There was some talk about making a list of questions to use for people as an example. I think it's an excellent idea (if Anton doesn't have enough time to do that, I'm sure others would be happy to put effort into it).
Now, however, I also think we could do a combined Best of Math Overflow list, that would also contain answers. I see two arguments against such a list:
- It would arbitrarily promote some good questions and answers over other good questions and answers.
- It is unnecessary as votes/favorites/seen count already provides a similar list.
However, I see more arguments for it:
- We do want people to pick up good ideas on writing questions, and people learn best from examples.
- We can put a disclaimer: "this is in many ways a quite random selection" on the list.
- The is no way I know of to search for highest-voted answers.
- Soft-questions are higher represented among highest-voted and highest-seen questions than socially optimal.
- We can include explanations highlighting what exactly we consider worthy of emulation.
- It will increase motivation to provide not only mathematically meaningful, but also highly readable answers.
I had this idea after reading David Speyer's answer to Peter Lee's question What is Grothendieck Riemann Roch for flag variety of Lie algebra; as you might have guessed, if there was such a list, I would nominate David's text to it.
What do you think? I understand that one (e.g. Anton) could be worried about people spending too much energy of "complementary" things, and one could make a case against all "best of" lists, but I think this particular project would be beneficial for the community.
]]>