@Tom (re tagging): There is already a list of all the arXiv tags next to the tag box when you ask a question. Unfortunately, people have become very good at ignoring everything on the page that doesn't immediately relate to what they're doing (I'm guilty of it too), which makes it very hard to educate users before they've actually engaged the community. But after somebody asks a question and starts participating, they're usually very quick to learn how they should behave. Tagging is one thing that takes people a while to get the hang of. Choosing a good title is another one.

I think I must follow Harry Gindi's kind advice and leave this site. It will be better, however, if we part with some warmer sort of mutual feelings. So here are my wishes:

1) I wish this site success. Life is paradoxical. The natural evolution may well bring this site from such ideas as "not fostering creativity" to something more balanced.

2) Respect each other. Please note also that posting my question about fractal matrices - and hoping that I will be understood - implied my respect of the smartness of my readers.

3) By happy in your personal lives.

It is a frequently a matter of collective interest to decide whether a given means M (for example, being strict with question policy) helps to achieve a given objective O (for example, to maintain a certain level of discourse).

In the example at hand, we need to ask what is meant by "discourse", especially since its most common meaning, discussion, is expressly deprecated in the main arena.

Inconsistent values are problems in practice and theory both.

You mentioned a sense of "discourse" that splits a hair between it and "discussion", but whether you are using that sense is another question.

Closing vague unanswerable questions is partially to deter people from asking such questions and encourage them to ask focused questions that have answers, which is what I believe the SE framework is best for. But it's also to protect the target user base. If a mathematician spends a lot of energy answering a vague question (and they will because so many of them are far too nice or are OCD), I think it's a waste of time (or at least does more harm than good). I generally think that vague questions should be closed but not deleted. That way, if somebody really has something to say about it, they can do it in the comments, where they can't waste too much time because they are restricted to 600 character chunks, but they can easily provide a link to a blog post they made on the topic. The extra energy barrier keeps MO from becoming scatterbrained.

The bottom line is that several people here tried to figure out what you meant, and you have insisted on a lack of clarification, that "any connection" would be exactly what you were looking for. Finally you got one response drawing a certain kind of connection, to which you promptly replied "well, anything except THAT".

If you want people to understand you and communicate with you, you need to meet us a little closer to halfway.

"If the details of a question exist only in your head" - no, that question did not have any hidden details. It was exactly as it was formulated: does anybody know anything like that.

I like your energetic way of writing, although I cannot guess what you meant by hammer and screw. Thank you anyhow; perhaps your site was indeed a wrong place to ask serious questions. Still, my question did already receive the very clear answer, in the negative (remember that it began with "Does anyone know... ?"). So I am already grateful, and my wishes of success to your site!

Re strong language: I'm not convinced that the language is too strong (but maybe I can be). Each of those quotes is at the beginning of a paragraph which goes on to explain the criticism. It should be clear that those criticisms apply to questions that don't "have answers" (in the sense I described in the previous paragraph). Even [big-list] and [soft-question] questions really should have a focus to them. Even if they don't have a single answer, it should be clear what constitutes an answer. The fundamental examples question is extremely broad, but it isn't vague. It's clear what constitutes an answer, and an expert answering the question is not struck with a feeling of "how do I even begin?" upon reading it.

More generally, I'd like to point out that crowd-sourcing (which is what MO is) works well when you have well-defined tasks for people to do and works poorly for large projects starting from scratch. Successful "open source" projects always have one (or a few) people who bring the project to a point where it is reasonable for others to make useful specific contributions. When you ask a question on MO, you have to be that person who brings the question to a point where others can meaningfully contribute to it. Asking somebody else to do it is inappropriate.

One good way to evaluate questions is to look at the answers they get. This criterion is independent of whatever form of evilness the Management-Ownership has chosen to submit us to: presumably you wanted answers to your question.... Yet the question has not gotten any.

The questions "what is the right definition of a ring" and "why are functional equation important" are very good questions and so are the questions "why is the exterior algebra so ubiqutous" and "interesting applications of the Pigeon-hole principle". In the page how to ask a good question these four questions would be in the column of being too vague/board. The page advices to ask something like: "Does the pigeon-hole principle can be used to prove Y?" I disagree with such a general advice. It depends what the person asking the question really want to know. If what he really wants to learn about interesting applications of the pigeon hole principle this is reasonable, can be of interest to others, and this is precisely what he should ask.

One important aspect that is missing is that we should strongly encourage questions about mathematics (pure math, applied math, connections to other sciences and academic areas, even teaching/presenting math and math-history) and not encourage (but allow nevertheless within limits) questions around math; namely questions "of interest to mathematicians" which are not questions in mathematics.

Dear Anton: Being interesting is impornat for a question (or answer) in order to be useful and in order to be clear. Strong language: "criminally undervoted", "Such questions (imprecise) are as bad as (or worse than) homework questions; they waste everybody's time." " There are few things worse than a question which is too vague, too broad, or imprecise. Not only is it lazy to ask a vague or imprecise question, it's also rude. You're essentially asking somebody to do the work of figuring out what you want to ask, and then answer it..". However my main problem with the two last quotes, is not just the strong language, I simply disagree with the content. (But I would avoid such language anyway.)

I complained about buzzard's third example because I do know a lot about maps GL_n(K) ---> GL_N(L) when L is R or C, K is R or C and N is finite and I have some knowledge about the case K=Q_p, L=C, N finite. I couldn't tell whether or not this was the knowledge the original poster wanted. (As it turned out, "admissible" was the clue that it was not. Perhaps it is my fault that I wasn't sharp enough to pick up on that.)

If I were to try to turn this into rules for inexperienced posters, I would say "link or cite your definitions" and "if you know your question lies in a particular field, indicate it." For example, I have a question which starts out something like: "This is a question about quivers with potential in the sense of Derksen, Weyman and Zelevinsky..."

Specifically, I asked my question http://mathoverflow.net/questions/10700/self-similar-matrices because I needed any hint on any type of self-similar matrices or whatever resembles that in any manner.

My experience in Yang-Baxter equation and related issues strongly suggests that whatever looks at first sight vaguely similar, in some 5 years or so becomes just the same thing.

everything is clear in the already finished parts of mathematics. So, why not foster the ability to do at least something where everything is still unclear, vague and evasive? This is much trickier of course, going off the beaten track...

Sure the "Management-Ownership", as Jon put it, will make the wise and ideologically correct decision on the subject of this discussion, which I respect in advance. But can I ask you: why exactly do you want to push me, with my broad questions, out of this forum into some obscure "blogs"?

It's progress that the Management-Ownership of the site is beginning to clarify its values. Yes, there's always a Management-Ownership — it resides in the Power to flip the switch off any time the arc of state deviates too far from its owned or unowned objectives — that's just the way the Internet was designed, no matter what mumbo-jumbo anyone gives you about “we are not a hierophancy”.

The local definition of “Question Worth Asking” (QWA) appears to be converging toward “Question With Immediate Answer” (QWIA), so long as it's not too “local”, the definition of “local” being somewhat out of site, out of mind right now. I don't think the rest of the world would agree that QWA = QWIA, but we are only talking about site-local definitions here.

At any rate, it's still a kind of progress …

• People often vote up questions that are not useful or clear but sound interesting.
• Easy-to-understand questions tend to accumulate upvotes because lots of people look at them. Very good precise technical questions are often criminally undervoted.
• People vote much more liberally on "fun" questions and community wiki questions.

I think these problems will always be with us, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't push for people to ask better, clearer questions. If anything, we should push for people to change their voting habits.

Where did you feel like the language was too strong?

• @Harrison Brown. Expanded the "do your homework" section slightly and explicitly said that good questions take effort.
• @Jonas Meyer. Corrected those typos. I'd prefer you make a new post when you find new typos rather than edit an old post since it's easier for me to keep track of new posts than edits. You can just delete posts as they become out-dated (or I can delete them as I correct if you don't mind).
• @Ilya Nikokoshev. (re: broken formatting) I wanted to remind myself to set those two paragraphs apart a bit since they apply to both of the previous sections. I ended up just adding an extra <br> to offset them. (re: formatting section) In the question you linked to, I agree that h3s work better, but in the example, there are very few section headings and lots of text, so the larger headings make it easier to assess the question quickly. I also used to use h3 headings, but I've become a bit bolder with h2s. You also have to take into account that headings on MO are grey, not black, so they don't draw they eye as much. For example, in this question, I think h2s work better than h3s would.
• @Mariano. Fixed links.
• @Mariano, Noah Snyder, bwebster, wilton. I substantially changed the first paragraph of the "Be precise" section (I didn't like that paragraph either) and expanded the paragraph on generalizations in the "Turn it around" section (retitled "Consider different formulations of the question").
• @fedja. I think the problem with that question is either (a) the words aren't meaningful enough or (b) the asker has misjudged the composition of the community (nobody understands what he's talking about). In either case, the right thing to do is to tell him to explain what he means better. I'm also not sure how much content there is to the question. He should explain what a "winner takes all" rule is, what the undesirable behavior is, and what desirable behaviors another rule should have.
• @Mariano re that example. That is a vague, imprecise question. The first two sections are devoted to discouraging that kind of question.

Three

Look at how well this looks here and also this works in the question.

Two

And this is the text which looks too small compared to the title.

The one little piece of advice in that page with which I disagree (somewhat emphatically :) ) is «Even better, turn your question around by giving your particular example as motivation and ask a more general question» I would suggest instead that people do ask about specific examples and, if they are they want and if this is justified, that they ask more general questions. A few reasons that come to mind: they may not be aware of what the more general question is and refrain from asking as a consequence, they may get answers for the more general question which have nothing to do with what they intended to ask (!), they may focus in one particular generalization precluding other generalizations of which they are not aware, and, finally, generality is something that should be justified (there is a difference between general nonsense and boring, useless general nonsense...)

An example: a while ago I asked about certain special measures on convex sets and I purposedly phrased the question in the least general way possible and involving as little technology as I could: I was quite sure MOers would be able to jump from a triangle to a convex set by themselves, and if they knew about it, see the connection with the Radon transform, and so on.

The formatting is broken currently for a paragraph that starts with "There are few things worse than a question which is too vague, too broad, or imprecise."

One small suggestion re the "do your homework" section: There's certainly more that you should do other than try to find a reference! If I have something which I think might be a good MO question, but it's not immediately apparent what exactly I want to learn, I'll almost always play with it for a while (usually at least half an hour, and sometimes as long as off and on for a couple of days) before I ask it. Even if I don't think that I have any chance of being able to solve the problem or answer the question myself, making an effort to do so to the best of my ability always "clears the fog" and helps me to understand where I'm having trouble or what it is I really want to know. And apparently it works, since people have very generously upvoted even some of my embarrassingly trivial questions.

Anyway, it seems like one of the underlying themes to the page is: "Put some effort into your questions!" It might pay off to make that more explicit.

Actually, maybe the last paragraph of "Be specific" would be better suited for a separate page or section of the faq on suggested voting practices.

The reasoning behind putting that paragraph there is that I want the page to serve two functions:

• Help people compose good questions.
• Help people judge how good a question is, and make it easy to suggest improvements to the question author.

Since composing a good question is a matter of writing a question and then evaluating how good it is (then repeating several times), I feel like these two functions are not worth separating. More generally, I feel like advice on how to respond to a violation of a rule should occur very close to the rest of the discussion about that rule.

"...will not be as good as ... the Wikipedia page." In some cases, that's harsh! But that sentence is saved by "or".

I see where you're coming from, but I really want to use "and" there. The point is that for focused questions, an MO answer is quite likely to be better than the Wikipedia page, but for extremely broad questions, it basically can't be because it's unreasonable for somebody to spend more than a few hours writing an answer. I've rewritten it as

Worse, somebody who is too kind and too generous with her time may spend a great deal of time and energy crafting an answer that might not satisfy the asker and that will be just a shadow of a proper survey paper. Such questions can't be reasonably answered in a few hours, even by an expert who knows the "answer."

I've also pasted it into a public wave, which you should be able to find by logging into wave and typing "with:public how to write a good Math Overflow question" into the search box. If you don't have a wave account and want one, let me know. I have 53 invitations.