfindel and used the new link instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2023-05-15T07:54:03.860" LastActivityDate="2023-05-15T07:54:03.860" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6499" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-15T07:43:26.647" Score="2" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently encountered &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;analysis&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-analysis-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;analysis&lt;/a&gt; and found it to be a bit confusing and unnecessary, despite the detailed tag info. I then discovered this meta thread about it from 2015 that proposed creating the tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2612/create-analysis-tag-update-2017-delete-analysis-tag&quot;&gt;Create [analysis] tag? + Update 2017: Delete [analysis] tag?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4557/121522&quot;&gt;answer by amoeba in 2017 proposed deleting it&lt;/a&gt;. I won't rehash the arguments here but based on the votes there seems to be support for getting rid of it. For what its worth, AdamO (who proposed its creation) states in a comment on that answer &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2612/create-analysis-tag-update-2017-delete-analysis-tag#comment11981_4557&quot;&gt;I can say in confidence that my tag did not help&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since 2017, the tag has grown from 171 to 465 questions. Shall we get rid of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastActivityDate="2023-05-15T07:43:26.647" Title="Delete [analysis] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6495" CreationDate="2023-05-15T08:05:57.457" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the list of the images that weren't copied to the &lt;code&gt;i.stack.imgur.com&lt;/code&gt; domain on the latest run of Glorfindel's script (now including &lt;code&gt;imgur.com&lt;/code&gt; as well as &lt;code&gt;i.imgur.com&lt;/code&gt; URLs):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Uncertainties&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Frequency&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;URL&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Replacement&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Post IDs&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Fixed&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/48kXw9k.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/48kXw9k.gif&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Not uploaded but archived as &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20230503063307/https://i.imgur.com/48kXw9k.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://web.archive.org/web/20230503063307/https://i.imgur.com/48kXw9k.gif&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;583472&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Fixed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/bB5iP6u.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/bB5iP6u.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Not uploaded but archived as &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20230503063357/https://i.imgur.com/bB5iP6u.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://web.archive.org/web/20230503063357/https://i.imgur.com/bB5iP6u.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;348160&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Fixed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/kHpvTQH.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/kHpvTQH.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Not uploaded but archived as &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20230505174634/https://i.imgur.com/kHpvTQH.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://web.archive.org/web/20230505174634/https://i.imgur.com/kHpvTQH.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;349146&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Fixed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Failures&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Frequency&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;URL&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Failure&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Post IDs&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Fixed&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/9tY9sLE.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/9tY9sLE.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Not found in Wayback Machine.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;273446&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/ALQfTcs.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/ALQfTcs.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Not found in Wayback Machine.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;94690&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/DJsKegq.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/DJsKegq.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Not found in Wayback Machine.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;94542&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/EfcnrIf.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/EfcnrIf.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Not found in Wayback Machine.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;358226&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/Hudw20v.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/Hudw20v.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Not found in Wayback Machine.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;94690&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/MC4AT8E.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/MC4AT8E.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Not found in Wayback Machine.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;94690&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/MQLsxMQ.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/MQLsxMQ.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Not found in Wayback Machine.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;394939&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/VasiB3e.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/VasiB3e.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Not found in Wayback Machine.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;423420&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/VpIj86Z.mp4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/VpIj86Z.mp4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Not found in Wayback Machine.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;499867&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/a/Xd9JcHg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/a/Xd9JcHg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Not found in Wayback Machine.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;375796&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Fixed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/eyRBF7C.jpg/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/eyRBF7C.jpg/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;APIException: You didn't enter a valid URL&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;61711&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Fixed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/fdX26L7.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/fdX26L7.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Not found in Wayback Machine.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;394939&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/g8ERIjw.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/g8ERIjw.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Not found in Wayback Machine.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;94690&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/hYBiBwm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/hYBiBwm.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Not found in Wayback Machine.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;94542&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/iv2eTlX.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/iv2eTlX.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Not found in Wayback Machine.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;294432&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/jqfjcwR.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/jqfjcwR.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Not found in Wayback Machine.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;94690&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/lJZM1mc.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/lJZM1mc.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Not found in Wayback Machine.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;394939&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/pon8eKL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/pon8eKL.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Not found in Wayback Machine.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;273446&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/q18e0zh.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/q18e0zh.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Not found in Wayback Machine.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;94542&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/uyZMCLp.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/uyZMCLp.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Not found in Wayback Machine.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;273799&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/vW6UuLB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.imgur.com/vW6UuLB.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Not found in Wayback Machine.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;340199&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://imgur.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://imgur.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;ProcessImageException: com.stackexchange.toolbox.editor.DownloadFailedException: Invalid Content-Type text/html returned for &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20230509193115/https://imgur.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://web.archive.org/web/20230509193115/https://imgur.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;96997&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://imgur.com/9wWdcjr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://imgur.com/9wWdcjr&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;DownloadFailedException: Image not found on imgur image page.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;151482&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://imgur.com/a/U9OVAFO&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://imgur.com/a/U9OVAFO&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;DownloadFailedException: Image not found on imgur image page.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;601146&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://imgur.com/a/dTXM9a2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://imgur.com/a/dTXM9a2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;ProcessImageException: com.stackexchange.toolbox.editor.DownloadFailedException: Broken image, an error image is served instead.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;465738&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://imgur.com/a/j0VXwZK&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://imgur.com/a/j0VXwZK&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;ProcessImageException: com.stackexchange.toolbox.editor.DownloadFailedException: Broken image, an error image is served instead.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;367174&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://imgur.com/a/zb2hM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://imgur.com/a/zb2hM&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;DownloadFailedException: Image not found on imgur image page.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;59248&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://imgur.com/gqHQhVI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://imgur.com/gqHQhVI&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;DownloadFailedException: Image not found on imgur image page.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;465738&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://imgur.com/vUPjsxI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://imgur.com/vUPjsxI&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;DownloadFailedException: Image not found on imgur image page.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;232858&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://imgur.com/vsb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://imgur.com/vsb&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;DownloadFailedException: com.stackexchange.toolbox.RequestFailedException: Request failed: 404 - Not Found&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;161898&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20170815001603/https://imgur.com/a/g4CdU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://web.archive.org/web/20170815001603/https://imgur.com/a/g4CdU&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;ProcessImageException: com.stackexchange.toolbox.editor.DownloadFailedException: com.stackexchange.toolbox.RequestFailedException: Request failed: 404 - NOT FOUND&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;297905&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2023-05-15T08:05:57.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6501" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6502" CreationDate="2023-05-16T16:46:50.470" Score="2" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm struggling to model a machine learning problem and created a stylized version of the problem as a question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/615727/predicting-future-zombies&quot;&gt;Predicting Future Zombies&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was closed as off-topic.  Any suggestions on how to improve the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&lt;/a&gt;, the question seems to fall within the machine learning and data-driven computing categories that are considered on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3712" LastActivityDate="2023-05-17T01:58:20.580" Title="Machine Learning Question Off Topic?" Tags="|support|on-topic|machine-learning|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6501" CreationDate="2023-05-16T16:58:48.300" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't vote to close, but a read of the question doesn't make it clear what the problem is and what, specifically, you need help with. &lt;em&gt;Zombies don't exist in reality, so explaining what problem you're trying to solve in explicit detail is an important part to getting useful answers.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The best course of action is to explain what real-world problem you're facing &amp;amp; where you need help.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be specific!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've broken down the question into its (few) sentences with commentary. But the common theme is that it's not clear (1) what the &lt;em&gt;statistical&lt;/em&gt; problem is and (2) what part you need help with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to predict the number of zombies we're going to need to kill each day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, there's a wide range of options, including killing 0 zombies or all the zombies. Is there a utility function associated with killing a zombie? Are there constraints? Sending out a party to kill a zombie creates risk for the party &amp;amp; they themselves could be turned, so maybe you need to allocate these resources carefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have historical data on the date each human was bit, the date they turned (if they already turned), and which state they were in so we can prepare the appropriate National Guard unit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, so there's some data about each zombie, and one can surmise that National Guard units might be doing some (or all?) zombie-killing, but we need some more explicit information on how these things are related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given data like this that will contain bites up to the previous day, I'd like to predict the number that will turn in each state on each of the upcoming 60 days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a 100% conversion rate from bites to zombies? Is the time from bite-to-zombie conversion fixed? Is it a random value arising from a known distribution? Or is it something to be estimated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, is your knowledge of bites god-like — total and comprehensive? Or do you only have data on some bites and need to estimate how many people are bitten but not recorded in your data?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm struggling to model a machine learning problem and created a stylized version of the problem as a question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This Meta post is the first time that machine learning is mentioned as being related to your question. What aspect of this is related to machine learning, as opposed to, say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/survival&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;survival&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;survival&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-survival-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;survival&lt;/a&gt; analysis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on context, this is what I think you're asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A person got infected with zombie virus  on some date. Everyone who is infected eventually turns to a zombie, but we don't know how long after infection a person will turn to a zombie. Given a list infection dates and durations (&amp;amp; some of the durations may be missing because the person with an infection is not yet a zombie), can we estimate the time-to-zombie-ism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This problem seems to be about &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/survival&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;survival&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;survival&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-survival-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;survival&lt;/a&gt; times: you have a censored random variable but you know that &lt;em&gt;eventually&lt;/em&gt; everyone who is bitten turns to become a zombie, and you want to estimate the duration between the bite and the zombie-ism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is just a guess! My guess could be wrong! You have to explain the problem that you're trying to solve to receive useful answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2023-05-17T01:58:20.580" LastActivityDate="2023-05-17T01:58:20.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6503" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6504" CreationDate="2023-05-18T16:36:40.177" Score="6" ViewCount="186" Body="&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about my Cross Validated post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/616166/how-to-set-up-my-workflow-and-data-for-my-first-network-model&quot;&gt;How to set up my workflow and data for my first network model&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hello,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I would appreciate help.  I am trying to ask a question, but I don't understand what I need to do differently.  The feedback is make it more focused.  Ok... how?  I've read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&lt;/a&gt;  3 times now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my thinking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Search: well, I've been online all week trying to learn what I need to do, so I think I've gotten this part out of the way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be on topic: For me, the question asks about setting up an initial dataframe for my network. I think of a set-up as the pseudo-code phase.  Plan, make an outline, and try to implement.  My post explains my plan and outline.  I'm asking if this the correct way to think about it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be specific: My question is, did I do this right?  However, looking back at it, did I ask too many questions pertaining to the one topic I'm talking about?  I'm asking about the whole setup, hence the one topic.  So should I break each question into a different post?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make it relevant to others:  I'm assuming if you aren't interested in the topic, then you don't need to answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keep an open mind:  That I've definitely got.  I am one those people that learn from making mistakes, and I make a lot of them.  But I can't fix them unless I understand how to fix them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that is what this question is about.  Please help me understand what I can do better so that I can ask if my setup to build my network is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You guys have been doing this stuff for a very long time and understand all the aspects to it.  I am new to the site, new to programming, new to building a network.  It means I don't know what I'm talking about enough to maybe put it into a precise question.  I don't know what I have to ask to get the answer I'm looking for.  Does that make sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="388205" LastEditorUserId="44269" LastEditDate="2023-05-23T20:57:59.127" LastActivityDate="2023-05-23T20:57:59.127" Title="how to make this a better focused question" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6503" CreationDate="2023-05-19T04:19:48.813" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't vote to close OP's question. But I would have voted to close it in line of &lt;em&gt;needs more focus&lt;/em&gt;. So, I am in agreement with the reason it was closed. What did the comment (by whuber) state? It precisely mentioned &amp;quot;[...] to edit this post to narrow it to a specific and definite statistical question.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why so? Here is my quick take on the present status of the query:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; It is plagued with information not necessarily relevant to a possible question: we really don't need to know whether it emanated from your PhD work and it would expand vastly in the coming years and all that. One can skip the intro, which imo doesn't add anything substantial to the query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; Then you followed with a description of your purported data and the approach you have planned to take. That's good. However, I still feel the language used is verbose: you can trim down in a shorter and more comprehensible language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; The main meat of the post consists of the questions, which, albeit are related, are simply too many for a single post. This is not the norm here. Perhaps you can make additional posts citing them together for them to be answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; Finally, the last para. It simply adds nothing to the query of the post. It involves greetings and other things like the usage of meta CV. This is simply not needed. (See this Meta &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2950/should-hi-thanks-taglines-and-salutations-be-removed-from-posts&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; for additional details.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Crux of my criticism is while there is definitely a question that could be entertained by the community and provide useful advice, it is certainly camouflaged among irrelevant statements: come straight to the technical content without beating the bush. Remember any potential answerer wouldn't waste their time to read a long post to come to a conclusion. Note the length doesn't matter unless it delves into a broader confabulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate you raised it here and would be happy to vote to reopen if you carefully exclude those unrelated statements and shorten your query to one or two questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastActivityDate="2023-05-19T04:19:48.813" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6503" CreationDate="2023-05-19T08:29:53.740" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first answer here by @User1865345 is excellent, and I agree with it all. It has the merit that it applies not just to the specific question originally raised by the OP. but also to many others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is another take that is also very general. It's hard for anyone new to a field to imagine that they are answering their own question -- they wouldn't be asking if they could! -- but you can try some role reversal. One way to do that is to think of any topic on which you are well informed, something you've studied in depth, a sport or hobby that is a major part of your life, your views on politics, or your home town. All of a sudden an alien speaking English appears asking several loosely linked questions on that topic. In your role reversal, consider&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How long would the ideal answer to those linked questions be?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How long would it take even an expert to write it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In turn, here are my personal takes on those simple but crucial points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I answer a question, it is necessary that I think I can answer it with a few minutes' work. I have to think that, even if I am fooling myself, and in practice I will spend more because I enjoy answering, think I have something to say, and work on giving a good balance of principle and example. But if I think there are too many questions being asked, I back off and vote to close even if I think I understand the questions. &lt;strong&gt;People answering have to think that it is possible to write a good reply fairly quickly.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments on how long an answer might be boil down to the same point. &lt;strong&gt;If you seem to be asking for the equivalent of a review paper or book chapter, it is unlikely that anyone wants to spend time posting that on SE.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There aren't absolute rules on this. Sometimes people do write impressively authoritative, comprehensive and detailed answers, but that is less likely if a thread starts with a series of loosely linked questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2023-05-19T11:03:02.593" LastActivityDate="2023-05-19T11:03:02.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6509" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-02T18:43:00.487" Score="11" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have someone on the loose right now who is making post after post that is grossly off-topic. What is the most helpful action for users to take when we see this? Should we vote to close to hit the threshold of three to close without moderator action? Should we flag the posts instead of voting to close? I can see leaving this as an issue for the moderators to handle through a ban instead of closing posts and egging-on a troll. Should we flag and vote to close?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247274" LastActivityDate="2023-06-04T17:27:46.867" Title="Spam-poster on the loose: Flag, VTC, Both?" Tags="|discussion|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6509" CreationDate="2023-06-02T19:15:21.143" Score="14" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;em&gt;Don't&lt;/em&gt; respond&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's best not to engage -- writing a comment or answer or otherwise exchanging words -- with a bad actor. They want to get attention, sow discord, and otherwise cause a ruckus. Don't let them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt; vote, close and flag&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, there are several options that can be taken individually or in any combination, as the situation merits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions which are simply spam, offensive content, or flagrantly unrelated to anything to do with this forum &lt;strong&gt;should&lt;/strong&gt; be downvoted. Questions with a very negative score are pushed off the front page, depriving the post of attention.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Off-topic questions &lt;strong&gt;should&lt;/strong&gt; be closed as off-topic, so every vote is helpful in that regard.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you feel that the questions merit special attention, you can either flag for moderator attention or use one of the standard flags, whichever is most appropriate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The aggregate effect of these actions may even trigger an automatic suspension of the user. This suspension is a feature of the Stack Exchange software &amp;amp; is a positive step to keep garbage off this site. This will slow down the user until a moderator can look into the mess and take any additional remediation steps. (Diamond moderators are asked not to disclose specific details about how the automated systems work to prevent bad actors from evading them.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as a reminder, the main Meta.SE site is a great resource for topics that are common across all of the SE network, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/problem-user&quot;&gt;problem users&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://%5Bdown-votes%5D&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;down votes&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/spam&quot;&gt;spam&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/flags&quot;&gt;flags&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/355421/what-are-our-policies-regarding-self-harm-and-suicide/355422#355422&quot;&gt;suicidal users&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2023-06-04T17:27:46.867" LastActivityDate="2023-06-04T17:27:46.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6511" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-06T03:33:54.453" Score="25" ViewCount="589" Body="&lt;p&gt;I won't beat the bush here: for cognizance of the community, I would briefly state all the recent events that unfolded over the past week or so. And then (my personal opinion) there would be a message for the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What is happening?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The menace of AI-generated content is not a new thing. But how they were and would be handled is the bone of contention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE Inc. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/389583/1266833&quot;&gt;claimed&lt;/a&gt; (albeit without bothering to show the exact figures, methodologies and analyses):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We recently performed a set of analyses on the current approach to AI-generated content moderation. The conclusions of these analyses strongly indicate to us that AI-generated content is not being properly identified across the network, and that the potential for false-positives is very high.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then they rather blatantly imposed on the moderators new policy to handle suspension emanating from such posts and &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389811/moderation-strike-stack-overflow-inc-cannot-consistently-ignore-mistreat-an&quot;&gt;dictated&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;require[ing] an immediate cessation of issuing suspensions for AI-generated content and to stop moderating AI-generated content on that basis alone, affording only one exceptionally rare case in which it was permissible to delete or suspend for AI content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why did Mods go to strike?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As has been conspicuous in the actions taken by SE, of late, this time too it was marred by poor interaction with the stakeholders and rather stern standing against any form of constructive feedbacks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389811/moderation-strike-stack-overflow-inc-cannot-consistently-ignore-mistreat-an&quot;&gt;specifically&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The new policy overrode established community consensus and previous CM support, was not discussed with any community members, was presented misleadingly to moderators and then even more misleadingly in public, and is based on unsubstantiated claims derived from unreviewed and unreviewable data analysis. [...] There has been a lack of communication with moderators and a lack of communication with the community. When communication happened, it was one-sided, with Stack Exchange, Inc. being unwilling to receive critical feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of today, June 5th, 2023, a large number of moderators, curators, contributors, and users from around Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network are initiating a general moderation strike. This strike is in protest of recent and upcoming changes to policy and the platform that are being performed by Stack Exchange, Inc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Moderators' response&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderators are a vital cog in the machine. They countered the allegation &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389828/moderators-do-not-and-never-did-rely-blindly-on-automatic-gpt-detector-tools&quot;&gt;made&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The decision to delete content or suspend users is always taken seriously, and experienced SE moderators are not foolish enough to rely blindly on ... any automated tool, really. Just like we don't automatically suspend everyone who shows up in &amp;quot;suspicious votes&amp;quot; tools, we don't automatically delete every post that automatic GPT detector tools claim is AI-generated, nor suspend every such poster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To &lt;a href=&quot;https://openletter.mousetail.nl/#signatures&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reiterate&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just one tool saying one answer is AI is not enough to get a suspension. Moderators look for various heuristics, including posting patterns, answer speed, writing style, and others, in order to identify AI-generated content. This can include checking an automated detector, but this is not a primary method used, due to the false positive rate. While any one method can be unreliable, when an answer matches multiple heuristics, moderators can be relatively confident that the post is indeed AI-generated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Sycorax - On Strike aptly &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/63744064#63744064&quot;&gt;asserted&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The change in policy is poorly justified and communicated (and SE employees have said contradictory things in different channels in the past week), but the worse part of it is that SE is ordering us, as elected moderators, unilaterally on how to do our volunteer work. We were elected to apply our best judgment to maintain &amp;amp; improve our sites, using donated time and expertise, but SE Inc has decided that they Know Best, Actually (™️)... for secret reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;In solidarity with the mods&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The recent rule imposition is an antithesis of what SE stands for. Our long goal is to nurture a high-quality repository of no-nonsense q&amp;amp;a. Botched implementation of such half baked rules and diktats would be nothing but an hindrance with respect to the spirit of SE with the pretext of attracting new users (which is also important but not in the name of loosening moderation over GPT generated garbage).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I urge the community to sign this &lt;a href=&quot;https://openletter.mousetail.nl/#signatures&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open letter&lt;/a&gt; - yes, even users without diamonds can do that too - and show solidarity with our moderators. We are proud two of our moderators have signed in the letter (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/22311/sycorax-on-strike&quot;&gt;Sycorax - On Strike ♦&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/17230/scortchi-reinstate-monica&quot;&gt;Scortchi - Reinstate Monica ♦&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the letter suggests:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you are not a moderator you can participate in the strike by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; Not voting on posts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; Not submitting edits&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; Not reviewing in the review queues&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet $&lt;/span&gt; Not commenting&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; Not flagging posts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;without resorting to any form of vandalism or other destructive tactics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/63742735#63742735&quot;&gt;quote&lt;/a&gt; Scortchi - Reinstate Monica:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These rights hardly amount to democracy; but they do amount to the difference between enlightened despotism &amp;amp; mere despotism, between governance through promulgated standing laws &amp;amp; through extemporary arbitrary decrees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All are welcome to act according to their own will - they can agree without even adhering to the suggestions altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update as of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$26$&lt;/span&gt;th of June: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/390704/1266833&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update as of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$4$&lt;/span&gt;th of August: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/391847/moderation-strike-results-of-negotiations&quot;&gt;Moderation strike: Results of negotiations&lt;/a&gt;. Also &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/64118303#64118303&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-08-04T03:56:08.463" LastActivityDate="2023-08-04T03:56:08.463" Title="June 5 General Moderation Strike: Recap, Possible roles, consequences and other relevant info" Tags="|discussion|moderation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6511" CreationDate="2023-06-06T15:31:35.440" Score="12" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Some context&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is news to me, so please don't read anything into what actions I might have taken or did not take.  I devote my time to this site, not to SE generally; but I would think that in any real strike the organizers would (at the very least) have attempted to contact all diamond mods across the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;About the letter&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have followed some of the Meta discussion about AI-generated content and am aware of SE's recent statements about it.  However, I have not even read the entire open letter because its governing assumption, &amp;quot;Stack Overflow, Inc. has decreed a near-total prohibition on moderating AI-generated content,&amp;quot; does not accord with the facts as I know them.  That misconstrues the statements I have read and appears to me like an overblown reaction.  Unless additional, contrary facts come to my attention, I don't think I will be signing that letter nor changing my interaction with the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Implications for us&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as how CV moderates AI-generated content, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;your diamond mods&lt;/a&gt; have been discussing this privately for over half a year (since the public release of ChatGPT).  My sense is we had developed a consensus that we should continue moderating posts &lt;em&gt;on their intrinsic merits&lt;/em&gt; -- not on whether a chatbot (or for that matter, a computer algebra system or even a calculator) was employed to create them.  (Personally--this might not be part of the consensus--I see potential advantages in the &lt;em&gt;judicious&lt;/em&gt; use of chatbots to perform research and improve writing style, &lt;em&gt;provided the poster takes responsibility for the accuracy of their work.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What your mods have been doing&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are, however, closely monitoring the site for evidence of &lt;em&gt;abuse&lt;/em&gt; of chatbots and we have been quick to close down activity that reflects such abuse, such as posts that spew statistical nonsense or users who appear to be spamming the site with nothing but chatbot output.  But this doesn't require any change in our moderation policy at all and, as far as I can tell, is consistent with recent policy statements from SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2023-06-06T15:31:35.440" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6511" CreationDate="2023-06-06T17:08:06.893" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm primarily participating in the strike because SE has&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Used the private, moderator-and-staff-only Teams platform to state a new policy for moderating AI-generated content. Mods are instructed not to share things posted to the private Teams platform, so I won't go into detail. The justification for this change in policy makes allusion to an analysis that SE conducted internally, but was not shared with the moderators at the time the policy was announced. (Some elements have been shared since then, but I haven't had time to review it.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stack Exchange, Inc. seems poised to unilaterally change &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/legal/moderator-agreement&quot;&gt;the moderator agreement&lt;/a&gt;, without soliciting our input.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both announcements make factual claims about how AI content is moderated that I have trouble believing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My objections are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The two statements are not entirely consistent with each other. &lt;strong&gt;I can't follow a policy that is inconsistent.&lt;/strong&gt; Moreover, SE staff have also stated different versions of the policy in mod-only chatrooms, so &lt;em&gt;even among SE staff&lt;/em&gt;, there is not a coherent understanding of the policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It strikes me as deeply troubling to have a secret policy (the one posted to the private Teams) that governs how users interact with the site.  I think the site can only work and be fairly moderated of the site is transparent about that process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Diamond moderators and site curators want to be a part of the solution to moderating AI content. We want to find bad content and remove it. Stack Exchange has the stated purpose of creating a high-quality repository of question-and-answer content and this is a goal that we believe in; it's why we joined the site and volunteered our time. Catching us by surprise with a &lt;em&gt;binding change&lt;/em&gt; to how we moderate content is not the way to improve how we do that task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Moderators have been asking &lt;em&gt;for years&lt;/em&gt; to have better tools to help us detect low-quality content. Stack Exchange Inc. hasn't built them. But now that the network is facing a massive influx of AI-generated content, Stack Exchange has additionally announced that we are forbidden from using GPT detectors as a heuristic to aid in detection of low-quality content. Ok, fine, great, we can accept the loss of a tool that's prone to error, but if Stack Exchange not going to build any tools that &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; work, how are we supposed to do this job?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this is avoidable. Stack Exchange, Inc. has policies and processes for changing how the site works. There are also innumerable ways that they could solicit moderator input and feedback on how to achieve their goals. The sites themselves are home to hundreds, if not thousands, of experts in a variety of fields. Moreover, these people are all actively involved in using and moderating the sites. Surely there is some value to be found in tapping their expertise in curating content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recognize that my objections are primarily based in procedural issues, not the policy itself. It might be hard to understand why I feel so strongly about procedure, but imagine that you had volunteered to a particular role and then were subjected to arbitrary revisions to what that role is and the expectations for your performance. Moreover, you do not have the tools you need to do the job efficiently, so you improvise with some (relatively poor) tools... then they take away those tools. I think most people would object to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that a lot of the problems come down to poor communication. I am consistently baffled by how Stack Exchange staff interact with the volunteers (diamond moderators or otherwise) who do the grunt work of keeping garbage off the sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The coordinated action of a group of moderators working together to influence Stack Exchange, Inc. seems like the best way to effect change. This is why I decided to join the strike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whuber writes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My sense is we had developed a consensus that we should continue moderating posts on their intrinsic merits -- not on whether a chatbot (or for that matter, a computer algebra system or even a calculator) was employed to create them. (Personally--this might not be part of the consensus--I see potential advantages in the judicious use of chatbots to perform research and improve writing style, provided the poster takes responsibility for the accuracy of their work.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a philosophy of moderation, I agree: the reason to remove low-quality content is that it is low-quality content. If a responsive, factually correct and well-reasoned answer is submitted, we are all better off, regardless of the tools that produced it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that the numbers are against us. AI is an automatic bullshit machine, so automation or persistence among bad actors might flood the site with useless content. The past few decades are replete with examples of cases where humans were overwhelmed with computer-generated bullshit. There was a period not too long ago when spam nearly made email unusable. To this day, various kinds of computer security issues persist due to bad actors using automated tooling to create malware and malicious websites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is especially close to home for me because I work in the computer security field. I've seen how this might end: without dramatic improvements to the tooling and automation around how content is curated, Stack Exchange will not be a useful resource because it will be overwhelmed with garbage, AI-generated answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, Cross Validated has been fortunate that we have not seen the same flood of poor answers that the high-traffic network sites have. But I don't know how long that will last.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of other site moderators participating or not participating in the strike, I hold them in the highest esteem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2023-06-06T19:28:41.773" LastActivityDate="2023-06-06T19:28:41.773" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6514" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-07T00:56:19.820" Score="0" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some people using the Cross Validated Stack Exchange website for the first time have difficulty formatting their sections headers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;This is an Example of a Well-Formatted Section Header&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, there are people who have trouble with the idea that one single tiny space character &lt;code&gt;⎵&lt;/code&gt; before for after a &lt;code&gt;#&lt;/code&gt; could make the section header not render correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#Approach Using a $χ^{2}$ Distribution# &#xA;# Approach Using a $χ^{2}$ Distribution # &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;###Approach Using a &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$χ^{2}$&lt;/span&gt; Distribution###&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Approach Using a &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$χ^{2}$&lt;/span&gt; Distribution&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The feature request is that headers render correctly regardless of the number of white-spaces characters to the left or right of the pound signs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following is a somewhat reasonable regular expression for section headers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to amend my suggestion if you think that you can improve upon it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Level One Header &lt;code&gt;(?:^\s*)(#[^\n\r]+#?)(?:$)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Level Two Header &lt;code&gt;(?:^\s*)(##[^\n\r]+#?)(?:$)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Level Three Header &lt;code&gt;(?:^\s*)(###[^\n\r]+#?)(?:$)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;(?:^\s*)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;(&lt;/code&gt; ....... begin group&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;?:&lt;/code&gt; ....... annotate group as a non-capturing group&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;^&lt;/code&gt; ....... start of string&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;\s*&lt;/code&gt; ....... zero or more white space carriage return, tab, new line, and more&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;\s&lt;/code&gt; ....... any one white space character such as carriage return, tab, new line, and more&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;*&lt;/code&gt; ....... zero or more&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;(#[^\n\r]+#?)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;(&lt;/code&gt; begin group&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;#&lt;/code&gt; this is a number sign or pound signs or hashtags&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[^\n\r]+&lt;/code&gt;  one or more of anything other than newline and carriage return&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[&lt;/code&gt; begin character class&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;^&lt;/code&gt; negate character class (invert the class)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;\n\r&lt;/code&gt; ...... newline and carriage return&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;]&lt;/code&gt; .... end character class&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;+&lt;/code&gt;  one or more&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;#?&lt;/code&gt; zero or one number sign or pound signs or hashtags&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;#&lt;/code&gt; number sign or pound signs or hashtags&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;?&lt;/code&gt; zero or one&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;)&lt;/code&gt; .... end group&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;(?:$)&lt;/code&gt; non-capturing group for end of string&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;?:&lt;/code&gt; non-capturing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;$&lt;/code&gt; end of string&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="290074" LastActivityDate="2023-06-07T00:56:19.820" Title="Feature Request: Both `#Header#` and `# Header #` render as headers" Tags="|feature-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6511" CreationDate="2023-06-07T09:28:06.990" Score="15" Body="&lt;h4&gt;Thanks to all the moderators --- your great work is appreciated&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a moderator, and I have only a thin knowledge of this controversy, based on reading some of the posts relating to this strike.  My main purpose in this answer is to thank all our moderators for their work on this site and to note that I empathise with the difficulties they are experiencing dealing with an influx of AI-generated answers.  This seems to me to be an inherently hard problem to deal with, so I can only hope that our moderators are given appropriate support.  I'm a big fan of whuber's recommendation that moderators continue moderating posts on their intrinsic merits (once they are no longer on strike).  I have confidence that our moderators can do a good job dealing with AI-generated answers if properly supported.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that it mind, a general request from the community:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do not post AI-generated answers without attribution to the relevant AI platform.  If you want to post an answer that was generated using an AI language tool, make it clear in your answer that this is where it came from and cite the source appropriately (e.g., cite the tool you used and the query that generated the text).  Let moderators deal with your post with the aid of candid attribution of your sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you are the unfortunate victim of an incorrect attribution of AI-usage, and your question/answer is closed, deleted, etc., try to remain calm and understand that &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; false positives are an inevitable result of binary predictions applying to thousands of data points.  (As statisticians, this should not come as a shock to us.)  If you have been incorrectly flagged as using an AI language tool for an answer, stay calm and talk to the moderators about it.  It is understandable to feel somewhat offended at having been flagged as AI if you have written your own work, but temper that feeling by acknowledgement that perfect prediction in all cases is an unrealistic expectation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173082" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2023-06-07T10:02:54.617" LastActivityDate="2023-06-07T10:02:54.617" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6516" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6517" CreationDate="2023-06-09T08:12:18.617" Score="3" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/618286/maximum-of-exy-for-two-rvs-with-same-marginal-distribution&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and it was quickly closed as off-topic. Could anyone offer any advice as to how this question may be improved, if it is at all salvageable? This will help me with future contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This particular question was not a homework problem (though I miss the days of having homework), but I can certainly see why it may be construed as such, given its simplistic nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="165367" LastActivityDate="2023-06-09T12:35:42.707" Title="How can I improve my off-topic question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6516" CreationDate="2023-06-09T12:30:18.803" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the outset, let me state I wasn't one of the reviewers to vtc your post (I have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6511/june-5-general-moderation-strike-recap-possible-roles-consequences-and-other&quot;&gt;desisted myself&lt;/a&gt; from review work, to digress a bit). So, this would be my quick assessment of the present status of the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question basically entails (dis)proving an inequality providing a bound to &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\mathbb E[XY]$&lt;/span&gt; where both &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$X, Y$&lt;/span&gt; have the same marginal distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a classic problem to be classified as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;self-study&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-self-study-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;self-study&lt;/a&gt; (which you didn't use) problem. The tag explicitly mentions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A routine exercise designed to test one's knowledge; often from a textbook, course, or test used for a class or self-study. This community's policy is to &amp;quot;provide helpful hints&amp;quot; for such questions rather than complete answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They don't necessarily need to be an exact homework or course work problem assigned by your prof, which often though maybe the case; the flavor and tone of the question matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closure reason offers you helpful link to meta posts that offer general advices as to how to frame a workable self-study post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The crux is that for a homework like problem to be worthy of the site, it needs to show a conceptual query and a genuine effort/approach to solve the problem - show what you have tried.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You apparently proved the relation to be true for some special cases. But then you left the general case, assuming that you couldn't strike any idea how to solve for the general case. But you didn't say why that is so. What are the present tools that you have used to do the same? Or did you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It needed to elicit more information as to how tried to solve for the general case which was missing - remember we are not asking you to show the solution (that's why the question was asked at the first place) but at least a minimal effort was warranted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noted Xi'an did provide a helpful hint in the comment, which you seemed to have used for your problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I would have considered the question as a borderline and might have left it open. But I can up to some extent concur with the reviewers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for how you could improve it, let me allure your attention to this meta SO &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/334823/19518994&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; which shares the general sentiment that one needs to adhere, among them particularly these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; Search for already existing questions about your issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; Help us understand your baseline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other useful threads which you can find helpful but the general spirit is unilaterally same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-06-09T12:35:42.707" LastActivityDate="2023-06-09T12:35:42.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6490" CreationDate="2023-06-09T15:22:32.493" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The company plans to sell its data to large-scale AI projects. So while we can't answer the question of whether or not the data will be sold to OpenAI &lt;em&gt;specifically&lt;/em&gt;, we do know that there is a plan to sell it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paresh Dave. &amp;quot;Stack Overflow Will Charge AI Giants for Training Data&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;Wired&lt;/em&gt;. April 20, 2023.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wired.com/story/stack-overflow-will-charge-ai-giants-for-training-data/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.wired.com/story/stack-overflow-will-charge-ai-giants-for-training-data/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OpenAI, Google, and other companies building large-scale AI projects have traditionally paid nothing for much of their training data, scraping it from the web. But Stack Overflow, a popular internet forum for computer programming help, plans to begin charging large AI developers as soon as the middle of this year for access to the 50 million questions and answers on its service, CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar says. The site has more than 20 million registered users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow’s decision to seek compensation from companies tapping its data, part of a broader generative AI strategy, has not been previously reported. It follows an announcement by Reddit this week that it will begin charging some AI developers to access its own content starting in June.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE appears to be undertaking steps to support this monetization. See:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389922/june-2023-data-dump-is-missing&quot;&gt;June 2023 Data Dump is missing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now has has temporarily suspended those steps. See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/390200/320588&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/390200/320588&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case anyone is curious, there are some options for downloading all of your contributions to StackExchange. This is the a recent Q&amp;amp;A that I've found on our Meta. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4798/is-it-safe-to-use-cross-validated-as-a-note-keeping-software/4799#4799&quot;&gt;Is it safe to use Cross Validated as a note keeping software?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2023-06-24T22:12:05.540" LastActivityDate="2023-06-24T22:12:05.540" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6519" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6520" CreationDate="2023-06-10T23:55:12.357" Score="5" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the question suggests, I'm unsure of what to do with flagged answers that only have a quotation and no other commentary. For context, I came across a review today with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/218358/how-can-i-compute-the-confidence-level-in-the-approximate-randomization-test/618422#618422&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, which fits this criterion. It was flagged for being low quality, which can be seen below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8sTBJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8sTBJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that it is low quality because it doesn't have any attempt at a substantive explanation related to the question or the quotation. However, it doesn't really fit into the normal reasons for deletion as far as I can tell (it does &lt;em&gt;attempt&lt;/em&gt; to answer the question, just not in a great way). For questions like these, what is the best course of action?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="345611" LastActivityDate="2023-06-22T15:01:06.490" Title="Should quote only answers be treated like link only answers?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-answers|low-quality-posts|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6519" CreationDate="2023-06-11T01:25:46.447" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an impeccable example of how a quote-only answer should &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the sake of context, quote-only answers aren't forbidden unlike link-only answers. But those are not preferred. As has been accentuated in the answers to this Meta SO &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/422878/are-quote-only-answers-allowed&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We prefer answers to be your own original work, contributing something new to this site specifically, not just copying something entirely from somewhere else. ... Note that even if you find the complete answer somewhere else that can be copied (with proper attribution), surely there is still something you can add on top of it ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does the quote apply? Does it directly engage with the question? Does it clear up a misconception underlying the question? Does it explain how to think about the problem? Something else? ... What are you trying to get at with this wording? How does the explanation apply to OP's circumstance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quote only answers are poor in the sense that even if those are self-evident, the poster ought to explain how a post of this kind helps OP's cause. Otherwise those would be prone to misinterpretation and dearth of communication would raise questions (as done here by whuber) all the more showing their lack of ability to construe a coherent quality answer. Being new to the platform could not be a pretext, for answering properly with a cited quote is a common protocol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, how to handle such answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the answer came at the First Answer review, then the feedback could have been shared:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it’s currently written, your answer is unclear. Please edit to add additional details that will help others understand how this addresses the question asked. You can find more information on how to write good answers in the help center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume the reviewer plausibly raised a flag against the post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the proper way would be to initially leave an explicit comment to bring up the issue in poster's attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that there is a legit comment that has already called on the poster to address the relevance of the quote in light of the original question, I would wait for some time in the hope that they might respond and edit their post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that doesn't happen, then I would recommend deletion with &lt;em&gt;no comments needed&lt;/em&gt; for the existing reasons couldn't be resorted for the same: the link-only answer statement might resemble the tone, but it is not ultimately applicable, imo, here: the citation is there; the quote won't disappear (albeit with no context).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wish, you can leave a custom comment why you voted the way you did. But I feel the insouciance and subsequent absence of any reply to the comment raised speaks volume of the action that can be comprehended by other reviewers and the community at large about its inevitable fate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-06-11T01:30:49.337" LastActivityDate="2023-06-11T01:30:49.337" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6521" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6522" CreationDate="2023-06-15T16:13:36.477" Score="8" ViewCount="287" Body="&lt;p&gt;I keep seeing a user in the Suggested Edits queue doing the exact same edit to several questions, such as this one &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/348581&quot;&gt;here.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/M6f6g.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/M6f6g.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It always has the same typo &amp;quot;Thanks in Adavanced&amp;quot; and the deleted portion is always the same typo every time too (except is says &amp;quot;thank you in advanced&amp;quot;. I've seen this edit for several of his/her suggestions. What should be done with this kind of edit? Should it simply be rejected or should we alert a mod somehow? Why am I seeing it like this in the first place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;Edit&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps because I wasn't clear enough, I think the point of my post was missed. I am aware of how &amp;quot;thank you&amp;quot; deletes are usually handled. My issue was this person seemed to magically find several of these &amp;quot;thank you in &lt;strong&gt;advanced&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; errors. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/348568&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/348569&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/348567&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/348571&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/348550&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/348551&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Somehow I find it unlikely that people here have made that typo several times across posts, but perhaps I'm wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="345611" LastEditorUserId="345611" LastEditDate="2023-06-16T00:30:08.563" LastActivityDate="2023-06-20T01:07:01.423" Title="Really confused about this constant edit suggestion" Tags="|discussion|suggested-edits|thank-you-edits|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6521" CreationDate="2023-06-15T17:06:34.717" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is SE policy, &lt;em&gt;across all sites,&lt;/em&gt; that superfluous, irrelevant phrases like the perfunctory (and polite) TIA closing should be removed.  (Feel free to disagree -- I do -- but that's how it is.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evidently this reviewer has some problems with English but they are perfectly correct with their suggestions -- and kudos to them for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One user makes the perfectly legitimate point that applying such edits to old posts inappropriately bumps them to the top of the queue.  As a reviewer I have handled this by not approving suggested edits that &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; make such changes to posts older than 30 days.  Indeed, it takes a substantial change -- such as correcting an important error -- for me to approve any edits to years'-old posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastEditorUserId="919" LastEditDate="2023-06-15T18:43:40.030" LastActivityDate="2023-06-15T18:43:40.030" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6521" CreationDate="2023-06-16T13:20:50.907" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am most likely the user since I have submitted around 25 or those edits. I magically find it by searching (with quotes in the search) &amp;quot;Thank you in advanced&amp;quot; or similar incorrect fluff. From posts as have been mentioned I got the idea that this is fine, and I don't see a reason that it shouldn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="390392" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2023-06-16T13:59:39.547" LastActivityDate="2023-06-16T13:59:39.547" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6521" CreationDate="2023-06-16T14:01:53.080" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with whuber's take on this. I am only posting to emphasize what has already been written in the past and now in the thread given in the comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We really don't need to see any form of greetings and other or any form of salutations in the post - post a straight forward no-nonsense technical query without beating the bush. If the user is new, please make them aware why we don't prefer any &amp;quot;TIA&amp;quot; related statements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But should one suggest an edit/edit singly to weed out such statements from a post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me allure the reader's notice again to a particular para of the old wise &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2814/362671&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; of Nick Cox (emphasis in italics done from my part):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Editing even one small thing requires a careful decision&lt;/strong&gt;. It will bump the question momentarily to the top of the active list. Some people are irritated to re-open a post of interest to find one minute change. But even threads that have seen many posts can carry errors worth correcting. Nevertheless, for this and other reasons, &lt;em&gt;it is good advice that if you edit, edit everything that you spot as deserving change, so as to make the edit worthwhile.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please re-read this. When you edit a post, try to see how you can make the post more readable, lucid and comprehensive. While I won't dictate anyone how they would suggest an edit or so, if this is done solely for the sake of removing &amp;quot;TIA&amp;quot; statements without substantially editing anything else consistently, this might be a case to reconsider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By doing this, you are depriving the new askers from the eyes of the potential users who could answer/add valuable comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might have approved those suggested edits myself, but I really do discourage anyone to go on such a spree to dig out all posts only to remove those TIA statements. Better goal would be to make the new users familiar with the norms and established protocols here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastActivityDate="2023-06-16T14:01:53.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6521" CreationDate="2023-06-20T01:07:01.423" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Minor edits removing salutations, thanks-in-advances etc are in principle a good thing, as other answers have said. And as other answers also say, they come at a cost, including reviewer time (if edits are made by a low-reputation editor so go through the review queue) and of bumping questions to the top of the active list (taking attention away from more recent questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tone of the other answers, and comments underneath them, suggest that overall this editing practice is discouraged, particularly on older questions. I would like to write a more encouraging answer, but with some suggestions to such editors (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiGnome&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the kind who on Wiki projects is often called a &amp;quot;gnome&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;) that would make the practice more useful and less harmful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see why age of question should in itself be a barrier to a &amp;quot;tidy-up&amp;quot; edit, though I see others disagree with me. But I would encourage any editor to consider the visibility of the question. &lt;strong&gt;Tidying up a question which is seen thousands of times in a year is two orders of magnitude more valuable than doing so to a question viewed only tens of times in a year&lt;/strong&gt; (you can get a sense of this by looking at the &amp;quot;Viewed&amp;quot; stats at the top of the page). This substantially improves the cost-benefit ratio of the edit, and on high-traffic questions I'd suggest is worthwhile even on questions that are several years old. I'd also suggest that &lt;strong&gt;removing salutations is a lot more beneficial than removing thanks or other sign-offs&lt;/strong&gt;, due to the importance of preview snippets (e.g. in search engines) where space is at a premium and salutations can really eat into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a courtesy to reviewers, and to help counteract the cost of taking up space on the active question list, do try to find other things to improve as part of your edit. If you deliberately searched for a remove-worthy phrase (common salutation, thank you, misspelling etc) then it's likely the question was posted by someone not familiar with how Stack Exchange works or who may have made other mistakes with their English. Either way there's a good chance that you can improve the question further, even if it's only by adding more appropriate tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, please resist the temptation of trying to make yourself useful or grow your reputation by making many such edits in quick succession. This renders the active question list useless as it fills up with minor edits. The &amp;quot;cost&amp;quot; of your edits will be much lower if you reduce the rate at which you perform them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an edit reviewer, the following behaviours would likely lead to me rejecting gnomish edits, even if I accept there was good intent behind them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;low effort, failing to make changes to other obvious errors,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rapid editing so multiple edits are jamming up the review queue and would dominate the active question list,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a focus on questions with low traffic that don't seem to deserve another turn on the main page (e.g. the question is actually quite poor, even if not quite close-worthy, or very niche to the needs of the particular questioner rather than of general interest).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastActivityDate="2023-06-20T01:07:01.423" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6519" CreationDate="2023-06-22T12:41:52.273" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, quote-only answers should not be flagged or deleted - at least not &lt;em&gt;solely because they are quote-only&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, they should be treated just as any other answer. If their application to the question is unclear, one should request clarification, possibly downvote, and if the answerer indeed does not clarify, vote to delete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, sometimes a quote is indeed all there needs to be to an answer - for instance, for a question about the correct term for a particular visualization or method, it may be quite enough to paste a quote from a paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a dearth of answers already, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5326/1352&quot;&gt;we should not make the perfect the enemy of the good&lt;/a&gt;. Better to have a quote-only answer than no answer at all, because a longer answer would have taken so long that someone who &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; have invested the time to post a helpful quote did not have the time to instead post a non-quote answer. (And yes, of course that still presupposes some minimum quality.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key difference to link-only answers is that (a) the quote actually includes the relevant content, in contrast to a link only, and (b) that links rot, whereas a correctly referenced quote should be stable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="1352" LastEditDate="2023-06-22T15:01:06.490" LastActivityDate="2023-06-22T15:01:06.490" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6528" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-26T11:23:27.430" Score="-1" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a large number of questions asking for recommendations of textbooks and material on these fields. Unsurprisingly, given the language of this site and most of its audience, resources are limited to material in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would assume there must be a breadth of untranslated material from countries with a mathematical tradition (such as &lt;strong&gt;French&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;Russian&lt;/strong&gt;) that is never mentioned in these threads. (&lt;em&gt;I am personally interested on French and Spanish sources but I'd rather have this open-question be a general repository for &lt;strong&gt;any language&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;) Thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Which non-English hidden gems could you recommend for (self?-)studying mathematical or theoretical statistics or probability?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="180158" OwnerDisplayName="Kuku" LastActivityDate="2023-06-26T13:14:47.173" Title="Non-English recommendations of books on mathematical and theoretical statistics or probability?" Tags="|discussion|references|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2023-06-26T14:09:16.693" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6528" CreationDate="2023-06-26T13:14:47.173" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do find this an interesting but also troubling question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a question on the main website this question is too broad, as generating a non-english library of resources is too broad in the topics and the languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the question is interesting in challenging the concept of English as lingua franca (Ironically a non-english term) for the use in statistics, science and technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A problem with the question is that, also on meta, it is not very clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know several languages and statistical writings in different languages asside from English (Dutch, German, French), but I have no clue about how to answe this question (Because it is broad and general).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastActivityDate="2023-06-26T13:14:47.173" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6530" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6531" CreationDate="2023-06-27T21:57:43.657" Score="6" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;For instance, would the following question be on-topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of training a decision tree, let &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$Y$&lt;/span&gt; be the dependent&#xA;variable and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$X_1, \dots X_d$&lt;/span&gt; the independent variables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a typical implementation of a decision tree, the conditions used to&#xA;split the dependent variable only involve a single dependent variable&#xA;(e.g. &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$X_2 &amp;gt; t_{X_2}$&lt;/span&gt;). However, some implementations use conditions&#xA;(called &lt;em&gt;oblique&lt;/em&gt;) that involve more than a single feature (e.g. &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$X_1+ X_2 &amp;gt; t_{f(X_1, X_2)}$&lt;/span&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, an oblique condition can be written as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$  \sum_{j=0}^{k} w_iX_j \space &amp;lt; \space  \mu_{X_1, \dots, X_n} $$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the number of features appearing in the condition &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$k$&lt;/span&gt; and the&#xA;weights of those features &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$w_i$&lt;/span&gt; and the features themselves and the&#xA;right member of the inequality can all change, this means that there&#xA;is a very large number of possible conditions to split on, each&#xA;having an associated measure of impurity that has to be calculated. How do the&#xA;implementations of oblique decision trees go about addressing this&#xA;issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="376166" LastActivityDate="2023-06-28T03:29:07.490" Title="Is it on topic to ask about how implementations of a certain algorithm deal with certain problems?" Tags="|discussion|support|on-topic|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6530" CreationDate="2023-06-28T03:29:07.490" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;For all practical purposes, as gung - Reinstate Monica &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6530/is-it-on-topic-to-ask-about-how-implementations-of-a-certain-algorithm-deal-with#comment22247_6530&quot;&gt;noted&lt;/a&gt;, these sort of queries can be positively entertained by the community. I am not seeing any reason it could be closed as off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that might not deter one to potentially vtc the question for it being too broad/or needing more focus. I would be more specific with my query along with proper citation of sources. After that I would be having no qualms with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastActivityDate="2023-06-28T03:29:07.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-16T06:06:38.553" Score="4" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found an interesting question, posed by a user who has not registered yet. I am afraid the user may have lost access (account confirmation lost in spam, typo in email address, user on holidays, got sick, or whatever reason) and eventually gets deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will the question survive if it gets an answer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If yes, will it still be possible to comment?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do votes on the question / answers to such a question make a difference here?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="237561" LastEditorUserId="237561" LastEditDate="2023-07-16T06:16:37.247" LastActivityDate="2023-07-17T03:03:05.767" Title="What happens with questions of unregistered users?" Tags="|support|new-users|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6533" CreationDate="2023-07-16T15:20:51.333" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Turning my comment as a brief answer: as has also been noted by gung - Reinstate Monica, the status of registering of a user doesn't have any bearing on the questions posted by the said user. Unless the quality of the post elicits downvotes and subsequent closing (with a possible &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools&quot;&gt;deletion&lt;/a&gt; thereafter) or the user, if they bother to visit again, decides to delete the post before receiving any positively voted answer, the question would &amp;quot;survive&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Handle the post the way you handle any other regular post. There is no necessity of a different treatment. If someone doesn't visit again to provide further feedback/clarification, there is nothing you can do. Apart from that, this is business as usual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-07-17T03:03:05.767" LastActivityDate="2023-07-17T03:03:05.767" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6535" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-17T21:58:56.367" Score="4" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I asked the question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/621493/how-to-reason-about-the-monty-hall-problem-with-odds-ratios&quot;&gt;How to reason about the Monty Hall problem with odds ratios?&lt;/a&gt; It was closed due to being deemed off-topic. I'd like to challenge that decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two reasons that were &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/621493/how-to-reason-about-the-monty-hall-problem-with-odds-ratios#comment1156715_621493&quot;&gt;provided&lt;/a&gt; for why it was deemed off-topic are 1) being controversial and 2) being about arithmetic, not statistics or machine learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Controversial&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/621493/how-to-reason-about-the-monty-hall-problem-with-odds-ratios#comment1156570_621493&quot;&gt;initial comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This looks like you are merely asking the Monty Hall problem, which--because it is notorious for the disputes arising around it--doesn't work here on CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am seeing &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=monty%20hall&quot;&gt;many other questions&lt;/a&gt; about the Monty Hall problem that haven't been deemed off-topic and closed. So then, the established precedent seems to be that questions about Monty Hall problems are on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, I am not seeing anything in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask&quot;&gt;What types of questions should I avoid asking?&lt;/a&gt; FAQs that would indicate that it is off-topic and should be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tangentially, the Mathematics StackExchange has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/monty-hall&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;monty-hall&lt;/code&gt; tag&lt;/a&gt; indicating that over there, it is not only deemed to be on-topic but also popular and encouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Arithmetic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This I'm not sure of. Looking at the traditional forumla for Bayes' rule and the odds form, it doesn't seem obvious how to go from one to the other. In particular, the former has four terms (&lt;code&gt;P(A|B)&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;P(B|A)&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;P(A)&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;P(B)&lt;/code&gt;) whereas the latter only has three (prior odds, likelihood ratio, and posterior odds).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience on other Stack Exchange sites, the sense I get is that questions that are much simpler than this one are welcomed. However, I could be wrong about how simple this actually is, or about whether there is a higher bar here on CV, so I am happy to defer to the judgement of others here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I figured out the answer to my original question. This fact seems tangential to the question of whether the original question should be closed as off-topic, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is high quality enough to serve as an answer, but here's my thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In performing a Bayesian update by utilizing odds ratios, first you determine what the prior odds are, then you figure out the likelihood ratio, and then to determine the posterior odds, you multiply the prior odds by the likelihood ratio.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose you choose door number one and Monty opens door number three. The question we are trying to answer here is, given that Monty opened door number three which revealed a goat, what are the odds that door number one has the car? (Well, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/30848/136074&quot;&gt;technically&lt;/a&gt; this question needs to be worded more precisely.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The prior odds (before Monty opens the door) of the car being behind door number one are &lt;code&gt;1:2&lt;/code&gt;. It is equally likely to be behind each of the doors, and door one is one of three doors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To determine the likelihood ratio, we have to ask ourselves two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the car is behind door one, how likely is it that Monty would open door three?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the car isn't behind door one, how likely is it that Monty would open door three?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's explore each.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the car is behind door one, how likely is it that Monty would open door three?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this scenario, Monty will randomly choose a door to open amongst door two and door three, so there is a 50% chance here that he opens door three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the car isn't behind door one, how likely is it that Monty would open door three?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the car isn't behind door one, that means it's either behind door two or door three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a 50% chance that it's behind door two. If it is behind door two, there is a 100% chance that Monty opens door three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a 50% chance that it's behind door three. If it is behind door three, there is a 0% chance that Monty opens door three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So then, &lt;code&gt;0.5 * 1 + 0.5 * 0 = 0.5 + 0 = 0.5&lt;/code&gt; tells us that, if the car isn't behind door one, there is a 50% chance that he opens door three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that, we can come up with our likelihood ratio of &lt;code&gt;50% : 50%&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;1:1&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that we have our prior odds of &lt;code&gt;1:2&lt;/code&gt; and our likelihood ratio of &lt;code&gt;1:1&lt;/code&gt;, we can multiply them to get our posterior odds of &lt;code&gt;1:2&lt;/code&gt; that door one contains the car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intuitively, the way I think about it is something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We started out thinking that there's a 1/3 chance it's behind door one and a 2/3 chance that it's behind either door two or door three. Monty opened door three, revealing that there is a goat behind it. It's still the case that there is a 2/3 chance of the car being behind either door two or door three. But we now know that door three doesn't have the car, so it's a 2/3 chance of being behind door two and 0% chance of being behind door three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia also gives a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem#Bayes%27_theorem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;similar explanation&lt;/a&gt;, but rather than focusing on the odds of &lt;code&gt;is behind door one&lt;/code&gt;-to-&lt;code&gt;isn't behind door one&lt;/code&gt;, it looks at the odds of &lt;code&gt;is behind door one&lt;/code&gt;-to-&lt;code&gt;is behind door two&lt;/code&gt;-to-&lt;code&gt;is behind door three&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="136074" LastEditorUserId="136074" LastEditDate="2023-07-18T02:04:56.070" LastActivityDate="2023-07-18T02:04:56.070" Title="Should this question about the Monty Hall problem and odds ratios be closed as off-topic?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6535" CreationDate="2023-07-17T22:57:30.653" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions that look for statistical insight related to working with odds, however simple they might seem, would likely be welcome here on CV if not already asked and answered.  This isn't one of them (but possibly it could be turned into one with some constructive and thoughtful editing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You misconstrue the reasons that were offered for closure.&lt;/strong&gt; They have little to do with &amp;quot;simplicity&amp;quot; and everything to do with duplication and lack of topicality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Probabilities and odds are equivalent ways of expressing the same quantities.  You convert from probabilities to odds and back again as explained, &lt;em&gt;inter alia,&lt;/em&gt; at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/133633/919&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/133633/919&lt;/a&gt; (which also covers odds ratios), so that's been asked and answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good analogy, IMHO, is between expressing temperatures in degrees Fahrenheit (F) and Celsius (C).  Would an explanation of global warming on a (hypothetical) climate site merit a repeat just to re-express all temperatures in F rather than C?  Perhaps if the purpose is to illustrate temperature conversions it would be appropriate on the Math site, but it wouldn't be suitable on a site for people interested in climate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You assert the Monty Hall problem has already appeared here on CV.  (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/373.&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/373.&lt;/a&gt;)  Why shouldn't that be sufficient reason to close a restatement of the question, especially one that asks nothing new?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, &lt;strong&gt;you haven't established any reason why any new version of the Monty Hall question should exist.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, wouldn't your argument, if it were accepted, imply anyone could &lt;em&gt;re-ask&lt;/em&gt; all of the 100K+ questions related to probabilities that have already appeared here and request that they be re-explained with all probabilities expressed as odds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, it bears repeating that two illegitimate reasons for not closing a question are (a) &amp;quot;it was allowed before&amp;quot; and (b) &amp;quot;another site allows it.&amp;quot;  Sometimes off-topic questions remain for historical purposes (the site's policies and norms have changed a little over the years) or because they were never detected by moderators in the first place.  And what other sites allow is their own business.  If you think Math would accept your question, by all means post it there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2023-07-17T22:57:30.653" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6539" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-22T11:33:06.913" Score="11" ViewCount="257" Body="&lt;p&gt;New or inexperienced users are sometimes faced with their question (or answer) being closed without any detailed feedback, or even without any comments on their post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this is definitely the way to handle spam, it would frustrate users in particular when they put quite some effort into their post. I am afraid that it would even scare them away from CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⮚ shouldn't serious users get least one individual feedback before their post is closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/621939&quot;&gt;recent &lt;strong&gt;example&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/a&gt; The user split up their question into four points, addressing various thoughts they had when trying to analyse their data. It thus became a very long and complex question that is probably too complex to answer as a whole. Therefore maybe no answer can be accepted as &amp;quot;answering the question to the fullest&amp;quot;. However it is clear (at least to me) that this was a thoughtful question, but for the user the answer is: &lt;code&gt;Closed. This question needs to be more focused. It is not currently accepting answers.&lt;/code&gt; A decision  was taken within three hours after the question was posted, but apparently no discussion in comments going on before vtc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am afraid that this can make users think they are unwelcome, and that no-one bothered to actually read their question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the community think about this issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;Edit:&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personal comments may lead to an endless discussion about closing reasons, and it is perfectly understandable if they are avoided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be an option to have automatic replies for &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; users that indicate that it was not a machine that closed their question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Welcome to CV. At least three reviewers have read your question and found it needs to be more focused. It is therefore not currently accepting answers, but it will be reconsidered when edits have been made to improve it.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="237561" LastEditorUserId="237561" LastEditDate="2023-07-22T13:12:43.577" LastActivityDate="2023-07-26T10:06:30.470" Title="How can we encourage new users to edit their closed posts?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|comment|review|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6539" CreationDate="2023-07-22T11:57:39.153" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there can be a simple yes/no answer to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I am one of the close voters in the specific post mentioned, here is my two cents:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am of the conviction that the message&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closed. This question needs to be more focused. It is not currently accepting answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is followed suit by this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update the question so it focuses on one problem only. This will help others answer the question. You can edit the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;couldn't be clearer in conveying what the reviewers were thinking about the post in concern. A vtc is not at all the end of the journey, rather, I believe, it is one of the genuine steps to help OP - any positive feedback in tune to ameliorate the post would increase the chance for getting a valuable answer in return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, myself, routinely try to leave a welcome message that might also be mentioning any additional thing(s) OP needs to address. But whenever I feel the default closure reason is enough, I don't add any extra comment. I respect each reviewer who volunteer to clear the queue by taking out some time from their schedule. If they refrain from any customized comment, that is not tantamount to any form of rudeness or unwelcome attitude towards OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone wants to add any comment airing the same thing as the default closure statement, they can do that readily. But I feel it is redundant. And absence of such isn't akin to any form of reprehensible tone, I reiterate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Response to the edited query:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be an option to have automatic replies for new users that indicate that it was not a machine that closed their question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this direly necessary? If you notice, there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; in the closure message that leads to this statement (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that need additional work or that are not a good fit for this site may be closed by &lt;strong&gt;experienced community members.&lt;/strong&gt; Closed questions cannot be answered, but can be edited to make them eligible for reopening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a detailed elaboration and each point has been properly articulated for any new user to comprehend the situation. We expect from any new user a minimal attitude to at least immerse in a bit to check the norms here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really want to add something &lt;em&gt;softer&lt;/em&gt; or more &lt;em&gt;humane&lt;/em&gt; touch by any standard, you are welcome to do so. But as gung - Reinstate Monica indicated, you have to keep in mind the sheer load of the queues to be reviewed - only the mods and few users bother to clear up the pending queue; we appreciate new users of the community to come forward and volunteer in the same vein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO, the default message really works well and so, no additional message is explicitly needed to articulate the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-07-22T13:41:30.863" LastActivityDate="2023-07-22T13:41:30.863" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6539" CreationDate="2023-07-22T13:50:24.357" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange jargon often uses common English words but with different meanings.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;New users, and sometimes even we older ones, are often confused by situations like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If one asks something about X on X.SE, how can it possibly be &amp;quot;off topic&amp;quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If one quotes some authenticated facts and asks a question about them, how can the question be &amp;quot;opinion based&amp;quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And what does &amp;quot;focused&amp;quot; mean when the question doesn't even include an image?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever I vote to close (and sometimes for already closed questions), unless someone has already given a good explanation, I usually add a comment explaining why it was closed.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In particular, I point out specifically what was wrong and how the question could be changed to correct the problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question asked is different from the summary question in the Title.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Three related questions should be posted separately.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hearsay is posted as well-known fact where quotations and citations are required.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's much too long with far too many irrelevant details.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It violates a restriction (specifically describe it) that is listed in the site's tour (include link).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, just yesterday, a post on Skeptics.SE was looking for examples of claims of spinal-cord faith healing, presumably because the OP was skeptical that such claims were real.&#xA;The question certainly looked reasonable for a &amp;quot;skeptics&amp;quot; site, but it was closed for being &amp;quot;off-topic&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I added this comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be an acceptable question for this site, it must contain a quotation either from a well-known person or from a well-known publication.&#xA;In this case, it would have to be a quotation that explicitly reports a specific case of spinal-cord damage being healed through faith healing.&#xA;Without such a quotation, there isn't any notable claim here to be skeptical about.&#xA;(And yes, I know you are trying to find such claims, but that isn't what this site is for.)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;— &lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/55865/has-faith-healing-ever-repaired-spinal-cord-damage&quot;&gt;religion - Has faith healing ever repaired spinal-cord damage? - Skeptics Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a very steep learning curve on Stack Exchange sites, and I'm sure many new users are turned off by this attitude and give up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="390133" LastActivityDate="2023-07-22T13:50:24.357" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6539" CreationDate="2023-07-23T22:01:26.587" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;My policy is that I have four tiers of responses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If it seems that OP didn't put minimal effort to write the question like properly formatting it, doing a trivial Google search, reading it before posting to notice that it does not make logical sense, or checking that the question would be bluntly off-topic, I just vote to close without comment. If the person asking doesn't care, why should I?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If they put in minimal effort, but still the question is an obvious candidate to put on hold, I vote to close and comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If they put some effort into asking &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the question is fresh, I ask for clarification without voting to close. I try to re-visit and if there was no reaction after several hours, then I vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I feel that OP did put some effort and the question is an edge case, sometimes I try answering it even if it's slightly unclear, near duplicate, or a bit vague. In some cases it works, in others I wonder if I should stop doing this because I learn that the question was unclear enough that I misunderstood it, etc and my answer didn't help at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35989" LastActivityDate="2023-07-23T22:01:26.587" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6539" CreationDate="2023-07-24T15:12:28.100" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess, or hope, we all agree that it is better to be nice not nasty and that we want users to feel welcome rather than the opposite. Existing policy already allows detailed and friendly comment from those with time and inclination to give it. I often try to elicit better or more precise questions through comments, with mixed success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's encouraging that really rude or offensive comments almost never appear on CV and are edited out swiftly if they do. (The rudest comments I've seen have been directed &lt;em&gt;at&lt;/em&gt; moderators or long-term supporters.) The standard of civility and helpfulness here vastly exceeds what can be seen e.g. on Twitter, let alone worse places, and I don't think we should beat ourselves up as being unfriendly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are other statements of equal importance here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cross Validated specifically and Stack Exchange (SE) generally do not offer help lines. &lt;strong&gt;On SE there is no entitlement to an answer. People must ask a good question first, and even then no-one is obliged to answer.&lt;/strong&gt; I consider that CV is a good thing and would not be active here otherwise, but a problem for CV -- for new users and experienced users alike -- is that many threads are of very limited value. There are many reasons for this, but in total it is why &lt;strong&gt;people should maintain, if not strengthen, the existing barriers whereby, given sufficient reputation, you can vote to close, or downvote, or explain why a question is not yet a good question, in your view&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE is well documented. I consider that &lt;strong&gt;new users who are disappointed are partly to blame for their disappointment if they don't read around to discover expectations or limitations which imply why their question hasn't been accepted&lt;/strong&gt;. It's not really a good use of anyone's time to write out specific messages explaining why (for example) a software-specific question is off-topic here -- or a request for advice on how to analyse someone's data is impossible to answer well without much more detail on their goals and indeed their data. I have done my share of that, but I don't feel personal or collective obligation to do much more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As often pointed out, statistics is a field where many people briefly have an obligation to study or apply statistics, but they do not have a long-term incentive or goal to put much more effort into learning it thoroughly.  That is often fine but it also leads to many of the more naive posts which boil down to requests to do the posters' thinking for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2023-07-26T10:06:30.470" LastActivityDate="2023-07-26T10:06:30.470" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6544" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-24T23:38:37.870" Score="4" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to search for posts containing images?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not find a way, but it would be practical to have some ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastActivityDate="2023-07-24T23:38:37.870" Title="How to search for posts containing images?" Tags="|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6539" CreationDate="2023-07-25T00:52:43.440" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is also a question that has concerned me, at least sufficiently that I try to put a comment explaining my suggested next step — especially if I am the final person to vote to close a question, and the question seems in good faith but where the poster is likely unfamiliar with SE procedures in general or CV in particular. My recommendation is often to edit and refocus if I feel the question can be salvaged, or to ask the question on another site if an alternative SE would be a better fit (we can migrate to some other sites on the network as part of the closing vote, but not all). Quite often there's also an &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-problem&quot;&gt;X/Y problem&lt;/a&gt; and my suggestion is to have a serious rethink before editing or re-asking. I might point in the direction of some similar questions which I think might be relevant, and may even solve the underlying problem, without being duplicates of what was actually asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the above paragraph might suggest, I would like to somewhat challenge the framing of this Meta CV question. &lt;strong&gt;Sometimes we don't, in fact, want to encourage new users to edit their closed posts.&lt;/strong&gt; A case that I'm never sure how to best deal with is when a poster asks a question that's both close-worthy from our point of view, and mis-specified from their point of view (they haven't asked the question they really meant or needed to ask, due to a faulty assumption or the X/Y problem). By the time the question's closed, it may already have answers, which will become irrelevant or confusing to future readers if the question is substantially edited and reopened. This highlights how &lt;strong&gt;it's important to close poor questions early, before answers come in — and one of the drawbacks of expecting reviewers to provide substantial personalised feedback is that this slows down reviewing&lt;/strong&gt;, while discouraging experienced users with 5 minutes to spare from checking out the review queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On balance, I share many of the concerns raised by this Meta post. I have seen salvageable and potentially interesting questions that just fizzle out after closure without reviewer feedback. I don't want to blame reviewers in any way for not leaving feedback — it's unpaid work after all (free labour granted to a for-profit corporation, no less!), certainly the OP has no &amp;quot;right&amp;quot; to feedback just as they have no &amp;quot;right&amp;quot; to an answer, and the reasons that appear on the close notice are usually informative enough. Nevertheless, OPs seldom seem to act on them in the absence of feedback. Sometimes this will be due to &amp;quot;drive-by&amp;quot; question-askers, who may not have acted on extra feedback anyway. &lt;strong&gt;One factor in reviewers deciding how much effort to give in terms of feedback and encouragement, is their perceived likelihood of the OP being drive-by&lt;/strong&gt;: after years of reviewing you do get a decent sense of this. So you'd have to be careful about reading too much in to rates of OP editing and improving questions in cases with and without reviewer comments. Similarly, even if you restrict yourself to cases where OPs do make edits, I suspect you'd find the biggest quality improvements come in cases where reviewers leave useful and specific feedback that goes beyond the generic message on the close notice, but again reviewers will generally only leave such feedback in cases where substantial improvement seems possible!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, the problem might be less severe than it first seems, but also rather hard to perform a valid statistical analysis on. Are there any actionable responses we could take anyway? I have a few suggestions intuitively, several of which might be suitable for A/B testing if someone at SE wanted a more data-driven approach. These are mostly technical suggestions because I think other answers have explained why you're unlikely to achieve the change you want via a policy or attempt at enforcing a new social norm in favour of reviewers giving more detailed feedback (and I say that as someone who often gives it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there ways to make providing additional feedback easier for reviewers?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We have a &lt;strong&gt;Meta list of canned responses to copy/paste&lt;/strong&gt; that often &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2468/how-best-to-leave-comments-on-questions-and-answers-in-the-review-queue&quot;&gt;provides more detail than the reasons given in the close notice&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Could we promote this list more&lt;/strong&gt;, so more reviewers are aware of it? (This is something CV might be able to do for itself, the other suggestions I think only work if there was buy-in from SE itself, which means they are really better-suited to SE Meta than CV Meta.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As an extension of the above, &lt;strong&gt;would reviewers benefit from drop-down commenting tools for common responses?&lt;/strong&gt; This might be a useful addition to the Review Queue itself. I believe there are/were browser extensions for SE sites that serve a similar purpose.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the close notice too daunting or confusing for posters?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally they explain the reason for closure quite adequately, and they do suggest editing and improving so the question can be reopened. Nevertheless,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we could try &lt;strong&gt;cutting down the verbiage&lt;/strong&gt; so the notice is less intimidating,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we could try &lt;strong&gt;rewording to emphasise the editing/improvement&lt;/strong&gt; angle more clearly,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we could try &lt;strong&gt;giving a less intimidating and less final-sounding name, e.g. &amp;quot;on hold&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;closed&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;even though it's basically duplicating info that's in the close notice already, we could try &lt;strong&gt;having a bot comment to suggest editing and improving&lt;/strong&gt;. I like this suggestion enough to think it might be worth trying, since people sometimes do respond to redundant information, but it does come with risks e.g. OPs responding to the bot in the comment in the hope of drawing assistance but getting no reply.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;even more radically, &lt;strong&gt;should we distinguish between questions that look salvageable and those that aren't?&lt;/strong&gt; There are some which fall so far below our quality standards, or so far outside our scope, that encouraging the OP to edit seems wasteful. I can see some benefits to having a &lt;strong&gt;checkbox in the close-voting menu to say the post looks salvageable, and the OP should receive feedback encouraging them to edit&lt;/strong&gt; (whether that's via a reworded &amp;quot;on hold&amp;quot; notice rather than the normal &amp;quot;closed&amp;quot; — something which might be visible to the OP but not other readers on the site — or the bot comment suggestion, or some other method else entirely).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22228" LastActivityDate="2023-07-25T00:52:43.440" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6546" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-26T14:00:59.920" Score="13" ViewCount="349" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over the past one and a half years, Stack Overflow has lost around 50% 35% of its traffic (Update: Around 15% of the observed loss seems to be related to the recategorization of the Google Analytics Cookie around May 2022). This decline is similarly reflected in site usage, with approximately a 50% decrease in the number of questions and answers, as well as the number of votes these posts receive.&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^\dagger$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How has CV's traffic changed in this time period? My impression is that it's an active, even vital site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^\dagger$&lt;/span&gt; Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overflow&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Fall of Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="78229" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-07-26T17:15:47.137" LastActivityDate="2023-08-07T03:44:52.620" Title="How much has the traffic of CV fallen over the past one and half years?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6548" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6549" CreationDate="2023-08-01T11:37:31.457" Score="4" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to get an answer to our new &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/622609/247274&quot;&gt;quantile regression community wiki&lt;/a&gt; that addresses a particular aspect of quantile regression that is not being addressed in the current answers, so I thought I’d throw a bounty its way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since all future answers will be community wiki, how would the bounty work? I would part with my &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$50$&lt;/span&gt; or &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$100$&lt;/span&gt; points no matter what, I figure, but who gets the points when ownership is communal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="247274" LastEditorUserId="247274" LastEditDate="2023-08-01T12:13:15.347" LastActivityDate="2023-08-01T14:48:31.290" Title="Bounty community wiki?" Tags="|discussion|bounty|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6548" CreationDate="2023-08-01T12:09:41.807" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The bounty should go to whomever you award it to.  If you don't award it on time, it should go to the answer that accrued the most upvotes during the bounty period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19282/bounty-on-a-community-wiki-question-what-will-happen&quot;&gt;The earned reputation will go to the person who initiated the awarded answer&lt;/a&gt;, even if others edited the answer subsequently to improve it.  You would not be able to award points to an editor, even if they added the bulk of the value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastEditorUserId="247274" LastEditDate="2023-08-01T14:48:31.290" LastActivityDate="2023-08-01T14:48:31.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6546" CreationDate="2023-08-03T10:17:25.457" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/site-analytics&quot;&gt;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/site-analytics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Effective May 10th 2022, the traffic data in this chart is outdated. We are working to resolve the issue. [This update was posted on July 26, 2023]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fpkw4.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fpkw4.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last 3 years:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zbKig.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zbKig.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/site-analytics&quot;&gt;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/site-analytics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/reAHP.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/reAHP.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last 3 years:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yfEBo.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yfEBo.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12359" LastEditorUserId="12359" LastEditDate="2023-08-03T10:46:01.707" LastActivityDate="2023-08-03T10:46:01.707" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6551" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-03T15:13:54.153" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few minutes ago I had to &lt;code&gt;skip&lt;/code&gt; the two reopen votes visible in my review queue because I couldn't complete any of them due to a strange error of the kind&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An error occurred bla bla bla...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also see that there were no reopen votes reviewed so far which is quite strange...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56940" LastEditorUserId="56940" LastEditDate="2023-08-03T15:28:17.467" LastActivityDate="2023-08-03T15:28:17.467" Title="Is CV's 'Reopen votes' review queue working right now?" Tags="|bug|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6552" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-06T19:46:53.233" Score="5" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find this tag is often being misused, at least according to it's excerpt, the original Meta thread and also the tag wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sequence-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sequence-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sequence-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-sequence-analysis-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;sequence-analysis&lt;/a&gt; reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Excerpt] Analysis of a DNA, RNA, or peptide sequence to understand its features, function, structure, or evolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Wiki] In bioinformatics, methodologies used include sequence alignment, searches against biological databases, and others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &amp;quot;sequence analysis&amp;quot; also occurs in chemistry (identifying the order of monomers in a polymer) and marketing (analytical customer relationship management applications, such as NPTB models (Next Product to Buy).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See this thread for context on the creation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sequence-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sequence-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sequence-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-sequence-analysis-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;sequence-analysis&lt;/a&gt; and differences from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sequential-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sequential-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sequential-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-sequential-analysis-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;sequential-analysis&lt;/a&gt; (another beast altogether): &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1348/add-tags-for-sequencing-sequence-analysis-or-traminer&quot;&gt;Add tags for sequencing, sequence analysis or TraMineR?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should we do to avoid the ambiguity? Create new tags? Re-tag things? Broaden the tag definition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60613" LastActivityDate="2023-08-25T08:09:59.090" Title="What to do with the [sequence-analysis] tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6546" CreationDate="2023-08-06T21:22:08.987" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some old links and discussions dealing with the same topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The below image is related to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/336925/&quot;&gt;All localized Stack Overflows seem to suffer from a decline to some degree. Why?&lt;/a&gt; and uses the script from &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/1137128/questions-and-answers-per-month#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2JOo8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2JOo8.png&quot; alt=&quot;small decline&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the question some nicer (some cleaner and edited) graphs are shown, that give the same idea. There is a decline in questions, but this is mostly from 'deleted questions'. The non-deleted questions are only changing slowly (it is still a decline, but not incredibly much).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't believe that the decline in questions is a bad situation. As a comparison/analogy, would it be bad for an encyclopedia (e.g. wikipedia) when the number of new articles decreases? Wouldn't it be instead more strange to assume that the number of questions should increase without limit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Four years ago, when SE was undergoing many changes I was thinking as well that there is a decline and thought of this meta post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5781&quot;&gt;Is it time for an independent Statistics Q&amp;amp;A website? How can we be more independent? #STEXIT #WhoOwnsTheInternet&lt;/a&gt; (I must regret that I have no backbone and got stuck to SE instead of starting a blog or something, maybe it is the lazy path to procrastinate?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That post had also a graph about the time evolution of the traffic (in terms of questions and votes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NdtLg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NdtLg.png&quot; alt=&quot;time development&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the updated image from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/1137761#resultSets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Bmaoc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Bmaoc.png&quot; alt=&quot;development for votes&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From 2014 to 2018 there was a change where the highly voted questions stopped increasing and the low voted questions kept increasing, but now from 2018 to 2023 we see that the highly voted questions remain relatively more stable (to be fair, possibly there's a small declining trend) and there is much more a decline in questions with little votes (note that this number of votes is the number after 30 days, and does not depend on effects like acquiring more votes due to the age).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-08-07T03:44:52.620" LastActivityDate="2023-08-07T03:44:52.620" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6552" CreationDate="2023-08-07T05:41:40.630" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over the time I have have spent here, I have observed that some of the tags that are misused most usually end with &lt;code&gt;analysis&lt;/code&gt; (and of course &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mathematical-statistics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-statistics&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mathematical-statistics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-mathematical-statistics-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;mathematical-statistics&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can be pensive about the possible reasons, but the general causes of a blatant misuse are these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; &lt;em&gt;Trail of ambiguity&lt;/em&gt;: When someone is asking any question that involves some analysis (not zeroing in on what it could be) or is altogether asking about the veracity of an analysis or so forth, they would type the word &lt;code&gt;analysis&lt;/code&gt; in the tag field and whatever they feel has the proximity to their interest, click on the one without bothering much. As of the tag in concern, I checked some of the questions where OP used the tag and the abject misuse was predominant. But what this showed is that OP intended to use that tag for indicating there is a sequence that needs to be analysed (in time series, rate of convergence of series, their order, etcetera). For example, see this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/507055/order-of-convergence-of-a-product-of-two-convergent-sequences&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; which basically is asking about the order of convergence. When OP was searching for a tag like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sequence&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sequence&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sequence&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-sequence-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;sequence&lt;/a&gt;, the first thing that appeared was &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sequence-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sequence-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sequence-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-sequence-analysis-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;sequence-analysis&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; &lt;em&gt;Insouciance&lt;/em&gt;: Let's face it. The cohort of users checking a tag wiki before using it is small. There can be scant to no information in the tag wiki. But, imo, the current tag in discussion has enough info stated for any user to get acquainted with what it entails and when it should be used. It explicitly states the field of study it is relevant and the misuse clearly implies that OP never read the tag wiki at the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is the possible way to avert this? I would advocate for changing the nomenclature rather than modifying the tag wiki. One can vouch for the latter, and I have no qualms on that but changing that while retaining the old name that perpetuated the practice would be futile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't see any necessity for creation of any &lt;em&gt;broad&lt;/em&gt; tags like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sequence&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sequence&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;sequence&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-sequence-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;sequence&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;analysis&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-analysis-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;analysis&lt;/a&gt;. Proper naming that clearly articulates what it means and has no scope of vagueness (like in this case, as suggested by Stephan Kolassa in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/64136624#64136624&quot;&gt;Ten Fold&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/genetic-sequence-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;genetic-sequence-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;genetic-sequence-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-genetic-sequence-analysis-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;genetic-sequence-analysis&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/omics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;omics&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;omics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-omics-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;omics&lt;/a&gt; suggested by gung - Reinstate Monica in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6552/what-to-do-with-the-sequence-analysis-tag/6554?noredirect=1#comment22361_6554&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt;) should be adopted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-08-07T11:40:23.643" LastActivityDate="2023-08-07T11:40:23.643" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6555" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6556" CreationDate="2023-08-13T22:38:28.383" Score="4" ViewCount="257" Body="&lt;p&gt;A short while ago my first question was closed because it was about programming (well, it wasn't my intent but I understand why, so I deleted the question). Now, I wonder if it is OK sharing codes in answers to explain the things better by showing the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read some very old questions sound familiar but nothing recently. What is the community's current policy/opinion about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="331205" LastActivityDate="2023-08-14T16:35:34.497" Title="Is it OK to share codes in the answers" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6555" CreationDate="2023-08-14T07:06:32.733" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;By all means provide code in your answers, but don't make it the focal point. The website is about statistics, not about programming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People reading an answer are not necessarily familiar with the programming language used in that answer, or may not even know programming at all. The person who originally asked the question might be familiar with the language, but you're not writing just for this person - you are also writing for people who may encounter a similar problem with a different language or software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So unless the question is inherently related to a specific programming language, generally the core of the answer should be language-agnostic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, using code to illustrate the answer can be a nice and useful addition (personally, I often understand things faster when an answer is illustrated with code), but you can't expect code in a specific language to be useful to all readers interested in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164936" LastEditorUserId="164936" LastEditDate="2023-08-14T07:23:27.433" LastActivityDate="2023-08-14T07:23:27.433" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6555" CreationDate="2023-08-14T16:35:34.497" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I write answers here, I would say half the time I include R code snippets as a way for people to follow along with my thought process as I show them what I'm doing with it. I by no means just answer without contextualizing that code. The purpose is to illustrate either a statistical concept or troubleshooting somebody's statistical question that involves something more coding focused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two examples below which showcase what I mean. One talks about chi-square tests by using R as a guide to follow along. The other is a similarly written answer for an MI question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/619510/am-i-using-the-chi-squared-test-correctly/619515#619515&quot;&gt;Chi-squared test.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/618065/multiple-imputation-in-r-package-amelia-with-wide-vs-long-data/618066#618066&quot;&gt;Multiple imputation.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="345611" LastActivityDate="2023-08-14T16:35:34.497" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6552" CreationDate="2023-08-22T11:31:47.670" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Proposal (downvote if disagree):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[sequence-analysis]&lt;/code&gt; -&amp;gt; &lt;code&gt;[sequencing]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sequencing has unambiguous ties to genetics and biochemistry, which was the intended usage of the tag. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequencing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiki&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also has the same initial letters &lt;code&gt;[sequenc*]&lt;/code&gt; which might lead to easier adoption for people that were correctly using the previous tag&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60613" LastEditorUserId="60613" LastEditDate="2023-08-25T08:09:59.090" LastActivityDate="2023-08-25T08:09:59.090" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6559" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-23T14:43:44.810" Score="-7" ViewCount="277" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/624690/110833&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Clustering vectors of unequal size&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was unilaterally closed by a moderator less than an hour after it was published. While the question might require some improvement or might be even too general for the Cross Validated SE, I am taken aback by the fact that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moderator hasn't made any prior attempt to clarify the question or help me improve it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moderator chose to act unilaterally, rather than allow the community to judge the question and close it (if necessary) by the customary number of votes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a clarification regarding the criteria by which moderators are allowed to close questions without consulting with the OP and the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What is really expected as the answer to this question is a clear statement of the moderation policies and criteria for unilateral closure - most likely in a form of reference to an existing meta post, as I am certainly not the first one raising the question. At least this seems to be the practice in other communities, striving for objective moderation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Further clarification (in response to a popular comment):&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Questions have a comments section, explicitly intended for posing a questions aiming at clarification (obviously, it is usually the OP who clarifies their question in response, not the moderator or other users.) This is the SE policy. In fact, the moderator did pose such a question, and I replied to it (and, upon the suggestion of another moderator, even included this reply in the body of the question.) But such a constructive discussion does not require immediate closure - so the question is about the criteria used by the moderation team for applying such a closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="110833" LastEditorUserId="110833" LastEditDate="2023-08-24T07:33:12.930" LastActivityDate="2023-08-25T11:53:24.987" Title="Moderator using *nuclear* option" Tags="|discussion|support|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6559" CreationDate="2023-08-23T14:49:12.573" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderator hasn't made any prior attempt to clarify the question or help me improve it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moderator left &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/624690/clustering-vectors-of-unequal-size?noredirect=1#comment1164071_624690&quot;&gt;a comment right below the question&lt;/a&gt; that explains exactly why it was closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moderator chose to act unilaterally, rather than allow the community to judge the question and close it (if necessary) by the customary number of votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no &lt;strong&gt;requirement&lt;/strong&gt; that a moderator sit back and wait for the community to do anything, as evinced by the fact that a single moderator can close the question. A moderator might &lt;em&gt;choose&lt;/em&gt; to wait for the community for any number of reasons, possibly because the moderator is interested in the community's opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a clarification regarding the criteria by which moderators are allowed to close questions without consulting with the OP and the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Off-topic, unclear, overly-broad and other unsuitable questions can be closed by anyone with sufficient privileges. I didn't close it, but I support the decision. Ambiguous and unclear questions of this nature invite irrelevant, ambiguous answers and protracted discussion; that's not how this site works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Help Center has more information on how question closure works, how moderation works, and how to ask a good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2023-08-24T18:22:32.380" LastActivityDate="2023-08-24T18:22:32.380" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6559" CreationDate="2023-08-23T14:52:20.010" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my two cent. (I am not acting, of course, for the moderator in question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last time I checked, moderator is part of the community. The precedent is that whenever they detect a post that is plausibly not in the form to be answered in a concise way, then they can temporarily put the post on hold eliciting information from OP (which has been done here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the post is updated, it goes to the reopen review queue for the community to check it. I am not seeing any problem in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key is proper interaction and accurate articulation and clarification of what has been sought in the closure reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-08-23T14:55:58.900" LastActivityDate="2023-08-23T14:55:58.900" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6559" CreationDate="2023-08-23T15:27:11.503" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question arises from a specific post and raises the general question of criteria for prompt moderator closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just want to spell out two simple general points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Although not the case here, it is a strong positive for me that moderators can act unilaterally given unwelcome postings (questions, answers, comments) that are spam, filth, or hateful or offensive rants. I make no claim there to a comprehensive list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As others have mentioned, moderators are not beyond query or challenge, but in my experience they are right most of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2023-08-23T15:57:02.843" LastActivityDate="2023-08-23T15:57:02.843" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6559" CreationDate="2023-08-24T02:56:34.943" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't speak specifically to this site, but on other SE sites I've had more than my share of closed questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most cases, when I sit back and calmly look at it (pretending I'm not its author), I can usually understand &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it was closed.&#xA;At that point I either delete the question or correct the problems that are now obvious to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose people post answers to the problematic question.&#xA;Depending upon what is wrong with the question, correcting those problems may cause posted answers to become incorrect or appear to no longer match the (new) question.&#xA;The situation is even worse if any of those answers have received up-votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's one of the main reasons why moderators choose &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;to act unilaterally, rather than allow the community to judge the question and close it (if necessary) by the customary number of votes&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;; simply to prevent anyone from posting answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And looking at this specific question, the first thing I notice is that there isn't a single question mark in either the Title or the Body.&#xA;On almost all SE sites, the Title should be a simple question, and the Body should contain a single question that is similar but possibly longer version of the Title question.&#xA;To me, regardless of what the posting actually says, lacking both instances of an actual question is a major indication that there is something seriously wrong with a post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="390133" LastActivityDate="2023-08-24T02:56:34.943" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6565" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-27T19:15:07.833" Score="2" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;I stumbled upon a user with a record of popular and interesting questions to have been suspended because of low-quality posts for a year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find this drastic, in particular in view of the user's previous (imho) quite valuable activity. I wonder whether such suspensions are made by the system based on the mere number of closed or deleted posts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should all users be treated the same way, irrespective of their previous contributions? Suspension can feel as a very aggressive sanction, in particular as it is publicly visible and the user's rep is shown as 1. This would not make much of a difference for a low rep spammer or a beginner, but for a loyal contributor it must be very frustrating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have attempts been made to introduce some less fierce sanctions, such as limiting the number of allowed posts per week/month tacitly for a while, and allowing mods to modify the sanction for low quality posts on a per case basis? Would this be feasible? What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I came to the conclusion that a suspension can also be helpful when someone has got addicted to the site and started wild posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="237561" LastEditorUserId="237561" LastEditDate="2023-08-28T09:15:21.363" LastActivityDate="2023-08-28T09:44:45.013" Title="Suspension and length of suspension of irrespective of user merits?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6565" CreationDate="2023-08-28T03:19:40.053" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Echoing what Sycorax &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6565/suspension-and-length-of-suspension-of-irrespective-of-user-merits#comment22448_6565&quot;&gt;noted&lt;/a&gt; and what has been explained in this Meta &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/125271/1266833&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How long do suspensions usually last for?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It really depends on the mod or the user, but usually, via the system-recommended suspension lengths, the first will last for 7 days, the second 30 days, and the third 365 days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From that same post,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A network-wide suspension ... can be longer than 365 days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt; [There can be bans for longer (way longer) durations for drastic cases, for instance, a &lt;em&gt;temporary&lt;/em&gt; suspension ending in the year of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$2292, $&lt;/span&gt; mainly due to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/319634/why-not-perma-ban-instead-of-suspend-an-account-for-275-years&quot;&gt;absence&lt;/a&gt; of any feature akin to permanent ban.]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suspension is imposed when all other reasonable options have been exhausted. It's not that the OP is not made aware of the consequences of their deeds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There can be varied reasons to invite the spectre of suspension but broadly &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/211220/1266833&quot;&gt;speaking&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] an account can be suspended for a protracted amount of time when all other attempts at reasoning have failed when it comes to a certain type of behavior. ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also as has been noted in this Overflow &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/04/06/a-day-in-the-penalty-box/&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt;, these can be primarily due to tue user showing &lt;strong&gt;no effort to learn and improve over time&lt;/strong&gt; and involving &lt;strong&gt;disruptive behaviour&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/399911/what-kind-of-suspensions-are-there-on-stack-overflow&quot;&gt;What kind of suspensions are there on Stack Overflow?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; You claimed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should all users be treated the same way, irrespective of their previous contributions? Suspension can feel as a very agressive sanction, in particular as it is publicly visible and the user's rep is shown as 1. This would not make much of a difference for a low rep spammer or a beginner, but for a loyal contributor it must be very frustrating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I would like to allure your attention to that old blog (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our general strategy is to &lt;strong&gt;discourage specific problem &lt;em&gt;behaviors&lt;/em&gt;, not individual users&lt;/strong&gt;. But sometimes you just can’t seem to reach people, and it becomes necessary to place accounts in timed suspension. ... We don’t hold grudges. The point of all this is to address the behavior. If the behavior improves, you are welcome back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't view suspension as a means of public shaming; this is a derogatory term that should not be synonymous to suspension. It's one of the last resorts that attempt to provide room to the said user for retrospecting and being pensive over their actions/behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Enforcement of norms and standards in this community driven site should be the foremost priority if it needs to flourish in a sustainable manner. There is no two tier system for users with high reputation and for those who are newbies - if they persistently break the rules and engage in a way not warranted, proper actions should be taken by the moderators. Recently, for instance, in our sister site, Maths, on account of constant influx of low quality homework/assignment questions and subsequent answering by high rep users without bothering to find any possible duplicate or to flag/vtc, the mods have decided to amp up their involvement to avert this plague. Check their meta post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/33508/enforcement-of-quality-standards&quot;&gt;Enforcement of Quality Standards&lt;/a&gt;. This resulted in suspension of some very high rep users. This was not done to vilify them, shame/embarrass them publicly, but rather was a purportedly strong step to deter them from the activities that were considered to be hindrances for making the site a quality repository of good Q&amp;amp;As.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; You asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have attempts been made to introduce some less fierce sanctions, such as limiting the number of allowed posts per week/month tacitly for a while, and allowing mods to modify the sanction for low quality posts on a per case basis? Would this be feasible? What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, my quick search didn't land me to any post that proposed any alternative route advocating &lt;em&gt;less fierce sanctions&lt;/em&gt; (I am not saying there are none). If you want to suggest some, I would urge you to ask this in &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta.SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember as this &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/211220/1266833&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... we once didn't have suspensions, the thinking was that if a user was that much of a problem, they should probably just leave the site. That thinking changed quickly as we learned that very awesome people sometimes just have difficulty controlling their emotions, or folks learn that using sock puppets was a pretty bad idea and just participate honestly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When used correctly, suspensions should just freeze the action, let us inform the user of what's wrong, how they might fix it and lift automatically after a short time. Using them for anything else is generally a bad idea, and we've moved away from that over the years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suspensions aren't imposed hastily. Rather it involves detailed scrutiny of the activities of the said user, their failure to respond to any possible warning etc. So, imo, I don't think there is any necessity to moot about any alternative. Dire situations demand dire actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, throughout the post, I have tried to articulate my opinion as well as the established facts here and tried to explicitly discern the two. However, I think I am in full agreement with the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2023-08-28T04:10:14.067" LastActivityDate="2023-08-28T04:10:14.067" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6565" CreationDate="2023-08-28T09:05:25.223" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The moderators won't discuss individual cases. Although the person in question has not been identified, everyone in the thread knows who it is, which leads to an uncomfortable mix of discussion of general principles (which is surely fine) with particular comments that grow out of knowing about, or even participating in, that person's recent threads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think we should get closer to identifying that person, or be more precise about what they did (which I suspect is the major issue) or didn't do (which is germane also). So &lt;strong&gt;we should respect the moderators' restraint and indeed silence&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A while back there was general discussion arising from one particular user. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1665/is-it-reasonable-to-downvote-a-fair-fraction-of-one-users-posts-for-lack-of-res&quot;&gt;Is it reasonable to downvote a fair fraction of one user&amp;#39;s posts for lack of research?&lt;/a&gt; In that case, there was similarly some awareness in the Meta thread of who was implied. (I checked and they are no longer very active here. I don't think they were ever suspended, but from some rummaging around I think it's fair to say that they have various problems in understanding how SE best works, despite thousands of posts over many years!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to make a further few generic comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off, &lt;strong&gt;reputation is, unsurprisingly I hope, an imperfect measure of contribution to CV&lt;/strong&gt;. I can't and won't offer alternative measures or criteria. But I imagine that long-term members like me privately think sometimes that a person has more reputation than they deserve -- and sometimes less. Other people can have such private thoughts about anyone's profile. On one level, no one should care one bit, but the point is still germane.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, some people here make comments that are often worth as much or more as accepted, upvoted answers. To the point, anyone active with many questions and/or answers can often acquire moderate reputation because their posts look interesting or entertaining to upvoters. This can occur despite, not because of, a string of poorly researched or duplicate or near duplicate questions, whereby a member is using CV as a helpline or their version of Google; or despite, not because of, a string of idiosyncratic or intriguing answers that seem deserving of upvote, despite being often irrelevant or even incorrect. (I won't downvote an answer as being poor, and we are not expected to.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So reputation is not even an especially good measure of contribution. What's more, &lt;strong&gt;reputation is not a guarantor of good behaviour&lt;/strong&gt;. Some of the longest suspensions that I have witnessed have been of users with 4- or 5-figure reputations. Manifestly, I have not been and am not a moderator, and I am breaking no confidence in discussing some history in abstraction. My impression from a close or moderate distance -- either engaging directly in threads with such people or just observing from what remains of answers and comments (and noting comments posted in anger but later removed) -- is that long suspensions typically involve one or more of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Just not regustering repeated advice intended to be in everyone's best interests. Repeating closed questions and ignoring previous comments is one such behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A pattern of disrespect for community norms, including the principles behind moderation, voting, editing and commenting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Personally directed abuse of various kinds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also my strong impression, based mainly on moderators' own statements here, that &lt;strong&gt;decisions in difficult or challenging cases always involve discussions between moderators&lt;/strong&gt;, to the extent that drastic action always requires a consensus. A moderator won't act alone unless a particular action seems obvious, e.g. deletion of spam or filth. Also, moderators need to be patient, but not infinitely patient, and they need not accept abuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2023-08-28T09:44:45.013" LastActivityDate="2023-08-28T09:44:45.013" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6570" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6571" CreationDate="2023-08-31T05:19:54.217" Score="6" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;I sometimes see a reopen vote in the queue that looks something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QWhvy.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QWhvy.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I see that the question has been edited, which is why I assume it is now in the reopen queue. But I don't see anything here that has actually changed (normally when I see edit changes, they are in green/red shading). Am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="345611" LastActivityDate="2023-08-31T05:37:40.807" Title="Confusion about reopen vote with no actual edits shown" Tags="|discussion|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6570" CreationDate="2023-08-31T05:32:28.163" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do see a couple of (minor) edits in the history: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/625237/revisions&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/625237/revisions&lt;/a&gt; . But you're right that those edits do not show up in the reopen queue. I think that's because the edits were made before the question was even closed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vucNA.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vucNA.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it wasn't sent to the reopen queue automatically because of the edits, someone just disagreed that it was a duplicate and voted to reopen. I presume the reopen queue doesn't show the edits because the sequence of events suggests that the edits are unrelated to the reopen vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="121522" LastEditDate="2023-08-31T05:37:40.807" LastActivityDate="2023-08-31T05:37:40.807" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6572" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-09-06T13:29:57.973" Score="11" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question of deriving the KL divergence of two Gaussians appears frequently. It arises especially often in the context of variational auto-encoders, because the essential paper on the topic by Kingma and Welling, &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.6114.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, provided only the barest details about the result. Naturally, people will ask how to obtain that result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we have a few versions of this identical question asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/388409&quot;&gt;VAE derivation for Gaussian case&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/369418&quot;&gt;Solution of $\int p_\theta(z) \log q(z) dz $ of Gaussian case&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/378081&quot;&gt;KL-Divergence of $Q(z|X)$ and $P(z)$ in Variational Autoencoder (VAE)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/318748/&quot;&gt;Deriving the KL divergence loss for VAEs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/7440/&quot;&gt;KL divergence between two univariate Gaussians&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are, I assume, many more examples. This isn't great, because a goal of the site is to produce canonical answers to statistical questions. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/291992/what-is-a-canonical-question-answer-and-what-is-their-purpose&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/291992/what-is-a-canonical-question-answer-and-what-is-their-purpose&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do we have a canonical Q&amp;amp;A that we can use as a one-stop duplicate target?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If not, what should a canonical Question address?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should we merge any of these Questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there additional Questions that we should add to this list?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that marking as duplicate is a simple action &amp;amp; easily reversed. On the other hand, merging threads is permanent and irreversible, so we are hesitant to take that action unless we're absolutely certain that the questions are exactly the same — all of the answers to one are answers to the other and vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update Sept. 16, 2023 -- Another question in this vein appeared today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/626623/kl-divergence-in-vae&quot;&gt;KL Divergence in VAE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2023-09-16T16:31:03.107" LastActivityDate="2023-09-16T16:31:03.107" Title="Do we have a canonical Q&amp;A for deriving KL divergence for two Gaussians?" Tags="|discussion|exact-duplicates|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6573" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-09-11T21:11:54.157" Score="7" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often get locked into comment stalemates trying to get specific conditions on open-ended questions so that there is a clear answer or two to address the question. The problem arises when posters fail to single in on the issue, so it's totally unclear whether they have a specific problem in mind and they won't divulge the &lt;em&gt;details&lt;/em&gt; or if they have an &lt;em&gt;unfocused&lt;/em&gt;, non-specific problem in mind for which there are too many conditions/assumptions involved to even offer a useful answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-10-13T09:23:08.167" LastActivityDate="2023-10-13T14:25:44.423" Title="What's the difference between &quot;needs more details or clarity&quot; vs. &quot;needs more focus&quot;?" Tags="|discussion|closing-questions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6573" CreationDate="2023-09-11T21:46:08.030" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Lack of focus&amp;quot; is intended to refer to posts that pose multiple different questions.  Just take some care, perhaps in a friendly comment, that you don't suggest that the OP break a badly formulated post into a zillion smaller bad posts!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Needs more details or clarity&amp;quot; refers to posts that cannot be uniquely understood without additional information.  Recognizing this might take experience and creativity: many times the poster cannot even tell that their question is ambiguous because their knowledge is limited.  Thus, posting an expansive comment can usually be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="919" LastActivityDate="2023-09-11T21:46:08.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6573" CreationDate="2023-09-12T00:51:09.887" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are actually 3 types of problems here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Needs more details example:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who is right?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;T͟h͟i͟s͟  paper contradicts what T͟h͟i͟s͟  paper says.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Both are from reputable authors.&#xA;Which one is right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To understand the question, people have to read both papers before they can even guess what the OP perceives as a contradiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant parts of the papers should have been quoted inline, and the actual contradiction explicitly stated in both the Title and the Body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Needs more clarity example:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A massive wall of text resembling a James Joyce novel (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4300/pg4300-images.html#chap18&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ulysses&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this does is demonstrate the OP's total lack of understanding of the concept of paragraphs, and the OP's being unable to communicate organized thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the necessary information might be there, but no reader is going to bother spending an hour trying to analyze and organize the question so that it can be understood by anyone other than its author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Lack of focus example:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read that …, so I'm wondering, Question &lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And either way, does that mean Question &lt;em&gt;C&lt;/em&gt;? or perhaps Question &lt;em&gt;D&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I also don't understand Question &lt;em&gt;E&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Body contains 4 completely different questions, none of which match the question in the Title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="390133" LastActivityDate="2023-09-12T00:51:09.887" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6573" CreationDate="2023-09-12T15:54:06.263" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming you have left a helpful comment which your question suggests you have then sweating about which reason to give is not necessary. I would go for lack of detail/clarity myself whenever I am in doubt partly because I am never quite sure how to measure lack of focus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If three people vote to close for three different reasons it still gets closed. I did ask a question about unanimity ages ago &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4436/does-unanimity-of-reasons-to-close-matter&quot;&gt;Does unanimity of reasons to close matter?&lt;/a&gt;. The consensus was it does not matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101426" LastActivityDate="2023-09-12T15:54:06.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6578" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-09-19T18:43:00.300" Score="-12" ViewCount="456" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/393127/256777&quot;&gt;SO is looking for some sites where they would experimentally lower the rep requirement for voting to 1.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we want to volunteer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest up- and downvotes on this question to stand for &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;no&amp;quot;. Or feel free to post an answer. (And of course the mods should have the final say, because they would be the ones to be saddled with all the additional work.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2023-10-12T01:21:59.007" LastActivityDate="2023-10-12T01:21:59.007" Title="Do we want to volunteer for the alpha test on lowering rep requirements for voting?" Tags="|discussion|votes|reputation|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6578" CreationDate="2023-09-19T23:31:58.440" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;My vote against is on various grounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't sense that the present low thresholds are too high, so that serious members who are able and willing to contribute are disenfranchised. They just need to do some useful work first. It's a fair question what kind of evidence would be expected either way, and that's a question too for those who want to explore change. But I've often seen unexplained downvoting of good answers, which can only be puzzled out as personal dislike or some kind of petty revenge. I think it's sufficient to raise the spectre of someone new to the site who might run riot downvoting those who explain why their new post is poor as posted. The site exists as a resource for anyone who finds it interesting or useful, but that doesn't make equal voting rights for everybody an obvious goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Like many others I participate elsewhere and find a general relationship between quality of site and the application of moderation (in SE's sense and wider senses too) and the possibilities and constraints allowed by (e.g.) the SE system of reputation and privileges. I sense that many sites are marred if not ruined by low thresholds for participation, which result in lower standards and all too often lead to multitudes of silly, ignorant, nasty and hateful posts. The single most obvious example in my experience is Twitter (X) but I am aware of (much) more obnoxious sites (even in fields that include statistical work).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Naturally you can't tell precisely what might work better without trying it, a platitude. In this context, I cite another equally ancient platitude, that you need not try to fix what isn't broken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a gut reaction. Sorry, but I haven't the inclination to read through all the existing Meta thread, but I am confident that if I am missing something important in the idea that this will be pointed out!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastActivityDate="2023-09-19T23:31:58.440" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6578" CreationDate="2023-09-20T09:55:31.430" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading the long post, let me regurgitate what I could comprehend: previous criteria of upvoting and downvoting would be reduced to encourage an otherwise a passive section of the community. To counter any form of dubious activity, tools the moderators use have been modified taking feedback from the moderators but they admit these won't be enough to deter any form of malice. To deter nonsensical downvotes, one has to mandatorily leave a comment (not publicly). Mostly it would be the revamped mod tools that would be used to avert any mischievous activities, at least that is what I could make out of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my take: I am pretty much conservative when it comes to lower what is already a low bar, as also noted by Nick Cox. It seems to be an over-ambitious endeavor which generates enough discomfiture in me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not the place and time to argue whether those bars were and are still apt (they are). Even though apparently there have been preparations for over three months or so equipping the mods with new/modified tools (I am not aware of the specifics), chances are implementation of this venture would open a deluge of sock puppet accounts, and yes, the idea that registered account is a must would deter sock puppetry is quite shaky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here moderators do an excellent job in maintaining the site day in day out. The reviewers of the community also volunteer in clearing the review queue and detecting spam/bogus posts etc. Over all these, they would impose additional burden to gauge for any malicious activities thanks to the experimentation. I am not saying it would be impossible for the moderators to dole out the duty but what is the endgame here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is then the downvote. There is a reason why one needs to gain enough confidence in the community (in the form of the reputation of 125) before getting the privilege. Again, it would be insolent to think all new users are rogue who would go on a downvoting rampage or reactionary spree. But even a fraction of such activities would be primitive to the quality that site maintains. Yes, the system can detect serial voting but again due to the implementation, it would put extra pressure. Rep 1 users to be precise are novice and are not aware of the norms here and for all practical purposes, they don't pay tok much heed to the help page either. The existing bars provide them time to acclimatize with the ecosystem. Many come here due to urgency - they are in hurry to get solutions and whenever they feel they are not getting any &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt; substance, they would resort to downvoting. Maybe they won't involve in a rapid spree but the downvote was only due to that someone elicited clarification - that is only one speculative instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the sake of argument, let's say, we agree in participating. What is the long term goal? Okay, this is not specific to this site and would be more generic. Over the years, we can say we have developed a good community which cherish and maintain a certain standard of repository of posts. If these minimum bars are lifted, would it alleviate the quality in a significant way? As a student of this subject, I must not throw my biased presumption that it wouldn't; if any experimentation indicates then, so be it. But think about it: any potential good user won't get deterred by the existing bars. They contribute, interact constructively, gradually gain reputations and subsequently become a part of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate the efforts they are undertaking to assess how a certain number of users would add value to the site. But the thing is it seems to me quite half-baked. It is not good to be sclerotic but for seeking more contribution from a certain new users by removing the rational barriers is a no-no. I think SO's participation would be disastrous. Compared to SO, CV is way less intense. But that doesn't mean it should be the ground for such experimentation, at least not in the proposed form, imo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-09-20T11:55:50.890" LastActivityDate="2023-09-20T11:55:50.890" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6578" CreationDate="2023-09-20T20:30:04.543" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;-1 The voting system doesn't need fixing by changing rep standards, the principle of voting by popularity is the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The system doesn't measure quality directly and only superficially relates to how good a post is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If lowering the required reputation is gonna do anything, then it is increasing the problems that the system already has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For example, hot network questions already get a lot of irregular votes from people that are not otherwise visiting the website and this will increase if more visitors can vote as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Such random hot posts that receive reputation that has little to do with a relative comparison of quality will increase if a pool of voters is added that visit the website in an irregular way. For example, some q&amp;amp;a that is used or linked in a university lecture might suddenly get a lot of votes from students that read the material. In many other ways low reputation visitors may visit the website in a very irregular way. The reputation system will be greatly influenced by such flows of occasional visitors that will not vote other questions at the same time. This makes voting/reputation system even less of a &lt;em&gt;rating&lt;/em&gt; system than it already is.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Additionally, the site might become more vulnerable to attacks with bots.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If any changes should be made, then it is a removal of the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2023-09-21T06:30:57.427" LastActivityDate="2023-09-21T06:30:57.427" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6582" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6583" CreationDate="2023-09-21T13:47:45.917" Score="10" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are times when I answer here -- but, upon further reflection, it is clear that I'm not the best person to answer the question (because of lack of expertise or just confusion about the question). So I simply delete the answer. However, sometimes I feel this could be confusing to the person asking the question, as all of the commentary that goes with it also gets swept away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another issue is you can't leave a comment after which explains the reason for deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a best practice in this situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="345611" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2023-09-21T14:30:04.310" LastActivityDate="2023-09-25T11:33:55.103" Title="What is the proper way to delete your own answer?" Tags="|discussion|support|deleted-answers|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6582" CreationDate="2023-09-21T14:08:59.983" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can edit the answer at the top, saying you are no longer satisfied with it, explaining why, and then say you leave the old answer at the bottom for context (marking it well out). This or something like it is done multiple times at the site, but is difficult to search for ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example is at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/229193/whats-wrong-with-multiple-testing-correction-compared-to-joint-tests&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s wrong with &amp;#39;&amp;#39;multiple testing correction&amp;#39;&amp;#39; compared to &amp;#39;&amp;#39;joint tests&amp;#39;&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;specifically the answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/229197/11887&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/229197/11887&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastActivityDate="2023-09-21T14:08:59.983" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6582" CreationDate="2023-09-21T14:49:05.550" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd divide up the territory, without claiming a complete analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An answer you now see as &lt;strong&gt;wrong&lt;/strong&gt; should be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An answer you now think is &lt;strong&gt;irrelevant&lt;/strong&gt; possibly should be deleted. Irrelevance need not be a matter of blame: often it becomes clear that the original question was not really what most concerns the OP. But sometimes your interpretation of the question remains a possible interpretation for someone else. The OP owns the thread by being the only person who can &amp;quot;accept&amp;quot; an answer, but the OP lacks exclusive rights otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An answer you now think is &lt;strong&gt;partial&lt;/strong&gt; possibly should be deleted. Sometimes people fill in silence with what they know is incomplete but may still be helpful or interesting. But then better answers may appear. How far such an answer should have been a comment can be a delicate decision. For example, I will sometimes post a partial answer if I have comments and a graph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An answer you now think is &lt;strong&gt;redundant&lt;/strong&gt; — because later answers are clearer, more comprehensive, or just better while not contradicting your own — possibly should be deleted. But answers can be complementary, a short and sweet answer being useful as well as a lengthier, fuller analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The overall advice is easy — delete if you think that will improve the thread! But as you say deletion doesn't just remove (NB) an answer, it will remove (NB) any associated comments. In statistics it can be true that comments are about as valuable as answers, so thinking about the damage in removing comments is important too. (NB: &amp;quot;remove&amp;quot; is a simplification here, given that much material remains visible after deletion, depending on your reputation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2023-09-22T11:51:57.577" LastActivityDate="2023-09-22T11:51:57.577" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6582" CreationDate="2023-09-22T08:26:53.983" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Option: don't delete but add a disclaimer&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I feel that an answer is not great but still useful, (and sometimes even a wrong approach can be useful as we can learn from errors), then I leave the question undeleted with some disclaimer at the beginning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Confused about the notion of overfitting and noisy target function &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/625733/&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/625733/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit: Watching the video further, I see that they meant something else. I leave my answer anyway as a useful answer for people that land on this question and have a different interpretation of the question...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I had a different interpretation but the answer is still useful as an approach to the different case. Since more people than only the original poster may have the same question, it can be useful to leave the answer for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fitting an Orthogonal Grid to Noisy Points &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/581290/&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/581290/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer is not a complete answer to the exact question but I leave it as it does explain some principles and works well in another related situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I answered a question in a way that can be less easily generalized. I left the answer undeleted, because it could help with some intuition and because albeit the path approach not being the best, the question is usefull in explaining that less optimal path approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is this &amp;quot;phenomenon&amp;quot; called? &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/401970/&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/401970/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer is not a direct answer to your question, because it relates to a different cause of the pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer was not useful to the original example which had a different cause, but there are many people that may run into the problem with the cause that was dealt with by the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Option: don't delete and add the old answer into the new answer&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a fan of it. This can lead to complex and confusing long posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have an example here for the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/289075/&quot;&gt;What is the smallest $\lambda$ that gives a 0 component in lasso?&lt;/a&gt; and as you can see in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/291367/revisions&quot;&gt;revisions&lt;/a&gt; I have been struggling with it having first deleted the old answer, then re-added it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Option: delete the answer and leave a comment that explains the deletion.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/479637/&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/479637/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7qPXWm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7qPXWm.png&quot; alt=&quot;example with a comment&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I used the answer field as a sandbox to compose a comment, and I accidentally posted the answer (this happens regularly)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/350781/&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/350781/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sOQUMm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sOQUMm.png&quot; alt=&quot;example with comment 2&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A post that is more like a comment and has grown big, complex and confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Option: deletion with an edit/disclaimer in the question that explains the deletion.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/561944/&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/561944/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7Dso2m.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7Dso2m.png&quot; alt=&quot;deletion with an edit example&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I had many and long comments which I placed in a deleted question. Possibly it could have been an undeleted question with some different formulation, but I regarded it as not an answer and just a hack to place a more advanced comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Option: deletion without any comments, edits, or explanations.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have examples of this. It is not good practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Accepted answer that can't be removed&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here one might edit the question. Either with a small note or very rigorous like here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/330799/&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/330799/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fQKnGm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fQKnGm.png&quot; alt=&quot;alternative delete&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastActivityDate="2023-09-22T08:26:53.983" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6586" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6587" CreationDate="2023-09-24T08:23:05.833" Score="4" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently asked a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/627135/e-commerce-does-higher-delivery-time-lead-to-lower-sales&quot;&gt;E-commerce - Does higher delivery time lead to lower sales?&lt;/a&gt;. In this question I ask for help on finding appropriate statistical methods on a problem that I am facing. My question was closed as off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I get feedback on my question? What is the question missing to be welcomed by the community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read the answers on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;What topics can I ask about here?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1479/how-to-ask-a-good-question-on-crossvalidated&quot;&gt;How to ask a &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; question on CrossValidated?&lt;/a&gt;. It seems to me that my question is on topic (applied statistical analysis), short, specific, clear, and concise. I intentionally left out the description of data and programming language, as I believe it would not serve the question to make it specific in that way. What did I miss?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="269947" LastActivityDate="2023-09-24T09:08:40.097" Title="Feedback on question: E-commerce - Does higher delivery time lead to lower sales?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6586" CreationDate="2023-09-24T09:08:40.097" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was one of the reviewers who vtc your question. But AFAIR, I thought the post was unclear and didn't provide enough information and material that could garner a quality based informative and concise answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Namely, there you wrote your product delivery time varies throughout the time. But how? (I see the same has been raised as a comment by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/627135/e-commerce-does-higher-delivery-time-lead-to-lower-sales#comment1169828_627135&quot;&gt;dimitriy&lt;/a&gt;). You said you want your test based on historical data. Well then at least provide a snippet of it! What does it contain? What's the format? Etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you asked for an example to show the purported test based on a toy historical data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, albeit the post could have to some extent a statistical query, the dearth of some useful information renders it unanswerable, imo. Of course, I think it can be salvaged provided you are able to reply to the response sought and supply some critical information necessary for an answerable query. That was my take of your post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If others think differently, they can surely vote to reopen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastActivityDate="2023-09-24T09:08:40.097" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6582" CreationDate="2023-09-25T11:33:55.103" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to other answers: if you delete or amend your answer because you found out it is incorrect, yet you are still unable to give a correct answer and the question remains unanswered, you could start a bounty on the question. It would help the OP getting an answer, and would make up for the possibly erroneous information you unfortunately temporarily spread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164936" LastActivityDate="2023-09-25T11:33:55.103" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6589" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-06T01:47:54.790" Score="4" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today, I needed to search about fitting discrete distributions on my mobile device; I ended up in the thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/66192/how-to-fit-a-discrete-distribution-to-count-data&quot;&gt;How to fit a discrete distribution to count data?&lt;/a&gt;, which was indeed quite relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/66197/93018&quot;&gt;first answer&lt;/a&gt;, there were (are) these comments from 2013:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wm9gX.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wm9gX.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, I had to scroll down (and down, and down...) in my phone to see if there were any other answers, which was frustrating. Judging that these 4 comments (the 5th was added later) were conversational and &lt;em&gt;irrelevant&lt;/em&gt; to the topic, I flagged all of them as &amp;quot;no longer needed&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple of hours later, I saw that all my 4 flags had been &lt;strong&gt;declined&lt;/strong&gt; (and, in the meanwhile, a 5th similarly irrelevant comment was added).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I picked up this specific comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll try to restrain myself ;-). –&#xA;gung - Reinstate Monica&#xA;Aug 1, 2013 at 2:47&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and proceeded to raise a custom flag as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How exactly is this comment (and all the rest above, and the one just added below) useful to the topic (had my &amp;quot;no longer needed&amp;quot; flags declined)? I accessed this earlier today in a mobile device, and had to scroll down (and down...) through completely irrelevant stuff until I was able to see if there were any other answers... Please be reasonable in flag handling!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just a few minutes later, my custom flag above was similarly &lt;strong&gt;declined&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qNCdV.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qNCdV.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the flag dialog box, a comment should be flagged as &amp;quot;no longer needed&amp;quot; if&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This comment is outdated, conversational, or not relevant to this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I consider that all 3 reasons were applicable here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, in the general SE &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/237980/645313&quot;&gt;Guide to moderating comments&lt;/a&gt;, I read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's no longer needed&lt;/strong&gt; covers a wide variety of different comments, including:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Chatty comments. They might be polite, friendly, or even informative - but have nothing whatsoever to do with the post! Whether&#xA;tangential discussions or simply two friends chewing the fat, these&#xA;are pretty benign - right up until they're being shoved in the face of&#xA;every reader two years later. Again, don't worry too much about these&#xA;if you don't see them by default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Jokes, &amp;quot;thank you&amp;quot;, etc. - not necessarily harmful in the moment, but distracting and annoying after the fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On top of being outdated, conversational, and most importantly &lt;em&gt;irrelevant to the post&lt;/em&gt;, all 4 comments I flagged seem exactly that, i.e. &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;pretty benign - right up until they're being &lt;strong&gt;shoved in the face of every reader two years later&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (well, actually 10 years later in my case); moreover, the one I singled out for my follow-up custom flag seems to belong exactly to the case of &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Jokes [...] distracting and annoying after the fact&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the above, why were my flags declined? Why are the personal formatting choices (which, BTW, seem to have just been undone) and jokes of someone back from 2013 still of interest to anyone looking to fit discrete distributions after 10 years?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93018" LastEditorUserId="93018" LastEditDate="2023-10-06T03:30:27.543" LastActivityDate="2023-10-06T04:17:28.807" Title="Why were my &quot;no longer needed&quot; comment flags declined?" Tags="|discussion|comment|flagging|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6589" CreationDate="2023-10-06T03:40:55.417" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cannot explain why the concerned mod declined the flags. Instead, let me add my two cents:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I write an answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\rm f$&lt;/span&gt; be a Baire function such that for every &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\rm x, $&lt;/span&gt; the equation &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\rm f(x, y) =0\tag 1\label 1$&lt;/span&gt; has a unique solution. Then &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\rm y$&lt;/span&gt; as a function of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\rm x$&lt;/span&gt; defined by the above function &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\eqref 1$&lt;/span&gt; is Baire. ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now someone reads the post and leaves the comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with the post but am quite baffled at your usage of &lt;code&gt;\rm&lt;/code&gt; in typesetting the mathematical expressions; also there is only one relation and you already stated it as &lt;em&gt;the above function&lt;/em&gt;, so was it necessary to add a reference to the equation since it is apparent that it has not been referred later in the post? A passing observation only. Otherwise &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$+1.$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it add anything directly to the content of the post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, is it irrelevant and is a possible opener of a chat akin to meeting a colleague/classmate after a long time at the bar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typesetting and formatting play a critical role in any post and should be taken seriously along the same par with that of the content in the post: be it numbering, be it the font style, be it highlighting, be it indentation, et cetera. If someone feels this needs to be addressed, they definitely should leave a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what happened exactly here. gung - Reinstate Monica sought a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/66192/how-to-fit-a-discrete-distribution-to-count-data/66197#comment127799_66197&quot;&gt;clarification&lt;/a&gt; on Glen_b's usage of indenting to which Glen_b clarified their stance, which changed after few years prompting them to leave a comment airing the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; Are these comments obsolete/outdated comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think so. Albeit being not directly related to the content of the post, it does point to the changes made in the post. One can opine that the changes were minimal. But that is subjective. At least to me, I take typesetting and formatting very seriously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; Are those chatty comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No again. Yes, there is a bit of friendly tone between them as they are two of the old users of the community here. &amp;quot;... have nothing whatsoever to do with the post! Whether tangential discussions or simply two friends chewing the fat, these are pretty benign&amp;quot; - this doesn't apply here as the comments are again, while not directly related to the post's content, is not altogether irrelevant to the post. And this thread isn't even long enough for it to be taken to a chat room or outright deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I would have no consternation either if the mod decided to delete them. But I won't agree to this: they &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; be deleted on the grounds stated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had to scroll down (and down, and down...) in my phone to see if there were any other answers, which was frustrating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also happen to use my phone most of the time to access the site. You can always check how many answers there are to the question: it is explicitly stated at the beginning of the answer field:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bLXRtm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bLXRtm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you aren't interested in the first answer, you can quickly scroll down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll try to restrain myself ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not able to comprehend what gung tried to mean by that, that is if there was any inner meaning to it (only they can explain!). Was it a joke? Maybe. Maybe not. They were reacting to the clarification made by Glen_b.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;given that, with the last comment (and edit), all the ones above it are now literally obsolete (what they refer to is not there anymore), should one now raise a custom flag on it, suggesting to delete all of them?&#xA;...&#xA;I was already at the end of it, I was just trying to see what more there is, but I found myself drowned in irrelevant clutter...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely! Go ahead and raise a flag if you deem it is necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But let me add a brief remark here: raise a flag if it is &lt;strong&gt;direly&lt;/strong&gt; needed. If you dig in, you can easily find many comments which seem to be not that important or trivial compared to the main discussion. Would you resort to raise a flag continuously? I adopt the practice only if it is absolutely necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the moderator decided to delete those comments, I would have no problem either. But if I were in the mod's position, I would have declined the flag due to the points I already stated above but for emphasis, I feel those stated reasons don't add to them. To that particular comment by gung, it seems to be border line. And finally reversal of the stance by Glen_b does indeed make their earlier comment not necessary but does this warrant raising a flag for them to be deleted? I am not sure but go ahead. I personally would have deleted my earlier comments if I changed my stance and stating it later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly I would like to allure your attention to this from the Meta post you linked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: don't be too concerned if the occasional comment flag is declined; comment value is often subjective and moderators are encouraged to process flags quickly - in most cases, it's no big deal if comments persist a bit longer than needed. Declined comment flags do not count toward flag bans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-10-06T04:17:28.807" LastActivityDate="2023-10-06T04:17:28.807" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6578" CreationDate="2023-10-07T16:42:16.560" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I generally favour experimentation because sites can fall into a rut and let's face it, most online communities are pretty resistant to any site changes, however minor. But I really wish these had been separate initiatives. I'm less bothered by the removal of the upvote limit than the downvote limit &amp;amp; rep cost changes. Whatever tools they have developed for the inevitable consequence of the latter - a few annoyed new users mass downvoting people posting critical responses - surely this creates a lot of new and unnecessary work for the volunteer mods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;More importantly&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;the plan is NOT to revert the changes after the experiment unless there's a strong reason&lt;/strong&gt; to do this, though this is not made very clear in the linked post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relevant text in the main post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because our test includes regular monitoring and clear guidance on&#xA;when reverting the change is the best course of action, our plan is to&#xA;retain these changes unless we see evidence they're causing negative&#xA;impacts that we can't address quickly by making changes to tooling or&#xA;automations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then more explicitly in the comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/393127/if-more-users-could-vote-would-they-engage-more-testing-1-reputation-voting-on?answertab=scoredesc#comment1314805_393148&quot;&gt;Our plan is to only roll back if we meet the guidance for doing so or&#xA;if unexpected negative outcomes cause us to determine that rolling&#xA;back is the best course of action.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This bothers me. I don't really trust the company's judgment of whether the effects of the experiment are negative or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastEditorUserId="121522" LastEditDate="2023-10-10T07:48:29.350" LastActivityDate="2023-10-10T07:48:29.350" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6573" CreationDate="2023-10-13T14:25:44.423" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Detail versus focus&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Focus relates to the 'focal point' in physics, a central point where all light beams converge. If there is no or little focus then there is not such a central point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A request for more focus occurs when a post is dealing with too many details and questions all at once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A request for more details is the opposite and occurs when a post has no detail at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the image below the top left corner has low detail and the bottom right corner has no focus. Moving towards the upper right or bottom left corner is adding more detail/focus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XWRC6.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XWRC6.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;detail versus focus&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Detail versus clarity&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a subtle difference between detail and clarity. In both cases a question is not very easy to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Detail relates more to sharpness and the amount of small pieces of information. For example, a very short post with no background information has little detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clarity relates more to the quality and whether the information is well represented. For example a post written with bad grammar and spelling, typos and non logical sentences is not clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rN88q.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rN88q.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;detail versus clarity&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastActivityDate="2023-10-13T14:25:44.423" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6595" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6596" CreationDate="2023-11-02T23:09:02.897" Score="9" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is simple theoretically, but probably not so simple practically...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to check the distribution of question votes vs answer votes on CV? My assumption is that people are more likely to vote on questions because they do not always require expertise to upvote, whereas for an answer there is a need to understand both the question and the answer content matter in order to rightfully judge how meaningful the answer is. Hence my assumption is that people vote less on answers than they do questions. There are probably other variables here that would also be interesting, but I somehow doubt that stuff would be available to normal users of CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be interesting to get a sense of the psychology of voting here, but otherwise it isn't a life or death question for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="345611" LastActivityDate="2023-11-03T12:38:10.623" Title="Distribution of question and answer votes on CV" Tags="|discussion|questions|answers|votes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6595" CreationDate="2023-11-03T10:25:06.870" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stackexchange/Stackoverflow provides archives of the database as well as a page that allows to write and execute SQL scripts that access the latest database dump. The webpage for the latter is data.stackexchange.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of extracting information about votes is in this q&amp;amp;a: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5336/&quot;&gt;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5336/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It links to a script like &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/872670/scores-for-questions-and-answers-compared-by-month#graphhttp://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/872670/scores-for-questions-and-answers-compared-by-month#graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; which creates images such as this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dJf8d.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dJf8d.png&quot; alt=&quot;example&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This graph shows that among the new posts the answers receive relatively more votes than the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be due to a mixture of causes. Potentially the users have changed in their voting behaviour, but it may also have to do with the age of the questions and newer questions are also less old. Relating to age: it is possible that questions receive less votes early and more later. Also, among  questions there might be more low quality posts that get removed in time, that is in particular visible in the gap at the end of the curve where questions that are less than 1 year old have on average a much lower score (among questions older than 1 year the bad, low score, questions are removed, this happens automatically after 1 year).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also possible to analyse the votes based on a specific time period, like the number of votes received in the first X days. In that way the age of the questions has no influence as the votes are all recorded for the same age of X days. Below is an example for 30 days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1uZxa.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1uZxa.png&quot; alt=&quot;old posts with high scores&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That image above is from this meta post &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/338680/&quot;&gt;Is the voting and reputation system sustainable? How can we improve it or maybe it should be replaced?&lt;/a&gt; which includes several more ways of analysing the distribution in votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An intriguing example is the distribution of the mean of votes for answers as function of the time of the day that the answer and the corresponding question had been posted. (the effect is so strong in the image because it relates to the statistics for a language related StackExchange which makes it more strongly tied to a particular location/longitude on Earth)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/S9qn2.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/S9qn2.png&quot; alt=&quot;the impact of question and answer posting time on answer score&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2023-11-03T12:38:10.623" LastActivityDate="2023-11-03T12:38:10.623" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6597" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6598" CreationDate="2023-11-10T11:55:32.793" Score="9" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;At times I see that someone will provide an answer that, while not directly addressing &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of the points in a question, will nonetheless give a good insight on something that is either partially solving the problem or is tangentially related in some way. I feel somewhat torn on these answers. On one hand, I think the commentary they provide can be very useful (for  example a question about regression assumptions where an elaborate answer is only given for the linearity assumption), but I also wonder if it should be upvoted if it doesn't address the &lt;em&gt;complete&lt;/em&gt; problem. What is the correct way to consider these answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, I don't mean answers where somebody answers the full question and another person will chime in with additional commentary that supplements it. I mean more for standalone answers that do not build off of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="345611" LastActivityDate="2023-11-11T12:44:26.710" Title="How to vote on partial answers?" Tags="|discussion|answers|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6597" CreationDate="2023-11-10T18:59:08.787" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer&quot;&gt;help-page&lt;/a&gt; mentions this (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make sure your answer provides that – or at least a viable alternative. Your answer can say “don’t do that,” but it should also say “try this instead.” Any answer that &lt;strong&gt;fully addresses at least part of the question is helpful&lt;/strong&gt; and can get the asker going in the right direction. State any limitations, assumptions or simplifications in your answer. &lt;strong&gt;Brevity is acceptable, but fuller explanations are better.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there is no doubt they are indeed &lt;em&gt;acceptable&lt;/em&gt; answers. But upvoting them depends on the specific post and the overall scenario in concern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Context is important and relevant here. whuber has raised a good &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6597/how-to-vote-on-partial-answers#comment22562_6597&quot;&gt;point&lt;/a&gt;. The help-page again goes on in the same vein:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Save yourself some frustration and avoid trying to answer questions which...&#xA;...are unclear or lacking specific details that can uniquely identify the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone has answered such ambiguous query (same in case of a broad question) and the bone of the post is seeking more information, check if it could have been possible only with leaving a comment and then may ask the answerer to do the same. However, if there is also some good advice (in the spirit of the first quoted para above) that has the potential to help OP, albeit in that ambiguous set of information, then that should be upvoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, answers are not monoliths - they are prone to be altered once OP has provided enough details for the responder to update their post. So, the best approach would be to wait (you can follow the post), both for OP's clarification as well as the subsequent update of the answer, if it is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-11-10T19:14:31.877" LastActivityDate="2023-11-10T19:14:31.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6597" CreationDate="2023-11-11T10:30:19.213" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A very good question that did get me thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6597/how-to-vote-on-partial-answers?cb=1#comment22562_6597&quot;&gt;whuber's comment&lt;/a&gt; is absolutely key:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &amp;quot;partial answer&amp;quot; suggests the question is not a good one for the site because it raises multiple issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here is what I will do in the case of &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;partial&lt;/em&gt; answers: upvote them. Because they are good. Yes, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6597/how-to-vote-on-partial-answers?cb=1#comment22561_6597&quot;&gt;that will likely reduce the probability of later &lt;em&gt;full&lt;/em&gt; answers&lt;/a&gt;. I will consider this a feature, not a bug of upvoting the partial answer: if the asker is unsatisfied with the (good!) partial answer, they should post a new, more focused, follow-up question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, I believe that rewarding good partial answers will have an educational impact &lt;em&gt;on the asker&lt;/em&gt; that will overall improve the quality of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2023-11-11T10:30:19.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6597" CreationDate="2023-11-11T11:26:28.823" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A partial answer should be both &lt;strong&gt;confident&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;diffident&lt;/strong&gt;. It should be confident because you think you have something worth saying that is (much) more than a comment, but it is not a full answer. It should be diffident for the same reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Manifestly, whatever can be said as a comment should be a comment, starting with &amp;quot;I agree with X&amp;quot; (sometimes worth saying) or &amp;quot;I have the same problem&amp;quot; (not usually worth saying). I agree also that really poor or confused questions should not be answered. Votes to close, downvoting, flagging, and commenting on what's poor or confused are among the tools provided, depending on how and why it is not a good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a good idea to &lt;strong&gt;flag the diffidence early on&lt;/strong&gt;, to explain why you're posting a partial answer. Ideally you will then fend off possible comments (or thoughts) to the effect that you didn't answer the question completely, or even at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I can address part of the question here, namely ...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;There are already excellent answers from @User1865345 and @Stephan Kolassa, but here I want to add a further perspective.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;No-one has answered yet, but here are some thoughts to start a discussion.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What I have to say won't fit into comments because ...&lt;/em&gt;. (For example, you may be posting a graph, or more mathematics or code than is easy to read in comments.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This divides opinion, I guess, but I think &lt;strong&gt;it can be in order to try to widen or shift a thread&lt;/strong&gt; because the question as posted obscures or ignores a deeper or more worthwhile question, or because there is an interesting or useful question alongside. Naturally the OP has control over whether they accept any answer, and they or others might riposte that your answer is irrelevant or marginal to the question. That's part of the risk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Posting &lt;strong&gt;a partial answer carries some obligation to keep an eye on the thread to see if someone else posts a more complete and/or better answer&lt;/strong&gt;. If that happens, there can be various options, including&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;leaving your partial answer, because it hasn't been superseded or it remains your view&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;taking what is different and summarizing it as a comment on someone else's answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;occasionally adding material as an edit to someone else's answer (best done only if you think the poster &amp;quot;knows&amp;quot; you from your contributions or direct exchanges and won't mind)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;just deleting your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think tolerance for (and appreciation of) partial answers on CV goes along with a statistical culture that recognises and even celebrates the possibility of different attitudes and styles, particularly in data analysis, but also in statistical philosophy and theory. People new to statistics are often very surprised or disappointed by this, but it is part of what they may need to appreciate. CV is the site on Stack Exchange I know and like best; on Stack Overflow I often see very limited tolerance for comments or discussion, even when relevant to the question and likely to be helpful to readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Self-exemplifying: I didn't comment on how to vote. I just picked up on ideas so far and ideas nearby.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2023-11-11T12:44:26.710" LastActivityDate="2023-11-11T12:44:26.710" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6601" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6602" CreationDate="2023-11-11T17:34:31.587" Score="2" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/630929/estimating-expected-value-with-respect-to-posterior&quot;&gt;My question&lt;/a&gt; was closed for lack of enough detail and no private feedback was provided as to what detail is exactly missing, which is not &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions&quot;&gt;how I read it is supposed to be&lt;/a&gt;. Even though I cannot think of a single part that requires detail, I added information to the one part I could think would benefit and it got rejected for opening, again without further explanation. How can I request in such scenarios for more information regarding the closing reason?* I believe if someone has enough time to read my question twice and vote to close it, they have enough time to write one line explaining the reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*: in case it's not obvious, this is the question I want answer to here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="312367" LastEditorUserId="44269" LastEditDate="2023-11-12T00:20:56.830" LastActivityDate="2023-11-14T17:04:40.990" Title="How to request reason for closing" Tags="|discussion|support|closing-questions|votes|reopen-closed|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6601" CreationDate="2023-11-11T18:22:08.490" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Writing a question in Meta asking for feedback is a way to solicit feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The blue box at the top of your post reads &amp;quot;Closed. This question needs details or clarity. It is not currently accepting answers.&#xA;Add details and clarify the problem being solved. This will help others answer the question. You can edit the question.&amp;quot; This is the feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't vote to close the question, so I can't speak for the people who did. However, there are several parts of the question that could be clarified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question is completely general. You want to compute an expectation of an arbitrary function where neither &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$P$&lt;/span&gt; nor &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$f$&lt;/span&gt; are described. Often, solving a very general problem is harder than solving a more specific problem; providing detail about what you want to do and how the proposed procedure fits into it could make the answer more tractable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In general, estimating posterior distributions is challenging. It becomes more challenging when estimating very many parameters and highly multimodal and non-identified likelihoods, such as neural networks. Bayesian inference tools exist to estimate posterior distributions, but it's not clear from the question whether you are using them at all, or if you are conflating them with SGD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You describe SGD as &amp;quot;sampling parameters,&amp;quot; which is not what SGD is. SGD does not generate random deviates from a desired target distribution. SGD is an &lt;em&gt;optimization&lt;/em&gt; algorithm. The purpose of SGD is to adjust parameters &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\theta$&lt;/span&gt; so that some loss achieves a local minimum. When the SGD loss is a negative likelihood, then it is analogous to a maximum likelihood estimator; both are point estimates of parameters given a dataset and a model specification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bayesian neural networks are a specialized topic in their own right. It's possible that this is what you're after, since you're using a neural network and desire estimates of distributions over &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\theta$&lt;/span&gt;. If you are asking about Bayesian neural networks, then this question is very broad and would benefit from an explanation of what you know and what you would like to find out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible that you have some specialized procedure in mind that resolves these inconsistencies and ambiguities. If so, you should edit your question to describe them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22311" LastEditorUserId="22311" LastEditDate="2023-11-14T17:04:40.990" LastActivityDate="2023-11-14T17:04:40.990" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5757" CreationDate="2023-11-18T07:41:56.900" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just going to ask the exact same question and found that I already upvoted this question here, because great minds think alike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question currently has 12 upvotes and 0 downvotes, I would take this as a clear vote that we should indeed have such a tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have created &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/ethics/info&quot;&gt;a tag wiki&lt;/a&gt; based on the comments above; everyone please take a look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also started &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=ethics+-%5Bethics%5D&quot;&gt;retagging questions&lt;/a&gt;, everyone is invited to contribute here. (Let's retag slowly, no more than a few questions every day, so as not to bump-flood the homepage. No need to retag closed questions, unless they can be improved to be candidates for reopening.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2023-11-18T07:41:56.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5757" CreationDate="2023-11-21T13:37:24.697" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would suggest to formulate the tag information and the tag wiki in a similar way as we use tags for software. E.g. the R-tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for any &lt;em&gt;on-topic&lt;/em&gt; question that (a) involves &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; either as a critical part of the question or expected answer, &amp;amp; (b) is not &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; about how to use &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in the help section&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Programming&lt;/strong&gt;, ask on Stack Overflow. If the language is statistically oriented (such as &lt;strong&gt;R, SAS, Stata, SPSS&lt;/strong&gt;, etc.), then decide based on the nature of your question: if it needs &lt;em&gt;statistical expertise&lt;/em&gt; to understand or answer, ask it here; if it's about the &lt;em&gt;implementation&lt;/em&gt; of an algorithm, routine &lt;em&gt;data processing&lt;/em&gt;, or details of the &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt;, then please refer to the collection of links to resources we maintain.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For ethics we could have an analogues approach. The questions should require statistical expertise and require statistics to answer, rather than being just about a more general ethical question that is related to statistics but not neccesarily about statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example question of such category could be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/449322/was-amazons-ai-tool-more-than-human-recruiters-biased-against-women&quot;&gt;Was Amazon's AI tool, more than human recruiters, biased against women?&lt;/a&gt; which is not a question purely about the ethics (e.g. whether or not bias is good) but about &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; statistics can lead to the ethical problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastActivityDate="2023-11-21T13:37:24.697" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6605" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-11-23T08:55:46.660" Score="8" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am studying multilevel/hierarchical models and I have trouble deriving the mathematical formulae for certain models. Is it on topic to ask about this ? I mean, I fit a model with software, and I want to understand the mathematical formula, which I am having problems with doing. Is that on topic ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="401006" LastActivityDate="2023-11-24T09:15:16.810" Title="Is it on topic to ask about derivation of mathematical statistical formulae?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6605" CreationDate="2023-11-23T10:24:15.027" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is more to it than simply answering in an affirmative or negative sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since its inception, the community has catered to questions that implicitly needed or explicitly sought derivations/arguments/proofs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But they were &lt;em&gt;conceptual&lt;/em&gt; queries and hence different from  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/self-study&quot;&gt;homework&lt;/a&gt; based queries that &lt;em&gt;ask&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;solving&lt;/em&gt; their problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more important thing is how the question is presented: It has to be well-researched. Check books, articles, lecture notes, old CV posts (check for possible duplicates). Then write down&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your objectives and problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What your current understanding points to and whether this or that line of approach is efficient/optimal/problematic or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That amplifies your chance of getting a constructive, helpful answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps basic but worth mentioning: a question that shows attempts to understand any available derivation or any relevant effort thereof in laying out a sketch/argument in the same vein is preferable to a question which simply asks to show a proof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-11-23T15:51:59.857" LastActivityDate="2023-11-23T15:51:59.857" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6605" CreationDate="2023-11-23T16:36:27.037" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about derivations are often asked and answered. Sometimes, when they are homework, then they are off-topic (or actually technically not off-topic, but considered written in a bad format).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Questions with details and understanding&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question is about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and I want to understand the mathematical formula&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then it is always on-topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(provided that it is about statistics, purely mathematical questions are sometimes moved to the maths stackexchange page, an example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/4784766/&quot;&gt;proof using Cauchy Schwarz inequality&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples with the bias variance decomposition formula&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/256141/&quot;&gt;Mathematical intuition of Bias-Variance equation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/123320&quot;&gt;MSE decomposition to Variance and Bias Squared&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/505231/&quot;&gt;Conditional bias-variance decomposition of MSE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/469384&quot;&gt;Bias-Variance decomposition: Expectations over what?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Homework&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Home-work and study type of questions are a slightly difficult situation. If you have 'trouble deriving the mathematical formulae' then you should ideally explain that trouble, as that's the root cause of the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of doing home-work is to learn from the experience. Getting the answer without doing any work and learning how to overcome the trouble doesn't help much. Also, home-work questions are often a duplicate of a previously existing question with only a slight variation. E.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=find+MLE&quot;&gt;find the MLE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the four questions in the previous section above the questions about the derivation are never plainly directly asking for the solution and are always about understanding the intuition or some particular step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might see homework questions being answered even when it is borderline. I notice that I did this here &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/319238/&quot;&gt;Showing $\frac{2X}{1-X^2}$ is standard Cauchy when $X$ is standard Cauchy&lt;/a&gt;  Possibly it helps if an answer can be about intuition or in some other way a more colorful description about the method of derivation, but based on the question this can not be directly said whether this is gonna be the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/self-study/info&quot;&gt;self-study tag info&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;'How did they do/derive/prove this?' type of questions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't mean that asking directly for derivations is off-topic. For example if someone finds some step in an article and asks how it is derived like &amp;quot;I have been reading this article ... from ... and do not see how they got equation ... How can we derive this?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/243384/&quot;&gt;Deriving Bellman&amp;#39;s Equation in Reinforcement Learning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/164223&quot;&gt;Proof of LOOCV formula&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if it is formulated without any context and if it is a simple question then people might think that it is homework and ignore it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Other&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I myself have made several questions about derivations as sub-questions to other questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/552589&quot;&gt;Deriving the limiting distribution of a sum of Pareto distributed variables&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/548613&quot;&gt;Derivation of moment generating function for limiting distribution of sum of logbeta distributed variables&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Structural formulas of linear models&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first I thought your question was about deriving mathematical equations, but I also notice your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/631850&quot;&gt;Doubts about mixed model (R vs SAS) with nested random effects&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is more about the use of syntax and debugging code. Questions about writing such formulae have been closed before &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/603881&quot;&gt;Why do I have to subtract 1 from R regression to measure fixed effects?&lt;/a&gt; because they are about coding. Personally I feel that this is borderline as I argued in a comment it can be seen in a wider context than just a single programming language&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't believe this is much about R notation. Those symbolic notations of the structural formulas of linear models are used in a wider setting. An early description is Wilkinson and Rogers, 1973, &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.2307/2346786&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Symbolic Description of Factorial Models for Analysis of Variance&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;other questions like that are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/551690/&quot;&gt;How do I specify crossed random intercepts in lme?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/548024/&quot;&gt;Retrieving correlations through linear mixed-effects modeling&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/561826/&quot;&gt;Difficulty of specifying a within-group correlation structure in a linear mixed-effects model&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are always a bit tricky. A question about a warning message from a computer code is about coding , but when it involves statistics to solve the problem then it is on-topic. However, without the answer it might not be clear whether the solution is about a statistics problem or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, the answer seems to me like it is more about the logic, the encoding off the location:block not being nested in your data, and this makes it less of a programming error specific to the programming language. That makes it less off-topic (at least in my opinion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="164061" LastEditDate="2023-11-24T09:15:16.810" LastActivityDate="2023-11-24T09:15:16.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6608" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6609" CreationDate="2023-11-30T15:15:50.580" Score="7" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know this has been discussed here on CV meta before, but the most recent discussion I can find is quite old, so I thought it might be worth a new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of unanswered questions. Roughly 1/3 of all the questions are &amp;quot;unanswered&amp;quot; (per the Stack Exchange definition); that's around 73,000 unanswered questions.  Some of these actually have answers but those answers haven't been upvoted or accepted. Others seem like unanswerable questions, or questions with flaws, but which haven't been marked as such. Some have comments that are really answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if this reflects badly on CV compared to other SE sites. I'm also wondering if there is anything we can do about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2023-12-06T16:44:06.350" Title="Unanswered questions" Tags="|discussion|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6608" CreationDate="2023-11-30T18:52:37.693" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;My first thought was to vtc this post as a possible duplicate to the already well discussed posts which, even though took place almost a decade ago, still are in complete relevance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case though, large swath of unanswered questions has been a headache not only for this community, but it is rather a network wide issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if this reflects badly on CV compared to other SE sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know about the current standing of CV among her other sister communities. But we can all agree that no one would love to see hundreds of questions, that have genuine well-researched queries, lying unanswered in a dark corner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also wondering if there is anything we can do about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peter, as far as reducing the number of unanswered questions, there is no radical overnight approach. You have to resort to the old means, discussed both here as well as in other SE posts- the most prominent ways are closures and answering (nodding to kjetil's  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6608/unanswered-questions#comment22583_6608&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Closures&lt;/strong&gt; Let's face it: one can count by the fingertips the number of folks who volunteer in clearing the review queue along with the mods. We need greater participation from the community not only in the review queue but also to search for old questions that can be closed as dupe/low quality/programming based (there are many which escaped the vigil eyes back then).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Answering&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\diamond$&lt;/span&gt; If you see a question already has been answered completely or there are few hints which you can compile as an answer, then please go ahead and make an answer (referencing the said comments and if it is verbatim, then as community wiki).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\diamond$&lt;/span&gt; If you can provide at least a comprehensive &lt;em&gt;partial&lt;/em&gt; answer, then again don't hesitate to jot down one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\diamond$&lt;/span&gt; Find it interesting? But you can't provide the answer? Then provide bounty to promote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\diamond$&lt;/span&gt; Edit old questions of your followed tags that you deem are good queries but otherwise missed the mark due to some unwise usage of ambiguous formalism into a more cogent structure. Trust me, I happened to edit few old posts that received answers subsequently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\diamond$&lt;/span&gt; Share any such posts that you think deserve an answer among your peers, colleagues, professors. This, in turn, might initiate participation of new, experienced users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Continuing the same point, I would add that at the end of the day, we need more &lt;em&gt;answerers&lt;/em&gt;. So, we need more participation. One way is, as I wrote, to share the platform and spread the words in the forest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; If there is already a good answer but not upvoted, then give a &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$+1.$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt;  Identify those tags that have the most unanswered questions. Try to pinpoint any possible reason or so. Every tag has a batch of top answerers. Why didn't they answer? See if you can find anything and address the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-11-30T20:03:48.903" LastActivityDate="2023-11-30T20:03:48.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6610" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-12-02T13:12:29.093" Score="4" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/239257/what-does-def-above-an-equals-sign-mean&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; is on the list of unanswered questions, even though it has an answer that has many upvotes (including, now, mine). Am I missing something or is this a bug of some kind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT  Here is a screen shot as of Dec 4, 2023 at 7:13 AM Eastern time&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mq728.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mq728.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screen shot&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="686" LastEditDate="2023-12-04T12:14:37.870" LastActivityDate="2023-12-04T12:14:37.870" Title="Why is this question marked as unanswered?" Tags="|bug|unanswered-questions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6608" CreationDate="2023-12-05T08:03:13.537" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps some stupid answers, but ones that come to the top of my head:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't know how this generally works across the Stack Exchange, but I'm wondering if there can simply be an &amp;quot;old questions&amp;quot; review which automatically pulls old and unanswered questions and allows people to vote on whether they should remain or be deleted. Something that would be particularly useful is a feature that you can vote on questions that the user clearly won't accept answers on anymore (e.g. user posts question in 2012, gets answer in comments, says thanks, and never sees the site again).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Perhaps some kind of bounty-based system where a user is rewarded for doing similar actions. E.g. a mod puts up some bounty for clearing 100 or so reviews of old questions to clear the bin. To perhaps minimize &lt;em&gt;how much&lt;/em&gt; of a bounty, it could also be in a contest format where the person with the most reviews gets a set amount, with a 1st Place, 2nd Place, and 3rd Place award given.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some kind of badge to the same effect (perhaps in relation to the first point).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel there would probably have to be &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; kind of incentives to really get that ball rolling, hence the suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="345611" LastEditorUserId="345611" LastEditDate="2023-12-05T08:39:48.363" LastActivityDate="2023-12-05T08:39:48.363" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6608" CreationDate="2023-12-06T16:44:06.350" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I sometimes find old &amp;quot;unanswered&amp;quot; questions that are actually answered in the comments to the question. When I find such questions I often create an answer from the comments (crediting the commentors), but somehow I also feel a bit bad about taking credit for others work !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7486" LastActivityDate="2023-12-06T16:44:06.350" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6613" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-12-08T06:06:21.240" Score="2" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;There does not seem to be any one tag covering all of data dredging. The tags I can find are [p-hacking], [stepwise regression], [feature selection] and [model selection].  Are there any other tags that one should look at when looking for Q&amp;amp;As on this topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="261208" LastActivityDate="2023-12-08T06:06:21.240" Title="What tags cover data dredging?" Tags="|discussion|tags|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4791" CreationDate="2023-12-10T17:03:31.053" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been wondering the same question lately for old, off-topic questions, after reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6608/unanswered-questions&quot;&gt;this other thread&lt;/a&gt; and stumbling upon a couple of old, probably off-topic questions. (NB: I think it's a bad idea to close old questions just because they're old – they may be still relevant to other people than the person who originally asked the question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A problem I see is that starting a &amp;quot;vote to close&amp;quot; (VTC) process on an old question gives additional work to people who review the VTC queue. An answer to the other thread mentions that there are few people reviewing the queue. So, in my opinion, it raises the question as to whether it's a good use of reviewers' time to attract their attention on inactive questions. Is an old and inactive question really a problem, even if it's off-topic? Shouldn't the effort concentrate on active, more visible questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, one advantage of closing an old question is preventing new answers from appearing. If the question is unanswered, closing also prevents the community bot from bumping it up. In short, closing an off-topic question prevents it from becoming active again and appearing on the home page. So closing has an eventual benefit, as the question will become a problem soon or later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A compromise I've been thinking of is checking if the review queue is &amp;quot;congested&amp;quot; with a lot of questions to review, before starting a VTC process on an old question. Probably not a very satisfying solution; but in any case, I'd like to hear other opinions about it, as I may be misjudging the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164936" LastEditorUserId="44269" LastEditDate="2023-12-12T17:50:52.003" LastActivityDate="2023-12-12T17:50:52.003" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6615" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6616" CreationDate="2023-12-13T10:49:19.150" Score="6" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since this question asks for an intuition behind the idea:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/633476/287262&quot;&gt;What is the intuition behind the idea that for linear regression, the number of observations should exceed the number of parameters?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought I might also add something that is not about a linear regression but might lead to the same intuition. Therefore, I wrote about the problem of a logistic regression instead, and my &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/633501/362671&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; got deleted. I see the point that this was too far-fetched, but my idea when I heard that observations should exceed the number of parameters was that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/469799/287262&quot;&gt;Why is logistic regression particularly prone to overfitting in high dimensions?&lt;/a&gt; also showed this intuition to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt that it was even right to see both questions as dealing with the &lt;em&gt;same&lt;/em&gt; intuition, so that this question here is not about reopening the deleted answer (unless someone wants to). Yet, the answer was not deleted for being wrong, as far as I can see, but just since it was not about linear regression, at least if you check the only upvoted remark for this (which was again upvoted right before the answer was deleted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I show that in other models, you also have to avoid that the number of parameters (or dimensions) are too many, is this clearly off-topic for a question that asks about &amp;quot;the intuition of the idea that for linear regression, ...&amp;quot;? Mind that the question also becomes clearer in the body:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a population model has k independent variables and 1 intercept, why&#xA;are k+1 observations required to perform OLS estimates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the intuition behind this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even then, the other link about logistic regression might lead to this intuition, or take anything else that is not about linear regression and still helps understanding this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the wording of the question right? English is not my mother tongue, and I understood it as a much broader question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="287262" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2024-01-04T09:06:34.713" LastActivityDate="2024-01-04T09:06:34.713" Title="If someone asks &quot;What is the intuition behind the idea that for linear regression, ...&quot;, does the answer have to be only about the linear regression?" Tags="|discussion|deleted-answers|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6615" CreationDate="2023-12-13T12:26:35.007" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's perfectly valid (even good) to explain that a question is a special case of a more general phenomenon and then address the general case. It's also fine to explain a concept in a different domain and then explain the connection with the topic of the original question. But I don't think your answer is a good example of either of these, and the intuition you claim it offers is not evident. The question is about linear regression and OLS. You bring up logistic regression, perfect separation, MLE, and overfitting, but don't make much of an attempt to explain why invoking these concepts is useful to address the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note I have not seen your answer before this and so was not involved in the decision, but would probably also have voted to delete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastActivityDate="2023-12-13T12:26:35.007" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6617" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6619" CreationDate="2023-12-18T23:43:10.923" Score="4" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently answered &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/635224/2958&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; using the following code&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$\begin{array}&#xA;\mathbb P\Big(X = \mu+\frac12\left(\gamma+\sqrt{4\kappa-3\gamma^2}\right)\sigma\Big) &amp;amp;=&amp;amp; \dfrac{\sqrt{4\kappa-3\gamma^2}-\gamma}{2\sqrt{4\kappa-3\gamma^2}(\kappa-\gamma^2)} \\&#xA;\mathbb P\Big(X = \mu\Big) &amp;amp;=&amp;amp; 1-\dfrac{1}{(\kappa-\gamma^2)} \\&#xA;\mathbb P\Big(X = \mu+\frac12\left(\gamma-\sqrt{4\kappa-3\gamma^2}\right)\sigma\Big) &amp;amp;=&amp;amp; \dfrac{\sqrt{4\kappa-3\gamma^2}+\gamma}{2\sqrt{4\kappa-3\gamma^2}(\kappa-\gamma^2)}\end{array}$$&lt;/span&gt; &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and saw a difference in the &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$P$&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\mathbb P$&lt;/span&gt; at the start of the first line of the array compared to the second and third, looking like this trimmed image&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PFkaE.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PFkaE.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In full&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$$\begin{array}&#xA;\mathbb P\Big(X = \mu+\frac12\left(\gamma+\sqrt{4\kappa-3\gamma^2}\right)\sigma\Big) &amp;amp;=&amp;amp; \dfrac{\sqrt{4\kappa-3\gamma^2}-\gamma}{2\sqrt{4\kappa-3\gamma^2}(\kappa-\gamma^2)} \\&#xA;\mathbb P\Big(X = \mu\Big) &amp;amp;=&amp;amp; 1-\dfrac{1}{(\kappa-\gamma^2)} \\&#xA;\mathbb P\Big(X = \mu+\frac12\left(\gamma-\sqrt{4\kappa-3\gamma^2}\right)\sigma\Big) &amp;amp;=&amp;amp; \dfrac{\sqrt{4\kappa-3\gamma^2}+\gamma}{2\sqrt{4\kappa-3\gamma^2}(\kappa-\gamma^2)}\end{array}$$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What might have caused this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2958" LastActivityDate="2023-12-19T02:20:58.787" Title="Bug: MathJax/LaTeX mathbb font in array" Tags="|bug|math-display|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6617" CreationDate="2023-12-19T02:20:58.787" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The error is that the &lt;code&gt;array&lt;/code&gt; environment has a required argument that gives information about how the columns should be aligned, and in your case, the initial &lt;code&gt;\mathbb&lt;/code&gt; is read as that argument.  The characters that are allowed for alignments are &lt;code&gt;c&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;r&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;l&lt;/code&gt; (for center, right, and left), plus &lt;code&gt;|&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;:&lt;/code&gt; for vertical lines and dots.  Since none of the characters in &lt;code&gt;\mathbb&lt;/code&gt; are valid, they are ignored.  But the effect is that the &lt;code&gt;\mathbb&lt;/code&gt; is eaten by the &lt;code&gt;array&lt;/code&gt; environment, and so it is not applied to the P.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9462" LastActivityDate="2023-12-19T02:20:58.787" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6620" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-12-24T16:12:24.993" Score="2" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many people include code in either their questions or their answers, in R or Python or some other language. That's fine. I'm not talking about questions that fall under the 'asking for code' category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But sometimes the code doesn't run at all, or gives different output, or requires some more code in order to work e.g. in R, installing and loading a particular package.  The last is especially problematic when either a) the function in the code is in more than one package or b) the package isn't in CRAN.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should we do with these? Should there be a new reporting option? Should we correct the code (if we can)?  Downvote the question or answer?  Or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2023-12-26T14:20:17.737" LastActivityDate="2023-12-27T08:11:13.090" Title="What to do with questions that have bad or incomplete code?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6620" CreationDate="2023-12-24T16:55:30.523" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are confronted by a dubious chunk of code that needs clarification, leave a comment explaining why the script, as it stands, doesn't make any coherent code/meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If OP responds and follows suit with editing the relevant script, then that's good. Otherwise you can close the question on the ground of &amp;quot;Needs details or clarity&amp;quot;; as for answer depending on the whole content, you can either flag it as &amp;quot;Not an answer&amp;quot; or in serious situations, &amp;quot;In need of moderator intervention&amp;quot;. Whether to downvote or not depends on the context and severity of the problem in hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it warrants any additional closure reason/reporting option - the existing ones serve well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for whether you should correct the code, I again think it depends on the context but I prefer the correction must come from OP's pov.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-12-24T17:01:36.000" LastActivityDate="2023-12-24T17:01:36.000" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6620" CreationDate="2023-12-27T07:42:19.280" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If code doesn't work and is necessary to understand the question, then the question is not clear, and it can be closed for being unclear and requiring clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, ideally a code shouldn't be necessary to understand a question. It should be like an appendix to explain an idea further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally like to use code in answers and questions. Sometimes I use it as a more essential part of an explanation and then I ensure that it can be read as pseudo-code. I do this especially in questions where people explain their question with a python code and I answer with a question that contains R code. Then I make it such that the code is clear to understand. In that case, if it doesn't work, then it should still be understandable. For such cases where a code speaks for itself, it is still desirable, but shouldn't be necessary that the code can run without errors or loading packages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of such use of code is in an answer to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/616591/&quot;&gt;Why does this multiple linear regression fail to recover the true coefficients?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In R you get the same behavior when we use the function &lt;code&gt;lm&lt;/code&gt; which&#xA;gives as output&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; lm(y~X+0)&#xA;&#xA;Call:&#xA;lm(formula = y ~ X + 0)&#xA;&#xA;Coefficients:&#xA;   X1     X2     X3  &#xA;-0.02   0.94     NA&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I use code in an explanation. But I speak about only a single line out of a larger code. So technically it doesn't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2023-12-27T08:11:13.090" LastActivityDate="2023-12-27T08:11:13.090" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6624" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-02T17:52:48.677" Score="17" ViewCount="411" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Update on March 21, 2024&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site sponsorship has been extended through June 30th.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Update on January 24, 2024&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site sponsorship is now only visible to users in the US and Canada, due to the sponsor’s preference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're excited to announce that Google Cloud will be sponsoring Cross Validated Stack Exchange beginning January 9th, going through March 31st. We wanted to give you a heads-up and walk you through what it will look like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How and where will the sponsorship be displayed?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sponsorship will be shown on the right side of the header at the top of the site in a manner that's similar to the mockup below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3tACX.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3tACX.png&quot; alt=&quot;image of Cross Validated SE home page with Google Cloud sponsorship logo in top right&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What else changes?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing! Quoting from &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/307861/site-sponsorships-bringing-resources-back-to-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;the original MSE announcement on sponsorships&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First — sponsors do not own these Q&amp;amp;A sites. Sponsors work alongside our communities who ultimately build these sites. Communities ask the questions; communities create the tags; communities conduct elections as they do now, and we are not renaming our current sites like a garish sport stadium to the highest bidder. Any ads a sponsor submits still have go through our crazy-strict ad editorial process… as it has always been. Companies do not have access to personal data, and all Q&amp;amp;A content remains irrevocably licensed under Creative Commons for sharing and attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sponsorships are a tool that our clients can use to let folks who would be interested in their products know about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What if I think I've found a design glitch/bug?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If something looks off, please report it as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bug&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'bug'&quot;&gt;bug&lt;/a&gt; so we can investigate and squash it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's it! If you have any other questions or concerns, please leave them as answers below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And lastly, thank you. These types of partnerships help us bring more resources to our communities, and they wouldn't be possible without the work you've put into making this site successful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="379610" LastEditorUserId="379610" LastEditDate="2024-03-21T20:11:06.347" LastActivityDate="2024-03-21T20:11:06.347" Title="Google Cloud will be Sponsoring Cross Validated SE" Tags="|discussion|site-sponsorship|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6625" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-08T01:21:23.647" Score="12" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;When we started contributing to CV we did not foresee the content would be used to train chat bots and that chat bots would be as profitable as they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did we consent to the content to be used to train language models?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36041" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2024-01-08T15:57:00.097" LastActivityDate="2024-01-08T15:57:00.097" Title="Chatgpt and similar chat bots are trained using CV content. Did we agree to it?" Tags="|discussion|machine-learning|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6626" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6636" CreationDate="2024-01-10T13:24:31.087" Score="9" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;A new banner highlighting the policy on using AI-generated material has been developed and experimentally used (has been graduated) at SO and it has resulted&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$^\dagger$&lt;/span&gt; in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] a reduction in posts flagged for AI-generated content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, without beating around the bush, what is our standpoint towards such banner: are we interested in this feature? Would the community be eager to implement it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Implementation of the banner would &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426353/testing-an-ai-generated-content-policy-banner-on-stack-overflow&quot;&gt;involve&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; Two options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;**Reminder**: Answers generated by Artificial Intelligence tools are not allowed on [Site Name]. Learn more&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;**Reminder**: Answers generated by Artificial Intelligence tools must be cited on [Site Name]. Learn more”&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] display once users select the answer field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “new contributor” banner will no longer be shown in the answer field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All users will see this banner when posting an answer with the option to dismiss. Once dismissed, logged-in users will not see this banner again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Relevant Links&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet~~ \dagger$&lt;/span&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426353/testing-an-ai-generated-content-policy-banner-on-stack-overflow&quot;&gt;Testing an &amp;quot;AI-generated content&amp;quot; policy banner on Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/395881/sites-can-now-request-to-enable-a-banner-to-warn-about-their-policy-on-ai-genera?cb=1&quot;&gt;Sites can now request to enable a banner to warn about their policy on AI-generated content&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$\bullet$&lt;/span&gt; Our stance on AI-generated contents: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6422/what-to-do-about-answers-written-by-chatgpt&quot;&gt;What to do about answers written by ChatGPT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update as of &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$17$&lt;/span&gt;th of Jan: The question has received &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$+10$&lt;/span&gt; upvotes and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-2$&lt;/span&gt; downvotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stephan's &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6629/362671&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; has &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$+9$&lt;/span&gt; upvotes and &lt;span class=&quot;math-container&quot;&gt;$-2$&lt;/span&gt; downvotes, thus, so far, the community is reluctant in implementing the banner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2024-01-17T13:46:41.563" LastActivityDate="2024-02-08T21:01:56.400" Title="Should we opt for the banner warning the usage of AI-generated contents?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6627" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-10T17:35:10.603" Score="7" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed several questions popping up recently on the topic of Bayesian Optimization. Many of the questions are bizarre, full of misconceptions, and (as some moderators have noted) perfect examples of XY problems. But these questions aren't always closeable per se. If we dealt with just one such instance, an acceptable answer would be to gently correct their understanding. But we sometimes deal with 100s of undertrained statisticians participating in a free, possibly low quality MOOC. If we have 1000s of questions from them it doesn't make sense for the site to contain 1000s of copies of the same general answer. &amp;quot;X is wrong, thus Y doesn't matter&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads me to ask a two-part question (knowingly violating the site recommended rules);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a way to detect trends in questions when a &amp;quot;hot&amp;quot; topic surfaces, i.e. who are the askers, who are the answers, what is the view and vote activity on a particular topic, etc.?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how can we speed up review and possible closure knowing that hot topics tend to attract bad questions, and (as an olive branch) point these askers to higher quality sources on a particular subject?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastActivityDate="2024-01-11T15:34:24.813" Title="How to detect and address wayward trends in questions?" Tags="|feature-request|questions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6627" CreationDate="2024-01-10T18:33:40.760" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's a valid apprehension. I would be extra vigilant to discern any patterns in the posts of any of my followed tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to detect trends in questions when a &amp;quot;hot&amp;quot; topic surfaces, i.e., who are the askers, who are the answers, what is the view and vote activity on a particular topic, etc.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags?tab=popular&quot;&gt;popular&lt;/a&gt; tags to see which ones are more frequently used; then you can check for an individual tag its &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/bayesian-optimization/topusers&quot;&gt;top users&lt;/a&gt; which would show you number of questions it received over the last 7 days, last 30 days and what percentage of those were unanswered. You would also be able to check the top askers and answerers both over the past one month and all time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;how can we speed up review and possible closure knowing that hot topics tend to attract bad questions, and (as an olive branch) point these askers to higher quality sources on a particular subject?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like you to check this related post  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5000/what-to-do-about-wrong-questions&quot;&gt;What to do about &amp;quot;wrong&amp;quot; questions?&lt;/a&gt; in which the consensus was to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;write an answer that essentially explains why the question itself is mistaken, even if such an answer does not answer the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but also as whuber &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5000/what-to-do-about-wrong-questions#comment14438_5000&quot;&gt;noted&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] find, edit, or create a canonical answer that addresses the problematic procedure you are concerned about and propose it as the duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think we need an additional closure reason. Irrespective of how many such questions come, the effective way, in my opinion, is to, if it is an XY problem, make OP aware of the same and point them out a canonical post if this is available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might seem imperative that a &amp;quot;hot&amp;quot; topic would prompt new users ask such questions so the reviewers should be rather more attentive while reviewing &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/first-questions/&quot;&gt;first questions&lt;/a&gt;: implicit is the perennial request for more users from the community to come forward for volunteering in the review queues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastEditorUserId="7290" LastEditDate="2024-01-11T15:34:24.813" LastActivityDate="2024-01-11T15:34:24.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6626" CreationDate="2024-01-10T22:49:45.930" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The potential upside: users are alerted to our policy and post less AI-generated content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The downside (note I am not writing &amp;quot;potential&amp;quot; here): more screen clutter, more complexity. Yet another piece of information for users to digest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not seen a deluge of AI-generated posts here. Conversely, screen space and attention is precious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I personally do not think we need this feature.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest people upvote or downvote this answer if they agree or disagree with it, and we tally the votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2024-01-10T22:49:45.930" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6630" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-14T19:20:24.753" Score="4" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title basically tells it.  Multilevel models are pretty popular as a question topic and it might be good to have a separate tag for the nonlinear type. But I'm not sure if it's needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Link to the created tag wiki: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nonlinear-multilevel-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nonlinear-multilevel-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nonlinear-multilevel-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-nonlinear-multilevel-analysis-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;nonlinear-multilevel-analysis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2024-01-15T15:47:18.877" LastActivityDate="2024-01-15T15:47:18.877" Title="Should we have a &quot;nonlinear multilevel analysis&quot; tag?" Tags="|discussion|tags|tag-proposal|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6631" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6632" CreationDate="2024-01-21T17:53:33.360" Score="6" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry for the long-winded question title. During interviews for a junior data scientist position I have noticed that almost every interviewer I have talked to (not recruiters or &amp;quot;talent managers&amp;quot;, but real life data scientists including the head of data science quite often) know very little statistics. I am very interested to hear if anyone has real-life experience in a data science setting, where a lack of statistical knowledge has caused serious problems?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would such a question be off-topic? If not then what tag(s) might I use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11405" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2024-01-22T01:21:15.747" LastActivityDate="2024-01-23T10:34:41.647" Title="Is it off-topic to ask for examples of situations where a lack of statistical understanding causes a problem in data science" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6631" CreationDate="2024-01-21T21:51:58.503" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As whuber &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6631/is-it-off-top-to-ask-for-examples-of-situations-where-a-lack-of-statistical-unde#comment22695_6631&quot;&gt;noted&lt;/a&gt;, these types of discussions aren't suitable for SE - just ask yourself, whether there can be any &lt;strong&gt;single, definitive&lt;/strong&gt; answer to such a question, if it were posted, leading to an inevitable closure on the grounds of &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;primarily opinion based&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;. In fact, if you can't find any tag that fits your query, chances are it might be not an on-topic question on SE (not always, of course). SE is a q&amp;amp;a site and not a forum/chat, unfortunately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can definitely, as whuber suggested, visit our primary chat room &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/18/ten-fold&quot;&gt;Ten Fold&lt;/a&gt; where folks from diverse areas often drop by and might have valuable knowledge and experiences to share with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastEditorUserId="22047" LastEditDate="2024-01-22T01:22:33.900" LastActivityDate="2024-01-22T01:22:33.900" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6631" CreationDate="2024-01-23T10:34:41.647" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a number of questions that don't meet the strict standards we expect, but are nonetheless valuable. Many are closed but some are tolerated and turned into community wikis. The decision about whether to do this is probably (and necessarily) a bit &lt;em&gt;ad hoc&lt;/em&gt;, but I would support doing the same for a question like this. It's an interesting one and no worse than several others we have done the same for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastActivityDate="2024-01-23T10:34:41.647" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6634" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-24T16:35:47.483" Score="13" ViewCount="93" Body="&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s that time of the year again! As we wave goodbye to last year and welcome the new one, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22year+in+moderation%22+is%3Aquestion&quot;&gt;a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As most of you here might be aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;A Theory of Moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't eliminate the need for having &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/11/21/our-theory-of-moderation-re-visited/&quot;&gt;moderators&lt;/a&gt; altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks — folks like you. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference in ensuring Stack Exchange sites remain a valuable source of high-quality content on the web.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as we say goodbye to 2023 (and January 2024… ahem) and move into 2024, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pmN7M.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;exciting&lt;/em&gt; stats&lt;/a&gt;. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Cross Validated over the past 12 months:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Action&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Moderators&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Community User¹&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;Community²&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;All comments on a post moved to chat&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;15&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answer flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,443&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;304&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Answers flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;86&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;298&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,353&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Bounties canceled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;7&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comment flags handled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,087&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;104&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;11&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments deleted⁸&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,950&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;58&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;4,983&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments flagged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;713&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;8&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;481&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Comments undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;35&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Escalations to the Community Manager team&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts bumped&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;8,230&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts deleted⁷&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;977&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;8,189&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3,522&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts locked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;39&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;294&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts undeleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;70&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;400&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Posts unlocked&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;48&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Question flags handled⁶&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;692&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;917&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;6&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions closed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,821&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,484&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;66&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions flagged⁶&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;157&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;60&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,585&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;15&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions migrated&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;58&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;67&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions protected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;19&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;15&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions reopened&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;179&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;117&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Questions unprotected&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Revisions redacted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag highlight language set&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms created&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;7&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tag synonyms proposed&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;9&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tags merged&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;Close votes&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;623&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5,646&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;First answers&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;39&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,377&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;First questions&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;209&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;9,638&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;Late answers&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;13&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,202&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;Low quality posts&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;49&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,118&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;Reopen votes&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;207&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,296&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;Suggested edits&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;138&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;65&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;2,094&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Tasks reviewed⁵: &amp;quot;Triage&amp;quot; queue&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;User banned from review&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;User review-bans lifted early&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;User suspensions lifted early&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users contacted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;19&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users deleted&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;5&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users destroyed⁴&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;1,650&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: left;&quot;&gt;Users suspended³&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;14&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;87&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: right;&quot;&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Footnotes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ This refers to the automated systems otherwise known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/-1&quot;&gt;user #-1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² This refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users&quot;&gt;the membership of Cross Validated&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators&quot;&gt;diamonds next to their names&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;³ The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁴ A &amp;quot;destroyed&amp;quot; user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/88994/what-is-the-difference-between-a-deleted-user-and-a-destroyed-user&quot;&gt;Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁵ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁶ Includes close flags (but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; close or reopen votes). The community² can handle these flags by at least one person voting to close a question that has a close flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁷ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁸ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Further reading:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6452/2022-a-year-in-moderation&quot;&gt;2022: a year in moderation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can also check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/search?q=title%3A%222023%3A+a+year+in+moderation%22&quot;&gt;this report on other sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or peruse &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/396299/208518&quot;&gt;detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wishing everyone a happy 2024! ^_^&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72321" LastEditorUserId="72321" LastEditDate="2024-01-24T18:37:50.083" LastActivityDate="2024-01-24T18:37:50.083" Title="2023: a year in moderation" Tags="|discussion|moderation|statistics|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6635" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-30T17:02:23.157" Score="2" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disclaimer&lt;/strong&gt;: I realize this could be perceived as off-topic, but wanted to get perspectives from those directly in the field. If this question gets closed, I understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been investigating statistics journals to submit my work to (specifically, an application paper). Many journals are specialized, others quite general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I've noticed that top journals in the field (&lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt;, sub-journals of the &lt;em&gt;Journal of the Royal Statistic Society&lt;/em&gt; (RSS)) generally exhibit the above traits. In many cases, the impact factor is less than 2. In certain cases, the time from submission to publication is 1.5-2 years in duration. In the majority of cases, the acceptance rate is ~10% or lower. Some of the most celebrated contributions to statistics have been published in this way. This trend has been previously investigated by van Nierop (2009) for example (Title: Why do statistics journals have low impact factors?). Interestingly, the &lt;em&gt;Journal of the American Statistical Association&lt;/em&gt; (JASA) currently enjoys an impact factor of 3.7, but long times between submission and publication. A similar trend exists for &lt;em&gt;RSS Series B: Statistical Methodology&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long wait times appear to explain why impact factors are so low, but the association is not causal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For important work, these trends can be discouraging. A solution however exists in the form of preprints to avoid potentially being &amp;quot;scooped&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone weigh in on this? CV has many seasoned statisticians who've likely served on journal editorial boards at some point in their career.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reference&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Van Nierop, E. (2009), Why do statistics journals have low impact factors?. Statistica Neerlandica, 63: 52-62. &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9574.2008.00408.x&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9574.2008.00408.x&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175663" LastEditorUserId="175663" LastEditDate="2024-02-02T16:51:30.707" LastActivityDate="2024-02-02T16:51:30.707" Title="Why do statistics journals generally have low impact factors, long publication times, and low acceptance rates?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2024-01-30T17:08:57.920" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6626" CreationDate="2024-02-08T17:33:25.637" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As no-one seems to have anything to say in favour of a banner, I've indicated that our site would prefer not to have one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/384923/225179&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/384923/225179&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can doubtless ask for one should we change our mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2024-02-08T21:01:56.400" LastActivityDate="2024-02-08T21:01:56.400" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6637" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6638" CreationDate="2024-02-14T03:08:59.443" Score="9" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;Was just curious about this question today because I have sometimes seen that people here will ask for article links which include whatever is relevant to their statistical questions. Sometimes this isn't an option because there is a paywall. Because there isn't a way to upload the pdf directly, this prohibits people sometimes from sharing a link that would elucidate whatever statistical questions the OP will have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some ways I considered to get around this are Scihub and some open repository like Mega or Google Docs. The problem with Scihub is that it is technically journal piracy, so I imagine that option is not legal for CV. For sites like Mega or Google Docs, one can host their &lt;em&gt;legally&lt;/em&gt; obtained documents online, but I assume one cannot disseminate them to a wider audience unless there is some kind of licensing agreement that allows this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess my question is this: what is the best way to share links behind paywalls and are the options above available on CV?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="345611" LastActivityDate="2024-02-20T08:42:00.487" Title="Are Scihub or Mega/Google Docs articles allowed on CV?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6637" CreationDate="2024-02-14T03:48:29.217" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nice question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problem is we often befuddle between what is &lt;em&gt;illegal&lt;/em&gt; and what is &lt;em&gt;unethical&lt;/em&gt; (see this &lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4624&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing is clear though: we need proper, clear citation to any work/pre-print/literature. Those should be coupled with DOI, arXiv identifier or whichever applies to the work concerned. These would ensure once a link dies/rots, future users can still seek the required paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming to the bone of contention: should we cite Sci-hub/lib-gen or other such repositories?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See, it's an open secret that many people around the world (especially South-Asian countries) use these resources and at least it would not be too much to say that even more people are getting or already are acquainted with such resources. So, if they &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt;, they would &lt;em&gt;resort&lt;/em&gt; to such resources, irrespective of whether one explicitly includes such links. Personally, while I admit even I use Sci-hub, I never cite them. While I cannot forbid others, I think it's apt to not engage in such practice of using resources likes Sci-hub in our posts here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? Because it can be political and there can be uncharted legal issues not explored/beyond our knowledge:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... a link to Sci-Hub is, itself, a radical expression of personal politics. In keeping with our desire to minimise the expression of party/personal politics here, I would therefore recommend avoiding such links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pertaining to legal issues, one can check these related posts and links therein:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/114919/what-should-i-do-when-i-see-copyright-violations-posted-on-stack-overflow&quot;&gt;What should I do when I see copyright violations posted on Stack Overflow?&lt;/a&gt; (SO)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/3953/what-to-do-when-a-post-contains-a-suspicious-link-possibly-with-copyrighted-m&quot;&gt;What to do when a post contains a &amp;quot;suspicious&amp;quot; link (possibly with copyrighted material)?&lt;/a&gt; (MO)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastActivityDate="2024-02-14T03:48:29.217" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6637" CreationDate="2024-02-14T15:48:59.893" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Agreeing with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6638/17230&quot;&gt;User1865345's answer&lt;/a&gt;, I'd say best practice is to:—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Give a full reference, including name &amp;amp; title. That's a fail-safe in case of link-rot, &amp;amp; an aid to recognition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Link to the DOI, or if there isn't one, somewhere like JSTOR, arXiv, PubMed, &amp;amp;c. That reduces the risk of link-rot; &amp;amp; spares people having to download a PDF file before they even know if they want to read the whole paper, in the (typical) case that the site provides an abstract, or some kind of preview.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may still wish to add another link; though, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6637/are-scihub-or-mega-google-docs-articles-allowed-on-cv#comment22729_6637&quot;&gt;Sycorax points out&lt;/a&gt;, links oughtn't to be essential to understanding a question or answer, so it's all right if the first link isn't immediately accessible to everyone. If you do, &amp;amp; don't know if you might be infringing copyright, or somehow abetting infringement, consider the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The law. IANAL, but I imagine you are infringing copyright if you make available a complete article &amp;amp; you're not the copyright owner &amp;amp; don't have their permission (either specifically or through a general license). I've no idea about linking to copyright-infringing material that someone else put up. (In either case I believe the copyright owner may issue a D.M.C.A. take-down notice.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;S.E.'s current &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public&quot;&gt;Terms of Service&lt;/a&gt;. The 'Acceptable Use Policy' says you mustn't &amp;quot;post content that infringes on another’s intellectual property right, including [...] copyright&amp;quot;. Don't know if 'posting' can mean 'linking to'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Current site policy: see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5196/17230&quot;&gt;Links to copyright material&lt;/a&gt;. For articles, at any rate, the consensus seems to be that it's not for other users to bother themselves about anyone's possible infringement of someone else's copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Readers' sensibilities: it would be courteous to avoid &lt;em&gt;direct&lt;/em&gt; links to potentially copyright-infringing material; better they land on a page that describes the content &amp;amp; leaves them the choice. If some might consider a particular site disreputable, I'd recommend making the target clear in the link text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastEditorUserId="17230" LastEditDate="2024-02-20T08:42:00.487" LastActivityDate="2024-02-20T08:42:00.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6641" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-18T18:41:14.587" Score="1" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tag &amp;quot;references&amp;quot; is about requests for references. Fine. That's a useful tag. But the tags &amp;quot;textbooks&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;books&amp;quot; are synonyms of that tag.  That leaves us with no tag I can find for questions &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; books -- how they get written, how they get published, best practices for writing them, why they do things, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure how to resolve this.  Can tags be &amp;quot;unsynonymized&amp;quot;?  I can see that that might cause problems, but I am not very knowledgeable about the meta part of this site or stack exchange in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" LastActivityDate="2024-02-21T09:05:57.030" Title="Could we have a tag for question about books?" Tags="|discussion|feature-request|books|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6641" CreationDate="2024-02-21T09:05:57.030" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any threshold for splitting/merging is somewhat arbitrary, but I personally think the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/references&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;references&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;references&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-references-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;references&lt;/a&gt; tag already meets our needs sufficiently. Specifics like books/textbooks/papers can be noted in the question title and body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121522" LastActivityDate="2024-02-21T09:05:57.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6644" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6645" CreationDate="2024-02-21T09:21:40.527" Score="6" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have an antique question (asked in 2011): &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/224/1352&quot;&gt;Recommended visualization libraries for standalone applications&lt;/a&gt;. Yes, we do have our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/data-visualization&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;data-visualization&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;data-visualization&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-data-visualization-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;data-visualization&lt;/a&gt; tag, and this one asks about visualizing data (not, say, generating cartoons)... but it is so specifically about &lt;em&gt;software&lt;/em&gt; that I would absolutely like to close it as off-topic, or migrate it to &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Software Recommendations.SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any thoughts on this? Would moderators be able to migrate this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2024-02-21T12:28:23.860" Title="Recommended visualization libraries question - on topic?" Tags="|discussion|on-topic|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6644" CreationDate="2024-02-21T12:28:23.860" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing to be aware of, in the context of these discussions, is that we cannot migrate old questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question does not seem to be about statistics or data visualization in a meaningful sense.  The answers are mostly, 'try &lt;code&gt;package&lt;/code&gt;'.  The whole thread is pretty uninformative.  I would argue that it should be closed.  I don't know that I believe it should be deleted, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7290" LastActivityDate="2024-02-21T12:28:23.860" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6646" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-23T09:27:59.637" Score="11" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;S.E. have added a new help page on the use of generative A.I. to write answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/ai-policy&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/ai-policy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think what's lacking is any reminder that whoever posts an answer is responsible for its being correct &amp;amp; relevant; merely acknowledging generative A.I. use doesn't legitimate recklessly posting potential nonsense. We've discussed this in a couple of Meta posts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6445/17230&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the policy on Human/AI collaboration for answering questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6422/17230&quot;&gt;What to do about answers written by ChatGPT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can edit the help page: I propose we do that after consideration of proposed changes here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2024-02-23T14:42:20.413" Title="Shall we edit the Help Centre page on generative A.I.?" Tags="|discussion|policy|help-center|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6646" CreationDate="2024-02-23T14:42:20.413" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6646/362671&quot;&gt;Scortchi - Reinstate Monica&lt;/a&gt;'s assessment that merely acknowledging the usage of generative AI in one's post doesn't give them the right to open the floodgates of blindly dumping the content, irrespective of gauging the veracity and soundness of the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, it should be explicitly stated as mentioned in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I suppose one might upvote this post to show agreement; but again this can be done by directly upvoting the, in words of Nick Cox, &amp;quot;Good idea&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastActivityDate="2024-02-23T14:42:20.413" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="974" CreationDate="2024-03-01T02:58:13.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking back at my career, I realize the best math course I took was a Problem Seminar course. In that course, we were given ten problems to solve per week. During a good week, I could solve maybe 8 of 10 problems. That taught me how to solve a problem without a textbook context to hint as to how to find a solution. This site does the same thing within the context of statistics. That is, practice makes perfect, and if one can increasingly better answer arbitrary questions, then one has increased the ability to use statistics in one's work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This differs from a Problem Seminar because creative answers can be downvoted here, and there is an overlay of conventionality applied here that is particular to statistics. On the plus side, even when the insular thinking of those who review answers is apparent, one at least gleans the boundaries of conventional statistical thinking. That is important for writing multidisciplinary work in that it indicates which concepts should be avoided as they mean something else in other fields. For example, a &amp;quot;sample&amp;quot; for statistics is not a blood &amp;quot;sample&amp;quot; for medicine, so one winds up using alternative concepts more generally, e.g., dataset instead of &amp;quot;sample.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, answering a question here is like taking an oral certification exam as a single candidate being reviewed by a dozen specialists. In such a setting, the question that the specialists have is, &amp;quot;Is this candidate one of us or not.&amp;quot; So it matters HOW one answers a question, i.e., like a specialist statistician or NOT. Either way, it is a profound learning experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99274" LastEditorUserId="56940" LastEditDate="2024-03-01T20:57:51.940" LastActivityDate="2024-03-01T20:57:51.940" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6650" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-03-06T19:17:49.747" Score="4" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this question really qualified as a &amp;quot;wiki&amp;quot; question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/641986/frequentist-probability-can-we-prove-mathematically-what-we-are-setting-probabi/&quot;&gt;Frequentist probability: Can we prove mathematically what we are setting probabilities equal to, or are they just assumptions/definitions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that this is a conceptual question with several possible &amp;quot;right&amp;quot; answers, and the poster clearly has their own opinion on the subject. Yet, my history with wikis on stats usually are questions like, &amp;quot;What are good stats jokes?&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;What kind of texts or papers will help me get started in econometrics?&amp;quot; etc. If anything it could be a duplicate of any of the previous questions along the lines of misunderstandings in statistics and probability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastEditorUserId="362671" LastEditDate="2024-03-07T02:12:35.183" LastActivityDate="2024-03-07T02:12:35.183" Title="Is this really a Wiki?" Tags="|discussion|community-wiki|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6650" CreationDate="2024-03-06T19:48:01.650" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems like OP marked it as wiki. I have removed that status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11887" LastActivityDate="2024-03-06T19:48:01.650" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6650" CreationDate="2024-03-07T02:07:40.587" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, it was marked as community wiki by whuber, following which kjetil removed the status subsequently to be again marked as community wiki by whuber:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fsq1mm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fsq1mm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the aptness of the status, it is properly articulated in this old meta CV &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/291/362671&quot;&gt;thread&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... if it turns out that there truly isn't a right answer or a single answer that helps the asker, then it should be up to the asker to come back and make it a community wiki question to denote that there actually isn't a single right answer to solve the problem, but it's actually any (combination of) or all of the posted answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current post in question deals with the agreement and soundness of the empirical probability, which brings into table both philosophical as well as mathematical take, as evident in the various answers it garnered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be a single answer useful to OP, but the plausibility here is that all the posts are providing various outlooks and it is due to this that, imo, the question be made as community wiki and I agree with the decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="362671" LastActivityDate="2024-03-07T02:07:40.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6653" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-03-13T09:02:35.533" Score="2" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;We just got a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/642470/1352&quot;&gt;How do I compare the results between two different Likert Scales questionnaires?&lt;/a&gt; from a newly registered user. Under &amp;quot;Related&amp;quot;, I see a question asked four years ago: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/473977/1352&quot;&gt;How can I compare the results of two Likert scale surveys?&lt;/a&gt; (The poster was last seen more than three years ago.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two questions look &lt;em&gt;eerily&lt;/em&gt; similar. Compare the last paragraph of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/642470/1352&quot;&gt;2024 question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just want to compare the results and show that 'X' electronic health record is revealed to be much more useable for pharmacy students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to the last paragraph of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/473977/1352&quot;&gt;2020 question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just want to compare the results and show that 'X' application is ranked to be much more useable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it rather strange that two people would independently come up with so very similar questions. Or maybe some teacher is re-running their course from four years ago and re-using the same wording on their homework questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2024-03-13T16:04:02.207" Title="Did someone... clone... a question?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6653" CreationDate="2024-03-13T16:04:02.207" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am the person that made the post! I did use the &amp;quot;How can I compare the results of two Likert scale surveys?&amp;quot; post as a template as I noticed that the question the person asked was quite similar to the issue I am having troubles right now. I admit, I copy and pasted the template but just edited some of the things that were different. For that, I apologise for not crediting the original poster. I was reading the comments on the original post, but I saw that that there was only two comments on it, so I wanted to repost this question (in the form of my project) in hopes to get more people's thoughts!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify, I am a final year undergraduate student studying Bachelor of Pharmacy. I am currently doing a Final Year Project (FYP) where I am researching on the difference between two distinct academic Electronic Health Record platforms to assess students' perceptions on what features or potential factors make an optimal academic Electronic Health Record. The final outcome of the FYP is to determine what things can be modified or fine-tuned in academic Electronic Health Record systems to better prepare pharmacy students for clinical practice in the future (i.e. in the hospital).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, I designed two questionnaires (one for Year 4 students using Platform A, and the other for Year 3 students using Platform B) in the form of Likert scales. Both questionnaires are identical with a set of 20 statements in total. I have collected all the data, and also calculated the weighted mean for each individual question. However, I am unsure how I can further go about in analysing between the two surveys... Even after doing a bit of research, most videos just explain how to analyse ONE set of likert scale, rather than comparing between two sets of data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For now, I am planning to just directly compare the mean results of each statement for my discussion section, but I want to know if there's a more efficient way / more fruitful way to discuss the data (I feel like just comparing between the mean between the two data sets may not be that meaningful...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If any of you are able to share some insight on what I can do, please let me know! Sorry again for any troubles caused and thank you for reading up til here!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="409225" LastActivityDate="2024-03-13T16:04:02.207" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6655" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6656" CreationDate="2024-03-13T17:17:09.020" Score="8" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;off-topic&amp;quot; message when a question is closed currently reads as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question appears to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;off-topic&lt;/a&gt; because it focuses on&#xA;programming, debugging, or performing routine operations, or it asks&#xA;about obtaining datasets. You could try the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/793/internet-support-for-statistics-software&quot;&gt;support links we maintain&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opendata.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Open Data site&lt;/a&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the Open Data site be so prominent in this message?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience on Cross Validated, off-topic questions about programming or software recommendations are (currently at least) much more common than off-topic questions about open datasets. So why not mentioning directly &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;stackoverflow&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;softwarerecs&lt;/a&gt; too in this message?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, it's been my experience that there are currently very few &lt;em&gt;active&lt;/em&gt; experienced users on opendata.SE, which has an impact on the website moderation. So I'm wondering if we should be more careful about suggesting asking questions on opendata.SE, when they could also be off-topic there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a recent example, there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/21484/what-would-be-a-good-python-module-lybrary-as-an-alternative-to-visplore-as-vi&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; that has been asked today on opendata.SE right after &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/642389/what-would-be-a-good-python-module-lybrary-as-an-alternative-to-visplore-as-vi&quot;&gt;being closed on CrossValidated&lt;/a&gt;. I don't know what the community at opendata.SE think about it, but I believe the question might be off-topic there too, and could have been a better fit for the software recommendations website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is there some room for improvement of the CrossValidated &amp;quot;off-topic&amp;quot; message?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per the comment of Sycorax about the difficulty of adding content to the message, an alternative would be to remove any mention of specific websites, and have a message such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question appears to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;off-topic&lt;/a&gt; because it focuses on&#xA;programming, debugging, or performing routine operations, or it asks&#xA;about obtaining datasets. You could try the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/793/internet-support-for-statistics-software&quot;&gt;support links we maintain&lt;/a&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164936" LastEditorUserId="164936" LastEditDate="2024-03-13T17:40:53.510" LastActivityDate="2024-03-15T08:29:46.643" Title="Off-topic message: why is the Open Data website so prominent?" Tags="|discussion|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6655" CreationDate="2024-03-15T08:29:46.643" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This limit that the website platform has for close reasons occurs more often in these discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly we can hack this by making a 'read more' link for several of these close reasons and create a wiki page for each of these cases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;off-topic&lt;/a&gt; already sort of does this and possibly the information about the open data site and about the support links could be placed there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example the message could be something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question appears to be off-topic because it focuses on programming, debugging, or performing routine operations, or it asks about obtaining datasets. Read more on our &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;help page about off-topic posts&lt;/a&gt; for information about improving your question or for places where you can ask the question instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then we have only a &lt;em&gt;single&lt;/em&gt; link and people will be more easily guided to a more complete help text where they can get more information rather than that they might follow a dead end with one of the two links in the current message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164061" LastActivityDate="2024-03-15T08:29:46.643" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
</posts>