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In several recent instances I found that I want to post a well-defined question certainly formulated by other people. Examples:
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:
Do you have any suggestions?
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!)
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 :)
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.
@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.
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.
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.
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).
@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.)
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