But I'd like to respond to the sentiment "It seems many people here think -- the main mission is to help publications and all other quests should be closed (strength might be different) but the idea is like this." From what I can see, it's really more complicated than that. For example, one of the most upvoted questions recently is a career advice question (the one with "loneliness" or "lonely" in the title). While the MO appropriateness of this has been queried (being not a mathematical question, hence outside of anyone's expertise around here), no votes to close have been cast, and indeed this (and many other questions of this type) are largely tolerated.

Very different in character is the recent smiley-face question posed by Joseph O'Rourke. Virtually without exception, the questions he poses are well-liked and appreciated (count me a fan as well!). Now, I don't know what his research is precisely, but I would guess that many of his questions are driven by sheer curiosity and not necessarily by publication needs -- those I guess could be a happy by-product. I've never heard a breath of complaint about such questions, even from those who maintain the strictest standards of MO-appropriateness.

You might ask yourself: what do these questions have in common?

It's not that either question was put with publication needs in mind -- and that's not the benchmark, even for the very strict among us. It's more the thoughtfulness and seriousness of intent ('serious' here doesn't mean lacking in humor or morose or anything limited like that). The point is that both Flora and Joseph evidently put a lot of thought into their questions; their questions are expressed with clarity and honesty. In other words, these are questions by people who really want to know; they have thought matters through, considered their questions well, and put care into their formulations. To a very large degree, that's what we want! And that's what almost everyone accepts.

I'll join the chorus and say that I too find MO less interesting these days, and would welcome more questions coming from a background of non-expertise. Gerry Myerson once said words to the effect, "outside of our own areas of expertise, we are all graduate students". It's too bad so many people feel that they have to have hat in hand (asking here beforehand about appropriateness, or assuming by default that they should go to MSE first, etc.) before bringing to MO a question asked at the level of a competent graduate student -- realizing here that "competent graduate student" is a somewhat fuzzy concept. As long as such a one has "done one's homework", makes a good faith effort to think about the question a bit before posting (googling, Wikipedia, etc.), and asks a question with care and seriousness in the sense above, that is, really wanting to know, it ought to be be welcomed here.

ad 1. yes, but that it is hardly written anywhere and as such interesting, was checked beforehand by OP (because he cared). It can happen that people do not check and do not care and get lucky sometimes with their question, like the proverbial blind chicken; still I prefer a site where the default is that people are careful and competent when they ask to increase the ration of 'good' over 'bad' questions.

ad 2. I think one of the more "exciting" times on MO was "Department Closure time"; I almost left just because of this question and some of the reactions to it. ABC was also "exciting"; I did never consider to leave because of this, but took a bit of an almost complete MO-vacation after it (also though not only) to recover from that excitement (you can check my rep history to see the latter). Also some other of the excitement around here to me is as appealing as excitement over the releases of certain new cell-phones or what not .

ad 3. Well, there is something to your point of view, and this helps a bit to overcome occassional frustration. But then, the site is designed to answer some specific person's question; only the questioner can accept an answer and as soon as it is accepted it is the first answer in any view (oldest, newest, votes, regardless you always get that answer first as 'the answer' to the question; so I prefer the person at that button having some interest and competence on the thing being asked).

Regarding the main mission: in my opinion this is summarized very well in the first sentence of the FAQs.

MathOverflow's primary goal is for users to ask and answer research level math questions, the sorts of questions you come across when you're writing or reading articles or graduate level books.

It does not only say 'writing articles' (ie, direct relevance to active research) but also reading ariticles and graduate level books; so of course somehow general interest mathematical questions are also welcome, and even a very important part of the content. (Yet there is no mention of question one comes across when writing ones CV for instance! Sometimes, they can still be alright, but definitely they are already outside the primary goal.)

But at least to me, as for Todd Trimble it seems, it is important that the OP really and in a reasonable sense cares about the question. What I find frustrating is to answer a question to then find out somehow the person asking it did not really care in the first place (be it on MO or some student I teach or another context) or subjectively cares but it is completely unreasonable. If this should happen on MO too often, then I will stop dedicating some of my time to answer questions here.

Let me give you an example of a recent MO question that I found a good MO question, while it seems not for writing an article (it in principle could be, but it seems not in the present case):

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/110345/does-a-power-series-converging-everywhere-on-its-circle-of-convergence-define-a-c

There is a clear mathematical question OP found interesting enough to dedicate some time to look (before asking) for an answer. This was unsuccessfull so one asks on MO. IMO this is a very good way to use MO.

You'll notice that I said "best successes", and that this was my opinion. My opinion is that these are exemplars of good cases where the people involved really care about both the question and answers. I did not say MO should accommodate only research-oriented questions for purposes of publication.

I repeat, however, that I see problems with the abc question, and I am uncomfortable with one or two of the answers. I won't repeat my reasons.

The 'ten-votes rule' should (if at all) apply to a) only, with a reasonably but not overly long period of validity.

I was curious about the statistics, so I just look quickly at all the discussions in the "Is this question acceptable" category with at least ten comments in them. Of course, some of the questions under discussion have since been deleted (so I can't see them), I may have missed some due to sloppiness, and some controversial questions may not have led to discussions in this category or may have had fewer comments. I also looked at the top 20 closed questions by number of votes. Based on this, I'd guess that the ABC question is the only non-soft, non-big-list question that has ever been closed three times, and it ended up being re-opened a third time.

So I don't think the proposed guideline would ever have changed anything. On the other hand, that also makes it seem harmless. Certainly it's no more arbitrary than the current system (where 15 supporters can re-open for a third time, while 14 accomplish nothing).

Let us have an informal guiding principle that when we have a question which is not offensive, not a big list, and not very soft, then once it is clearly supported by ten (say) 3K+ participants we let it stay open.

What are some more examples of such questions, beyond the ABC question? I've lost track of the overall context, and I'm having trouble thinking of controversial questions satisfying these constaints. I'm probably overlooking a bunch of examples (I haven't really tried looking), and it would be useful to see what the consequences of such a principle would be.

I'm not too clear on that myself. The best successes on MO, in my opinion, are where someone has a question that they really want to know the answer to because they need it to advance their research, and someone comes in and provides just the insight or solution they need, with a consequent happy ending that winds up in a publication. When MO succeeds in providing an environment for that, it's very deeply gratifying for all concerned, and we can all justly celebrate the very existence of MO.

Here it's something rather different. It looks more like a case where someone has asked something rather casually, and several answers appear which, yes, are very good, but probably much deeper and more intense than the casual questioner bargained for. The number of participants who are really able to understand and make substantial use of the answers is probably pretty small, certainly much smaller than the upvoting would reflect, and very likely the original questioner is excluded from that number.

The answers by Minhyong and Marty particularly are, to a casual reader, beautifully and eloquently written -- a showcase for eloquently written MO answers as it were -- but how they really benefit the masses is not terrifically clear. You could think of them as akin to colloquium talks that are absolutely wonderful for experts but quickly get into things way over the heads of the general audience. You could try to say feel-good words here, e.g., they provide education for a general audience. Well, perhaps. Perhaps to the same extent that colloquia given by experts on deep and beautiful but difficult mathematics are lastingly educational for a general audience[1]. Or, to put it more cynically, they might provide good sources of material to bone up on before a cocktail party, so that you can look smart if the subject of the Mochizuki's work comes up.

Anyway, it's not so unreasonable to me to inquire more deeply why people are upholding this as among the great success stories of MO. (Notice I didn't even touch upon Vesselin Dimitrov's answers, which are different in character and perhaps even more intense, and which have raised real concerns among some MO participants as discussed before.)

[1] There is the obvious counter that unlike most colloquium talks, these answers are written down. Fair enough. It's still debatable the extent to which casual readers are still going to wrap their heads around these answers, and retain them firmly in memory.

1. I forgot to comment on "interesting-but-ultimately-useless." But, for me it was mainly just quoting Andrew Stacey with a different (from 'garbage') formulation he used, to get past the IMO tangential 'garbage' issue. Yet, what the formulation means to me is that there are not few cases where while something on MO might be interesting/amusing/fun to quite a few (sometimes including me), this something does not seem to have any actual relevance or use for anybody. Were I mean this to be understood in the context of thinking 'MO should be a tool for a research-mathematician' (if not 'use' starts to be highly illdefined.)

2. Mainly, I am in fact rather with Todd Trimble. I did not mean to express 'the edited version of the question is a good MO question' (the edit was good given the context/constraints). What I however would admit is that hypothetically if somebody would have shown me the initial answers in advance, then I would have likely in the end agreed to somehow 'host' them on MO (bending the rules a bit on this occassion). Regarding the 'laziness' and related: Yes! This was infact essentially my very first criticism of the original question. Also, I am too not clear in which sense there was such an impressive success for MO.

Let me say first that Andy Putman's revision (as quoted above) is about as good a revision that one could make while keeping the essential sense of the original question (in particular, he got rid of the really bad parts), and it was very kind of him to perform that service. But -- to my mind, it remains just a pretty way of asking, "tell me about the work of X". In other words, it's still the kind of question that could be posed by just about anyone without any forethought or prior investigation or even any serious interest. How is it an "impressive" question, or even "admittedly good"?

It strikes me as a case where the ends are used to justify the means. In other words, the question itself could be penetrating or it could be lazy -- apparently it doesn't matter too much, if it provides an opportunity for experts to write answers that satisfy people's cravings to read about hot new developments. I feel as though I must sound very cynical here! But I think if you were to ask the same type of question about a deep and technical paper but with a lot less buzz surrounding it, people would be far less impressed (and indeed, I seem to remember that questions whose essential spirit is "tell me about X" usually get criticized for being on the lazy side and are soon closed -- and I think there's a point to that).

a) was terrible, b) was admittedly good (could also be we just got lucky this time; also I stopped complaining then) c) some issues surface, d) we'll see.

Regarding c) I consider it as potentially quite problematic if when some well-known mathematician releases some clarification to his proof, then basically instantly on MO somebody flippantly comments that this seems to be essentially nonsense. (Okay, these "comments" seem to have been unclear, but in my opinion you either need to ask for clarfification privately and wait for the reply or at least give the benefit of the doubt, but not choose an interpretation that makes this look nonsensical.)

I do not know if this is so unreasonable. Okay, one could say the public interest in these news is so big that side-effects like possibly insulting the author need to be tolerated, but then perhaps one does not have to share this opinion.

Regarding the other matter: if you exclude lists, and very soft-questions, and things that are llikely to be offensive from your rule, then I would say that I in principle would accept the underlying idea. (For reasons explained I would see issues with "writing it down somewhere", as then some might start trying to game the system.) But, we could agree on it as some informal guiding principle. (Which in someways for example I try to follow anyway already.)

Let us perhaps look at Music: mathematical point of view somewhat recent with ten reopen votes one from you.

I was not even totally against this question, but the way it started and developped is really not something to be encouraged, IMO.

And in addition it raises a curious technical issue if ever your rule should be implement: it might turn out to be a good strategy to start with a really bad version, and to incrementally improve to accumalate reopen votes on the way, to then be 'save forever'.

More generally, it will be a good strategy to create lots and lots of noise around questions to over time 'find' ten votes (it is after all only about 3% of the voting population) of not so frequent visitors and/or voters.

In any case this rule (with an absolute number!) seems the more unreasonable the more I think about it.

MathOverflow is not a discussion forum. As a side-effect of being very good for to-the-point questions and answers, the Stack Exchange software is bad for disscusions and designed to minimize them. There's a place for discussion about mathematics, but it isn't MathOverflow. Blogs and threaded discussion forums are a more appropriate place for discussions.

Regarding the test case of the popular post on abc and Mochizuki, it seems clear that however good the answers are considered to be, there's not an actual dialogue or multi-person conversation taking place. Yes, the answerers refer (usually briefly) to one another's answers, but they are not asking questions of each other. What we have is several monologues written at an expert-level about partial understandings of what is going on in a paper nobody can speak about with definitiveness, amid a chorus of general celebration about how good the answers are. It's nothing like the back-and-forth high-flying discussion that you would expect in a working seminar, and that the paper really needs in order to be properly evaluated. And that's to be expected -- the software is not geared toward having such a discussion.

Frank. Great. That's what I was aiming for. I don't explain my views in order to convince anyone that they are right. I explain them with the aim of showing that they are reasonable and that therefore my actions, being based on my views, are also reasonable and so should not be dismissed out of hand.

For those who want to be able to find everything in one place, am I right in assuming that it's possible to follow MO and the various fora Andrew mentioned via RSS? (I'm not interested in doing so personally, so out of laziness/busy-ness I'm not taking the time to find out the answer to that question myself.)

I seem to arrive at the opposite conclusion to Yemon. I barely have time for MO and definitely none for anything else. I'm assuming that this is also true for many other senior mathematicians. So I want MO to accommodate as flexibly as possible a broad range of substantial mathematical discussions and not limit itself to its original purpose of answering mainly precise specific questions that have a known unique answer.

I find MO less and less useful. Part of it is that my real questions don't get answers (though now that Peter Michor has joined I'm hopeful once again). However, I feel that in principle it is still a useful resource and so I keep an eye on it and answer questions when I'm able to do so in a timely manner. What makes it possible for me to do this is that I can quickly scan through the list of New questions each morning to see if there are any that catch my eye. Because the level is meant to be high, if a question looks interesting from the title and first line then I can assume with a reasonable probability that it will be interesting and so worth my time clicking through.

If it fills up with garbage, the likelihood of me being able to maintain this "light touch" will converge to zero. It will take more of my time to filter out the garbage than the few shiny stones that are there are worth. I've almost given up reading maths blogs because I don't have time to filter out what is interesting-but-ultimately-useless from the gold. Instead, I concentrate my attention on those places where I know that I have a high chance of fruitful mathematical interaction.

I can understand the "let's have everything in one place" attitude. I once shared it. But I don't any longer and the reason I don't is that I found it impossible to fit the kind of discussion that I wanted to have into the machinery. Rather than fight it, I figured I'd let MO be what it was best at and find other venues for other discussions: for maths, I've set up the nForum; for publishing, I've set up the publishing forum; for climate change, I've set up Azimuth's forum. (Anyone notice a pattern there? If anyone's interested in teaching get in touch.) Now I regard the "let's have everything in one place" attitude as really laziness. It says, "I can't be bothered to find out where the best stuff is so I want it all in one place, no matter what comes with it.". Shall we integrate MathSciNet with MO? The arXiv? The BBC? Where does it stop?

No, I want MO to remain focussed on what it does best because there is something that it does best and that nothing else does. If MO gets too broad, it will stop doing that one thing well and then we'll have nowhere for asking focussed, answerable questions.

In addition the argument that it takes more time to visit two sites seems in the end quite weak, although I can see why subjectively one sees it so, since going to the site is really not what takes the time in the virtual world (and using feeds or alike this could even be further optimized).

Yet, as I somehow expected, it seems a main obstacle to all ideas of creating something new (and in this way also avoiding friction on MO) could be outright refusal by some (since I am somehow replying to Deane Yang, I would like to explict exclude him from the some in view of his balanced position on the matter) to move this content there.

One can already notice this with academia.SE, essentially always there is some reason constructed why tranfering to there is supposedly a non-option.

Seriously, why are we all so risk averse? Is it because MO is such a success that we are now afraid to fail?

Well, I can't speak for anyone else, but I barely have time (in semi-work mode, that is) for MO, let alone anything else. (This is one reason I get somewhat exercised about what should or should not be on MO.) To quote the words of the Sage of Intake:

Well I used to do the I Ching

But then I had to feed the meter

Now I can't see into the future

But at least I can use the heater

First, would I be intolerant if I would be annoyed by a question or find it very problematic because I think somebody else could find it (or reactions it created) offensive, while not finding it offensive myself?

Second, not to be intolerant, do I in your opinion really have to wait until the potentially offensive content appears or is it alright to shut-down something before somebody actually gets offended?

Third, I could well imagine that Mochizucki meanwhile already got offended by some contribution (if he should follow this). [To be clear what I mean: the way his "comments" where initially discussed is in my opinion potentially a lot more offensive than many other things where some people here say it is/could be offensive.]

So, am I now intolerant if I do not want this question?

What I'd propose is a forum intended for only limited use. For example, it might be aimed only at looking into correctness for papers of exceptionally broad interest and importance (like Mochizuki's work). The ground rules might be that a discussion on a paper can be started only if the forum managers (and perhaps also the paper's authors) approve and if several well-known experts volunteer to moderate this specific discussion. That would be pretty narrow, but it would be very easy to run and it would avoid most or all of the potential problems.

You know, come to think of it, I will volunteer.

Great! Any more takers?

Just need a name, a basic colour scheme, and a logo.

(Actually, we have an area on the nForum called "Preprints & Publications" which is precisely for discussion of preprints and publications. So we could do this without even setting up a new forum. But new fora are cheap anyway and maybe the nForum is too tightly bound to the nLab for this purpose.)

The number of people who have offered to set up such a forum is considerably larger than the number who have offered to moderate it (in proportion, that is).

(Seriously, I really do have no idea who Jim Lehrer is so don't know what sort of volunteering is being volunteered here.)

BTW, I think the reason that not many volunteers rose to the call is that most people would be hesitant to commit to work whose details are rather sketchy. It is one thing when the volunteers are "free to fail". It is a totally different thing if the volunteers are expected to be able to adhere to certain as-of-yet unstated expectations.

You know, come to think of it, I will volunteer. Because if we just sit here and talk about it all day, nothing will ever happen. But on the one condition: Just like the original MathOverflow, such a forum should be set-up as an "experiment". We should have no expectations that it will succeed. And the first, say, 6 months (or a year, just some finite-and-not-too-large number of days), should be understood as a trial period; if it works, great. If it doesn't, the people running it should be free to shut down the forum (after dumping all the discussions to, say, nLab) at the end of the period by saying "sorry things didn't work out..." Seriously, why are we all so risk averse? Is it because MO is such a success that we are now afraid to fail? Is there actually something that we'd lose if we try to set up one of these sites and things don't work as great as we imagined, and we end up shuttering the place?

He moderated many presidential candidate debates.

(Seriously, I really do have no idea who Jim Lehrer is so don't know what sort of volunteering is being volunteered here.)

The number of people who have offered to set up such a forum is considerably larger than the number who have offered to moderate it (in proportion, that is).

If all is needed is a Jim Lehrer style of moderating, I am sure many (including myself) would not mind volunteering our services. But I suspect that many expect the moderators to have some degree of authority in the subjects being discussed. This drastically limits the pool of available candidates.

1. Just to underline what grp said on edits. The issue with repeated edits is that the default is that everybody (visiting the site in a certain not very short time-frame after it) gets notified of the edit (via the question being bumped). These notifications via bumps can be (and are for me, sometimes at least) a considerable annoyance, and perhaps more importantly take away visibilty from other questions (if it is not on the front-page anymore it is gone forever, seems almost true for some more typical questions). True, if the question is sufficiently high profile and/or this is sufficientlty rare it is not a big deal, as grp said. But it clearly shows that MO is (by design!) not made for this type of content; and if it is not very rare it will be problem.

2. I strongly agree with Todd Trimble's last comment. Moreover, I do not at all share JDH's point of view that the software handles these disputes in an elegant way. To me frequent changes in the open/close status are really the worst case scenario. It feels absurd to have some answers but not others only due to the fact when the users wanted to post them (on a relatively short time scale), or to make it necessary to make some strange effort to get an answer in. So then I need to watch the site closely not to miss the one hour when the question was reopened before being reclosed to get in my answer. Perhaps initially only a very sketchy answer so that even after the question was closed I can expand it. Or maybe leave a sequence of comments on a closed question with the request that somebody when the question happens to be open reposts this as a CW answer. Or perhaps then usesrs could start coordinating/announcing when exactly they will vote to reopen, so that then people wishing to answer can prepare and give the answer while the closers prepare to reclose as quickly as possible. This is a bit exagerated but effects of this form do occur. For example Minhyong Kim asked to be notified in case of reopening. And in general the argument with the preriods of time open and close seems somewhat besides the point. Since there is no symmetrie at all. To get the point across another exageration, if a question were open/closed every other hour say, to me this seems almost as good as it being open, and it being closed sometimes nothing but a useless annoyance (without any actual effect).

3. Yes, Gil Kalai, "often the main reason for not allowing a question is that it may encourage similar questions" but not always. And for these rare cases I am in favor of a more veto-based system. Also, tolerance is not a one-way road. Where is the tolerance towards or consideration for those that get majorly annoyed by seeing certain question on MO that are there just because some others find them somewhat interesting or amusing?
   (The present case is not a good example since I think some really also care a lot about having the question, but for some question it seems really hard to make an argument that anybody has more than a idle or passing interest in the matter, though many might share this interest.)

without much need at all for meta-discussion about closing

JDH (Joel), I think rational discussions in case of disputes are generally a good idea. It can happen that someone gives reasons that hadn't been considered by others; it's so easy to click on buttons irreflectively.

My view is that MO is strengthened by such questions as the one under discussion and many similar ones. The software appears to handle closing disputes in an elegant, robust way, without much need at all for meta-discussion about closing. Namely, controversial questions are closed and reopened for periods of time roughly in correspondence with the depth of their support by the community. If you oppose a question, vote to close it, and if you support it, vote to reopen. The question will settle into a status that reflects the community norms.

I am considering setting up a forum for such when I am assured I will get enough moderation help.

That's been the problem all along with this. The number of people who have offered to set up such a forum is considerably larger than the number who have offered to moderate it (in proportion, that is).

Update: that "apology" is now gone as of five minutes ago, since VD has updated again, retracting a lot of a recent update in view of comments by Mochizuki.

My statement was meant in the context of this discussion; so for this controversial type of question (at least mainly, or even only; to use 'at least' instead of 'in particular' would have been better). I agree as a completely general principle it would not be so good. And by controversial I did not mean each question that causes some discussion, but only those where some people express quite clearly that they are actually concerned about the (implications of the) existence of a particular question, and if you like add "in an immediate way" (so not just some long term effect, and so on).

Conversely, it is hard to believe for me that you truly believe that even if say 50 users would say they find some question very problematic possibly even close to offensive, as long as 10 think it is good enough it should stay. I really do not think it is a good principle to moderate an internet resource according to the standards of the 10 most resistant users. In particular, having an absolute number for permanent openness would particularly help controversial things. (Numbers refer to 3k+ users, of course.)

Side comments: while on the one hand I find the information Dimitrov gives quite interesting, on the other hand I am really not sure that it is appropriate to have this continuing near-real-time documentation (see the last couple revisions) and to possibly force the author into rapid responses. [Side remark, for those claiming it is so important this was/is on MO: do you think Mochizucki would not have posted the comments if it were not for MO? If no, it seems hard to maintain the importance claim. If yes, it seems there is a need to argue that MO should really be used to pressure authors into public comments.]

The answer is interesting, even influential, and it wasn't going to be posted to some other web site.

How do you know it was not going to be posted to some other website? Did you check with Dimitrov or somebody close to him? If not this seems like pure speculation, and to me (also as pure speculation) one that seems unlikely to be justified. Why wouldn't he for example have put up the thing on a personal website and posted a link in a comment on a blog, for instance?

1. I agree with Greg Kuperberg that things being as they are has the unfortuante psychological effect that there is a lot more talk on that a question is not a good than that a question is good.

2. However, leaving psycholgy aside though it might be important, I would still like to make explict that closers need a majority against openers to close a question permanently. And the question starts open after all. Not sure if Greg Kuperberg would be in favor of switching the open/close roles completely (question starts closed, and 5 to open) in order to instead skew the situation for anti-restrictionists with voting power. Would you?

3. I am not quite sure what (hypothetical) change of voting mechanism with 'anti-close' votes people envison. Yet, the 'obvious' idea is IMO flawed and I do not see a good alternative right away. (What I mean by 'obvious' idea is to look at the difference of close and anti-close votes and only if this passes a threshold of say again 5 the question is closed. But what then if it is closed with difference 5. It seems bad to reopen if it just drops to 4, and then reclose at 5 again, since this open/close with a single vote would be a major annoyance IMO. But if you only reopen if it drops to 0 (matching current situation) then the system gets considerably more random regarding timing; think of 5 people wanting to close and 1 not, if the anti-vote gets in in time it stays open if not it is closed.)

4. It might be true that closing is too easy. But then reopening is likewise too easy. Even more so, IMO. Reopening should be relatively more difficult than closing. If five qualified (in the sense of points and thus with some experience on MO) users think a question is unsuitable (in its current form) then this is a considerably stronger statement than just whoever posting a question. To override there opinion should take more than just a matching vote. In general, I think appropriateness of MO questions should not be a majority decision, by contrast if enough people 'veto' a question it should stay closed. I understand that Gil Kalai just formulated the opposing view that if enough people 'endorse' a question it should stay open, but I disagree, in particular for controversial question like the current one. If enough people see a problem, it is a problem (at least for these people) and the others should have a very good reason to ignore the concerns of these MO colleagues.

And, more generally, I do believe (but it is really just a believe) that the phenomenon that some users (in particular young ones) that try to be 'good MO citizens' are at a considerable disadvantage regarding the question they can/dare to ask relative to some others that simply do as they please. IMO this sends a wrong message. But that this is so is more a believe or feeling that will be hard to back up. However, in this spirit the above comment arose that in a word-by-word sense might as said be an overstatement.

Regarding your general remark: this is fine for me, but since some are so against closures it could be a problem for them.

In principle, it would be possible for a group of experts to use MO as described in his last paragraph -- but it would take an awful lot of skill and discipline to do it well, for example a divide-and-conquer approach with question like "I have been studying lemma 4.1.2, and there is this point that I don't understand... can someone clarify?" But I think there are better and more efficient alternatives I think than MO. Such as, for example, the seminar room, or perhaps closed video-conferencing. (And I'm not even factoring in the noise level from the crowd of (typically non-expert) bystanders watching and voting up/down.)

Are you sure about this? I think I see "yeah, this is fine" more often than anything else. In any case, asking on meta whether a question is suitable should be deprecated. In case of doubt, it's often better to post anyway but be mentally prepared for closing than to ask on meta first.

Discussions of the correctness of major results should be done in private until a consensus among experts emerges and the author has a chance to reply to any concerns in private. Having these discussions in public in front of a bunch of interested but completely uninformed bystanders is counterproductive. There's too much opportunity for politics and for people's feelings getting hurt.

I agree with some underlying ideas here but I think this is not the right way to think about this. I sometimes wonder "Is this correct?" when reading a paper. This is certainly a valid question when looking at Mochizuki's work. But, leaving that very special case aside for a moment, this is not really what I ask myself when reading a paper. Either the results contradict my expectations or there is a step in the argument that I don't follow (and some variants). In any case, clarifying that is a perfectly valid use of MO. There is a proper way to ask such questions though: "Does this result contradict so-and-so's result?" and "Is this part of this paper wrong?" are not proper.

For larger beasts like Mochizuki's work there are quite a few more traps... Questions are more likely to be overly broad, subjective, discussiony, spammy or offensive. It's the nature of the beast to steer in these directions, but these are valid reasons to close any question on MO, not just questions of that type. Again, however, there are productive ways to use MO with the goal to ultimately answer the question: "Is this a valid argument?" The trick is always the same: turn it into a mathematical question about a specific aspect or part of the argument.

I don't see why "[d]iscussions of the correctness of major results should be done in private." It's perfectly fine for experts going through the argument to use MO to ask questions and clarify certain points. I think MO is actually well suited for this since the format helps prevent useless political digressions. I would be very happy if a loose group of experts decided to use MO this way while working through a long winded solution to a major problem.

You and anyone else with mathematical expertise are invited to contribute. You just have to not mind not "owning" the page you start, in the sense that people are likely to add something to it. In practice, something is subtracted only if there is an error or spam or crackpottishness, or if something is better placed on another page. Such things, among many others, are discussed at the nForum.

Here's a discussion we had on the nForum about a year ago that's quite related: http://nforum.mathforge.org/discussion/3342

@General: It might be true that some (including me) sometimes are perhaps overly cautious. However, I am a bit puzzled why Greg Kuperberg, Kevin Walker, Deane Yang and likely existing likeminded senior members on MO did not support the idea of davidac, who explictly asked about asking such a question on meta before the current one, when apparently they find this such a good idea. What to me is mainly an unfortunate developpment of MO is that those that follow proper procedures and ask in case of doubt first on meta often are told not to ask something, while then if somebody simply does ask it is tolerate. I consider this as problematic. Thus, regarding the general idea of experiments it would seem like a good idea to me if some discussion could happen first on meta; but in exchange this discussion is rather permissive and open-minded (for lack of better word).

But, regarding what Kevn Walker said: I am still convinced tha without any experiment some things can be judged in advance as not feasible. Simply for technical reasons by the sheer size and number of the necessary contributions, it does not seem feasible to have an indepth discussion of a long and complicated paper on MO. Okay, one might use MO as a link collection to whereever but then we also get close to what I was always in favor of, namely that after a reasonable amount of time one can ask about preprints on MO to collect the consensus opinion/information that accumalted already (as opposed to trying to create this info on the fly on MO).

Also, some of these things can go well multiple times but then fail horribly. For example, I do not have the habit of jumping over a running chainsaw installed at one meter height, while I am sure most of the time it would not cause any harm and might be fun.

I would pitch in to help in ways I can if such a site were to be born.

See Yemon's comment about the "pink elephant". I'm not sure about "pink", but at 7,000 pages then "elephant" is justified. Interestingly, its largest baby is my list of "papers that caught my eye". I've even made notes on a couple of them.

Although it will spoil the joke, let me quote from the pink elephant:

The purpose of the nLab is to provide a public place where people can make notes about stuff. The purpose is not to make polished expositions of material; that is a happy by-product.

We all make notes as we read papers, read books and doodle on pads of paper. The nLab is somewhere to put all those notes, and, incidentally, to make them available to others. Others might read them and add or polish them. But even if they don’t, it is still easier to link from them to other notes that you’ve made.

What would be better would be a place where folks could store their "notes" in plain view that they take when reading a paper. Then others could benefit from reading them, and maybe add their own notes or correct misconceptions. This sounds a bit like a wiki to me. If a discussion arises, there could be a forum attached where regular note-takers could discuss topics of interest and note their contributions. Discussions would arise naturally from time to time, but naturally not "top down" as would happen here.

I like that. I would pitch in to help in ways I can if such a site were to be born.

Noah Snyder wrote:

Furthermore, if one were to design a site for discussions like this it would look very very different from MO. There would be no anonymous users, comments from non-experts and new contributors would be moderated before being posted, there would certainly not be upvoting by non-experts.

Why not just require all anonymous contribution be regarded as "non-expert" and moderated; a "no anonymous user" stance seems a bit extreme? Another problem is how we decide who to call "expert": we certainly cannot base it upon "votes", as the traffic volume of MO already indicates, for certain subfields if votes were used as a notion of expertise we would hardly ever get new experts beside the seeding few.

I'd think instead we would just have no MO-style voting at all, but with proper threading support. Real-name users will be staking their reputation on what they write, so I don't see why any moderation should be necessary. Moderation of anonymous and pseudonymous users should be done by real-name users (a post from anon comes in, it becomes only visible to real-name users but not public at large; some X number of seconding votes releases the post for public consumption, with the names of those who approved the post displayed for accountability).

The difficulty in such a system would be for moderators (more like a sysad) to verify the real names when users register. But that can be done by requiring first registrations to use a verifiable institutional e-mail address or something like that.

It may be good/interesting to also have a Slashdot-like "post as anonymous coward" option....

Anyway, just my random two cents. Feel free to tear a hole into my scheme.

Furthermore, if one were to design a site for discussions like this it would look very very different from MO. There would be no anonymous users, comments from non-experts and new contributors would be moderated before being posted, there would certainly not be upvoting by non-experts.

Independently of the above, I think that MO should be a place where the rules for "fancypants established mathematicians" are different than the rules for non-mathematicians. More specifically, I think questions from fancypants mathematicians should be given the benefit of the doubt, while questions that appear to be from non-mathematicians should be subjected to greater scrutiny. I'll refrain from writing more, since this is off-topic in this thread. But if you disagree then I'm interested to hear why, so feel free to start another thread or email me privately.