I also wasn't making a fuss about the points. I mean, yes, I posted it as a separate thread, but if Anton or Scott had clearly said "No, that is against the rules" when I e-mailed them, I wouldn't have posted it as a new question at all (not to blame them, we're in different time-zones after all). Certainly it was a mathematical question, and I found an answer to it, so it's not completely insane to not want it to be community wiki. I asked the moderators, but in my haste, I did not wait for a definitive answer and posted it as a separate question. Not everything is so black and white.

You haven't addressed the question: what's the difficulty with answering a community wiki question?

I hope you will stop making such a fuss about community wiki stuff and points and accepted answers and so forth. Maybe you're right that the way things are currently set up is unfair. Well, so what? Sometimes some things are just not fair. Sometimes we should just accept it and not make a fuss and move on. Especially if it's such a pointless, petty matter having to do with a negligible amount of meaningless points on some website.

I still don't understand why everyone got so angry about the joke title (if you remember the thread posted a while ago as "please check my proof of the Riemann Hypothesis", which was not me, you can check to see that people did not respond so violently to it). This is what pissed people off enough to start voting the question down.

About your last response to Douglas Zare: Yes, exactly, a new user is worth spending time on. But fpqc has a long history of being a rude and unreasonable troublemaker best avoided.

@Pedant: That was not my intention. I really thought that reposting the thread would not be a problem. I first e-mailed Scott and Anton (although Scott responded with confusion and Anton didn't respond until several hours later), but after I received Scott's confused response, I made the post (no, he did not give me permission, but he also didn't say not to do it).

The whole e-mail exchange:

Dear Scott,

You may remember the question I asked as GLC about formally étale being a local property. This is in fact true, and I'd like to post the answer, but the question is now community wiki. Would you be opposed to me asking the question and then answering it?

Thanks,
fpqc

fpqc,

I'm confused, what's the difficulty with answering a community wiki question?

Best,
Scott

By the way, Scott, if you'd like me to remove the e-mail from here, I will (or you can do it yourself as a moderator). I'm sorry for not first asking your permission, but I thought it was innocuous enough for me to post it here. I sent the same e-mail to Anton, who responded several hours later, but at that point, it was too late.

More than anything, I was just excited to have an answer to the question, and I got impatient waiting for a response from Anton or Scott, so I went ahead with the plan.

No better way for a math undergrad to be in the limelight in the international stage. Kudos, +1 to fpqc for the inventiveness.

On the matter of this particular post, I'd encourage everyone to follow Noah's thinking --- optimize your behaviour for the benefit of someone using google in 5 years time, when you're (metaphorically :-) dead and gone. We're still in the earliest days of mathoverflow (hopefully), and as time passes the main value of mathoverflow will shift, relatively, from the the everyday community of interactions towards the long-tail of googleable answers.

If somebody wants to post anonymously rather than using their normal account for some reason, I think they should be able to do so. After all, they would be allowed to post anonymously if they didn't have a registered account. Of course, I'd prefer that people be open about their identity whenever possible, and any actual sockpuppetry would be a big no-no, as Noah said. If somebody has a separate anonymous account for posting spammy or offensive content (or otherwise misbehaving), I have no problem with suspending all accounts which I believe are controlled by the offending party.

Edit: Yes, and to avoid conflicts of interest, I did not register the account (thereby making it so I couldn't vote).

Anyway, I think that the thread should be reopened because I'm actually interested in seeing if the argument can be simplified further. That's why I didn't immediately accept my own answer.

As Kevin said, anybody interested in contributing to any answer to the question can already easily do so. The more you explain why you reposted, the more it seems like you did it for exactly the wrong reasons. I hope I'm just misunderstanding.

• I clearly have the true correct answer, but the asker won't be able to accept it because of the bounty rules, so I'll repost and answer the question. This reasoning would be presumptuous, rude to the original asker, and rude to the community because it populates the site with duplicates. This argument at least makes some sense if you're the person who originally asked the question. (btw, if you have a meta.SE account, please vote up this post, which suggests a very nice re-implementation of the bounty system.)
• I have an answer but I don't want to post it here because it would be forced to be CW because of the CW rules, so I'll repost and answer the question. This would be rude in the same ways as the previous one, but without any defensible reason behind it. This argument doesn't make sense even if you are the person who originally asked the question.

I think the best thing to do would've been to just post a new answer to the old question.

Anyway, given that the repost did make some sense, I'd like to know what's the best thing to do about it. I think leaving the duplicate question separate is a silly thing to do; there's no reason all the answers shouldn't be in one thread.

Suggestion: Stop thinking about points.

Points might play a role on the site in a broad sense, but for petty little special cases like this, certainly almost nobody cares. Surely anybody who is capable of simplifying the argument further won't feel any less motivated to do so by whether something is community wiki or not.

Also, I don't feel bad for Bjorn because he won the 100 point bounty.

Lastly, I already have the power to vote to close. Why would I be "reputation whoring" now of all times? I just felt like that thread had been ruined by controversy community wikifying and autoaccepting of answers, so I decided to start a new one, so we could start with a "clean slate".

Anyway, I think that the thread should be reopened because I'm actually interested in seeing if the argument can be simplified further. That's why I didn't immediately accept my own answer.

Incidentally, I suppose I could merge the original question into the new one. In addition to moving the answers over, I believe this would have the effect of unaccepting the answer. Though it's better than nothing, I find this option distasteful for a couple of reasons:

• It just doesn't feel right to merge the original into the duplicate.
• It would annihilate the comment thread to the original question, and the comment thread to the new question would become nonsense.
• It would leave Bjorn's answer CW, which seems unfair. The CW rules are a bit weird, but they should at least be fairly applied. I have to say that this repost looks a lot like you're just trying to gain some reputation. If your real objection was that there was no way your answer could be accepted, you probably should have made your repost CW.

By the way, fpqc is the same person as Giant Laser Cannon. If he weren't, such a repost would be totally unacceptable.