On 1/4/07, Nick Cox <[email protected]> wrote:
1. Brainstorming about what does not work very well
and what might work better is all interesting and worthwhile,
but the suggestions I have seen so far involve
other people doing more work -- and no volunteers to help --
indeed explicit denials of intention to get more involved.
..
3. The name Statalist has been grabbed, but no one should feel in any
way inhibited or prohibited from setting up their own list/forum/blog
for discussion of Stata in their own way. Show us!
I've gone ahead and applied for a wiki at http://www.openserving.com
that I've imaginatively named "Stata Wiki". Its taking a while for
them to process account applications at the moment, but when its all
set up I shall let the list know the URL so they can add content.
In the meantime if people want to mail thoughts on structure then that
would be handy. David Elliot has provided a start. Although it was
for forums as he indicates it would work well for a wiki.
On 1/4/07, David Elliott <[email protected]> wrote:
I'll throw out a straw man framework just to stimulate further
discussion. If we had a forum format, I could see the following wide
subject areas:
= = = = = = = = Statalist Forum = = = = = = = =
Orientation & FAQ (Posting limited to Admin and Moderators)
Stata Install, Setup & Platform issues
Inputting data: conversion, infiling, datatypes, dictionary,
labelling, formatting
Data manipulation: generate and egen, recode, summarizing, merging
Basic Stats, tabulate and all the rest
Graphics
Advanced Stats, regression, svy:, xt:, sampling
Automation: writing do, ado, hlp & dlg files
Matrix Manipulation and Mata
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
The above would also provide a basic skeleton for a Wiki as well.
One thing that needs to be considered is that there are already a
number of very useful tutorials and resources out there already such
as the FAQ's at http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/ and the UCLA
resources at http://www.ats.ucla.edu/STAT/stata/ to name but two.
Who owns these documents (author or site host)? Are they happy to see
their work duplicated within the wiki? If so who will 'wikifiy' the
pages (I'd aim to do some, but don't have the time to do all of them)?
Obviously copyrighted material that appears in the Stata Journal,
manuals or publications (such as the recent 'Stata Tips') should not
be included, but I can envisage the wiki serving as early drafts for
such publications, or for subject specific tips.
One perspective that I feel is pertinent is that in the not too
distant past some expressed the desire to have a wiki for R (see
http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php for the results). Whilst
still in its infancy, it is worth noting that it seems to have far
less contributions than the R-help mailing list, a point worth noting,
as many infrequent posters want 'real-time' support from other users
who sacrifice their time for free. Thus a wiki wouldn't stop people
asking questions that are in the manual or FAQs, but would provide yet
another resource to point people to (and another line in the automated
signature of every message that is sent through the statalist server).
With regards to forums, one option of solving the multiple threading
of single topics may be to have statalist mirrored/archived on gmane
which essentially funnels mailing lists into newsgroups and may be a
solution midway between those who are hankering after properly
threaded discussions (see http://gmane.org/). Note that it is
possible to import archives, so all the wealth of knowledge that
already exists would not be lost. This doesn't provide the bbcode
alluded to by David Elliot, but most people who provide answers have a
standard method of delimiting commands and showing code which really
isn't any less hassle than clicking on a button to bring up the bbcode
tags (although I tend to type these by hand myself in the forums that
do use them).
In the meantime discussion would be useful, but may well clutter up
statalist. If a separate mailing list (sic. forum) is required I can
probably get something up and running a bit quicker (although if this
is desired it would have to be stated in the next fortnight as I will
shortly be incommunicado for a month or so).
Neil
--
"Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute
rejection of authority." - Thomas H. Huxley
Email - [email protected] / [email protected]
Website - http://slack.ser.man.ac.uk/
Photos - http://www.flickr.com/photos/slackline/
*
* 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/
