Two comments oblique to this, which I write as an author of
various FAQs, mostly on the Stata website, and of other
materials that others have occasionally wished to link
to or incorporate in their own.
Don't estimate the amount of maintenance needed. Each
new release of Stata brings a need to scan the FAQs to see
what is now out-of-date. If you have even a few dozen documents
that are notionally yours, that is a quite a lot of work --
not easily automated -- to fit into anyone's "spare time".
If you link to anybody's FAQs, revisions come for free;
if you copy material with acknowledgements to the author,
it's most unlikely that that author will keep you appraised
of updates. (Of course, links can disappear too, but that
is a well-known problem.)
Nick
[email protected]
William Gould, Stata
> Concerning the creation of a wiki for Stata, Neil Shephard
> <[email protected]> wrote
>
> > 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)?
>
> StataCorp would grant permission for its FAQs to be used under the
> GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) on a nonexclusive
> basis. When they were
> used whole, we would ask that proper attribution be given to
> the original
> author, especially when that original author was not
> StataCorp, and we would
> also ask that a link be included back to the original FAQ on
> our site, where
> the most up-to-date version is to be found. If FAQs were cut
> up and respliced
> back together, or parts of them used in new dicussion, we
> would ask for
> attribution where it was possible and appropriate, with a link, again
> especially in the case when the FAQ was not written by us.
> The emphasis on
> all of this on the word ask. We would require that the
> derived work be under
> the GFD license. StataCorp's answer to the use of the FAQs
> for a wiki on Stata
> would be yes.
*
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* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
