tea.mathoverflow.net - Discussion Feed (Posting questions of others)

Kevin Buzzard comments on "Posting questions of others" (1624)

2010-01-08T15:55:38-08:00

No Ilya, you're fine. I think the question is interesting, and Minhyong and I had a chat about it but didn't get far, and then forgot about it. You were welcome to post it. Everything I say on this site is in the public domain ;-)

Ilya Nikokoshev comments on "Posting questions of others" (1615)

2010-01-08T10:43:39-08:00

@Buzzard, sorry, I didn't put much thought into writing that line — the intention of my post was to say something closer to "the original participants probably wanted to, but knew it's not important that they do it themselves; so they would be happy if somebody else does this".

The part I was focusing on was the conclusion — that you don't mind others posting this question — rather than the exact reasons. I hope I got it right; please let me know if I should have done something differently.

(And I will probably have the 9-to-6 schedule for my non-mathematics job soon, so I hope others will step in and fill in whatever omissions in my own interaction with MO will appear: post related questions, edit my posts, tag my questions, etc.)

Kevin Buzzard comments on "Posting questions of others" (1609)

2010-01-08T06:42:35-08:00

@Ilya:

"I posted as CW (because if original participants didn't post, they probably wanted to, but forgot)".

Here's another possibility: I didn't post Minhyong's question, and neither did he, because we live in the real world, with admin to do and small kids to look after when it gets to 5pm, and neither of care at all about amassing reputation, and we both know full well that there is an army of grad students out there continually on the site who will eventually do the job for us. I think this is much closer to the truth than your guess.

Ilya Nikokoshev comments on "Posting questions of others" (1581)

2010-01-07T17:25:49-08:00

I was wrong: it doesn't really owns questions, it turns out. The discussion still makes it look like it owns all community wiki votes, but it probably doesn't either (only votes from deleted or migrated questions).

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Posting questions of others" (1580)

2010-01-07T17:11:01-08:00

Can you link to a question owned by the community user?

I kind of like the bounty idea, but (1) reputation continues to pour in after the bounty is offered and (2) you'll have to select an answer. I don't think you should make a separate dummy user for every possible source. If you just have one user named "Ilya's general purpose dummy user" I doubt he'll be confused with John Baez.

Ilya Nikokoshev comments on "Posting questions of others" (1578)

2010-01-07T16:44:42-08:00

Actually, some questions are owned by Community User: I wonder if this is something we could use?

Creating a separate account for questions from TWF by John Baez is more risky compared to Joint Meetings as the possibility of confusion with Joen Baez himself is too high. As one possible solution, a poster can commit to give up all votes on the question as bounty.

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Posting questions of others" (1576)

2010-01-07T16:35:05-08:00

@Harry: nope, but you're welcome to suggest it as a feature-request on meta.SE. I'd vote for it, but I doubt it would gain much traction, so it would probably take at least several months before it was implemented.

Harry Gindi comments on "Posting questions of others" (1574)

2010-01-07T16:15:46-08:00

Can't you enable some sort of restricted community wiki type of thing so you don't gain rep, but the answers aren't community wiki?

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Posting questions of others" (1573)

2010-01-07T15:59:33-08:00

This is a question we came up against with the 20 questions seminar at Berkeley, and I think the solution was a good one. I'm assuming that (1) you're not slighting the other person by publicly posting their question, (2) you've encouraged them to post it themselves and they have declined for whatever reason, and (3) you're hesitant to post the question because you'd feel weird getting reputation points from it (btw, I think it's fine to gain rep from it if you feel some sense of ownership; you have to make the call about whether it's appropriate). Then I think the right thing to do is to use a dummy account to post the question. Explain that you're actually you, and that you're using the dummy account because you don't want gain rep. That way, people still gain rep for answering it and the question still gets upvoted if it's good (actually, it'll probably get upvoted more).

I plan to use this approach for reposting questions from the Joint Meetings.

Ilya Nikokoshev comments on "Posting questions of others" (1560)

2010-01-07T13:31:21-08:00

The examples I gave are (1) and (2) in MO comments (edit: and (2) is basically about references for a well-known topic), (3) as a question from John Baez to readers of his TWF (4) as a well-known question which one paper referenced.

So they certainly pass the "don't make private things public" test :)

David Speyer comments on "Posting questions of others" (1559)

2010-01-07T13:29:25-08:00

One should probably only repost questions which were asked in public. I am currently beating my head against a conjecture which Allen Knutson made to me over tea at MSRI; I'm not going to repost it here because I don't know whether he is comfortable having it made public. (Plus, I want to solve it first!)

Ilya Nikokoshev comments on "Posting questions of others" (1557)

2010-01-07T13:25:44-08:00

In several recent instances I found that I want to post a well-defined question certainly formulated by other people. Examples:

I posted Non-simply-connected smooth proper scheme over Z? from December comment remark by Kevin Buzzard and Minhyong Kim
I want to post the question I've heard about before + formulated by Qiaochu Yuan in comments to What’s the relationship between Gauss sums and the normal distribution?
I posted Killing the torsion in homotopy asked by John Baez
This is less direct, but anyway. I posted Why no abelian varieties over Z? as a question mentioned as solved long time ago by a paper.

It' clear that in all of these cases one should at least indicate the source, as I do, but it's not clear what to do with reputation.

Do we have any etiquette about posting other people's questions? So far, I'm doing the following, but it's rather inconsistent:

I posted as CW (because if original participants didn't post, they probably wanted to, but forgot; posting benefits all, though it would be more fair if original askers received reputation; and for me it would be certainly inappropriate to get reputation.)
I'm planning to wait a bit and see if Qiaochu Yuan asks the questions; meanwhile I'll prepare some background work and, if he doesn't post, I'll post mine.
I asked people not to upvote the question; it was not a CW because I wanted people to be able to upvote answers.
I posted as fully my question: I thought about something similar and took time to write it down carefully (this seemed well-received).

Do you have any suggestions?