Questions tagged [policy]
Questions related to policies and guidelines of the Stack Exchange sites.
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What to do about answers written by ChatGPT
As you may be aware, over the last week Stack Overflow has been plagued by some users' feeding questions posted there into the chat-bot 'ChatGPT' then copy-&-pasting its responses into purported ...
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Why is my CV question here duplicated on 'Solve Forum'?
I was doing an image search for other examples of something relating to a question I had already asked on Cross Validated, and came across this word-for-word copy:
https://solveforum.com/forums/...
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Why is motivation important
Why should questions contain motivation and why does the absence of motivation make questions ambiguous?
I wrote this question Probability Mass Function making the Truncated Normal Discrete and it was ...
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Question closed, user asks it again
I made an interesting observation today. A user asked a question which was closed some time later, because the question needed more focus. As I scroll up, I see the same question being asked again ...
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Is it time for an independent Statistics Q&A website? How can we be more independent? #STEXIT #WhoOwnsTheInternet
There has been recent turmoil on StackExchange (relating to various issues) and there are thoughts rising that it might be better for the community to be more independent from the commercial side of ...
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Syntax highlighting with r tag
Adding r tag to the question syntax highlights the R code present in the question or in the answers. Examples here and here.
On the other hand questions tagged r imply that the question is related to ...
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Converting comment to answer in simple questions. Good practice?
Sometimes there are simple questions, often by newcomers, that could be answered by a one-liner (e.g. "What method to use for my data?"). In most such cases I provide a comment rather than answer ...
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What is our policy on retagging old questions?
@whuber recently gave some reason as to why we should avoid trivial edits to questions/answers:
Users are awarded badges for making lots of edits, editing old posts, etc. Do you want to encourage ...
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Any evidence-based arguments in favor of the "comments are not for extended discussion" policy?
The SE universe has a "comments are not for extended discussion" policy, with the effect that if such an extended discussion occurs, moderators intervene and "move the discussion to chat".
I am a ...
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Should I add the self-study tag to a question that is copy-pasted from a book?
This question was asked earlier today https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/239640/simulation-problem-in-r#comment455733_239640.
The text is copy-pasted from an Exercise from Introduction to ...
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When dealing with old off-topic questions, should we close or lock them, and why?
Some topics that are now considered off-topic used to be tolerated in the early days of this site. Consequently, there exist old threads with lots of votes/views/answers that are off-topic under ...
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Should we be merging our non-merged tag synonyms as a matter of course?
Tags on SE can be made synonyms with or without merging.
Non-merged synonyms have a bit of a weird behaviour. Take a look e.g. at books which is a synonym of references. If I search for [books], I ...
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Is the help wrong when it says that cross-posting is not allowed?
I've just been having a discussion in comments here
where I referred the poster to the help on cross-posting.
I've been told that I'm wrong (which, given how often I am wrong, hardly comes as a shock ...
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Handling users who act inappropriately after warnings and after being directed to posting guidelines
I'm curious about how CV handles abusive/rude users who continue to act inappropriately on the boards despite being directed to the CV posting guidelines and warned about their inappropriate postings? ...
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What is our policy on creating new tags?
We should try to keep some order when it comes to tags. Do we already have an order? If not which rules do you suggest? Can I just create a tag if I feel that an important tag is missing?
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What are the criteria applied to conclude this migrated Q was off topic? How do we draw the line?
This post was migrated to mathematics:
https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2166949/deriving-a-1-alpha100-confidence-interval-for-theta-pivotal-quantity
(Its revision history on CV can be seen ...
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Should we close questions that can be easily answered by Wikipedia or Google?
Suppose, someone asks a question that can be answered very easily by using either a textbook or Wikipedia or Google etc. (See this question for an example). Should we close this type of question?
My ...
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If I use my own StackExchange answers elsewhere, am I violating copyright law?
And a related question, "Who owns the text of an answer I write on StackExchange?"
Hypothetically, If I take the text of an answer I wrote on StackExchange and include it word for word, verbatim, in ...
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Can I cross-post a question which answer I'm not satisfied with?
For Gaussian distribution matrix $X$, find $E(F(X))$ and $\sigma(X)$ s.t. $F=\sum f(x_i)P_i,$ given $E(f_i(x_i)),\sigma(f_i(x_i)) \forall i$
While jbowman answers my question, I am unsatisfied. I ...
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Aren't we supposed to flag obsolete comments?
So, there's this chain of comments in Any example of (roughly) independent variables that are dependent at extreme values?:
After the edits the whole exchange became obsolete, and will only confuse ...
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Can questions be asked on more than one Stack Exchange site?
No one likes duplicate questions, but I'm considering posting a question about information theory. It would be well-suited to both Cross Validated AND Cryptography. I'd be interested in the opinions ...
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Policy on questions that read like, "How should I do my job?"
I was wondering what the policy is on questions which look like a commercial organisation is asking how to solve a business problem.
It's totally understandable that everyone needs a hand from time ...
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Is there an area to ask a question about how a company uses data science?
My question is: What data science tools does Khan Academy use to track student performance? More specifically: I'm curious as to how they track their performance in relation to a student that is not ...
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Is it acceptable to edit other people's answers to include new information?
Recently I have noticed a few suggested edits that included adding new information to an existing answer. Is that acceptable?
My intuition is that edits should not add new information that the author ...
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Are plain "Welcome to our site" comments too chatty?
My reading of the various pieces of stackexchange-network information about comments and chattiness would suggest that "Welcome to our site" comments on their own (absent any other text such as being ...
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What's the site policy on removing text such as "thank you", or "This question is too easy"
I can see in this answer that questions shouldn't be asked with "thank you"s, "cheers", etc. But should we remove these during editing? I'm asking because the policy on the Mathematics site is to ...
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What is and what should be our policy on making questions community wiki?
This recent question has just been converted into a community wiki (CW): When (if ever) is a frequentist approach substantively better than a Bayesian?
I understand that the idea behind converting ...
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A question is unclear, but resolving the "unclarity" is part of the answer [duplicate]
Interpretation of the variance of a slope is unclear because the OP seems to be confused by notation, and therefore the notation in the question is confusing. StatStudent pointed this out in the ...
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Why do Cross Validated and Math SE have different policies for homework questions?
Why is it that CrossValidated requires homework or the like to be tagged w/ self-study, but Math SE did away w/ homework tag a long time ago? Why don't the arguments for no more homework tag in Math ...
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Hand-holding versus guidance when answering
A comment was posted on my answer to a question about a year ago, expressing surprise that the answer got so many upvotes given that it isn't very detailed. The comment was up-voted a few times, and ...
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Editing posts protocol: "Please help", and trivial edits
This started as a discussion on chat and it grew into a larger discussion than I anticipated. I'm going to move it over here as suggested by Gung. Here are some links to allow others to follow the ...
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Why is a comment that maligns my field not inappropriate for CV?
I'm not sure where to bring up this issue, but the CV meta seemed as good a place as any.
Recently I was reading this question about whether the banning of p-values and confidence intervals by the ...
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Plugging your software: allowed?
Recently, I wrote a small package to provide a formula interface (and some other bits) to the glmnet R package. This came about after I posted on StackOverflow ...
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Asking for clarification on the benefits of redundancy or multiple questions and answers on one topic
I have discovered this site only recently, and coming from a non-mathematical or computer background, but with quite a bit of interest in statistics and scientific methodology, I've come to enjoy it ...
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What is our policy on merging duplicate questions?
Sometimes a duplicate question gets an answer before it gets closed as a duplicate. In some cases this answer is either better than the answer(s) in the "main" question, or at least adds something ...
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Why was an answer considered off-topic and when it was deleted?
One of my recent answers got deleted while it got scoring of +12/-2 and for some time it was the accepted answer. I would consider this scoring to be rather positive. The answer that got deleted ...
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CrossValidated should not use C.W. as a rep-denial mechanism or for "soft-close"
I've noticed that community wiki status is sometimes applied forcibly to posts that moderators judge are not quite a good fit for this site -- too broad, too open-ended, or too likely to attract ...
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Cross-posting in CV and math.SE tends to become an epidemic
UPDATE 31/7/2014: It continues unabated.
I know that the general issue of cross-posting questions has been discussed before; opinions were not unanimous, but one could discern that the general ...
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Notify a user in a new question
I just posted a question inspired by an earlier question/answer pair in cross-validated (CV). I think this is part of the intent of the site and a delightful phenomenon. There were folks involved in ...
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Cross-Posting on Math and CV
As I've been using Mathematics, I've noticed that questions related to statistics or probabilities take more time to get answered, if they get answered, than at CV. This is just my impression without ...
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Is it acceptable to post the same question on multiple sites?
For example, if I want to reach a wider audience of potential answerers, is it acceptable to post the same question here, as well as on mathoverflow, and other sites that come up that are relevant? ...
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Posting same question on other statistics forums in addition to Cross Validated
I'm aware that it's a no-no to post the same question on multiple Stack Exchange sites. I'm curious, however: what do people feel about posting the same question on non-SE sites, such as MetaOptimize ...
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CrossValidated's rather extreme up-voting problem
Users have pointed out that it is very difficult for beginners to comment on questions, see this thread. These users particularly seem to emphasize that it appears Cross Validated has separate ...
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Encouraging questioners to answer their own self-study questions
I just had a thought: we should encourage askers of [self-study] questions to write up (and accept) the answers the answers that they end up with.
The question here is: is that a good idea?
If we ...
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Identical username for two distinct active accounts allowed by the system?
I found two active users with identical user names, but distinct accounts.
I was over at math.SE and saw an interesting meta-quesiton. I read it through and I thought I recognized the username of the ...
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What standard should be applied in deciding whether a question requires sufficient 'statistical expertise' to be posted to CV?
The FAQ currently states:
If the language is statistically oriented (such as R, SAS, Stata,
SPSS, etc.), then decide based on the nature of your question: if it
needs statistical expertise to ...
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Vote on policy for R questions
The thread Policy on R questions: Stackoverflow vs Stats Analysis suggests that we have some difference of opinions as to how to approach this issue. To get to some sort of resolution I propose that ...
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Policy on R questions: Stackoverflow Vs Stats Analysis
If you see the comments to the question on MLE for Naive Bayes in R you will notice that there is confusion about whether R questions should go to Stackoverflow or Stats Analysis. I am of the opinion ...
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What can we do to encourage broader participation?
Despite being one of the guilty parties, I don't look favorably on the statistics that show a small number of people are collecting most of the points. (E.g., look at the number of people with an ...
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Is this question really not related to "Statistical Analysis"?
Below question has been closed on Statistical Analysis web site. Is this really not a question for this site? I guess it the same as we ask Visual Studio question on stackoverflow, windows/mac ...