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This is in some ways a response to MO unwelcoming? post by Qiaochu Yuan and suggestions by others, including Ben Webster and David Speyer, and many more. I believe we may benefit from thinking about making the place more attractive for the right people, and here's a particularly obvious and simple thing one could fix immediately: right now we may be having some well-defined problem with our FAQ not reflecting all of our policies.
Here's a brief overview of recent "rather fiery experience" (quote from Tom Leinster) (correct me if I'm wrong).
Anweshi somehow heard about our site and after a first look was interested enough to think about posting a question. He read the FAQ, extracted what he could from it and proceeded to post the question which quickly generated calls to close the question and some heated comments; a rational discussion then followed on Meta. He learned very fast that there are some strong community norms: and he did it on Meta and interacting with people, rather then from the FAQ.
This is like the perfect experiment and it seems to confirm previous observations about what FAQ lacks (as for my opinion and attempts at explanation, they are at Characterization of MO + Question Policy and A Consensus FAQ (suggestion)).
I was thinking about this for the last month, but was always putting off posting, because it was clear that I haven't produced something of a good quality. But now I'm just posting whatever rough outline I could come up with at this moment and hoping for the best.
The primary criterion for determining whether a question is appropriate for Math Overflow is "is this of interest to mathematicians?" By a "mathematician," we mean a person whose primary occupation is doing mathematics. Of course, you should make your question detailed and specific, and write clearly and simply. Part of the goal of this site is to produce a repository of standard questions and answers that mathematicians have when they are exploring a new field; these "newbie" questions are welcome and even encouraged.
Please look around to see if your question has already been asked (and maybe even answered!) before you ask. If you end up asking a question that has been asked before, that is OK and deliberately allowed. Other users will hopefully edit in links to related or similar questions to help future visitors find their way.
It's perfectly fine to ask and answer your own question, but pretend you're on Jeopardy: phrase it in the form of a question. Also, we recommend not answering your own question immediately since leaving the question "open" encourages other people to respond to it. You might discover that somebody else has an even better answer!
It's also highly recommended that you read How to ask a good Math Overflow question.
The site's primary goal is to post research math questions — in particular, if you're stuck with some question for your paper, by all means just go right now and post it. (That's right -- we have no barriers, you don't even have to register — in a different section of the FAQ?)
The software that works on the site and the community around it are targeted towards asking well-defined questions: math questions that actually have a specific answer. If you look around, you might notice that we also have less focused, undergraduate, lists-of-something, or not-really-math questions. We suggest that if you're new to the site, you stick to asking and answering only focused questions until you find out all the quirks of the community. Otherwise you might find yourself in a discussion.
Please also look around to see if your question has already been asked (and maybe even answered!) on Google or on your topic page on Wikipedia. If you do post a question that was asked here before, don't worry: somebody will give you a link and close your question as duplicate. But if you're asking a very general question ("explain for me the topic ..."), you're likely to be just redirected to nLab, Wikipedia or review articles on arXiv.
if you're not sure whether your question is "in the stream", just read the whole FAQ and look around for the questions that are well-written, nicely formatted, highly upvoted, with lots of answers and no controversy; these examples are worth emulating. And don't forget you can always count on Meta to answer your questions about MathOverflow: "how to do X", "why my question is closed", "what's the deal with Community Wiki" etc.
The best way to ensure your question will be answered: write it as best as you can using How to ask a good Math Overflow question guide .
I had a look at stack overflow. The existing FAQ looks much like it is lifted from there. A new FAQ precisely for MO is a high necessity. Maybe the moderators too want to add something; but the existing one looks like a copy from SO, with some patches. MO is not SO. The FAQ here looks like some lazy kid copying his friend's answer sheet almost as-is, including all the mistakes. Throw the old FAQ out and write a new one. One for this site.
@Ilya. There was some thread by you somewhere on some comment in SO about posting to MO, along the lines of "don't post stupid stuff there, they will get annoyed". That suggestion of yours also was extremely good. Unfortunately I am not able to dig it up now.
@Anweshi: this thread is my first link in the list above: Characterization of MO + Question Policy
@Anweshi: no need to start a new thread. Don't worry, everybody saw what you said the first time.
Yes, the first part of the FAQ is a modification of the default SE FAQ. I like Ilya's version better, though there are a couple of things I'd like to change. I'll go through it now and post the tweaks I'd like to make shortly.
Ok, here's my tweaked version of Ilya's version of the "What kinds of questions can I ask here?" section of the FAQ. Please ignore (or parse) the html tags.
Math Overflow's primary goal is for users to ask and answer <strong>research level math questions<strong>, the sorts of questions you come across when you're writing or reading articles or graduate level books. Of course, individual questions don't have to be worthy of an article, and they don't have to be about new mathematics. A typical example is, "Can this hypothesis in that theorem be relaxed in this way?" In particular, if you're stuck on some question in the paper you're writing, by all means <a href="/questions/ask">ask it</a>.
The site works best for well-defined questions: math questions that actually have a specific answer. You'll notice that there is the occasional question making a list of something, asking about the workings of the mathematical community, or something else which isn't really a math question. Such questions can be helpful to the community, but it is <strong>extremely tricky</strong> to ask them in a way that produces a useful response. So if you're new to the site, we suggest you stick to asking precise math questions until you learn about the quirks of the community and the strengths of the medium. If you have a very broad question (like "Please explain topic X"), try searching <a href="http://google.com">Google</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org">Wikipedia</a>, <a href="http://ncatlab.org/nlab">nLab</a>, or looking for survey articles on the <a href="http://arxiv.org/find/math">arXiv</a>.
Please look around to see if your question has already been asked (and maybe even answered!). If you do post a question that was asked here before, don't worry; somebody will give you a link and close your question as duplicate.
The best way to get great answers to your question is to write a great question. To help you do that, we've written down some guidelines on <a href="/howtoask">How to ask a good Math Overflow question</a>.
Main changes:
@CSiegel: I've actually just added something like that to the top of the next section, "What kind of questions should I not ask here?"
@Anton, thanks, this looks much better!
Some comments:
@Ilya:
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