Since I can't see deleted questions, I can't give links; but I assume I'm not the only one who's recognized the pattern.

More generally, are there similar ways to improve the value of an old answer written by someone else, and which are considered acceptable edits?

You should be cautious about pursuing "digit theory" within number theory too far, since it doesn't have a good reputation, the results of Lucas, Dickson, and Stickelberger notwithstanding. For instance, there is a review on MathSciNet about a paper involving digits that ends with the following remark: "There is also a list of serious number theory papers, by Lucas, Kummer, and others, that mention digits (usually to a prime base). But the reviewer is not convinced thereby that Smith numbers are not a rathole down which valuable mathematical effort is being poured."

(Emphasis as in original; except for potential error in copying.)

Part of KConrad's answer to this question 'Are there results in "Digit Theory"?' , which does not in any way ask for evaluation or guidanace in pursuing these questions (had it, I had never contributed an answer to this) but only existence of results. (A detail: this was added in the second revision, without the "within number theory" which was added in the third revision; I am however not sure whether this addition makes the thing better or worse. I downvoted, with initially brief comment [the comments are meanwhile deleted but a copy is in the meta-thread 'downvoting without comment is not constructive'], on the third revision, and there being is a fourth revision the author seems unresponsive.)

I already had decided to let this go. However, just now, I notice there is a (new) comment by OP of question on Mark Sapir's answer:

Thanks for bringing Bunjakovskiĭ to our attention. Do you refer to the first or the second formula? It seems that "digit theory" has existed for a long time in the mathematical underground, without ever becoming really respectable.

(My emphasis.)

Showing that this statement (KConrad's) seems to have an immediate effect on the perception of these types of questions.

This is one of these cases were I absolutely do not understand the standards of this site. How is it possible that apparently it is considered acceptable(see footnote) to introduce without any need (in addition in a somewhat flippant way) a negative evaluation of various fields of mathematical investigation. (Merely the quoting of this less than nice review seems problematic. For example, without having followed up in full detail on this, an author of the reviewed paper still published in 2011, so it seems possible they are reading the site; and this might not be such a nice experience then.)

So my question would be: why is the paragraph mentioned at the start widely considered acceptable? (On request I can recall, for comparison, several examples of things that were not considered acceptable that are in my opinion a lot less problematic.)

Footnote: The posting was frequently visible. Said answer has a current score of 13 (most of which arriving after the first revision, so this being part if it); as 16 upvotes and 3 downvotes, one from me as said, yet one might only be "general" as various parts of this question/answer got one downvote; so perhaps I am not alone, as there seems to be one other 'real' downvote, but still it seems the general opinion is this is acceptable. (Also I implictly referred to it on meta.) So it is not just 'nobody noticed'.

There are some users (I don't really want to single anyone out) who have been asking questions in a specific subject at a fairly steady pace for the last few months or so (edit: maybe longer). Many of these questions are pretty borderline in terms of acceptability, but in most cases, taking the question in isolation, it would probably be too harsh to close it. The problem, according to me, is that taken as a whole, this pattern of serial questioning has various negative effects:

--- It lowers the average quality of questions on MO, which (maybe) puts people off the site;

--- It leads to frustration among some experienced users, who maybe feel a little like they are being expected to do people's homework for them;

--- Most important, for me, is that this is probably bad for the questioners. It seems reasonable to assume that (at least in some cases) the people asking are graduate students; if so, it seems like very bad idea for them to turn to MO every time they have a question, rather than trying to figure these things out for themselves. The obvious response is that it isn't MO's job to worry about whether students are doing what they should be doing, which is true; still, I find it troubling, and it makes me wonder whether something cannot be done.

Firstly, I would like to know if other people have noticed the same behaviour and share my feelings. If it's just me, fine. If not, I wonder if there's a way to deal with this behaviour with being unduly discouraging to the people asking (who are probably doing so in perfectly good faith). One issue is that "How to ask" only contains question-wise guidelines on what is acceptable, but not more global guidelines on using MO (like, "At some point you need to stop asking questions and figure things out for yourself!") But maybe those things are just a subset of good sense.

Anyway, I'd be interested to hear if anyone has any ideas on what MO users could do about this kind of issue, or if the best approach is just to ignore it (edit: or rather, deal with it on a case-by-case basis).

[intervening text no longer necessary]

To those of you who are not involved: I'm sorry for wasting your time.

Regarding the present discussion: a tweak I've dreamt about is one for people with a certain amount of rep, where they could click on a drop-down menu which would offer a choice of canned but politely worded responses to clearly off-topic questions or ineptly worded questions. For example, Joel Reyes Noche's suggested response could be on offer. (Maybe it's a silly idea, I don't know.)

It's not a new suggestion but it is a good one. We have such a list on TeX-SX: http://meta.tex.stackexchange.com/q/430/86. The purpose of such a list is to make it as easy to be polite as it is to be rude (or perhaps "terse" is a better choice of word). For example, a common problem with new users on TeX-SX is that they post just a code snippet instead of a full document (this makes it harder for someone to investigate the cause of the problem as they have to reconstruct the preamble, often guessing the packages used from the commands in the snippet). It's easy to post a terse "Please post a MWE" but it can come across as a bit rude. It takes more time to post:

[Welcome to TeX.sx!](http://meta.tex.stackexchange.com/q/1436) Please add a [minimal working example (MWE)] (http://meta.tex.stackexchange.com/q/228) that illustrates your problem. It will be much easier for us to reproduce your situation and find out what the issue is when we see compilable code, starting with `\documentclass{...}` and ending with `\end{document}`.

but thanks to the Text Building Blocks, it is possible to cut-and-paste the above into a comment with as little effort as to write "Please post a MWE".

The point is not to enforce a level of politeness but to make it possible for those who want to be polite to be so, and to make it easier that the first comment left on a new question is a polite one - thus setting the tone for all of the others.

I like to think that the presence of this list on TeX-SX helps make TeX-SX the friendliest StackExchange site on the network.

As we're still on SE1.0, we don't have CW posts on our meta. So if this seems a good idea we'd need some way to make a list and post ideas. I'd suggest a sticky thread here where the first post was the blocks and it was regularly updated by whoever "owned" that post.

The purpose of this discussion is to see if folks think this would be a good idea and (if so) to gather some suggestions for the initial blocks and (hopefully) a volunteer who will maintain the list.

this question

with no explanation. I would contact the OP to ask why but cannot find an email address to ask. Is it appropriate to vote to undelete?

That looks quite odd --- I never thought about this possibility. I think this trick is worth noticing. Do you think it could be exploited by someone with malicious intents? You can only use it on your own questions unless you have high reputation, and in any case it is easy to detect automatically and leaves permanent track in the database; so the answer seems to be "no". But maybe my "black hat" mind isn't twisted enough.

Worse uncorrected details pass unrighted

This zeal for fixing spelling? Not delighted.

My question is how should a situations be handled where somebody quotes (in an uncritical way) something that is, at least by todays standards as I see them, sexist; and the same for similar problematics.

What to me makes this situation a bit tricky is that it is 'only' a quote. So, the person posting it is not really responsible for it. But then if one quotes uncritically one somehow endorses what is quoted and if it is on MO then one can see this (and in fact I do) as a problem.

So I am not quite sure what to do. Are critical comments sufficient? (They typically appear.) Or should there be something critical in the body of the answer? Or should it go entirely? Or still something else.

But this is hardly a research level question, so to avoid annoyed remarks and rapid closure of your question please read the FAQ and probably prefer http://math.stackexchange.com for asking such questions.

In a comment under the answer, I wrote:

Marc, if you agree that this question is not appropriate for MO, then neither is giving an answer. The point is that asking such questions on MO should not be encouraged; please confine remarks like the second sentence to a comment instead. Thanks. -- Todd Trimble

The answerer wrote:

@Todd: I don't agree with the fact that answering a question is encouraging similar questions. The question was by a newcomer, who has gained no reputation by doing so and probably will now go elsewhere; I see no harm in the fact that he should do so without feeling the door was slammed on him. Also I think using comments as happens often (and here) for a many-party discussion is rather confusing, and not well supported by the software; I did not feel inclined to add to this confusion. -- Marc van Leeuwen

I thought surely I was espousing a widely held view on MO etiquette, but instead of embarking on a discussion with Marc in comment boxes, I thought any discussion should go here. I feel sure this type of thing has come up before and has been discussed on meta, but I find it hard to search for relevant entries. If anyone can point to such discussions, that would be great. Otherwise, please feel free to weigh in on this subject.

(A tell-me-all-about-X non-question can be turned into a great question, I think, with sufficient work from the asker, and this has happened several times. But...)

I have noticed a mistake, and after alerting the writer by comments I have received some comments in return which indicate that my correction has been somewhat acknowledged.

To what degree should I pursue the correction of the answer? Should I badger the answerer through comments, or just let it be? Or should there some middle-ground solution between the point where I feel that I am harassing someone, to the point I feel I am leaving a mistake out in the open?

Anyway, I recently posted a question on terminology in general topology at

http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/66041/does-this-property-of-scattered-spaces-have-a-name

but have received no answers or comments in almost 24 hours. If this trend of silence continues, what is a reasonable minimum time to wait before posting it to MO (assuming, of course, it is suitable for MO)?

I cannot quite phrase what I think the problem is, but I don't think this is a good use of MO. Ideas?

• http://mathoverflow.net/questions/66828/friedman-and-proof-of-hanna-neumann-conjecture
• http://mathoverflow.net/questions/66759/collatz-conjecture-solved-closed
• http://mathoverflow.net/questions/34978/p-vs-np-solved-closed
• http://mathoverflow.net/questions/34953/whats-wrong-with-this-proof-closed
• http://mathoverflow.net/questions/26821/is-thompsons-group-f-amenable
• http://tea.mathoverflow.net/discussion/590/

In general, such questions are inappropriate for MO, but, as they say where I'm from, c'est l'exception qui confirme la règle!

Is this acceptable behaviour? I'd only do it if the question was reposted, and probably only if it was closed here. If we were part of the SE2.0 network, this would have been migrated and there would have been a trail to follow to take you to the final resting place of the question, so I'm simply trying to do by hand what would have been done automatically.

I can see it being fine if all you're doing is fixing a typo (mathematical or otherwise) or righting some kind of minor oversight. But is it also acceptable to significantly change or expand the original post so as to make it -- at least in your opinion -- clearer or more comprehensible?

I'm asking partly out of sheer curiosity and partly because my answer to this question was edited today. I'm not particularly annoyed by this edit (which I have nonetheless rolled back), but I was taken aback by it. (It also introduced a minor error: the hypothesis "connected" was missing from the first assertion, which also propagated later when it was claimed that "$X$ must be a point.") So I'd like to see what the community's standpoint is in regards to edits of this type.

I know that I do the following:

1. I sometimes "name drop" in the purely gratuitous "I'd like to show off that I have met or am otherwise connected to some famous person". I don't have a good reason for doing this, and I'm sure it is an unhelpful and problematic habit. I hope I'll grow out of it.

2. I often would like to share some opinion, which is not a "result" that could be in a paper, but I want to lend it some more credence. If I have a reason to believe that some famous (in the sense of mathematically well respected) mathematician also shares this opinion (or maybe disagrees with it), then I like to bring up what that I think they think something. This, I think, has a fair amount of intellectual and academic value: well-respected people are well-respected for many reasons, but often some of them are reasons for also respecting their opinions.

3. I occasionally cite unpublished work / personal correspondence / personal conversation. I would never rest a proof on such facts --- I'd always want to reprove them in a publication. But I definitely do want to give credit where credit's due.

I assume that 3. is non-problematic, except that I should always make an effort to find any publication by the same person with substantively the same ideas. I believe that 1. is problematic, but I don't have a great strategy for fixing my own behavior beyond being aware of it. (And I don't think I "name drop" that often.) My secondary question is to gauge how problematic y'all find behavior like 1.

My primary question is about "name dropping" in the form of item 2. above. Namely, there's some gray area, and I want to know how to navigate it. Are there things one should look out for? Ways to site opinions of respected mathematicians that don't come across as type-1?

I think that such a discussion would make very valuable reading for "young mathematicians" like myself. So I'm asking it not just for me --- for example, I've seen many websites with "advice for young mathematicians", but none that adress this question. I don't think that this question is appropriate for the main MathOverflow: it is too discussiony, subjective, doesn't have a single correct answer. But if you disagree, please say so, and I'll (or you'll) post a Community Wiki question about it. I do think that the question is appropriate here on Meta, because it is at least in part about professional behavior over on MO.

Thanks,

Theo JF (not to be confused with the other MathOverflow Theo, so I need to get into the habit of including my initials when I sign things)

I see the ideal as only comments explaining votes to close, and in the case that there is any controversy, a neutrally worded link to a meta thread. Now, of course it would be crazy to legislate this, and hence this proposal is for a new piece of MO etiquette. In the event that comment threads get out of hand, e.g. the recent comment thread on the question about third derivatives, we could at least point the "culprits" to evidence of established consensus that this behavior was "impolite".

Specifically, I propose that we consider it "impolite" to leave multiple "meta" comments on a single post. This imposes no burden when a question is uncontroversially closed, and it doesn't interfere with the ideal that votes to close (and downvotes!) are accompanied by explanations (and ideally suggestions for alternative venues or improvements), and it still allows anyone with an opinion to "fire and forget".

If one anticipates wanting to make multiple meta comments, then it behooves one to create a meta thread right away, and include that in the first comment. (In utopia, the poster would also wait to stand on their soap box until they're over at meta, leaving only a neutrally worded link; people shouldn't dishonestly "get the last word in" by diverting responses to meta.) It would be every so slightly impolite to do this in ones second comment instead.

I'd also like to remind everyone to vote up comments with links to meta, to ensure people see these, and help divert meta traffic here. I'm also happy for people to word their meta links more strongly, e.g. "I have created a a thread in meta <link> to discuss this question. All further meta discussion should take place there."

As a jumping off point, let me point out something I just did: * I asked a question about whether a particular statement was true. * A very nice counter-example was posted. * I realized that the counter-example was precisely based around a piece of wiggle room that doesn't exist in my situation, and thus was left with a dilemma. The counter-example perfectly answered the question I had asked, but not the one I should have. * I opted to ask a second question which was almost exactly the same, but had a new hypothesis making the old answer inapplicable. (And, of course, provided links between the questions).

So here's where I ask your collective opinion...did I do right?

For anyone who wants to see an example, rather than reply in the abstract, this most recently happened with http://mathoverflow.net/questions/48687/are-there-any-counterexample-to-following-number-theoretic-situation-closed. Of course, you won't be able to see the answer or my comment on it unless you are appropriately privileged.

I'd like to open the floor for a community discussion on the etiquette of removing tags from closed questions. Is it necessary? Should we have informal guidelines?

Take a look at all of his answers.

Of course, the person asking the question has every right to decide if it's answered, and certainly there are many answers (to other questions) which are virtually indisputably the correct ones. But it seems to me that so long as the question is open the answers can compete in the eyes of the OP and of the general audience, while once an answer is accepted, casual readership may drop.

In addition (if I may say this without an implied accusation) it seems dismissive of the answers that may come to accept one so quickly. One does not know what may turn up (I of course hope that what I write is valuable, or else I wouldn't write it). Steven Gubkin commented in response to me that he would change the accepted answer if a better one came along, but I don't want to try to steal the honor, nor do I want the previously accepted answerer to think that's what is going on. And if the award is transferable then wouldn't it make more sense to wait, say, a day?

So, is it bad etiquette to accept early? Alternatively, and less judgmentally, is it good etiquette to let it sit, and if so, for how long?

Recently a user (who I'll call Q) posted a handful of questions. The questions got pretty substantive answers, but the answers got no more than 1 upvote, probably because the questions were somewhat technical, so Q was able to delete the questions. One of the users (who I'll call A) who answered one of the questions emailed a moderator to find out what happened to his nice answer, the moderator emailed Q saying that A would like the question and answer undeleted, and Q emailed back saying effectively, "Please don't undelete that. It's a problem I'm working on with my advisor and I'm not supposed to discuss it in public."

In the spirit of open decision-making, I'm brining the issue to meta. If you're a 10k+ rep user, you can have a look at the questions and answers here, here, and here. If you're not a 10k+ rep user, you can email moderators@mathoverflow.net and one of us will direct you to some copies of the questions I've posted elsewhere.

My opinions

I'd like to undelete the questions and answers since it seems dishonest and unfair to the answerers to leave them deleted. More generally, I'm for the policy that a thread can be undeleted at the request of anybody who contributed, or anybody at all. To me, this is a natural extension of not allowing people to delete questions with substantive answers and of allowing 10k+ rep users to vote to undelete. I'd even be in favor of regularly scraping the database for deleted questions with substantive-looking answers to make sure this sort of abuse doesn't go unnoticed.

I'm actually fairly open to such "enforced renames" but wanted to see what the community thinks. The relevant user did not provide a working email address, so can't be contacted directly. We could comment on their question pointing them to this thread, I guess.

Clearly, for posterity, they should be linked. I've put comments on both with links to the other.

If I'd been the first to see the second question, I would have voted to close as duplicate. Now, I'm a little hesitant to do so. I'm not completely sure why - there doesn't seem to be a good reason to not vote to close "as duplicate" since it's not saying it's a bad question in any way, but I'd rather find out what others think before deciding.

I guess I'm also thinking about precedents here (so saying, "Well, I think in this case it's okay" is not really satisfactory), is it better for the site if such situations still get closed as duplicates, or not?

I always get a bit lost with questions like (the original version of) http://mathoverflow.net/questions/38597/do-the-homological-dimension-and-cohomological-dimension-for-a-group-agree.

Should I delete the question, as it is (probably) impossible to get a satisfactory answer? Or should it just be closed, seeing that there are at least seven people who found the question interesting, and so perchance it ought to be preserved for posterity? For now I've voted to close the question as 'no longer relevant'. If some high-rep user is reading this and decide that it should be closed (as opposed to deleted), it would help if they can also add votes to close it.

(Mostly I want to close/delete it so that it doesn't pollute the front page by having an unanswerable question propping up every now and then by MathOverflow.)

For example, the set theorists, logicians, and model-theorists here all seem to know a lot about accessible categories (I assume because they have some sort of application to model theory, according to the title of Makkai-Pare). When I ask a technical question about accessible categories, would it be wrong to tag them [lo.logic], [model-theory], and maybe [set-theory], even though it's not directly about those subjects? tagging it just as [ct.category-theory] and [accessible-categories] makes it so the people who can answer it easily probably won't even see it because they're not subscribed to the ct.category-theory RSS feed (or whatever technology people are using these days).

Do you all consider this bad etiquette?

A bit of history: I flagged the comment for moderator attention, shortly afterward the answer disappeared, but it has reappeared since, with the comment intact. I also don't understand the upvotes: are these genuine signs of support or instances of people misclicking while trying to flag it?

For background, the question was closed as "doesn't belong here".

Now, one could make a case pro or contra having questions like that on Math Overflow (I have no opinion on this matter, and I'm not interested on wasting everyone's time discussing this) but I certainly think people should learn about changes in policy.

I'm not going to say anything about how exactly moderators should close the questions -- it's one of the points of having competent moderators that they're more often right than not -- but it's probably best to communicate somewhere what happens. Otherwise, moderators' time will be wasted on explaining on many similar questions the reasons for closing that could be explained only once.

For example, for many "What is..." questions, a reference to nLab would be more than sufficient to close the question, without entering hard and long discussions (of which you might have seen an example here). Surely, there could be other cases of "speedy close" (modeled after "speedy delete") questions, that would be dealt with fast and efficient.

The example I have in mind is question 25664, which is not a bad question at the heart but the formulation is flawed in such a way that it is impossible to give a definite answer. The two excellent answers by Joel and Andrej both proceed by outlining the flaws of the question and proposing alternatives formulations. Note that this particular case is a little moot since the author has expressed support for closing.

It turned out that Akela perceived my behaviour as bullying and attacked me, and other users in the comments. I'm frankly disappointed at the attitude of Akela. I have even thought of removing the bitter comments at the beginning of the question myself, but it didn't feel quite right. Still, now I am sincerely upset about this situation.

EDIT: I have removed the actual dialogue, since we have clarified with Akela.

Now I'm not convinced anymore, and I have also been suggested in the comments to make this community wiki, so I'd like to communitywikify it. The problem is that a lot of people answered and gained points from that, and I'm worried it may be rude to change the status now and let them lose their points, What am I supposed to do in this case?

I think this is important for the following reason: we all know that this site is by far the best place to get some mathematical questions answered. So, when I'm stuck on some trivial lemma in some paper, I'll of course come here. However, this is not as useful to the well-being of the site as me answering questions. Now that I'm reading this site only rarely, it's much less likely that I'll find a nice question that I want to answer. If too many people start acting like me, the quality of the answers will decrease. The worrisome thing is that this begins a vicious cycle: as the quality of the answer decreases, fewer people start browsing the site to read them, they become less likely to give their own answers, and so on.

A few disclaimers:

1) Not that this needs saying, but this is still a wonderful site, and it's amazing that there is now a place to get quick answers to questions that would give us so much pain before. To the creators: thank you very much for spending so much time on this.

2) A big factor in this might be just that this site is not so young any more, so it's hard to keep the up excitement of this amazing new thing appearing. I don't know what to do specifically about this, but I think this is not a reason to give up. Also, this might not be so hopeless: so many people still don't know about the site, they can be made excited about it just as we were when we first saw it.

3) I have a habit of wording my opinions rather strongly and directly, but I certainly don't mean to insult anyone. I think it's amazing how well-intentioned pretty much everyone on this site is, and I appreciate all of you guys. Also, there might be a bit of hyperbole involved - I don't really think the site is in danger of imminent destruction, but I think this is something good to think about, and hyperbole is good to make one's point clear.

So my main question: should I do anything about this? Should the moderators? Should I walk down Olav Tryggvasons gate in sackcloth and ashes?

This answer ends with "but you'll have to ask another question to find out why :-)" Sure enough, someone took the bait in this question. The question is phrased in such a way that a third party could answer it, but it is obviously addressed to a particular user.

Asking a question to clarify an existing answer is certainly fine, but ending an answer with a prompt to do that is sketchy. I was tempted to vote for closing the question, but I couldn't find a convincing reason and I really want to know the answer in this particular case.

Anyway, what do people think about this?