tea.mathoverflow.net - Category Feed (Etiquette)

Extending from a plane in R^3, again, and again, and again

2011-10-27T17:47:22-07:00

The same mildly interesting question, or minor variants thereof, has been asked several times, often by accounts with different or changing usernames. Each time someone asks for clarification, or points out that the question is similar to or identical to one before, the question gets deleted. This means that even if I were to later spend some spare time trying to answer the question, I have no incentive to, because the user(s) keep employing these monumentally irritating hit-and-run tactics.

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.

The "digits of $\pi$" question

2013-05-29T08:01:32-07:00

A new, recent answer to this old (2010) question http://mathoverflow.net/questions/18375/is-there-any-finitely-long-sequence-of-digits-which-is-not-found-in-the-digits-of has resulted in a steeply argumentative chain of comments and another new and argumentative answer. At the least it is time to close this question.

Editing old answers by other users

2013-04-06T18:57:19-07:00

Having just reached enough reputation to edit posts, I was wondering how best to use this new capability. One idea that had been on my mind for a while was to add latex to some very good "old" answers which currently have no latex. I think this might add value to those answers. Is such editing considered good etiquette at mathoverflow? Is it encouraged or discouraged?

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

No response to answers and comments

2013-04-06T08:19:38-07:00

It annoys me when an OP either does not respond to an answer (or substantive comment) or gives a brief response after a week or so. How about adding to the faq page a short etiquette section that mentions that prompt follow up from the OP is expected? This should not be necessary, but I am afraid that it is.

Is the reputation of "Digit theory" an appropriate subject for MO

2013-03-25T05:53:27-07:00

Since a couple of days I have considerable problems with the following:

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'.

Should serial questioning be discouraged?

2013-03-05T07:21:29-08:00

I wanted to ask for opinions about a certain pattern of behaviour I've observed. It may be that only I am bothered by it, in which case we can all forget about it. If not, I wonder what can be done to discourage it.

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).

To anonymous user(s) - please be civil.

2013-02-20T20:38:32-08:00

Dear anonymous MO users: I'd like to reiterate that you are expected to be extra polite on MathOverflow.

[intervening text no longer necessary]

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

Downvoting correct answers

2013-02-25T13:18:43-08:00

Why do people downvote correct answers to questions? For example, http://mathoverflow.net/questions/122800/products-of-boolean-algebras-and-probability-measures-thereon had an accepted answer with 0 upvotes and a correct answer by Todd Trimble, both of which have been downvoted. Todd makes the apt comment asking why the answer was downvoted and nobody has responded. The same happened to my accepted answer to http://mathoverflow.net/questions/122217/which-limits-does-group-cohomology-commute-with/122220#122220. I think it looks a bit bad when correct, accepted answers get downvoted to 0 because people may think the consensus is that the response was wrong.

Are there good reasons to downvote a correct answer?

Can someone undelete a question please

2013-02-13T16:47:54-08:00

Unless I've gone crazy there was a question a bit earlier about the number of idempotent matrices over Z/m. It had 5 or so upvotes and I gave what I believe to be a correct answer. The question now seems to be gone. Given that I put some effort into thinking about and answering the question it would be nice to have it back. Would super users be willing to vote to undelete.

Text Building Blocks

2012-12-31T03:09:42-08:00

In a recent thread, Todd Trimble made the suggestion:

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.

Why this deletion by the OP?

2012-12-31T16:09:41-08:00

The OP deleted

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?

Excessive editing

2012-11-20T16:42:37-08:00

User J.H.S. has bumped several old, dead, questions to the front page with trivial edits. Is there a way to curb this?

Link to paper with possible error

2012-10-15T09:25:10-07:00

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/109734/deformation-retraction-of-the-complement contains a link to a paper with a possible error. I commented there with

"It might be more appropriate to remove the link to the paper, and just stick to the mathematical question. If it turns out there is an actual error in the paper, then the author could be contacted privately."

Do we agree? Is this something a moderator should get involved in?

The question I want to ask has already been asked, but not adequately answered. What should I do?

2012-09-17T15:10:32-07:00

I want to ask:

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/11239/conformal-maps-of-doubly-connected-regions-to-annuli

I am interested in explicit formulas for the radius r described in the question. For example, if I give you parameterizations for the inner curve and the outer curve of a topological annulus, I want to be able to compute the radius of the annulus r

"manually closing" questions

2012-07-27T02:17:04-07:00

The original author of What is Penrose’s Twister theory? edited the question and added manually the word "[closed]" to the title. As a result, the question looks like it's closed at first sight, but in fact it isn't.

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.

Disappearing question.

2012-06-02T12:58:41-07:00

I answered a question earlier today (2012/06/02 GMT) about minimal position of a curve with its image under a Dehn multi-twist. Now the question seems to have disappeared. The question was perfectly fine, and I had to think a bit to give a clear answer. So I am left wondering what happened to the question and to my answer! I think that the question was asked by a 1 point user, perhaps named sean. The question was definitely crossposted to SE - the question seems to have also disappeared from that website... it is all very confusing.

Must we raise the dead for umlaut's sake

2012-05-29T08:29:51-07:00

I don't know how much bumping I can take.

Worse uncorrected details pass unrighted

This zeal for fixing spelling? Not delighted.

Are "open questions" acceptable? How should they be treated.

2009-10-22T20:04:44-07:00

We had an example recently, http://mathoverflow.net/questions/1973/is-there-a-complex-structure-on-the-6-sphere, where the commenters seemed to think the question was inappropriate. I'm a little surprised to find myself agreeing -- we don't just want people copying and pasting lists of open problems into mathoverflow... Or maybe we do?

For now, I've edited that post to include the tag "open-problem", and invited the commenters over here.

Downvoting well intentioned, but inappropriate questions from first time posters

2012-03-28T13:09:24-07:00

Today there have been a lot of questions by first time posters that were off-topic for this site, but were neither crank questions nor (obvious) homework. For example, there was a question about how to get into a math grad program from an electrical engineer, a question about what little o notation means, etc... All of these questions are off-topic, and were closed as such, usually with a polite comment directing the OP to a more appropriate site. However, each of these also received a down vote. I would ask that we cut a little slack for well-intentioned first time posters who obviously misunderstood the scope of this site (even if it is fairly well-stated in the FAQ) and just politely close the question and direct it to a more appropriate site. It is really the homework and crank questions (and the incomprehensible questions) that need to be discouraged with down votes. At least that is my opinion. Of course all are free to down vote as they see fit.

Why not real names?

2010-04-06T07:41:57-07:00

Why are real names not required for MO? Since this is a site for professional mathematicians and graduate students, I see no reason that anonymous posting should be allowed.

Flagging a post as spam

2012-01-21T17:28:46-08:00

When is it approriate to flag a post as spam? Today I hit the 5 flag limit because of 2 posts on RH, an inductive proof of Goldbach and some other junk. Each of these have aporox -5 votes or more. In general I have flagged as spam things of this sort or undergrad HW where the poster says it is homework. Besides putting a -1 vote does flagging as spam do anything? My hope is that the moderators delete spam but maybe it isn't so.

Citation for questions answered on MO

2012-01-19T09:34:49-08:00

I was wondering, what is the etiquette for citing an answer in MO? Should we just (in a paper) give the example and said something like "We would like to thank John X. Smith for showing us this example in mathverflow.net" ? What is the appropriate etiquette?

Thanks

ruben

sexist (and related) quotations on MO

2011-12-17T09:18:48-08:00

There is a direct motivation for this post (see an addition from some days ago in the colorful language thread, which I just noticed today, in case you want to know) but it is about something that comes up occassionally, so a general question.

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.

Deleting CW answers

2011-12-17T22:16:26-08:00

Mark Sapir posted a facetious answer to the following question:

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/83675/numbers-whose-powers-approach-integers-closed

Since the answer was CW, I decided to edit the answer to replace what was there with a sensible answer.
(The question was not the greatest, but it was related to some interesting mathematics. I may not have answered if the question
was simply closed (a comment mentioned Pisot numbers) but in the circumstances...)
Anyway, it seems that Mark Sapir had second thoughts and deleted his answer, even though the content was now (essentially) 100% written
by someone else. Software questions aside, I would like to suggest that marking an answer as "CW" relinquishes editorial control over the answer,
and that it is poor form to subsequently delete the question when others have made possibly substantial efforts. (On this occasion the edit only
took me 5 minutes or so, but I can imagine other scenarios...)

What to do if you've "answered" the wrong question?

2011-12-09T06:25:36-08:00

This query is regarding the following MO question: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/82851/local-kahlerforms-on-complex-manifold/82863#82863

The question was (and in some sense, still is) vaguely worded. I had interpreted it as something more complicated (and arguably much more interesting) than it really was. As a result, I posted a partial answer, explaining what some of the difficulties are, and asking for much more details in the specific situation that the OP was interested in.

In the end, though, it seems that the OP was actually asking something else, at least I think so. Perhaps not.

My question, however, is this: if one posts a (partial) answer to a question, and then discovers that the question was really asking something else, should one delete said answer, or leave it there for other users' interest?

In this particular case, I will nevertheless wait for it to become clear if, as I suspect, I was really (partially) answering a different question.

answering a question one thinks should be closed

2011-12-08T10:24:50-08:00

This regards question 82952, a beginner question. An answer appeared, which had a brief sentence with mathematical content, followed by this:

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.

«Tell me all about» questions

2011-11-23T22:27:22-08:00

IIRC the FAQ used to say that questions of thje form «tell me about X» (which are not even questions) are a bad fit for MO. This is probably subsumed under the MathOverflow is not an encyclopedia item in the FAQ, but I think it would be useful to be a bit more explicit, as this kind of questions pops up quite often and it would then be useful to be able to point to the FAQ more concretely.

(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...)

Should a mathematician be a robot?

2011-11-08T07:22:49-08:00

Dear colleagues,

Recently I asked a question in MO about axiomatization of quantum mechanics, it's here: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/80146/is-the-mendeleev-table-explained-in-quantum-mechanics-closed It was almost immediately closed as "off topic". Three moderators reacted to my protest, and one of them, Dmitri Pavlov suggested to continue our talk here, in Meta. That's why I write here. From what moderators wrote me I understood that questions like "is this an axiomatization of quantum mechanics?" are not accepted here. Mark Sapir even wrote that my question is senseless (however, he lately removed all his comments). This is very interesting for me, because this is a sign of some philosophy, and I even think that I understand the philosophical idea that moderators have in mind when justifying their actions -- this must be the idea that before asking questions to specialists you should first prove that you are a specialist in this area as well. It can be called a "philosophy of robots" (I tried to explain this in that thread, you can look).

I am a partisan of the idea that misunderstangs between people are always results of philosophy, so I would be happy if somebody will explain me the idea of why questions like mine are "off topic" here.

Sergei Akbarov

Insisting on correcting an answer

2011-10-31T16:02:09-07:00

Suppose I see an answer which is pretty old (let's say older than a few months)

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?

Is it OK to upvote a question just for not being complete nonsense?

2011-10-03T17:05:31-07:00

Alright, I just started visiting MO and want to behave in a consistent way. This stems from the question

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/77068/is-there-a-finite-dimensional-vector-space-which-dimension-cannot-be-found-clos

which I upvoted and someone with a lot of reputation was surprised by this so I figured I must've done something wrong, so I decided to ask here. There's plenty of similar threads in meta but I couldn't find my specific issue. In my week or so here I've seen plenty of questions that seem to be homework, or someone didn't even try to solve it or just complete crackpot questions. I figured that having one upvote tells me (at least to my mind) that the question is not in those categories and might be a real question, so when I see a question that seems to be an honest question (even if it's not well posed as the one in the link) I upvote it. Should I stop doing so? should I only vote questions that are well posed AND are useful?

How long to wait before reposting unanswered math.SE question to MO?

2011-09-21T03:53:54-07:00

I apologize if this is essentially a duplicate question; I did try the search function to try to find an answer to my question, to no avail.

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)?

no effort by OP

2011-09-05T13:05:26-07:00

Just a general complaint. I seem to be seeing more, or at least noticing more, questions at about a U. S. Master's level, where the OP has made no apparent effort. Two current are:

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/74554/does-such-a-3-by-3-matrix-exist

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/74528/how-to-prove-uniqueness-of-matrix-polynomial-and-its-eigendecomposition

I suppose it is particularly noticeable with matrix questions, which usually appear cheesy anyway.

"Erratum for Cassels-Froehlich" thread.

2010-01-11T14:14:10-08:00

I started http://mathoverflow.net/questions/11437/erratum-for-cassels-froehlich, half-expecting it to be closed very quickly. I decided I didn't care if it got closed though, because it was a good way to raise awareness of an issue that is currently important to me. I finished my post with something of the form "if this gets closed then just email me".

To my genuine surprise, (1) the post got lots of upvotes (17 at last count) and (2) I've collected a huge set of errata for this book that someone else had but hadn't as far as I know made public until I asked. On the other hand I still feel that this is sort-of an abuse of the system. I used MO because I know there are lots of number theorists reading and I thought I'd get some useful errata for CUP and for me. This seems to me to be a very narrow-interest thread: it's about 1 book, and anyone who doesn't own that book will surely not be particularly interested. It's a classic book though, and for those that do own the book, the thread is doing them a great service. Also, the authors/editors aren't going to compile their own typos: most if not all the contributors are retired and some are dead, including Froehlich, and Cassels is now very old and no longer active.

I am sort-of bewildered by this. I would far rather be seeing fun problems on MO in general, but on the other hand I am loving this thread because a typo in a hard book can sometimes kill a graduate student, and the fewer typos the better.

Using MO as testing ground for conjectures

2011-08-10T14:43:36-07:00

We've had a few questions by Victor Porton (http://mathoverflow.net/users/4086/porton) which are a bit strange in that they are more or less statements of conjectures endogenous to his theory (to which he always links: his theory has a webpage)

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

Asking MO vs. asking someone personally

2011-08-06T13:28:54-07:00

Suppose you have a mathematical question, and you know a small number of specific people who you believe can answer that question. Suppose at least some of these people regularly participate on MO. Also suppose that the question is one that (possibly with some small amount of work to make it slightly more general) is suitable for MO.

What are the benefits and drawbacks of asking this question on MO rather than e-mailing the specific people? I am interested in answers to this question both from the viewpoint of the mathematics community as a whole, as well as from the viewpoint of the questioner.

Spam on the "tablets" thread

2011-06-30T08:52:06-07:00

The question http://mathoverflow.net/questions/37425/best-tablet-computer-for-mathematics is getting clogged up with spam answers by user Abouttablets.

6 answers by one person

2011-06-24T13:27:28-07:00

On my question http://mathoverflow.net/questions/25161/why-is-lebesgue-integration-taught-using-positive-and-negative-parts-of-functions/68747#68747, one person has lately been posting answers repeatedly. They keep getting downvotes, which is appropriate given their content, but I'm curious if someone can be blocked from posting answers to a question. Or can answers with no redeeming content be deleted by someone else (I don't know how to do it myself)?

Upvoting closed questions?

2011-06-18T10:31:41-07:00

There are occasionally questions which are closed, but which continue to be voted up. What is the etiquette surrounding this - is post-closure voting enabled so as to re-open questions if there is sufficient interest? Are we helping if we continue to up-vote such questions, rather than post to Meta about re-opening?

For example, the post http://mathoverflow.net/questions/68146/tell-me-about-system-design-closed clearly elicits positive responses - it's been voted up at least 15 times since it was closed. Without betraying what I personally opine about this example, it would seem people like the question, and ergo want to see the answer.

Discussing preprints on MO

2011-06-03T13:23:06-07:00

I think it's appropriate to have a meta thread on this issue. Here are a few examples:

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

attribution on MO contact undergraduate project

2011-06-05T16:50:36-07:00

It appears one of my papers has been accepted pending revision of the final section, which is going to be shortened and renamed "Concluding Remarks.". I told my co-author again about some similar, very pretty, results I worked up from data sent to me through an MO question by young Nick Salter. The data was collected for a Summer REU project at Clemson, anyway, here are many links:

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/8326/is-there-an-approach-to-understanding-solution-counts-to-quadratic-forms-that-doe

http://www.math.clemson.edu/~kevja/

http://www.math.clemson.edu/~kevja/REU/2009/Participants.html

http://www.math.clemson.edu/~kevja/REU/2009/Research.html

http://www.math.clemson.edu/~kevja/REU/2009/mod_forms_reu_write_up.pdf

The short story is that I contacted Salter, always cc'ing Kevin James. There is no evidence that James ever read any of my emails, certainly he never replied to me. Salter sent me a three page Latex summary of his own and his raw computer data. I told him a different way to look at the data, what I believed it meant in the end, and the very nice identities I found. I suppose I thought I could coach him through positive integral forms, genera, and the Siegel weighted representation measure. At that point Salter replied that he had lost interest in the project.

So, any help with language and, especially, Latex and Bibtex for this would be appreciated. If I cannot satisfy my co-author that this will raise no eyebrows, then it simply will not be included, as there is then no adequate reason to disturb an accepted paper.

Adding relevant links to TeX-SX.

2011-04-10T13:14:16-07:00

This feels as though it should be okay, but I thought I'd mention it here in case there were any objections that I hadn't thought of. The question http://mathoverflow.net/questions/61227/how-to-write-a-multiple-choice-test-book-with-latex was closed with comments saying that it would fit better on http://tex.stackexchange.com. I saw that (presumably) the questioner took that advice and the question was asked there. So I added a link to the question on TeX-SX to the top of the question on MO, so that anyone who sees the question here will know where to go to on TeX-SX.

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.

The Lamentations of Math Graduates

2011-03-30T20:00:06-07:00

This post might as well have its own meta thread. I'm honestly tempted to delete it; there's not even a pretense of containing a question, just a lot of stuff about what a terrible idea grad school is.

Editing other people's answers

2011-03-27T14:52:56-07:00

With enough reputation points you can edit other people's questions and answers. My question is: When is this practice appropriate?

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.

Suggestions for compulsive editors

2011-03-24T05:05:13-07:00

I'm sure the first I'll receive is: Don't compulsively edit.

I'll make one, also: Perhaps draft your answers/questions on wordpress, and then import them when you like what you see. (Wordpress has that annoying $latex _______$ format, though.)

Anyhow, I'm someone who's never really happy with what he has written (usually with good reason) and therefore always returns to edit it. It is somewhat embarrassing that doing this always bounces whatever question (or answer) I have edited to the top of the page. Does anyone else have this problem? How do you deal with it?

Edit: I just checked out the question 'Drafts' asked here on meta a little while ago. Let me just say that this would be a complete solution to the problem I'm bringing up here!!! Please implement it!

Retagging

2010-07-06T18:36:22-07:00

Is there not a way to do massive retagging without bumping questions to the frontpage? Jose (José, I guess...) Brox has added the 'visual-math' tag to quite a few questions, bumping out half of the active list.

Questions spoiled by comments

2011-02-09T02:15:22-08:00

I'd like to voice my frustration with two common types of comments on questions that I think often make MathOverflow less useful. First, someone often writes the answer to a question into the comments. This makes the question difficult to answer without looking like you're stealing credit. Second, people can be very quick to say that a question is too basic and say that it belongs in math.stackexchange.com. Both of these habits tend to come across as supercilious or guarded, even though the intention can be more reasonable than that.

I think that it would be useful to have a statement in the FAQ that people shouldn't scribble answers into the comments. Even if one does it for the noble reason that it's only speculation or could only be the easy part of the question, it often still complicates things and comes across as false modesty.

As for the referrals to math.SE, I think that the bold part in the FAQ that MathOverflow is for "research-level math questions" is slightly overstated. A graduate-level question, unless it is truly standard or homework like, is typically close enough to research-level to be fine. Moreover, people sometimes refer a question to math.SE just because they underestimated it, and yet it comes across as raising the bar ever higher. Roughly speaking the division between MO and math.SE is going to be graduate and above vs undergraduate and below, and I think that the FAQ should explain that more carefully. Otherwise, the day may come when MO's standards are so high that no questions still qualify.

Requiring identity before answering

2011-02-04T20:10:08-08:00

No one has responded to a certain MO question which seems to me a reasonable question and I am considering providing one. Probably the question is not a homework problem, but it could be, and I am discouraged by a previous post of the MO.

Would it violate MO etiquette for me to post something like this:

1. Write an answer if you are not a student taking a course in the subject of your question, or

2. give you hints if you are a student and this is not a homework problem.

If you do not want to identify yourself on MO, send me an email.

EDIT 8 Feb 2011: I edited out the identifying information. This may make some responses incomprehensible.

Why do I answer poorly posed questions by anonymous users?

2011-01-28T00:05:40-08:00

For the latest example, see http://mathoverflow.net/questions/53465/about-schauder-basis .

The original question, except for failing to include the obviously necessary assumption that the group is metrizable, is a not unreasonable one (as contrasted to being a reasonable one) for someone who does not have the requisite background. Since I could answer without thought, I did.

The follow-up

"Suppose Γ is a comapct Lie Group， G is its dual， then I want to ask what can we say about G? "

"Of course Γ and G should be Abelian"

by the OP annoyed me as well as Yemon. Still, I gave an answer. Why? Because the thread is read by people who might like to know about the result of Szarek's and I was glad to have the opportunity to bring it to their attention.

Should I have instead

1. Ignored the question, or

2. Voted to close?

I have mixed feelings. I do not want to encourage poor questions on the one hand, but I like to take advantage of the opportunity to "educate".

Deleting an answer to shed downvotes?

2011-01-24T06:55:29-08:00

I'm fairly certain that this answer http://mathoverflow.net/questions/40082/why-do-we-teach-calculus-students-the-derivative-as-a-limit/53042#53042 was posted over the weekend and received several down-votes; it seems that Misha has simply deleted the downvoted version and reposted an identical answer. Am I right about this, and if so, what's the appropriate thing to do?

What do you do, when on a different forum...

2011-01-27T06:10:55-08:00

During a recent exchange with a MO member on IRC, he made it very clear that he had no respect for me or the field that I study. As a result of this he was banned from this particular channel, and just generally lost it. Since this particular exchange I've discovered that many old posts I've made on here which he has replied too, or commented on have received exactly two down votes, from him and what I assume is another account of his. This particular individual is very vindictive, manipulative, and immature. Is there anywhere I can register a complaint? Or is there any method I can use to insure that he doesn't have the ability to post or comment on anything that I do?

What to do with answers to an off-topic question

2011-01-22T22:08:57-08:00

I vaguely remember seeing a discussion on meta along the same lines, but I haven't been able to find it. This question was closed as too localised, but a few minutes prior to closure, it received an answer that points to an undergraduate group theory book. The person who answered has also asked a fair few very elementary questions in the past few days. If the rationale behind closing is to not encourage these types of questions, then should undergrad level answers that managed to sneak in before closure also be deleted? Downvoted? Neither?

Minor and/or repeated edits

2011-01-17T11:44:45-08:00

Every once in a while I have the urge to make a small edit to an old answer of mine, but the nature of the edit does not seem to me to justify bumping the question to the front page. Is there some way to make minor edits to an answer without bumping it? If not, is there some community standard about when such edits are appropriate? (I wasn't able to find one, looking through old meta comments.)

In this case, I'm thinking of adding a small discussion about wild vs. tame ramification to this answer (http://mathoverflow.net/questions/51905/how-to-picture-mathbbc-p/51912#51912), which seems to me not to warrant bumping the question, but I've had this urge a few times in the past.

Accepting an answer for a community-wiki question

2011-01-01T13:18:45-08:00

Ideally, is one supposed to accept an answer even for a community-wiki question for which, by definition, there is no single right answer? I looked at a few of the most popular big-list questions on MO and did not see a de facto consensus on the matter. I ask because common sense suggests that it is ridiculous for me to, say, accept one of the 50+ answers to my recent question about the Museum of Mathematics as the "right answer"; at the same time, I get the vibe that one is always "supposed" to accept an answer unless no satisfactory answers are provided.

"Name dropping" on MO and beyond

2010-12-19T20:44:33-08:00

I'd like to highlight and ask about one of the many issues discussed on http://tea.mathoverflow.net/discussion/843/ , and in particular to have a more narrowly focused thread. Namely, I'm wondering for my own writing, speaking, and interacting in the mathematics world: what ways should / shouldn't I refer to other mathematicians?

I know that I do the following:

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.
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.
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)

Etiquette proposal: one "meta" comment per user per post.

2010-12-20T09:07:22-08:00

I've been wishing for a while that we could reduce the level of "meta" noise in the comments on the main site. (By "meta" here I mean anything whose meaning or intent is contingent on the particular nature of mathoverflow itself, rather than mathematics per se.)

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 to discuss this question. All further meta discussion should take place there."

What to do when answers change the question?

2010-12-16T00:43:49-08:00

It's a sad fact of life on MathOverflow that sometimes you get an answer (often a good one) that makes you realize you asked the wrong question. We don't seem to have a really established policy on what to do in this situation, and probably we can't really expect to come up with one. Still, I'd feel better if I had a better read on the community's opinion on this matter.

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?

Am I a bully?

2010-12-09T00:43:13-08:00

From time to time, MO will see a question at (or below) the level of an exercise in an intro undergrad course. The question will be closed, fast, but an answer may get posted before closure. On a couple of occasions, I've left a comment on the answer, asking (politely) whether we want to encourage the asking of this sort of question. On both occasions, the answer disappeared - I assume the person who posted it deleted it, and I assume that was, at least in part, after reflecting on my comment. Well, that's what I was after, so I should be happy, but I also worry, just a little, that the answerer, and others who witness the exchange, might think I'm being a bully. So I put the question before meta, hoping to be reassured that what I've done has not been a breach of etiquette, but ready to take my lumps if the collective opinion is that I've overstepped a line.

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.

Removing tags on closed questions

2010-11-07T12:45:20-08:00

For some time we have taken the habit of removing tags from closed questions. I personally never saw the necessity for that, but I appreciate the effort to keep MO clean. Recently, there have been a few instances where I had to restore deleted tags from reopened questions. Albeit this is a minor annoyance, I wonder if tag removal is perhaps a little too hasty in some cases.

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?

Troll alert

2010-10-17T21:00:28-07:00

That's the guy!

Take a look at all of his answers.

How long to wait before accepting an answer?

2010-11-22T08:42:58-08:00

I just left a comment at http://mathoverflow.net/questions/46949/justifying-the-definition-of-arclength as well about this, but that's no place to have a conversation. The question was open for about an hour when I found it and wrote my answer, but by the time I was finished (still about an hour after the question was asked) one of the previous answers had already been accepted. I left my comment and Steven Gubkin replied and wondered about the etiquette; conveniently, there is such a category here at mmo. (I have lurked around here for a while and thought I remembered there being such a thread already, but I can't find it.)

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?

Reposting questions

2010-11-13T07:42:17-08:00

I've run the mailing list Number Theory Net since 1986. It's a fairly low volume list with a membership of about 1400 including a number of prominent Number theorists. The posts are usually in two categories: announcements (e.g. job postings, conference announcements, etc.) and questions and answers. The latter are the kinds of things which would be very appropriate for MO. I've thought, over the past few months, that it would be really helpful to repost these questions (I'd like to post them under the name of the poster but I realize that that brings up all sorts of other issues) on MO for a number of reasons: (1) having a discussion on the web is less intrusive than being bombarded by email, (2) It would open things up to a larger audience. (3) the style of discussion on MO -- with comments, etc. -- is qualitatively much different than on a mailing list. Of course I could just suggest to such posters that they go to MO. Another advantage for me is that I could fob off the occasional problem of crackpots, or incoherent posts to the collective wisdom of MO -- such things would get downrated and closed off quickly, or perhaps forced to edit to make things more clear. So what do people think about the reposting idea?

Victor

anonymity in ratings

2010-11-08T09:10:24-08:00

As far as I can tell, when one gives an up- or down-vote to a question or an answer, one does so anonymously. What is the advantage of such anonymity?

In the thread titled "most memorable titles", quite a large number of people answered simply by citing published papers with memorable titles, some of them employing humor to get the reader's attention or to help the reader remember them. "A Midsummer Knot's Dream" got a net 15 up votes, "The Joy of Sets" got 11 (that one's a book, not a paper), "Integrity of Ghosts" got 7, etc. Some were not particularly humorous but were memorable for other reasons, e.g. "Can one hear the shape of a drum?".

My first participation in that thread cited a paper by T. D. Parsons titled "Ancestors, Cardinals, and Representatives" with a link to its jstor URL, and like most postings in that thread, said nothing more. It immediately got one down vote, which seems irrational by itself, but that was followed almost instantly by someone going through various of my postings in various other threads and down-voting them. So I added a comment my "Ancestors" posting asking the anonymous person who did that to step forward and explain how it was so different from other replies in that thread that it would get such a different reaction. Several days have passed and that has not happened. The anonymous down-voter remains anonymous. Under the circumstances as a whole, that behavior strikes me as impolite. Would I be mistaken in thinking that?

The thread did not ask ONLY, nor even primarily, for such titles, but those are what have been posted. By I posted something else in reply to the question posed: "I was wondering if the MO-users would be willing to share their wisdom with me on what makes the title of a paper memorable for them; or perhaps just cite an example of title they find memorable?" It was a title that have considered for a book that would exist if I were to collect and extend some things I've written (only one of them an actual published paper, which I didn't cite). That title is _Calculus_Made_Honest_. It got three down-votes, and again I asked the anonymous person to explain his or her objections, and again that has not happened. But Robin Chapman posted a comment that I was off-topic BECAUSE I didn't cite a particular existing published paper (as if the question had asked simply for that). Since his comment doesn't make sense and shows only that he didn't understand the original question in the thread, at least some slight suspicion that he is that anonymous person could fall on him, and if it's not Robin Chapman, then he would be to some extent the victim of the practice of doing these things anonymously. Is that consideration outweighed by some particular advantages of anonymity?

"What if somebody posts his/her thesis problem?" case study

2010-11-05T11:54:53-07:00

When I talk to people about MO, they sometimes ask what happens if somebody posts their thesis problem. See, for example, the "diploma thesis" meta thread. My usual answers are that (1) good thesis problems are very different from good MO questions, so it shouldn't come up much, and (2) there's a public "paper trail" so the possibility of academic dishonesty isn't any larger than anywhere else.

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.

Potentially offensive usernames?

2010-11-05T04:52:13-07:00

A question was just flagged for moderator attention, with the text "I wouldn't mind if somebody replaced this user's name. Seriously.", referring to this user.

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.

"MO-level"

2010-10-06T13:57:39-07:00

Maybe we should try to use more neutral wordings to deflect questions which are not "MO-level", as "MO-level" sounds a bit elitist?! :)

It would be funny if it wasn't so high school level............

2010-10-29T16:37:50-07:00

To All, I was now suspended without notice and for no reason. I don't even CARE why anymore. But it's a sad statement about this website. I did nothing wrong. I even deleted a post for fear the exchange between myself and the posters-they know who they are,they're the ones chuckling right now. Let's see-the moderators found it offensive that I disagreed that infinite combinatorics was combinatorics,but set theory? And since I wrote it in all caps for emphasis,that was grounds for being suspended? It's pathetically ludicrous. I guess it's a sign of the times,especially after this Tuesday. You don't need a reason to abuse people that disagree with you anymore. Sincerely, Andrew L.

Vote to close or vote down?

2009-12-10T01:06:42-08:00

Having 3000 rep, I have two options when I don't like a question: I can vote to close it or I can vote it down. The incentive for me, bizarrely, is to vote to close. Quite apart from the margin reputation cost of voting down, when I vote to close then I'm measuring my opinion against the other high reputation people of MO - and I have a higher respect for these people's opinion than of Joe MOwer - so I can better measure how my opinions of MO match against the ideal standard. To be facetious for a second (who, me?), I'd rather measure my "MO impact factor" in milliSpeyers (about 491) than metaEuclids (page 53 in the user list, if you're wondering).

How does one deal with really, really bad answers?

2010-10-13T12:46:57-07:00

For example, this one is obviously a joke, and is barely tolerable as a comment. Should it be flagged? (as what?) Should it just be down-voted?

How long can a MathOverflow question be?

2010-10-08T00:53:01-07:00

I am considering adding to one of my questions to revive interest in it, and to give out more
information which may stimulate an answer. However, the more information will add greatly to the
length of the question, and will introduce related questions, on which I welcome input.

I looked at the advice on how to ask, and while it encourages focus, it does not discourage length.
I like to think my style is readable enough, and will follow the guidelines, but I have heard from
few critics about any of my writing besides the taglines I use in posts and comments. Would
the MathOverflow community read a lengthy addition to a previous question of mine?

For reference, the longest question I've posted is also my first. It is at
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/31337/how-do-i-fix-someones-published-error .
I measure it as about 4 screens in length. The question I wish to lengthen is at
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/37679/erik-westzynthiuss-cool-upper-bound-argument-update .
I measure this one at about 3 screens in length, and may potentially add up to 6 more screens
worth to it. Assuming consistency in quality, will it turn out to be too long to ask?

Although I am interested primarily in human tolerances, if the software limits posts to under
8000 bytes, I may have a different problem. Information on the SE software tolerance is also desired.

Gerhard "Am I Saying Too Much" Paseman, 2010.10.08

Lattices

2010-09-18T16:24:04-07:00

The 'lattice' tag is being used at least a couple of rather unrelated senses of the word... Any suggestions on how to turn things into something more useful?

Are these duplicates?

2010-09-15T01:09:34-07:00

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/38763/is-lp-mathbbr-minus-the-zero-function-contractible and http://mathoverflow.net/questions/198/how-do-you-show-that-s-infty-is-contractible both cover the same ground. Both got satisfactory answers, but it's interesting to note that the separation in time also led to a separation in users in that I was probably the first on the scene who knew of the earlier question.

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?

Question in the title

2010-09-14T12:06:48-07:00

I'd love if the FAQ contained the observation that it is nice to repeat the text of the title when the title is the whole question.

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.

Deciding what to vote up

2010-08-31T08:58:08-07:00

This is a set of questions rather than a comment. Basically, how do I decide what to vote up? Should I vote for every question that catches my attention enough for me to click on it? No---particularly if I read it and find it poor. But what if I read it and find it outside my range of understanding? Still no, although its failure to get my vote reflects my ignorance rather than its merit. Suppose that I understand the question at least enough to know that it's well posed, but I don't know the field enough to judge whether it's trivial or absurdly difficult. Perhaps I should leave it to the experts to judge. What if the question is sound, to my knowledge, but too technical or specialized to interest me when I read the details? I guess that most people would not vote up in such a case, and so I tend follow them, but I might vote if there is something about the question that appeals to me. At the other end of the spectrum are the "pop" questions that everyone likes, including me. should I toss my vote onto the already towering pile of votes? What are your criteria for voting?

Delete or close?

2010-08-27T11:03:25-07:00

A long time ago I asked this question. I am pretty convinced now that the question does not have an answer that I hoped to find.

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.)

Consistent and well-defined policy in closing questions

2010-08-21T03:05:16-07:00

Being a low-rep and not very active user, I don't know if I should comment on matters like these, but I believe that the policy of closing questions should be consistent and well defined. That's because it is an act against the efforts of the questioner, the answerers and possibly the to-be answerers, who are thinking about how to write down a good answer, while the question is being closed. I don't say questions should not be closed when needed, but claim that closing should be well-justified, and reasons should not be subjective-and-argumentative with respect to a majority of the reasonable users.

There reason I'm writing this now is because I think two questions by Kelsey L are closed by totally wrong reasons:

1) http://mathoverflow.net/questions/36224/what-jobs-are-there-in-pure-math-besides-being-a-professor-closed
*closed as not a real question*

My comment: This is a real question. There are many examples of this sort of questions. It should be closed as "exact duplicate"

2) http://mathoverflow.net/questions/36256/noise-filtering-closed
*closed as spam*

My comment: This is not spam. The other acts of the user do not justify closing a question as spam. It could be closed as off-topic, or too localized.

Again, I don't say this particular user is not a troll. I just say that, a consistent and well-defined policy will not upset the more respected questioners in the future if their questions get closed. This way, it will be taken less personally. Maybe a catalog of typical good examples could be listed under each of the reasons like off-topic, too localized, etc. This could be included in the faq, or it could pop up when a user presses the 'close' button.

In summary, closing questions should not be arbitrary or based on personal tastes, and this message should be conveyed to the users wherever possible.

Simultaneous close votes to all my questions

2010-08-21T16:08:16-07:00

Interestingly, today almost all of my questions got both a downvote and a close vote, with no comment left. This happened right after I opened a meta thread about having a well defined policy in closing questions. Could someone explain me what might be going on? Is someone trying to give me a message that question closing is personal and arbitrary, and it will stay the way it is?

http://mathoverflow.net/users/1229/agcl

Why do people often answer a question as a comment?

2010-08-16T08:44:40-07:00

(I also have a relevant post about this in the feature request thread.) I don't understand why correct, relevant answers to questions are often posted as comments, instead of as answers. There are several reasons to post an answer as an answer:
(1) The answer is registered as an answer, for archival purposes.
(2) The questioner can officially accept the answer.
(3) Readers can vote on whether the answer answers the question.
(4) Subsequent comments about the answer are indented beneath the answer, so there's no ambiguity about whether the subsequent comment refers to the answer.

private message

2010-08-14T07:14:24-07:00

I posted a comment that I believe is off-topic for mathoverflow, but useful for the person who asked the question.
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/35563/best-algorithm-to-use-for-a-bus-train-transport-route-planner

I would have rather sent a private message, such as an email.
1. Is there a way to send private messages on mathoverflow?
2. If not, should I delete my off-topic comment?

Dont arsk us about:

2010-08-10T07:55:54-07:00

rocks
troll's with sticks
All sorts of dragons
Mrs Cake
Huje green things with teeth
Any kinds of black dogs with orange eyebrows
Rains of spaniel's
fog
Mrs Cake
Proofs of P ≠ NP

A question on tagging

2010-08-02T12:30:47-07:00

Can I tag things somewhat inappropriately so the proper people see it on their newsfeeds?

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).

Not providing any background in questions

2010-07-29T18:30:16-07:00

I just posed a question in which I didn't bother to give any background whatsoever. My reasoning is: If someone doesn't understand my question from the get-go, then they're probably not going to have an answer, whether or not I provide background. So I might as well spare myself the trouble of typing out the background information.

Do you all consider this bad etiquette?

I don't appreciate being made the dancing bear in this forum.

2010-07-26T13:53:50-07:00

Scott Morrison just booted me off again for 2 days. Before I even had a chance to respond to my previous long meta post. Apparently the reasons were that 1) Waldim Zudilin took offense to a compliment I paid my teacher Melvyn Nathason as one of today's"preeminent number theorists" and 2) My commentary on the notes supposedly left by Fermat on his famous theorum was off-topic. Meanwhile,such professional and nonpersonal comments such as these were left:

@Andrew L : I want to expand my comment in the hope that it will help you. What you posted is "wikipedia level knowledge". There are times when such general comments are helpful, especially if the post is obviously the work of a beginner. However, the current post is not asking for background and asks a very technical question : how do we know the date of Fermat's undated marginal note? The author of the question demonstrates enough knowledge that it is clearly unnecessary (and maybe a little insulting) to post background knowledge that most people who understand the question would know. – Andy Putman 14 hours ago

@Andrew L - the word you are looking for is "theorem". – Gerry 13 hours ago

Nah,it's strictly professional, all this. Sure it is. One comment really gave me pause and reinforced my reaction:

Wow. You guys should really lighten up. – Angelo 4 hours ago

I couldn't agree more,Angelo-but you better be careful before they decide you're not acting appropriately either for not totally agreeing with them and suspend you,too.

And on top of all this,it looks like my lengthy response here-which was pretty civil given my level of anger and frustration-has officially landed me on Scott Morrison's personal shit list.I hope I'm wrong about this,but the quick trigger he booted me off on given this ridiculous incident makes me think so. He's not someone I need as an enemy over something this trivial.

I'm not welcome here. It's clear since the reasons for kicking me off have steadily become more trivial and pointless as time has gone on. There was no good reason to suspend me over this. NONE. This is for someone's entertainment,nothing more.

I'm done. Good luck with this forum. Very well done. You won't be hearing from me again anytime soon.

Sincerely,
Andrew L.

Links to possibly copyrighted material

2010-07-26T06:45:34-07:00

We've gotten a couple of moderator flags on this post about the link to Halmos's book. In all previous intra-moderator discussions on this subject, our position has always been that we won't worry about what people are linking to (as long as its on-topic) until we got a take-down notice (which we never have), but this is in part due to our own ideological opinions on copyright (the original of Naive Set Theory was written in 1960; if the copyright law in force then had not been changed, it would be in the public domain in a couple of years). Do other people feel differently?

Sockpuppetry

2010-07-14T11:46:17-07:00

The thread
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/31387/what-is-the-situation-with-hilberts-fifth-problem/31820#31820
contains some sockpuppetry, now rendered very confusing because of the merging of two accounts. A short summary is that a user appears to have pretended to be soliciting information, then "discovered" the information in question in the form of some references to his or her own works. This is broadly consistent with the user's habit of posting both questions and answers that consist merely of references to the author's preprints on the arXiv, but is substantially less ethical and more irritating, at least to me. (It also comes packaged with a collection of bizarre insults.) I am curious whether there is a consensus on the appropriate way to deal with such a situation. (I note, for example, that the question has not been closed.)

Full disclosure: the user in question and I have interacted unpleasantly on a couple of other MO threads recently.

"Question closed" edits?

2010-07-10T07:27:28-07:00

As a matter of etiquette, what is the MO policy about "closed" questions? Browsing MO recently I came across two cases

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/28400/an-inequality-question
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/31140/equation-system-question-closed

where the original posters (I assume they are different individuals) "closed" their own questions by replacing the question text with the phrase "question closed". As a personal opinion I feel rather annoyed at this, especially in the first case (where Scott was nice enough to revert the edit and put back the original question text) where the question may be a genuinely interesting one, and the answers and discussions are of some merit. I have been under the (perhaps incorrect, as there's nothing to this effect in the FAQ) impression that part of the reason for MO is as a publicly available and searchable record of what has been discussed. Somewhat reinforcing this notion is the idea that duplicate questions are discouraged. To close a question by essentially deleting the question text is contrary to what I thought of as the spirit of MO (again, I may be under a wrong impression).

What are people's thoughts on this?

Inappropriate language

2010-06-30T18:47:21-07:00

I was shocked to see the four-letter word in the first comment to this question, by the answering person himself. Why do we tolerate such language? I thought this was a site for mathematics professionals, not a children's playground or a sailor's club. (The conversation in the comments also suggests an attempt at gaming the reputation system.)

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?

Policy about closing questions

2009-11-01T13:01:13-08:00

I originally wanted to comment on this closed question but this probably belongs to meta.

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.

Someone's just learnt how to 'edit'

2010-06-22T14:03:57-07:00

Right now (Tue Jun 22 23:02:21 CEST 2010) the front page is filled with minor edits by a user who's just broken through the 2000 barrier. The couple of edits that I checked were minor, one even reversed a grammatical correction by someone else!

Any harm in tags that may not be quite right?

2010-06-12T15:48:41-07:00

Kristal Cantwell added a combinatorial-game-theory tag to my recent question "Do there exist chess positions that require exponentially many moves to reach?" I intentionally left out that tag because the problem, strictly speaking, has nothing to do with the field known as combinatorial game theory. However, it's a problem in combinatorics, and a problem about games, and the kind of people who enjoy combinatorial game theory would probably enjoy this question. OK to keep the tag, or will this kind of sloppiness come back to bite us in the long run? I guess I don't completely understand what the tags are used for.

Constructive downvoting

2010-05-26T14:05:52-07:00

Once in a while, one of my answers will be voted down, but there will be no comment explaining what is wrong with my answer. I would not propose an answer if I did not believe it would be helpful/correct, and I don't think anyone serious in the community would do so either. Wouldn't it be better etiquette to always provide an explanation when downvoting an answer? In particular, the person answering would very much like to know if they made a mistake, what it was. But moreover, everyone who has UPvoted the question might also want to know if it there were problems with it. I try to take the same point of view with students- I don't just tell them they are wrong, but explain to them why and how to fix it. I think such commenting would make the community better. Any thoughts?

-Dave

Best practice for flawed questions

2010-05-23T13:30:42-07:00

Is it better to close flawed questions or to leave them open?

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.

Perceived bullying

2010-05-23T05:22:52-07:00

In the question Fundamental group of the line with doubled origin Akela started by complaining that in other questions people had tried to make his use of mathematical terminology more precise. Moreover this was expressed in a qute bitter way, and I felt it was a completely unnecessary remark, so I told him in the comments. Apparently many other people think so, since currently my comment has 17 upvotes.

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.

Deleting own post, getting points

2010-05-18T18:10:40-07:00

So I posted a silly question (rather, a not entirely trivial question but one that I should have been able to answer myself and that was unlikely to be of interest to those who knew enoughto understand the question) and before anybody answered it or voted on it, I figured out that it was a silly question so I deleted it so as not to waste other people's time. But it seems that my reputation went up in the couple of minutes after I deleted it, without my getting up votes on any other questions or answers, so some people appear to have upvoted the question shortly after it was deleted.

Was it inappropriate to delete my own post? I was partly interested in trying to avoid it cluttering the question list for other people (community-oriented interest), but it was also partly to not be publicly associated with a silly question (selfish interest) that might lose me "reputation" in both senses of the word.

Also, I think I should lose any upvote reputation points (30 based on my estimate) I got on the question (Because if it had stayed on, it would probably have got some compensatory downvotes from the knowledgeable people). The question ID was 25190.

Community wikifying after a while

2010-05-06T03:19:01-07:00

I asked yesterday this question about books on recent history of mathematics. At the moment I decided not to tick the cw box. The rationale was that I honestly thought there may be some answers better than others, and people should be awarded points for that.

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?

Minor edits

2010-05-07T12:16:27-07:00

Occasionally, I notice some very minor typos in one of my answers/questions that is already not in the front page. Also, there are cases where I'm not completely satisfied with my phrasing, and I'd like to make some small changes. The problem is that any edit bumps the question/answer to the front page, and therefore until now I have never made a minor edit.

However, as time passes by I get more and more annoyed by seeing these minor errors/bad choices of phrasing, and I'd really like to know whether making minor edits is legitimate in MO. Of course, I'm not talking about a burst of edits (say, at least one week between minor edits).

Is Mathoverflow becoming less fun?

2010-04-28T22:28:00-07:00

I've noticed that I am spending less and less time on mathoverflow. Somehow, I'm not getting as much enjoyment from the site as I used to. I talked to a few other people who seem to agree. I think it wouldn't be a waste of space to see if other people are noticing this, and (more importantly) whether it can be helped.

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.

Accidental duplicate ... what next?

2010-04-28T13:44:37-07:00

So I just asked http://mathoverflow.net/questions/22837/what-are-the-uses-of-the-homotopy-groups-of-spheres and jc and Andrea spotted that it was sort of related to http://mathoverflow.net/questions/16495/applications-of-homotopy-groups-of-spheres. I like to think that my version was a better question (well, I would, wouldn't I? But it also seems backed-up by the comments and answers to the two questions) and I think it has also garnered better answers.

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

Answering your own question

2010-04-05T05:05:02-07:00

Hi

Sorry if this has come up before, but I am somewhat new to MO and totally now to meta.MO and couldn't find this treated using the search option.

I just came across a somewhat easy question on MO, which had a correct answer attached to it. I read both and though:"yes.. ok.. easy question - easy answer". I then almost moved along for the next adventure, but realized that the answer was given by the same person as the question, but this was not at all evident from the answer. In fact it seemed as though the person was talking to himself in a non-trivial way.

This offended me, especially since the person was given 1 thumb up for the question and 3 thumbs up for the answer, and the answer was given within an hour of the question. I wanted to leave a comment warning others, but wasn't sure what the proper etiquette is?

I am not even sure if I should be offended? But to me it seems like an easy way to build up undeserved rep, because people may not notice this deception (my interpretation).

What is the general opinion of such behavior?

Bait Answers

2010-04-20T08:25:48-07:00

I'm puzzled about the etiquette in this situation. This particular situation seems harmless to me, but I think similar situations can be problematic.

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?

A borderline question

2010-04-05T09:02:58-07:00

Tomorrow it will have been 25 years since Neron died, but I can't find much biographical information on him. The wikipedia article just tells me birth and death dates, and one place of employment. A google search tells me another place of employment, his mathematical genealogy... and not much else. He doesn't have a MacTutor biography and his name only comes up there in the John Tate biography.

To cut to the chase, I was thinking of asking for some biographical data/stories about him in a community wiki question. This seems to be the most likely place to find someone who might have known/worked with him. Moreover, St. Andrews does not seem to solicit requests or suggestions for biographies, so I don't know where else I would ask this.

Of course this question is a borderline question, so I'm asking here first. Would "Biographical Data about Andre Neron" work as a MO question?