tea.mathoverflow.net - Discussion Feed (A way to deal with badly-written questions)

Ilya Grigoriev comments on "A way to deal with badly-written questions" (5738)

2010-06-03T10:45:46-07:00

Let me try to express my point in a much shorter form. I think we need to motivate people other than the original poster to edit badly-written questions: the original author is not always the best person to do this, and if this is a community effort, it'll be more effective. Currently, the reputation cap is very high to edit badly-written questions, and people are not encouraged to do this.

Of course, it is a problem if editing the question would mess up the answers. But it might be possible to avoid this just by telling people to be careful when editing badly-written questions, and by retaining high reputation cap to edit well-written questions.

I think this is the problem that "community wiki" questions were meant to solve according to the designers, but they obviously ended up having a completely different role on this site.

Scott Morrison comments on "A way to deal with badly-written questions" (5737)

2010-06-03T09:40:12-07:00

An intermediate solution is for all of us to learn polite ways to say "this question is badly written", and leave more comments. I often ask the poster to provide more context or motivation, and it's easy to phrase this as "you'll get better answers if ...". On the other hand, I think most of my comments about poor grammar or failure to use appropriate capitalisation and punctuation come across very badly. It's hard not to be impatient with people about simple things like this, and harder to couch it as "this will turn out better if ...".

François G. Dorais comments on "A way to deal with badly-written questions" (5736)

2010-06-03T09:26:05-07:00

Noah, editing is a problem when someone posts a good answer to the wrong question.

Noah Snyder comments on "A way to deal with badly-written questions" (5735)

2010-06-03T07:33:58-07:00

People should just rewrite the question! This is why we have the power to edit!

Harry Gindi comments on "A way to deal with badly-written questions" (5732)

2010-06-03T01:27:15-07:00

I disagree that we need another whole voting system. Votes should take into account whether or not a question makes sense and whether or not the user has done the required preliminary work before asking the question (check wikipedia, the nLab, familiar references). People should also not ask questions where the answerer has to fill in any blanks to figure out what the question actually is. This is to discourage, among other things, people asking questions about things with which they aren't really familiar. It's very easy to ask such a question. Simply pick any field of mathematics that you've never studied seriously about which you've heard something cool or interesting sounding.

For example, I know nothing about the standard conjectures, algebraic cycles, motives, etc. However, I've heard cool things about them, and I could very easily ask a question about them that would have a great answer (a great answer I wouldn't understand, no less!). However, the question is bound to be flawed and a waste of the experts' time. This is the impression I got from all of the user in question's posts. When you ask a question, you should expect that you'll understand the answer (this may not always be true, but sometimes problems are harder than they appear).

Voting for the question based on the quality of the answers is madness. On MO, votes should be cast based on the merits of the post itself. The less clear a question is, the more interesting answers it admits, simply because what passes for a relevant answer is less restrictive.

Ilya Grigoriev comments on "A way to deal with badly-written questions" (5730)

2010-06-03T00:53:44-07:00

There are many badly-written questions on mathoverflow, and it seems obvious that the site would be improved if they were rewritten (whether this means that the question is made more pointed & precise, LaTeXing is improved, or paragraph-breaks are introduced). Currently, they either kludge along and prevent better-written questions on the same topics from being asked, or are closed, which mainly results in fresh people looking at them being unable to contribute any interesting answers on one-hand, and also in any good answers already there being forgotten. It seems to me that it's too rare that they are edited and made better questions (unless there is an actual math mistake).

Some other threads on this topic:
http://tea.mathoverflow.net/discussion/409/best-practice-for-flawed-questions/
http://tea.mathoverflow.net/discussion/418/why-is-the-hahnbanach-thorem-so-important/

Here's an outline of an idea of how this could be improved. It's science-fiction so far, but if people like the idea, it could be improved and posted on stackexchange meta. In any case, I'm mainly interested in whether people like this philosophy.

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Apart from voting on a question (which seems so far to mainly represent how much people want it answered), people of certain reputation (more than 100, less than 3000) should also be able to vote on whether "this question is well-written" or "this question is badly-written" and leave comments with their vote. Hopefully, this alone will motivate the author to edit.

If the "badly-written" votes vastly outnumber the good votes, the question should be put in limbo. This should have a few effects:

- It should be removed from the front page, perhaps. It should certainly be added to a separate "limbo" section of the site.
- The reputation cap needed to edit the question should be dramatically lowered.
- It should probably still allow new answers (but people should be warned off by its limbo status)

If the question stays long enough in limbo, it should be closed automatically. If people vote strongly enough it's well-written, it should reopen. But, most importantly: the original author and others should be able to edit it, and when they do they should be able to check a box saying "The question is now good enough to be out of limbo". Then, it should be immediately taken out of limbo. To prevent abuse, the author should only be able to do this twice or thrice, any other person - once, and it should be easier to put the question back in limbo afterwards. Also, perhaps the reputation needed for people to check this box (if they are not the author) should be higher.

There should of course be appropriate reputation bonuses/perhaps penalties for all of this.

I think this should be good enough to motivate people to improve questions, and reward people for doing so. Please say if you think it's a good idea or just deranged rambling of a sleepy mind.