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I reposted a question that had a bounty-forced accepted answer and forced community wiki status so I could post a complete answer. This seems like a legitimate thing to do, at least to me. Have I done something wrong?
I don't really see what problem reposting the question solves. I understand that the CW and bounty rules are a little annoying, but I think posting a duplicate is more annoying. I'd like to merge the questions (effectively moving the new answer to the old question).
Incidentally, I suppose I could merge the original question into the new one. In addition to moving the answers over, I believe this would have the effect of unaccepting the answer. Though it's better than nothing, I find this option distasteful for a couple of reasons:
By the way, fpqc is the same person as Giant Laser Cannon. If he weren't, such a repost would be totally unacceptable.
Well, since I've been "outed", can I be reunited with GLC?
Also, I don't feel bad for Bjorn because he won the 100 point bounty.
Lastly, I already have the power to vote to close. Why would I be "reputation whoring" now of all times? I just felt like that thread had been ruined by controversy community wikifying and autoaccepting of answers, so I decided to start a new one, so we could start with a "clean slate".
Anyway, I think that the thread should be reopened because I'm actually interested in seeing if the argument can be simplified further. That's why I didn't immediately accept my own answer.
@fpqc:
Suggestion: Stop thinking about points.
Points might play a role on the site in a broad sense, but for petty little special cases like this, certainly almost nobody cares. Surely anybody who is capable of simplifying the argument further won't feel any less motivated to do so by whether something is community wiki or not.
Yes, I'll merge GLC with you now. Sorry about "outing" you, but I assumed you were aiming to announce it anyway, since your repost makes absolutely no sense otherwise. The only two arguments I can think of would be
I think the best thing to do would've been to just post a new answer to the old question.
Anyway, given that the repost did make some sense, I'd like to know what's the best thing to do about it. I think leaving the duplicate question separate is a silly thing to do; there's no reason all the answers shouldn't be in one thread.
Anyway, I think that the thread should be reopened because I'm actually interested in seeing if the argument can be simplified further. That's why I didn't immediately accept my own answer.
As Kevin said, anybody interested in contributing to any answer to the question can already easily do so. The more you explain why you reposted, the more it seems like you did it for exactly the wrong reasons. I hope I'm just misunderstanding.
I had asked Anton to bar me from entering my main account a while back so things would cool down (about a month ago), so I was posting from the GLC=LASER=Lasergun unregistered account. I asked Anton in advance if this was okay to do. However, I (as GLC) screwed it up by trying to mislead people into clicking on the post, which pissed enough people off that I didn't want to be associated with the user. I was still interested in the question, though, which put me in an odd position.
Edit: Yes, and to avoid conflicts of interest, I did not register the account (thereby making it so I couldn't vote).
This was not sockpuppetry. Neither account was used to vote for or otherwise support the other. The two accounts did not interact in any way, so I think it was perfectly kosher.
If somebody wants to post anonymously rather than using their normal account for some reason, I think they should be able to do so. After all, they would be allowed to post anonymously if they didn't have a registered account. Of course, I'd prefer that people be open about their identity whenever possible, and any actual sockpuppetry would be a big no-no, as Noah said. If somebody has a separate anonymous account for posting spammy or offensive content (or otherwise misbehaving), I have no problem with suspending all accounts which I believe are controlled by the offending party.
I was aware of the double accounts (thanks to Pete, in fact) and I think I monitored closely enough to be sure that nothing nefarious was going on. I raised the subject of perceived sock-puppetry early, and in private, and I'm happy with how everything played out: fpqc handled using a second account in an appropriate and sensible manner.
On the matter of this particular post, I'd encourage everyone to follow Noah's thinking --- optimize your behaviour for the benefit of someone using google in 5 years time, when you're (metaphorically :-) dead and gone. We're still in the earliest days of mathoverflow (hopefully), and as time passes the main value of mathoverflow will shift, relatively, from the the everyday community of interactions towards the long-tail of googleable answers.
@Douglas: fpqc's method of attention seeking is not through sockpuppetry. He just creates some trouble, or does something out of the ordinary, until people notice it and react through comments and negvotes. And then someone might start a meta thread on the issue, failing which he will start one himself.
No better way for a math undergrad to be in the limelight in the international stage. Kudos, +1 to fpqc for the inventiveness.
We should get rid of the auto-CW thing and the autoaccepted answers thing.
@Pedant: That was not my intention. I really thought that reposting the thread would not be a problem. I first e-mailed Scott and Anton (although Scott responded with confusion and Anton didn't respond until several hours later), but after I received Scott's confused response, I made the post (no, he did not give me permission, but he also didn't say not to do it).
The whole e-mail exchange:
Dear Scott,
You may remember the question I asked as GLC about formally étale being a local property. This is in fact true, and I'd like to post the answer, but the question is now community wiki. Would you be opposed to me asking the question and then answering it?
Thanks,
fpqc
fpqc,
I'm confused, what's the difficulty with answering a community wiki question?
Best,
Scott
By the way, Scott, if you'd like me to remove the e-mail from here, I will (or you can do it yourself as a moderator). I'm sorry for not first asking your permission, but I thought it was innocuous enough for me to post it here. I sent the same e-mail to Anton, who responded several hours later, but at that point, it was too late.
More than anything, I was just excited to have an answer to the question, and I got impatient waiting for a response from Anton or Scott, so I went ahead with the plan.
I would just like to add that to those who follow topics of interest to fpqc/GLC, it was pretty obvious that these were the same user, and so the danger of people being misled by the existence of both accounts was minimal, I think.
I don't see how that makes it a worse question. Again, the users fpqc and GLC never interacted, so there should be no problem. It's kind of telling that you consider helping me a waste of time but not an unregistered user.
I think having more than one userid is ok, unless there are no explicit problems created.
Prof. Zare neither posted an answer nor a comment on the original question, so presumably he means time spent working on the problem. If it were an intractable problem or a problem that didn't have an answer, I could understand Prof. Zare thinking that his time was wasted, but he spent time doing mathematics. I'm sorry, but if you feel that your time was not well-spent working on a problem that I posted, there's nothing I can do about it.
@fpqc. Whatever your intention on this particular post, my statement does not change regarding your general strategy of attention seeking.
About your last response to Douglas Zare: Yes, exactly, a new user is worth spending time on. But fpqc has a long history of being a rude and unreasonable troublemaker best avoided.
Prof. Zare did not spend any time on the user (presumably he spent time on the problem). I will work on a problem posted on MO because I find it interesting, not because x, y, or even z posted it. I would assume that he found the problem interesting enough to give it some thought. That is not my fault.
I still don't understand why everyone got so angry about the joke title (if you remember the thread posted a while ago as "please check my proof of the Riemann Hypothesis", which was not me, you can check to see that people did not respond so violently to it). This is what pissed people off enough to start voting the question down.
I do not think the main reason people started voting the question down was because of any joke title. I think the main reason was probably because the question was a duplicate of another question. Evidence: the reason given for the closure of the question, and the comments to the question, and the upvotes to the comments to the question.
You haven't addressed the question: what's the difficulty with answering a community wiki question?
I hope you will stop making such a fuss about community wiki stuff and points and accepted answers and so forth. Maybe you're right that the way things are currently set up is unfair. Well, so what? Sometimes some things are just not fair. Sometimes we should just accept it and not make a fuss and move on. Especially if it's such a pointless, petty matter having to do with a negligible amount of meaningless points on some website.
The main reason that people started voting down the original question (which is not closed) was because I changed the title to "Using mathematics to improve the environment" at one point. The current question was closed because it was a repost of the original one.
I also wasn't making a fuss about the points. I mean, yes, I posted it as a separate thread, but if Anton or Scott had clearly said "No, that is against the rules" when I e-mailed them, I wouldn't have posted it as a new question at all (not to blame them, we're in different time-zones after all). Certainly it was a mathematical question, and I found an answer to it, so it's not completely insane to not want it to be community wiki. I asked the moderators, but in my haste, I did not wait for a definitive answer and posted it as a separate question. Not everything is so black and white.
You keep coming up with imaginative ways to annoy people, as evinced precisely by the downvotes you've gotten for all sort of things. The best plan would be to stop doing such things...
I mean, that's certainly not my intention...
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