up vote 17 down vote favorite

It's inevitable that we will get lots R questions in this stack exchange. Should we:

  1. Bounce them all to SO
  2. Answer all questions, even when it's clearly programming and not statistics.
  3. Answer the question unless it clearly has no statistical content.

I would vote for 3.

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6  
This should probably be expanded to include questions that cover any tool that has a substantial programming aspect: Excel, SAS, Incanter, ect, ect. – Sharpie Jul 19 '10 at 21:53
5  
I vote for 3, too!!! – Vivi Jul 19 '10 at 22:51
Does the answer to this question (even though it is older) supersede meta.stats.stackexchange.com/questions/252/…? – Russell S. Pierce Aug 10 '10 at 0:32
No we should follow the thinking in meta.stats.stackexchange.com/questions/252/… The FAQs have been updated to reflect this change. – csgillespie Aug 11 '10 at 13:15

6 Answers

up vote 17 down vote accepted

This is something that we deal with over at BioStar pretty regularly. Based on that experience, I'd argue that number 3 is the right approach, for the following reasons

  • There's going to be a fair amount of overlap between responders on the two sites
  • Bouncing people around will just lead an already confused person to become more frustrated. We want to be helping.

Of course, blatantly off-topic questions should should still be nixed. For borderline questions, I'd suggest that we give them a gentle nudge towards SO if they don't get answers here. Just suggest that they may get better responses there, and most people will be happy to make the jump over to the appropriate forum.

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up vote 5 down vote

I also vote on 3. On the other hand, this site is finally the place which can accept purely statistical R questions from SO.

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up vote 4 down vote

I'll say 3 as well, but there should be a very liberal criteria for determining whether a question has statistical content. For example, a seemingly purely programing based question (e.g. how to work with and store data in sparse matrices) should not be bounced to SO so long as the question asker specify that it is their ultimate goal to perform a specific statistical procedure on that data. There are many cases where it will be better to ask that type of question to people familiar with the procedure (and the available methods for conducting that procedure) rather than to a general programing forum. That is, a general programming forum may technically solve a problem but leave a dataset in a state that is not readily amenable to analysis.

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up vote 2 down vote

Another vote for 3.

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up vote 2 down vote

I would go for choice 3. Something along the lines of bouncing to Stack Overflow if the question is purely about implementation. Such as:

  • How do I do x in R?

  • Function Y/Script Z is not working, Help!

But if the question has to do with understanding some theoretical aspect of statistics and then carrying those concepts forward into implementation using a tool, R or otherwise, then I would vote that Stats should have a home for it.

Update

I have been tagging questions that may be too heavy on the programming as "possibly-off-topic":

http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/possibly-off-topic

This way, we can easily locate them once we come to a consensus on this issue.

Retracted- see here.

If you find a question that you think is off-topic, link it to the appropriate discussion on meta so that it may be tracked. If there is no discussion on Meta yet, consider startin one!

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up vote 1 down vote

I agree with 3 too, although as ever it'll depend on the contents of the question.

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