Talk:Stata

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I set up the page with some basic information from the Stata website. There was an article about the history of Statacorp in The Stata Journal recently, and I will try to get the information up once I get access to the article.

[edit] VfD

On April 28, this article was nominated for deletion. The discussion can be found at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Stata. The result was keep. —Xezbeth 14:34, May 7, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] PanelWhiz

I've removed the links, both external and wiki to PanelWhiz. At the time of this comment, PanelWhiz does not appear to be notable enough to merit an article. I also see no reason for WP:EL#Advertising and conflicts of interest to have been disregarded in this situation. Finally, since Stata has been around for over 20 years, and PanelWhiz has been around for less than one year, I find it hard to believe that PanelWhiz is so integral to Stata that it deserves a mention in the Stata article. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, and that convincing would start with the establishment of the notability of PanelWhiz via multiple non-trivial articles about PanelWhiz in reliable sources. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Aagtbdfoua (talk • contribs) 13:00, 7 April 2007 (UTC).

  • PanelWhiz - A Panel Data Front-End for Extracting Panel Data in Stata. See also PanelWhiz.
  • Panel Data - Known Panel and Repeated Cross-Section Data Providers

The removed links are above. I'm also baffled why the same link was listed twice. - Aagtbdfoua 13:03, 7 April 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Support for PanelWhiz

Dear Aagtbdfoua,

As far as I know the two largest packages EVER written for Stata are GLLAMM and PanelWhiz. GLLAMM refers to a class of econometric estimators and PanelWhiz (in its previous version: SOEP Menu) refers to a methodology of retrieving data. There are NO other packages written for Stata in the world that are comparable in scope. Both packages are regularly presented at official Stata User's Meetings in the United Kingdom and Germany. In both instances, Statacorp has changed its source code in its executable to incorporate features introduced in the packages (in PanelWhiz's case: including multi-language support for variable and value labels). Might I suggest contacting the president of Statacorp (William Gould) and asking him his opinion whether PanelWhiz should be linked on the Stata wiki-page? He knows both packages very well. Might he not be a reputable person, having intimate knowledge of the functionality? An important part of Stata is that it is expanable! Users can write programs themselves. PanelWhiz contains something like 30,000 lines of Stata code. There are SEVERAL HUNDRED additional commands for Stata in the package PanelWhiz. It is the reason why PanelWhiz is also linked to Stata: PanelWhiz Link on Stata homepage. Users have been using SOEP Menu (basically PanelWhiz only for the German Panel SOEP) since 2003.

The Data Providers GSOEP and HILDA link PanelWhiz directly on their homepages:

The advantage of PanelWhiz linking to Stata and allowing a PanelWhiz wiki-article, is that you will allow users to find the package easily and help them in their research. Often the users are Masters and PhD students and other researchers. so much research is flawed, due to incorrect data work. PanelWhiz reduces these errors dramatically, as complex data sets contain typically many many files. The German household panel contains more than 200 data files. PanelWhiz handles this internally and CORRECTLY. It was presented recently at the 2007 German Stata users' meeting but already in 2003 at the 2003 UK Stata users' meeting. It has been around several years.

On page A-13 of the official scientific review of the ENTIRE institute RWI-Essen, where i work, the precursor to PanelWhiz, SOEP Menu is explicitly reviewed: "So wird am Institut beispielsweise das von einem Institutsmitarbeiter programmierte SOEPMENU, ein in das Softwarepaket STATA eingebundenes Modul zur Extrahierung von Daten aus dem SOEP, erweitert." [Link]

I hope you will think over your decision. everything in the PanelWhiz wiki-link is factually written in an attempt to help researchers use data sets easily and improve their research. several data set providers, ship their data already prepared for PanelWhiz (Australian HILDA since 2006, German SOEP starting 2007). Please ask some empirical social scientists using Stata, before you remove the PanelWhiz page.

Sincerely, DeNew 14:36, 7 April 2007 (UTC).

Well, I'm here from the RfC - I'm an economics student/TA, and I've never personally used PanelWhiz. However, I have heard of it - so that means it's probably pretty notable, as an econometric tool, since there aren't that many out there. I suggest we should probably clean up PanelWhiz and find some better sources. --Haemo 03:11, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
I heartily agree with Aagtbdfoua that PanelWhiz should have been removed. I've used Stata for almost a decade, and come across many packages in that time, and I've never heard of PanelWhiz. Ww.ellis 16:12, 20 July 2007 (UTC)