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Etiquette: Policy about closing questions

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    I originally wanted to comment on this closed question but this probably belongs to meta.

    For background, the question was closed as "doesn't belong here".

    Now, one could make a case pro or contra having questions like that on Math Overflow (I have no opinion on this matter, and I'm not interested on wasting everyone's time discussing this) but I certainly think people should learn about changes in policy.

    I'm not going to say anything about how exactly moderators should close the questions -- it's one of the points of having competent moderators that they're more often right than not -- but it's probably best to communicate somewhere what happens. Otherwise, moderators' time will be wasted on explaining on many similar questions the reasons for closing that could be explained only once.

    For example, for many "What is..." questions, a reference to nLab would be more than sufficient to close the question, without entering hard and long discussions (of which you might have seen an example here). Surely, there could be other cases of "speedy close" (modeled after "speedy delete") questions, that would be dealt with fast and efficient.

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    I believe that this question should be reopened. There has been questions on different topics but of a similar flavour on MO which have produced nice results.

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    I think this question is far too broad. The OP doesn't even say whether he/she has primary school or undergraduate education in mind, for example. There are similar questions currently on MO, yes, but the successful ones have been more specific and the ones that were less specific were from an earlier era and would probably be closed if they were asked now (and might still be closed if they attract too much attention).

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    I agree with the closing of this question. It's not at an appropriate level.
    • CommentAuthorKevin Lin
    • CommentTimeJun 29th 2010
     

    I also agree that it is not at an appropriate level. Tangentially -- I have thought of posting a question about mnemonics for remembering things from category theory, particularly things that have both left and right versions, which I always mix up. Would such a question be appropriate?

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    I think Kevin's answer would be appropriate (certainly much *more* appropriate than the closed question). It's much more specific and it's clearly at an appropriate level. Left vs. right issues are annoying to all of us. For example, if someone asked "Why are diagrams in quantum topology read from the bottom to the top?" I'd have a great answer: because function composition is written right-to-left so if you want left-to-right to match with top-to-bottom then you have to define diagram composition as bottom to top! I can imagine that people have similar answers for left and right adjoints.
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    The only way I remember left and right adjoint is by remembering which slot it fits in on the hom functor =p.

    Also, with composition, Phil Hirschhorn does something quite lovely in his book Model Categories and their localizations. Instead of writing composites with by any convention in particular, he just writes composites literally as their composites $A\to B\to C$ with the name of the arrow above the arrow.

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