st: Cross-posting on Statalist and other forums

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

As many members will be aware, there are several other forums for
raising Stata-linked queries.

There are several blogs with much Stata content. Typically the people
running them are happy to take questions directly linked to original
postings, but discourage (or don't encourage) other posts in one way
or another. The same applies, as far as I can tell, to most
interactions based on Facebook and Twitter. Either way, I am not here
focusing on blogs or social media.

Prominent examples of web forums (there may well be others):

Stata Forum, www.stata-forum.de, is in German

Stack Overflow, aimed at "professional and enthusiast programmers",
http://stackoverflow.com/about,  has a Stata tag

Cross Validated, http://stats.stackexchange.com/about, is a sister
site of Stack Overflow dedicated to statistics questions and answers

Talkstats, www.talkstats.com, has a Stata forum

The nub of the matter is this. From time to time, it becomes evident
that people have posted pretty much the same question to Statalist and
to some other site. This bites most when you realise that you just
wrote an answer but somebody else  already wrote one as good or better
on some other site.

What are the expectations here?

Although this has hitherto been only an occasional issue, it seems
likely to become rather more common. I've drafted something that might
appear in the FAQ but welcome comments, or meta-comments, either
publicly or privately.

% draft begins

People posting on Statalist may also think about posting questions on
other listservers or in web forums. There is absolutely no rule on
that; it is not our business to constrain what you do elsewhere.

But if you do post elsewhere, we ask that you provide cross-references
either way to searchable archives. That way, people interested in your
question can check quickly what has been said elsewhere and avoid
posting similar comments. Being open about cross-posting saves
everybody's time and temper.

Cross-posting doesn't remove the request that you close threads on
Statalist. If your question was well answered somewhere else, post a
cross-reference to that in a closure to Statalist.

% draft ends

I don't seek by this to start a debate on whether Statalist should
re-invent itself as a web forum, not that that's out of order!

Nick
njcoxstata@gmail.com
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