I agree. I would have voted to close it as well.

It's not so much hall-monitorishness. We actually hate to see bad questions left up and we use "the rules" as justification. As I (and others) have noted in the past, there's plenty of wiggle room if the question is legitimately good and interesting.

For the record, I know a number of experts who don't post on MO because they came here on a bad day when things like "math jokes" and other big lists were at the top of the page. I try to close these questions (or at least the crappier ones) when possible to prevent that from happening

One thing worth pointing out is that this question had an erratic history: I was considering whether to post an answer when the author decided to accept one of the two answers already given. This was about 3 hours after posing it and with very low views. I was a bit annoyed, but said, "Oh well". I guess he unaccepted the answer later and put a bounty on it? All this is very weird.

A lot of the good answers in these questions can be more insightful than answers to more specific 'quantatative' questions. Even if the initial question wasn't so great, from the point of view of someone who's just here to learn interesting stuff, that can still be useful for me.

That's not the point of MO. If it were, I doubt that MO would be nearly as active today. Soft questions are a side-show that we allow as long as they're not causing a problem. To be honest, I could do without them entirely, and I'd still visit the site.

Hopefully sometime soon there will be a lower-level math stack-exchange style site and we can try to push things there. I feel like we've picked up a large number of users who aren't research mathematicians, and as a result soft questions and questions that are too easy are getting too many upvotes which encourages people to continue asking them. Having another page to send people to will make it easier to do something about this. It'd be nice if there were a tool other than voting (which is swamped by the larger number of weaker lurkers) and closing (which annoys people more than it actually accomplishes anything) to deal with questions that we'd like to discourage.

@Ilya: Soft questions add to the "irritation factor".

I also find that people who are at a "lower level" as you say tend not to have their hearts in it as much (not to say this is true of everyone at a lower level).

@Scott C: +1 again!

The irritation factor from discussions like this one and several more in the past few days, with lots of extreme views expressed, is x10 more irritating than anything I can possibly see on the front page of MO. Frankly, there are many poorly worded or thought through questions that nobody cares about.

And Scott C. has given evidence to the contrary.

This discussion is taking place on meta out of view from the front page. Your argument doesn't hold water.

That's a big concern especially since the system for voting/closing questions is so non-transparent and undemocratic.

I somewhat agree with you that votes down should at least have some sort of comment left, but votes to close are transparent and democratic. It takes five votes to close, and the people who successfully close a topic have their names listed.

@VP:

1. Anecdotal evidence is evidence. What matters is how much we weight it. Sorry, try again. As for your anecdotal evidence, it would mean a lot more coming from someone who identified him/herself. I'm sorry, but based on Scott C's track record, I place quite a bit more weight in his opinions.

2. I don't answer rhetorical questions.

3. These questions are clearly in violation of MO policy.

4. Fine, you offered your "perspective".

5. You said voting/closing, not voting to close.

6. Unlike you, the people who usually vote to close have their real names available and are easy to contact by e-mail if the person was sufficiently interested.

7. Irritation factor and your personal level of irritation are quite different things....

I think that it is up to people with high rep what ought and oughtn't to be closed. My e-mai is available through my userpage, and if anyone has questions about why I voted to close a certain topic, it's very easy to write me by e-mail.

I'm sure you may realize that female participation in the overall mathematical community is also quite low, although I'm not sure of the statistics. If you were hinting that women will tend to ask softer questions, I think that's a rather condescending thing to say. The majority of women I've met in the mathematical community have been extremely serious about research, and perhaps the reason there are so few active women at MO is due to the level of off-topic and soft-question types of discussion. If that's not what you were implying, then I apologize in advance, but the above viewpoint is not uncommon in the scientific community at large.

Dear Harry,

In recent years, the proportion of math Ph.D's in the US awarded to women was approximately 1/4. I am sure you will agree that this is orders of magnitude higher than the proportion of female participation on MO. I did *not* speculate as to the reasons for this disparity---you may have noticed that the paragraph ended with a question, which was not intended rhetorically. It is of course possible that women are avoiding MO because of soft questions on the front page (though as mentioned above I find it surprising that this would be anyone's real reason---my apologies in advance, Andrew!).

Best,
Stephen

PS- I don't spend any of my time reading questions like "Best math jokes". That's how I know they're easy to avoid.

Dear Andrew,

Perhaps you can be more specific:

What proportion of the questions would need to be vague in order that it be difficult for you to find the ones with which you can help?

Best,
Stephen

@Stephen: I have talked with many women about MO, and the reasons they give for not participating much are essentially the same as the reasons I get from men. Here they are, in roughly decreasing frequency:

1) I don't want to get too involved, because it looks really addictive.

2) I'm too busy / I have too much on my plate / I don't have tenure.

3) I actually read [present tense] it a lot, but whenever I see a question I can answer, someone has already produced a ridiculously thorough response, and I have nothing meaningful to add.

4) If I have a question, I'd rather ask my collaborators/colleagues than broadcast my ignorance on the internet.

4.5) When I have a question, it is rarely well-formed, and I need to talk to a person in real-time to refine it.

5) [only heard at the Gross conference] Emerton and BCnrd are an intimidating presence, since they can answer any question I have a hope of answering.

I agree that the low rate of active participation of women is troubling, but I can't say with any confidence that it has much to do with the frequency of soft questions in either direction. Naturally, it is possible that they are being turned off by the manner of questions being closed, and don't feel inclined to say so to one of the chief culprits.

In regard to your question for Andrew, I don't have a quantitative measure for vagueness tolerance, and I think asking for a number is perhaps a bit demanding. However, my preference is for this to be as small as reasonably possible. For example, I would personally find a front page full of well-formed mathematics questions much more appealing than one that is half-full of of such questions with the rest taken up by noise, even if I could easily block out the noise, because it suggests that the noise is wanted.

http://www.wiskundemeisjes.nl/

@Harry: The URL translates to "math girls", and it seems to be a math blog rather than spam. I think the link was posted in response to Mark's claim that women are underrepresented in the math blogosphere, but it is difficult to read Informer's intentions without additional context.

Well that's what informer should have informed us on (excuse the pun), not all of us are fluent in dutch. Secondly, what's the point of linking to it? Without any context or explanation it basically is as Harry said spam, even though the link is to a good blog.

@Scott: I think these are great points, I actually think #1 and 2 are the biggest ones for lack of participation. There's really *no reason* for a lot of people to contribute here other than wanting to generally contribute to math... But I (and I'm sure you!) have certainly known plenty of people who are unhappy enough to do this via teaching and would be difficult to compel to contribute here regardless of our standards.

I think it's interesting that you mention #4/4.5 because most of my discussions with friends and colleagues that end up producing interesting **research-level** ideas are precisely the ill-formed ones that would make inappropriate MO questions by the standards of some here.

The well-defined exact questions are not really "research level" but are more "understanding what isn't explained in this text book level." Which is good, and still interesting, but I find it odd that there is the idea that we can somehow simultaneously require "research level" and "well-defined" questions.

Not that I think we should allow *excessively* vague or obviously meaningless questions. But a number of really good soft questions out there have had people complaining that they should be closed in the comments, and I think this is unfortunate.

Particularly because they are often non-constructive complaints. Asking someone to "make their question more specific," e.g., is not so helpful, because it's entirely possible that they don't know enough to, or the question was purposefully vague so as to not mislead people by technical details unimportant to what they were thinking about. (This is of course giving the benefit of the doubt that they're trying to ask a legitimate question!)

*Specific* comments like "are you sure you don't mean X", or "did you know this property is called Y", or "are you familiar with Z", or "are you really trying to ask W" etc are much more constructive. (I would point out specific examples to illustrate this more clearly, but I don't want to single anyone out.)

It does make me more than a little irritated to see some of the non-constructive comments some people like to make. I mean, I'm all for making a vague question into a more exact one, but trying to burn every comment that doesn't have an immediate textbook answer to the ground is going a little too far.

Again, this is assuming people are asking questions in good-faith; clearly, cases where people are asking vague questions and refusing to clarify or participate, or are asking obvious nonsense are different.

And we have to remember, too, asking good, clear questions is not really a trivial task for lots of people. I've met some very smart people who could not form a well-posed question the first time to save their lives!

This is aside from the other kinds of "soft" questions that are inherently on the far end of softness, that these complaints don't so much apply to. But these very soft questions make up an even smaller fraction of the total, so I really can't imagine how anyone can think they are a serious problem.

Also, it's not mutually exclusive to have more "research level" questions and allow "soft" ones. We can certainly have *more* exact, well-posed "research-level" questions without going after everything that isn't one. We just need to (and, I think, **should**) encourage more people to ask these kinds of questions, but this can be done completely independently of discouraging soft ones.

I strongly agree with almost everything Scott and Andrew have said in this thread. With regards to the argument "it's not so hard to ignore what you don't like", I want to completely reproduce a post a made a month ago, but I'll just post the "conclusion" to encourage people to go read the whole thing:

If a "good" question is going to encourage people to come to the site for the wrong reasons (or discourage people in the mood to do some real math from coming to the site), then it will make it harder for the right people to connect. In those situations, I will argue that "MO is not the right website for this" and campaign for closing the question.

I believe that MO will be maximally useful if its purpose is crystal clear in everybody's mind. It is basically meant to be used to prevent you from getting stuck on "baby steps" in research (where "reasearch" is broadly interpreted to include learning stuff you might use in research). As Scott said, "MO functions more smoothly when the question comes with the expectation that there is an expert in the subject who knows the answer more or less immediately. This keeps people from coming away from their interactions feeling that they have been wasting their time." Reason (4.5) is a very good reason for not coming to MO yet.

A common response is, "why not make another site for fuzzier or ill-formed questions?" I wouldn't know how to do that, and I have serious doubts that it's even possible. Making such things productive requires a huge amount of feedback which I don't think the internet can provide. Sometimes, even talking with someone in person can't provide enough feedback ... a lot of the process has to happen in your own head. Also, it's usually hard or impossible to make progress in a crowd rather than in a small group. Whether you use the internet or not, I don't think it will ever be very productive broadly announce something like, "Hey, I keep getting this feeling that almost everything is made of triangles. Is there some general principle here?" and then sit back and wait for answers.

Andrew, Anton, Mark, Scott

I think we all agree on one goal: maximize the number of good (this adjective requires clarification) questions and answers available on MO. I also think that our opinions about *which* questions and answers are good are not so far apart as you might believe, and that the direction in which we differ is not what you might suppose from this interaction. In fact, I think most questions on MO are either not specific enough or else too close to graduate-level homework problems.

Where we differ is just in the method of encouraging good behavior---in a nutshell, I'd like to see good behavior rewarded and bad behavior ignored (when reasonable) or corrected as gently as possible. There is an apt British saying: don't get into a fight with a chimney sweep.

But you are all much more experienced with MO than I am. I hope it continues to grow!

Best,
Stephen