Alexander here touches on a question that has vexed
many people almost since Statalist was first
started. How best to turn the best and most
durable postings into a searchable, useable resource?
Naturally, you know one answer: Copy postings good
for your purposes into some personal collection.
Otherwise, the Statalist "manager" is Marcello Pagano.
He can speak for himself, but I doubt he
wants more responsibility here.
I think no cool tool exists here except those
you are already using, your mailer and Statalist.
I have some doubts about a voting system: people
are just too busy to add one more thing they
should be doing to their lists, etc., etc.
More positively,
if you think a particular posting on Statalist is
especially good, there are three main ways of trying
to get it preserved more visibly.
1. Suggest to the author that they write it up.
The answer may be: "I just did that."
(Some of our best posters have essentially no interest
in publication of any form beyond
Statalist, especially as academic criteria
make no difference to their livelihoods as
consultants.)
2. Suggest to StataCorp that it should be
written up as an FAQ. That said, I guess
StataCorp would want to point out that
archiving Statalist postings and making
that archive searchable is their main
way of making Statalist a resource. There
are all sorts of reasons why only a few
new FAQs are published on the Stata website
each year. Turning a good posting into an
FAQ can be quite a lot of work, for a start.
Also, official Stata FAQs tend not to cover
user-written programs.
3. Suggest to the Stata Journal editors
([email protected])
that a posting should be written up, for
example as a Tip. The posting Alexander
refers to is a case in point. I
was thinking aloud, in June 2003, about a small issue.
In the event I decided that little
solutions using -floor()- and -ceil()-
were indeed the best I could think of,
and I prevailed upon the Stata Journal
to publish the main idea, which is in
print at
SJ-3-4 dm0002 . . . . . . . . Stata tip 2: Building with floors and ceilings
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . N. J. Cox
Q4/03 SJ 3(4):446--447 (no commands)
tips for using floor() and ceil()
Three tips are published each issue in the SJ. With three
in the pipeline for SJ 6(1) 2006, we will have reached 30.
Tips are just an example. Several other pieces in the SJ have
grown out of Statalist postings.
Nick
[email protected]
Alexander Nervedi
> For statlist managers:
>
> I was just trying to get my head around trying to round up
> numbers and came
> across the excellant suggestions made by Nick at
> http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2003-06/msg00463.html
>
> I think a cool tool would be one that lets users rate
> responses that they
> they found really useful. There are quite a few solutions and
> threads one
> needs to go down so that a rating by a previous user could
> make it easier
> for subsequnt seekers to get more quickly to the information.
>
> thanks, you guys are already doing a great job.
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
