Re: st: Statalist in a forum format

[Stas Kolenikov <skolenik@gmail.com>]

Thanks to those who replied ---

Nick, I see now that options like SO/CV were considered, and you
present some good arguments why they don't quite work like statalist.

Marcello, thanks for giving me the compliment of an expert sample
manipulator :) ! I could definitely post this on statalist.org, but it
would be tucked under "Using the forum" where it may or may not have
generated the discussion. Carrying it on in both formats is difficult
to keep track of. As the trad statalist moderator, have you seen
people signing off the list before it officially closes?

Richard, I don't think StackExchange is more difficult to use than any
other forum, but Nick and Sergiy have disagreed. So I lost here 1:2.
There's more stuff floating around on your screen, but most of this
stuff is useful and functional, to the extent that I got so used to it
that the lighter functionality of statalist.org forum did not seem
sufficient to me anymore. It's akin to running models with factor
variables using -xi- vs. the current implementation that achieves the
same plus supports -margins-.

Sergiy, I agree that hanging out with nice people is cool, and most
users would get their questions answered by these nice people in
whatever format, but I have been arguing for functionality and
fit-for-purpose. The developers time is an interesting question, and
that's up to Stata Corp to decide upon. To some extent, though, a
better site for the forum might mean that the users would have to
spend less time searching for a reliable answer, but I am not a
usability expert to provide any substantiated evidence to support
this.


-- Stas Kolenikov, PhD, PStat (ASA, SSC)
-- Principal Survey Scientist, Abt SRBI
-- Opinions stated in this email are mine only, and do not reflect the
position of my employer
-- http://stas.kolenikov.name



On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 7:33 AM, Marcello Pagano <pagano@hsph.harvard.edu> wrote:
> Two things to add,
>
> 1. The market should be asked to decide. No one is stopping anyone from
> drifting to Stack Overflow and/or Cross Validated. We can coexist.
> We can also improve.
>
> 2. Stas is an expert survey person and knows very well how to influence a
> sample, not, of course, that he ever would, but why is this discussion not
> being carried out on Statalist.org? Is it possible that the view of
> new-/old-Statalist might be skewed one way or another by those still
> remaining on old-Statalist versus those already migrated to the forum?
>
> m.p.
>
>
>
> On 4/8/2014 7:39 AM, Nick Cox wrote:
>>
>> Stas raises many questions and makes several positive suggestions and I
>> won't pretend to address all, but I don't agree with his strongest
>> pitch. (If I had thought that people migrating to Stack Overflow or
>> Cross Validated was the best way to fix Statalist's slowly growing
>> problems, I would
>> have recommended that during earlier discussions.)
>>
>> Stack Overflow (SO; a large forum for programming questions, which
>> recently passed 7 million questions (!)) and Cross Validated (CV; a
>> smaller forum for statistics questions, which is approaching 35,000
>> questions) have both in existence for a few years now. I am positive
>> about both and have been an active contributor to both for more than a
>> year. Indeed a glance at
>>
>> http://stackoverflow.com/tags/stata/topusers
>>
>> http://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/stata/topusers
>>
>> will show that Stata questions on both lists are mostly handled by
>> people also active here on Statalist.
>>
>> However, the picture that Stas paints is in my view rosier than the
>> real prospects on those sites for Stata users.
>>
>> 1. The two sites divide questions linked to Stata very awkwardly as
>> programming questions belong on SO and statistics questions belong on CV
>> and questions involving elements of both have to jump one way or the
>> other, as cross-postings are strongly discouraged. What's more,
>> programming questions as construed on SO don't really include
>> introductory or beginner questions about code, which are much more
>> welcome on Statalist. (Notwithstanding that, you are expected to read
>> the documentation here....)
>>
>> So, many, perhaps most, questions on the Stata language are _not_
>> welcome on either  CV or SO. SO bills itself as for professional and
>> enthusiast programmers, and programming really does mean what it says,
>> not working out command syntax.
>>
>> 2. Much of what is valuable here falls some way -- indeed, in many
>> cases, a long way -- outside the style or remit of SO or CV. Examples
>> include
>>
>>     - announcements of new user-written commands
>>     - suggestions for future Stata development
>>     - new Stata version announcements
>>     - how-to's on some topic
>>     - job/consulting opportunities
>>     - bug reports (unless somehow phrased as a question)
>>
>> Losing such material would be a major blow to Statalist.
>>
>> 3. Stas plays much attention to what activity or activities would
>> promote the public
>> reputation of Stata outside the user community. However, I doubt that
>> migrating lots of questions to SO or CV is unlikely to have quite the
>> effect Stas desires. I am dimly aware of lots of questions on R on SO;
>> evidently R is used heavily, especially in universities, and many of its
>> users struggle with it; so what else is new? I don't think people whose
>> opinions you would most value count users any more than they would
>> assess newspapers by mass circulation. In fact, the existence of a
>> self-contained good quality forum with high activity is quite possibly
>> more likely to maintain and improve the reputation of Stata, not least
>> by promoting some sense of community.  I am not worried that the
>> community becomes too inward-looking; what I see is overwhelmingly
>> people using Stata and then using the results in their papers and
>> presentations to groups outside.
>>
>> 4. Broadly I would describe SO and CV as considerably more complicated
>> than the new Statalist forum. I don't attribute as much importance to
>> mechanisms such as voting, reputation and badges as Stas does. For
>> example, I just counted up that I have been awarded 101 badges across
>> SO and CV, but that doesn't amount for more than the arcana of the
>> games played by my 10-year-old nephew. It strikes me that people find
>> it easy to judge reputation just by watching Statalist briefly without
>> anyone needing to measure it.
>>
>> Above all, no one is (I hope) insisting that there is one best forum for
>> all. For example, no one has mentioned www.talkstats.com in this thread,
>> but it's evidently congenial to many Stata users, and www.stata-forum.de
>> offers German language support. In each case, highly competent and
>> experienced users handle much of the traffic. What's puzzling is that
>> despite their very much greater sophistication -- until just now --
>> neither SO nor CV has achieved lift-off compared with Statalist in terms
>> of frequent Stata questions. Some people evidently prefer(red)
>> email-based questions, but I think a major factor was people asking
>> questions wherever experts appeared concentrated.
>>
>> Nick
>> njcoxstata@gmail.com
>>
>>
>> On 7 April 2014 15:34, Stas Kolenikov <skolenik@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Dear Stataliasters,
>>>
>>> thanks again to Marcello Pagano, Stata Corp side team and everybody
>>> involved in setting up statalist.org. I however would like play a
>>> devil's advocate and argue that we DO NOT NEED statalist in that form.
>>> I would instead argue that we need to find ways to move the statalist
>>> discussion to the StackExchange system (http://www.stackexchange.com).
>>>
>>> Let me describe the system in bold strokes. (Disclaimer: I am closely
>>> familiar only with the statistics website on StackExchange family,
>>> http://stats.stackexchange.com, although I keep an eye on another five
>>> or so sites, such as latex, math, biking, and board games, out of 100+
>>> for all walks of life). On each of the sites, users ask questions and
>>> seek inputs from other participants. Other users can answer these
>>> questions. (So far, that's trivial, and every forum does that. The
>>> crucial differences begin at this point.) The quality of different
>>> answers can be compared by upvotes or downvotes that registered users
>>> can cast. Answers can be improved by editing. In fact, questions can
>>> be edited, as well (so at the very least, one could edit a novice's
>>> question to incorporate the code formatting and tag the topic(s) that
>>> the question raise(s)... and NJC can edit Stas Kolenikov's questions
>>> for silly grammar :) ). Besides full answers, users can also provide
>>> smaller-scale comments. Duplicate questions are being identified,
>>> flagged, and closed, with links to what they are duplicating. A user's
>>> contribution to the site is measured by their "reputation" that is
>>> accumulated through good questions and answers, and by badges (asking
>>> questions roles, answering question roles, editing roles, flagging
>>> roles, etc.). Thus there is a variety of feedback mechanisms that help
>>> improving the quality of questions and answers, and motivate the users
>>> to participate. Thematic sites provide special formatting and/or
>>> syntax highlighting, like Latex-type MathJAX formatting on math or
>>> statistics sites (implemented on statalist.org, as well); code
>>> formatting on programming and statistics sites (partially implemented
>>> on statalist.org, requires some cleanup, as far as I understand; on
>>> stats.stackexchange.com, R code is provided with simple syntax
>>> highlighting, too); chess board rendering on the chess site; card
>>> rendering on the poker website; etc. There's a sophisticated system of
>>> tags that have mini-wikies (available on mouse-over) and full wikies
>>> (available on clicks); users accumulate their reputation both overall
>>> and within tags. Moderators play a major role in keeping the site
>>> running, as it is the moderators who take actions on low quality
>>> questions and answers (close duplicates, migrate questions to more
>>> appropriate sites, etc.)
>>>
>>> The biggest difference between a typical forum format (including
>>> statalist) and StackExchange is the conceptual vision of the mission
>>> they have in mind. Historically, plain-email-text statalist has been
>>> aimed at "User 1 posts their current problem" - "User 2 posts a
>>> solution to that specific problem" - "User 3 refines, if there's room"
>>> - and everybody forgets about the whole thing a month later (although
>>> in the case of statalist, we often see referrals to statalist
>>> archives). StackExchange works on generating knowledge about the
>>> universe (in this case, this would be Stata universe) that is supposed
>>> to stay for prosperity, so that website users and the Internet at
>>> large could benefit from the previously generated answers. The
>>> ultimate goal is that StackExchange posts show up on the first page of
>>> Google when you search something like "fixed effects model with
>>> heteroskedastic panels". In some of my Google queries, I do indeed get
>>> SE posts, so somehow the mechanism of StackExchange I described above
>>> does work.
>>>
>>> I am not quite sure how to better describe my next point, but I think
>>> that creating statalist.org compartmentalizes Stata as an obscure
>>> software. While those in the academic ivory towers can enjoy their
>>> academic freedom, others in industry and government have to fight this
>>> impression at their workplaces ("How is it called again? Why are you
>>> not happy with some alternative software that we have a license
>>> for?"). This is a tiring uphill battle. (Literally today, I had to
>>> convert some SAS code to Stata and back, and StackOverflow, the
>>> programming branch of StackExchange, offered some good pointers...
>>> which I got from the first Google search page!) The statistics branch
>>> of StackExchange, CrossValidated (http://stats.stackexchange.com), is
>>> heavily entrenched in R, and the popular claims regarding popularity
>>> of R are based on the counts of posts on StackExchange
>>> (http://r4stats.com/articles/popularity/). Moving to stackexchange.com
>>> rather than to statalist.org would help strengthening the argument
>>> that Stata is a proper, kosher, mainstream statistical package. A
>>> fivefold or tenfold increase in the volume of Stata questions that
>>> could happen once hsphsun2 closes would make a good splash in Stata
>>> reputation in the big world outside statalist walls.
>>>
>>> Toning this down a little bit, I think the best of two worlds can be
>>> combined on statalist.org if the major components of the StackExchange
>>> system are utilized. The unique features that Stata Corp can donate to
>>> the system to make it superior over the limitations of the format and
>>> capabilities of StackExchange would be syntax highlighting similar to
>>> that of the Do-Editor, and automatic links to the online help files
>>> (http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?whatever) that are added once a Stata
>>> command is being identified in the code section. A more prominent use
>>> of tags is a must for the forum to be usable as a reference, rather
>>> than a hit-and-run (ask-and-wait) system that it has historically
>>> been. Stata commands may act as tags (based on either what user enters
>>> as a special tag if that's something user-contributed, like -outreg-
>>> or -ivreg2-, or what is being recognized automatically, which I
>>> suggested above). Users should be required to use tags, or at least
>>> asked to confirm when they are submitting a question with no tags. (7
>>> tags on 78 "General" forum questions, and two more from "Using the
>>> forum"??? I'd say it is not working yet.) For tags to work well,
>>> though, other users should be able to edit tags in the original posts.
>>> Adding any of that functionality would require serious work on the
>>> forum engine. How much the engine can be expanded, I have no idea; I
>>> am not a website programmer. If this equates to just reproducing
>>> StackExchange engine, it is obviously a futile exercise.
>>>
>>> Joining StackExchange system as a separate site may or may not work
>>> out (see http://area51.stackexchange.com/faq -- there should be a
>>> critical mass of users, questions and topics, and so far, I am aware
>>> of about five or so statalist people who are active on CrossValidated,
>>> which won't create a critical mass). R questions are split between the
>>> statistics website and the programming website, depending on whether
>>> it is more of "why doesn't lmer produce a standard error for variance
>>> components" (statistics) or "how do I tweak ggplot2 to produce
>>> transparent graphs" (programming). I imagine Stata questions could
>>> work pretty much the same way, too. At the moment, there is about 1
>>> question a day on Stata on statistics website, and may be two
>>> questions a day on programming website... compared to 10+ new
>>> questions on statalist... on a slow day.
>>>
>>>
>>> -- Stas Kolenikov, PhD, PStat (ASA, SSC)
>>> -- Principal Survey Scientist, Abt SRBI
>>> -- Opinions stated in this email are mine only, and do not reflect the
>>> position of my employer
>>> -- http://stas.kolenikov.name
>>> *
>>> *   For searches and help try:
>>> *   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
>>> *   http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/resources/statalist-faq/
>>> *   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
>>
>> *
>> *   For searches and help try:
>> *   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
>> *   http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/resources/statalist-faq/
>> *   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
>
>
> *
> *   For searches and help try:
> *   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
> *   http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/resources/statalist-faq/
> *   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
*   http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/resources/statalist-faq/
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/