A new Q&A website for Data-Analysis (based on StackOverFlow engine) – is waiting for you

The bottom line of this post is for you to go to:
Stack Exchange Q&A site proposal: Statistical Analysis
And commit yourself to using the website for asking and answering questions.
144 peoples already committed to using the website, we need 356 more… 🙂
If you are looking for the reasons to do so – read on…

What is the StackOverFlow Q&A website about?

StackOverFlow.com (“SO” for short) is a programming Q & A site that’s free. Free to ask questions, free to answer questions, free to read. Free, And fast.

For the R community, SO offers a growing database of R related questions and answer (click the link to check them out).

You might be asking yourself what’s so special about SO over other available resources such as R mailing lists, R blogs, R wiki and so on?
That is a great question.

The answer is that SO succeeds in doing a great job synthesizing aspects of Wikis, Blogs, Forums, and Digg/Reddit to offer a very powerful Q&A website.

In SO, the new questions are like forum/blog posts (A main text with comments/answers). After someone answers a question, other users can give a thumb-up or a thumb-down to the answer (like digg/reddit). And all content can be edited, like a wiki page, by the users (provided the user has enough “karma points”).
You also get badges (“awards”) for a bunch of actions (like coming to the website every day for a month. Giving an answer that got X amount of thumb-ups and so on). The awards allows someone who is asking a question to see how much the person who had answered him has good reputation (in terms of acceptance/appreciation of his answers by other SO members).
It also offers a small (but effective) ego-boost for the person who gives answers.

So if StackOverFlow is so great – what is this new website you wrote about in the title?

Well, StackOverFlow has one limitation. It deals ONLY with programming questions. Other questions like:

  • Which of the following three graphics best displays this data set? Why?
  • Can you give an example of where I might prefer to use a z-test vs a t-test?
  • What is the relationship between Bayesian and neural networks?

Will not be answered, and the threads will get closed as being “off topic”. Why? because such questions are dealing with: statistics, data analysis, data mining, data visualization – But in no means in programming.

So there is no StackOverFlow-like Q&A website for data analysis… Until now!

In the past few weeks, Rob Hyndman and other users, have made much effort to push the creation of a new website, based on the StackOverFlow engine, to allow for statistically related Q&A.
His proposal for a new website is almost complete. All it need is for you (yes you), to go to the following link:
Stack Exchange Q&A site proposal: Statistical Analysis
And commit yourself to the website (that is, click the button called “commit” – so to declare that you will have interest in reading, asking and answering questions on such a website)

Once a few more tens 379 more people will commit – the website will go online!

Hope to see you there.

0 thoughts on “A new Q&A website for Data-Analysis (based on StackOverFlow engine) – is waiting for you”

  1. As it stands now, there are 116 of 500 commits. I am not sure that I would call 384 a few tens more.

    I’d call that “a few hundred more”.

    1. Interesting. I hadn’t seen that before. It doesn’t seem very active, and has a strong emphasis on data mining rather than statistics. 24 users compared to over 300 on the SE proposal. Also, I think there will be some real advantages in being part of the SE community of sites. I’d rather see that site join up with the new SE site rather than abandon the SE proposal.

  2. I am not sure if the 500 ‘committed’ respondents are there to ASK the questions or to ‘ANSWER’ them? What is ‘Wiki’?
    I don’t mind in joining the group.

    1. both, I think SO just wants to make sure that they won’t create a subsite that nobody will be using.

  3. hi… currently i am working on a research article… i have selected a checklist which has been already developed. but we had to remove some items from the original checklist to suit out sample population. do we need to assess the validity of the checklist after removing the items? if yes? please guide me regarding the exact procedure to do the same….

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