Talk:Sampling error

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Untitled

What's the difference between sampling and standard errors? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 20:14, 22 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The standard error is an estimate of the size of the (unknown) sampling error. -- Avenue (talk) 14:23, 7 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Genetic drift

The discussion of "genetic drift" is completely out of place. Evolutionary processes are not attempts to estimate some factor in a population. Natural disasters that radically diminish a biological population is not a selection process that can be said to be "in error". This is not an appropriate topic for this information. Alan.A.Mick (talk) 01:49, 11 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I agreed with this but I looked it up and apparently geneticists really do call this kind of evolutionary event a "sampling error", weirdly enough. So I've kept it but separated it completely into a second definition. Euan Richard (talk) 12:56, 24 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Article needs work

Just flagging, in case someone else can attend to any of these before I do.

The article needs a head (e.g. first sentence of section 1.1).

References/citations need some cleaning up.

It needs a better/simpler example, something more familiar to most readers, e.g. a survey.

Perhaps add a picture or two to illustrate how a sample can differ from a population.

The section on non-sampling errors is just copied from that article - remove it and place a link in "see also"?

Tayste (edits) 21:32, 11 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I put some work into the article as a whole. I think it's more consistent and a heck of a lot less repetitive now. It could still do with some specific examples of the calculation of sampling errors, for specific distributions / parameters / etc. Euan Richard (talk) 12:56, 24 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The introduction is awkward, it is not clear if we are talking about general type of error that comes from sampling or the concept of "sampling error" a statistical concept. I think it more useful to speak of the concept of sampling error from a statistical concept as most visitors will probably looking for that definition. Statfix55 (talk) 19:40, 3 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]