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I don't see any necessary problem with asking a question like that. Here are some things to be sure you do:
Provide a complete and correct citation for the paper.
Provide a link to the paper.
Paste into the body of your question the equation / text you need help understanding (i.e., don't just say 'I need help with equation 5').
Paste in enough of the ...
answered Mar 21 '15 at 14:54
gung - Reinstate Monica
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21
See http://stackexchange.com/legal & https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/.
For what it's worth,† my understanding of all that is that you're perfectly free to reproduce anything you've written here elsewhere; but you can't stop someone else reproducing it provided they properly attribute it to you.
† I'm not giving legal advice,...
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Your content is yours: you own it, and can use it howsoever you wish. You may also license it to other people to use it.
By posting something here, you grant Stack Exchange a license to host and reproduce your content. Of course you do: otherwise they couldn’t legally do so. The license is non-exclusive, meaning that you can also license your content to ...
15
My thoughts first on what one does if one is writing a question:
If you're quoting a paper, you should quote it verbatim and then explain why the original is wrong (including quoting the correct statement from the earlier reference). If you really want to make it obvious, include "[sic]" inside the quote, immediately after the part that's wrong to highlight ...
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It is off-topic because it isn't about statistics, machine learning, etc; but having access to a given reference. It would also be kind of a private question which is of low interest to the community.
Glen_b provides more advice within a comment:
I'd regard it as off-topic; it's not a question on statistics / machine learning but on access to papers. If ...
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To answer the title question: Yes, all such questions should be community wiki.
Proposal
I propose the creation of an exception rule for questions about book recommendations, similar to the one created for What is your favorite “data analysis” cartoon? and Famous statistician quotes.
To ensure a certain quality, the exception rule can only be applied if ...
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Setting aside the specific thread on the main site that motivated this question, I think we can address the title question more generally.
Namely, I think we should be mostly indifferent to what is posted elsewhere on the internet. In this case, I think it shouldn't matter if a question is answered on Wikipedia, but we could apply the same principle to ...
answered Jul 14 '16 at 21:33
gung - Reinstate Monica
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11
I don't agree that book recommendations are a good use for this site — but let's set that aside for a moment to avoid using Community Wiki as a way to make these somehow okay.
Community Wiki was not designed to solicit crowd-sourced lists of stuff. The problem with Community Wiki is it's often used to to allow questions that otherwise would not be ...
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A reference request could be too broad. For example, some reference requests would run into the "too many possible answers" criterion for being overly broad.
As such, askers of such requests should take care to do what they can to narrow the scope of their question (e.g. make it clear what they know and what they need, for example, so that a book of about ...
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I think it's fine. After all, a "knowledge site" doesn't mean a statistical textbook or encyclopaedia—those exist already, & answering specific, even idiosyncratic, questions is almost the raison d'être of CV, certainly its forte. If you follow @gung's advice the question will be as potentially useful to other people as it can be; if it ...
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This doesn't seem like a bad question, or that it should be off-topic necessarily, to me. Questions asking for references, and questions asking about the theoretical / philosophical aspects of hypothesis testing have long been on-topic. Instead, I see two potential issues:
Try to frame your question in such a way that there can be a right answer or an ...
answered Mar 11 '15 at 3:23
gung - Reinstate Monica
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9
Usually I comment, and ask for clarification what part of the question is not already answered by Wikipedia. Then I vote to close as "unclear what you are asking" or "too broad".
unclear what you're asking Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it’s hard to tell exactly ...
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It's off topic here, and I doubt this particular discussion (aside from the question of on-topicness) would be on topic at any of the other SE network sites.
You're free to raise it on our chat if you wish.
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sources and resources have been make synonyms of references.
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Methodological questions concerning crowdsourcing and machine learning are on-topic on Cross Validated SE, but they can't be:
duplicate
unclear.
too broad.
primarily opinion-based.
Questions which ask for references are not off-topic, but depending on how it is asked some users can consider it 'too broad'. So, always try to be the most specific as ...
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There's a third approach, which is at least worth presenting: such posts could be treated just like others—recommendations of a statistical method, say—, rather than like polls. A great answer might deal with several notable textbooks; discussing what they cover, & omit; their statistical prerequistes; their mathematical level; their ...
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Following a recent discussion initiated by Andre Silva, it has been proposed to backlist the recommendations tag.
Moreover, references has the following synonyms: resources, book (s), tutorial, video, textbook (s).
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The two tags are now merged, and all threads tagged with reference-request have been updated.
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I think an answer that only copies and pastes from Wikipedia, with appropriate attribution, is fine if it answers the question completely. Originality is nice, but shouldn't be required. I believe Wikipedia's license is compatible with Stack Exchange's. Copying and pasting more than a few sentences from sites without free licenses could be legally ...
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[Based on my comment.]
We also have best-practices and rule-of-thumb (and even expertise, which was used only once!). Since the purpose of this site is to provide guidance, expert opinion and thoughful recommendations, I don't see any interest in keeping the recommendations tag alive.
As @Nick pointed out, there is no connexion between 'recommendations' and ...
4
About references:
I included a link to the most upvoted answer in Should all "book recommendation" questions be classified as community wiki? in the tag wiki as additional guidance.
@amoeba edited the tag excerpt to also advise using specific tags:
Questions seeking external references (books, papers, etc.) about a particular subject. Always ...
3
An important other note, aside more licensing issues, is the issue of self-plagiarism. Copying your own work without citation can be considered a form of plagiarism. Now I mainly hear about this in cases where parts of one published article is reused in another, but it might also play a role here. So if you want to be on the safe side: make sure to cite the ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
