@Glen_b Very understandable. Maybe you could point me to some sources regarding stat theory?

@Andy It looks like it was possibly automatic; I don't know what circumstances would lead to that happening.

@Howcan rather a big topic. Volume 1 of Kendall and Stuart(/Stuart and Ord) is perhaps a place to get some stat theory. Or Casella and Berger. Or Cox and Hinkley

@Andy, "disputed" doesn't mean declined or unhelpful. If you flag something for closure (prior to the rep level for closing) or as not-an-answer, it goes into the review queue. If people there vote to leave open, the flag was "disputed" in the sense that some people think A & some people think B (at least, I'm pretty sure this is how it works). It doesn't mean you did anything wrong.

In this specific case, I think it may be because I voted to leave open on that answer in the Low Quality review queue. My reading of it was that the author of the answer was also the OP, & the author understood it to be / meant it to be posted as the answer to their question. As such, I deferred to the OP's wishes (I could be wrong on any of that, though).

I can imagine a more fully explained version of that answer (& the fact that that is the answer implies that the Q was really about Stata code & is off-topic), nonetheless it did strike me as an answer. Moreover, it seemed like the only answer that Q could ever get. Thus, I thought it best to leave it open.

Thanks @gung, I didn't know it worked like that. Good to know :-)

@Silverfish: I am not sure it can be "cleaned up" easily. It would make sense to convert David's answer (together with all following 10+ comments) into a comment under his "main" answer, but this would ruin it, because it is too long for a comment. And I don't think that moderators can convert an answer to a comment splitting it into several comments (this would arguably be the best thing to do in this case). At least I've never seen it done.