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Community: Who should be allowed to ask a question?

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    My impression is that MO is suffering a bit from questions which are not well-posed or could be homework. Sometimes writers do not put any effort in the presentation of their questions; lots of typos, improper use of LaTeX. Sometimes, the questions reveal that not even one single Google search was carried out before putting the question on MO.

    I think there could be a quick solution to this. Why not requiring a very low number of reputation points (like 25 or so) before someone is allowed to ask a question. At the same time, if someone has more than a certain number (like 3000) reputation points, he is allowed to invite new MO-members which automatically get those 25 points and can ask questions right away.

    This would probably clean up MO quite a bit.
  2.  
    There are probably lots of answers to this question, but one very pertinent one is "we (by which I mean the moderators) can't change the software". So that's the end of the story really.

    More details: The moderators are paying money (I think) to have the software, which is an _old_ version of some software, and the people who run the software won't make any changes because they want us to use the new version, which we are not yet doing. So your point is moot: there's nothing we (by which I mean the moderators, not me) can do unless we make absolutely huge changes to the site by upgrading the entire package.
  3.  

    @KB: Nope.

    The moderators are not paying money to use the old software, but they're also ambivalent about moving over to the new software, since it would entail some changes that would simply be unacceptable. An optimal situation would be if we could use the new software but pay monthly (as was originally planned) while maintaining our autonomy from the rest of the SE network.

    • CommentAuthorWill Jagy
    • CommentTimeDec 5th 2010
     
    I recommended something similar months ago, the answer by Scott M. was not about the software. Two features I think are abused, anonymity and freedom to question by anyone, together allow some big star to wake up one day and ask a question under a pseudonym, Scott's phrasing included something about minimal barriers.

    With the idea of no barriers at the start, I came up with the idea of part reciprocity, every five questions you need to have a minimum number of new answers with upvotes to ask the next question. That's not going to be possible either, but it would move arguments about amateurism and main field of interest to the more concrete "can you both give and receive on this particular website." The effort of answering somebody else's questions, and answering well, gives some sense of what makes a readable question, and those who can only ask are cut off after a while, probably to just go make new user ID's.

    One can dream.
    • CommentAuthorsean tilson
    • CommentTimeDec 5th 2010 edited
     
    I think there is a problem with a minimum rep required for asking questions: asking good questions is one of the main ways of getting reputation in the first place! I think that I have asked some reasonable questions here, and while I am not as active as others, I do learn from this site and wouldn't be able to learn as much if I wasn't able to ask questions, or make comments that asked about particular points.

    This new minimum would cut out a lot of beginning grad students who are not capable of answering questions in a way that they feel contributes to the site. I recently had a "good" answer to a question of Pete Clark's about flat and projective modules (good in the sense that it got some votes). This is a pure coincidence in that it was all timing. I happened to be on after Pete posted the question, that is I happened to submit that answer before someone else did.

    I do think that there are ridiculous questions being posted, and that something should be done about it, but I don't think a minimum to ask is the right thing to do. What about modifying it to there being a minimum to ask unless your user ID identifies you in some fashion? (like on the Manifold Atlas)
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    @KB and @HG: I feel like both of you left out with an important detail, which is that the SE people haven't offered to move us to SE2.0 yet (or in fact make any changes to the site's status). So while people are ambivalent, it is not yet an option anyways.

    On the question at hand: I think people don't give enough credit to the ease of moderating bad questions. I mean, yes, over the past couple of days there has been a burst of closed questions, and that has been annoying, but have they really been that disruptive/hard to ignore? As long as people keep asking and answering good questions, they'll disappear pretty fast. At the end of the day, I guess the question comes down to how many good questions you want to make it too annoying for people to ask in return for filtering out some bad ones. Will has shown that he's not particularly worried about this point, but I don't really agree; we'll never really know which questions might not have been asked had we required people to wait until getting rep before being able to ask. At the moment, I think things are in the "ain't broke; don't fix" stage, which is rather convenient, since we couldn't fix even if we wanted to.

  7.  
    @Kevin: That solves the problem. If we cannot change it, then the question is really pointless.

    @Sean: If someone is really interested to participate, he will be able to get the 25 reputation points or some invitation by a member. I do not see a problem here. Sure, it makes MO more exclusive, but that was the idea.

    @Ben: Whether it has "really been that disruptive/hard to ignore", I do not know. I for one, find it annoying. But you are right, there is no urgency and as Kevin remarked, we have to live with it anyway.
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    I agree heartily with Ben Webster. Having to page through closed questions is slightly annoying, but it's really no big deal. The point to make here is that the platform is designed to be largely community-moderated and this works very well: the chore of closing inappropriate questions and explaining as politely as possible why this was done has been distributed over a large populace. I probably participate in this process as much as most people do on this site, and it doesn't interfere with my use and enjoyment of the site.

    Trying to "fix" things by making it harder in any way for people to immediately come to the site and ask questions is a remedy that, to my mind, could be much worse than the ill we're trying to cure. I have already seen a lot of resentment about MO elsewhere on the internet (especially math.SE) from people who think that it has an exclusive, club-like atmosphere. These people are right to the extent that it is designed for the rather select group of professional, research mathematicians and is not especially welcoming to others. However, they're wrong in the sense that the club we're cultivating is not the "MO club" or the "Berkeley club" or the "hotshot young algebraic geometers club" -- it really is both accessible and appealing to all stripes of professional mathematicians all over the world. (Fun fact: I have never met any of the MO moderators in person -- correction: I think I met Scott Carnahan once, and I was friends with his girlfriend at one point -- or had any prior dealings with them whatsoever. But as a function of MO I have grown to think of these people as my colleagues, and in some ways I have grown closer to them than some of my actual colleagues whom I mostly just say hi to when I pass them in the hall. And with regard to the user base as a whole: participating in MO has been the most positive, significant networking experience of my professional life. It's not even close. When I meet people in person now, I'm "that Math Overflow guy"...)

    Believe me that when I tell people about MO and what a great site it is, their most common concern is whether the site is difficult to use or requires registration, and so forth. I always tell them that you can just jump in immediately and figure out within ten minutes how to ask or answer a question. Let's stop for a moment and reflect on how well our site is doing: almost every week a truly superstar mathematician pops up, often people who were world-famous before the internet even existed. Raising the barrier to entry even a little bit is going to scare off some people that we would be absolutely delighted to have. Let's not do that, even if we could.

  9.  

    I completely agree with what Pete just said (apart from the bits about Scott Carnahan). In addition, I've just scanned through the first two pages of MO users, and I think that there are only two who might admit to having met me "in real life" and two more who would probably associate me more with the nLab than MO.

    Of course, being a social gathering place for mathematicians is not MO's purpose, nor even on the radar as far as MO's porpoises go. But it's a nice side-effect. And as much as I am happy with MO being elitist, I am unhappy with MO being exclusive.

  10.  
    Re Pete's comment: A couple of weeks ago, someone I randomly bumped into asked if I was an MO user. It was interesting.
  11.  
    As usual, Pete is spot on. We shouldn't raise the barrier to entry and on the contrary be very grateful for for the amazing quality of the participants to our site ( what a jubilation in this "our" !).
    I also feel, like Pete, that I have warmer feelings toward many users of MO than toward many colleagues I know for real: I remember the pleasant feeling I had when first being introduced to Donu Arapura. It was as if an old friend had come to visit me, although in fact I had never seen him before.
    To come back to the point of this thread: the great American aphorism "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" exactly applies to MO's policy of making it as easy as possible for new users to ask questions.
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    +1 Ben and Pete.

    Regarding getting to know MO users better than your in-person colleagues, see this quiz.

  13.  

    !??!!!??? ROTFL

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    Officially I got only 5 right :( But that's because I couldn't remember how to spell Harry's lastname, and forgot that Tim only goes by his lastname on MO.

  15.  
    I got 8 right, but would have had 9 if I had remembered a middle initial (the one about the poet). I had to laugh out loud at the one about the ultimate meaning of cohomology in an infinity-topos.
    • CommentAuthorHarry Gindi
    • CommentTimeDec 6th 2010 edited
     

    I realized that was Urs immediately =D!

    (oops, spoiler'd)

    It's a bit unsettling to know that I'm more predictable than Andrew L, and on par with the guy who puts his quote at the end of every one of his posts =/.

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    I got 7 - would have been 8 except for the same middle initial. I knew the one about the "binary domain" because it was on one of my questions.

    • CommentAuthorCam McLeman
    • CommentTimeDec 6th 2010 edited
     

    Harry: Spoiler alert!

    I got 10 (in fact, exactly the 10 most correctly-gotten), but remembered 15 out of 17 quotes.

    Also, +1 to pit_trout's comment on Sporcle.

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    Forget MO reputation. Being on that list is the mark of a true mathematician.

    (Even if less than half of you know about my particular eccentricity.)

    • CommentAuthorgrp
    • CommentTimeDec 6th 2010
     
    If by "true mathematician", Andrew, you mean "memorable MathOverflow Menagerie member", then I will agree and take my share of pride/shame.

    Gerhard "Eccentric? Me? No. Just Idiosyncratic." Paseman, 2010.12.06
  21.  
    I feel simultaneously honored and amused.
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    That quiz has to be one of the nerdiest things I've ever seen. (Also, 12. High score?)

  23.  
    @Andrew Stacey, "nor even on the radar as far as MO's porpoises go," I think porpoises more likely to go for sonar.
  24.  
    @Andreas: Then maybe this site isn't for beginning mid-level graduate students. I spend a bit of time checking the new questions multiple times a day to see if there is one I can be of help with. The answer is almost always no. I imagine that if there were not people at about the same stage as myself I would have an even harder time answering questions. That being said, the answers I have received here have been very helpful and I doubt I would be able to get such answers over at MSE.

    I also agree with Andrew Stacey about the difference between being "elitist" and "exclusive." I feel that MO gets called elitist all too often.
    • CommentAuthorWill Jagy
    • CommentTimeDec 7th 2010
     
    Sean, I've got to say that I never really saw this from the position of an early graduate student or late undergraduate. I would not want to push away any mathematics student who honestly tried to answer some questions and tried to write sensible queries but found it rough going sometimes.

    I looked at your profile, you do have an orphaned user ID from October 2009, but meanwhile you have managed to amass about 975 points, ask five clearly substantial questions, and give some 34 serious answers. You are doing this the right way.
  26.  

    @Will:

    I've got to say that I never really saw this from the position of an early graduate student or late undergraduate.

    that's okay, we understand. Your age ain't exactly much of a secret :)

    • CommentAuthorWill Jagy
    • CommentTimeDec 7th 2010
     
    I was going to say something about Ancient of Days, a phrase I remembered from my youth in the dawn of the world, but it turns out it generally refers to deity:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_of_Days
  28.  
    I do have that orphaned account don't I. Most of the points I have gotten have been from questions, or at least, that is what got me involved in the site more so than answering. While not all questions are appropriate, I think some reasonable questions can be formed by people who will not be able to answer most questions.

    That is a very generous account of my answers, most of them are not that good.

    Anyway, my main point was that I think putting such a minimum would keep people such as beginning to intermediate grad students away. I just wanted to point that out. There is some initial nerve you have to work up to posting on here, especially an answer.

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