Stack-Exchange site for Public Health and Epidemiology

Summary

Stack-Exchange is a great website to get expert answers for your questions. We want a Stack-Exchange site for Public Health and Epidemiology. We need your help to do this. Here is how, in under 2 minutes:

1. If you don’t have an account on the Stack-Exchange website, start one.
2. Go to the PHE page.
3. Click “Follow it” (left side of the page).
4. Scroll down and at the very least, find your 10 favourite example questions and vote for them. The site already has enough example questions to get to the next stage – they just need more votes.
5. Even better, add some new example questions and/or comment about the proposed focus of the site.

Not convinced?

Stack-Exchange is a website where people go to ask questions on a variety of topics. There are many websites like this, but what separates Stack-Exchange is how the site enables the community of users to evaluate and filter both the questions and answers posted on the site.

Stack-exchange is organized into topic areas, including a site for statistics, called Cross-Validated. I cannot overstate how useful I have found this site over the past year. If you enter a statistical question into your favorite search engine, you probably find a link to something on Cross-Validated related to your question. More importantly, if you ask a good question, you are likely to get useful responses.

For example, here is a question I posted, and the answers, which led me to some nice references to help me with my problem. Overall, the process is very interactive, with people making suggestions on how to improve the wording of my questions, and other people commenting on the specific answers provided.

What is particularly amazing is the quality of the people who are willing to help others in such a free and open way. Here is the current list of users, sorted by their “reputation” which is awarded for things like asking good questions and giving good answers.

For example, Frank Harrell has answered over 150 questions on the site.  That’s good help if you can get it.

While the Cross-Validated site is very good for some epidemiological questions, there is a proposal to start a separate Stack-Exchange site for Public Health and Epidemiology. One of the interesting things about Stack-Exchange is that you can’t just start a new section without going through a “staging” process. This is basically to ensure that your section will have enough interested users to actually make it useful.

How can you help?

1. If you don’t have an account on the Stack-Exchange website, start one.
2. Go to the PHE page.
3. Click “Follow it” (left side of the page).
4. Scroll down and at the very least, find your 10 favourite example questions and vote for them. The site already has enough example questions to get to the next stage – they just need more votes.
5. Even better, add some new example questions and/or comment about the proposed focus of the site.

Many thanks