I am only keeping this thread a little bit alive since it allows me to get known to some of the experts who closed down my questions. I am not sure whether I will use this thread via linking as a future amunition. Since the thread is basically @ad hominem and the original topic really never could shine. I guess this is also the purpose of the thread. To get known to each other.

But closing is the best option, since in case you want to address me, you can do it here: janburse@fastmail.fm.

I agree that this thread should probably be closed (although not feeding the troll is in my experience almost as efficient a way of getting rid of him), but I don't want it to be deleted, since linking to it might be a fast way of saying "oh, you don't know Jan Burse? Have a look here" in the future.

do you gatecrash reading clubs/groups and demand that they explain to you what is going on in The Sound And The Fury?

Why do people always mention things that I've done when they're trying to explain how absurd some given behavior is?!

@Anton: Please, please, stop provoking me, I can't stand baby talk about so called experts being angry. I dont want to be served by experts that invest the least energy. Nobody does this, when you go to a doctor you don't want fast food.

If anyone is being provocative, it seems to be you. Experts do not want to be asked (told? ordered?) to "serve" people who mistake them for specialist motorcycle mechanics. Your attempted analogy with doctors is absurd: do you gatecrash reading clubs/groups and demand that they explain to you what is going on in The Sound And The Fury?

But you might have noticed that I want to close this thread, since this thread has a title that refers to an issue that does not exist anymore. The original purpose of this thread was to reopen some posed questions.

Since this is not possible on a multitude of reasons, which has now been settled, this thread should be closed. And in my opinion it should be deleted, since too many topics were intermingled, and to follow the different topics in the given format is difficult.

Best Regards

You're the one who's being unprofessional here...

Since the questions do not exist anymore, this thread does not make any sense anymore. May I therefore kindly ask you for the last time to remove this thread. If Alex wants something to discuss with me he can mail me: janburse@fastmail.fm.

You are welcome to take topics from this thread to open new threads. Maybe you have observed that this thread had a multitude of topics, so its better to start all over individually.

But please consider this discussion as non existent anymore.

Best Regards

May I kindly ask you again to close this thread and remove it. I am now pretty sure that this thread leads to absolutely nothing. Could you please also remove my 3 queries.

I won't delete this thread. Alex, for example, asked me not to. But I have deleted your three questions as you requested.

It sounds like the basic problem is that you want MO to be a place to formulate questions, rather than a place to post and answer already well-formulated questions. I disagree with this. I think formulating a question is something that should happen privately, or perhaps with help from a small group of people. While you're preparing a question, you can keep it on your hard drive, discuss it on your blog, or even bring it here to meta. By the time you post it to MO, you should have already worked on it.

I think of MO as a very busy expert who has agreed to help me out. I try to pose my question so that the expert can provide the most help with the least energy. If I haven't thought through the question, I'm wasting the expert's time and she will be angry with me.

But this requires some technical means on MO side and some effort of the community. For example the rep points of a community member could be separated into two streams. Whether someone is a good teacher or whether someone is a good problem solver. This is not the same necessarely.

So what I am saying is not contradictory, when I am saying I am going to MO because I find something and when I am saying that I don't want that MO displays something. Since I would go to MO to find queries which are in state "released". And since I would start doing queries in mode "inprogress" which would initially not be visible to the outside.

May I kindly ask you again to close this thread and remove it. I am now pretty sure that this thread leads to absolutely nothing. Could you please also remove my 3 queries.

Thanks in Advance

MO poped up in my queries during some of my research. The other sites never poped up. So why should I go there? Do you think I will find something?

It sounds like MO popping up in search queries is one of your main objections against it.

The problem is that MO does take the business of posting queries to the outside very quickly. And I have no control whats ever. For example my very first query poped up on top on google when I was entering some of the salient key words. And this makes your process so embarassing. I don't know whether you have any sensibility for that.

MO is meant to be a professional forum. You are expected to think carefully about your question before posting it. See http://mathoverflow.net/howtoask.

As I have describe initially how I landed here, MO poped up in my queries during some of my research. The other sites never poped up. So why should I go there? Do you think I will find something?

Bye

I am very happy that you mention this:

contribution to the website, and your "threat" above to just take your business elsewhere due to our "oppression" of you that casts a "bad light" on this community. Perhaps you ought to re-read Alex Bartel's comment and re-think your audacity in joining a community just to agitate for change within 48

The problem is that MO does take the business of posting queries to the outside very quickly. And I have no control whats ever. For example my very first query poped up on top on google when I was entering some of the salient key words. And this makes your process so embarassing. I don't know whether you have any sensibility for that.

Therefore I am advocating a "inprogress" mode for queries and a "inreview" mode for queries. The "inprogress" queries should have the attribute "noindex" set in their page. So that not only MO-ers which are not interested do not find me, but also people from the outside.

Whether a requirement that I am proposing is moot or not is not relevant. If you don't have the means at the moment to implement a requirement, then pitty, maybe you can propose a workaround somehow. At least you should take note, if you care. Do you have a known problems page BTW?

Also in the first place I had already pasted my very first query elsewhere, interestingly I got a prompt answer. If you want that I don't discuss my experience with MO somewhere else, you would need a corresponding clause in your usage agreement. Maybe you have that somewhere, I don't know.

Maybe discussing else shows a certain insensibility of me. Could be. But it mirrors the way MO seems to embarass people and how insensible MO is concerning this embarassement.

Bye

Your most recent post is a suggestion / demand (depending on how I want to read the word "should") that we, the MO community, change our pretty well-working process to conform to one that you personally find more acceptable. This is especially farcical considering your (currently) rather limited contribution to the website, and your "threat" above to just take your business elsewhere due to our "oppression" of you that casts a "bad light" on this community. Perhaps you ought to re-read Alex Bartel's comment and re-think your audacity in joining a community just to agitate for change within 48 hours.

Aside from the fact that the process is largely driven by software out of our control (so any discussion of change is ultimately moot in short-term considerations), even if we were to have control of the underlying software, why do you think the community should "fix" a process that just ain't broken to begin with?

My new posts: No No I am not asking anybody to ignore any guidelines. But I guess hasty closing of queries is not the solution. There should be proper review process in place, with states "inprogress", "inreview" etc.. Otherwise the online editing is not needed, and you can simply upload elsewhere reviewed queries via ftp. This way how it is now done, is just embarassing newbees and even sometimes already existing contents. This is my current thinking now, that there is something wrong with the invitation to post queries and the magic of having high reps directly closing.

Doubtful articles in state "inprogress" or "inreview" should appear on differnt lists, so that people who are only willingly to work on ripe posts can ignore them. And people who are willingly to help out can devote their time to the other. But currently the way it is done is a no go for researches and practicioner that are used to more direct communication.

The review process can be refined as follows. It should not breed dependent question authors, but instead promote that question authors can formulate their queries without the help of others. So after the author has reached a certain rep, he can choose on his own whether he wants to directly release an article or first put in state inprogress. But initial authors with low rep should not have this option.

Let me point out to you that you have arrived here a couple of hours ago and are telling people what MO should and what it shouldn't do. You haven't even observed the local customs, according to your own admission. Please contemplate these last two sentences.

Actually you are interpreting my posts wrong. I just want to find out what are the boundaries concerning the copyright here. And I do this in asking or declaring my intentions in first person sentences. Reason for doing it like this, economy of the posts, I don't need 10 pages to express my questions, using millions of parabolas etc.. I am astonished that even in this thread some content style analysis is done, diverting from the issue.

I can understand that content style is important for the articles given a certain goal how they should be perceived. But all this content style meta comments do not contain much information. What would be interesting here would for example some statistics from the MO owners about their usage and user profiles. Do they know how much people from private are here, how much people from academia?

Any statistics about the demographics, besides the funding scheme? And of course it could be related the demographics and the refusal of articles. Further what interests me, are there some simulations around of the rep model? Are there possible abuses, like rep pumps? Etc.. millions interesting questions.

Bye

I cannot further cooperate since this is unpaid work. You can contact me for paid outside of this forum.

What exactly is the service that we've been given a sample of? It's hard for me to imagine any culture (even in the private sector) where it customary to charge people for the privilege of listening to you asking them for help?

@Scott Morrison, Anton Geraschenko: Question: Is there an opt out possibility, i.e. to retract from the licensce later on, will then all articles, especially answers, that one has created be deleted, what happens with the backlinks...

What is it that you're trying to opt out of? When you post on MO (or SO, or math.SE, or ...), you retain the copyright to your words, but license them under the cc-sa license. You can only opt out of this by deciding not to use those sites. You can use another license later if you wish, but that doesn't change the fact that you released them under the cc-sa license, so people will still be able to use anything you wrote under the terms of that license.

So all articles are infinitely editable... Right? I don't know the state machine of the things. I am deducing that answers get closed from what I saw. But questions what do they get? I don't know. You see nobody answered my questions until now. How can I know. Would need to observe somebodies else question... Or read some FAQ.

I suspect I know whatever information you're looking for, but I can't parse this post. It sounds like you've come up with some other way to find that information.

I think you may have realised this already, but just in case, I will spell out some observations: there is a "culture shock" going on here. The attitude that you are displaying regarding copyright, "ownership" of words, intellectual merit of questions and answers, payment for services and many other things is pretty alien to working mathematicians who are not in the private sector and who happen to constitute the vast majority of users of this site. Your behaviour can be compared to that of a Westerner who goes to Japan, enters the hosts' house in his boots, uses the table napkin to clean his nose and talks loudly about a quarrel between a Republican and a Democratic governor, as reported in the latest New York times, while the Japanese hosts are trying hard to enjoy their tea and sometimes to politely point out to the guest that he is misbehaving.

Let me point out to you that you have arrived here a couple of hours ago and are telling people what MO should and what it shouldn't do. You haven't even observed the local customs, according to your own admission. Please contemplate these last two sentences.

You will be surprised to learn that the MO-community is much more homogeneous in their attitudes and their outlook on mathematics than you may be used to from the private sector, where the word "mathematics" itself can mean all sorts of things. So there is fairly little serious disagreement about what the active users want MO to be. The little disagreement that there is is usually settled in a different language and a different tone from the one you are employing.

Please don't feel offended by this post, all this is meant as a piece of friendly advise of something that is obvious to everybody on this forum, but might not be obvious to you, just like the misbehaviour wouldn't be obvious to the Westerner in my little (slightly exaggerated) parabola. I will leave it at that and will let you draw your own conclusions about a good future course of action, or let you fail to do so, as the case may be.

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/22299/what-are-some-examples-of-colorful-language-in-serious-mathematics-papers/22455#22455

How did this pass the research criteria? Since two examples where put into the question teaser?

Interesstingly the following was closed: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/7155?sort=votes&page=1#sort-top

Maybe the problem with MO right now is, that it does not have an alt section. Like the newsgroups have, everything is drop dead serious, and there is no room for (re-)creation, for experimenting etc.. Does a real life math department look like this?

Is the homo ludens excluded from MO? What view has MO of current day research? I think games have a big tradition in math and it would be an error to promote anemic math on MO. The media that we have here could also be used for a more playful math. I think it is also partly, I have seen some posts with diagrams etc..

Maybe can use the tag soft-question for one of my questions... But not happy with it... I have another idea...

Bye

Or read some FAQ.

This is never a bad idea.

Mathoverflow is not "other stack sites", which have claimed to be "Usenet for web 2.0", and has never claimed to want to replicate usenet functionality. I suggest that you bring your contributions to Math.SE, where the administrators might be more flexible regarding the "usenet-like" functionality you are requesting.

I (and I'm sure most others here) do not want to be a part of a site where people do things like copyright answers. If anyone wants to make use of an MO answer in a paper, then the ethics of academia require that the work be cited. Expecting anything more than credit, I think, is both immoral and damaging to the community.

if you're not happy with the licensing used at MathOverflow, please delete your content.

Motivation and non-vaguness are not important for the true seeker.

and open refusals to take suggestions, why should we even care about helping you? With every comment you post, the more I feel like my time trying to play peacemaker and advocate your cause has been completely wasted.

• Make clear in the statement of the question that your definition of PA- does not agree with standard/common notation, and point the reader to definitions below. This will forestall any confusion.

• Please give a short description of why the question is interesting and "not of no relevance".

(It is always important to sell your question to the crowd, to make experts who may be able to provide you with an answer, but who do not have the answer readily available, care enough to figure out the solution.)

Once you do that I think it may be possible to convince the requisite number of voters to re-open the question.

Also, since the question, once fixed up, may be able to stand alone as a valid question, you may also want to remove the link to the previous closed version. And as a matter of personal taste, I would prefer it if you remove the copyright claim on the bottom, since by posting on MO you already implicitly agreed to allow MO and users to re-distribute the content using a CC license.

Unfortunately (?) we do not advertise this fact to new users. So it has to be pointed out every now and then.

So no, there is no secret kabal or oppression. In general you may find many similar names closing questions in one fixed topic because, well, we do have limited number of experts in each specialty.

Also: since this thread is meant for you to make a case about why you think the question should be re-opened, you may want to focus less on complaining about the process and more on giving the intellectual merit of your questions. Granted, since none of the people who voted to close have so far appeared to explain their reasons, it may be a tad difficult for you to address the criticisms yes. But you may want to try to extrapolate from the comments to your questions and give a pre-emptive defence anyway.

The OP wants these questions reopened. I think I've failed to communicate that meta is the right place to come to have that discussion, so I'm starting this thread for him.

@Jan Burse: You should explain why the questions should be reopened here. This is also the right place to ask for clarification about why people voted to close.