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I recently noticed that StackOverflow attaches a special notice to old questions with a lot of upvotes that they don't feel reflect the site:
This question exists because it has historical significance, but it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site, so please do not use it as evidence that you can ask similar questions here.
More info: http://stackoverflow.com/faq
What do people think about doing something similar here?
How do they decide when to put one of those notices?
If it comes up, I think such a notice is a good idea, but I don't think we should go out of our way to dig up questions to add the notice to. I feel like most of the early questions that would no longer be considered appropriate have been closed for a while, and I haven't seen the "there are greater evils" argument in a while. Maybe I just haven't been paying enough attention.
Can we do it (in the special way) without migrating to 2.0?
While I think it is a good idea in general, I think the community is far from a strong consensus on many such question types that, in my view, might warrant such a notice. If you have a sample question for a test, Qiaochu, that might help focus this thread.
Gerhard "Ask Me About System Design" Paseman, 2011.08.23
As far as I can tell, such edits (and locking) can be done manually by moderators without difficulty.
Note, however, the stats on the question pointed by Qiaochu: 2329 votes, 3912 favorites, 268 answers, etc. Nothing on MO comes remotely close to that!
@François: On SO, these notices were put in manually by moderators as well, so Qiaochu's proposal is one of social convention. I like the idea of labeling questions which should not be taken to be representative examples, but for the most part, they are already labeled with "[closed]", which is even better than an ad hoc notice.
Actually, now that I've thought about it some more, I don't understand these notices. Why was the SO question not simply closed (and locked, since SO is more prone to close/reopen wars than MO), rather than having this notice posted and then locked? Given that there are 268 answers, new answers are almost certainly undesirable.
Maybe to stop people from complaining about it being closed? Who knows, maybe the "special" status with a historical reminder is enough to cool people down.
What I thought was the main goal of such a message, which I too noticed some time ago when starting to browse SO and more generally some SE site in the course of the migrating debate is this:
It is there for new vistitors of the site. Somebody comes to the site, wants to get a first impression of it, looks at the highest voted questions, and thinks these are the 'best', which they are most often not, and perhaps asks a similar question that then gets closed as off-topic.
To avoid this a clear messsage seems best, the closed or locked could easily be overlooked, or not understood, by somebody unfamiliar with the site.
Since also many of the topvoted questions on MO are not representative of the site, I think in principle it could make sense to have this too. Whether there are 10000 or 1000 or 100 votes, is IMO not relevant; what is relevant is whether the topvoted questions are good example question for a new user; if not, clearly mark them as such to avoid misunderstandings.
Whether it is worth the effort in practise, I do not now.
I had the privilege of talking with Scott Morrison on several issues, one of which was a two-tier system of questions. The sense I got from him, and which is likely shared by many of the moderators, is that the risks of introducing such a system to MathOverflow and adversely affecting the existting ecology are too great compared to the possible benefits such a system might obtain.
Scott may be right, but I still think the idea deserves some discussion, so in response to Kevin Buzzard's longing, I suggest (drumroll please): the 'research' tier and 'other' tier. Most of the present mechanisms that exist would carry over to the new system, but the new features would be that everyone would have three new views to choose from, which would be to look at either or both tiers of questions, that all or many new questions would initially be posted to the "other" tier, and that a certain amount of work (votes, number of sponsors or detractors, reputation) was required to move a question from one tier to another.
There are several ways to use such an arrangement; my intent in presenting it was to give those like Kevin an opportunity to view a community-filtered primarily research oriented list of questions and the opportunity to ignore a list of other questions about which the community is still deciding whether to tolerate and allow. I see the benefits in such a system and few downsides. I'd like to hear others take on this idea.
Gerhard "That's Enough Drumroll Now, Thanks" Paseman, 2011.08.24
I thought MO was the research tier...
Mariano, but not everybody might know or agree what it means.
I don't like the two-tier idea very much, primarily because I feel like it would cause unnecessary fragmentation. If a question doesn't belong on MO, I don't want to have to answer the defense, "this is meant for the other tier, not the research tier."
Still, I do feel that there is easily crowd-sourcable information that we're not taking advantage of. I've fantasized about how nice it would be to have a Netflix-style recommendation engine which would show you questions based in part on how your voting history correlates with the voting histories of other people. This would have two awesome benefits:
I spoke to Jeff about this idea briefly a couple of months ago. I got the impression that he thought this would be desirable, but is simply technically infeasible. But the more I think about it, the more feasible it feels. Even if the recommendation system is very crude, benefit 2 kicks in right away. On MO, we have about half a million votes which have been cast by about 5000 users. This data set is about two orders of magnitude smaller than the training data for the Netflix prize. On this scale, it is reasonable to maintain a table of correlation coefficients between every pair of users.
Even if it turns out that the algorithm is costly, it would be reasonable to restrict this feature to users who have cast at least X votes. With X=100, this narrows the list down to about 750 users.
Edit: actually, the numbers are a bit smaller, since I was counting every kind of vote (including votes to close/delete, as well as accept/flag/favorite, which are also types of votes internally). If you only count upvotes (since this is easy to do in the public dump), there are 3179 users who have cast an upvote, and 646 who have cast at least 100 upvotes.
Anton, I think that it would be convenient to the reader to have a nicely configurable view that selects the questions most likely to be preferred by that reader. However, I see this as a potential fault from the poster's point of view. In the present system, a post that is made is guaranteed to be seen by a large (and statistically significant fraction of) body of experts who may be capable of answering the question quickly and professionally. This combined with the fact that the entry fee is nonexistent makes MathOverflow a braintrust for everyone, and we've seen the upsides and downsides to this.
The two-tier system ups the entry fee by requiring new questions to be sponsored before guaranteeing that they will be seen. The self-filtered style you suggest may be appropriate if you can maintain the guarantee, or at least the appearance, that any new question will be seen by enough experts. At this stage, I don't see how you could maintain even the appearance of the guarantee with this addition. I also think the guarantee is too valuable to give up, and I admit concerns about messing with it with a two tier system.
Gerhard "Ask Me About System Design" Paseman, 2011.08.24
Returning to the original subject, I think it might be worth considering such special notices. As a thought experiment, which of the following questions are deserving of a special notice?
These were selected just because they have 80+ votes and aren't obviously on topic.
Please explain why you think the question should have a special notice instead of being closed as no longer relevant.
@# François
How about the memorable titles question?
It didn't fit my (completely arbitrary) criteria. Why that one in particular?
@François: "common false beliefs" and "proofs without words" would probably be redirected to math.SE nowadays, so perhaps they should just be closed? I am a little conflicted on "colorful language." The other questions you listed are closed and I think it should stay that way.
Clarified version, and taking Qiaochu's anwer and François's request I initially overlooked into acount:
From François original list, I'd say: all except 'false beliefs' and (perhaps) 'single paper' should have a special notice. The reason is that to me most of the other ones have a 'for fun' feel. I'd too put 'memorable titles', as while not conceived like this, it turned into a for-fun question.
Now, I have nothing against the occassional MO-fun question, but the emaphasize is on the occassional; and it is hard to get this right.
Why I do not think that 'dep closure' is a suitable MO question is document at great (perhaps excessive) length in the depth of this board.
I agree on 'Thinking and explaining'; nothing against the question, but I'd say it is fair to say that a similar question, or at least a question somebody might consider as similar, would likely not have an easy time when asked (the comments on the question document this), and vaguely similar things do get occassionally asked with much less success (say, this somewhat recent 'flow state' question; yes, of course this is not the same, but to some 'outsider' it could have a similar feel).
By contrast, 'false beliefs' is to some extent actually useful (if you disagree you claim that you are sure none of the statements could have fooled you, so think twice ;) , and if you pass that test there is still teaching) and perhaps also the 'single paper' as a collection of nice papers, I looked at some that were listed and would otherwise not have done so.
@Nilima Note that you can also filter out undesirable questions, e.g. by the [soft-question]-tag. This way, you would still see mathematical questions from other disciplines.
Good point. Maybe it's worth adding that tag to those questions (which would of course have the unfortunate side effect of bumping them to the front page)?
Nilima's arguments make a lot of sense to me. I'm not too keen on any of the questions in question, but when singling out for a "special notice" then I find Nilima's choices good.
One comment on the filtering-by-tags: I find this practically useless because very few people ever tag their questions correctly at first so whilst I could exclude "soft-questions" then I'd still see a fair number of them because they don't tend to be tagged "soft-question" at the start.
Nilima, mainly out of general interest, what you refer to by 'taste' would it include questions like this one or is it meant more narrowly: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/1420/whats-the-best-proof-of-quadratic-reciprocity
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