tea.mathoverflow.net - Discussion Feed (We must do something about these offtopic questions!)

davidk01 comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (1088)

2009-12-15T17:57:17-08:00

I don't really see how you are going to gauge the level requirement or even come remotely close to saying what the right level is other than barring some questions that are clearly from homework assignments in undergraduate math classes. I once remember reading a definition of derivative that had words like sections, cotagent bundles and flat connections in it. Whoever wrote it was making a point about the value of seeing the same thing from different angles and perspectives but I can see this being used for nefarious purposes by people who want to judge "levels" of questions. So by trying to judge levels and such things you are just going to set a different kind of bar for the same kind of crud phrased in a different kind of language.

Andrew Stacey comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (1044)

2009-12-14T04:22:44-08:00

Back on topic, I'm beginning to think that the FAQ's emphasis on homework is misjudged. It's not whether a question is homework or not that matters, it's whether or not the level is appropriate for the site. I've seen a few questions coming over from stackoverflow that aren't homework - the person is trying to write a program for a living! - but which don't fit here. So I'd make it clearer that it is the level that matters.

I'm not quite sure how to phrase it though.

Andrew Stacey comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (1043)

2009-12-14T04:20:30-08:00

As the one who introduced the term "riff-raff" (check your sources, hanche! I know that you're in the US at the moment but there's no need to go native), perhaps I ought to explain it's use as I (a native speaker of English, perhaps the only one here?) use it. It certainly used to be derogatory, but now it's actual use is much more ironic. The user of "riff-raff" should be perfectly aware that he or she is "putting on airs" that are probably undeserved and phrases like "Let's keep out the riff-raff" should be seen as being so over-the-top that everyone else says "Yes, very funny, but who actually do we want to exclude?".

The perfect example of its use was in an episode of Fawlty Towers where Basil Fawlty puts in an advertisement for his hotel "No riff-raff", hoping to attract a higher class of client. The irony being that the Lord that actually came to stay at the hotel was a con man. (Of course, Basil Fawlty wasn't being ironic, but John Cleese and Connie Booth were in putting those words into the script.)

davidk01 comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (989)

2009-12-11T13:49:53-08:00

Your policy sounds very reasonable to me Scott. I have nothing against it being implemented or being noted in the FAQ somewhere and being encouraged throughout the site.

Scott Morrison comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (987)

2009-12-11T12:37:42-08:00

@davidk01. Sure! While I've written to many people via the addresses they've filled out at mathoverflow, I've never revealed this information (and I've been careful when writing to multiple people to BCC). Presume innocence and assume that I would have checked with both of you first via email. :-)

On a related note: I would strongly encourage you to use your full real name both here and at mathoverflow: (a) you have to use your real name on job applications, might as well get it out there earlier, (b) using real names tends to moderate language and behaviour!

In fact, I'm sort of tempted to propose a new policy: pseudonymous and anonymous users aren't allowed to get into fights on either MO or meta!

davidk01 comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (980)

2009-12-11T09:36:42-08:00

@David Speyer: Of course, I would like to be accessible and if people wish to find out about my email address they certainly can. Like you I don't think it is desirable to remain perfectly anonymous in forums such as MO. My point was more about moderator and administrator conduct. I trust them with a certain amount of "private" information in order to help them fulfill their duties. Scott's comment about emails was an extra bit that was unnecessary since his first paragraph made his point very clear and I had reached the same conclusion myself.

David Speyer comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (971)

2009-12-11T04:43:03-08:00

Ah, davidk01? If you don't want people to e-mail you, you probably shouldn't use your full name in your profile page for the meta forum. A quick google search leads me to your e-mail address.

I would encourage you to make your contact information public. I get a fair amount of spam and crank mail, but I am also regularly contacted by mathematicians whom I have never heard of, who have interesting things to say about my and their work. You are an academic in training, which means you are going to be in the business of offering ideas to the public; I think it is best to be contactable.

I would have e-mailed this all to you, as it is sort of off topic here, but I gather you don't want that :).

davidk01 comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (970)

2009-12-11T02:49:32-08:00

@Scott Morrison: Point taken and for future reference do not offer my email to anyone or suggest to offer it to anyone. I provide it in good faith to the moderators and I expect it to stay private.

Scott Morrison comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (969)

2009-12-10T23:53:24-08:00

@davidk01 and @Harry. This is unacceptable, even here on meta. Stay on topic, and please try to ignore each other on meta in future. Nothing either of you has said to each other of late has been helpful to anyone else using meta, and it's downright boring.

I would be happy to furnish both of you with each other's email addresses, and you can continue this in private.

davidk01 comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (941)

2009-12-10T16:00:48-08:00

Being in your third undergraduate semester is not an excuse for how you act.

davidk01 comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (936)

2009-12-10T15:22:22-08:00

@Harry Gindi: I'll disagree with you on that one. Skimming through your answers it is obvious to me you do not have a deep knowledge of any of the subjects you comment on and your snide and obnoxious remarks are more a sign of immaturity than anything else. Humility is one of the hallmarks of great thinkers and educators and your comments clearly indicate a lack of it.

davidk01 comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (933)

2009-12-10T14:42:45-08:00

@hanche: Exactly. Currently, "of interest to mathematician" means interesting to pure algebraists or analysts but it is leaning on the algebra side a little bit. This is a far cry from what it should actually mean.

Harald Hanche-Olsen comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (932)

2009-12-10T14:10:52-08:00

The point of my parenthetical remark was that “riffraff” (I looked it up, it shouldn't be hyphenated apparently) is perhaps an unnecessarily derogatory term, though it may be okay to use semiprivately here on meta. We do not wish to discourage anybody who is interested in mathematics from learning more about it – quite the contrary. But the site is made for mathematicians, and if it is to be usable to mathematicians there is a need to discourage (there is that word again) the asking of questions that aren't of interest to mathematicians, preferably in a nice and non-offputting way. Otherwise, the people we want to attract will have a hard time finding interesting questions, and they'll lose interest ang go away. Heck, I am already having a hard time myself, finding the occasional nugget in between all the algebraic geometry. 8-)

davidk01 comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (931)

2009-12-10T11:48:04-08:00

@Harry Gindi: I don't think you should take it upon yourself to encourage or discourage people. The whole point of this site is to expand one's perspective on certain topics by seeking answers from people who hopefully know a little bit more than you, so your encouragement or lack thereof does not add any content to the site.

@hanche: It's a little hard to really decide what passes for riff-raff. Some questions might be inarticulate or ill-posed but that doesn't mean it won't be corrected if some feedback is provided. I have also found that often many opponents of "riff-raff" tend to generate it themselves with negative and snide remarks.

Harald Hanche-Olsen comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (923)

2009-12-10T07:14:39-08:00

@davidk01: No, someone is likely to answer it, and if we let that slide, the “riff-raff” (as Andrew calls them) will take over. (I actually don't think there is anything wrong about the so-called riff-raff, but this site wasn't built for them, and we can't let them take over.)

Andrew Stacey comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (917)

2009-12-10T00:51:22-08:00

What stats? I haven't seen any proper statistics on the number of homework questions. It's not even "marginally positive".

I've yet to see even a good definition of the problem, let alone a decent reason why making it difficult for people to join our wonderful club would be a good idea. I keep asking for people to take a look at my questions and say which they object to - I've no objection to being a guinea pig on this - to make the discussion more objective but as yet there've been no takers.

As for the general principle of excluding riff-raff, I think MO's doing a good job of that already. If you search for mathoverflow on stackoverflow you encounter this comment:

unfortunately, mathoverflow is too snobbish to entertain this kind of question;

Happy?

davidk01 comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (907)

2009-12-09T19:46:51-08:00

Isn't the better solution to let the question sit and not answer it. After all, people are perfectly capable of deciding whether a question is worth their time or not.

Benjamin Weiss comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (812)

2009-12-07T16:20:35-08:00

I think that Peter McNamara's suggestion sounds best to me. The requirement that somebody get 10 reputation before asking a question can be a slight nuisance to a mathematician (especially one who is new to the site). But a time delay of a day or two (or even a week) before posting a question would not deter the mathematician almost at all, but would deter (almost) all homework people.

Perhaps a combination of the two? Either a 1 day/1 week delay or 10 reputation before posting?

It is good to see the stats that the trend is only slowly growing. I'd like to hope that it won't get much worse.

Scott Morrison comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (808)

2009-12-07T11:14:47-08:00

@Harrison Brown, thanks for the statistics. At some point we'll be able to produce a database dump, after which we'll produce all sorts of statistics!

Given that the trend on "bad questions" is only marginally positive, and I think everyone will agree the trend on "good questions" is clear, I'm happy to claim that my point is validated -- the bad questions aren't a problem at this point! :-)

Harrison Brown comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (804)

2009-12-07T02:28:08-08:00

@Andrew: I don't think I'm failing Stats 101, I'm just passing Lying with Statistics 101 with flying colors! :P Of course you're right that I should be counting the proportion, and of course I thought of this when compiling the numbers, but there's not an obvious stats page, and I really didn't want to have to go through and look at when *every* question was asked! So at least for now I'm opting to dump the raw data and let people draw their own conclusions. (For what it's worth, I suspect that the proportion of bad questions is probably roughly constant and may even be going to 0, but I haven't crunched the numbers.)

I think that questions with net negative downvotes is the right thing to count, though, or at least a good first approximation. If a question gets 2 downvotes and 4 upvotes, then it's unlikely to be an obvious homework problem, but if a question gets 4 downvotes and 2 upvotes it's certainly not a great question. And keep in mind that in the first week or two after MO "opened to the public," as it were, an elementary question might only get one or two downvotes before being closed, and nowadays a contentious "soft" question could easily get more than that.

Yeah, okay, you got me there; I didn't think about when MO was top secret and unlinkable by man or beast. Knock off the first two data points, and eyeballing it the trendline is much less clear, but I'll probably do a better analysis in the next couple days anyway. (Or someone else will, and then I won't. Unless I feel like it.)

Andrew Stacey comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (800)

2009-12-07T01:03:00-08:00

@Harrison: You've just failed Stats 101. You shouldn't be counting the total number of such questions, but the proportion. Plus you should discard at least the period where Anton expressly forbade anyone to link to MathOverflow. Also, these are net number of downvotes, not gross. For example, my question on walking in the rain shows a positive count of 6 votes and 2 favourites; however I can see from my records that it also garnered 8 negative votes (whence it actually got 14 positive votes putting it 4th on my list!).

@Scott: I had an idea about the moderator-as-dictator problem. It may not be possible, but perhaps the moderators should each have two accounts: a "normal" one and a "moderator" one. They do most of their stuff with their normal account, including accruing reputation, and only use the moderator one for moderation stuff. Then, for example, Ben and Anton would be able to merely "vote to close" as they wish and it would also be clear that when you vote to close a question then you are acting slightly outside the community (I don't wish to imply anything wrong with you doing that, I think it's very important that you do so). Although there aren't many moderators, they do set the tone. But there is a problem with that: if they go around closing lots of questions then the rest of us think "It's the moderators' job to close questions" but if they go around not doing so then we think "They're not doing it, maybe I shouldn't be closing questions either.". If you can split your accounts, you can give us an example without being dictatorial.

@Alberto: Possibly part of the problem is that there aren't many people with at least 3000 rep. So you should go out and find people near that boundary and vote for their answers! Slightly more seriously, most of them are in the US (I think only myself and Ilya aren't) which means that there are significant periods when there's effectively no moderation. However, these things will change as people use the site more.

Whatever the merits of your solution, it won't happen. The makers of the SO system have no incentive to put that limitation on their software because over on the Mother Site, every question is a homework question! By that I mean that on stackoverflow, the point of asking a question is to get an answer not to understand the answer.

For me, that's the crucial difference between a "homework" question and a "non-homework" question. I would not vote down a question that said "I've been trying to solve this elementary problem. I've tried this, that, and the other but can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. Can anyone give me a hint as to the right way to approach this problem?". I would vote down a question that said "I want to solve this difficult problem but I'm too lazy, can someone else do it for me.".

As explicit examples, take this question. That, I think, is a fantastic question. It gives the context, it locates the exact piece that is confusing the questioner, and it asks for enlightenment rather than a dull answer. However, it is a homework question. Well, not quite literally - I happen to know that this person is reading this book independently - but the level is of an undergraduate differential topology course.

Now take this question (bizarrely, he's accepted his own answer to this question where he admits he was looking for a better one). To me, that reads as "I can't be bothered to do this tedious calculation, can someone do it for me?". The question is far too localised in that it is highly unlikely that anyone has done that specific type of problem before so anyone who can say something sensible is going to have to essentially solve the problem themselves. There's no indication of what he's tried (since he admits in his sketched answer that the method he knows is "tedious and unenlightening"), no context, and no indication as to what an appropriate level of answer would be. For me, this question is "homework", even though it's unlikely that an undergraduate would have a clue what was going on.

(I hope Theo doesn't mind me picking on him!)

As a final example, take this question. I hope Scott won't mind me pointing out his comment following his answer!

My point is that the classification as "homework" is fairly arbitrary and it is best to let the community decide and take appropriate action. I see no need for any new technical stuff, what is needed is more involvement from those with enough rep (myself as guilty as the next) but we need more guidance from the mods.

Harrison Brown comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (799)

2009-12-07T00:00:31-08:00

If anyone would like to compile some statistics that would be great.

Behold! The power of procrastination!

Actually, I didn't do that much, just tallied up, by hand, the number of questions with total negative score that got asked each week (Mon-Sun) since the beginning of October. I did it by week to smooth out the noise so I wouldn't have to dig out my econometrics or statistics book, but it's probably a little too coarse and there are only 10 data points. Nevertheless, they're pretty revealing. Here's the raw data:

Oct 4: 1
Oct 5-11: 7
Oct 12-18: 12
Oct 19-25: 21
Oct 26-Nov 1: 14
Nov 2-8: 20
Nov 9-15: 22
Nov 16-22: 13
Nov 23-29: 8
Nov 30-Dec 6: 24

Plugging it into my trusty OpenOffice spreadsheet program, yeah, there's a general upward trend of about two extra "bad" questions per week. Throwing out the week containing Thanksgiving (presumably American students wouldn't be going online for homework help that week, and it does stand out as an obvious outlier), we get an R^2 of 0.6 for the basic linear regression. (Including Thanksgiving week it's much lower, about 0.3.)

So yes, there's something of an upward trend and it's reasonably statistically significant, but unless it gets much much worse it's probably entirely controllable. I really should be studying for my economics final right now, though, or possibly sleeping (or, um, finishing my algebraic geometry final paper), so I'm not going to do any deeper analysis, but if there's still interest later in the week I could take a closer look at it.

Scott Morrison comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (790)

2009-12-06T15:47:55-08:00

More generally, I don't think we're experiencing any real downward trend in terms of the appearance of homework questions -- rather that we've just had a bad weekend. If anyone would like to compile some statistics that would be great.

Scott Morrison comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (789)

2009-12-06T15:47:16-08:00

@fpqc above: we're definitely not going to ask google to go away, via robots.txt.

Scott Morrison comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (788)

2009-12-06T15:47:12-08:00

I'm always extremely excited to see that someone has voted to close a question -- it means that if I'm considering it I just go right ahead. Often I wish my "vote to close" didn't have instantaneous effect, so I could be more sure I'm following consensus.

Ilya Nikokoshev comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (782)

2009-12-06T09:58:56-08:00

@Andrew, I think you have these powers for a reason, so you should use them. I'm not a moderator, but so far I've voted to close several questions which were later closed by Anton or Scott: a typical example.

I'd think moderators will appreciate help with closing obvious homework questions + important community input where the question is borderline. I don't remember the exact place, but somewhere Anton says that sometimes he's not sure if the question should be closed, but unfortunately he can't just vote to close, since moderator votes close immediately. He'd then appreciate if somebody else votes to close first.

Most importantly, this site is intentionally designed to be run by community and if people who are not moderators won't use their powers, there will be no way to know what is the community point of view.

Alberto GarciaRaboso comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (781)

2009-12-06T09:51:52-08:00

@Andrew: it's true that a solution already exists, but it is not unique (ha ha). The problem with the current state of affairs is that it requires the explicit attention of moderators (and/or very reputable users) and there's a risk of needing them to continuously police the site. I believe my proposal would drastically cut down on the need for this burdensome task.

Moreover, as you express in your second paragraph, there's the issue of differences of opinion on what constitutes or not a homework problem. This is something that I have seen happen in the last few days with a couple of questions: sometimes a change in wording can make a uninteresting/inappropiate question into an acceptable one. By deterring random visitors from asking questions we would probably be left with more questions that are poor because of how they are expressed rather than because they are trivial.

Ilya Nikokoshev comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (780)

2009-12-06T09:43:37-08:00

It's possible to delete questions, though right now only moderators can do it.

Andrew Stacey comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (777)

2009-12-06T09:31:51-08:00

The software already has a solution to this: people with at least 3000 rep can vote to close questions. Perhaps we (as I'm one of them) should be more stringent in using this ability. And maybe the moderators should think about deleting posts that have been closed if the question is of "homework" type.

This solution is fairly robust because it will be the more able mathematicians who get enough rep to vote to close. The list is growing, and there's a substantial number of people who are fairly near to the 3000 borderline. At the moment, though, I'm a little hesitant on using these Advanced Powers - but if I knew that I was acting in accord with the wishes of the moderators, I'd be a bit more forthcoming in voting to close homework questions.

Alberto GarciaRaboso comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (775)

2009-12-06T09:21:05-08:00

@Akhil: you're right, answering a question is not enough, but each up vote on it will grant you ten points. Getting your answer accepted is worth 15 extra reputation points. Hence, just *one* up vote in *one* answer would be enough to pass what fpqc calls "the trial".

Akhil Mathew comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (773)

2009-12-06T08:29:54-08:00

@Alberto: If I'm not mistaken, you don't get points for answering a question; you only get them if your answer is accepted.

Alberto GarciaRaboso comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (771)

2009-12-06T07:19:12-08:00

@fpqc: That's the whole point: for a mathematician to answer a question and get *one* up vote is not such a big deal, while random visitors to the site are shut out from spamming MO.

Alberto GarciaRaboso comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (769)

2009-12-06T07:06:16-08:00

My thought is pretty much the same as Harrison's: as MO grows and it is more visible on search engines, we might get more homework-type questions. However, I don't think MO is old enough to determine whether the current trend will stop after finals: it might or it might not. fpqc has been systematically downvoting (which is OK) and bashing (which I think is unnecessary and might make people think badly of mathematicians) these questions and the answers given to them. Eventually a moderator closes the question and all is well. However, I'm not sure if this model will remain effective in the future.

It is clear that the users asking for their homework problems to be solved are new to MO, meaning their reputation is usually just 1. Here's my suggestion: disallow users to ask questions until they get a reputation of, say, 10 points. This should be enough to preempt a flood of unwanted posts, while representing a very minor nuisance for mathematicians signing up for the first time.

Peter McNamara comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (765)

2009-12-06T06:56:24-08:00

Regarding homework questions, My suspicion is that most of them come from very newly registered users. For example http://mathoverflow.net/users/2343/peppermint

The moderators would have to say how technically plausible this would be to implement, but what if you forced a new user to wait a specified amount of time (say 24 hours) before they were allowed to post a question? This should discourage random internetters from stumbling onto this site and immediately posting, but for a real mathematician, the timeliness of an answer to their first question is unlikely to be of too much importance.

PS, whoever upvoted peppermint's question should be kicked off mathoverflow

David Speyer comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (763)

2009-12-06T06:45:22-08:00

I think that it is a bad idea to keep search engines from spidering MO. One of the things which works well about the original stack overflow site is that people can often find answers to their questions by just googling for previous similar questions, and I thin the same could be true of us. For example, right now we are the second google hit for

"Godel's theorem" "excluded middle"

Hopefully, anyone who is having the same confusion as vonjd will now find a good explanation. Of course, I cheated: I already knew that MO contained a good answer to this question. But I hope that, as MO grows, it will contain more and more answers to common questions.

Harrison Brown comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (748)

2009-12-06T03:19:24-08:00

It is right about the end of term at a lot of schools, so I'm betting the influx of homework or study-guide questions will die down within a week or so. Of course, as MO grows and gets better PageRank numbers and whatnot, we'll likely have to deal with more and more silly questions, but I think the current spike is transient and not unexpected.

Harry Gindi comments on "We must do something about these offtopic questions!" (745)

2009-12-06T02:05:15-08:00

If you browse "newest questions", you'll quickly notice that 8 of the past 20 questions were voted down for being homework/offtopic/nonsense. I'm not sure if I'm overreacting, but it seems like the frequency of such questions has been increasing slowly and steadily.