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There's a wave Writing an article about mathoverflow with a little of this, but there's been no traffic recently. I'll add anyone who asks me -- just IM or email.
Some random items, duplicated from the wave:
I think Steve Huntsman may have hit the nail on the head here. How many "personal communication" citations are really "sci.math.research" for example, but not cited as such because of perhaps lack of guidelines on how to do that. I confess that I am new to the whole scene so this is just a hunch...
So how might we convince Steve that he should cite MO more directly?
Personally, I wouldn't hesitate to cite a particular MO page, using the convention of adding "Accessed DDMMYYYY" when citing (potentially mutable) webpages. What objections do people have to doing this, and can we resolve these objections?
I'd like to see such references for two reasons. One, I think it's more useful to the reader. They can actually go read the discussion, instead of being potentially frustrated by an opaque reference to a private conversation.Two, it's great advertising for MO!
Polymath5 is now farming out some subquestions to mathoverflow. I think this is a great success story! See my blog post about mathoverflow and polymath, or just jump directly to the list of questions, tagged polymath5.
Steve: I don't think there's anything problematic about specifying a MO URL as opposed to not doing so. The worst that can happen is that at some point in the future the URL stops working. Meanwhile, it's useful.
Personally I think that if MO helps you with your research, then acknowledging that in print
I probably agree with you that in the reference list, the citation should be for the person, not MO itself - but the source should be given as a particular MO page, e.g. in the way that Scott describes.
A quick remark because I didn't know this until I tested it out: changing the title of a question does not break the link with the old title in it.
So is there a consensus on how to quote MO properly (I feel I may have to do something like that soon) ? Thanks.
Re: What if MO disappears.
As soon as possible, we'll provide sanitized dumps of the database which should contain basically all the information that you normally have access to. Given that the SO dumps are only a few hundred MB, the MO dumps should be quite small.
There is an attribution page (linked to from the bottom of each MO page) listing what you should do if you want to republish any content. If you're just citing or paraphrasing something that happened on MO, I'd include the following information:
I don't see any downside to linking to the specific post or page that you're using, even if there's a chance it disappears. It doesn't stop people from citing impossible-to-find papers. Btw, does anybody have a copy of Artin's Algebraization of formal moduli I they could send me?
Let's agree on some citation guidelines, and I'll include them in the attribution page. Is there some way I should make the attribution page more prominent?
@David: I would be happiest if the user number appeared somewhere, even if it's not the full URL, like this
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/11851
See this very similar discussion on meta.MO.
answered Jan 15 at 11:52, David Speyer (/users/297)
But I think it should be fine to just include the number of the post and the name of the user if it's a pain to include the user numbers, since that is enough information to track down the source. I'll look into the possibility of including the URLs of the posts and the user numbers automatically whenever you send an MO page to your printer (or print to a file). It's also worth noting:
I think there are two different concepts here: copyright and citations.
The first concept is only applicable if you're copying the text; the copyright law (I'm not a lawyer, but this idea is quite clear and well-known) doesn't protect ideas, mechanisms or algorithms (note that patent law sometimes does).
For example, suppose nobody knew how to calculate some function f(x) at x = 137 and finally Smarty S. was able to provide a long calculation that established that f(137) = 12. It doesn't matter where s/he did it — in a journal, on the web, in a talk: both before and after, anyone is able to talk about the value of f(137) and speculate about it being equal 12, or claim it being 12 or 13. After the result is posted, nothing in the copyright law prohibits saying "f(137) is known to be 12 (see reference)".
I don't think therefore that there could be any legal requirement for citations that Math Overflow could impose, unless some part of the text is copied. However, ethically, it's well-established in mathematics that you should cite other people's ideas, for two reasons: (1) you shouldn't pretend you did something when it's actually another person and (2) if the statement is non-trivial, you need to give readers the ability to see its proof or the source.
Since we aren't sure about the sitewide policy, perhaps the best thing would be to ask the person who answered in each case, especially if a person is normally pseudonymous. I personally would go for something like
[10] Communicated by David Speyer on MathOverflow (/questions/11851).
Let's agree on some citation guidelines, and I'll include them in the attribution page
I think it may be a good idea, but it should make clear the distinction between republishing (action possible under cc-wiki license; and I'm not aware of how we could change any of its requirements) and citing (something done voluntary by mathematicians on ethical basis; and the format of which this thread discusses).
I've added a citation recommendation to the attribution page.
William Stein thinks we're awesome.
and/or amsrefs... to which I am partial :P
There's an article in "The Tyee", a newspaper from British Columbia, that talks about mathoverflow at length, including quotes from David Brown and Anton Geraschenko.
The publicity is nice, but the fact that they mention us right before "psychics" is something of a double-edged sword.
Well, "Equations and extra-sensory perception" makes for a great tag line...
I just noticed that the arxiv's experimental full text search pulls up a few articles mentioning mathoverflow that I hadn't known about:
http://search.arxiv.org:8081/?query=%22math+overflow%22+OR+mathoverflow&in=grp_math
Very cool. It seems worthwhile to add comments to the questions cited in the arxiv articles to complete the trackback circle.
The conjecture to which it refers is posted (by one of the authors) here: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/25030/can-we-select-a-rainbow-matching-if-each-degree-is-6-and-each-colorclass-is-a-c-6
Apologies if these have been mentioned elsewhere, but I just wanted to add 2 links to newspaper articles to the repository:
I've mentioned this in another thread -- but cannot locate it now. I cited and acknowledged MO in the following eprint: http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.4761
Is there a "mathoverflow in the news" thread elsewhere? Anyway, a minor mention that I thought was interesting.
And an article all about mathoverflow at theatlantic.com.
@Sam, indeed, that is pretty neat. (For those in a hurry: Michael Freedman posted a paper on the arxiv specifically to answer two mathoverflow questions.)
I also cite a MO question in the most recent version of one of my preprints: http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.4559