Timeline for Improving citations of MathOverflow posts
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Apr 13, 2017 at 12:58 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
replaced http://mathoverflow.net/ with https://mathoverflow.net/
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| Feb 2, 2014 at 15:48 | comment | added | François G. Dorais Mod | Regarding DOIs, they are intended for a lot of purposes and, in many ways, can be thought of as "permalinks 2.0." Like many things, they get associated to where they are most visible: journals & books. I don't think we need to worry too much about it. For what it's worth, if CrossRef classifies the MO archives as a journal, they will charge us prohibitive fees instead of much cheaper rates for other content. It's good to keep in mind some possibilities are incompatible with each other. | |
| Feb 2, 2014 at 15:37 | comment | added | François G. Dorais Mod | Thanks for the clarifications Henry. I think your example with the Annals of MO clarifies the issue very well and I completely agree. (Maybe it's worth inserting in an edit?) I think mentioning volume & issue numbers, ISSN, DOIs in the question was misleading. I was trying to illustrate the broad range of possibilities but I ended up focusing on one in depth rather than a handful in breadth. Hindsight is 20/20... | |
| Feb 2, 2014 at 15:20 | comment | added | Henry Cohn | I'm not sure what to think about the DOI issue (instead of generic permalinks). I think right now many mathematicians would interpret it as imitating journals, but that might change over time as they see DOIs in more places, so maybe it's not worth worrying about. | |
| Feb 2, 2014 at 15:17 | comment | added | Henry Cohn | For example, I'd feel uncomfortable citing a typical MO contribution in a way that looked like a journal paper, and I'd be embarrassed to be cited that way. I'd rather cite it in a way that nobody would interpret as saying "compared with all the other valuable mathematics on the web, this is particularly journal-like." I'd be fine with something like "Name, Mathoverflow answer N, date, permalink", but "Name, Title, Annals of Mathoverflow Volume (Year), No. Issue, DOI" would make me unhappy (to make up an extreme case). | |
| Feb 2, 2014 at 15:03 | comment | added | Henry Cohn | In terms of being amenable to citations, long-term archiving is the only substantive issue I see, although popularizing a recommended format could also help. In terms of looking like a journal, the arXiv could be a useful comparison. It's inherently more journal-like than MO, but papers are still cited a little differently to make their unrefereed preprint status clear. This isn't a problem if you don't care about this distinction (it's still just as good a citation in terms of awarding credit or providing access), but the small difference in format makes people who do care more comfortable. | |
| Feb 2, 2014 at 14:50 | comment | added | Henry Cohn | By the way, in terms of permalinks to snapshots, I was imagining that everything would be archived (not just on demand), but a permalink like archives.mathoverflow.net/x/y would link to a view of page x at stage y (i.e., after the y-th significant change). So the library would archive a time-stamped stream of posts and edits, and then a front end website would turn a permalink into a web page at a given time. | |
| Feb 2, 2014 at 14:30 | comment | added | François G. Dorais Mod | Regarding "MO is trying to become more citable by pretending to be something it's not." This is indeed a touchy issue. Unfortunately, academic citations are somewhat rigid. I'm afraid anything we could do to make MO more amenable to the format can be seen as "[MO] pretending to be something it's not." Since you're not arguing that MO shouldn't try to be more amenable to academic citations, it would be more useful to break down what aspects you see as more contentious than others. | |
| Feb 2, 2014 at 13:39 | comment | added | François G. Dorais Mod | The Internet Archive has a mechanism for saving pages on demand, e.g. this page right now. The question is whether we could do better. | |
| Feb 2, 2014 at 13:38 | comment | added | François G. Dorais Mod | Regarding 1, this is really the topic of the long-term archiving thread and should be discussed there. However, the fact that MO is constantly updating makes it difficult to ingest (their term) by archival organizations; they would still need a buffer like archives.mathoverflow.net to do it properly (though the buffer doesn't need to be publicly visible). | |
| Feb 2, 2014 at 13:26 | comment | added | François G. Dorais Mod | Thanks Henry! Just a few complementary links: The snapshot archiving mechanism in 4 was suggested here and a few flaws were pointed out. This feature request is about making revision links more accessible; you should consider adding specific changes you feel would be useful there. | |
| Feb 2, 2014 at 12:32 | comment | added | Lucia | I like the one month window in which someone can delete and after which things become permanent. @StefanKohl: There was an excellent mathematician on MO, whose answers now appear as User631, who posted many beautiful and informative answers, and for some reason deleted many of these. I think these are a real loss for MO, but maybe this situation is uncommon. | |
| Feb 2, 2014 at 10:50 | comment | added | Stefan Kohl Mod | Are there actual cases of where cited MO posts were deleted? -- I'd doubt there are many. | |
| Feb 2, 2014 at 8:20 | history | answered | Henry Cohn | CC BY-SA 3.0 |