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Etiquette: Reposting questions

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    I've run the mailing list Number Theory Net since 1986. It's a fairly low volume list with a membership of about 1400 including a number of prominent Number theorists. The posts are usually in two categories: announcements (e.g. job postings, conference announcements, etc.) and questions and answers. The latter are the kinds of things which would be very appropriate for MO. I've thought, over the past few months, that it would be really helpful to repost these questions (I'd like to post them under the name of the poster but I realize that that brings up all sorts of other issues) on MO for a number of reasons: (1) having a discussion on the web is less intrusive than being bombarded by email, (2) It would open things up to a larger audience. (3) the style of discussion on MO -- with comments, etc. -- is qualitatively much different than on a mailing list. Of course I could just suggest to such posters that they go to MO. Another advantage for me is that I could fob off the occasional problem of crackpots, or incoherent posts to the collective wisdom of MO -- such things would get downrated and closed off quickly, or perhaps forced to edit to make things more clear. So what do people think about the reposting idea?


    Victor
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    You should certainly post good questions. I don't see what the point of posting bad questions is, though.

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    I'm not sure if I entirely understand what you're asking about, are you asking about posting old questions or new questions? For old questions that have never been answered and which you still would like to know the answer I'd say go ahead and post them (probably under your name but mentioning who asked it originally) but not at a rate of more than a couple per week.

    If you're asking about posting every new question you get here, I think that's sort of the wrong way to go about it. I think a better way would be to just email the list to say something like "Now this list is going to be for announcements only, for math questions you should instead go to mathoverflow.net and ask them there." If people send you questions after them you just send them a form reply saying "We've decided that math questions are better asked at MO than on this list, so please redirect your questions there."
    • CommentAuthorWill Jagy
    • CommentTimeNov 13th 2010 edited
     
    Hi, Victor. You might individually email Kevin Buzzard, for example, anybody else who is prominent on MO but with obvious knowledge of NMBRTHRY. For perspective, my first question on MO was a difficult but extremely specific "Diophantine representation" problem, what numbers are integrally represented by this inhomogeneous polynomial? Kevin got a fair start, posted it on NMBRTHRY, but the final ingredient was email from Hendrik Lenstra that was not visible on either site until Kevin posted excerpts. I don't know how Lenstra learned of the problem. Note, however, that we are also talking about Zhi Wei Sun. There is also a difference in style, correlated with age (I'm 54) but perhaps not determined. My high school classmate started a Facebook account because he had moved and needed people to be able to find him. He invited me to join Facebook, which I eventually managed to do. Since then, I have been amazed at the prolific posts on Facebook from people who could not be bothered to reply to email from me, in one dramatic case replying to a long and careful email from me on facebook only. So I would summarize by saying there is a difference in culture, NMBRTHRY is email, MO is closer to facebook.

    Oh, the MAA wrote back recently, after a couple of years they are probably going to put the easiest case of my problem in the Monthly Problem section. The easiest case is the one actually found by Kaplansky, it appears they will not mention that in the problem body but perhaps wih the solutions.
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    I agree with Will Jagy, that the culture around MO is different from the one around NMBRTHRY. Some people regularly use the latter to popularise their conjectures, which they computer-generate at an incredible rate. MO rightly discourages this sort of usage. So for some people, MO will just not be the right kind of replacement. I do think that the better questions from NMBRTHRY will find an excellent home on MO, but if people from the mailing list are to be encouraged to use MO, they should be made doubly and triply aware of the differences between intended usage.

    By the way, there is also the group theory mailing list group-pub-forum, maintained by the mathematics department of Bath University, which usually attracts a high quality of questions and answers, and many of those would really be a welcome addition to MO. It might make sense to point out the existence of MO to the users of that mailing list.

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    By the way, Victor, many thanks for maintaining that list!

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    I agree that the culture of NMBRTHRY is different than MO. For Will's problem, Hendrik Lenstra subscribes to NMBRTHRY but doesn't ever post on it. He and someone else (whose name escapes me at the moment) have, in the past, given answers to questions privately, with copying me. When I've asked them whether they should be posted to NMBRTHRY they've said no, because their answer was tentative and not complete. It's their own wish, but I've also found such answers valuable, and the culture of MO is that people hardly hesitate to post such answers. As far as the comment about crackpots and badly written questions, that's a reflection of something that I'm dealing with right so I was grumbling about it, perhaps wishing that I had a little help with that. Certainly I shouldn't be encouraging such people to post on MO.

    Will, I will ask Kevin his opinion, and to Alex -- you're welcome. I've maintained NMBRTHRY for 24 years now, and have been thinking about its future. On one hand I might like to hand off the moderation (or at least share it) to someone else, but after looking at MO, I see that as more of what the future trend will be.
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    On the subject of mailing lists that currently deal with crackpots... It seems that here at MathOverflow we have a pretty robust and low effort response to crackpots. Maybe we shouldn't be worrying too much about mailing list managers fobbing them off on us?

    • CommentAuthorWill Jagy
    • CommentTimeNov 14th 2010
     
    Scott, that is my sense. But mainly I know Victor's work, for years. I wrote Victor last night, suggesting that he write to you and Anton as well. He has not written back yet, but he is a busy guy and travels quite a bit. My idea was that a somewhat modified post on this could be put to the full group, one that will not trigger panic responses. I have Victor's email addresses, if you don't.

    Meanwhile, it occurred to me that the real question, at the opposite end into whale territory, is what does Hendrik Lenstra think? MO, I think with some justification, gives latitude to whales, when they identify themselves, at least. Would H. Lenstra at least look at MO?
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    Victor: what are you asking me? I'm not sure I follow. Are you suggesting reposting a gazillion old posts or just posting new ones as they arrive?

    I am a moderator of sci.math.research and I sometimes accept posts, thinking "this would get answered much more quickly on MO" but without telling the OP this. I am happy to leave things this way. Victor sounds like he's being more "pro-active" than me :-)

    @Will: I emailed Lenstra explicitly asking him how to solve "Conjecture 2". That's how he heard about it (or at least one way he heard about it).

    @Victor: the whole "this answer isn't complete" thing---that's exactly what the comments are for here. I feel it works very well. If I see a question that I know I can answer, I answer with an answer. If I see one that I think I can answer but don't have time/energy to check the details or to work through a key point then I leave a comment.
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    @Kevin: I'm certainly not suggesting that I repost a gazillion old post -- only the new ones. And the comments (as opposed to answers) were what I was talking about. That is one thing that I do like about MO -- that people can throw out only partially formed ideas which may well contribute to a definitive answer. I think that the psychology behind writing emails is closer to what one might do when writing a letter -- since the communication is slow, you want to be complete and coherent, almost like a published paper. In fact a lot of letters are so informative that they've ended up being published in things like collected works.
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    Are you going to check with the posters that they're ok about having the question put on this site? If you are then I'm not sure I can see any other problem with it myself. Some work for you though!
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    I agree with Noah Snyder.

    MO works much better when questions are posted by people who are personally invested in them and are willing to watch and vote on the answers, respond to comments, make clarifications, etc. Also, the reputation system tracks who asks good questions and who does not, which breaks down if one person is posting on behalf of many others.

    So I would suggest that you not post other people's questions wholesale. Instead, you could tell them about the site and encourage them to come and post for themselves.

    If there are questions, originated by others, that you are personally interested in, and they don't care to post them for themselves, then by all means you should post them yourself. But in this case you should follow the question as if it is your own.

    That's my ε dollars.

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