Vanilla 1.1.9 is a product of Lussumo. More Information: Documentation, Community Support.
The comments to this question on StackOverflow contain the following remark about MO:
Do not ask this sort of question on mathoverflow.net. Mathoverflow is reserved for research mathematics and the like, your question would be closed even faster on mathoverflow. If you need help with someone simple like this please refer to mathforum.org/dr/math, artofproblemsolving.com/Forum/index.php/…, nrich.maths.org/discus/messages/… . Math Overflow is a horrible place to ask this sort of thing, they will close the question and be annoyed. Furthermore the answer to your question is: is in.
This strikes me as an efficient and essentially correct description of the policy about asking questions. I wonder if we should borrow some of that for the FAQ?
The reason I open this topic is because I have a feeling that "is this of interest to mathematicians?" test is really way too open to interpretation. The questions like
trivially pass. On the other hand, homework questions would appear to pass (since many students, especially at well-staffed universities, are used to TAs and professors politely answering all questions) but they don't under current policy. Moreover, I haven't looked at the list of closed questions but I'm sure for at least half of them the case could be made that they should pass.
Here are some hypothetical questions that I have hard time differentiating from the ones listed above and not closed:
Now there's some intuition that I have that says these example questions aren't the ones that should be encouraged, but I can't find any reason why they won't pass the test of "being of interest to mathematicians" with flying colors. Did I miss something?
@Harry, I see a post that I think clearly is a very bad one :) What should be my actions?
Shall I first discuss the post with the person in question, and is it better be done publicly or privately? Or should I call attention of moderators first?
I have said this before, but since the same issue keeps coming up, maybe it's worth saying it again. The MathOverFlow Management needs to rewrite the FAQ to reflect the editorial POV that they actually intend to enforce on the site, and drop all that hippy-dippy philosophy copied over from StackOverFlow. It only manages to confuse people and to waste everyone's time and energy.
The specific post I found offensive was your comment, Harry: Dump the first one in the lake, then it's only a one-body job search. – Harry Nov 15 at 17:06
There certainly could be different opinions about this topic. Let me state mine: I would prefer to have any soft question (even the ones I didn't like listed in my above post) to an inflammatory comment like the one you posted.
Now this was 1.5 months ago, so I guess I won't say much more, but hope I fulfill my duty to discuss with the person who posted an offensive to me comment :)
Re: "If the best characterization is you know 'em when you see 'em, perhaps the FAQ should give a list of examples like these."
Yeah, we could set up a Ten Least Wanted List, and maybe create a Vilification Committee Of Safety.
@Harrison, I think this one would be as useful as a similar real-life banner:
The administration of this building reserves the right to escort out any person from these premises at any time.
You don't see many of these signs on supermarkets, libraries, or homes (maybe unless you're a Hollywood star...) yet it in no way diminishes the legal right of any person to throw out unwanted guests from the place s/he owns.
But, how about the banners similar to "Welcome to the place of learning", "Please take off your shoes", "Smile, you're on camera". The last one is especially true: on the Internet posts usually don't disappear.
Harry, the idea that it was a joke is reasonable, but the written interaction on the Internet is very different from the spoken interaction in person: people don't have enough non-verbal clues to get all of the meaning. So many things that would be funny in a conversation look outside of the context on the internet.
Anyway, I maybe the unfunny person here, but I urge you to think about people completely without sense of humor, people who don't speak English well, people who just lost their partner, people who don't know that the next line below the question is not the only answer posted and everyone else who might come by. It's probably impossible to write a joke that won't offend a single person, but I think it's reasonable to try a bit harder than just go posting all possible jokes :)
Didn't mean to offend you of course, sorry if it looked like that :)
I don't really see the argument for making a list of examples of bad questions. The sorts of people who would carefully go through a list of examples are also the sorts of people who would read (at least skim) the FAQ (in particular, they'd see the short list of what kinds of questions not to ask) and pay attention to what actually happens on the site before posting a question they're not sure about. I feel like a list of examples of bad questions wouldn't help anybody.
I'd be much more in favor of a list of examples of good questions that illustrate different use cases. That way the person reading the examples might actually be inspired to ask a good question rather than avoid asking a bad question. For example, Harry was unsure about a certain type of question would fly. It happens that it was exactly one of the use cases MO was meant for, but there aren't too many examples of that sort of question on the site. If there were a list of use cases somewhere, he wouldn't have hesitated. Another thing I like about this idea is that we could walk people through the process of making their question better. I think I'm pretty good about polishing my questions so that they're appealing to others, but it would be nice to have a checklist. It would also be nice to be able to point people to that sort of documentation.
Okay, I've convinced myself that a list of use cases is a good idea. I'll post a URL here once I have a draft.
Great idea. I wonder if we could create a tag for that, something like [exemplary-question] so that the list can be generated dynamically?
On a related note, I know there will never be direct query access to the database but I wonder if admins could manually add pages with results of some queries other than standard ones:
Here's my example query that returns most favorited questions from the public StackOverflow dump.
Updated with more query fun:
@Ilya: I'm hesitant to create an [exemplary-question] tag. I like the idea of the list being generated dynamically, but who would decide to put the tag on the question? If anybody can add the tag, I feel like there might be trouble, and if we can restrict it so that only moderators (say) can use the tag, then there isn't much point to it since I could just add it to the list. In any case, I think the list should be fairly short, so dynamic generation isn't that important. We only need to point to one good example of each use case, we don't need to identify all good examples.
About other queries:
What I'd like to see is a possibility for an admin to do something so that the world sees a new URL, say /favorites, which displays questions using (an admin-written, but otherwise arbitrary) query.
This will make the list of favorited questions (a simple select statement which I tested on SO dump), allow "Want to help? Consider..." to be changed from in-page javascript to a true list of questions, allow to have different representations of most voted questions (e.g. display where votes >= 25 but order by date) and give power to make funny queries like the ones listed above.
While I'll post it to SE meta,I actually suspect we're out of luck for a while. Perhaps we could do a public dump with sql interface?
As for use case questions, while it's a great idea to insert them into FAQ, we could also go on to add about 1-2 exemplary questions per week, which is kinf of too long for a single page. I like the way this is done in Wikipedia.
@Ilya: Arbitrary queries take time. I think it might be an unreasonable request for performance reasons. Then again, I don't actually know anything about how databases do anything.
I've no idea what S[OE] do, but the phrase "database dump" suggests that it is a copy of the database updated every so often (daily? weekly?) that can be searched (but not written to) by anyone. As it's a copy it doesn't use up bandwidth or database priority of the main site so operates completely independently of the main site.
I can see lots of reasons why that would be extremely useful to have, if possible.
(You'd need to ensure that the dump didn't contain any private information, though.)
Yes, we'll eventually release dumps of the database periodically (SO does it monthly), but SE doesn't allow us to get a copy of the database yet. I'd forgotten about the problem of removing any private data. I posted a feature-request on meta.SE asking to be able to download a version of the database which is suitable for public release. Please vote it up if you want to see periodic dumps of MO data.
SO dump leaves out the private data. It doesn't even contain deleted questions. This will likely be how it works fpr SE.
@Ilya: I assume the SE data dumps will be complete, so that you can completely restore your site if you change to a different provider (say). If Fog Creek doesn't give us a one-click way to get a sanitized data dump, I'm happy to contact the SO folk and ask them how they modify their database before they release it.
On the Stack Overflow blog, Jeff posted Stack Overflow: Where We Hate Fun today. It's a worthwhile to skim through the comments to see what kinds of arguments come up in another community when they address the question "what is appropriate here?"
@Anton re:database, there are some privacy concerns about giving the ability to download the whole database. You should be able to find a lot on Meta.
Here's a typical example: I remember one post discussing whether: the dump should contain deleted questions? It seems reasonable (and some people thought "required by law") to give people ability to delete content they posted under some circumstances and remove it as much as possible from the public eye. One may argue either way, but for now, obviously, For Creek erred on the side of caution (a reasonable choice for me, as long as their backups are really OK) and doesn't put deleted questions in the dumps.
So, if I were them, I would indeed provide a one-click link which would contain exactly the data visible to public. And I could do it for everyone, subject to available bandwith.
Just to point out the obvious, the reason soft questions get many votes is that, in many case, everybody can understand them. More specialized questions (meaning questions that few people can understand) will obviously get fewer votes, even if they are excellent questions. I certainly never vote for a question in algebraic geometry because I haven't a clue what they're about. That does not mean I am against algebraic geometry. Equally obviously, for the same reason a good question in algebraic geometry is more likely to get lots of votes than a good question in PDE theory, just because of the distribution of interests of the MO residents.
For these reasons, I wonder if the page http://mathoverflow.net/questions?sort=votes ought to have a disclaimer on it, for the benefit of newcomers that might read more into vote counts than warranted. (If feasible, the disclaimer could be hidden from users with sufficient rep.)
1 to 32 of 32