tea.mathoverflow.net - Discussion Feed (Helping non-specialists write better questions)

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Helping non-specialists write better questions" (1976)

2010-01-19T12:08:35-08:00

When you edit, there's a box that says

Good Edits

Fix grammatical or spelling errors.
Clarify meaning without changing it.
Correct minor mistakes.
Add related resources or links.
Always respect the original author.

but I don't think anybody ever looks at it.

Mariano comments on "Helping non-specialists write better questions" (1974)

2010-01-19T09:26:00-08:00

It may not be a bad idea to add a comment somewhere prominent in the page which lets you edit a question that it tends to be a bad idea to change the content of the question (at least, after there have been answers), maybe conditionally on the reputation of the questioner (as someone who's been around longer will surely have noticed how annoying that is!)...

I would phrase the comment without using the word 'jerk', though.

Pete L. Clark comments on "Helping non-specialists write better questions" (1967)

2010-01-18T17:56:26-08:00

I agree with Tom both that Qiaochu's intentions are laudable and that just posting a primer on how to ask questions in a way that mathematicians will find clear is probably not going to help very much. Qiaochu, you are so wonderfully clear that I doubt you have ever had a problem with it, but many (most?) undergraduate math majors (and some math graduate students) have trouble expressing themselves clearly and in an appropriate amount of detail. For some people, this is harder than the mathematics itself. At UGA, we have an entire course in which majors are supposed to learn to read, think and write closer to the way mathematicians do.

I think that people need to be patient with the questioners (though sometimes it is hard! I lost my patience with someone earlier today, I'm afraid) in getting clarifications. Moreover, experienced MOers who enjoy this sort of work should feel welcome to be proactive in editing questions to help recast them in our language. Most posters will take this as a great favor, whereas if the edit is a misinterpretation it is easy to say so.

Tom Leinster comments on "Helping non-specialists write better questions" (1965)

2010-01-18T15:04:49-08:00

Qiaochu, I think it's an excellent question, and from the looks of those questions you've been very helpful to people in that position.

I don't know what the answer is. I'm sceptical that writing a brief primer on mathematical language would solve things, since there are already plenty of introductions to university-level mathematics out there. I don't think it's for lack of such resources that people phrase things in what we might regard as an unmathematical way.

Maybe the most important thing is that other people follow your example. In my opinion, MO users are sometimes too fast to leap on non-mathematicians who ask questions that are difficult for us to understand, but might have nontrivial content. (I've probably been guilty of this myself.) Reading the first link you give, it's clear that the original poster has taken your advice and used it to make his question more comprehensible. It's a thoroughly constructive exchange.

At present I can't see a better way of handling it than what you're doing: patient dialogue with the poster to help tease out the meaning of the question.

Qiaochu Yuan comments on "Helping non-specialists write better questions" (1964)

2010-01-18T14:25:57-08:00

On more than one occasion now (http://mathoverflow.net/questions/12214/reconstructing-a-permutation-of-a-set-from-counts-of-distinct-elements-in-all-pos and http://mathoverflow.net/questions/10889/conditions-that-allow-unique-solutions-for-linear-diophantine-equations that I have seen) there has been a question asked by a non-specialist which presumably has legitimate mathematical content, but it's hard to see what that content is because the question is not stated in the language mathematicians are used to, e.g. in terms of sets and functions. It seems to me that these people are precisely the group who would benefit the most from having their questions looked at by MO, so I am interested in trying to streamline the process of helping them out.

How can this be accomplished? For example, perhaps it might be appropriate to write a brief primer on mathematical language for those who are earnestly interested in getting their questions answered, for example programmers who encounter a natural mathematical question in their work. If that can't be done, what can we do to streamline the process of rewriting questions so that they are more accessible to a mathematical audience?