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A compendium of comments I've found useful. Feel free to add more.
Questions
Self-study
Is this a question from a course or textbook? If so, please add the self-study tag & read its wiki.
Is this a question from a course or textbook? If so,
please add the [tag:self-study] tag & read its
[wiki](https://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/self-study/info).
...
24
No.
Substantive content should not be changed in someone else's answer. Nor should editorial content be added. People who disagree should leave comments, downvote, and/or post their own answer. In their own answer, they can call out the other answer and explain what they disagree with and why.
At all times all parties should abide by SE's be nice policy. ...
answered Aug 3 '18 at 1:59
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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To typeset an operator, it is much better to use \operatorname instead of \mathrm, as explained on tex.SE: What's the difference between \mathrm and \operatorname?
Compare (first line uses \mathrm, second line uses \operatorname):
$$\mathrm{Var}[x] + 2\mathrm{Var}[y] - \mathrm{E}[x]\mathrm{E}[y]$$
$$\operatorname{Var}[x] + 2\operatorname{Var}[y] - \...
18
No. Reasons for editing are described in here:
When should I edit posts?
Any time you feel you can make the post better, and are inclined to do
so. Editing is encouraged!
Some common reasons to edit are:
to fix grammatical or spelling mistakes
to clarify the meaning of a post without changing it
to correct minor mistakes or add ...
17
Your content is yours: you own it, and can use it howsoever you wish. You may also license it to other people to use it.
By posting something here, you grant Stack Exchange a license to host and reproduce your content. Of course you do: otherwise they couldn’t legally do so. The license is non-exclusive, meaning that you can also license your content to ...
17
Q: Why does the "Unanswered Questions" tab show questions that have answers?
A: The Unanswered Questions tab shows questions that have no answers with a positive score nor an accepted answer. (That includes questions with no answers at all.)
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For Corr, Cov and Var I usually use \DeclareMathOperator{\Corr}{Corr}, which, done once in an answer, allows me to just write \Corr(X,Y) whenever I need it later, which displays:
$$\DeclareMathOperator{\Corr}{Corr} \Corr(X,Y)$$
Like Amoeba's answer, this ensures spacing is done correctly in a way that \mathrm doesn't. But see newcommand vs. ...
15
@whuber's stamina is admirable, but I have to endorse @NickCox's suggestion: You just have to hang in there, contribute answers to questions that don't need clarification (etc.) until you get to 50.
The other option is to build the lack of clarity into your answer. Recognize that many askers here don't know enough to use the right terms or include the ...
answered Dec 4 '14 at 22:09
gung - Reinstate Monica
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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 ...
15
The actual criterion is in our help/on-topic (search for programming). A question containing code or asking about code -- or even sometimes asking for code is not automatically off topic, but many are. Briefly, if the issue is one that takes our subject-matter knowledge to answer it belongs here. If it doesn't (such as "what's wrong with this code?", which ...
15
FWIW, I deliberately have not read the thread in question and therefore have no views here on who is more nearly right, and so forth.
I think this is more general inter-personal etiquette than site policy.
It's OK in my view in most cases to correct small presentation errors in anyone's posts. That is especially easy if you feel you know the other party ...
14
Based on number of posts:
Time of day: Looks like 3:00-7:00 (all times are UTC) is half as busy as 14:00-18:00
day of week: Saturday is the least busy day, followed by Sunday
combined: 6:00-7:00 Saturday is just over 20% as busy as 15:00-16:00 Wednesday
via this query --
http://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/51030/posts-by-day-of-week-and-hour-of-...
12
When you are writing a question or an answer, a set of icons is visible above the text field.
One icon is a pair of curly braces, $\{\}$. To add a block of code, highlight the block and click the curly braces.
This is a block of `code`
You will see that the curly braces are just adding four spaces at the beginning of each line. When you have a block ...
answered Feb 13 '15 at 14:54
gung - Reinstate Monica
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12
Yes, your votes will still be used. You may cast just one or just two out of the three you are allowed.
I base this conclusion on having analyzed (in detail) the results of some other elections. A close look at some of those data summaries and visualizations will show that some voters cast incomplete ballots but their votes contributed to the results.
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I can answer 20% of why this question was closed, being one of the five close voters. The question has been edited since, and may well be edited again, so I won't make a running commentary on whether I think the current state of the question deserves to be reopened.
Here is my general thought process about question clarity, which I ran through when looking ...
12
Your main point is well answered already. I will just address what you could do about the technical argument leading to disagreement: Can a seasonal ARIMA model mimic a periodic model? Can you please add that as a question (with links back to your answer leading to this disagreement), so it can be addressed and discussed properly?
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Your efforts to try to improve the site are appreciated!
As I understand it, if enough reviews / suggested edits are rejected you'll automatically generate a (temporary) ban without any intervention by a moderator.
This should lift in a few days.
[If it's still there on Monday, please notify a moderator; we should be able to reverse it.]
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Ten years ago, it was a custom that every site got its own name (i.e. Stack Overflow, Super User, Server Fault), not just [topic] Stack Exchange. There was a community poll (sadly, the results are no longer visible) and Cross Validated was the winner.
11
Most likely those papers are copyrighted, and if you posted a downloaded version you would be violating that copyright as would SE. It is fine to reference papers and link to their hosting site. You can also quote from them or post a screenshot of a part of them as fair use.
answered Mar 31 '14 at 14:11
gung - Reinstate Monica
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11
The moderator elections are fairly well announced and documented on the site - I'd suggest that anyone paying sufficiently little attention to the site to not notice the elections going on is probably poorly suited to being a moderator.
Which means, in all likelihood, if someone hasn't put their name in, it's because they don't want to be moderator. And if ...
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If they do not supply contact information in their profile, then you cannot contact them privately through this site. SE does not work that way. We respect our users' wishes to remain private.
If you think there is an emergency--for instance, if a user might inadvertently have posted sensitive information and you wish to warn them--then please just flag ...
11
The deleted answer has been restored.
I am guessing that the deletion of that post was a well-meaning response to a (well-upvoted) comment by a community member claiming that it did not answer the question. Subsequent edits to the answer appear to have addressed that comment, but evidently they were overlooked by another community member who flagged the ...
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A. There's a number of levels of association of similar questions
$\quad $ (4 by my reckoning, if we also count 'not quite similar enough to do anything'):
Where the questions are exact duplicates, to the extent that they invite identical answers - and both have answers - they should usually be merged (preferably into the better question; if they're of ...
11
The closest thing to this we currently offer is an RSS feed for every question:
You can follow the feed from there, and get notifications with whichever feed reader you have. It should be updated with edits and answers, but not comments.
Other than that, you can also favorite a question, and it'll be highlighted on your favorite posts tab anytime there are ...
11
If you click the icon at the top right (the one that looks like a hamburger), a list drops down. That list includes a link to log out. That way will only take you two steps.
answered Oct 11 '17 at 20:37
gung - Reinstate Monica
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11
The SE developers implemented and maintain it. Note that it is the same on all SE sites, so this question presumably belongs on meta.SE, not here (it is almost certainly a duplicate, however). The place to start is: Who is the Community user? From there, you can read through the threads tagged with community-user.
answered Mar 12 '19 at 16:58
gung - Reinstate Monica
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11
"See so-and-so's comment" doesn't meet the standard for an answer on our site. Answers should be complete in themselves; for example, if BruceET was to delete his comment, your answer would be useless.
It is usually seen as acceptable to
invite the author of the comment to post as an answer, if you feel it is a complete answer to the question, or
to ...
11
The company is shifting to behave more like a standard profit-seeking enterprise and less like an idealistic start-up. There's no doubt that it takes a lot of money to run SE, and that money has been provided by venture capitalists who want a return on their investment. There's a new CEO, I think there's been a lot of turnover elsewhere as well. Jeff is ...
answered Jan 3 '20 at 20:45
gung - Reinstate Monica
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Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible