With the recent discussions on various soft questions in mind, I thought I'd like to share an example I just saw of where MO works at what I think is its best. It's not an example of a "high flying" question that might make it into one of our "celebratory" threads here on meta, but a nice quiet example of MO helping people to help people.
The question is Does the following condition imply the homotopy type of a wedge of spheres?.
Here's what I particularly like about it:
- The person asking explains where the problem comes from, in particular relating it to actual work that they are doing and thereby demonstrating the usefulness of the question to them.
- There is a little information as to the background of the questioner (more is implied by the question itself) which makes it easier to know at what level to pitch an answer.
- One could argue that the level is a little low, but it's a question coming from a researcher in one field wanting some result in another which they haven't been able to find.
- To someone who knows the answer (as a few did), it takes mere moments to answer this question to the satisfaction of the questioner.
- The question and answer(s) are straightforward enough that I think anyone familiar with the basic language of algebraic topology would be able to understand them.
I'm not claiming that this is a perfect question; just that in the light of recent discussions I wanted to highlight an example of where I think MO is doing something that no other resource is doing, and hopefully show why I (and others) would like it to continue doing this and not morph into some general purpose discussion forum.
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