Dear Folks,

I just read the following question by our own Andrea Ferretti on meta.math.stackexchange.com

http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/395/why-was-my-question-promoting-another-math-website-deleted

The gist of it seems to be that he posted a question on the same site (to emphasize, the meta site, not the main math-SE site) inquiring about how to promote his site, which collects links to online lecture notes and books in mathematics.

I am rather disappointed by Robert Cartaino's response. To me it does not seem in the spirit of a free online community devoted to promoting mathematics.

What do others think? Please discuss.

I'm not distressed at Robert's response. I get the impression that the SE/SO team are watching these new sites very closely in part because they don't know how to make them successful. They've got a good thing in SO and want to see if it can succeed elsewhere, but the key to the success of SO is not so much the software but the community, and that's much harder to construct, so they're naturally a little cautious. I don't read Robert's response as a "Go away and never darken our doors again" but rather a "Hang on! We need a chance to think about this.". Note that Andrea's message was in effect an advertisement for his site.

It's also worth bearing in mind that the SE team want people to be active both on the main sites and their respective metas. They want people who use the site to get involved with its meta site. Here, I feel that we have a little more of an attitude that meta is there if you really want it, but it's not expected that Joe Mathematician will come here regularly. In part, I think that that is because MO already has a clearly defined community that it wants to server (professional mathematicians) and so the key questions are more "How do we attract and maintain people from that community?" whereas on the SE sites, there isn't such a ready-made community so the key questions are more "How should we build our community?".

So given that meta.math.SE ought to have a higher level of exposure than meta.MO, Andrea's question really ought to have been more along the lines of: "Should we have a list of 'approved' external resources somewhere on math.SE? If so, what's the best way to display it and how do we go about deciding what should be on it? Disclaimer: if there were such a list, I would be interested in getting [my site](link to site) on it.".[1]

Personally, I prefer the MO style of meta. But I'm not in charge so I have to play the game that's in town, or leave. Of course, I can state my opinion and argue for it, but then I have to accept the decisions of those that actually do run the show.

[1] I'd argue that Pete's website should be there. I wondered where I'd come across the name "Pete Clark" before MO, and then I remembered that I'd come across your notes when looking for easy proofs of some result or other.

Is that the Scottish fiddler (I never click through on youtube links just in case I get someone playing the Bagpipes)? If so, I'm afraid that your conjecture is correct. Google tells me a lot about him, but I have to wait until the middle of the second page to get anything about you (and then the page is the one I was referring to: your expositions). Makes me worried now about the fact that Google gives me top billing when I search.

All I can say is that I'm glad that I was on the right side of the law in this story.

Harry, you might well think that I couldn't possibly comment.

(For non Brits, who may not get the reference, look up the second man to enter parliament with honest intentions)

FYI, this is the text of the deleted post:

I have launched a few months ago a mathematical site called MathOnline. Here one can collect lecture notes, survey articles, books and so on. All the material can be organized and searched by author, topic, language, level and so on.

Registered users can add new books, add tags, write reviews, vote, keep a list of the favorite books and see other people's profiles. The level is usually from university mathematics on, even if it is possible to add elementary resources.

Every contribution is appreciated. You can simply use it to to find material, or better you can register and contribute, or advertise it with your colleagues and interested people. Every advice for more features is welcome!

My question here is the following: is there an opportunity to advertise it (if you like the idea and the realization) in some way on math.stackexchange or here in meta? Of course, as with every site with user-generated content, the more public exposure it gets, the more opportunity it has to become a repository of useful material.

So far I have been able to promote it to the MathOverflow community, but I think the level there is too advanced. Undergraduate students follow much more courses and hence are exposed to a lot of books and lecture notes. So I'd like to be able to promote it here on math.stackexchange. Ideally it would be very nice if one could have a link somewhere.

I am not trying to spam this site, but I think that it could be useful to have a place where to redirect when people ask for online material. By the nature of the site, the more people use it, the more interesting it becomes. I have been not working very much lately on MathOnline, but if the traffic there improved, I'd be happy to start developing it again.

Although I don't think the post is unsalvageable (putting the first 3 paragraphs as a quote at the bottom would make it fine in my eyes), I can certainly understand why Robert thought it looked enough like an advertisement to delete it.

I think I should say a word on this. First, it is true that the message is in itself a promotion. This is because I more or less copied an analogous message that I had posted at the beginning on this meta. I did not realize that this meta has a different flavour, and especially had a different flavour at the beginning, when messages unrelated to the mantaining of MO were more frequent.

Second, I don't have any problems with Roberto Cardaino's answer. I mailed me to explain about the deletion, and I can see his point of view. I still think that MathOnline would be useful to a community with many undergraduates (and viceversa), but I understand that they do not want to promote anything for now. In any case MathOnline is listed in another thread among the possible available resources.

@Andrea: For the record, I made that thread specifically because your thread got killed. I was hoping we'd be able to get around the rules if you reposted your post as the description for MathOnline. I also downvoted Cardaino's answer, since I think his perspective is uninformed and shortsighted. As I said before, I don't like the way the SO community works, and I especially don't like how they think that their SO experience is applicable to all communities regardless of focus.

@Everyone: For what it's worth, I ask people here to vote up Andrew and Scott's posts (linked in Andrew Stacey's post here) over at the LaTeX meta in a show of solidarity. If you're feeling particularly bellicose, vote down all of the other answers as well.

@Harry: thank you for doing that. I'm not willing to put a description for now, just to avoid any other issues. But I see it is ranked high in the proposal, so hopefully it could end in the FAQ. :-)

Dear Kaestur, the point it that I was trying to find some kind of agreement with the community of math.stackexchange.

I felt that my website may be useful, and I wanted to know whether they were interested enough in it to give it some visibility. I don't expect that the community will do that with every mathematical website, and I was asking for an ad-hoc arrangement. For that question to make sense, I have to describe what my site is about (which admittedly I did in terms which looked like advertising).

In other words the question was: "Do you think MathOnline is useful enough to promote it math.stackexchange?" and not "How to promote any site on math.stackexchange?".