<p>The following question was recently asked on the main site, and quickly showed up on Hot Network Questions and gained many views.</p>
<p><a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/128616/2921">What&#39;s a real-world example of &quot;overfitting&quot;?</a></p>
<p>Let's work together to improve the question to make it shine, and make it as great an example of this site as we can.  This looks like something that could be a great question -- one that could serve as a wonderful resource, and might be of interest to many folks learning the subject, or teaching it.</p>
<p>What can we do to improve the question and the answers?  Please post suggestions.</p>
<p>My suggestions:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Let's curate the answers.  Look through the answers, and try to pick out the best ones.  Vote up the good ones.  For the bad ones, vote them down, and where appropriate, flag them for deletion.</p>
<p>As it currently stands, only a small fraction of the answers actually try to answer the question that was asked (which asks for a <em>real-world</em> example of over-fitting).  Many of the answers give artificial examples or try to give an intuitive explanation for what over-fitting is, which is nice but does not answer the question.  I suggest that we flag those answers for deletion, either by flagging them as &quot;Not an answer&quot; or flagging them for moderator attention with a custom comment.  Also, we can downvote those answers and vote to delete them once their total vote-count goes negative.</p>
</li>
<li><p>Vote up the good answers, and edit them to improve them.  A few of the answers try to give real-world answers.  Let's vote them up, and then edit them to elaborate further so that the answer serves as a great example.</p>
</li>
<li><p>I've edited the question to try to make it a bit more specific.  If you can see ways to improve the question further, I encourage you to edit it to refine it further.</p>
</li>
<li><p>What else?  Other suggestions?</p>
</li>
</ol>
