In my opinion converting Statalist to a modern Internet-based "forum"
format is a wonderful idea and should be actively pursued. I understand
the concern that it would entail significant extra work for the list's
volunteer moderators to make such a transition, but it also seems to me
that the transition costs are "best" borne (in the efficiency and
fairness senses) by Statacorp itself. Statacorp obviously benefits
immensely from Statalist's popularity and success. The existence of the
list and its generous contributors and participants helps to demystify
much of what Stata software is capable of doing, and encourages new and
repeat business for the corporation. Rather than removing Statacorp
from any involvement with the list, why doesn't Statacorp become _more_
involved in this narrow way -- taking the lead technically and
financially to convert Statalist's outmoded and clunky way of doing
business to a forum format, organized by topic, easily searchable, with
questions and comments editable by the submitter, and so on. Once the
transition has been made, I am confident that our volunteer moderators
would spend less time than they do now managing our exchanges.
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Nick Cox
Sent: Wednesday, January 03, 2007 12:55 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: st: RE: re: a wish list for Statalist
Statalist is not, and never has been, moderated.
This is explicit in the FAQ. Marcello is the maintainer.
That still means a lot of work in handling all sorts of
administration.
Perhaps Roy is using the word in some loose or idiosyncratic
sense. What the Statalist FAQ means by moderation is that
some person acts as a human filter determining what gets
posted to the list. As said, and as most members should
know, we don't do this.
Nick
[email protected]
roy wada
> Yes, Marcello has moderated it for a long time, and has done
> a good job, but
> I imagine most people end up going directly to the Stata
> website, which is
> the dominant listing on web searches. If you have an
> independent work of
> writing that is mainly distributed through a corporate
> website, what does it
> mean?
>
> The maintained appearance is that the Stata Corp is not
> actively involved in
> providing Statalist, which means that it will not devote more
> resources
> towards its operation. The result is the minimalist format
> that we have.
> Potential users may be less likely to volunteer something that end up
> looking more like a duplication of [email protected],
> especially when
> it gets posted on www.stata.com/statalist. Altruism is funny
> that way.
> Appearance is everything as they say.
>
> By providing a web interface the Stata Corp is already
> involved, and since
> it is involved, I would like it to provide an upgraded format
> for forum that
> is reasonably straightforward to implement and very valuable
> to have. I
> would not impose on Marcello to do it, but it is easy enough to do,
> teenagers have been doing it for years, you can put it into
> Google Groups if
> you have to.
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
